It's a global company right? What if they just don't respond. How does it get banned.
But US doesn't have a national Fire Wall like China.
So on one hand we don't have the ability to block content/internet like China, but we seem to want to be more like China and be able to?
You'll lose most audience to a competitor that doesn't require VPN at this step.
You actually do have a chance iff someone manages to catch the essence of tiktok and implement it at home without screwing everything up, so better do not.
Sure, TikTok could mount a massive campaign to get people off of its (in the future) banned in the app stores app and onto the web and then get them to install VPNs, but in the end they'd easily lose 80-90% of their users.
Is TikTok with 10-20% of its users in the US still a problem? Maybe, but not nearly the problem TikTok is with 100% of its users.
A third thing to consider is the network effect. If (hypothetically) in Russia, every other teen uses VPN to post on an otherwise unavailable platform, there's enough content made by Russians there to get fellow Russians interested. OTOH, if in the US, the majority of the kids stop going there, there will be less relatable content that kids would be interested in. Those that exited the platform would publish their stuff elsewhere, and that's where everyone would eventually end up going.
We had a very recent example of how that can work here in Brazil. Like the USA, we have hundreds of independent ISPs, and no national firewall. Twitter tried the "just don't respond", and got banned for over a month (the ban was lifted once Twitter gave up and cooperated with the courts).
So what happens if they do make a pure web version, and host that on servers outside the US?