On performative bans, enforceability, and who pays for symbolic laws
Montana’s governor signed a bill today that says a state can ban a phone app, TikTok. It reads tough. It polls well. It also outsources the hard part to people who were not in the room: app stores, carriers, and anyone whose job depends on a camera and a feed they didn’t build but learned to use.
This is the American way of tech panic. We skip the engineering diagram and go straight to the podium. The bill names a threat and then gestures at enforcement like it lives in the air: block downloads, penalize distributors, pretend geofencing and state lines are the same thing. Meanwhile every teenager in the state knows three ways around a wall before the ink is dry. Adults will too, if their business model requires it.
If the worry is data leaving the country, write a data-security law and enforce it on every platform, not just the one that makes headlines. If the worry is addiction, fund treatment and publish design rules with teeth—rate limits, defaults, off-ramps—that apply across the board. If the worry is propaganda, say you’re regulating speech and prepare to meet the First Amendment in daylight. Don’t pretend a download button is foreign policy.
There are receipts for this kind of theater. Businesses that market on the app wake up to costs they didn’t vote for—new campaigns to build, audiences to rebuild, contracts to unwind. Creators who pay rent with short videos get told to go find another staircase to climb, as if reach were portable. Parents who finally had one place to watch what their kids watch will follow them into darker corners. App stores get handed a compliance chore that turns into a map problem, a VPN problem, and a lawsuit problem.
The state will call it a line in the sand. The internet calls it a speed bump. You can make a point with a pen. You cannot make a network obey without building the machinery to inspect, block, and punish at the edge cases where ordinary people live. That machinery is expensive, invasive, and—if you’re honest—scalable to things you swore you’d never police.
I don’t love the app. I do love plain talk. If the goal is to hurt a rival state, say so and own the collateral. If the goal is to protect residents, regulate the harms directly and fund the boring parts: enforcement, education, and appeals that don’t require a lawyer you can’t afford. Symbolism is cheap. Compliance is a bill. Pay it or stop pretending you passed a solution.