The bell tolls for TikTok as lifelines to avoid January 19 US ban vanish

Comment TikTok is just about out of options to save itself from a looming ban in the United States, though that hasn't stopped one US senator from planning a bill to extend the divest-or-dumped deadline another 270 days past this Sunday. 

That's right: Barring a 90-day extension by Biden; a multi-billion dollar deal is agreed upon and closed in the next few days; a Supreme Court reprieve; or Senate action on legislation that has yet to be introduced, it's lights out for TikTok in the US on Sunday, January 19, the deadline set for Chinese tech giant ByteDance to sell the app or have it nixed from US app stores. 

The argument being that the social network is used by millions of teen and adult Americans, on millions of their devices, and thus presents a national security risk as China and the United States are adversaries: ByteDance could be legally compelled by the Chinese authorities to influence netizens to suit President Xi's wishes by carefully selecting which videos they see, or could snoop on them, and so on. The software maker has insisted this has not and would not happen.

The ban on TikTok, which was rolled into a larger government funding bill and would ban apps operated by companies based in "foreign adversary" nations (not just TikTok), was passed by the Senate in April 2024, and signed into law by President Biden a short time later. The bill required TikTok, and other apps covered by the fine-print, to be sold off to a US buyer approved by Uncle Sam by January 19, 2025, or face expulsion. The only exception to the ban would be if a sale were underway, which would give a covered app an additional 100-day reprieve.

As of right now, there's no known deal by an American buyer to save TikTok from its fate, and attempts to stop the ban in court have been unsuccessful thus far. A bill to extend TikTok's deadline, which Senator Ed Markey (D-MA) said on Monday he planned to introduce soon, has yet to hit the congressional docket. 

In short, things aren't looking good for this short-form video-sharing software in the United States. 

SCOTUS unlikely to bail out TikTok

TikTok has been fighting hard to prevent the enactment of the sale-or-ban forced on it by the passage of 2024's Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act (PFACAA), but it hasn't found much sympathy in US courts. 

Beijing-based ByteDance sued Uncle Sam to stop the bill in May, and a US federal appeals court rejected a challenge to the PFACAA last month. TikTok appealed to the US Supreme Court, which heard oral arguments in the case on Friday, January 10. While it has yet to issue a decision in the case, SCOTUS watchers say America's highest court was skeptical of TikTok's arguments and is likely to uphold the ban. 

That said, even if SCOTUS were to block the ban, it had better act fast - lawyer Jacob Huebert, president of the Liberty Justice Center, told The Register that there's no stay in effect that will prevent the ban from taking effect on Sunday.

"The lower court upheld the law and declined to issue even a temporary injunction to prevent the law from taking effect while we sought Supreme Court review," Huebert told us.

The Supreme Court, meanwhile, declined to tell us whether an expedited decision on the matter would be coming this week. 

Consider that one life-saving avenue is likely exhausted.

Totally PFACAA'd

One of TikTok's other avenues of salvation would be the sale to someone in the US with the cash and desire to take ownership. 

There have been a number of names floated as potential buyers for the platform as PFACAA was signed into law, with former US Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin rumored to be interested in buying the social network in March of last year, as well as former Activision Blizzard CEO Bobby Kotick.

Oracle, which proposed buying the twerkin'-teens site in 2020, when an opponent of the current ban President Donald Trump planned to eliminate the app from US devices, may still be interested, too. TikTok uses Oracle's cloud, for what it's worth.

Billionaire Frank McCourt and his advocacy group Project Liberty put in a bid for the app last week ahead of the SCOTUS hearings, with the added caveat that the deal won't include the TikTok algorithm – considered by ByteDance to be its super-secret special sauce that can't possibly be sold off – but there's been no update on whether the Chinese giant will agree to the undisclosed terms of the offer. 

The Chinese government – which along with the US government must OK whoever snaps up TikTok from its Chinese parent company, if anyone - is allegedly weighing a possible sale to Twitter billionaire Elon Musk, though the reality of such a deal appears tenuous at best. ByteDance described such a suggestion as "pure fiction."

• Oracle fears US TikTok ban will dent its cloud profits
• TikTok appeals to have Trump – or Supreme Court – decide its fate later
• Canada closes TikTok's offices but leaves using the app a matter of 'personal choice'
• Intern allegedly messed with ByteDance's LLM training cluster

As mentioned above, news of a pending sale would give TikTok 100 additional days to avoid its January 19 expiration date; today is January 14, giving it perilously little time to agree to terms with anyone.

TikTok is a huge company that has at least a billion active users worldwide and 150 million alone in the US, and is likely worth upwards of $100 billion. A deal of that magnitude takes a lot of time, with ex-White House CIO Theresa Payton telling us she doubted a deal could be reached between passage of the ban bill and its enactment. 

The biz's lawyers reportedly told SCOTUS during last week's oral arguments it would be impossible to complete a sale of an organization of that magnitude by the deadline. 

Biden or Trump to the rescue?

Senator Markey agrees that TikTok "has its problems," but he doesn't think the ban he voted yes to (Markey voted in favor of the larger bill package) in April last year is the right answer.

"The Senate never held a direct vote on the TikTok ban itself," Markey said on the Senate floor yesterday. "This rushed process left many of my colleagues with the impression that ByteDance, TikTok's parent company, would divest from the platform, rendering the ban unnecessary, as its proponents had suggested".

"Now that my colleagues understand that the TikTok ban is real, we need time to have a deeper conversation about how to address the national security risk caused by ByteDance's ownership of TikTok," Sen. Markey continued. "We need time to understand the ban's implication on TikTok's creators and users. We need time to consider alternative ideas."

The Democrat's proposed legislation would grant ByteDance an additional nine months to negotiate a solution that could keep TikTok operational in the US, but the bill had not been formally introduced at the time of writing. Whether it could make it through the entire legislative process, especially when so many in the US government seem unmoved by TikTok's appeals to prevent the ban, is unknown. 

Markey's office hasn't responded to questions about the introduction of the bill. 

It's also possible that President Biden could take action to extend the deadline by 90 days, provided ByteDance has shown it is making progress toward divesting from TikTok. While some US lawmakers have urged him to take this step, whether he intends to act remains unclear. We've asked the White House, and haven't heard back.

President-elect Donald Trump, set to take office this coming Monday, the day after the ban goes into effect, now opposes a ban of the app, and has expressed a desire not to get rid of it because, naturally, his reach on the thing is significant.

That said, without someone else acting to prevent the blockade from going into effect on Sunday, it's not clear what authority Trump will have to entirely reverse it. (He may be able to pause it.) The Trump transition team didn't respond to questions for this story.

If none of these many improbable last-minute reprieves materialize in the next few days, expect TikTok to vanish from US app stores on Sunday, killing the app's ability to reach new people or push updates.

That doesn't mean it'll automatically be deleted from users' devices, of course, so it'll probably still be usable until TikTok decides to shut down app functionality for those in the United States. We'll find out more this weekend, unless a miracle happens in the next few days.

There is some whispering TikTok is otherwise set to simply cut off access to US users come Sunday. ®