President Trump’s plan for TikTok in the U.S. faces backlash after he proposed a joint venture with the U.S. owning half of the app. China rejected the idea, insisting TikTok’s ownership must follow Chinese laws. Meanwhile, the app’s removal from U.S. stores has left users and businesses uncertain.
Author: Kit Eaton
On Sunday, the wildly popular app TikTok—which has around 170 million U.S. users and serves as a storefront for countless small or one-person American businesses—disappeared from Apple’s App Store and Google’s Play U.S. store. The popular social video platform was finally subject to the strict “ban or sale” law, upheld by the Supreme Court, that targets purported national security issues with its Chinese ownership. But not for long.
On Monday the freshly-minted 47th U.S. President signed an executive order punting total enforcement of the ban 75 days down the road to, according to the order’s words, let the new administration decide an “appropriate course forward in an orderly way” that will protect “national security while avoiding an abrupt shutdown of a communications platform used by millions of Americans.” Trump also, bizarrely, suggested the U.S. deserves, in some undefined way, 50 percent ownership of the app. China, CNN reports, was not pleased, and had some choice business leadership advice for Trump, who’s filed for corporate bankruptcy six times.
Speaking to reporters Monday, Trump said the law banning TikTok gave him 90 days to “make a deal” or to close TikTok, “So if I do the deal for the United States, then I think we should get half. Like a joint venture.” On his own Truth Social social platform Trump suggested a joint venture would mean “we save TikTok, keep it in good hands and allow it to say up. [sic] Without U.S. approval, there is no Tik Tok [sic]. With our approval, it is worth hundreds of billions of dollars—maybe trillions.” Tech commentator John Gruber pointed out that Trump’s suggestion is unironically “quite overtly socialist.”
It remains unclear if Trump implied the U.S. deserved half of the entire app, or a distinct, separate American version of the global content stream. The first option would be an astonishing piece of naivety, since TikTok is estimated to have a global user base of over 2 billion people, 12 times as many as the number of U.S. users. Chinese officials certainly think the same. The nation’s Foreign Ministry said the “operation and acquisition of companies” is entirely the purview of companies themselves, and should follow Chinese law for Chinese enterprises, CNN reported. Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Guo Jiakun said that the U.S. should “provide an open, fair, just and non-discriminatory business environment.” The Department of Justice’s case against the app centers around the alleged ties between TikTok owner ByteDance’s close ties to the Chinese government, some of which was based on classified evidence that has not been made public.
According to CNN that sentiment was echoed among China’s citizens, with “tens of millions” of people on the social media platform Weibo condemning the potential U.S. government “robbery.” One user wryly suggested Apple and Tesla (the EV company owned by Trump ally Elon Musk) should “also give up 50 percent of their shares to Chinese companies, then.”
The situation for TikTok’s U.S. users, and, by implication, the thousands of smaller enterprises that rely on the app to sell or promote their services to the public, now remains unclear: TikTok worked to quickly reinstate services to American users who already had accounts and had downloaded the app. But, as Gruber points out, TikTok “is not available from either Apple’s App Store or Google’s Play Store” right now. He also notes Senator Tom Cotton (R-Arkansas), Chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, and Senator Pete Ricketts (R-Nebraska) issued a statement praising Apple, Google and Microsoft for following the law and taking the app down, and pointing out that “the law, after all, risks ruinous bankruptcy for any company who violates it.”
Time will tell if Trump, who portrayed a successful businessman on the TV show “The Apprentice,” can pull off a “deal” that sees TikTok remain online for U.S. users—China has long indicated the sale of the app’s all-important recommendation algorithm is illegal under Chinese law, and without it the app would arguably be of much less value to U.S. users and businesses.
Credits: TCA, LLC.