India may have done the US a favor.
FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr mentioned that India's move of outright banning the use of TikTok is a move that the US should adopt to secure its communication network.
TikTok has been the topic of controversy since the Trump administration for allegedly being a national security threat due to it taking data from users' phones, per NPR.
TikTok Banning Approval From Carr
Carr mentioned that the Indian government set an "incredibly important precedent" by banning the use of TikTok in India two and a half years ago, per Tech Crunch.
According to the FCC Commissioner's statement to the Indian daily Economic Times, the banning of the social app is a "natural next step" in the US government's efforts to shore up and further secure its communication network.
"We need to follow India's lead more broadly to weed out other nefarious apps as well," Carr said.
He also explained that because of TikTok's nature of collecting data from phones, China could use sensitive and non-public data TikTok may have collected for "blackmail, espionage, foreign influence campaigns, and surveillance."
He also added that TikTok's history of malign data and its representations are incompatible with the US government's interests and that he doesn't see a path forward for anything other than a blank ban working.
Carr described India's leadership to be informative and helpful as the FCC works to ban TikTok from the US, per his statement to India's Economic Times.
Carr's stance on TikTok reflects the growing cautious approach US states and lawmakers have to the China-based app, which has 100 million users in the nation.
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To Ban Or Not To Ban?
TikTok is no stranger to threats of being banned and outright being banned themselves. You may remember that the Trump administration previously banned TikTok in the US for being a national security threat, but was prevented from doing so by federal judge Carl Nichols in Washington.
Nichols found that Trump overstepped his authority in using his emergency economic powers. Interestingly, he was the second judge to block Trump's attempt of banning TikTok from the US.
US President Joe Biden eventually revoked and replaced the executive orders Trump signed to ban transactions with TikTok by American businesses, with the current administration treating transactions with the app with "heightened risk," per CNBC.
As previously mentioned, however, the number of politicians and states supporting the idea to outright ban TikTok in the US is growing by the minute, with the app being banned from all US House of Representatives-managed devices, per Reuters.
Lawmakers have also created a bill banning TikTok from the country in late 2022 due to national security concerns, but the odds are presumably stacked against it, per the BBC.
FBI Director Christopher Wray agrees with Commissioner Carr, with his statement in November saying that there is a possibility that the Chinese government could use the data it had collected to control data collection on millions of users, per CBS News.
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