Washington’s fight against TikTok has spanned three years and two administrations. now following Appearance of CEO Shou Zi Chew before the United States Congress in March and signs of bipartisan consensus around an imminent ban, the battle may soon come to an end. This imminent victory for the China hawks in DC signals a reversal of a long-standing commitment to an open Internet. Instead, US lawmakers are embracing a techno-nationalist ideology that eerily resembles China’s.
In the 2000s, the US adopted a liberal-democratic approach to Internet governance that was based on a basic faith in the value of freedom, openness, and decentralization. The aspirations of this open network were global. Social media platforms, though mostly based in the San Francisco Bay Area, resembled international public spheres. In 2009, the Green Movement in Iran became known as one of the first “Twitter revolutions” as protesters organized on the platform. The following year, social media facilitated grassroots revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt, when disgruntled citizens demonstrated against government corruption during the Arab Spring.
The degree to which social media actually caused or accelerated these political movements has always been controversial, but non-democratic governments, especially China’s, saw regime stability threats inherent in the open web and took very real action. Fearing that US-owned online platforms could allow a “peaceful evolution” in which the United States would covertly and non-violently overthrow the Communist Party, the Chinese state built an increasingly strict censorship apparatus. And when the Arab revolutions were echoed in the Chinese jasmine revolution in February 2011, with citizens calling for anti-government protests on social media, the government quickly issued orders of stricter control of the Internet.
Beijing not only rejected the open web, but also formulated its own vision of cyber sovereignty. First in the 2010 State Council White Paper and later, in cybersecurity legislation and official speeches by President Xi Jinping, officials promoted the idea that there are many Internet networks separated by digital borders and patrolled by government actors.
Washington now appears to be pursuing its own version of cyber sovereignty, ripped straight from Beijing’s. (and possibly from Moscow) playbook China hawks are eager to frame TikTok as a national security threat despite such accusations. they are often hypothetical and rarely substantiated, making them sound strangely like Beijing’s paranoid ideologues. Congress is likely to ban the application through the endorsed by the White House restraint law, a bill introduced by Sen. Mark Warner, a Virginia Democrat, with bipartisan support. But its reach extends far beyond Tik Tok. If approved, this bill authorizes the Department of Commerce to prohibit any technology of “foreign adversaries” that threatens national security. In addition to jeopardizing First Amendment principles, the bill potentially criminalizes the use of digital security tools, such as virtual private networks, to circumvent restrictions.
This new point of view may have more to do with money than ideology. Policymakers’ support for the vision of the open web has always been based in part on their belief that American companies and private innovators were superior enough to maintain market dominance. TikTok, owned by Beijing-based Bytedance, undermines this longstanding assumption. The threat of foreign competition makes shedding old ideologies for protectionism in the name of national security increasingly attractive.
The open web was never perfect. The “Twitter revolutions” in the Middle East and beyond have largely ended in failure. Anti-democratic corners of the Internet have also flourished in the West, giving rise to jihadist radicalization, election manipulationand vaccine misinformation. Still, none of this is evidence of the essential bankruptcy of the open web vision. The pessimists in Washington who support a techno-nationalist approach to Internet governance have prepared the country to sacrifice the creativity and power of a web committed to free expression and open competition between platforms. Would the US have become a leader in social media in recent decades if the growth of its startups had been hampered by vague and shifting notions of “national security”? Changing our values to fit the competitive landscape is the other way around. Democracies must work to win on their own terms.
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