TikTok Pushes Back on Ban & The New Rules for Airline Refunds

This episode discusses TikTok's response to a new U.S. divestment bill and updated airline refund regulations aimed at enhancing consumer rights.

1. TikTok plans to contest the U.S. divestment bill legally, citing past successes in similar cases.
2. New airline regulations aim to simplify and guarantee refund processes for consumers, enhancing transparency and fairness.
3. The Biden administration defends the bill as a standard regulatory measure, not a direct ban, emphasizing national security.
4. Potential strategies for TikTok include delaying legal proceedings or restructuring to appease regulatory demands.
5. The episode highlights broader implications for consumer rights and corporate accountability in both the tech and airline sectors.

1: Introduction

Neil Freiman and Toby Howell introduce the topics of TikTok's legal challenges and new airline regulations. Key focus is on TikTok's strategic responses and the specifics of the airline refund rules. Neil Freiman: "We're diving into how TikTok is pushing back and what the new airline rules mean for you."

2: TikTok's Legal Battle

Discussion on TikTok's potential legal strategies and historical context of its regulatory challenges. Toby Howell: "TikTok isn't just fighting for its life in the U.S.; it's a battle for its very business model."

3: Airline Refund Regulations

Exploration of the new rules set by the Department of Transportation, emphasizing consumer benefits. Neil Freiman: "These changes are set to make a big impact on how airlines handle delays and cancellations."

1. Stay Informed: Keep up with legal developments related to tech companies to understand consumer rights.
2. Know Your Rights: As a traveler, familiarize yourself with your rights regarding airline services and refunds.
3. Monitor Investments: If investing in tech or travel sectors, consider the impact of regulatory changes.
4. Use Legal Resources: Utilize resources to understand the impact of laws on your privacy and consumer rights.
5. Engage in Public Discourse: Participate in discussions about consumer rights and corporate responsibilities to influence future regulations.

Episode 309: Neal and Toby discuss the TikTok law passed by the government, but the battle is far from over. Then, the Department of Transportation sets clear rules for all airlines that aim to ease the headache from flight delays and cancellations with automatic refunds. Next, Neal shares his favorite numbers on restaurant reservations, the SF public toilet, and Taylor Swift’s vinyl record. Also, Reggie Bush gets his Heisman Trophy back thanks to NIL. Lastly, Cicadas are here… get ready for a noisy entrance.

People

Neil Freiman, Toby Howell

Companies

ByteDance, TikTok, various airlines

Content Warnings:

None

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With discover limitations, apply see terms creditcard. Good morning, brew daily show. I'm Neil Freiman. And I'm Toby Howell. Today, reservations are so scarce at fancy restaurants, they're going for thousands of dollars on the secondary market.

Toby Howell
Then the TikTok divestment bill has been signed by President Biden. But what comes next? It's Thursday, April 25. Let's ride.

Neil Freiman
You hear a lot about us downtowns getting caught in the doom loop of falling foot traffic and commercial real estate values. You hear a lot less about the ones that have managed to escape it. Well, here's one. Detroit. Just over a decade ago, the Motor city was bankrupt in the biggest municipal bankruptcy in us history.

But tonight it's hosting the NFL draft with a ton of momentum, spurred by investments by rocket mortgage billionaire Dan Gilbert. Yeah, Detroit is so back. Detroit's home prices have jumped 40% since 2020. That was the biggest increase of any us metro area last fall. Big companies like Pharma, they're redeveloping old buildings.

Toby Howell
There's even a Gucci store right now. Motor City, way back. Yeah, according to one exec there, you've got this post bankruptcy kind of energy. So if anyone's looking for a little motivation or inspiration today, just channel that post bankruptcy energy that Detroit has. Shout out Detroit.

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Neil Freiman
You're always Toby. Plus, if you grab the Robinhood Gold card, you get 3% cash back across the board. Give me that math Toby. I'm seeing here that as long as you spend over $234 a month, you'll make your money back. With the 3% cash back, that's like.

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Limitations apply to the retirement match. Robinhood Gold card is subject to credit approval, terms applied to the card and the rewards program. More info in the description of this podcast. So, as expected, Congress passed a new bill that gives TikTok's chinese parent company, ByteDance, nine months to sell a platform or face a ban in the US. Joe Biden also signed it into law yesterday.

Toby Howell
But now things do get complicated, Tick Tock CEO show Chu said in a video that rest assured, we aren't going anywhere showing that the app plans to put up a fight here are the hurdles the new bill faces. One, will it be able to withstand the incoming legal challenge from TikTok, arguing that the sale infringes on the free speech rights of TikTok's 107 million monthly us users? And two, is there even a buyer that could feasibly afford to acquire TikTok's us operations, which could cost upwards of $100 billion and face antitrust scrutiny? So the current state of the playing field is the bill assigned. ByteDance has less than a year to divest its stake before a ban would take effect.

But before any kind of separation happens, we're going to see a challenge in the courts. Yeah, absolutely. Tick tock and his parent ByteDance have every reason to fight this bill. This is kind of like the US government saying, hey, Zuck, we need you meta to divest to sell Instagram. Maybe your, your flagship platform, your fastest growing one, the one that makes the bulk of your profits, you have to sell that.

Neil Freiman
And Zuck would absolutely go to the floor. He would do everything he can to stop this from happening. And that's exactly what Tick Tock's going to do. Tick Tock already has a very strong track record of winning these similar First Amendment battles. Remember Donald Trump trying to force a sale of the app back in 2020?

Toby Howell
Judges blocked that because it's basically a no no under the First Amendment. And then Montana tried to ban on ban tick Tock and the state last year because of its chinese ownership. But a different federal judge ruled against that for similar reasons. Only one narrower TikTok restriction has survived in the courts, and that was when governor of Texas announced a ban on state government devices back in 2022. And that has survived just because it is a much more narrow application of the law.

So if you just go through the track record of how tick tock is done in the courts, they've done pretty well so far. Right? But here's what the Biden administration is going to say. We're not banning tick tock, we're just asking you to divest from it. And we're giving you nine to twelve months to do that.

Neil Freiman
So we're not banning you at all. We're just regulating a commercial transaction, and we do it all the time. The FTC blocks m and a. We've blocked, we've tried to stop Microsoft from blocking activision Blizzard. We also have this national security apparatus that blocks foreign companies from taking over american ones.

And right now they're looking into Nippon Steel, taking from a japanese ally, taking over us steel. This is just a part of doing business in America, because we have to protect our national security interests. And that's exactly what we're doing with bike dance and tick tock. So this is just par for the course. We have to protect our security first and foremost.

Toby Howell
Right? And tick tock's playbook two here is maybe they don't need to full out win in the courts, they just need to slow this down enough. Because if you can slow it enough, there's a chance a new administration comes in, maybe Trump wins the election. And he has been more receptive to keeping tick Tock around. So it's not necessarily like we have to fall out win this legal case right now.

We just need to drag it out long enough that maybe the, the landscape changes a little bit. There's also one other pretty interesting option, which is that tick Bytedance could potentially spin off tick tock into its own entity, its own business, with its own stock, through, say, an IPO or whatever this is called, a shotgun divorce. And then Bytedance and its other chinese investing, the chinese shareholders of tick tock could own 20% or less. So that is another business mechanism that could potentially happen. It's all very complicated.

Neil Freiman
And the biggest wild card here is the chinese government, because they've said they're not going to allow by dance to sell tick tock. So we'll see what happens with Beijing. They could say, okay, you can sell it, but we're going to withhold the algorithm, which is really the money maker for TikTok to all anybody wants, because this algorithm has keeps people engaged on the platform so you can sell ads on it and is really the secret sauce to everything tick tock does. So if your friend comes up to you today and says, hey, is tick tock getting really banned? What would you say to them?

Toby Howell
Say, not in the foreseeable future. There's going to be a long, protracted court battle. Absolutely. Flying at us airports is about to get a little less frustrating. The transportation department released a set of rules yesterday that aims to make life easier for passengers, from mandating automatic refunds to more transparency around all the fees you get hit while booking.

Neil Freiman
The headline rule here is a requirement that airlines provide automatic cash refunds within a few days for canceled flights and significant delays. Currently, it's up to the airline to define how long a delay must last before it triggers refunds. 4 hours, 5 hours until you say, screw this, I'm getting a $19 beer. The new rules remove that wiggle room with a clear timetable, a significant delay that leads to refunds last 3 hours on domestic flights and 6 hours on international ones. And when that happens, airlines must send you a refund within seven business days before the burden was on passengers.

To secure a refund by filing paperwork or making that painfully long phone call to a customer service agent. Toby, this is unequivocally good news for consumers. It absolutely is. I saw a few TikToks edits yesterday saying, like, apologies. Pete Buttigieg, transportation secretary, I wasn't familiar with your game because this is a big win for consumers.

Toby Howell
Also, under these new rules, the refunds don't just stop at the actual ticket prices. You also get refunds of check bag fees if they weren't delivered within a certain timeframe. Also, if the Internet connection on a plane isn't working, you'll get refunds based off of that. So it really went to the, back to the drawing board and said, what are all the annoying fees that you have to deal with? What are all the annoying parts of flying, especially when you get delayed, that consumers are dealing with?

And how can we make it less annoying? And it looks like they did that. So airlines have, like, how are they responding to these rules? Mostly with saying, there's nothing wrong here, like, it's in our best interest to serve customers well because we're in a competitive market, and if we don't do that, they'll go to another airline. So they pushed back on the government saying, these are unreasonable recommendation, unreasonable regulations.

Neil Freiman
They're not necessary. We're doing all of this stuff already. It's not a big deal. You didn't see, like, heavy pushback because they're not going to really do much. This is not like tick tock they're not going to sue the government, it doesn't appear, but they are just like, this is freaking annoying.

Toby Howell
The also other thing that this reminded me of, too, is that when you are checking out and you're going through the, the process of buying an airline ticket, there's usually this prompt where pick a seat, or, and these airlines make it seem like if you don't buy a seat, you won't have a seat available. But this new rule will also make airlines tell passengers so that they do have a guaranteed seat that they are not required to pay extra for. These are some of those dark patterns that we've talked about in checkout flows. Remember, Epic Games got in trouble for making it seem like, or making it too easy to buy these, these big packages when you're checking out online. So airlines have been guilty of doing this.

And it looks like these new regulations are targeting those checkout flows as well. And while we're on the subject of airports, you got to hear about this new law proposed in California that targets security line skippers. This week, lawmakers advanced a bill, which is the first of its kind in the US, that would ban clear and other third party screening services from state airports unless they establish their own security line. Some politicians think it's unfair for people who have clear to cut passengers waiting in the regular security line, creating an environment of have and have nots. If you haven't heard of clear, it's this service, costing $189 a year that whisks you through security at airports and other event venues with just a biometric scan.

Neil Freiman
It's probably best known for its aggressive agents at airports that try to get you signed up. If there's a long TSA line and you're feeling nervous, you're gonna miss your flight. Toby, line skipping at airports, is this an actual problem? Yeah, it's a bad vibe. When you are stuck in security line, you see someone with clear get ushered through.

Toby Howell
Although I have been seeing clear lines that almost rival the length of TSA pre check or something like that. On the other side of the coin, the chamber of Commerce and other industry groups within California came out against the bill saying, like, hey, this is one government overreach and then two. There's potential harm to California's image as this tourist hub. Like, do we really want to be the only state in the nation that has these restrictions on clear? So there's always two sides of the coin here.

In general, though, I'm a TSA precheck guy, I don't mess with clear. I don't need to go in the regular line. I don't need to pay whatever $200 a year for clear TSA precheck. That's the sweet spot right there. Up next.

Oh, I can't even contain myself. It's Neil's numbers.

Neil Freiman
Support for today's show comes from Deloitte. If your company is like most, your future depends in part on technology. Yes, that means choose choosing the right technology and adopting it quickly. But that isnt enough to gain advantage. Your technology needs to be as outcome focused as you.

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Toby Howell
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Morningbrew that's Wistia.com dot brew.

Welcome to another edition of Neil's numbers, the segment where I share three stats from the week's news that will have you talking as eloquently as an Aaron Sorkin character. My first number is $80,000 a year, which is how much some people are making selling restaurant reservations on the secondary market, according to this article from the New Yorker. Yes, there really is a seatgeek for everything. But restaurants, especially the super fancy ones, are in such high demand these days that an ecosystem of entrepreneurs, so sorry. Has formed to create an economy around dinner reservations.

One of them is a sophomore at Brown University who regularly uses fake phone numbers and email addresses to make reservations. He says that sometimes the person picking up the phone at the restaurant, recognizes his voice, so he switches into falsetto to sound like a girl. He made $70,000 last year doing this, by the way, lubricating the secondary market for reservations is a site called Appointment Trader, which allows people to buy and sell reservations for everything from doctors appointments in Beverly Hills to private shopping experiences at the Hermes store in Paris. And business is booming. Appointment trader cleared almost $6 million in reservation sales during the past twelve months, more than double from the last year.

Toby, a side hustle where you hustle for sides. Can't get any more poetic. That was very well done. I do think that there are some holes in this story. Cause this was being passed around a lot of my group chats yesterday saying, one, how is this person who is calling these restaurants, this sophomore from Brown University, getting those reservations in the first place?

Toby Howell
Because, for instance, like polo bar, which is one of the ones that he says he calls so many times that they started to recognize his voice. They don't have reservations available to just call up. So I don't know how he's necessarily. Maybe he's posing as a famous person because a lot of these reservations get picked up by bots, which are these just very high frequency things that check and refresh the websites and then buy them themselves. So there's a little bit of holes.

I don't understand how it's getting from that person to the secondary market because it's still hard to snag that reservation. It is, but they open up, you know, two weeks in advance, they'll say, we're going to allow reservations two weeks in advance at 10:00 a.m. And there is, you know, it's not a Taylor Swift arrows tour ticket. Like there is like five to six minutes where you can get on the phone with somebody or go on their website and get a reservation. But to me this story just speaks about how hot like dinner is as just a cultural activity.

Neil Freiman
Now there was one poll during COVID that people responded saying they missed going out to dinner more than they missed hanging with friends and family. And so you've got this huge surge in demand for just going out to eat, enjoying this experience economy, especially at super fancy places. And it's really the scarcity of it all that makes it even more appealing to be able to get into this exclusive club. Uh, has created this insane secondary market where certain reservations, not just dinner, but just getting the reservations, are going for over $1,000. Paul Graham, the founder of Y Combinator, famous investor and founder, he quote, tweeted the snippet from this article and said, there is a missing startup here.

Toby Howell
Restaurants should be making this money, not scalpers. He was saying you could use paid reservations as a way to almost displace the resis and the open tables of the world, because clearly there is intense demand. But Resi actually initially rolled out a system where they were charging reservations. They would charge about 10% of a diner's check for reservations. Got immediate pushback.

A lot of people said, like, listen, not everything should be purchasable. Like, sometimes you just. It shouldn't be like a pay to play system wherever you go. So I do think some enterprising young person read this article and said, all right, I'm going to make a multimillion dollar company based off this exact system right here. My second number is $1.7 million, which is what a single public restroom in San Francisco was projected to cost.

Neil Freiman
Heard about this. Back in 2022, San Francisco was endlessly mocked when news broke that a project to build a public restroom in Noe Valleys town Square would cost $1.7 million. For many, it symbolized the byzantine bureaucracy and suffocating red tape of San Francisco, the most expensive city in the world to build in. Even Governor Gavin Newsom chimed in, saying, a single small bathroom should not cost 1.7 million. Well, fast forward to last Sunday.

And the bathroom was finally opened. The good news is that it ended up costing a lot less than 1.7 million. And that's because private companies stepped up to the plate. One donated a modular bathroom, while another covered the architecture and engineering work. The total cost of this bathroom wound up being $200,000, mostly in labor, which is encouraging news, Toby, because $1.7 million, that's a lot of waste.

Toby Howell
For a little waste, that's a lot of toilet paper. So you become a laughing stock for spending $1.7 million on a toilet, but then you get in and the pricing actually comes out to $200,000. What do you do? Obviously, you throw a big party in celebration. You have a party with brown cupcakes, local librarians handing out free copies of children's book called Everyone poops, and an emcee that calls himself the grand Poobah, telling jokes he said he got from his seven year old nephew.

So I really do like how San Francisco ended up embracing the negative headlines, saying, like, hey, we got this bathroom done. Let's throw a party for it. Yeah, but I don't think it resolves any of the problem because companies kind of stepped in the actual public initiative here, the proposal of the 1.7 million bathroom was still a thing. And if. If these companies had not stepped up and essentially donated the bathroom and just paid a few workers to.

Neil Freiman
To construct it, then it still would have cost a lot of money. So it's, this. This permitting, this agency approval has. Is still there. So, yeah, you can celebrate a little bit, but I would still say there hasn't been much change in what led to this in the first place.

So I'd be very skeptical that this might not happen in the future. For my final number, Taylor Swift's latest album, the Tortured poets department, has been out for just about one week. And what it lacks in musical variety, it makes up for in listenership records, because here's some breaking news. Taylor Swift is very popular on Spotify. Tortured Poets became its most streamed album in a single day in history in less than 12 hours after its release.

It also became the first album on the platform to receive more than 300 million streams in a single day ever. For comparison, Spotify's previous single day record holder was Beyonce's Cowboy Carter, which got 300 million streams in its first full week of release. Now onto vinyl, where taylor truly has no peer. She broke her own record for the most sales of a vinyl album in a week with 700,000 lp copies sold, and she did it in just three days. Maddie Healy could never.

I know everyone has their take on whether this album is good, Toby, but what's not debatable is that it's a blockbuster commercial success. Can you imagine if the album was good, how big it would be? Yeah. I mean, part of the reason I think she got so many streams is it's a double album. There's 34 songs on it, so there's just a lot to stream.

Toby Howell
The vinyl stuff, though you cannot ignore her presence in that industry. You have to go all the way back to early 2022 to find someone not named Taylor Swift who was breaking vinyl records. Harry's house from Harry Styles throw sold 372,000 vinyl copies in his first week. Then if you go back to kind of what vinyl used to be back in the mid 20 fourteen's, it was rockers who were making these headlines for their crazy vinyl sales, which there was this rocker, Jack, Jack White, who made headlines for setting a new record of most final sales in one week, and he sold 40,000 copies. It is crazy how much bigger the industry has become now that Taylor Swift has kind of put her stamp on it.

Yesterday was a massive day for college football fans. Reggie Bush got his 2005 Heisman Trophy reinstated more than a decade after it was rescinded by the NCAA. The iconic running back had the iconic trophy stripped for him more than a decade ago after an investigation found he received impermissible benefits during his time playing for USC. But now the landscape of college athletics has shifted considerably. NiL deals mean that players can be compensated for their name, image and likeness.

So the Heisman Trust reevaluated their decision and realized that the, quote, compensation of student athletes is an accepted practice now, and so decided that now was the right time to return the trophy to Bush. It's pretty wild to look back at the state of college football when Bush was in college compared to now. Archie Manning and Bronny James, two of the more marketable NCAA athletes, had nil deals lined up in the millions before they even stepped foot on campus. And all top athletes are compensated in some way at major football or basketball schools. It just feels right that reggie has this award back now.

Neil Freiman
Yeah, there was a huge campaign to get Reggie Bush back this Heisman. It's just crazy to look back at when he was playing and the very tight sensitivity around athletes getting any money. And now we're in a new era, 2024, where, yeah, people are getting millions of dollars before even entering college. Jack Golke of Oakland University is literally filming turbotax commercials hours after he finished a game in March Madness. It's just unrecognizable to the college landscape that Reggie Bush played in.

So there was a lot others, a big push by Reggie Bush and a bunch of other Heisman Trophy winners, and he had this big campaign to get him this Heisman trophy back because he said, look what happened in college athletics. We are in a new paradigm. In 2021, athletes were allowed to be compensated for their name, image and likeness. There was also this Supreme Court ruling that open the door for student athlete compensation. So those two things, nil and the Supreme Court ruling, has just changed college sports forever.

And I don't think you can say this is a particularly amateur sport anymore, at least at the college football level. Even if you look back at 2005, when Reggie Bush was in college, this kind of stuff was happening just anecdotally. You heard stories and whispers that a lot of other people were getting money under the table, and yet Reggie was kind of the only one truly punished. He had his award script for him. So even if you just look anecdotally at that time, it was seemed unfair.

Toby Howell
And then also, I've been seeing some people saying, is this just symbolic that he gets his trophy back. It is. But there was a joke in the morning booth newsletter that comes out this morning saying that this is great news for Nissan's Heisman house commercials. It actually is great news because Reggie Bush is one of the more recognizable college athletes of all time. They get them him back in the Heisman fold.

It does lead to a nice boost in marketability. So you can kind of see where the Heisman trusts head at too was in reinstating his trophy. And while we're talking about Reggie Bush college football, we should mention the NFL draft is tonight. So number one, another USC player, Caleb Williams, is expected to go number one overall to the Chicago Bears. And what's interesting about this draft, it's very top loaded with quarterbacks.

Neil Freiman
So it's not inconceivable that the first four picks could be all quarterbacks and. They'Re all four quarterbacks are going to go over the Gucci store that we know is in Detroit now and load up on Gucci bags. Let's finish up by saying if you're listening to Morning brew daily in South Carolina right now, you probably need to crank the volume because the cicadas are emerging and it's likely getting loud. Some South Carolina counties have become so overrun with their mating calls that residents are calling the sheriff's office wondering where the unexpected sirens or roars are coming from. And complaints are only going to grow.

Toby Howell
This year, the US is getting hit with a double whammy of the pes. Brood XIX and Brood XII are emerging together for the first time since 1803. The once in millennium double brood event means trillions of the bugs are emerging underground along the eastern seaboard this month. The collective might of their songs has been likened to jet engines firing. Anyone who gets too close often needs to wear ear muffs to protect their hearing.

Neil they don't pose a threat to humans other than being super loud, but that is a threat to humans, if you ask me. I can't help but think about the the eclipse as well. Another natural phenomenon that had a particular path of totality. That path of totality you wanted to be in because you can make a lot of money on Airbnbs. There was a lot of stuff going on where the cicadas are coming.

Neil Freiman
That is a path of totality you do not want to be in. And I wouldn't be surprised to see a similar out migration of people from these areas to places that don't have cicadas. I've heard anecdotally that people are moving from Chicago out of Chicago during the summer to other cities to escape the noise of the cicadas, because I know we can laugh about it, but I think it's pretty loud. I haven't really been in a hotspot, but they are extremely loud and extremely annoying to. I'll just say, like, where this path of totality is.

So these two broods are emerging. There's one that goes across the south from around Nashville, Atlanta, Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, and then there's this Illinois one. So it's really puts the noise in Illinois, and it's gonna be in the upper midwest. So those areas across the south and then through the. Through the midwest up to Illinois are gonna be absolutely smacked.

Toby Howell
I was also digging into, how do these broods work? Like, what is the. Or what is the natural explanation for why they emerged from the ground? And no one really knows. It's been a mystery for so long, figuring out how.

They all seem to know when is the right time to. To emerge. There's around 15 cicada broods that at any given time, are incubating underground. And scientists always try to figure out what is it that sets them off and decides that they're gonna emerge. Right now, some of it has to do with temperature.

It needs to be above 64 degrees underground in order for them to emerge. But a lot of people are just saying, like, this is just part of the essence of life. A ton of animals flock together. Birds, wildebeests, whatever you wanna call them. They make these decisions based on these kind of unreliable signals that scientists don't really understand.

Even cells and embryos developing embryos coordinate their growth. So a lot of scientists just stand back and say, hey, this is part of the essence of life. We don't have a full explanation for them, so just take it in. It's a sight to behold. Yeah.

Neil Freiman
If you want to remember, one thing about cicadas is that they pee so hard, they have a velocity of up to 3 meters/second which is the strongest pee in the animal kingdom. And that's because they drink 300 times their body weight in xylem, which is a plant SAP, when they come out. So I don't think anyone wanted to know that, Neil, but now a lot of people do. So thank you for that. All right, I think it's time to wrap it up.

Thanks so much for listening and have a great Thursday or almost there to the weekend. If you have any feedback on the show or any exclusive dinner reservations you want to offer us, send an email to Morningbrew daily at morningbrew brewed.com. Let's roll the credits. Emily Milliron is our executive producer. Raymond Liu is our producer.

Yuh Chenawa Ogu is our technical director. Billy Menino is on audio. Hair and makeup is stuck in line at airport security. Devin Emery is our chief content officer. And our show is a production of Morning Brew.

Toby Howell
Great show today, Neil. Let's run it back tomorrow.