Opinion The US found a way with TikTok. India merely silenced it

The case of TikTok unfolded differently. In June 2020, amid border tensions with China, TikTok and dozens of other Chinese apps were banned overnight. TikTok had more than 200 million Indian users at the time. For many — regional language creators, small-town performers, first-time influencers — it was the first platform where they could be visible. This ecosystem disappeared in an instant. Unlike with Facebook or Twitter, no attempt was made to negotiate localisation, and no conditional approvals were considered. TikTok was treated as dispensable.

The answer cannot be only “because China”. The ban points to a deeper issue: India has not developed the infrastructure or regulatory capacity to negotiate with global platforms that do not originate in the United States. With American companies, India has tried to wrestle, even if often unsuccessfully. With TikTok it lacked the imagination or tools to attempt a negotiated outcome.
By contrast, the United States has now crafted just that. After months of debate about banning TikTok, Washington has settled on a “third track”. Under this arrangement, TikTok will continue to operate, but only under strict conditions. All US user data must be stored on Oracle’s servers. Its operations will be overseen by a board of trustees appointed domestically. Even its recommendation algorithm will be subject to controlled inspection and licensing.

It is worth remembering that this is not TikTok’s first fork. ByteDance had already created two versions: Douyin for China, and TikTok for everywhere else. The US arrangement now creates a third track. For global tech firms, this is routine: To survive, they must split, localise, and negotiate across jurisdictions. The US deal shows that such adaptation is possible when the host country has the capacity to demand it. But it also shows that TikTok itself has built the flexibility to live in parallel forms. India never attempted this. Nor have homegrown apps — ShareChat, Moj, Koo — shown the capacity to be remade across contexts, rather than built for a single audience.

This is what makes negotiated localisation different from India’s approach. TikTok remains Chinese-owned, but its US presence is reconfigured to operate within American infrastructures and oversight. It is neither a ban nor full acceptance. It is a settlement made possible because the US has the institutional and technical capacity to demand it: Sovereign clouds, technically skilled regulators, and legal mechanisms that enforce compliance.

India lacks such instruments. Its digital economy has been built as a global servicing infrastructure: Data centres hosting foreign clients, engineers coding for export, policies that attract outsourcing and investment. This has generated jobs and growth, but not the localisation infrastructure needed to reshape global platforms on domestic terms — sovereign clouds, regulators with technical depth, and adaptive laws.

It is true that India has produced homegrown platforms with national relevance. ShareChat and Moj have built large audiences in regional languages, and Koo briefly offered an Indian alternative to Twitter. But these remain exceptions that highlight the imbalance. They have struggled with retention, monetisation, and scaling beyond niche communities. None has the durability or leverage to stand alongside TikTok, Instagram, or WhatsApp. Their existence complicates the picture but does not alter the fact: India’s digital priorities have favoured becoming the backend of the global economy over building systems of domestic oversight.
There have been narrow sectoral successes. WhatsApp Pay is a case in point. In 2018, the Reserve Bank of India required all payments data to be stored domestically. WhatsApp resisted, delaying rollout for nearly three years, but eventually complied. The service launched in phased fashion, capped at 20 million users. This showed that India can, under certain conditions, enforce localisation. But it was possible only because financial transactions fall under a tightly regulated sector with a strong central authority. Outside such domains, India lacks the mechanisms to compel adaptation at scale.

This is why TikTok was different. Social media does not have a dedicated regulator with the authority and technical expertise of the RBI. The Information Technology Act and the IT Rules provide broad punitive powers, but they are designed more for enforcement after the fact than for negotiated localisation. India has no institutional pathway to require algorithmic audits, data residency, or operational trusteeship from platforms like TikTok. The only choice was to shut it off.

Changing this trajectory means rethinking what our infrastructures are built for. Cloud and data systems are still designed to host foreign clients; we must begin to imagine them as sovereign systems that enforce residency and accountability. Regulators today interpret compliance after the fact; we should be equipping them with technologists who can read code and interrogate algorithms in real time. Our laws still rely on coercion as the only tool, when they should also allow conditional permissions and negotiated adaptation. And the talent pipelines that prepare engineers for export should prepare them equally for the slower, less glamorous work of domestic oversight. Without these shifts, India will keep building for others, not itself.

The US–TikTok deal shows that it is possible to reconfigure a global platform so that it operates on national terms. India’s ban, by contrast, revealed the absence of such capacity. TikTok may not return, but its absence leaves behind an important reminder: Until India rebalances its priorities, every new platform will arrive as someone else’s system, running on someone else’s terms.

The writer is professor of Global Media at the Chinese University of Hong Kong and faculty associate at the Berkman Klein Centre for Internet & Society, Harvard University