“I rarely see a bill that is this technically stupid,” Tarah Wheeler, the CEO of the cybersecurity firm Red Queen Dynamics and a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, told me. Google and Apple, which own the biggest mobile-app stores, did not respond to requests for comment, but, according to The New York Times, a trade group funded by the companies has said that they lack the ability to block downloads in a single state. “The bill’s champions have admitted that they have no feasible plan for operationalizing this attempt to censor American voices and that the bill’s constitutionality will be decided by the courts,” Brooke Oberwetter, a TikTok spokesperson, said in a statement. In a statement, TikTok challenged the legislation’s validity. But that doesn’t mean the bill’s attempted implementation won’t have real-world consequences, and it certainly marks an escalation in the ongoing political fight over the app’s future. Some doubted that we will actually ever see a world in which driving from Wyoming to Montana means watching TikTok and all its dancing teens suddenly evaporate from one’s app store. Experts I talked with viewed the law as more bluster than substance-a nonsense bill, if you will, best understood as a show of grievance rather than serious, practical legislation. A representative for Gianforte did not respond to an email request for comment on what he plans to do.īut it may not matter. 419, targets app stores and TikTok itself, rather than individuals, imposing a $10,000 daily fine for each time a user “accesses tiktok, is offered the ability to access tiktok, or is offered the ability to download tiktok.” The fate of the proposal, which would take effect in January 2024, now lies with Montana’s Republican governor, Greg Gianforte, who can veto it, sign it, or do nothing-and if he does nothing, it eventually becomes law automatically. “Why can’t you fly? Because you’re not built for flying.” Just like the human body is not designed to keep itself airborne, Schneier told me, the American internet is not constructed in such a way that a ban like the one passed in Montana last Friday could be realistically implemented.Īnd yet that bill is close to becoming law. “Why is a law saying that you can fly stupid? Because you can’t fly,” Bruce Schneier, a fellow and lecturer at Harvard’s Kennedy School, explained to me. The move is notable, but that doesn’t make it feasible. Montana is on its way to becoming the first state to ban TikTok, which, according to one computer-security expert, is a little like saying it’s the first state to allow humans to flap their arms and fly around in the clouds without an airplane.
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