[geofft]

Yes.

It's called the free market. Private businesses can make decisions as they see best, and the barrier for government overriding that is extremely high. In America at least, this is traditionally viewed as a good thing.

We also generally believe that making things "purely a money issue" is how to incentivize people to do their best work.

There are countries in the world where it's widely accepted that the government is closely involved in business decisions and does what it thinks is best for the country, and they ask people to be motivated the goals of the country, as determined by the ruling party, not their own profit motive. TikTok is familiar with one of those, in fact.

[crazygringo]

Exactly, I have no idea why you're being downvoted.

Private companies are supposed to able to follow whatever legal policies they want to in order to compete and make as much money as possible.

In a democracy, the executive branch of the government is not supposed to be able to do whatever it wants arbitrarily. That's why the legal principle of "due process" exists -- it has to follow established rules that don't single out individual people or organizations for arbitrary reasons.

The two issues (banning apps, banning companies) could not be more different in terms of the principles involved.