Summary
TikTok, with 170 million US users, faces a nationwide US ban starting January 19 unless its Chinese parent company, ByteDance, sells the platform.
A court rejected ByteDance’s bid to delay the ban, forcing TikTok to appeal to the Supreme Court.
The US government cites national security concerns over data collection, while TikTok argues its US user data is stored domestically.
President Biden may grant a 90-day extension, but the decision could fall to Trump, who has opposed banning TikTok.
Is the app itself illegal? Is there a fine to having it installed?
Tictok can still run servers outside the country…
Connecting to those servers would be blocked. Much like how the great firewall prevents most in/out connections.
It’s exists, Americans just can’t get in and their people can’t get out without workarounds and a little government dissident behavior.
Actually… I’ve been doing some digging and that doesn’t sound like it’s the case. I think it just makes it illegal to host the services in the us and provide the application from us services like app stores…
https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/house-bill/7521/text
(1) PROHIBITION OF FOREIGN ADVERSARY CONTROLLED APPLICATIONS.—It shall be unlawful for an entity to distribute, maintain, or update (or enable the distribution, maintenance, or updating of) a foreign adversary controlled application by carrying out, within the land or maritime borders of the United States, any of the following:
(A) Providing services to distribute, maintain, or update such foreign adversary controlled application (including any source code of such application) by means of a marketplace (including an online mobile application store) through which users within the land or maritime borders of the United States may access, maintain, or update such application.
(B) Providing internet hosting services to enable the distribution, maintenance, or updating of such foreign adversary controlled application for users within the land or maritime borders of the United States.
No there would be no blocking the would just shut it down but the could sanction any company that violates the ban that’s about it for enforcement. But a VPN to another country would bypass it but it would not be US version of tiktok.