President Trump’s latest attempt to unblock TikTok for its more than 170 million US users came hours after his inauguration on Monday: an executive order telling the Justice Department to ignore the law banning US app stores and other platforms host ByteDance applications.
The EO—the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act application to TikTok—orders the Attorney General “to take no action to enforce the Act for a period of 75 days from today” and directs the DOJ to “not take no action to enforce the law or impose any penalty against any entity for any non-compliance with the law.”
That second directive also bars the department from enforcing the law for violations committed between Jan. 19, when it took effect, and Trump’s inauguration on Monday. It directs the AP to send letters to each of those responsible firms “stating that there was no violation of the statute and that it is not responsible for any conduct.”
A January 19 start date was “unfortunate timing” and “interferes with my ability to negotiate a resolution to avoid an abrupt shutdown of the TikTok platform while addressing national security concerns,” the EO says.
It does not suggest or outline a resolution that would comply with the law’s requirement of a “qualified abuse” intended to stop China’s government from exerting its influence over TikTok’s Beijing-based parent company, ByteDance.
President Biden signed this law last April as part of a major supplemental spending bill (PDF). The bill’s passage follows years of bipartisan concern over the potential for the Chinese Communist Party to abuse its leverage over ByteDance to collect data on Americans — a vulnerability made much wider by Congress’ continued failure to pass a bill comprehensive privacy – or to push CCP – favorite messages.
The law survived two court challenges that ended with the Supreme Court ruling unanimously that its provisions targeting TikTok did not raise First Amendment issues.
Trump’s pre-inauguration assurances to US hosting firms were apparently enough to prompt them to restore TikTok online on Sunday. of Washington Post reported that “Trump’s team privately reached out to some of TikTok’s business partners, including Oracle, to assure them they would not face penalties for bringing the platform back online,” citing “a person familiar with the conversations “.
As of Tuesday morning, however, both Apple and Google’s app stores remain without TikTok, leaving the app in a bit of a zombie existence. A copy of the App Store on an iPad mini 6 linked to a support note that begins, “Apple is bound to follow the laws in the jurisdictions in which it operates,” while a copy of the Play Store on a Pixel 9 Pro showed a note saying ” Downloads for this app have been discontinued due to current US legal requirements.”
Analysts pointed to the risks that Apple and Google or any other trading partners would be left vulnerable after Trump leaves office: The law carries fines of $5,000 per user within US borders and has a five-year statute of limitations, Alan noted. Mr. Rosenstein. law professor at the University of Minnesota, in an analysis posted Friday in Lawfare.
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“Given these risks, corporate counsel would be hard-pressed to advise their CEOs to continue doing business with TikTok in any of these scenarios,” he wrote. But, he added, some executives may “see enough value in currying favor with Trump.”
Technology industry research firm MoffettNathanson shared a similar observation in a Jan. 17 research note: “Non-compliance could expose these companies to penalties under a future administration bent on enforcing the law more rigorously.”
TikTok’s executive order — an about-face from a 2020 Trump EO that sought to ban TikTok — came among more than three dozen “Presidential Actions” involving such legally and scientifically dubious measures as an effort to rewrite the 14th Amendment’s guarantee of birthright citizenship. and declare that transgender and non-binary people do not exist.
Tech-specific measures on that list include an order ending “federal censorship” of social media platforms (as in pushing social platforms to enforce their own anti-disinformation rules, something the Supreme Court ruled last summer was not rise to the level of censorship ) and repeal the executive order on AI security that Biden issued in October 2023 with industry support.
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About Rob Pegoraro
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