So here we are, first real week of 2025, and the thing I can't stop thinking about isn't a phone or a chip or a CES rumor. It's a calendar date. January 19th. That's the deadline written into the law Congress passed last spring, the one that says ByteDance either sells TikTok to a non-Chinese owner or the app gets pulled from every app store in the country. The Supreme Court agreed to hear the case on an expedited basis, and oral arguments are set for January 10th, which is next week as I'm typing this. Trump's lawyers already asked the Court to pause the whole thing so he can "personally" broker a deal once he's back in office, which is a wild sentence to type out loud but here we are.
I've been running this blog since November 2011, which means I've watched a lot of platforms die. Google Reader. Vine (RIP, still bitter about that one, honestly). Google+. Countless RSS readers that came and went trying to fill the Reader-shaped hole. But I've never watched one get killed by an act of Congress, upheld or not, with a specific date stamped on it like an eviction notice. That's new. Usually a platform just quietly starves: the founders get bored, ad revenue dries up, some acquihire happens and the servers go dark eighteen months later with a blog post nobody reads. This is different. This has a courtroom and a countdown clock.
I don't even use TikTok that much, for what it's worth. I've got the app, I open it maybe twice a week, mostly for cooking videos and the occasional guy explaining why my car's check engine light is lying to me. So this isn't really about me losing something I love. It's more that the whole shape of the argument bugs me. The government's case boils down to "a foreign company could theoretically hand user data to Beijing or quietly tune the algorithm for influence purposes," which, fine, sure, that's a real category of risk. But nobody's proposed a law that says "no app may harvest and sell this same data to literally anyone who pays for it," which every other app including the ones made in Menlo Park does constantly. Banning one app for a hypothetical version of a thing that's already standard practice everywhere else feels less like a security policy and more like picking a fight with a company because of where its parent happens to be headquartered. I could be wrong. I've been wrong about tech-policy predictions plenty of times before (see: my extremely confident 2012 post that Google+ was "clearly going to eat Facebook's lunch within two years").
What actually gets me is how weirdly quiet the run-up has been compared to how loud the aftermath is going to be. There's no telethon, no "save TikTok" campaign with the kind of energy that killed SOPA back in 2012 (a fight this same blog covered, badly, in a post I'm slightly embarrassed by now). Creators are posting "see you on Instagram Reels I guess" videos with the resigned energy of someone packing up a desk on their last day at a job they didn't love. Meanwhile every business reporter I read is doing the full spreadsheet math on what a ban means for ad spend, for Meta's stock, for the fifteen or so companies quietly building "TikTok but legal" clones in case the divestment actually happens.
My own prediction, worth exactly what you paid for it: something gets negotiated in the eleventh hour, the deadline slides, and we're having this same conversation again in June. Divestitures of this size don't happen in three weeks, and there's too much money and too many jobs on both sides for anyone to actually want the clean, dramatic outcome. But I've also been doing this long enough to know that the boring, deadline-slides-again outcome is usually the correct bet, and I've also watched exactly one law get enforced right on schedule when everybody assumed it wouldn't be, so who knows.
Either way, mark your calendar. Nineteen days out. I'll be watching, mostly out of morbid curiosity about what replaces the vacuum if it actually goes dark — because something always does, and it's rarely the thing anyone predicted in the comment section.