The bill to require TikTok to separate from its Chinese parent company or face a nationwide ban made it to President Joe Biden’s desk on Wednesday as part of a huge foreign aid package that passed through Congress this week. And Biden, as he previously promised, signed the bill into law.

ByteDance now has nine months to sell TikTok, a deadline that Biden can opt to extend once by 90 days. And while TikTok could avoid a ban with a successful sale or court challenge, the new law means Americans might want to start imagining an online world without TikTok.

The push to either ban TikTok or excise the platform from its owner has been around for years. For instance, then-President Trump announced plans to ban the app in the summer of 2020, although Trump now says he thinks banning TikTok is a bad idea and that people should be mad at Biden about it.

The threat of a TikTok ban has always been a little weird and complicated, drawing from a mixture of valid concerns and questionable moral panics about the ills of social media. As I’ve written previously, TikTok’s moderation failures and data privacy concerns are hardly unique, even as some lawmakers seem to persist in holding TikTok uniquely responsible for perpetuating them.

With that in mind, let’s break down the implications of this new law, why it’s happening, and what the internet would look like if TikTok disappeared.

What you need to know about the ban

Now that Biden has signed the bill into law, ByteDance has at least nine months — and possibly one year — to sell TikTok. It’s not clear, though, whether the law will survive a court challenge, which TikTok has already vowed to do.

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