What Happens When the Internet Gets Less American?

(Bloomberg Opinion) — America is going to have to reckon with an internet that is becoming less American.

Some U.S. lawmakers on both sides of the partisan divide have said they are worried about TikTok, the app that lets users record and share short skits or dance routines to music. The app quickly became popular in the U.S. and some other countries, and that has generated anxiety about TikTok’s ownership by the Chinese internet company ByteDance Inc.

The U.S. is conducting a national security review of TikTok, and a foreign investment committee is considering whether ByteDance should be forced to unwind an acquisition that brought the TikTok app to the U.S. The U.S. Navy this week alerted personnel not to use TikTok on government-issued smartphones because of a cybersecurity threat that the Navy didn’t detail.

TikTok has been on a mission to alleviate worries about its Chinese ownership by ramping up its outreach to U.S. politicians. It has also taken steps and considered structural changes to create separation between the app and China. Some of these efforts seem like pointless window dressing.

I don’t know whether TikTok is a genuine threat. I don’t know whether it is harvesting Americans’ data for the mother country. There have been news reports that TikTok scrubs material on its app outside of China that is considered unpalatable by the Chinese government and therefore helps spread a sanitized view about China outside the country’s borders. TikTok now says that it doesn’t house data on U.S. users in China and that the Chinese government doesn’t censor its global video app.

The discussion about TikTok in U.S. political circles has become caught up in the broader tug of war between the U.S. and China, but the fundamental issue is real. This isn’t the first non-American internet service to get big in the U.S. But this the first time, truly, that Americans have had to consider what it means to have a popular consumer internet service that isn’t owned by an American company. I suspect it won’t be the last time.(3)

This is not new ground for most other countries. Facebook and its Instagram and WhatsApp apps; Google and its YouTube service; Netflix; Twitter; and other digital services from U.S. companies have become prevalent in many parts of the world. Foreign governments have at times chafed at the internet dominance by American companies for both justifiable and bogus reasons and have sought to make those companies comply with local laws and norms.

It’s mostly understandable for governments outside the U.S. to have those worries about American internet services. It’s likewise mostly understandable for the U.S. to consider the implications when an Internet service from a company in China or Russia gains traction in America. What I wonder is whether what’s happening now is a declaration that an internet company cannot operate in the U.S. if it comes from a country with which the U.S. has fundamental and unresolvable disagreements over government policies or values.

There has been anxiety in technology circles for years that the world is being divided into two or more versions of the internet. There is the U.S. version, mostly freewheeling and free, that had become something of a global default. There’s the Chinese version, a parallel world in which activity and speech are tightly controlled by the government and from which foreign internet companies are largely barred. Some people also talk about a European internet and maybe an Indian internet, again with standards for behavior and company conduct that aligns with government priorities.

On the one hand, I am an American and I’d rather live in an American-style internet than one mirroring Vietnam, where what happens online is commandeered by an authoritarian government. On the other hand, tax regimes differ from country to country, in reflection of different government’s policy priorities. Should internet policy be so fundamentally different than tax policy? (There are legitimate technical reasons why it’s harder to have country-by-country internet services.)

Facebook, Google, Apple and Netflix have had to grapple with the balance between sticking to their American-honed principles while also complying with different standards and laws in all the countries where they operate. That may mean the companies have to push back when they believe their principles are compromised too much, and it may mean the companies should not do business in some places where the rules are fundamentally at odds with what their leaders and home country citizens believe.