The United States' threat to ban the Chinese video-sharing app TikTok unless shares are sold to US investors is setting a dangerous precedent of extortion for the free internet, Pavel Durov, the founder of the Telegram messaging app, said on Wednesday
MOSCOW (Pakistan Point News / Sputnik - 05th August, 2020) The United States' threat to ban the Chinese video-sharing app TikTok unless shares are sold to US investors is setting a dangerous precedent of extortion for the free internet, Pavel Durov, the founder of the Telegram messaging app, said on Wednesday.
After US President Donald Trump announced plans to ban TikTok last week, US tech sharks, including microsoft and Apple, expressed interest in buying the app from its developer, ByteDance.
"The US move against TikTok is setting a dangerous precedent that may eventually kill the internet as a truly global network (or what is left of it)," Durov said on his official Telegram channel, elaborating that "the problem with the US-TikTok case is that it legitimises an extortion tactic previously employed only by authoritarian regimes."
Durov said that Telegram had received similar offers to sell operation rights to state-linked organizations under the threat of getting banned, but never accepted them, considering it an equivalent of "betraying our users." Telegram itself is one of the world's most popular messaging apps, with over 400 million active users.
At the same time, the tech leader said he could see where the US was coming from, as China itself has banned pretty much every non-Chinese social media app on its territory, so making the market access a two-way street is only fair.
The US government has long been after TikTok, along with several other Chinese tech companies, over alleged data privacy concerns on the backdrop of a fierce economic competition that got coined as a "trade war."
Trump set a September 15 deadline for TikTok's purchase to be completed by a US company or else the video-sharing app will be banned.
The US president also told reporters on Monday that a substantial portion of the sale's proceeds, which US media speculated to be as high as $50 billion, should go to the US Treasury Department.
