TikTok is just the beginning. Legislators in the US will soon make it possible to ban any third-country app

The saga of TikTok and its ban in America is slowly entering its final phase, and it is only a matter of time before the ban on mobile phones of government institutions, and recently also public networks in schools and universities, will have its epilogue in the form of a complete ban.

We know that the word “ban” does not sound nice in the democratic world, but this time even that paradigm is no longer a problem. Everything is now packed in a “national security” envelope called R.E.S.T.R.I.C.T. (Restricting the Emergence of Security Threats that Risk Information and Communications Technology).

Namely, a new bipartisan bill supported in the US Congress makes it possible to declare any “foreign application” undesirable, that is, it can be considered as a security threat, which, in short, allows the government to order Google and Apple to remove them from their respective application stores.

So, it’s no longer about TikTok, but about all future platforms that the U.S. administration considers undesirable, or represents a security risk. Of course, given that the new law will probably be voted by acclamation, there will be no need to prove the harmfulness of an application in the court, because the entity who ordered it will be taken at their word, which is the case even now when “national security” is at stake.

Considering the support of both parties in the USA, there should be no doubts about the implementation of this future law, just like the “monkey see, monkey do” situation in the EU soon after, given that we have already witnessed the copying of the similar templates and the parroting of the same mantras.