The legal battles that will determine TikTok's future in the United States are coming in hot.
Here's the deal: On Monday, TikTok sued the state of Montana over a bill that would ban the app starting early next year.
TikTok alleges that the ban violates the First Amendment of the US Constitution, as well as other federal laws.
The suit comes less than a week after Montana's governor, Greg Gianforte, signed legislation that would impose a fine of $10,000 per day against TikTok or app stores that make the app available on personal devices in the state.
To be sure, the ban is a hugely politically motivated move. TikTok has become an easy target for politicians who want to appear to stand up against a powerful foreign adversary, in this case China. Because TikTok's parent company is Chinese, some federal lawmakers are freaking out that Beijing is going to use the app to steal Americans' data — a scenario security experts say is purely hypothetical and highly unlikely.
The Montana legislation faces a bunch of technological and legal hurdles that make it nearly impossible to enforce, my colleague Brian Fung writes.
Challenges abound
On Thursday, the American Civil Liberties Union accused Gianforte and the state legislature of having "trampled on the free speech of hundreds of thousands of Montanans who use the app to express themselves, gather information, and run their small business in the name of anti-Chinese sentiment."
A group of TikTok users echoed that complaint in a lawsuit, filed hours after the governor signed the bill.
"Montana can no more ban its residents from viewing or posting to TikTok than it could ban the Wall Street Journal because of who owns it or the ideas it publishes," according to the complaint.
The enforcement question
Even if the law survives the litany of legal challenges, it won't be easy to enforce. Tech companies that operate app stores can't filter them on a state-by-state level. So, that's enforcement problem number one.
Number two: It's unclear how, exactly, Montana officials might determine noncompliance. To do a proper ban, Montana would potentially have to do surveillance of its own citizens to see who's downloading the app and how, said Alan Rozenshtein, an associate law professor at the University of Minnesota. Which is pretty funny, considering the anti-Big-Brother-y ethos that supposedly motivated the law in the first place.
And of course, VPNs are widely available to anyone with the internet, making it a cinch to circumvent whatever digital fence the state tries to set up.
"Any teenage anime fan or British TV aficionado can tell you how to circumvent such a silly ban using a VPN," said Evan Greer, director of Fight for the Future, a consumer advocacy group.
Why does it matter?
Montana is part of a coterie of states that have imposed some level of TikTok restrictions, citing a largely hypothetical security risk.
There is no public evidence to suggest that the Chinese government has actually accessed TikTok's US user data. And TikTok isn't the only company that collects large amounts of data, or that might be an attractive target for Chinese espionage (See also: Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, Google, Apple, the US government, et al).
The legal challenges that play out over Montana's law, which was the first to go after personal devices, may determine whether other states follow suit.
RELATED: Montana's TikTok ban could crush small businesses that made their name on the app.
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