The law says it will be “unlawful” for entities to “distribute, maintain or update” the app including its source code, or by “providing services” that allow it to keep running as it is now. This distribution, maintenance, or updates could be, the law says, by means of mobile app stores that can be accessed in the US or by “providing internet hosting services.”
“The law really deliberately avoided saying that it was illegal to have the app on your phone,” says Milton Mueller, a professor and co-founder of the Internet Governance Project at the Georgia Institute of Technology, who filed an amicus brief to the Supreme Court in opposition of the ban. “Their attempt is to say, nobody new can download it from the Apple or Google stores, and nobody who has it can update it through those stores,” Mueller says. “There’s nothing in the law that says ‘TikTok you must block US users’, which is again interesting.”
If TikTok is removed from Apple’s App Store and Google’s Play Store in the US, it will not be possible to directly install new updates that will add new features, fix bugs within the code, or quash security flaws. Over time, that means TikTok will stop functioning properly. Apple didn’t respond to WIRED’s request for comment, while Google declined to comment on what it will do if the law comes into effect.
The law’s other focus is on stopping “hosting” companies providing services to TikTok—and the definition is pretty wide. Hosting companies “may include file hosting, domain name server hosting, cloud hosting, and virtual private server hosting,” the law says. Since the summer of 2022, as TikTok faced pressure about its Chinese ownership, the company has hosted US user data within Oracle’s cloud services. Oracle also did not respond to WIRED’s request for comment.
Even so, other systems such as content delivery networks, advertising networks, payment providers, and more are used as part of TikTok’s infrastructure. The law does not specifically mention these services, but differing legal readings could make them question whether they help to “maintain” or “distribute” TikTok’s fully functioning service.
Hall says a recent test of TikTok’s website showed 185 embedded domains on the page. “They pull in code, content from that array of third-party providers and their own domains too,” he says. “The apps will start to decay and rot as either services stop working, things like content distribution networks or services who feel like they can’t take the risks of the ambiguous nature of the language or the potential enforcement by the incoming administration.”
There’s one internet infrastructure player that the ban does not specifically put pressure on: Internet service providers. Countries such as Russia and China have developed censorship measures that allow them to block entire websites being accessed through web bowsers. Mueller believes this omission by US lawmakers was likely deliberate as it avoids setting up a Chinese-style internet firewall. “They knew that a system of ISP-based blocking and filtering would obviously be a form of First Amendment restriction,” he says.
Avoiding a TikTok Ban
While TikTok’s service in the US would likely degrade over time, there remain some potential ways around any ban—both for individuals and potentially also the company itself. How effective these measures would be likely depends on how motivated people are to keep using TikTok and what the company decides to do.
“TikTok has 170 million users,” says Alan Rozenshtein, an associate professor of law at the University of Minnesota, who is in favor of the law but says it is the “best of a bunch of bad options” relating to TikTok. “This law will not prevent every one of them from accessing TikTok. I don’t think that was ever the goal of the law. The law is to make it meaningfully harder to access TikTok.”
