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If nobody intervenes before Jan. 19, TikTok will become impossible to access via an American internet connection. It probably will remain possible to access from an American location, though.
The rub is a virtual private network, which sets up an encrypted tunnel for internet browsing and can run it through practically any country. VPNs have many millions of users across the world who rely on them for things ranging from basic privacy to watching out-of-market sports games to dodging censorship in repressive states. For that reason, VPNs are a huge business. The global market for them was more than $50 billion in 2023, according to one market research firm. Soon it will be worth much more.
Press coverage of the potential winners of TikTok’s American demise has tended to focus on Meta and Google. That’s with fair reason: Instagram and YouTube would jockey for TikTok users (and creators) whose app was shut off. But the biggest beneficiaries might be the internet privacy and security firms that offer VPNs. After all, you could either find a new platform or, for a few dollars per month, maintain access to the one you already love. VPNs are likely to see an enormous influx of new sign-ups.
VPN companies will accept this windfall. But I think some of the industry’s leaders, who tend to be dyed-in-the-wool believers in an open internet, will be regretful about the circumstances that led to it.
“When we see that there’s an ongoing global trend towards mass surveillance, censorship, and fragmentation of the internet, it’s deeply concerning.”— Lauren Hendry Parsons
“There might be a blip on the sales chart. It pales in comparison to these ongoing, cumulative attempts to undermine internet freedoms,” Lauren Hendry Parsons told me. Hendry Parsons is the director of advocacy and communications for ExpressVPN, a Hong Kong–headquartered internet security firm. She is also co-chair of the VPN Trust Initiative, a part of the trade group representing major VPN and security companies. ExpressVPN, Hendry Parsons told me, has 4 million subscribers. There are a handful of big players in the field, most of them selling their services for something like $4 a month, give or take.
I asked Hendry Parsons how she felt about this coming confluence of events. An abundance of stranded scrollers are about to board the VPN lifeboat. Yet the very value proposition of VPNs rests on an internet rife with restrictions and snoops. This moment of growth will be both validating of the VPN idea and, to whatever extent the industry is full of true devotees to the cause of online privacy, a sad moment.
“There is a perspective that says that these kinds of restrictions drive up VPN interest and VPN adoption,” Hendry Parsons said. “On the other hand, VPNs exist in order to facilitate access to the free and open internet securely, privately, and safely. These kinds of restrictions—if they were very limited in nature—might be a positive thing singularly. When we take them together, and when we see that there’s an ongoing global trend towards mass surveillance, censorship, and fragmentation of the internet, it’s deeply concerning.”
Ideally, it would not take the banning of a megapopular platform to get people to take online privacy seriously. Users would have a VPN for all public networks because they don’t want others to see what they’re doing, and everyone would have a password manager and two-factor authentication on every account. These would be routine, universal acts of digital hygiene.
But that stuff is boring. Any VPN company worth its salt has a “no-logs” policy, and as long as it is being honest, it has no way of finding out by itself how people are using its connections. Some providers regularly submit to third-party audits that they’re not keeping logs. Despite that restriction, evidence has mounted that nothing inspires VPN adoption like a government’s banning of something.
In Florida, a law went into effect Jan. 1 that required Pornhub users to submit their driver’s license to enter the site. Pornhub, in an amusing but very legit stand against data collection and surveillance, instead shut off access via Florida connections. Hendry Parsons said that in the first week of the year, ExpressVPN saw Florida traffic to its website increase by 99 percent over its typical levels. Unsurprisingly, searches for VPNs in the Sunshine State have also skyrocketed.
In Italy, citizens seemed to get much more interested in VPNs during a brief period in 2023 in which the government banned access to ChatGPT. Searches for VPNs went way up too.
In Brazil, VPN interest exploded last fall, after the nation’s government banned access to X. This rising demand came despite an explicit governmental threat of fining those who used VPNs. It was unclear, even to experts, how Brazil would locate violators or enforce the fines.
A nationwide American ban on TikTok will presage an utter boom time for VPNs, the biggest growth event in the sector’s history. The only question is, by what magnitude?
The durability of that growth will likely depend on how well VPNs function as a work-around. For now, TikTok is perfectly simple to access via VPN. (I’m doing it right now from California, through an Argentina-based IP address.) But its parent company, ByteDance, which is still fighting tooth and nail against the ban’s implementation, has not said how it will handle VPN traffic from the United States in an era of vertical-video prohibition. Many services deny (or try to deny) access to users arriving via VPN. Various streamers have figured out which IP addresses are associated with VPNs and blocked access to those using them. Some financial institutions have done the same, though in my reporting, a bit of trial and error has sometimes succeeded in getting a VPN user through the door.
Why the restrictions? Companies don’t usually spell it out. VPN use for privacy “doesn’t always overlap with different interest groups in the world,” Hendry Parsons told me. “Whether it’s advertisers and marketers, whether it’s governments wanting to control information their citizens have access to, whether it’s governments trying to keep their people safe, if it’s banks thinking that anonymity equals suspicion.” Another point of uncertainty is whether a VPN will facilitate downloads of TikTok’s app on Apple and Google devices, given the tech giants’ obligation to stop offering the app to new U.S. downloaders.
Where TikTok will fall on the VPN ease-of-use scale is unknown. But the mere question raises another one: If the United States government is going to restrict access to a platform on national security grounds, and if something as easy as a VPN helps millions access it anyway, why wouldn’t the government then put VPNs themselves in the crosshairs? VPNs are legal here—for now.
“I imagine that the United States, in its commitment to global cybersecurity and information freedom, would see VPNs for what they are,” Hendry Parsons said. She told me that would “point to the kinds of countries that have made VPNs illegal,” like Myanmar, and she wondered if America would ever want to align its internet policy with that of an authoritarian government. I admit to wondering the same thing.
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