It’s official. President Joe Biden has formally approved a bill mandating the TikTok parent company’s divestiture of the app within nine months. Failure by ByteDance to comply would result in TikTok’s effective prohibition in the United States and its removal from Apple’s App Store.
President Biden signed a $95 billion foreign aid package on Wednesday, which also included a provision concerning TikTok. This provision gives ByteDance, TikTok’s Chinese parent company, nine months to sell the app to a U.S.-approved buyer.
If progress towards a sale is evident, President Biden can extend the deadline by an additional three months. Otherwise, TikTok could face a ban.
If ByteDance fails to divest TikTok within that timeframe, the app would be effectively banned in the United States. App store operators such as Apple and Google would be prohibited from hosting TikTok in the US.
The law stems from concerns regarding TikTok and ByteDance possibly posing a national security threat in the United States. Despite ByteDance’s efforts to alleviate these concerns and its assertion that the Chinese government has never requested data on TikTok users in the United States, the company maintains it would not disclose such data if requested.
More news to come on this…
