The Founders Would Have Been Worried About TikTok
Does Congress really have the power to force a sale of TikTok? Last week, the House of Representatives voted overwhelmingly in favor of a bill that would require TikTok’s parent company, the Beijing-based ByteDance, to sell the U.S. version of TikTok to an American buyer within six months or have the app blocked. The bill faces an uncertain future in the Senate, but its early momentum seems to have genuinely shocked and dismayed many people, who see it as a xenophobic provocation, a performative-messaging bill, or the first step in a dangerous unwinding of a global, free internet. Underlying these somewhat confused critiques is a palpable sense of affront and bewilderment, a fierce instinct that something terribly wrong is afoot. In an era of globalization and free trade, the idea of the U.S. government blocking foreign ownership of a tech platform seems so extreme that there must be some darker explanation. But this intuition is mistaken. The idea that we must enact barriers to foreign-government surveillance and political interference is actually a very old one, …