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**MARCH 15, 2024**
On the Prospect website
They Don't Want Trump OR Biden. Here's How They Still Can Elect
Biden.
Our new survey of these voters shows how the president can still win
their support. BY PAGE S. GARDNER & STANLEY B. GREENBERG
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Judge Shopping Ended-by Judges Themselves
Feral (and federal) district court judges attempted to seize control of
national policy one too many times. BY RYAN COOPER
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Ken Paxton, America First Legal, and Premonitions of Project 2025
Texas today is what America will look like if Trump wins. It's not
pretty. BY TONI AGUILAR ROSENTHAL
Kuttner on TAP
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**** The Clock Is Tik-Toking for Tech
Forcing divestment of Chinese ownership of TikTok is no substitute for
comprehensive data privacy regulation. It's a first step.
The debate over whether to force divestment of TikTok's Chinese
ownership has scrambled the usual partisan and ideological alliances and
led to a lot of misleading commentary. But the airing of the TikTok
controversy has two useful side effects.
One is that it shines a light on Trump's utter opportunism and
hypocrisy on the issue-and has been the first occasion when large
numbers of Republican legislators have been willing to defy Trump's
wishes. The other benefit is the logical conclusion that the data
privacy problem and its remedies are hardly limited to an entity with
close ties to the Chinese Communist Party.
Last week, the House overwhelmingly passed a bipartisan bill that would
require the sale of TikTok to an entity not connected to the Chinese
government, or its shutdown. The vote was 352 to 65, with about 90
percent of Republicans and 75 percent of Democrats in support.
TikTok's lobbying machine then went into overdrive and has succeeded
in slowing action in the Senate. Majority leader Chuck Schumer has
refused to commit, as has Commerce Committee chair Maria Cantwell from
tech-heavy Washington state.
Why not? Because the major domestic tech platforms have immense
influence in the Democratic Party. And rather than being pleased about
the possible weakening of a Chinese-owned rival, they are concerned that
the broader privacy concerns behind the effort to force Chinese
divestment of TikTok will logically be extended to them.
Indeed, even if the divestment legislation succeeds, an American buyer
of TikTok may not be passing personal data to the Chinese spying
apparatus; but in the absence of much broader data and privacy
protections, a new domestic owner will join the rest of the tech
industry in profiting by selling personal data.
Former Trump Treasury secretary Steve Mnuchin is putting together a
consortium to buy TikTok if its sale is forced. He has never been known
as a great advocate of consumer privacy, much less regulation of tech.
[link removed]
As our friend Matt Stoller of the American Economic Liberties Project
writes
,
in the definitive explainer piece on the subject, "Those who say 'we
can't even regulate social media and now you want to divest TikTok's
ownership!' have it 180 degrees backwards. Being able to address
Chinese ownership of one video sharing platform is part of the movement
to reform all platforms."
And as Stoller recounts, even though Congress has not enacted a
comprehensive data privacy law, Biden's appointees at the FTC, the
Justice Department's Antitrust Division, and the Consumer Financial
Protection Bureau have made important inroads via litigation in
constraining some of the most abusive practices by the tech giants. The
newly assertive FTC, in several privacy cases, has gone after the
sharing of medical data, fertility data, location data, and a good deal
more, including cases against Avast, GoodRx, Premom, BetterHelp, Flo
Health, and many more.
But this is just the beginning of what needs to be done. So it's not a
case of either go after Chinese ownership of TikTok, or have a
comprehensive strategy on surveillance capitalism. It's both/and.
This brings us back to Trump. In 2020, as part of his campaign against
all things Chinese, Trump called for a ban on TikTok in the United
States. But as the House was preparing to vote last week, Trump reversed
course and claimed that forcing the sale of TikTok would only help his
nemesis Facebook, which he described on his social media site as "a true
Enemy of the People."
It did not take long for a little investigation to reveal
that billionaire Republican donor Jeff Yass owns 15 percent of TikTok
parent ByteDance, valued at roughly $40 billion. Trump has denied doing
a favor for Yass, but
**The Washington Post** reports that Trump and his aides have spoken
about TikTok to people with financial ties to Yass, who is the biggest
donor to the conservative organization Club for Growth, which is
currently paying former Trump senior counselor Kellyanne Conway
to defend TikTok on Capitol Hill.
So the TikTok case not only puts us on a path that begins better
safeguards for data privacy generally. It also begins the overdue
process of other Republicans beginning to ignore Trump's demands.
~ ROBERT KUTTNER
Follow Robert Kuttner on Twitter
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