A U.S.-Czech Republic Concerns the Integrability of Social Media and App Stores in the Presence of a Foreign Adversarial App

The fine print makes it illegal for any such entities to “distribute, maintain, or update (or enable the distribution, maintenance, or updating of) a foreign adversary controlled application” either through a marketplace or internet hosting services.

In mid-December, Democrats on a House committee dealing with competition between the U.S. and China sent letters to the CEOs of Apple and Google warning the companies to take steps to ensure they can “fully comply with this requirement” by the deadline — which would have an immediate impact on users.

If TikTok is banned, it’s not clear how quickly users would feel the effects. Apple would need to remove the app from their stores, and could not update it. It would still remain on users’ phones if they’ve already downloaded it but Oracle, which provides cloud infrastructure to TikTok in the US, would likely also be required to stop hosting the app’s data.

They are used in countries with strict internet restrictions to be able to use blocked social media platforms.

Virtual private network, or VPN, which encrypting users’ location information and makes it appear like they are surfing from another country, is one of the most discussed workarounds.

While the law concerns TikTok, it actually targets the companies that make the platform accessible in the U.S., including app stores like Apple’s App Store and Google Play, and cloud service providers like Oracle.

“If you already have [TikTok] on your phone, it’s not going to disappear from your phone on January 19th or January 20th,” Ruane says. “It will, however, very likely disappear from application stores.”

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She states that the service that you get with the application will be worse and worse over time, but it is too soon to say whether that will be within weeks or months.

And without the ability to update, the platform won’t be able to fix bugs, add features or address security concerns. Eventually, Ruane says, it may also become incompatible with the operating system of certain phones.

Lawmakers worried that the Chinese government could gain access to Americans’ data through the company that owns TikTok, and used it to sway public opinion, but the bill passed with bipartisan support.

The government is able to ban foreign-owned apps if it deems them a threat to national security, thanks to a new law signed by President Biden.

Many people have expressed an interest in buying TikTok so far, from ”Shark Tank” celebrity Kevin O’Leary to Mr. Beast. The problem has not been a lack of buyers — though obvious ones like Meta and Google would likely be barred by antirust authorities — but reluctant sellers. The Chinese government has always stated it wouldn’t approve a sale, but new reports suggest they might be changing their minds. It makes strategic sense that Musk was involved based on his relationships with both China and Trump.

But it will get harder for the platform’s users in the U.S. to access the app, says Kate Ruane, director of the Free Expression Project at the Center for Democracy and Technology (which joined an amicus brief supporting TikTok and its users’ protected speech).

It’s a hurdle to access the application and you would have to think about it. To access TikTok, to do all this or to learn how to do these are required technical skills is not worth it to me. “And I think for a fair number of users who are just casually using the application, the answer will probably be no.”

While Trump previously disparaged the app as a national security threat and even tried to ban it during his first term, he has since become a staunch defender of the platform and even asked the Supreme Court last month to pause the start date of the law in question.

“There’s a scenario in which ByteDance could move papers around and shift assets into another corporation, and that would give Trump enough cover to declare that TikTok is no longer controlled by ByteDance,” she said.

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“That’s pretty straightforward, but it’s also politically incredibly difficult to do because it would require the changing of votes for many, many, many members of Congress,” Ruane says.

Trump has two options, the first one is to instruct the Justice Department and attorney general to not enforce the law, giving companies that provide TikTok, like Apple, the option of continuing to do so.

But Ruane says that’s also easier said than done, as lawyers within those companies would still see — and likely seek to avoid — “gigantic legal risk” in flouting the law, which includes hefty penalties.

“So if anybody uses your service to access TikTok and you are in violation of the law, it’s $5,000 per person that does that,” Ruane says. You could get away with offering services to TikTok even though you’re in violation of the law because it would cost $5,000 times the number of people.

Alan Rozenshtein is an associate law professor at the University of Minnesota Law School and director of Lawfare. As he told NPR’s Fresh Air in December, Trump could “just declare that the law no longer applies.”

The deal had some support in the Biden administration. People close to talks about TikTok’s future say it is possible Trump brings Project Texas back, with Trump potentially determining that the agreement makes TikTok in compliance with the divest-or-ban law.

As TikTok anxiously awaits a Supreme Court decision that could determine whether it will be banned in the United States, users are preemptively fleeing the app and migrating to another Chinese social media platform called Xiaohongshu, which literally means “little red book” in Mandarin. Xiaohongshu was the most downloaded app in the US App Store, even though it doesn’t have an official English name. The second app on the list is Lemon8, another social media app owned by TikTok’s parent company ByteDance that is also experiencing a traffic surge from exiled TikTok users.

Some users are predictably going to Instagram or YouTube, but others say they would like to stick to a platform developed by a Chinese company to protest the decisions by US lawmakers that lead to this situation. One person wrote on Bluesky “Telling me to download Rednote out of spite over the TikTok ban was the only push I needed actually.” Taylor Lorenz shared a link to her account on Bluesky, calling it the hottest new social app in America.

Musk is uniquely positioned to play a role in a potential deal. He’s got a direct line to Trump, he’s dealt with Chinese officials before and has said he wants X to be more like TikTok. (Sales from China account for a significant share of Tesla’s business.) He could combine his platform to create an influential one. He has access to money he would need to make a deal, as the richest man in the world.

Long Le, an international business professor at Santa Clara University, tells The Verge that China may be open to a joint venture arrangement, similar to what foreign companies operating in China often undergo. Under the text of the US law, an app can be considered to be controlled by a foreign adversary if a person from one of those countries owns at least a 20 percent stake.

Le suggests that if they were going to do a joint venture, it would be great if they went with billionaire Musk since he is close to Trump. There are some aspects of trade and foreign investment that Musk could allow the US and China to have.