India has banned TikTok and over 300 Chinese apps. Some US officials see it as a model to follow.

Benjamin Powers

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The United States isn’t the only country locked into an uneasy technological rivalry with China.

India has banned hundreds of China-based apps and digital games over the last three years, most notably TikTok, in a sign of the growing tension between the two technology powers. And this week, India’s commerce minister said that Apple was considering moving up to 25 percent of iPhone production to the country — and out of China. While Apple hasn’t confirmed his remarks, they are in line with analyst projections.

The decisions India has made could spill far beyond its own borders. Federal Communications Commission member Brendan Carr told the India-based Economic Times that India set an “incredibly important precedent” when it banned TikTok in 2020, presenting India as a counterexample for those who claimed there is no way to ban the app in the United States. More broadly, India’s decisions have charted an uncertain course for the web and an internet-altering precedent were the U.S. to follow that road map.

“I think that the big issue is they don’t really seem to be discriminating or shutting down different forms of apps and technologies on the basis of predefined criteria about why they’re banning them other than just that it’s owned by China, and China is bad, for a wide range of strategic reasons that may make sense for them,” said Chris Meserole, director of the Artificial Intelligence and Emerging Tech Initiative at the Brookings Institution. “But I would be reluctant to endorse a similar approach to Chinese apps and Chinese technology or Chinese-owned apps and technology in the U.S.”

The India case study

India and China are two great powers locked in a friction-filled relationship based on geography, politics and economics. In 2020, skirmishes around the Line of Actual Control, a disputed border area in the Himalayan mountains, left 20 Indian soldiers dead. The incident provided the political support to begin banning Chinese apps, which the Indian government already had security concerns about.

Michael Kugelman, director of the South Asia Institute at the Wilson Center, a U.S. think tank, said some observers thought that it was meant as a form of punishment to China after India had lost more troops in that border clash than it had since the country went to war with China in the early 1960s. He disagrees. “I think that it was more from a concern about national security that India was increasingly concerned about the surveillance risks posed by having these Chinese tech apps in Indian markets being used by Indians,” Kugelman said.

India has banned more than 300 apps since 2020. TikTok is certainly the highest profile, but India’s targets have also included games and services like the combat game PUBG Mobile, whose daily active users sank by more than half after India banned it, and UC Browser, a web browser developed by Chinese behemoth Alibaba that was at one time the largest browser in India — along with hundreds of others.

Nikhil Pahwa, founder of MediaNama, a reporting project that examines technology policy in India, said the country’s initial forays into going after Chinese companies included blocking foreign direct investment funding from Chinese companies to Indian ones. But it then escalated to the immediate banning of 59 apps.

By then, Pahwa said, it was clear India was targeting Chinese apps even if it didn’t say so directly. This was the first time the Indian government had banned apps, and it issued a news release about why it was doing so — citing “raging concerns” about privacy and security — even though it could have taken the same action in secret.

“The fact that they’re allowed to keep it a secret, but they’ve announced it, shows that it’s a political move,” said Pahwa. “It shows that this was more political than it was procedural in a sense.”

Kugelman and Meserole said that there are concerns about privacy and security. But Pahwa noted that the government has not said anything publicly about its specific privacy concerns regarding the wide array of apps, nor about who raised concerns. In recent months, India has escalated to seizing funds of Chinese subsidiaries in India, on top of app bans.

Information flow in a democracy

Now a major question is whether India’s strategy will become a model for another tech power — the United States — where lawmakers and regulators are wrestling with security concerns related to Chinese tech. TikTok, which has been downloaded over 200 million times in the U.S., is at the center of the debate.

“From a lens of democracy and freedoms and things like that, should people be denied access to social media technologies, apps that have been used for so long?” said Kugelman.

The answer is unclear — like India, the U.S. hasn’t taken to banning apps, but the ways that information flows and is controlled is something that becomes part of the geopolitical discourse. China has the Great Firewall. Russia, since it invaded Ukraine, has disconnected or forcibly been disconnected from parts of the internet. But India, the world’s largest democracy, entering the fray presents a new concern.

“I think that the digital environment in India has certainly raised a lot of concerns for those that worry about democracy and freedom of speech,” said Kugelman. “And again, this is not only happening in India. I mean, we’re seeing this trend these days of democracies, nonetheless, having governments that act in undemocratic ways to control the flow of information.”

That creates questions about how those actions could transform the internet, whose creators had originally envisioned it as being freely accessed by people around the world.

Meserole said we are starting to get a clearer answer when it comes to what an EU internet, a Chinese internet and an Indian internet are going to look like. When it comes to India, it looks like “they are going to pave their own way, a bit,” he said. “A large part of that is going to be determined partly by their domestic politics and then also by their kind of foreign politics as it pertains to China.”

Pahwa is conflicted — on the one hand, he has advocated and worked toward an open internet. On the other, he recognizes there are legitimate concerns around security and the situation India is in, in relation to China. China’s laws could allow its security agencies to commandeer Chinese businesses over national security concerns, which could be a problem for India if China takes over a tech company with 200, 300 or 400 million users in India.

Moreover, he argued that the “splinternet” — an internet fractured by varying national policies on access — is already here.