On August 6, 2020, the US president signed an executive order that effectively threatened to ban TikTok from operating in the United States unless its US business was sold to an American company. The order was followed by a similar action targeting WeChat. The deadline was forty-five days. The legal battles that followed would extend that uncertainty for considerably longer.
The reasons given were about national security and data privacy. TikTok was owned by ByteDance, a Chinese company. The argument was that data collected from American users could be accessed by the Chinese government under Chinese law, and that this represented an unacceptable risk. TikTok and ByteDance disputed the characterisation but the political momentum was hard to argue against in the moment.
What this represented was a step into territory that had largely been theoretical for the previous decade. The internet had grown up with an assumption that applications could operate across national borders without much regard for where the company providing them was based. That assumption had always been more accurate for some borders than others. China itself had been operating a different version of the internet for years, with most major Western platforms blocked or limited. But in most of the rest of the world, the choice of which apps to use had been treated primarily as a market decision.
The TikTok action made that assumption considerably harder to maintain. If apps from one major economy could be banned in another major economy on national security grounds, the global app market was going to fragment along geopolitical lines in a way it largely had not before.
What followed in the months after the executive order was a complicated legal and commercial situation. The ban was challenged in court. Various sale arrangements were proposed and renegotiated. By the time the immediate crisis had cooled, the precedent had been set and would be referenced repeatedly in subsequent years for other apps and other countries.
The longer-term effect was the seriousness with which governments started examining who owned the platforms their citizens used and where the data was held. That examination would continue, with consequences that worked their way through several major platforms in the years that followed.