China says India's ban on Chinese apps may violate WTO rules
- by Virginia Carter
- in World Media
- — Jul 7, 2020
In the political circles the app ban has been seen as India's retaliation to Chinese incursions inside its borders in Ladakh. India is TikTok's top growth market and accounts for 30% of its 2 billion downloads worldwide.
"Upon receiving of recent credible inputs that such apps pose threat to sovereignty and integrity of India", the government has made a decision to bar the apps, the ministry said in the statement on Monday.
India's Minister for Electronics and Information Technology and Communications Ravi Shankar Prasad said that the step was taken for "safety, security, defence, sovereignty & integrity of India". Soon after India banned the application, the USA also banned two Chinese companies.
One government source told Reuters this week the ban was unlikely to be revoked soon.
Chinese tech giant unicorn ByteDance Ltd.is anticipating a loss of over Dollars 6 billion after three of its apps, including the hugely popular video app TikTok, were banned by India this week, a media report here said. We believe this move will help create a level playing field (for Indian platforms).
TikTok has committed to spend $1 billion in the region.
India is one of TikTok's largest markets.
The government order didn't name China, or cite the border clashes.
The ByteDance apps banned were its short video platforms TikTok and Vigo Video, as well as its social networking app Helo.
Stating that practical cooperation between China and India has been mutually beneficial, Zhao stated, "Such a pattern has been artificially undermined and it is not in the interest of the Indian side". The Chinese media report claimed that this was a huge blow for the company, especially due to the ban on TikTok. The government said such concerns also pose a threat to sovereignty and security of the country. It was updated on July 6, 2020, to say TikTok notified its users in India that the company was working to comply with an Indian government directive, not that users' data would be transferred to an Irish subsidiary.
