The US is banning TikTok, could Fortnite and League of Legends be next? | This Week in Business

gamesindustry.biz:

The US government this week said it will ban TikTok if the platform isn't sold in the next nine months.

It's a terrible idea, one predicated on the app being a national security risk because it's owned by Chinese firm ByteDance.

ByteDance said it will challenge this through the courts, but with the Supreme Court now firmly entrenched in its Calvinball era, who knows if the actual constitutionality of the law (or lack thereof) will have any bearing on its ultimate fate?

It's a strange bill for a country that prides itself so much on its free market economy, as it specifically names ByteDance as the company targeted by the legislation and TikTok as a service that cannot be permitted to continue operating in its current fashion.

It's not even clear what must happen with TikTok to make it sufficiently free of Chinese influence, as the law's definition for a "qualified divestiture" leaves it largely up to the president to determine if a sale of TikTok (or even a spin-off into a separate, US-based company) addresses concerns sufficiently.

In fact, under the text of the law, if some other company were to come along and do everything exactly the same as ByteDance, including being owned by a Chinese company, and offered a service substantially identical to TikTok, it would be perfectly legal until the president said it was a significant threat to national security.

And that's a particularly worrisome thing for the games industry, which stands to lose a lot more than just an effective marketing platform out of this. Even though the law specifies TikTok by name, the law also allows the president to apply it to other companies.

It does put some limits on which kind of companies the president can unilaterally force into a sale under threat of ban, and it's basically any company that meets the following criteria:

You might have noticed that applies to a number of major players in games.

STAT | 40% - The percent of Epic Games purchased by Tencent in 2012.

That's a little concerning.