Earlier this month Madurai Bench of Madras High Court directs the central government to ban the application, the court said the application is encouraging the pornography. The order directs the Media to not telecast the videos made using the Tik Tok App.
Related Post: Tik Tok to be Banned in India, Madras High Court Directs Centre for the Ban
Tik Tok has challenged the Madras High Court’s order in the supreme court of India seeking stay for the ban but apex court has refused to put the Madras High Court order on hold that directed the Centre to ban the TikTok app. A bench of Chief Justice Ranjan Gogoi, Justice Deepak Gupta and Justice Sanjiv Khanna said that it is keeping the issue open for further adjudication and would consider it on April 22nd.
After the court’s order, an executive agency of the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) has ordered Google and Apple have removed the Tik Tok App from their respective app stores. However, users who have already installed the app or using before the ban will be able to keep using the app; because, as the supreme court has mentioned in its order, this is just an interim order to ban the application. The top court will hear the matter again on April 22nd.
Related Post: Tik Tok to be Banned in India, Madras High Court Directs Centre for the Ban
If apex court on next hearing on April 22nd will decide to completely ban the application then the Chinese app Tik Tok will not be accessible in India. India is the biggest market for TikTok so it would be a huge loss for the company. ByteDance the Chinese tech company that owns the TikTok app has launched the application in India last year and very soon it becomes one of the most downloaded apps on Google and Apple App Stores. The company is claiming that it has more than 120 million monthly active users in India, so its definitely going to be very bad for the company’s business if it will be fully banned in the country.
Banning TikTok of any other mobile applications from different app stores is not going to solve the problem completely unless it will get banned fully including the ISP (Internet Service Provider) level ban. There are many applications restricted by Google and which are not available on Play Store but still, there are websites and third-party app stores from where any users can download any restricted apps.
So, completely restricting Android users to access some applications will not be an easy task for the government. Android users can install any applications by directly downloading the APK file via third-party websites like APKPure and APK Mirror which is more dangerous since these third-party platforms do not verify apps for hidden malicious content as Google and Apple do.