On Friday, House China Select Committee chair John Moolenaar (R-MI) and ranking member Raja Krishnamoorthi (D-IL) sent letters to the CEOs of Apple, Google and TikTok reminding them that keeping the TikTok app online past January 19 is a violation of the law. In letters to Apple and Google, the committee wrote: “Congress has provided ample time—233 days and counting” for ByteDance to find a buyer for TikTok. “As you know, without a qualified divestiture, the Act makes it unlawful” to keep TikTok in the app stores.
“Under U.S. law, [Apple and Google] must take the necessary steps to ensure [they] can fully comply with this requirement by January 19, 2025.”
Apple and Google, along with hosting companies like Oracle and Amazon Web Services, could face massive fines if they continue working with TikTok past the congressional deadline. Unless TikTok can convince the courts to stop the law from going into effect, Apple and Google will be forced to remove it from the app stores on the 19th. Its agreements with American cloud companies will also discontinue, in a move that could, ironically, make U.S. users’ data more accessible from China.
Moolenaar and Krishnamoorthi also wrote a letter to TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew, imploring him to start looking for a buyer. “We urge TikTok to immediately execute a qualified divestiture,” they said. TikTok and its parent company, ByteDance, have maintained in legal filings that they cannot and will not sell.
President Biden signed the Protecting Americans From Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act in April, with a wide margin of support from both political parties in Congress. The law requires TikTok’s Chinese parent company, ByteDance, to sell it to a non-Chinese company or see it banned in the U.S. It was motivated by concerns that the Chinese government could force TikTok’s parent company to use it as a tool to either surveil or spread propaganda to Americans. TikTok challenged the law in the powerful D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, arguing that forcing divestment of, or banning, such a popular communications platform was an infringement on Americans’ First Amendment right to communicate how and where they see fit. But the company lost its case — in an unusual interpretation of First Amendment law, the court ruled last week that the in passing the law, Congress “acted solely to protect” their speech rights “from a foreign adversary nation.”
TikTok has vowed to appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court. TikTok, Apple and Google did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
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