If ByteDance's interest in TikTok was purely commercial, they would have made the commercial decision to spin out the US market into a US-listed public company or sold it to a US buyer.

The fact that they chose to shut down instead, strongly suggests, that they have interests in TikTok beyond financial.

Google also opted to pull out of China instead of selling their Chinese operations to a domestic company. Does it imply that Google had interests beyond financial when operating in China?

I think it's more likely that they don't want the brand name dilution that comes from having a separate TikTok US that's probably going to be a shittier version of the original since it doesn't have the original algorithm (which isn't allowed to be exported) or the original TikTok engineers working on it.

> Google also opted to pull out of China instead of selling their Chinese operations to a domestic company. Does it imply that Google had interests beyond financial when operating in China?

Yes. At the time Larry & Sergey still ran the place and did have a somewhat idealist approach to running Google. When it turned out that it was impossible to bring an uncensored search engine to China, they shut it down.

The TikTok branding and user base are already firewalled from ByteDance's Chinese operations.

Their Chinese variant of TikTok is called Douyin, so there wouldn't be any brand dilution from spinning TikTok off.

I also have doubts that the technology behind TikTok would be difficult for a western engineer to understand. It's a relatively straigtforward algorithm, and it's details have been shared in a public paper.

Could it be that the straight forward algorithm which empowers the user is exactly the problem with tiktok in the US?

Douyin has the exact same logo - how is that "firewalled?"

Douyin isn't available outside China.

TikTok isn't available within China.

There's no risk of brand dilution.

I just watched Douyin yesterday on their site for numerous hours without a login to try and understand the differences.

Douyin is very much "available."

That doesn't follow. A third option is: shut down, wait for the pushback and for things to return to how they were before. And it might just be working.

There's no guarantee that will happen, and even if it does, TikTok will likely have lost marketshare by being unavailable for a period of time.

A financially motivated actor would have avoided the damage by spinning it out. They likely could have even kept a large minority share.

Alternatively, it's a single national security bill.

But actually, it is a standalone peice of legislation - the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act.

Thanks, I hate it