(Reuters) – President Donald Trump has threatened to end the short video app TikTok and messaging service WeChat by the end of September on the grounds that the apps pose a national security threat in Chinese. It would mark the first time the United States has attempted to shut down widely used mobile internet apps.
How would the US deal with blocking access to TikTok and WeChat?
The administration was able to order smartphone giants Apple Inc and Google Alphabet Inc to remove WeChat and TikTok from their app stores.
When the Indian government banned 59 Chinese apps in June, including TikTok and WeChat, it asked Google and Apple to remove the apps from their app stores, two sources told Reuters. Both companies met.
It would be a rare and potentially unusual move for the United States: Apple has not disclosed app removal applications from the U.S. government since it began publishing information about such requests in the second half of 2018.
The government could also order the apps to stop offering access to US users by threatening them with legal consequences. In India, some banned apps pulled themselves out of app stores.
If I already have TikTok and WeChat on my phone, will I still be able to use them?
The apps would probably work, but government commissions could update, block access to new features, and fix bug fixes.
Jay Kaplan, CEO of cybersecurity firm Synack and a former analyst at National Security Agency, cybersecurity, said it was “highly likely” Apple and Google could disable installed apps remotely, although experts were unaware of any instance in which they did so recently. have done. Apple and Google declined to comment.
Could users download the apps elsewhere?
Users with phones running Google’s Android can install apps from alternatives to Google’s official app store. Theoretically, they could download WeChat or TikTok from the companies’ websites.
Using alternatives to Apple’s App Store to install apps is harder, though not impossible. Ron Deibert, director of the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto, which has conducted extensive technical and censorship analysis of WeChat, said that using unofficial stores carries the risk of installing versions of popular apps modified with viruses or scams .
Would US users be able to access web versions of the app?
US-based hosting services such as Amazon.com Inc’s AWS and content providers such as Akamai Technologies Inc could be banned from doing business with targeted apps, said Angelique Medina, director of product marketing at network information firm ThousandEyes. Hosting sites outside the United States could still serve Americans, but probably at slower speeds.
Could Internet service providers block users from accessing these services?
The government could order ISPs to block users from accessing WeChat’s and TikTok’s servers, as China does to maintain its Great Firewall. But it would not be an easy task for the US government, because the United States has thousands more ISPs than China, said Chester Wisniewski, a researcher at cybersecurity provider Sophos. A U.S. order to ISPs could also be challenged in court, legal experts say.
In India, the government ordered telecom companies and other internet providers to block the apps of Chinese origin, according to reports seen by Reuters. Experts say there are no known cases of the US ordering ISPs to ban access to sites.
What about VPNs?
Americans could use virtual private networks, or VPNs, to bypass ISP blocks and browse the Internet as if they were abroad. This is how Internet users in China can access services like Facebook banned by the Great Firewall. Network experts said the same period would exist in the United States.
(Report by Jane Lanhee Lee, Stephen Nellis, Paresh Dave, Sankalp Phartiyal, Aditya Y. Kalra; Edited by Greg Mitchell and Dan Grebler)
