Well of course the United States is technologically capable of implementing a censorship framework on the Internet. If Communist China can, we certainly would be able to.
But that is exactly the point: we can’t, not because of a shortfall of technical knowlege, but because we’re the United States of America. We don’t do that kind of shit. And when we do, we eventually come to our senses. And we certainly don’t shit on the Bill of Rights because Millennials like a Chinese media company “too much”.
There is one very important thing they can’t do as well as a website: collect data. The browser won’t give them the permissions or access that a proper app would. That’s why mobile websites push you to use their apps.
Also, it’s easier to block ads in a browser. So basically everything they monetize is harder to use in a browser.
That is not how I read the OP. I read it as them asking how the current law will* be implemented. I do not think they are planning to use the Great Firewall method.
Well, the OP’s hypothetical is misplaced, since no network provider is going to implement any such system without being compelled to, and such compulsion is patently illegal.
The technology boils down to this:
Remove apps from all application stores
Find all domain names used for the service and redirect them to a blackhole address, like the FBI does for seized websites
Reverse engineer all IP addresses used for the service and firewall them at every network provider to drop all traffic to or from them
Repeat ad infinitum since these are all moving targets.
That’s in appropriate order of difficulty, which corresponds roughly to how concentrated the function is. There are only a couple of app stores, but dozens of domain name service providers and hundreds of network operators.
It’s working well in financial services: People on sanctions lists find it difficult to get financial services - not because there’s some centralised enforcement mechanism, but because a public list of sanctioned companies and individuals exists, together with the threat to fine the heck out of a bank or other financial entity that refuses to comply. The implementation works at the bank level, not the level of some central government agency. In effect, legislators are outsourcing the implementation of the sanctions to private companies. They complain, of course, but they comply. Circumvention is not impossible, but sufficiently difficult to make the sanctions sufficiently effective for their purpose.
Banking may be literally the single most regulated international industry in the world. The Internet is virtually completely unregulated.
You handwave the difference away.
But if you could wave a magic wand and instantaneously create the regulatory agencies, the sizable volume of banking legislation, huge amounts of rulemaking, and whole industries involved with regulatory compliance and enforcement… then yes, it’s easy.
Back to the OP’s point… it’s not rocket surgery. At the individual network level, administrators do this kind of thing all the time, which is why an employee often can’t get away with surfing porn on a company computer or network. It’s a similar kind of problem.
Just removing it from the default app stores would be sufficient to kill it off. The purpose of tiktok is to collect views and likes. Once sufficient people have stopped using it for various reasons (app updates, new phones), the content providers will stop posting because of insufficient attention and the death spiral will only steepen. Sure there will be a pool of rebel users that will take steps to keep using the app, but entropy always wins in the end.
Is that true if the US is the only country (or one of only a few) to ban it? Internationally it still might be used heavily, and there are plenty of Americans who would want to check out what they’re doing.
I wonder how much ByteDance makes from advertising by US based companies.
I’ve never used TikToc, so have no idea how the monetisation works.
But legislating to stop advertising on the platform would hurt. So not just advertising revenue dropping as US users fall away, but maybe a generally significant source of global advertising.
A key set of users outside of China are ex-pat Chinese, who still want a tie back to their motherland. Even those who have no intention of returning to live. They are one group that is likely to be quite interested in a VPN or other workaround.
That sounded more US-centric than intended. It would have been more accurate to say that removing it from the US stores would effectively kill it in the US.
Tiktok has millions of users outside the US even though the US has more than any other individual country, it still has less that 20% of the global user base.
Yes, but if the top content creators are overrepresented in the US (and your link implies that many of the top followed posters are in the US, but it doesn’t give details) that could still cause big problems for TikTok.
Presumably all that existing content doesn’t vanish. TikTok can still store/host those US-creator-made videos, and keep serving them up essentially forever. A tweak to the algorithm to reprioritize things it didn’t previously show for whatever reason, and it will feel like new content to the idle scroller. It’s notable that TikTok already makes it nearly impossible for the viewer to determine when a video was posted, so as long as there isn’t anything specific to date the content (“so sad to hear Betty White died last night!”) the user will be none the wiser.