Myriad news accounts have placed the amount TikTok would have to pay if it doesn't divest at an estimated $850 billion. Most likely, it'd actually be a little higher than that for a pair of reasons. First, the signed legislation includes not one, but two civil penalties. Second, both civil penalities are dollar amounts to be multiplied by the total number of TikTok users located within the land or maritime borders of the United States. That total has been skyrocketing in the past three years or so, and -- depending partly on how the news ecosystem portrays the potential ban -- the within-the-U.S. population on the app is likely to just keep growing above the figure now commonly in use: "More than 170 million Americans use TikTok every month," in the words of the company's May 2024 court petition. But let's take 170 million people as our basis, even though we know the number is probably climbing higher daily. (The civil penalties ignore the substantial number of US citizens living beyond the borders, but it's not clear to me if TikTok's figure does or doesn't include them, a potential calculations hiccup that, like potential proxying, I'll omit.)
The first of the two civil penalties comes into play if TikTok refuses to divest, gets banned, and then TikTok violates the ban by distributing, maintaining, or updating the app or suchlike within the United States. Such a violation costs $5,000 per user within U.S. land or maritime borders. 170 million U.S. TikTok users multipled by five grand a head gives $850 billion, to my knowledge the only figure the major media has been using.
The second of the two civil penalties comes into play if, before the Jan. 19 / Apr. 19 deadline date(s), TikTok violates the signed legislation's "Data and Information Portability to Alternative Applications" provision that you can find at the top of PDF page 144. This data portability provision means that upon the request of a user within U.S. borders, the foreign adversary controlled application (i.e. TikTok) must hand over "in a machine readable format [...] any data maintained by such application with respect to the account of such user, including content (including posts, photos, and videos) and all other account information." In other words, if U.S. users request that TikTok hand over their account data, then TikTok has to comply or pay this separate civil penalty. If TikTok is held to have violated this data portability provision, then they have to pay $500 per user within the U.S. borders. $500 multipled by 170 million U.S. TikTok users equals $85 billion.
TikTok already has a request-to-download-your-data feature, but it's not clear it really hands over "content [...] and all other account information" as the legislation specifies. TikTok might run afoul of the data portability provision in other ways, too, such as divesting before the deadline and leaving no infrastructure behind for U.S. users to obtain their account data through.
Assuming TikTok were found noncompliant with both the ban and the data portability provision, we can add both civil penalties together: $850 billion + $85 billion = $935 billion. Again, assuming TikTok's U.S. population grows daily, making the amount for both penalties together even higher than $935 billion. That's certainly approaching a trillion dollars, and perhaps by the time the lawsuit is over, more than a trillion dollars!
Created by Douglas Lucas in May 2024 as a footnote for his Aug. 27, 2024 article at Foreign Policy, "Banning TikTok Won't Keep Your Data Safe: Pompous billionaires, authoritarian regimes, and opaque oligarchs are hoarding our data. Only an alternative online ecosystem will stop them." (Gift link; alternate hyperlink.)