The Big Story TikTok’s meteoric rise in the United States has been many things, but the largest trend on display has been the globalization of the internet reaching for its last corners. China blocks the services of many of the United States’ biggest internet companies like Google and Facebook, but to date China’s web companies largely haven’t cared about American consumers. ByteDance’s TikTok changed all of that, but as the service looms larger stateside, rhetoric from the Trump administration and concerns from tech industry leaders suggest its wild ride could end all at once. This week U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo floated that the Trump Administration was “certainly looking” at banning Chinese social media apps like TikTok, a stance was echoed by Trump himself days later. On Friday, Amazon made a since recanted announcement that employees were not allowed to have the app on phones that accessed corporate email, citing security concerns. With these discussions following the ban of the app in India and Hong Kong, one certainly wonders whether the U.S. could be next. Perhaps we were all just being naive that the internet could be free and accessible across borders when the companies that direct it are burdened by the whims of their home country’s governments while also being forced to comply with local jurisdictions. Add in aggressive investment in cyber warfare, unregulated data gathering and generally opaque systems and you’re left with fodder for some fairly scary doomsday scenarios that a balkanized web could theoretically avoid. To me, it still feels unlikely that such a ban would take place. In many ways, the app is just too big and culturally relevant for an unprecedented removal not to create an uproar, but the conversations highlight a shift in thinking that suggest the U.S. might not be beyond building its own great firewall. ByteDance is apparently going to great lengths to ensure that TikTok’s rise isn’t a casualty of some legitimate data security concerns teamed with the Trump administrations general hawkishness on the perception of who wears the pants in our policy relationship with China. There seems to be little the company could do to shake off lingering concerns however, and whether or not the U.S. pursues an all-out ban, one can bet that significant efforts will be made to prevent it from scaling to Facebook-sized ambitions. | 
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