The TikTok deal raises more questions than answers

After months of delays, President Donald Trump signed an executive decree which is supposed to “save” Tiktok. Trump says the agreement will make the application “operated by the United States”, carrying out the divestment or bank law that threatened the presence of the application belonging to China in the United States. But the Trump administration has not revealed any information on who will have Tiktok American operations, or how much they will have. And questions remain on the question of whether the new agreement – and the measures taken to get there – is even legal.

“The tiktok saga was the clearest articulation, the most alive example of the anarchy of this administration, of its imperial conception of itself as above the rule of law,” explains Alan Rozenshtein, professor of law at the University of the Faculty of Law of Minnesota, Alan The penis. During an interview, Rozenshtein questions the repeated extensions of Trump who postponed the application of the law on the prohibition of Tiktok.

“The president claimed to extend the deadlines he did not have the power to extend,” said Rozenshtein. “What he actually did was not to do his job and to give himself strange 90 -day delay to redo his work.”

Since the law prohibiting Tiktok has briefly entered into force in January, Trump has pushed its application over four times, the most recent deadline giving Tiktok until December 16 to conclude an agreement with American companies. Some maintain that repeated delays violate the “Take Care” clause of the American Constitution, which stipulates that the president “will take care that the laws are faithfully executed”. Instead of applying the law, whether or not, Trump has spent months kicking the box.

The uncertainty surrounding the legal status of Tiktok has put companies like Google, Apple and Oracle in a strange position, because it is technically illegal for them to continue to distribute Tiktok in their application stores and to host the application on their servers. “The largest American companies have accepted this, knowing very well that it was illegal,” explains Rozenshtein.

He adds that these companies submit to a “brutal blackmail” by the Trump administration. The Ministry of Justice, under Trump or a future administration, could potentially continue businesses for violating the ban, even if the agency reassured them in writing that they would not be responsible for bringing Tiktok online.

Rozenshtein does not think it is realistic for a future administration to take measures against Apple, Google or Oracle, which, according to him, played a role in their decision to follow Trump’s continuous extensions. “I suspect it was the calculation, which may have been – predictable – the right calculation, but terrible for the rule of law.”

We still do not know which companies will take control of Tiktok American operations, but a CNBC report suggests that Oracle, Silver Lake and the MGX based in Abu Dhabi will control around 45% of Tiktok in the United States, while Bydance investors get 35%. Neither China nor Bytedance have publicly drawn up an agreement, although Trump said that Chinese President Xi Jinping had “shot” to continue.

The requirements presented in the decree are also muddy. As Rozenshtein pointed out, he indicates that the new owners of Tiktok will take control of the code, algorithms and moderation decisions of the application, while suggesting that there will be “intense monitoring of software, algorithms and data flows” by American security partners. “Intense surveillance” does not have exactly sense if Bytedance no longer controls Tiktok algorithm.

However, it will probably take some time until everything is finalized. On Thursday, a White House official said that Trump would probably reject the 120 -day application deadline to pay for documents and regulatory approvals, according to CNN. Until then, Trump – and companies distributing the Tiktok application – will remain on fragile legal ground. “The national security threat comes from the inside of the house these days, much more than it comes from China,” said Rozenshtein.

Congress has declared Tiktok for more than a year a threat to national security, and few things came out. There was no significant modification of the application, apart from the most a billion dollars he spent to transport US user data to servers based in the United States (which occurred Before The law has even entered into force). Now, everything we have left is an agreement that may not even satisfy the divestment or bank law, as well as a whole new contempt for having followed the law.