HOW A TIKTOK BAN WOULD WORK
If TikTok is banned, users will not be forced to delete the app. But TikTok plans to shut down the service and will show users a message about the law and offer to let them download their personal data, Reuters previously reported.
Even if TikTok was not planning a formal shutdown, the app would not work as well as it did before. App store providers are explicitly barred from distributing TikTok to US users, which means that Apple and Google will remove the app from their stores and will no longer distribute updates to fix bugs.
The TikTok app also relies on a constant flow of new videos, which would become nearly impossible to deliver. TikTok data for US users is hosted and processed on servers owned by Oracle, and most experts believe Oracle would have to cease those operations.
Oracle, Apple, Google and TikTok all either declined to comment or did not return requests for comment.
Beyond that, analyses have shown that more than 100 other service providers, such as content delivery networks, help make TikTok operate smoothly.
“Some subset of that stuff that is required for the app to actually work, both in terms of getting video to you, but also in terms of getting video and content up,” said Joseph Lorenzo Hall, a distinguished technologist with nonprofit group Internet Society.
“And so uploading might be one of the first things to go. Americans may only be able to watch as their app rots.”
The disengagement of those service providers could also affect tens of millions of TikTok users outside the US, but company engineers are working to address those issues, sources told Reuters.
IS THERE A WORKAROUND?
The most straightforward workaround to keep access to TikTok would be to use a virtual private network, or VPN, which can conceal the internet protocol, or IP, address of a user and thereby their location.
But TikTok has other means of knowing where the user is located, such as geolocation data from a phone, said Jason Kelley, director of activism for the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
Users could try to access a web-based version of TikTok via a browser while using a VPN, but the web version lacks many features of the app and – if the user has to create a new account – would not be as personalised to the user’s preferences.
“It won’t be a good service for you, and it won’t be a profitable service for them,” Kelley said.
