My point is that there is no such thing as a truly "free" internet, whether it be by corporations or governments. You might as well be defending unicorns.

US users make up about 17% of TikToc's global user base. Selling their addictive algorithm to keep a small number of users was never going to happen.

And what hand waving? It was banned because the US government could not control the flow of information to its own people like it can with all the other US corporate/state owned media. The data collection nonsense is just that. If they cared they could have regulated data collection across the board. Foreign countries abide by host countries laws all the time, see GDPR and similar. But that would have cut into the profits of other corporate/state controlled media outlets like Meta and Google.