The White House has confirmed that the deadline for TikTok to get itself a new owner in the US is being extended yet again, with President Donald Trump pushing things back by another 90 days via executive order. Which makes you wonder if the deadline for Chinese owner ByteDance to sell TikTok, or face a US ban, will ever actually arrive.
With the deadline now extended three times, the sense of urgency for ByteDance to comply with the sell-or-be-banned law that was passed by US Congress last year has more or less evaporated.
In January, when the original 19 Jan deadline approached, the prospect of TikTok going offline in the US seemed very real - indeed, it actually went offline for about fourteen hours before Trump stepped in. Whereas now, as one Forrester analyst put it earlier this week, “there is nothing ‘looming’ about the potential TikTok ban anymore”.
Forrester’s Kelsey Chickering told the BBC that “TikTok’s behaviour indicates they’re confident in their future”, adding that - earlier this year - rival apps like Snapchat hoped to gain market share on the back of all the uncertainty surrounding TikTok, but “they will not succeed because this next round for TikTok isn’t uncertain at all”.
In theory, Trump keeps extending the sell-or-be-banned deadline so that his team - led by Vice President JD Vance - can facilitate a deal that puts TikTok’s US operations into US ownership.
That would address the concerns expressed by Congress that China-based ByteDance’s ownership of TikTok presents data security risks. Those concerns are based on claims that the Chinese government has access to TikTok user-data via ByteDance.
As the latest deadline approached this week, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said, “As he has said many times, President Trump does not want TikTok to go dark”. Trump’s government will use the extra 90 days, she added, “to ensure this deal is closed so that the American people can continue to use TikTok with the assurance that their data is safe and secure”.
For the creators, musicians and record labels that use TikTok as a vital marketing and fan engagement platform, all the uncertainty about the app’s future in the US at the start of the year was rather concerning.
Since then, however, concerns have subsided with each deadline extension, because things seem less uncertain now. Even though, in Trump’s America, uncertainty is the norm, and there remain many unknowns about what will happen next in the world of TikTok.
After the first deadline extension in January, there were a flurry of reports about the different US companies and investors who were interested in buying TikTok’s US operations in order to satisfy the sell-or-be-banned law.
That included Oracle, Applovin Corp and billionaire Frank McCourt’s Project Liberty consortium. Many of those possible buyers were close to Trump or at least were busy pandering to the President.
Although talks between those investors and ByteDance got underway, it was never entirely clear how serious ByteDance itself really was about reaching an agreement, which would have to be approved by the Chinese government.
The TikTok owner seemed to remain quite bullish throughout, despite it having exhausted all legal routes for blocking Congress’s sell-or-be-banned law, and therefore being totally reliant on Trump’s favour to continue operating in the US.
With the sense of urgency very much removed by repeated deadline extensions, ByteDance is less likely to agree to a favourable deal with any of Trump’s pet investors, not least because TikTok’s market dominance and revenues in the US continue to grow, making its US operations more valuable as time goes by.
And as ByteDance drives an ever harder bargain, many of those American investors may decide it’s time to walk away from any negotiations.
Meanwhile, for Trump and the Chinese government, the dispute over the ownership of TikTok is part of something much bigger, ie the ongoing trade war between the US and China.
Speaking to Euronews this week, Darío García de Viedma of Spanish think tank the Elcano Royal Institute said he “doesn't see a scenario” in which a speedy sale or ban of TikTok is in the interests of either Trump or Chinese President Xi Jinping.
Resolving the issue around TikTok’s ownership “would have to be part of a broader negotiation”, he added, “where one concedes TikTok and the other concedes something else, like tariffs or export control”. Which means the urgency, or not, of resolving the TikTok ownership problem is connected to big picture geopolitics.
The actual sell-or-be-banned law passed by Congress last year only actually empowered the President to push back the TikTok ban by 90 days from the original 19 Jan deadline. Nevertheless, Trump seems to think he has the legal power to keep pushing things back ever further. Even if that's not true, with the Republicans controlling US Congress at the moment, he probably does have the political power.
But many now expect the Democrats to secure the majority in at least the House Of Representatives after next year’s mid-term elections. If Trump is still extending the TikTok deadline - 90 days at a time - by then, there might be some Congressional pushback.
Although, Congress may also have plenty of other issues to occupy its time, not least seeking to impeach Trump, potentially leaving everything TikTok wise in a bit of a limbo.
That said, even if TikTok ownership ceases to be a priority for both the White House and Congress, ByteDance will need Trump to keep issuing deadline-extending executive orders until any deal is done, mainly to reassure the lawyers at Apple and Google.
Because, under Congress’s sell-or-be-banned law, they will be legally liable if they distribute the TikTok app via their respective app stores when, technically speaking, it has been banned within the US.
Both tech giants removed TikTok from their app stores on the 19 Jan deadline and didn’t reinstate it until the following month after Trump’s government gave them firm reassurances that they would not be held liable for distributing the apps against Congress’s wishes.
If things become legally ambiguous again at any point, lawyers at Apple and Google are likely to want to err on the side of caution and stop their customers from downloading or updating the TikTok app via their platforms.
All of which means, while things do seem a lot less uncertain regarding TikTok in the US at the moment, in fact, things are as uncertain as they ever were, and will remain that way until the day TikTok US changes ownership - if, indeed, that ever happens.