The problem with banning TikTok

TikTok’s in trouble. But so is the internet as we know it.

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On August 6, President Trump issued an executive order prohibiting transactions with the video-sharing app TikTok. His order said that because TikTok is owned by the Beijing-based company ByteDance, the app could pose national security and privacy risks to users in the US.

But the Trump administration’s targeting of TikTok marks a departure from America’s traditional position on internet governance and online free speech. And it also comes at a time when the concept of a global internet itself is under threat.

Today a growing number of countries are pursuing various forms of internet sovereignty — from Russia building a walled-off “intranet,” to India regularly shutting down its internet in areas of social unrest, to some European nations introducing a “right to be forgotten” from search engines.

All these trends point in the direction of a “splinternet,” where your experience of the internet increasingly depends on where you live, and the whims of the ruling parties there. As we explain in this video, that’s a tough environment for an app like TikTok, which became globally successful almost immediately, and which connects people from around the world in hyper-personalized but often international subcultures.

With the excesses of the open internet visible daily (see: foreign election interference, data breaches, misinformation and hate speech, and domestic and corporate surveillance), the countries that do support a free internet will have to work hard to secure its future. But they may have to do it without the United States.

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Sources:
https://www.eugenewei.com/blog/2020/8...
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.c...
https://www.newamerica.org/cybersecur...
https://turner.substack.com/p/the-ris...
https://stratechery.com/2020/the-tikt...
https://www.lawfareblog.com/unpacking...
https://www.ft.com/content/6a1b9b4d-d...
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20...
https://www.accessnow.org/cms/assets/...

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