TikTok loses challenge against law requiring sale or ban

(NEW YORK) — Back in the 1980s, Honda sold a city car in Japan called, appropriately, the Honda City. It would have been a normal hatchback, were it not for what came in the trunk: a Honda motor scooter that drivers could fold up and store in the trunk of the City. It was called the Motocompo, and it was a vehicle that belonged to a sector transportation experts call “micromobility.”

David Zipper, a senior fellow at the MIT Mobility Initiative, noted that the segment encompasses a range of vehicles.

“Scooters, it can include bikes and e-bikes. Cargo e-bikes sometimes. Where it starts to get a little hazy is when you get into things like mopeds which are a little bit faster. And even golf carts some people group into this category of micromobility,” Zipper told ABC Audio.

The segment has seen an explosion of growth in the last 15 to 20 years, he said. The average price of a new car in the U.S. is just under $48,000, according to recent data from Cox Automotive. And while that’s down slightly from its 2022 peak, for many Americans, it’s still expensive to buy a car. That’s why Zipper said many are now turning to the micromobility sector.

“You’ve seen a variety of different types of innovations and new technologies take hold that have allowed for a lot of different form factors and a lot of different use cases of micromobility,” Zipper said.

Consequently, new companies are emerging to serve the burgeoning market. In an unassuming New York City building across from Brooklyn’s McCarren Park, a startup called Infinite Machine is putting the finishing touches on its take on a micromobility vehicle: an electric scooter called the P1.

The first thing that stands out about the P1 — the company’s first product — is the looks. The scooter has flat, slab-like body panels with sharp edges, all trimmed in black and what looks like stainless steel.

“We were inspired by vehicles like the Delorean and the Cybertruck,” Eddie Cohen, the president of Infinite Machine, said. 

He founded the company alongside his brother, CEO Joe Cohen, and the two first unveiled the P1 to the public in 2023.

“Imagine like a Vespa from the future,” Joe Cohen said. “It’s made from aluminum and steel … and it’s super high performance.”

The Cohens told ABC Audio this is the first vehicle in its class to come with Apple CarPlay. The phone-mirroring technology is viewable on a small touchscreen, where riders can also pull up exterior cameras. They’re primarily for “safety and insurance purposes,” Joe Cohen said, but the cameras have other uses.

“If you want to make some content on your ride and record your commute,” he said. “Also when it’s parked if someone screws with your vehicle, you can record that and use that as evidence for the authorities.”

The P1 can go about 60 miles on a charge, according to Infinite Machine. The battery of the P1, which is located in the scooter’s floor, is removable, meaning city dwellers can take it into their homes or apartments to fill up on electricity.

“The power needs for a vehicle like ours are so much lower. You can charge this thing with a normal outlet, you don’t need a special charger. So the question of like infrastructure — charging infrastructure — it’s not relevant for a vehicle like ours,” Joe Cohen said.

Advancements in battery technology are a big reason the micromobility segment is booming, and not just for electric scooters like the P1, Zipper noted.

“Turns out when you stick a battery on a bicycle — it becomes far more useful,” he said.

Electric power allows micromobility vehicles to behave more like traditional cars, according to Zipper.

“Maybe you want to arrive at work without being really sweaty,” he said. “Or you are having some mobility issues and you’re a little bit older and you really value that extra oomph to get up a hill. Maybe you want to be able to power a bicycle with a storage area to bring your kids to school or to get groceries.”

But riding a bike — even an electrically assisted one — in certain big-city environments raises safety concerns.

Consumer Product Safety Commission estimates more than 360,000 injuries related to micromobility devices were treated in emergency rooms across the country between 2017 to 2022. In that timeframe, there were more than 230 deaths, according to the commission.

A micromobility device like a bike or a scooter having to share the road with cars and trucks is “a recipe for in the best case scenario discomfort and in the worst case scenario a crash that could lead to death,” Zipper said.

He suggested the solution is to build out dedicated infrastructure: things like bike lanes that are protected by concrete barriers. It’s something he said many major metropolitan areas are already doing.

“In the last fifteen years or so, you’ve seen a lot of cities in the US, and frankly in other parts of the world too, invest a lot of money and resources in creating safe spaces for people who want to use a scooter, or a bicycle, or any of these other versions of micromobility that we’re talking about,” Zipper said.

But it hasn’t been smooth sailing. Community boards have clashed with homeowners and businesses in cities across the country over the rollout of dedicated bike infrastructure, with detractors angry about losing valuable parking space. In one New York City neighborhood, residents even made lawn signs reading “No Bike Lanes” in big bold letters. Meanwhile, organizations like the NYC E-Vehicle Alliance have cropped up to advocate for micromobility regulation amid rising rates of injuries and deaths.

In the meantime, Joe Cohen of Infinite Machine said at least some of this is going to fall on riders practicing safe driving habits.

“Until our city looks more friendly toward small vehicles like this, we have to just be really aware,” he said. “And our job is to not only design really safe vehicles on the hardware side, but also to educate our riders about how to be defensive and to take their own safety seriously.”

The P1 retails for $10,000 — putting it firmly at the top end of the micromobility market.

“We know we’re more expensive than the competition and we did that intentionally because we did not want to cheap out or value-engineer this product,” Eddie Cohen said.

His brother put it a slightly different way.

“It’s cheaper than the cheapest cars,” Joe Cohen said.

A little lower down on the price ladder is the Motocompacto, an electric scooter Honda unveiled last year that retails for around $1,000. It doesn’t have nearly as much space as the Infinite Machine, and just a fraction of the electric range. But when it’s not being used, it folds up into a briefcase-like shape that can be stowed in the trunk of a car.

Copyright © 2024, ABC Audio. All rights reserved.

(NEW YORK) — Tech billionaire Elon Musk has kept busy since Election Day, advising President-elect Donald Trump and receiving an appointment to co-lead a new government efficiency commission.

Musk has also found time to promote Trump in scores of posts on the social media platform X, formerly Twitter, which he owns. But such advocacy appears to have driven some X users to seek alternatives.

One such app, Bluesky, has drawn attention as a possible X rival and has amassed a total of 20 million users to date. Its growth accelerated in the aftermath of the election, when Bluesky added one million users in a single week.

Launched by former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, Bluesky has attracted some prominent users in recent days, including comedian Ben Stiller, author Stephen King, and pop star Lizzo.

Here’s what to know about Bluesky, and how to join:

What is Bluesky?

Bluesky is a text-oriented social media platform on which users can post messages as long as 300 characters. Like X, the messages posted on Bluesky appear on a newsfeed displayed to users. The app is available on iOS and Android.

The platform operates on an open framework, meaning that users can post their messages to a server tailored for specific interests or communities. The system design resembles that which is used on another text-first app, Mastodon, as well as the decentralized platform Discord.

Bluesky began in 2019 as a venture at Twitter overseen by Dorsey, and was launched as an independent company in 2022, the year after he left Twitter.

Development of the site started after a 2020 tweet from Dorsey announcing Twitter’s plans to fund a decentralized social media platform, Bluesky said in a blog post. The eventual leaders at Bluesky were among those who sent direct messages to Dorsey in response to his post, the blog added.

Who owns Bluesky?

The board of directors at Bluesky features Dorsey as well as Jeremie Miller, the founder in the late 1990s of a free instant messaging service called Jabber.

Bluesky’s CEO is Jay Graber, who formerly founded an events-oriented social media site called Happening and worked as a software engineer on a cryptocurrency called Zcash, according to LinkedIn. She also serves on the Bluesky board.

The company is owned by Graber as well as “the Bluesky team,” the Bluesky website says.

While Bluesky has retained a traditional corporate structure featuring a board and chief executive, the company said it aspires to take control of content away from a top-down entity and return it to creators.

“Traditional social networks are often closed platforms with a central authority,” the website says. “There’s a small group of people who control those companies, and they have total control over how users can use the platform and what developers can build.”

Dorsey criticized Musk’s leadership at Twitter on Bluesky last year, saying that things “all went south” at the platform after Musk’s acquisition, CNBC reported.

Is Bluesky a viable alternative to X?

The steady growth of Bluesky has made it a destination for an increasing number of celebrities, elected officials and government entities. But the platform remains much smaller than X or the Meta-owned competitor, Threads.

Bluesky boasts roughly 20 million users, which amounts to less than 10% of the 229 million daily active users disclosed by Twitter in a June 2022 earnings report. X’s user data is no longer publicly available since Musk took the company private.

In July, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced that Threads had exceeded 175 million monthly active users.

How do you join Bluesky?

During Bluesky’s initial years, users could only join the platform if they received an invitation. The policy aimed to limit the app’s user base as it underwent testing.

In February, however, the platform made itself available to all users. Individuals or organizations can navigate to the platform and follow instructions to create an account.

Copyright © 2024, ABC Audio. All rights reserved.

(WASHINGTON) — TikTok on Monday requested the emergency pause of a law set to ban the popular social media app next month.

A temporary lifting of the measure would afford the Supreme Court time to determine whether it should review the law, the company said in a court filing.

The filling arrives days after TikTok — which boasts more than 170 million U.S. users — lost a challenge against the measure in a federal appeals court.

A pause of the law would afford the Supreme Court time to determine whether it should “review this exceptionally important case,” TikTok said in the court filing on Monday.

The law would impose a nationwide ban of TikTok on Jan. 19, 2025, unless the company finds a different owner.

The ban would take effect one day before the inauguration of President-elect Donald Trump, who has signaled that he would seek to reverse a possible ban.

The legal pause would also allow the Trump administration an opportunity to decide its approach to TikTok, the company’s legal filing said.

TikTok had challenged the law on First Amendment grounds, arguing that a potential ban would deny American users access to a popular venue for public expression. Attorneys for the company also disputed claims that the app poses a national security risk.

In a ruling on Friday, a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit rejected TikTok’s bid to overturn the law.

The federal court found merit in security concerns about potential data collection or content manipulation undertaken by the Chinese government.

Each of those two concerns “constitutes an independently compelling national security interest,” the court opinion said. The court cited previous instances in which the Chinese government had pursued data, noting the government’s use of relationships with Chinese-owned businesses.

The China-based app has faced growing scrutiny from government officials over fears that user data could fall into the possession of the Chinese government and the app could be weaponized by China to spread misinformation. TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, has denied those claims.

There is little evidence that TikTok has shared U.S. user data with the Chinese government or that the Chinese government has asked the app to do so, cybersecurity experts previously told ABC News.

In a statement on Monday, TikTok urged the Supreme Court to intervene on its behalf.

“The Supreme Court has an established historical record of protecting Americans’ right to free speech, and we expect they will do just that on this important constitutional issue,” the company said. “Unfortunately, the TikTok ban was conceived and pushed through based upon inaccurate, flawed and hypothetical information, resulting in outright censorship of the American people.”

Copyright © 2024, ABC Audio. All rights reserved.