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By banning TikTok, India created a “incredibly important precedent,” according to the FCC Commissioner

FCC Commissioner noted that India’s ban on TikTok two and a half years ago created a “extremely significant precedent,” and he predicted that the Chinese behemoth app Bytedance will meet the same fate in the United States.

FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr told the Indian newspaper Economic Times that banning the social app TikTok is the “logical next step in our efforts to protect communication network” since it “operates as a sophisticated monitoring tool.”

Senior Republican on the Federal Communications Commission expresses concern that China may exploit TikTok data for “blackmail, espionage, foreign influence operations, and monitoring.”

He said that the United States “has to follow India’s model more generally to screen out other harmful applications as well.”

Carr’s comments are additional evidence of a rising movement among governments and politicians in the United States to be wary of TikTok, which has gathered over 100 million users in the country.

India has blocked hundreds of Chinese-affiliated applications in the previous two years, including TikTok, PUBG Mobile, Battlegrounds Mobile India, and UC Browser, due to border disputes.

The Indian government has banned the applications on the grounds that they threaten “national security and defence of India,” which in turn threatens India’s “sovereignty and integrity.”

Prior to the prohibition, India was TikTok’s biggest overseas market by user count, with over 200 million monthly active users.

In an interview with an Indian newspaper, Carr said, “India’s strong leadership has been enlightening and useful as we have pondered banning TikTok in the US” (paywalled). If you’ve ever heard someone say, “There’s no way to prohibit an app,” consider India as proof that it can be done.

Because of the “high risk owing to a multitude of security vulnerabilities,” the United States House of Representatives banned TikTok last week for all House-managed devices. Concerned that China may use it to monitor Americans and control material, almost two dozen jurisdictions have already blocked the software on state-managed devices.