Tech companies in the United States have opposed banning TikTok

Groups like the Information Technology Industry Association (ITIC) are lobbying to narrow a bill pending in the Senate against TikTok. The tech companies fear they too could be caught up in the legislation

Bloomberg Information reports, citing people familiar with the matter: Previous ban bills on the grounds that TikTok is Chinese-owned have targeted TikTok alone, but the bill introduced in the Senate last month by Warner, a Democrat, and Thune, a Republican, would give the commerce secretary the power to assess national security risks and ban any technology owned or operated by hostile countries like China or Russia. Hence the Biden administration and bipartisan support.

But some tech companies warned that the bill would give the government sweeping new regulatory powers. If the bill passes, technology executives say they fear their companies could be exposed to national security scrutiny for a small piece of hardware or a single line of code because most of their systems contain some Chinese technology.

John Rench, a senior adviser at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, said the current bill would significantly expand the authority of the commerce secretary. “It’s basically saying that security should take precedence over economic principles, over general trade regulations, over general rules of doing business,” he said. If I were a high-tech company, I’d be very worried, too.”
According to the New York Times: The federal executive and legislative body threatened to ban TikTok, a video-on-demand platform, on the grounds that TikTok, a subsidiary of Chinese company ByteDance, poses a national security threat to the United States. But Jameel Jaffer, a lawyer, wrote to The New York Times that if the government were to shut down Tiktok, The First Amendment to the Constitution guarantees free speech.

Perhaps ByteDance is a Chinese company and cannot claim the constitutional right of free speech. However, apart from the issue of the rights of the company, there are more than 150 million Americans using the platform, who post and consume on Douyin, and they are undoubtedly using the rights endowed by the First Amendment.