TikTok gets 15-day extension for US deal | Digital



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TikTok has been granted another extension of President Trump’s executive order requiring it to sell its assets in the United States, after claiming in an appeal petition that it had not received any communications from the US government for several weeks.

The short video app owned by ByteDance was initially given a September deadline to hand over its business to a U.S. buyer before transactions with the app were banned. The first executive order, which proposed to block app downloads and internet traffic from TikTok, was temporarily blocked by federal judges following a series of counter-lawsuits by TikTok employees and creators.

A second executive order signed by President Trump allowed him until Nov. 12 to strike a deal satisfying the U.S. government’s concerns about the safety and security of the app, mostly related to its Chinese ownership.

TikTok owner ByteDance reached a tentative deal with software giant Oracle and retailer Walmart in mid-September, under which ByteDance would create a new US-based company called TikTok Global that would be majority-owned by investors. Americans. Oracle and Walmart have tentatively agreed to take a 12.5% ​​and 7.5% stake in the new entity. As part of the deal, Oracle would become TikTok’s “trusted technology provider” and would be responsible for processing all US user data on its servers. However, control of TikTok’s source code and algorithms would remain with ByteDance – an element of the agreement that may fail to address user privacy concerns. The takeover of TikTok’s source code was a key part of Microsoft’s proposal to put in place user privacy protections for the US operation, a proposal that was ultimately rejected.

President Trump said he “agreed in principle” to the Oracle-Walmart deal on September 20, but it has yet to be fully endorsed by the US government.

The deal will also need to be approved by the Chinese government, which introduced new regulations in late August on the export of artificial intelligence technologies such as speech and text recognition, and those that analyze data to make content recommendations. customized, among other technologies.

Last week, TikTok filed a petition in a U.S. appeals court calling for a review of the actions of the Trump administration, claiming that its request for an extension of the November 12 deadline had fallen on the ears of a deaf. TikTok said it had not received “any substantive feedback” from the government in the nearly two months since it submitted its TikTok Global proposal, and that it had not received any communication from the Committee on the foreign investment in the United States (CFIUS) for weeks. As the November 12 deadline approached, he asked the appeals court to overturn the order.

On Friday, November 13, TikTok told a federal judge that the U.S. government had granted the company’s request for an extension.

He now has until November 27 to get approval for his draft deal.

TikTok had no comment on this story.

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