FCC to Apple and Google: Obey Our Wishes to Own the Communists

“Squirrel!” 

The famous invocation from Up—a movie whose sense of life I’m not sure any informed human being will be able to experience again—is essentially what the FCC’s Brendan Carr has said to Apple, Google—and now the rest of us—in an official letter to the two tech giants’ CEOs. In the letter, published on Twitter earlier this week, Carr warns the two leaders of the danger posed by TikTok, and urges them to remove the app from their app stores. 

The concerns seem legitimate enough. If a recently released report from Buzzfeed News is accurate, Beijing officials of ByteDance, TikTok’s parent company, may have entered “sensitive information” about United States users, to which these officials have access, “into a .cn domain…operated by the Chinese government’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology.” In other words, TikTok may be collecting extensive personal data about United States citizens and delivering it to the Chinese Communist Party. 

Reassurances by TikTok about the data being routed and stored stateside, Carr notes, do nothing to counter the allegations in the report, because wherever the data is stored, it could still be accessed and harvested by communist operatives in Beijing. And so, Carr says, the perception of TikTok as “an app for sharing funny videos or memes,” is its “sheep’s clothing.” The app, he believes, “presents a serious national security threat,” and he drops the names of many comprising a “wide range of U.S. officials, independent cybersecurity experts, and privacy and civil rights groups,” who, “on a bipartisan basis,” agree with him. 

After laying that groundwork, Carr goes on to argue that TikTok has violated the two companies’ published app store policies, and that “there is ample precedent for removing TikTok from the app stores too,” and “requests” that they do so: “If you do not remove TikTok from your app stores, please provide separate responses to me by July 8, 2022, explaining the basis for your company’s conclusion that the surreptitious access of private and sensitive U.S. user data by persons located in Beijing, coupled with TikTok’s pattern of misleading representations and conduct, does not run afoul of any of your app store policies.” 
 
Isn’t it ironic that these two successful and productive CEOs—whatever disagreements you and I might have with them—will spend a holiday dedicated to the Independence of what was once the greatest and the freest country in the history of the world, deciding how to respond to the insistent demands and implicit threats publicly lobbed at them by an official of an administrative agency? 
 
Suppose TikTok is every bit as bad as Carr claims, as much of a national security threat, and as much in violation of the two companies’ policies. Still, this is not the way a public official, in a country based on the rule of law, goes about getting an app removed from an app store. 

Our founders, I like to believe, would have sought a court order, based on clearly articulated and valid legal authority, along with a case substantiated by evidence admissible before a judge, and properly scrutinized and questioned. Appeals to “bipartisan” authorities, with a side of fearmongering rhetoric and a chaser of public shaming, posted on Twitter and appropriately tagged for all to read, heckle, and retweet, is the stuff of the very regime Carr purports to be protecting us from. 

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