TikTok: US judge halts app store ban

TikTok has avoided a government-ordered block on new downloads in the US after a judge issued a temporary injunction.The video-sharing app had faced being removed from Apple’s App Store and Android’s Google Play marketplace at midnight local time in Washington DC.Existing US-based users would have been able to have continued using it.But they would not have been able to have re-downloaded the app if they had deleted it from their phones, nor have been offered software updates.Judge Carl Nichols of the US District Court for the District of Columbia issued the injunction on Sunday evening having held a 90-minute hearing earlier in the day.The opinion was sealed, meaning that no reason for the decision was released.TikTok welcomed the intervention, and vowed to keep defending its rights.”We’re pleased that the court agreed with our legal arguments and issued an injunction preventing the implementation of the TikTok app ban,” it said in a statement.

TikTok had argued that forcing it off the iOS and Android app stores would have violated the First and Fifth Amendments of the US constitution.
It claimed that preventing some users joining the app unlawfully impinged upon their freedom of speech and that the firm’s own right to due process would have been breached by not giving it a proper opportunity to defend itself first.
“How does it make sense to impose this app store ban tonight when there are negotiations underway that might make it unnecessary?” added a member of the app’s legal team.
The US government’s lawyers in turn had described the app’s parent as being “a mouthpiece” for the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).
The ruling comes one week after another Chinese app – WeChat – that also faced a ban, was given its own last minute reprieve by the US courts.
National security
The long-term fate of TikTok in the US is still unclear. At present it is owned by a Chinese company, Bytedance, but operated as a separate entity to Douyin – a parallel version used by Chinese consumers.
The Trump administration has claimed Bytedance’s involvement poses a unacceptable national security threat, because it would have to comply with an order to support the CCP’s “malicious collection of American citizens’ personal data”.
Bytedance denies this, saying that TikTok’s user data is kept in the US and Singapore, and so is not subject to Chinese law.
Even so, after being threatened with a ban, a week ago TikTok said that it had agreed a deal to let database company Oracle and retail giant Walmart take up to a 20% stake in a new spun-off entity called TikTok Global ahead of shares in the endeavour being floated.
But President Trump subsequently said he would not accept any arrangement that did not involve Bytedance ceding control to the two US firms.
TikTok’s statement on Monday suggested negotiations over the deal were still ongoing.

“We will also maintain our ongoing dialogue with the government to turn our proposal, which the President gave his preliminary approval to last weekend, into an agreement,” it said.

To further complicate matters, Beijing has yet to announce whether it will grant Bytedance a licence to include TikTok’s algorithms in any deal.Algorithms power the app’s recommendation engine, deciding which videos to show to each user, based on the ways they have previously interacted with the product.The algorithms are highly responsive to each person’s interests, quickly picking up on shifts in behaviour, and are credited with helping make the app so popular.If China refused to let them be included in a deal, it could scupper any sell-off.