How a TikTok ban in the U.S. might work

TikTok is at risk of being banned in the US if Chinese parent ByteDance won’t sell its stake. Millions of Americans who use the popular video app are still wondering what it means for them.

Some fans of the service may turn to a virtual private network (VPN) to try and connect to TikTok in case of restrictions, a solution that allows you to connect to the internet from other countries. But the loophole may not be easy to exploit.

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This is not a problem yet, as there are still a number of ways that TikTok’s ban can be circumvented or accessed legally in the US.

The Committee on Foreign Investment in the US (CFIUS) is an interagency body that evaluates national security concerns surrounding these applications to determine how to mitigate the risks of continuing to operate within them. The group could advise President Joe Biden that ByteDance’s acquisition of Musical.ly in 2017, the precursor to TikTok, is not dismissed, forcing the sale of these assets.

TikTok has suggested a mitigation plan as an alternative to forced sales. But this is a long-term solution because CFIUS has threatened a ban if ByteDance will not sell its shares.

A forced sale would be a complicated step, requiring transactions that have been going on for years to be scrapped. The Trump administration pursued that route before it was futile. The Chinese government will oppose it again, but it should be cautious in its protests because the core of its argument against the US is that TikTok operates independently.

“It will be part of the calculus and how aggressively China wants to respond,” said Lindsay Gorman, senior fellow for emerging technologies at the Marshall Fund’s German Alliance for Securing Democracy. Gormany previously served as a senior adviser in the Biden White House.

If the US bans TikTok, the mechanics of how that happens are murky. Oracle is a cloud hosting service for all TikTok usage on US Internet service providers like Comcast (the parent company of NBC Universal) and Verizon traffic directly to the end user. And the app store is controlled by Apple and Google is the primary place for consumers to download the TikTok app.

Shannon Reaves, a partner in Stroock’s CFIUS compliance group, said the third-party requirement would not come from CFIUS, which is tasked only with evaluating foreign investments.

“There will be no action by CFIUS as a result of this review that will be taken against third parties that are not part of this transaction,” Reaves said. “So the Apples and the Googles and the others, that’s not going to happen.”

Governments may need to pass legislation or executive orders to require app distributors, ISPs and cloud services to block access to TikTok.

While there are certainly loopholes that a subset of computer-savvy users can exploit, the typical consumer will have a hard time accessing services that the government has banned, said Douglas Schmidt, an engineering professor at Vanderbilt.

“There’s almost always a way around it,” Schmidt said. “It’s just going to be harder for the average person to do without getting an advanced degree in computer security or something.”

In other words, a VPN won’t be enough, partly because the route still requires app store credentials, which will reveal the user’s location. Gerald Kasulis, vice president at NordVPN, said there is also technology available to detect when users try to access apps with a VPN.

Concerns about TikTok’s security risks revolve around two main issues. The first is who can access US consumer information and the second is who has the ability to determine what information reaches US users. Under Chinese law, companies can be required to hand over internal information to the government for national security purposes.

TikTok is seeking to assure the US government that US user data is stored outside of China. The company has developed a complex plan known as Project Texas that includes verification of the code in the US and a separate board of directors for its domestic subsidiaries, with members reviewed by the US government.

TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew, who will testify before a US House panel next week, told The Wall Street Journal that Project Texas would act like a divestment to resolve security concerns.

But the mood in Washington is not in favor of TikTok, and lawmakers have lost any faith in China and its motives. The issue resurfaced earlier this year, when suspected Chinese spy balloons were seen flying over large swathes of the U.S. Biden ordered the military to shoot down the balloons last month.

When it comes to consumer technology, users don’t know what information they’re doing to the Chinese government. And the US government has a lot of work to do to provide clarity on what will happen if the app is banned.

“Even for people who are studying it, it’s not easy to cut through and eliminate all of these applications,” Gorman said. “As a society, we have not made a decision that the app store, the Apple App Store or the Google Play Store, should limit applications based on the amount of information they collect. It cannot be imposed on anyone. It should be handled by the government.”

While many users might think that casual social media use would be of interest to foreign governments, Schmidt says the data can have surprising value for bad actors.

“Having information about your habits and interests and interactions and where you go and what you do can be used for things like phishing attacks to get access to other information, or for things like blackmail, if you do the things you do. don’t want anyone else to know,” Schmidt said.

It’s an unfamiliar territory for US companies, unlike China, which blocks access to all kinds of content, including most US internet services.

“Trying to access police data is very difficult, especially if there is a suspicion that the people doing it have a reason to do it,” Schmidt said. “And they are very incentivized to collect this information and use it for all kinds of purposes.”

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