TikTok In No Mood To Pursue Legal Action Against The Ban

Recently, the Indian government banned 59 Chinese applications including TikTok, UC Browser, Shein, Club Factory, SHAREit and more with an aim to safeguard the interests of crores of Indian mobile and internet users. TikTok India refuted media reports which said that the company was planning to pursue legal action against the government’s ban on 59 Chinese apps. In a statement given by TikTok, India spokesperson said that the company has “no plans to pursue such action. We are committed to working with the Indian government to address its concerns.”

The latest communication by TikTok comes just a day after its CEO Kevin Mayer called the ban “an unfortunate challenge in India” in a message to the company’s employees in the country. Shortly after the government’s decision came in public earlier this week, TikTok India head Nikhil Gandhi also responded to the ongoing restrictions and said that it was in the process of complying with the “interim order” passed by the government.

The Ministry Of Information Technology said that it had received many complaints from various sources including several reports about the misuse of some mobile apps available on Android and iOS platforms for stealing and surreptitiously transmitting users’ data in an unauthorized manner to servers which have locations outside India. Soon after the ban, TikTok stopped showing up in search results on the Google Play Store and Apple App Store. Some users searching for TikTok on Google Play ended up seeing some clone apps. The Apple App Store showed ‘helper apps’ like VideoSplit for TikTok, but not the TikTok app itself.

In a country with 450 million users of smartphones, there are about 300 million users who have one Chinese app or the other on their phones. And TikTok has been downloaded 467 million times in India, which is one-third of its total global downloads, providing parent company ByteDance with a revenue of $479,000 in its first full year of operation in India in 2019. The Global Times has reported that ByteDance, the parent company of TikTok, may lose $6 billion in revenue after India banned 59 Chinese apps.

Along with banning 59 apps, including TikTok, the Indian government has taken several steps against China to halt its penetration in the Indian economy. Union Minister NitinGadkari announced that Chinese companies would not be allowed to take part in highway projects. They cannot take part in joint ventures as well.