Alan Rosenstein
speaker
80 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard Dec 2024
Alan Rosenstein’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
Thanks for having me.
So the first thing the court has to decide is what to do. TikTok has asked the court to, in the meantime, pause the law so that it doesn't go into effect on January 19th. It made that application to Chief Justice John Roberts, who is in charge of... hearing these emergency motions from the D.C. Circuit, which is where TikTok lost the case earlier this year.
And so it's likely that the chief justice will circulate that to his colleagues and they will decide whether or not to pause the law. Ultimately, they'll have to decide whether to take the case itself, to hear TikTok's appeal. And if they do that, then we probably won't know an answer ultimately until sometime in the summer.
I don't think so. I mean, obviously, it's very difficult to predict and we really won't know until there's the briefing and then the oral argument and then really the decision. But I take the decision of the D.C. Circuit as a pretty good barometer for what the Supreme Court's going to do. The D.C. Circuit panel was three very distinguished, very well-respected judges.
It was a cross-ideological panel. So you had a judge appointed by... Barack Obama, a judge appointed by Donald Trump, and then a judge appointed all the way back by Ronald Reagan. And these three judges ruled quite comprehensively against TikTok on basically all of the important issues. And so while the Supreme Court certainly is not going to defer to the D.C. Circuit, it's going to take the D.C.
Circuit's view under consideration. And I think it's going to both use that as a signal Mm-hmm.
So it's not entirely clear what happens. The law works by, although it targets TikTok, it applies to, as you pointed out, app stores like Apple and Google and also cloud service providers like Oracle. These are the actual servers on which TikTok runs in the United States, and that's provided by companies like Oracle. And so the ban applies to these kinds of companies.
And so on January 19th, it becomes illegal for Apple to distribute the TikTok app on the App Store and it becomes illegal for Oracle, which is TikTok's U.S. cloud service provider, to provide services to TikTok. So what happens on January 19th? It could be that TikTok just goes dark in the United States and you just cannot access it.
I think more likely what's going to happen is that if TikTok thinks that the ban is really going to go into effect, it will move its infrastructure outside of the United States to physical servers that are not in the United States. Now, that's actually a very tricky thing to do. TikTok is quite large.
And so moving to a different cloud service provider is not a trivial thing, but they can probably make something work. And so on January 19th, it actually might be a seamless transition in the sense that if you already have TikTok on your phone, you may still be able to access it. But it might be quite a bit slower because now you're no longer accessing it in the United States.
And also your app will not upgrade over time. So as TikTok rolls out new features, as it finds bug fixes, your app is just going to stay. And so, you know, I think that for the first day, week, month or two, It may be that TikTok users don't actually experience much, if at all, of a disruption. But the farther we get into the ban, the worse the TikTok experience is going to be.
And I think the big worry for TikTok is that at some point, that experience will degrade sufficiently, that TikTok users will decide, hey, maybe I should look at one of the competitors like Instagram Reels or YouTube Shorts.
Yeah, it's quite a wild story. So. Before he was against the TikTok ban, President Trump was very much for the TikTok ban and, in fact, tried to ban TikTok and WeChat, which is another Chinese-owned communications platform. And he tried to do that under his own authority.
Basically, Congress has, over the last 50 years, given the president, really sweeping economic emergency powers to impose sanctions. sanctions and other kinds of economic measures in the interests of national security and foreign policy. And so using those powers, Trump actually tried to ban TikTok.
Now, those bans, those attempted bans were challenged in court, and Trump actually lost all of those. But the that the statute that he was trying to use didn't give him that authority because the statute actually had an explicit carve out for communications platforms.
So generally, the courts, with a few small exceptions, didn't reach the issue that is central to this case, which is what happens if Congress unambiguously tries to ban TikTok? Can it do that under the Constitution?
So that's why those cases turned out the way they did and why, although previous bans of TikTok have failed in the courts, at least before this one, that really wasn't an indication of what was going to happen with this case because this case was done under a totally separate law.
So the thing to keep in mind about this law is that, again, although it targets TikTok, the way it's enforced is not against TikTok directly, but against the app stores and the cloud service providers. And the reason that's important is because these are private companies, and they generally have the right to not do business with whomever they don't want to do business with.
You can't force Apple to distribute the TikTok app. You can't force Oracle to provide cloud services to TikTok. And this is important because if Trump wants to help TikTok, and from that clip, it's not actually obvious that he does. But if he wants to help TikTok, the people he has to convince are the executives at Apple and Oracle.
He has to convince the general counsel of Apple that when Apple CEO Tim Cook asks, well, should we continue to distribute the app? The general counsel says, yeah, I think that's OK. And so that's the audience. And so with that in mind, there are a couple of things he can do.
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