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Business: America’s confiscation of TikTok
must protect Big Business at all costs
Last week The House overwhelmingly passed a proposed ban on TikTok, effectively forcing a sale by the Chinese owners, ByteDance
For all intents and purposes a forced sale such as this is isomorphic to confiscation. Confiscation generally refers to seizure without fair confiscation to the owners.
And even if they do sell at the alleged valuation of $100B, ByteDance hasn’t asked for that price — its been assessed as “fair” value by third parties. Nobody apparently has asked ByteDance how much they’d sell it for, just that you need to sell it and the price you’re getting is $100B. No, for all intents and purposes, this is confiscation, which is commonly associated with punitive actions by the government in response to criminal actions.











