Why India banned TikTok and what the US can learn, as pressure mounts for Biden to follow suit

It hardly seems possible that TikTok could be banned in the United States. But it’s getting likelier by the day.

Mark Mahaney, the respected internet analyst with Evercore ISI, told Insider that while TikTok doesn’t have a “greater than 50 per cent chance of getting banned” in the US, the percentage has risen in the past six months as scrutiny has deepened over the app’s ties to ByteDance, its China-based owner.

And American regulators have one big thing they can point to in seeking that dramatic action. In a recent interview with The Economic Times, an Indian newspaper, Brendan Carr, a commissioner on the Federal Communications Commission, described India’s ban on TikTok as an “incredibly important precedent” and a “guide star” for other countries.

Why did India ban TikTok?

In 2020, after a geopolitical dispute with China, India banned the app entirely, citing a law that allows the government to block websites and apps in the interest of the country’s “sovereignty and integrity.”

Mark Shmulik, a Bernstein analyst, said that as political pressure builds for the US to follow suit, India’s actions are “a useful proxy” because it's a huge market similar to the US that has banned “an app that’s at the top of its popularity.”

What we learned from the India situation, the analysts say, is that banning TikTok would likely be a huge boon to rivals like Instagram, YouTube, and Snapchat – but it would also complicate doing business internationally.

What happened when India banned TikTok

In the summer of 2020, India banned 59 Chinese apps including TikTok, WeChat, Weibo, and QQ, an instant-messaging service owned by the internet giant Tencent. At the time, TikTok had nearly 200 million users in India and considered the country its biggest market outside the US.