Thoughts on Tech News of Note - Week ending 12-19-2025

• TikTok Finally Sold (I guess...)
• iRobot Bankruptcy
• The New Legitimacy of Online Gambling

TikTok Finally Sold (I guess...)
This is arguably the biggest tech story of the week and is an almost perfect cap to the year - although much could still happen in the world between now and 12/31/2025. Nevertheless, I'm probably the worst person in the world to write about this story as I have actively and intentionally stayed off TikTok. I don't have the app installed anywhere and have only seen a few videos on the internet or those that were cross posted to YouTube as Shorts. I more or less live on YouTube for video, with short jaunts occasionally taken to Nebula.tv and video players on the various news sites I frequent, like BBC and NPR. In general, I prefer long-form video over short-form. However, I acknowledge that some things are best kept short. The Shorts that tend to get me to click are videos of animals doing cute or silly things, radical transformations and/or makeovers, and quick looks at hot new tech products. But I mainly try to scroll past Shorts and not get sidetracked by them in my search for more "meaningful" content. Yet I also know that you can convey a lot of information in 2 minutes or less, so I'm earnestly not trying to put down the entire category. I know there are famous TikTok personalities that cover the news and educate their viewers on a wide range of topics. I've listened to many interviews on podcasts of some of those personalities and I respect what they're trying to do for their audiences. After all, mainstream media - whatever that is depends on who you are, I think - constantly tells us that our attention spans are shorter than ever. We see stories all the time about how college kids can't be bothered to read books, so professors are now assigning book snippets. And knowing that at least initially TikTok viewership skewed young, one can imagine the potential importance of the platform. 'Potential' is key here because we also know for the most part, people aren't going to TikTok to be informed or educated as much as they are to be entertained. If one can also be informed or educated while being entertained, then we are all theoretically better for it.

But in terms of the threat of all this real entertainment and potential education has to the United States, I can't say. I'm not sure it's honest to suggest that anyone can say. Supposedly, Congress was provided data to which the rest of us aren't privy and the horrors of those realities are supposedly what led to the TikTok ban in the first place. It was such a dire situation that they passed a law to ban it or sell it to American owners to keep unwitting Americans safe from undue Chinese influence and propaganda. So dire indeed that they then let the law remain unenforced for nearly an entire year. Well, the danger to American Democracy must be staggering, unmeasurable even. There are arguments raging even now as to whether the deal that has been made can accomplish the original point of a sale as the law intended. After a year of wheeling and dealing, Chinese investors will still have a stake in the final venture. Even if we will be safer under the new ownership and the revamped technical arrangements, who can quantify that impact? What are the appropriate metrics for determining that this approach is successful? I'm more interested in this facet than I am even in whether the platform will continue to be successful from a user and consumer perspective because that angle is so much easier to measure and probably much easier to predict. If the recommendations on the platform are perceived to be worse and that perception persists over time, then the platform will ultimately fail, and all the money spent to acquire it will have been yet another tech money pit. But there is a possibility that the platform will remain viable and appealing to people even after the algorithm is retrained and deemed safe for public consumption. TikTok has no real competitor despite companies like Meta and Google claiming they are in a fight for their lives against it. I suspect you'll have to mess it up pretty badly in order for everyone to just walk away from it. And it's also possible that even if the algorithm is decimated after being retrained, it may still get better with time if enough people stick with it. Meta and Google manage to serve people content they want to see at least some of the time. I would bet that even the new TikTok could manage that as well as they do. But I'm not seeing enough people in power asking how we'll know this was all worth the effort. I guess that tells me that the point was never really being safer. The point was appearing to be safer to allow for another power grab for the already powerful American technocracy and dispelling the idea of Chinese superiority in any form. More tech war served cold.

iRobot Bankruptcy
For once, I found myself a tiny bit sad that Amazon hadn't been allowed to buy iRobot. At the time the decision came down, it seemed reasonable to me. Knowing what I know about Amazon, it seemed perfectly logical that they would buy iRobot and then shove its products into all of our faces at the expense of any competitors that would dare to sell similar products on Amazon. Many articles have been written and videos created about Amazon's tendencies to front-load its store with as much of its own stuff as humanly and inhumanly possible. And of course, Amazon has an existing relationship with Best Buy, so we'd expect to see their products pushed there as well, likely taking up valuable specialized floor space in their stores alongside their Echo and Ring products. While there were and continue to be countless Chinese competitors, few of them had the brand recognition of Roomba and even fewer had the marketing chops and ruthless ambition of Amazon. But the period of uncertainty around the approval seems to have left iRobot in a lurch where those competitors were able to start lapping it soundly in terms of price and features. If you take any amount of time to research and cross-shop intelligent vacuums and mops, you'll find iRobot's products aren't at the top of the list anymore. I bought my parents a Roomba vacuum and mop several years ago, but if I were in the market today, there are other brands I'd consider first because of their positive reviews on sites like PCMag.com, Tom's Guide, and The Verge. Even Dyson is in the game now. And as a person who watches a lot of YouTube, I've certainly seen plenty of ad spots done by creators for vacuums from other top brands sold on Amazon. What would the industry look like now if Amazon had bought iRobot? Would they have toppled those other brands through sheer media marketing muscle, or would things look oddly similar to how they look today, just with iRobot products perhaps being on the list more often than not? How long would it have taken for iRobot to scale back up their R&D and product design efforts since they admit now that they had to slow things down while they waited for the deal to be approved? I think that if it's true they lost time while waiting for approval, that would have put them behind no matter what. I think it's possible that Amazon having bought them wouldn't have been as detrimental to the market as perhaps many of us assumed it would be at the time. But hindsight is always clearer than foresight and even now, this is just my speculation. The end result is that we have a fairly robust selection of products to choose from, many of them available exclusively on Amazon. And even if iRobot were to fade quietly into the vacuum of dead product space, maybe we're still better off overall.

Is this what winning that tech war against China looks like?

The New Legitimacy of Online Gambling
I have a tiny portfolio of weird stocks I've bought through Robinhood. I started using the app right before the pandemic on the recommendation of a co-worker. I remember the last conversation I had with him about stocks right before we were all sent home to work remotely was about the best medical and pharmaceutical stocks to buy - J&J, Medtronic, etc. It was the first time I'd ever bought stocks outside of my 401K. And because I was putting tiny amounts in - I'd buy only a few shares of stocks at most and usually only stocks whose prices were well under $100 per share - I didn't feel like I was throwing away money. The stock market had always felt a little bit like legitimate legal gambling to me. And I say legitimate because if you told someone at your church that you'd bought stocks, they'd just nod, smile, and maybe even ask for a stock tip. But if you told them you went to a casino or bought a bunch of lottery tickets, they'd be much more likely to look down their nose at you. I've lost some money on some bad choices (Nikola, sigh...) but I've also made money on some good guesses. And when Robinhood introduced the ability to get in on some IPOs, I jumped at that, including their own IPO back in 2021. So as someone with an account as well as a being a shareholder, I get plenty of email from them. And when I saw the email this week about their latest YES/NO event, for some reason I registered and watched it. Well, I watched it for a little while. As soon as it was clear to me that they were just going to talk about examples of things you could bet on with their new betting platform... sorry, prediction market offering... I bailed. It's just another step too close to plain old gambling to me and I don't like to feel like I'm intentionally wasting money. I think the idea of having even a tiny stake in something that could succeed or fail feels less like wasting money than buying an opportunity to make or lose money based on whether something happens. This is a small distinction, perhaps one without a real difference, but it's real in my mind. Nevertheless, this is a market that is exploding. And now that Polymarket is open to the USA competition is probably going to continue to heat up. Coinbase has made announcements. DraftKings has a new app. I'm not sure how we deal with the gambling equivalent of insider trading issues on these platforms. Maybe it doesn't matter since these aren't securities and no one is buying into anything other than an idea. But I sense that there is going to continue to be drama around people making bets on ideas that are sure bets for them because of what they know, and I don't see any clear way to prevent this across the board. Is it a tempest in a teapot? Will there even be a tempest?

Hey, maybe these emerging prediction market platforms will be how Congress deals with not being able to trade stocks if that law moves forward...