[WASHINGTON] US President Donald Trump is extending for a third time the deadline for Chinese company ByteDance to divest the American operations of TikTok, allowing the social media app to keep running in the US while negotiations proceed.
“As he has said many times, President Trump does not want TikTok to go dark,” White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said on Tuesday (Jun 17). “This extension will last 90 days, which the Administration will spend working to ensure this deal is closed so that the American people can continue to use TikTok with the assurance that their data is safe and secure.”
The decision provides yet another lifeline for the popular app that spurred worries in Washington over national security and which has emerged as a source of friction between the US and China. For Trump, who regards himself as the consummate dealmaker, the reprieve gives him more time to secure a complicated agreement that would require an American buyer and Beijing’s sign-off.
Movement on a deal has largely stalled with US-China trade relations swept up in larger tensions over negotiate over trade. Both sides are accusing each other of violating an agreement in Geneva in May to lower crippling tariffs. Subsequent talks in London this month saw the two sides look to ease confrontations centred on access to cutting-edge technology and rare-earth minerals.
Trump’s latest extension, reported earlier by The Wall Street Journal, will come via an executive order and provide ByteDance an additional three months to sell TikTok’s US operations beyond the latest Jun 19 deadline.
Under a law signed by then-president Joe Biden last year, ByteDance was directed to divest TikTok’s US unit by Jan 19, but the company has baulked at selling a lucrative business valued from US$20 billion to as high as US$150 billion depending on the proposed terms and technology included.
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Trump first extended the deadline shortly after taking office in January and extended it again in April. Trump’s latest move is likely to draw questions over its legality.
According to the law, the president could grant a one-time delay for as many as 90 days if “significant progress” was demonstrated towards securing a deal.
When he punted the deadline again in April, Trump said a deal was largely in place but claimed China had changed its stance because of the tariff war between the two countries that saw the president levy high duties on Chinese imports and draw retaliation from Beijing. It’s unclear whether lawmakers from either party in Washington will emerge to contest the latest reprieve.
The administration has fielded several bids to buy TikTok’s US assets, including a consortium of investors featuring Oracle, Blackstone and venture capital giant Andreessen Horowitz that had emerged as a top contender.
That potential agreement would have granted new outside investors 50 per cent of TikTok’s US business in a unit that would be spun off from ByteDance. ByteDance’s existing US investors would also own about 30 per cent of the business, cutting the Chinese firm’s stake to just below 20 per cent, allowing it to meet the ownership requirements of the US security law. Oracle would take a minority stake in the operations and provide security assurances for user data.
The proposal would also have left the app’s algorithm in Chinese hands, removing a potential obstacle to winning approval from the company and authorities in Beijing. That exposes it to challenges by China hawks in Congress who worry such a deal would give Beijing too much access to US data and could violate a provision in the law requiring the software to be removed from Chinese control.
The Trump administration was close to reaching the deal involving Oracle before the earlier Apr 5 deadline, but China withheld its approval following the US president’s decision to impose sweeping tariffs. BLOOMBERG
