A few days ago, after TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew testified before congress, Kevin McCarthy announced that the House would move ahead with a proposed “TikTok ban” bill. Among other things, the RESTRICT Act aims to “proactively tackle… sources of potentially dangerous technology before they gain a foothold in America”. While the mechanism is not yet clear, the intent of the bill appears to be more than just preventing a corporation from doing business in the US, or even barricading its servers: it posits that dangerous software should be prevented from running on US devices altogether.
Reading various threads on the topic across social media, I get the sense that a lot of people are generally on board with this initiative. After all, why should an adversarial nation retain access to millions of users’ data? I’m not here to make a judgement call on TikTok one way or the other. Rather, I want to argue that the notion of banning software on personal devices should be a non-starter, and that it would be a gross affront to our freedoms if it came to pass.
Here’s the way things have largely worked to date. The government decides that TikTok is a national security threat and passes legislation making it illegal to do business with them in the US. However, a user is still be able to go to tiktok.ch (perhaps through a VPN) and download whatever binaries they desire, “legal” or otherwise, because it is ultimately their call whether to share their personal data with another party — even if that party happens to be a political adversary. Perhaps the user could be convinced that running this app is a bad idea, or perhaps sharing certain kinds of data with an adversarial nation could be made illegal, but neither would have any bearing on their ability to actually run the app. The law would be enforced (or not) for the consequences of using a piece of software, not the act of running it in the first place.
Same with BitTorrent. Same with Telegram. Same with Stable Diffusion, or BitCoin, or Tor, or Mastodon, or VPNs, or emulators, or CD rippers.
And that’s the way things should work. But the narrative is starting to shift. I believe that the proliferation of walled app store gardens, however convenient for users, has also trained them that they don’t really control their own devices, nor should they want to. If the platform vendor wants to ban some software for whatever reason, then, well, que sera, sera. It’s just an app, after all.
But I see software as an incredibly powerful form of speech: the most powerful speech there is. A single clever binary is the lever that allows Archimedes to move the world. To allow the government or corporation to reach in and prevent software from running on a personal device is to rip power out of the hands of individuals and place it in the hands of a blessed few gatekeepers. It forfeits the potential for a single person to effect the most change ever possible in human history: something not just essential for technological progress, but also as a collective veto on unreasonable or unethical laws and policies. (VPNs can be used to escape the Great Firewall of China, encrypted messengers can be used to opt out of state dragnet surveillance, and piracy led directly to the development of app stores and streaming services.)
For existing software, it’s plain to see what will happen if governments gain access to this kind of power. End-to-end encryption will eventually be made illegal, and Telegram will be shown the door. The RIAA will lobby governments and corporations to protect their interests, and BitTorrent will be punted as well. AI will be framed as a dangerous technology that needs to be controlled, killing any open source AI products while permitting select corporations to produce work in this area. BitCoin and other cryptocurrencies will be banned with the justification that they are only useful for crime and money laundering. As for authoritarian countries, you can bet that any tools allowing people to communicate and organize freely will be strictly regulated and routed through official servers. Turkey recently blocked Twitter for making the government look bad during the earthquake, even though it was being used to find people buried in the rubble, and some people surely died as a result. The fact that this is even possible is a travesty.
And what about future software? Instead of a novel piece of software disseminating naturally from person to person, the government or platform vendor will decide whether it’s something that you should be able to run, and if it is, whether they ought to be the ones controlling it instead. Would web browsers or the open web exist today if this power was available several decades ago, or would we all be experiencing the web through a sanitized version of AOL? Nothing as transformative as any of the software mentioned above has ever emerged from a walled garden app store. Indeed, I would argue that most of the value we get from computers today is based on software that emerged organically from small groups of individuals, often in spite of pressure from the government or entrenched interests to eliminate it.
I will not defend each of the applications I mentioned earlier as a net positive for the world, but that’s not the point: they are transformative and inherently democratic, because their power comes solely from their usefulness together with people’s interest in using them. In democratic countries, we don’t ban books from being published just because they contain dangerous political ideas, and we certainly wouldn’t allow someone to come into our homes and pluck “illegal” books from our shelves. To counter bad ideas, we publish books arguing against those ideas; and to compete with TikTok, we ought to release better social media products. That’s a principle that should be axiomatic for software as much as it is for writing.
I’m far from the first to say it, but I fear we are standing on the precipice of the end of general purpose computing. Platform vendors are becoming more and more suspicious of software not going through their official channels. On Apple’s side, iOS is a well-known walled garden, while macOS has been enforcing signing and notarization of applications while locking down the OS partition in the interest of user security. On Windows, torrent and mining software appear to be classified as “potentially unwanted applications” by default. We can still install Linux on our machines, but only because OS vendors “kindly” permit their secure bootloaders to do so. Meanwhile, it’s becoming possible to enforce application security and integrity on a hardware level. With just a few executive or political decisions, it may soon become possible to unilaterally ban a piece of undesirable software from running on the vast majority of CPUs. The “loopholes” are almost all filled in, and most critically, we are losing the sense that our hardware works for us, and is ours to do with as we feel like.
With regard to privacy, Apple took a stand: we will not unlock phones at the behest of the FBI, because we value the privacy of user data more than the ability for a backdoor to help law enforcement. For the sake of an open future, the freedom to run software must be seen in a similar light, and we need to lobby our platform vendors to make it outright impossible for any party to impose a software ban. Today, Apple can respond in full honesty to court orders by saying that they simply don’t have the ability to access certain kinds of user data. A platform vendor must be able to give the same kind of reply to a dictator demanding the removal of an app that makes them look bad, a recording industry lawyer complaining about a user’s ability to save their own audio, or a government body mandating the end of encrypted communications between private parties. The user’s device must remain sancrosanct for software as it does for data.
Regardless of what China may be doing with our information, nobody should have the right to tell us what software we cannot run on our own personal devices. If TikTok is a national security threat, then eliminate the corporation, or pass data privacy laws, or even make connecting to their servers illegal; but leave our devices alone.
Signed,
-A Concerned Software User
(Addendum: I am reading the tea leaves a bit with regard to the implementation of this bill, I have nothing against initiatives to ban TikTok from government devices, and I am definitely not a CCP supporter.)