The US Senate has approved a controversial landmark bill that could see TikTok banned in America.
It gives TikTok's Chinese owner, ByteDance, six months to sell its stake or the app will be blocked in the United States.
The bill will now be handed over to US President, Joe Biden, who has vowed to sign it into law as soon as it reaches his desk.
If that happens, ByteDance will have to seek approval from Chinese officials to complete a forced sale, which Beijing has vowed to oppose.
The measure was passed as part of a package of four bills which also included military aid for Ukraine, Israel, Taiwan and other US partners in the Indo- Pacific.
It got widespread support from lawmakers with 79 Senators voting for it and 18 voting against it.
I’m assuming a ban would be implemented by removing TikTok from US app stores. If so, there is a workaround on both iOS and Android: create an alternate iCloud or Google account based in a non-US country and download/update TikTok through that account. Once downloaded, your phone will display and let you use apps from multiple regions.
On the Play Store, it’s as easy as switching accounts in the Play Store app (tap your profile in the upper-right). On iOS, it’s more annoying, as you need to fully sign out of iCloud on your phone, which resets things like Apple Pay, but it can be done every few months to pull updates.
Given the fact that side loading apps is easy on android and functionally not possible on iOS in the US, this style of ban may actually drive young people away from iOS when they see their Android-using peers still using TikTok unimpeded.
Android users might be able to just use FDroid and download that way as well
And that’s only if you don’t already have it downloaded. I wonder if a VPN will be needed in order to use the app, but it’s not like ByteDance will just block US IPs, why would they, so you’d have to block it at the ISP level.
I have a suspicion that if this passes, the US govt will pressure the EU to remove it from their store.
Maybe? I doubt it, at least not yet... EU is decidedly more reserved in being anti-China and still postures itself less aggressively than the US. There's a reason that the EU is full of Chinese cars and the US is not, for example.
However, EU already decided long ago and especially in the past few years, e.g. in the Russia-Ukraine conflict, to join the US in maintaining the old US-dominant world order, rather than work with the BRICS+ countries to build a new one. So at some point, if EU is serious about being pro-US, they will have to actually oppose China, not just pay lip service.
I'm sure the US will try, but the EU has been forcing US tech monopolies to allow third party app stores in the European market over the past few years. The EU would have to pull a pretty significant legal 180 to give US monopolies the power to enforce the kind of bans the US is implementing. That's not to say it won't happen; it's just not quite as easy to accomplish as it is in the US.