United States President Trump has recently renewed the United States ban on TikTok, the third extension since the Act was introduced. Last year, the United States Congress passed a law imposing a byte beat to remove TikTok from business in the United States. After the entry into force of the law in January of this year, TikTok was suspended for one day in the United States “suspension of service” until Trump intervened and issued two executive orders that were renewed for 75 days. This latest 90-day extension has been extended to September.
The United States Government claims that TikTok constitutes a national security threat. Trump supported a ban on TikTok, but later changed his position, partly because he believed that the platform had played a role in its second electoral victory. Last December he said, “I am fond of TikTok because it gave me 34 percentage points ahead of my support among the young voters”.
If agreement is not reached on 17 September, the application may again face the fate of being banned in the United States and placed under the app store. It should be noted that the administrative order of extension signed by Trump did not override the earlier “sale or prohibition” law. Therefore, there is still a legal possibility of the ban being enforced.
Several potential sellers have now surfaced and, according to BBC reports, Amazon made an offer to buy TikTok to the White House at the last minute, although Amazon refused to comment on it.Trump had offered to sell TikTok to Larry Ellison and Elon Musk, the co-founders of Oracle, although the latter had declared that it had no intention of interfering in the transaction.
Frank McCourt and Canadian businessmen Kevin O’Leary and Alexis Ohanian, co-founder of Reddit, both expressed interest in this, and Ohanian announced last month in social media that he would join McCord’s team.
In addition to this, it has been reported that the computing giant Microsoft (MSS), the private equity giant Blackstone Group (Blackstone), the venture capital company Andressen Horowitz and the search engine Perplexity AI are among those competing for shares.
It was also reported that the White House had considered a compromise that allowed byte beats to retain ownership of the TikTok core algorithm but leased it to a new entity operating the video-sharing application in the United States.
