On a technical level, how is TikTok being blocked/banned in the US?

Can I still sideload the app to my phone? Is it only being banned from the two big app stores? Is there a penalty for being found in possession of the software on US soil?

  • Nougat@fedia.io
    107·
    12 hours ago

    Public DNS servers hosted in the US will get notified to delist the domain or direct it to an alternate IP. ISPs will get notified to route IP traffic elsewhere.

        • borari@lemmy.dbzer0.com
          11·
          11 hours ago

          Yeah, I do to. We’re not talking about theoretically blocking access to a site nation wide. We’re talking about the TikTok ban, which doesn’t stipulate any sort of network blocking, it’s just a delisting from the app stores.

          The government has never required dns providers to remove records for a domain, or required ISPs to null route traffic to IPs. That’s almost certainly a First Amendment issue, and I can only imagine that such an order would be immediately challenged in court.

          • Nougat@fedia.io
            11·
            11 hours ago

            https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_censorship_in_the_United_States

            Trading with the Enemy Act (TWEA)

            In March 2008, the New York Times reported that a blocklist published by the Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC), an agency established under the Trading with the Enemy Act 1917 and other federal legislation, included websites, so that US companies are prohibited from doing business with those websites and must freeze their assets. The blocklist had the effect that US-based domain name registrars must block those websites. According to the article, eNom, a private domain name registrar and Web hosting company operating in the US, disables domain names that appear on the blocklist.[38] It described eNom’s disabling of a European travel agent’s web sites advertising travel to Cuba, which appeared on the list.[39] According to the report, the US government claimed that eNom was “legally required” to block the websites under US law, even though the websites were not hosted in the US, were not targeted at US persons, and were legal under foreign law.

            As far as null routing IPs, we’ll see.

            • borari@lemmy.dbzer0.com
              5·
              11 hours ago

              We won’t see, it’s never happened and isn’t a requirement in the ban bill.

              Read the cited article in Wikipedia. https://web.archive.org/web/20170407043030/https://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/04/us/04bar.html eNom didn’t block DNS users from resolving the domains, they were the registrar for the domains. The domain owners were paying eNom to list their records. As soon as the domain owners moved to a different DNS provider, anyone in the US would be able to access the sites again, even users using eNom public dns servers (if they exist idk).

              You didn’t cite a case of the US blocking DNS providers from resolving a domain, you cited a case of the US blocking a registrar from doing business with an entity on a blocklist published by OFAC.

      • Nougat@fedia.io
        13·
        11 hours ago

        To be fair, it wouldn’t be every ISP that would reroute, just backbone ones. Their routing tables would filter down to regional and last mile networks.