Trump gives Tiktok another ban extension

For thirdPresident Donald Trump will extend the deadline for Tiktok to withdraw from his Chinese parent company or will face an American ban. The White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, confirmed on Tuesday in a statement that Trump would sign a decree this week extending the deadline of 90 additional days, winning the new deadline in mid-September.

The Trump administration will spend the next 90 days “working to ensure that this agreement is concluded so that the American people can continue to use Tiktok with the assurance that their data is safe and secure,” said Leavitt.

The extension, signed for the first time on January 20, theoretically offers legal coverage for Tiktok American service providers who are subject to Protection of Americans against the law on applications controlled to the foreign opponent of Hundreds of billions of penalties They could face the application online and in American application stores. But this legal coverage was already fragile since Trump’s extensions are not codified in the law, which was adopted at an overwhelming majority by a bipartite vote in the Congress, and confirmed the Constitution by the Supreme Court.

As The penis Previously reported, Bytedance and a coalition led by Oracle had almost hammered an agreement In April, but Trump’s prices suddenly exploded the draft agreement. Although trade tensions between the United States and China has simmered, there have been no recent news about the resusciation of this agreement or another. Even when a sale seemed likely, it was not clear if China would allow Bytedance to sell the precious algorithm which feeds the video recommendations of Tiktok.

Several legislators, including those who have criticized a divestment or bane law for Tiktok and Bytedance, have warned that Trump’s repeated extensions are untenable and illegal. After Trump’s last extension in April, the Vice-President of the Intelligence Committee of the Senate Mark Warner (D-VA) said The penis This decision was “against the law” and said that “everything is an imposture if the algorithm does not move from Beijing”.

Even before the second extension, meaning. Ed Markey (D-MA), Chris Van Hollen (D-MD) and Cory Booker (D-NJ), who oppose a prohibition by Tiktok, wrote Trump that it would be “unacceptable and impracticable for your administration to continue to ignore the requirements of the law”. They warned: “All the other extensions of the Tiktok deadline will require Oracle, Apple, Google and other companies to continue to risk ruinous legal responsibility, a difficult decision to justify life.”

Indeed, Tiktok service providers in the United States can be fined to facilitate access to application after the deadline for prohibition, and Trump extensions are not outside the authorized mechanisms in law. So far, however, these companies seem to count on administration insurance that they will not be prosecuted for keeping Tiktok online, although it is would have taken a letter from the American prosecutor herself To ease Apple and Google’s concerns.

A court could assess whether Trump’s actions are legal, but only if someone continues to stop the extension – and so far, no one has done. Earlier this month, however, A Google shareholder filed a complaint Against the company for having pretended to be failed to share internal files on its decision to flee the law under the insurance of the Ministry of Justice. The same shareholder had already brought an action against the DoJ for having pretended to share information on his decision not to apply the law against Apple and Google.

While the members of the Trump party generally did not go so far as to call its illegal extensions, a dozen republicans of the house said in a press release in April that “any resolution must guarantee that US law is respected and that the Chinese Communist Party does not have access to American user data or the possibility of manipulating the content consumed by the Americans.” Senator Josh Hawley (R-MO) told journalists this month that Trump “had to enforce the status and ban on Tiktok. This central path, I don’t think it’s viable.”

But it is not clear what would prevent Trump from approving indefinite extensions or an agreement that does not respond to the letter of the law. As Hawley recognized while speaking to journalists in April, “Congress, we do not have an arm of application of the law”.