ByteDance in talks with US to avoid selling TikTok: Report
TikTok — which has been downloaded 175 million times within the US and quite a billion times round the world — has filed a lawsuit challenging the crackdown by the United States government .
ByteDance in talks with US to avoid selling TikTok: Report
Chinese internet giant ByteDance is in talks with the US about ways it’d avoid having to sell its TikTok operations within the us , the Wall Street Journal reported Wednesday.
TikTok has been at the middle of a diplomatic storm between Washington and Beijing, and President Donald Trump gave Americans a deadline to prevent doing business with TikTok’s Chinese parent company ByteDance — effectively compelling a purchase of the app to a US company.
Walmart has joined forces with Microsoft in negotiations to shop for TikTok. Oracle is additionally reported to have an interest in TikTok.
TikTok — which has been downloaded 175 million times within the US and quite a billion times round the world — has filed a lawsuit challenging the crackdown by the United States government .
The suit contends that Trump’s order was a misuse of the International Emergency Economic Powers Act because the platform isn’t “an unusual and extraordinary threat.”
Trump claims that TikTok might be employed by China to trace the locations of federal employees, build dossiers on people for blackmail and conduct corporate espionage.
TikTok — employed by as many as a billion people worldwide to form quirky, short-form videos on their cellphones — has repeatedly denied sharing data with Beijing.
Talks between ByteDance and therefore the US are happening for months but have grown more urgent because the deadline set by Trump nears, consistent with the Journal report.
At least one among TikTok’s major investors was a part of a gaggle that met recently with representatives from the Central intelligence to debate data security, the Journal reported, citing someone conversant in the matter.
Trump last week repeated his demand for a bit of the action from any sale of TikTok’s US operations for forcing such a deal.
“Well, I told them that they need until September 15th to form a deal; then , we close it up during this country,” Trump told journalists “And I said that the us has got to be compensated — well compensated — because we are those that are making it possible, then we should always be compensated.”
Critics have slammed Trump’s involve the United States government to urge a cut of the deal, contending that it appears unconstitutional and like extortion.
Meanwhile, ByteDance has vowed to “strictly abide” by new export rules in China which could potentially complicate a purchase of the business as demanded by Trump.
China’s commerce ministry added “civilian use” to an inventory of technologies that are restricted for export.
The new regulations could make it harder for ByteDance to sell the wildly popular video app, which features clips of everything from dance routines and hair-dye tutorials to jokes about lifestyle and politics.
