By Stephen Nellis and Max A. Cherney
(Reuters) – Social media app TikTok, which is owned by China’s ByteDance, will be banned in the United States on Sunday unless a deal comes together to sell it to a U.S. investor or the U.S. Supreme Court intervenes.
The ban results from an April law signed by President Joe Biden and is the first time the United States has attempted to shut down access to an app with such a large user base – roughly 170 million domestic users.
To pull it off, the law targets a wide swath of U.S.-based partners that help bring TikTok to users, rendering most easy workarounds such as using a virtual private network or changing a phone’s country settings moot or difficult to use, experts told Reuters.
At best, users might be able to access a web-based version of the service that has fewer features than the app, and even that might not work, experts said.
Here’s a closer look at how the ban will be implemented.
APP ‘ROTS’
The law will not force users to delete the app. But TikTok plans to shut down the service and will show users a message about the law and offer to let them download their personal data, Reuters previously reported.
Even if TikTok was not planning a formal shutdown, the app would not work as well as it did before. App store providers are explicitly barred from distributing TikTok to U.S. users, which means that Apple and Alphabet’s Google will remove the app from their stores and will no longer distribute updates to fix bugs.
The TikTok app also relies on a constant flow of new videos, which would become nearly impossible to deliver. TikTok data for U.S. users is hosted and processed on servers owned by Oracle, which most experts believe Oracle would have to cease those operations.
Oracle, Apple, Google and TikTok all either declined to comment or did not return requests for comment.
Beyond that, analyses have shown that more than 100 other service providers, such as content delivery networks, help make TikTok operate smoothly.
“Some subset of that stuff that is required for the app to actually work, both in terms of getting video to you, but also in terms of getting video and content up,” said Joseph Lorenzo Hall, a distinguished technologist with nonprofit group Internet Society. “And so uploading might be one of the first things to go. Americans may only be able to watch as their app rots.”
The disengagement of those service providers could also affect tens of millions of TikTok users outside the U.S., but company engineers are working to address those issues, sources told Reuters.
TWO PHONES AND A TRIP TO TORONTO?
The most straightforward workaround to keep access to TikTok would be to use a virtual private network, or VPN, which can conceal the internet protocol, or IP, address of a user and thereby their location.
But TikTok has other means of knowing where the user is located, such as geolocation data from a phone, said Jason Kelley, director of activism for the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
Users could try to access a web-based version of TikTok via a browser while using a VPN, but the web version lacks many features of the app and – if the user has to create a new account – would not be as personalized to the user’s preferences.
“It won’t be a good service for you, and it won’t be a profitable service for them,” Kelley said.
Some users have discussed steps such as switching an iPhone’s country settings to another country in a bid to keep using the app. But that would require cancelling existing app subscriptions and setting up a new payment method for that country, according to Apple documentation.
It is enough of a hassle that it may be easier to purchase a separate phone dedicated to the app, leading Hall to joke that the law could result in “Congress forcing the influencer population to carry two phones, just like most of them do.”
But even switching an iPhone’s settings to a different country is not a straightforward fix. The law bars Apple and other app store providers from delivering the TikTok app to users in the United States regardless of how their devices are configured, so a user would still have to leave the United States to download TikTok.
(Reporting by Stephen Nellis and Max Cherney in San Francisco; additional reporting by David Shepardson in Washington D.C.; editing by Kenneth Li and Nia Williams)
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