After Huawei, TikTok also goes to the ban: so Trump attacks China

It is written Huawei, but basically it reads China. That behind the now famous ban imposed by Donald Trump against the Shenzhen technology company there is a plan to break China's wings seems now the secret of puffin. And in the last few hours a hypothesis is taking hold that would reinforce this scenario. According to reports from the Financial Times, in fact, the White House is considering very seriously the possibility of adding ByteDance, the parent company of TikTok, to the famous "blacklist" (which already includes Huawei). The short video social network, with over 2 billion downloads across the West and around 800 million daily active users, is probably the digital platform with the highest growth rates in the world. And the fact that he is Chinese is seen by Trump as a major threat to the United States.

It must be said that the history of TikTok is more complex than it appears. As mentioned, the application is owned by the Chinese ByteDance, but has an American CEO (Kevin Mayer, top US manager already at the top of Disney's streaming division), also chosen to give the application the westernmost possible dimension. ByteDance works daily to pass an image of the social network as far as possible from the Chinese scenarios. Just think that TikTok, in China itself, is subject to ban. This situation, however, does not fully convince the Americans.

In China, in fact, ByteDance can always count on the sister app Douyin, which has about 1.5 billion users. Same owner, same technology (the differences are really minimal): two details that have often made the nose turn up. Because the division seems more like a smart move by ByteDance to be able to scale both the western and the Chinese market, without too many problems.

And then Trump and his seem ready to make the expected move: ban TikTok. That is, to require Google and Apple to delete the application from the Android and iOS stores. Sources quoted by the Financial Times say the Trump administration is ready: "We are going to send a very strong message to China." For its part, ByteDance continues to defend itself, and on several occasions it has made clear that TikTok's servers are not in China, but in Singapore and the United States. The company also specified that it has never shared user data with the Beijing government, and that it has no intention of doing so in the future. All reassurances that from the parts of the White House have gone quite unnoticed. Because the impression is that the attack on TikTok is more political than technological. And the convictions in Washington are bipartisan, given that even democratic leaders have moved against TikTok in recent weeks.

The possibilities on the field today, on the American front, seem to be two. On the one hand, that of inserting ByteDance in the black list, as happened with Huawei. This road seems the most viable, also because judging by the results obtained with Huawei (the last in order is the ban by the United Kingdom), the ban has few critical points. The Financial Times, however, writes that a plan B is also being studied in the White House. The second way could be to invoke the international law on economic emergency powers of 1977 (the IEEPA). A solution that could have fewer legal implications, according to experts who are studying the plan.

Meanwhile, ByteDance said last week that it was "evaluating the changes" on TikTok's corporate structure and considering setting up a TikTok board of directors separate from ByteDance, or setting up a corporate headquarters outside of China. We'll see if these moves are enough to convince Trump.

Needless to say, TikTok is a very delicate moment, especially after the Indian government's decision in recent days to block the app. In India, the country most important numerically for TikTok, there were about 200 million users of the music video app. Losing the American market would also be a real Caporetto.

Meanwhile, Mark Zuckerberg is lurking. The owner of Facebook Inc. has already put his engineers to work to sink the blow at the decisive moment. While Trump is ready to block TikTok within a month, Facebook is ready to release an update that - for users in the United States - provides for the arrival of the Reels service, entirely based on short music videos. Basically TikTok inside Instagram. A bit like what happened with the Stories, taken aback by the phenomenon of the then Snapchat. In short, history repeats itself. And if TikTok ends up blacklisted, the road will be cleared.