Congress has no TikTok FOMO

Hiya, it’s Alex in Los Angeles. Congress may have found a fast lane to taking action on TikTok. But first...Three things you need to know to [View in browser]( [Bloomberg]( [by Alex Barinka]( Hiya, it’s Alex in Los Angeles. Congress may have found a fast lane to taking action on TikTok. But first... Three things you need to know today: • Microsoft’s investment in OpenAI [will avoid a formal EU probe]( • AI demand means data centers will use [more energy than India by 2030]( • Memory chipmaker Micron is poised to [get $6 billion in Chips Act grants]( Different views of TikTok’s value What’s the value of TikTok to its users? You’d have to pay the average college student about $59 a month, or $767 a year, to get them to deactivate their account, according to a [survey]( from the Center for Economic Policy Research. That’s a meaningful amount for a young user (and more than the $47 monthly value placed upon Instagram) to offset what researchers found to be the fear of missing out on what’s happening on the app. But there will be no dollar amount shelled out to TikTok’s 170 million US users if the government’s efforts to separate the popular video app from its Chinese parent, ByteDance Ltd., leads to an eventual ban of the social media platform in America. It’d be more like a payment in kind: The bill is intended to protect users from unspecified actions by the government of China, where ByteDance is located. Legislation to force TikTok to separate from ByteDance or face a ban in the US was fast-tracked by the House on Wednesday, wrapped into a high-profile bill that is [part of a package of aid for Israel and Ukraine](. The legislation is expected to pass the House on Saturday and be considered quickly by the Senate. President Joe Biden said he supported an earlier divest-or-ban bill that passed in the House and slowed upon meeting concerns from senators. The new language alleviates one key criticism of the prior legislation — that the timeline was too short for ByteDance to reasonably divest the app — by doubling that timeline to about a year before a ban would go into effect. That also means if the latest bill were signed into law, enforcing any kind of ban would certainly happen after the US elections in November. The first bill, if it was approved and signed into law in the next month, would put the divestiture deadline within days of the election — a potential drama that some politicians would surely hope to avoid. Chinese interference and influence is still an invisible, largely hypothetical threat, but it’s fueling US lawmakers’ anxieties about the app. Still, if a ban or divestiture bill becomes law, the courts will most likely have a say, too. TikTok intends to fight the legality of any bill before a corporate separation, people familiar with the matter have said. The company has long said that the Chinese government does not and will not receive US user data or influence the feeds of American users. For its part, the Chinese embassy has held meetings with congressional staff to lobby against legislation that would force the sale of TikTok, Politico [reported](, citing two unnamed Capitol Hill staffers. With this legislation hurtling closer than any previous effort to becoming law, users may be once again considering where else to go to satiate their TikTok FOMO (fear of missing out). Investors seem to think Snapchat could hoover up some of those users, with shares of Snap jumping the most intraday since October on the news of the fast-tracked legislation. Elon Musk on Wednesday was once again teasing the idea of bringing back Vine, the once-beloved short-form video app bought and later killed by Twitter, now known as X, that predated TikTok’s rise to prominence. And of course, there are still the giants of Meta’s Instagram and Alphabet’s YouTube. All, notably, are American-based platforms that have long evaded Congress’s efforts to legislate their power.—[Alex Barinka](mailto:abarinka2@bloomberg.net) The big story Amazon had ambitious plans a decade ago for a technology it developed that let consumers buy products at grocery stores with no checkout lines. [But now, the e-commerce giant has pulled the cashierless “Just Walk Out” system from its own stores in favor of licensing it to other retailers.]( One to watch [Watch Pierre Ferragu of New Street Research, speak on Bloomberg Television about Tesla’s efforts to pay Elon Musk after a court voided his compensation package earlier this year.]( Get fully charged Atlassian co-founder Mike Cannon-Brookes is using his fortune to develop what would be the [world’s biggest solar farm in Australia and an undersea power cable to pipe the energy to Singapore](. Microsoft’s GitHub AI copilot is changing [the lives of software engineers](. Tim Cook says Apple is considering making some products in Indonesia in its effort to [diversify manufacturing away from China](. More from Bloomberg Bloomberg Technology Summit: Led by Bloomberg Businessweek Editor Brad Stone and Bloomberg TV Host and Executive Producer Emily Chang, this full-day experience in downtown San Francisco on May 9 brings together leading CEOs, tech visionaries and industry icons to explore the opportunities and pitfalls at the intersection of business and tech, from AI to the chip wars and beyond. With Evan Spiegel co-founder and CEO of Snap, Steve Huffman, co-founder & CEO of Reddit, and Sarah Bond, president of XBox and many others. [Learn More](. 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