The divest-or-be-banned TikTok ultimatum poses a dilemma for the app’s 170 million U.S. users

Banning TikTok won’t keep your data safe: Only an alternative online ecosystem will stop them.

U.S. President Joe Biden signed into law in April that bans TikTok .

Instead of a knowledge commons, today ’s internet has become a race to expand control over every last piece of data.

Frida Ghitis : We need a universal database to democratize access to a megaphone and bring us information from everyone.

Ghitis says it’s unlikely all states will immediately see advantages of a new structure, or that mega-corporations will go quietly into the night.

She says it will be very hard to dismantle the web of totalitarianism, once it's complete, and once it gets off the ground, users will fight for it, making larger-scale transition inevitable.

Former TikTok staff said boundaries between China -based ByteDance and Los Angeles- and Singapore -based TikTok are nonexistent.

Federal officials’ public explanations for why the U.S. government has given TikTok an ultimatum have been infrequent or dismissive.

The prospect of oligarchs anywhere strangling the internet should encourage an evolution toward a genuine global knowledge commons.