Honestly, i'm just happy knowing that while the main target is Tictoc, it's any app with over a million american users ran by a company in North Korea, Russia, China, Or Iran. I know that if the chinese government asked for every peace of american info they have, even though it isn't hosted on chinese servers, they're forced to give it up because ByteDance is a chinese company and the government would shut them down if they don't. And with how much of data the tictoc algarhythm collects about you down to the way you audibly and visually react to the content you consume on top of the usual activity across other websites and stuff I hope they sell  to a different company or just get banned from the US.

Not just those two but... Also... ahem... discord as well. I mean if the US is that paranoid, and from what I read somewhere, a Chinese company or china, don't remember which exactly, owns like 30% of the discord stalks... Yeah they should do the same. That is, if the government wasn't full of double-standards where oh I can do x but we won't let you do it because fuck you! but then again, all governments in the world have their double standards, it just seems to be a bit more noticeable in the US as of late especially given how much the spotlight has been focussed on them at the moment. Sad though, the way we're in right now is partly do to blame do to double standards of... Everyone, from people to governments, and so on.

@2: totally agree
@3, 4, 5: yes, absolutely! if not banned, at least forceably broken up, like it happened in the past with AT&T, the "we don't care, we don't have to, we're the phone company" joke was only partially a joke mind you. From that breaking up of the massive monopoly platform, not only didn't the market quality worsen as pro monopoly advocates warned left and right, but also new and innovative devices and strategies were invented by the smaller and nimbler companies, once they were again separated from the AT&T umbrela. So, perhaps, time came to repeat history? I mean, the DOJ is currently in a case with both google and apple, the FTC blocked some really dangerous mergers, noncompeats were recently banned across the whole US, so who knows, things may slowly, glatially improve, but I believe that eventually they will do so. I mean, the bill for net neutrality was passed back in legislation, which means that ISP's are again regulated more, same as telecommunications companies, so they are limited in what scummy tricks they can do. Who allowed those companies to dictate what businesses get what data speeds on the internet based on how much bribe they can pay them in the first place? well, the trump administration, so yeah, governments are bullshit. Also, not only media and telecom companies should be broken up, I believe the same of any monopoly, google's and facebook's illegal rigging of the ad market, anyone remembers the jedi blue project? But also microsoft, apple, and whoever is a monopoly in the meat and other foods industry. Why? well, capitalism is only fair when you got lots of competition, and you're prevented by that from worsening your services as an intermediary, to both consumers and producers, shifting ever more of the proffit towards your own bord and shareholders. One should also bann being able to criminally prosecute someone just for reverse engineering drm solutions, because that's also a form of cheating at the game, if your products were so great, you need not be woried about piracy, as it won't be significant enough. And also, adblockers aren't illegal...yet, because no one has been able to legally restrict what users can do with web pages on the internet without it backfiring on those corporates lobbying for this in the first place, but you know what's much easier to regulate? yep, mobile apps! put a digital lock on those, such a slight protection, that can even be from the mobile OS, and suddanly the person who wants to make their lives better can be prosecuted for circumventing intellectual property. So like, companies can do all sorts of privacy violations, rig ad markets and who knows what else, it's apparently fine when they do it with an app. But anyways, this is rambly enough as it is, so I'll end it and hit submit now, lest my browser crashes before I can do so.

Okay, I haven't the foggiest about whatever the "we don't understand modern technology" folks in congress are trying to do this time, but I'm personally fine with Facebook, Twitter, Discord, and all the other mega social sites getting the metaphorical smack down, especially if it leads to a vacuum where independantly hosted forums and other traditional social media can stage a renaissance.

I'm a bit more ambivalent on Google. I mostly use their search engine because I'm too lazy to tell Firefox to use a different search engine, and I don't particularly care for the changes they've forced upon users of Gmail's basic HTML view, but changing e-mail providers would be a major pain if Gmail went away, and while YouTube has UI issues, it would be annoying if it went away and I had to track down the YouTubers I have bookmarked across multiple platforms that would likely all have their own UI issues that are all different from each other.

@8:

* the fediverse and federation is becoming very powerful these days, so no, probably won't be different youtubers across wildly different platforms, because everything is kinda converging to fedi anyway, at least anything from the sphere you mentioned. Hell, node-bb, discourse and flarum now use activity pub for certain things, so not only can they interact with mastodon, et al, but also with one another, an unexpected side effect for sure. So if we're gonna do this, we're doing it the right way
* to change search engine settings, press alt+d to go to the address field, then down arrow to change search settings, then press enter to be directed to the right page in settings. The rest is pretty easily self-explanatory, select duck duck go, install an adon for searx NG, whatever
* you don't have to use google's web UI thing, thunderbird is fine, I recommend that to everyone because I use it myself and it's awesome for me

@9: agreed

yes, though I always thought it's spelled discourse. Yes, all that is correct, all hail common standards!

@13, I'd seriously love to know how. I hear they're looking to challenge it on freedom of speech grounds, but frankly I can't imagine a worse defence, they're not being censored for the things they publish after all, and they must be out of they're tiny minds if they think that the very right wing supreme court will accept that defence. I'm not sure if the constitution says anything about free enterprise, but even that would be a fairly shaky defence, and again, I just don't see the supreme court setting the precedent that social media companies can't legally be banned in the united states. That hole notion just seems utterly bonkers to me. They could easily make a lot of money by just selling it off now, somehow I don't think all this prevarication is going to do much for the stock price.

But that’s basically just handing the government’s defence straight to them. If TikTok say it’s a China property, the government doesn’t even really need to spell out why exactly it’s a national security concern because that in of itself is extremely concerning, regardless of any additional evidence they may or may not have.

Oh, how true that is. Except i"m sure the government would just passa  law stating that they can ban ISP's, outgoing VPN traffic, and mobile carriers for accessing certain  websites. In fact, some states are banning the access of adult websites unless the government of your state and the specific website communicate that you are over a certain age to access it.

@18, that makes sence, however. I mean you don't want say, children or miners accessing adult stuff like porn... That actually makes sence. Then again, bypassing the, are you over 18? Prompt is stupid easy, unfortunately, so I really don't know if doing this will actually have good results.

@20: I can only speak for myself, but explicit sexual content automatically getting an 18+ age rating has never made much sense to me. Granted, I'm not much for ageism or censorship in general, and feel it's pretty self-evident that all claims of "bad behavior in media will lead to bad behavior in real life" are all bullshit outside of a very small minority(compare sales figures for a game franchise like Grand Theft Auto with the murder rate in the US, and even if every murder was caused by GTA, the risk that playing GTA would make one commit murder would be less than 1-in-1000, add in all other violent media and that risk dropsmuch further. And again, that's assuming all murder stems from violent media). ANd while I don't have children and can't predict the way being a father might change my world view, at this moment, I'd rather my hypothetical 13-year-old be looking at porn or playing Mortal Kombat than be screwing around with their classmates or getting into street fights.