The US government has challenged yet another court ruling on TikTok. The Trump administration has cited national security concerns in its pursuit of the popular Chinese video-sharing app but multiple court rulings have blocked its efforts.
Most recently, US District Court Judge Carl Nichols issued an order that blocked the Commerce Department’s restrictions on TikTok. The Commerce Department wanted to bar the company from data hosting within the US. There were also reportedly restrictions on other technical transactions that would have effectively rendered TikTok unusable in the country.
However, in a December 7 ruling, Judge Nichols in Washington blocked all those restrictions, allowing ByteDance, TikTok’s Chinese owner, to continue operating the app in the United States. The Department of Justice is now appealing that order to the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia.
The US government appeals yet another court ruling on TikTok
The US-TikTok saga doesn’t seem to be ending anytime soon. It all began all the way back in August when President Donal Trump signed executive orders requiring ByteDance to sell TikTok’s US operations to an American company within 90 days or face a nationwide ban.
President Trump alleged that the company may have backdoors for the Chinese counterparts and that puts millions of Americans at risk. TikTok, which has over 100 million users in the US, has always denied those allegations as the Trump administration could never produce evidence for its claims.
ByteDance did reach an agreement with Oracle and Walmart in September to form a new entity called TikTok Global. It would be wholly owned by Oracle, Walmart, and existing US investors in ByteDance. The new entity would handle TikTok’s US user data and content moderation.
The Chinese company has since made multiple revisions to its propositions to satisfy the Trump administration’s national security concerns. However, the deal never received approvals from both Chinese as well as the American government.
In the meantime, the Trump administration tried to block new downloads of the app from the Google Play Store and the Apple App Store. But Judge Nichols blocked that effort as well. Separately, US District Judge Wendy Beetlestone in Pennsylvania also issued an injunction against the TikTok ban in October.
The US government challenged both the court rulings. A US appeals court in Washington heard the government’s appeal of the first ruling by Judge Nichols earlier this month. The hearing for Judge Beetlestone’s ruling is set for February 2021.
President Trump may not see out the US-TikTok saga
Amid all this, the Trump administration seems to have forgotten what it was after. The government has already granted multiple deadline extensions to TikTok. But the White House officials apparently haven’t provided any substantive feedback regarding that arrangement with Oracle.
Although TikTok will not get any further deadline extension, the government isn’t enforcing its own deadline either. In the meantime, talks between the two sides are still on. However, it’s now highly unlikely that the fate of TikTok in the US would be resolved before outgoing President Trump leaves office on January 20.