ByteDance: A Status Report on the TikTok (U.S.) Deal and Its Consequences

ByteDance has been in discussion with the U.S. Government regarding a potential solution for TikTok U.S. An agreement hasn’t been done. There are key matters to be resolved. Any agreement that is signed will have to be approved by Chinese law.

If there is a potential deal that could be used to delay the law, it is probably best to keep your TikTok app updated just in case.

is a senior editor following news across tech, culture, policy, and entertainment. He joined The Verge in 2021 after several years covering news at Engadget.

Despite several publicly announced bids to buy TikTok, its Chinese owner, ByteDance, has shown no inclination to sell or reduce its stake in the company as required by the law passed last year. After the delay was announced, ByteDance commented publicly on the deal talks for the first time, without specifying what “key matters” needed to be resolved before a potential solution could be reached.

Reply to Moolenaar and Warner: The U.S. App Store Crime will be deemed a national security threat

After his inauguration, Trump signed an executive order telling the Attorney General and Department of Justice to “…take no action to enforce the Act or impose any penalties against any entity for any noncompliance with the Act.” It took almost a month for the app to be returned to US app stores after the AG reassured them that the law would not be delayed and that billions of dollars in fines wouldn’t befall them.

After Trump announced the extension on Friday, 12 Republican members of the House Select Committee on China, including Chair John Moolenaar (R-MI), released a joint statement in response. The statement did not mention legal concerns with the second extension, but it said that any resolution had to ensure that U.S. law was followed and that the ability to manipulate the content consumed by Americans was not available to the Chinese Communist Party. The letter says the people who signed it will look forward to more details.

Senate Intelligence Committee Vice Chair Mark Warner (D-VA) was more critical in a phone interview with The Verge. “The whole thing is a sham if the algorithm doesn’t move from out of Beijing’s hands,” Warner said. “And close to 80 percent of Republicans knew this was a national security threat — will they find their voice now?”

The original Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act was passed with overwhelming bipartisan support to address what lawmakers insisted was a pressing national security threat, then upheld by the Supreme Court in January. TikTok has long denied that the Chinese government could access US user data or put its thumb on the scales of the recommendation feed through ByteDance, but many lawmakers have consistently doubted that defense.

Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA), a member of the China Committee who’s criticized the law and warned it will harm free expression and creators’ livelihoods, also wants to see a solution go through Congress, but is seeking a full repeal of the law. He said that the delay was a good step.

The first moves to put a firm line in the sand seem to have been made by China Committee and E&C Republicans. Some Republicans who support the law have urged Trump in one-off statements or writings. Moolenaar previously warned in an op-ed that an adequate deal must fully break ties with ByteDance after reports that Trump was considering a deal with Oracle that would potentially leave some ties intact. The senator told reporters earlier this week he would advise the president to not sign a deal if it didn’t comply with the statute. If he can’t get a deal to sell the company in a way that fully complies, Hawley thinks Trump “ought to enforce the statute and ban TikTok. This middle way, I don’t think is viable.

Earlier this week, when it seemed as though TikTok’s fate in the US would actually be decided by April 5th, everyone — from Amazon to the founder of OnlyFans — was coming out of the woodwork to buy it.

People familiar with the matter tell me that, despite all of the bids for the app, the White House was only seriously considering an Oracle-led consortium, which included many of ByteDance’s biggest investors who were set to roll their stakes into a new, US entity.

Larry Ellison was going to get more business from Oracle by reviving the broad strokes of the Project Texas proposal that the previous administration made, even though the current administration doesn’t actually care about national security threats. TikTok’s investors and employees were finally going to get certainty about the app’s fate. Byte Dance was going to retain control of its algorithm while being able to NationMaster NationMaster NationMaster. And Trump was going to get to say that he saved TikTok.

Well, that’s awkward! Less than two weeks after she appeared as the main character in a glossy magazine story about the fight for web supremacy, this is what happens when there is a search for a new product chief. There is a new leader of the Gemini app team, and he leads the lab org that has been behind the hit notebooklm. Hsiao’s reign has been somewhat controversial, since his goal is for theGemini app to surpass CHATGP this year. The pressure is on.