The law states that it “shall be unlawful” for businesses to “distribute, maintain or update” an application including its source code, or by “providing services” that allow it to continue running in its current state. This distribution, maintenance, or updates can happen, the law says, through mobile application stores that can be accessed in the US or by “providing Internet hosting services.”
“The law deliberately avoided making it illegal to have an app on your phone,” said Milton Mueller, a professor and founder of the Internet Governance Project at the Georgia Institute of Technology, who filed a brief with the Supreme. Court against ban. “Their effort is to say, no one can download it from the Apple or Google stores, and no one has it to update through those stores,” Mueller said. “There is no ‘TikTok must ban US users’ rule, which is interesting as well.”
If TikTok is removed from the Apple App Store and the Google 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 delete security flaws. In the long run, that means that TikTok will stop working properly. Apple did not respond to WIRED’s request for comment, while Google declined to comment on what it would do if the law went into effect.
Another focus of the law is to stop “hosting” companies that provide services on TikTok—and the definition is very broad. 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 has faced pressure regarding its Chinese ownership, the company has hosted the data of American users within Oracle’s cloud services. Oracle also did not respond to WIRED’s request for comment.
However, other systems such as content delivery networks, advertising networks, payment providers, and others are used as part of TikTok’s infrastructure. The law does not specifically mention these services, but a different legal reading may lead them to question whether they are helping to “maintain” or “distribute” a fully functional TikTok service.
Hall says a recent test of the TikTok website showed 185 embedded domains on the page. “They’re pulling code, content from this series of third-party providers and their own domains,” he says. “Applications will begin to rot and decay as services cease to function, things like content distribution networks or services that feel they can’t take the risk of the ambiguous nature of language or the potential compulsions of incoming administrators.”
There is one internet infrastructure player that the ban does not directly put pressure on: internet service providers. Countries like Russia and China have developed censorship measures that allow them to block all websites accessed by web bowsers. Mueller believes this omission by US lawmakers may have been deliberate as it avoided setting up a Chinese-style internet firewall. “They knew that an ISP-based blocking and filtering system would obviously be a form of First Amendment,” he said.
Avoiding TikTok Bans
While TikTok’s service in the US may be down over time, there are still potential alternatives to any ban—both for individuals and potentially for the company itself. How these measures work depends on how motivated people are to continue using TikTok and what the company decides to do.
“TikTok has 170 million users,” said Alan Rozenshtein, a law professor at the University of Minnesota, who favors the law but says it’s “the best of a bunch of bad options” regarding TikTok. “This law will not prevent everyone from accessing TikTok. I don’t think that was the intent of the law. The law makes it very difficult to access TikTok. “