WASHINGTON — The Trump administration said Friday it would bar the Chinese-owned mobile apps WeChat and TikTok from U.S. app stores as of midnight Sunday, a significant escalation in America’s tech fight with China that takes aim at two popular services used by more than 100 million people in the United States.
In a series of moves designed to render WeChat essentially useless within the United States, the government will also ban American companies from processing transactions for WeChat or hosting its internet traffic.
Similar restrictions will also go into effect for TikTok on Nov. 12 unless the company can assuage the administration’s concerns that the popular social media app poses a threat to U.S. national security. TikTok, which is owned by China’s ByteDance, is currently in talks with Oracle about a deal that could transfer some control to the American software maker. The Commerce Department said the prohibitions could be lifted if TikTok resolves the administration’s national security concerns by the November deadline.
The actions follow an Aug. 6 executive order in which President Trump argued that TikTok and WeChat collect data from American users that could be retrieved by the Chinese government. The administration has threatened fines of up to $1 million and up to 20 years in prison for violations of the order.
TikTok, which does not directly operate in China, has become a wildly popular platform for sharing viral videos in the United States. WeChat is at the center of digital life in China, functioning as a chat app, a payment platform and a news source. It is a vital source of connection for the global Chinese diaspora, but also a conduit for Chinese propaganda and surveillance.
Friday’s move is the latest tangible sign that the global internet, which once promised to break down political borders and connect the planet’s citizens, is fracturing, driven by nationalism and security fears.
People in China, the world’s most populous nation, can’t use the world’s most popular products, including Google, Facebook, YouTube and WhatsApp. Soon, Americans won’t be able to use WeChat. And even TikTok, perhaps China’s most successful digital export, is now under threat in the United States and has already been banned in India.
TikTok spokesman Josh Gartner said in a statement that the company was disappointed in the Commerce Department’s decision.
“We will continue to challenge the unjust executive order, which was enacted without due process and threatens to deprive the American people and small businesses across the U.S. of a significant platform for both a voice and livelihoods,” he said.
Tencent Holdings, which owns WeChat, called the rules “unfortunate” and said it would “continue to discuss with the government and other stakeholders in the U.S. ways to achieve a long-term solution.”
Oracle did not respond to a request for comment.
While the government is ordering a ban on the apps, it will largely be up to Apple and Google — which make the software that backs nearly all the world’s smartphones — to remove the apps from their stores. The two companies could face civil or criminal penalties for failing to comply with the new rules.
Apple and Google did not respond to requests for comment. Both have said in the past that they comply with the local laws in each country they serve.
Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, in an interview on Fox Business Network on Friday morning, said that the ban would initially have a much greater impact on WeChat.
“For all practical purposes it will be shut down in the U.S., but only in the U.S., as of midnight Monday,” Mr. Ross said.
TikTok would also face some changes, but would still be allowed to function until Nov. 12, Mr. Ross said, at which point it would face a ban if there was no deal that satisfied the administration’s concerns.
“As to TikTok, the only real change as of Sunday night will be users won’t have access to improved updated apps, upgraded apps or maintenance,” he said.
Mr. Trump, at a news conference Friday, said he thought a deal to keep TikTok operating in the U.S. could move “very, very fast.”
“Maybe we can keep a lot of people happy but we have to have the total security from China,” he said, adding that the administration was talking to Oracle, Walmart and Microsoft.
The Nov. 12 deadline for TikTok will allow users of the app — who are primarily young — to continue using the service ahead of the election. TikTok has increasingly become a political force, with users posting in support of their favored candidates and offering commentary on current events. It has also been utilized as a political tool — hundreds of teenage TikTok users claimed credit for low turnout at a rally for Mr. Trump in Tulsa, Okla., this year.
The order is not as draconian as some companies had feared. It won’t affect the ability of multinational companies like Starbucks or Walmart to work with WeChat in China, where they commonly use the app as a payment platform. Major U.S. companies had pushed back against such a restriction with the Trump administration, saying it would put them at a disadvantage against Chinese competitors.
Still, the actions take aim at two of China’s most popular and successful tech exports, which knit together nearly two billion people worldwide.
Many companies that will soon be barred from working with WeChat “are like the FedEx for the data business,” said Charlie Chai, an analyst for 86Research, a research firm focused on Chinese companies. “If no FedEx is willing to carry the data package for WeChat, then WeChat is dead” in the United States.
The Chinese government had not issued any statements, and it was not immediately clear if China would retaliate. China has long blocked access to such American social media as Twitter, Facebook and WhatsApp that it cannot readily monitor or censor.
Apple could have the biggest target on its back in China if it agrees to carry out the administration’s restrictions. Apple assembles most of its products there, and the country is Apple’s biggest sales market after the United States.
Other tech companies responded to the announcement with concerns that the effort could prompt similar action by other countries, to the detriment of American firms. Adam Mosseri, who leads Facebook’s Instagram product, said in a tweet that a TikTok ban “would be quite bad for Instagram, Facebook, and the internet more broadly.”
Vanessa Pappas, TikTok’s interim global head, said in a response to Mr. Mosseri that Facebook should “publicly join our challenge and support our litigation” against the ban. TikTok sued the Trump administration over the ban last month, arguing that the move had denied it of due process.
Tech companies have raised concerns about arbitrarily blocking apps without a clear policy process and have suggested it infringes on the First Amendment, said Adam Segal, a cybersecurity expert at the Council on Foreign Relations.
Mr. Segal said it was not entirely clear why the administration had chosen to go after these two Chinese services, and not other similar ones. “A lot of it just feels to me to be improvisational,” he said.
In a call with reporters Friday, a senior official with the Commerce Department pushed back on the idea that a ban would curtail Americans’ freedom of speech, saying the administration had targeted these apps in part because they are used to censor speech.
The Commerce Department declined to say whether the regulations could be used as a template for other Chinese companies, but noted that the secretary had the ability to prohibit additional transactions by the companies in the interest of national security.
The administration is already taking a wider scope to review Tencent’s activities in the United States beyond WeChat. The government has sent letters asking a series of questions about data policies to several companies in which Tencent has partial ownership, including Spotify, Riot Games and Epic Games, the maker of the popular game Fortnite, according to people familiar with the situation.
Mr. Ross portrayed the threat from Chinese apps in stark terms, likening it to a window that allows Beijing to peer into the everyday lives of Americans.
“What they collect are data on locality, data on what you are streaming toward, what your preferences are, what you are referencing, every bit of behavior that the American side is indulging in becomes available to whoever is watching on the other side,” he said. “That’s what we’re trying to squelch.”
In its announcement, the Commerce Department said both WeChat and TikTok collected information from their users including location data, network activity and browsing histories. As Chinese companies, they are also subject to China’s policy of “civil-military fusion” and mandatory cooperation with Chinese intelligence services, it said.
Cybersecurity experts have debated the extent to which the bans would address national security threats. Many other Chinese-owned companies gather data from mobile users in the United States, as do Facebook, Google and other non-Chinese services.
TikTok has been downloaded nearly 200 million times in the United States, about 9 percent of the app’s downloads outside China, according to Sensor Tower, an app analytics firm. WeChat has been downloaded nearly 22 million times in the United States since 2014, or about 7 percent of its downloads outside China.
Ahead of the Sunday deadline, people in the United States rushed to download WeChat. The app’s rank in the chart of top free iPhone apps soared to No. 100 from 1,385 on Friday, according to Sensor Tower.
The U.S. ability to enforce the ban remains an open question, and it likely won’t be clear until the coming weeks whether the government’s effort to break the app has worked. Workarounds are likely to materialize. Users could switch their settings for access to an app store outside the United States, or switch to other Tencent apps, like a messaging service called QQ.
A Commerce Department official said Friday that the department’s focus would be not on policing individual users but gradually limiting the ability of the apps to operate in the United States. The official declined to discuss enforcement but said the administration hoped to work with American tech companies, noting that “every company that this touches is becoming increasingly aware of the challenges that these applications pose.”
Ana Swanson and David McCabe reported from Washington, and Jack Nicas from Oakland, Calif.
Source: Economy - nytimes.com
