‘ByteDance probably misses deadline for proposal about selling TikTok’

Chinese company ByteDance is likely to miss next Tuesday’s deadline to submit a proposal to the United States government to sell TikTok’s American arm. President Donald Trump’s administration has said there will be no delay.

ByteDance is negotiating with Oracle and Microsoft, claims financial news agency Bloomberg. Those negotiations are still ongoing, despite the Chinese government instituting new rules. They prescribe that Chinese companies need permission to export algorithms for personalizing content, among other things. TikTok’s algorithm is one of them.

If ByteDance misses the deadline, the Trump administration would like to ban TikTok starting next Sunday, September 20. If that happens, Apple and Google should pull the app from their US download stores. The app will probably continue to work for existing users, but such details are not yet known.

The Trump administration wants ByteDance to sell TikTok’s US operations to a US company. Government body CFIUS was already negotiating with ByteDance and is less strict. CFIUS’s deadline expires in November and, according to CFIUS, sales may not be necessary.

President Trump announced on August 14 that TikTok had 90 days left to sell or spin-off its US division. The US government may be concerned about the possibility of user data being passed on to the Chinese government. However, the order could also be motivated by the trade war in which the two countries are involved. TikTok has already been banned in India.