The Trump administration on Friday (Nov. 13) extended the deadline for China-based Byte Jumping Inc. to divest its short-video app Jitterbug’s overseas TikTok business in the U.S. by another 15 days from the original Nov. 12 deadline. WordPress had previously asked for a 30-day extension in a complaint filed with the court.
The U.S. Treasury Department said in a statement on Friday that the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS) granted a 15-day extension of the original Nov. 12, 2020, deadline to “provide interested parties and the Committee with additional time” to resolve the case in a manner consistent with President Trump’s order issued on Aug. 14.
In that order, President Trump required ByteTek and TikTok to take specific divestitures and other measures within 90 days, by Nov. 12, to address the national security risks posed by ByteTek’s acquisition of musical.ly.
Beijing-based ByteTok filed a complaint with the U.S. Federal Court of Appeals in Washington, D.C., on Tuesday, asking for a 30-day extension to enforce the order.
The company has been in talks with Walmart and Oracle to transfer TikTok’s U.S. operations to a new company.
In a filing with the court on Tuesday, BytePop said they filed a fourth proposal last Friday to consider addressing the US concerns by “creating a new entity wholly owned by Oracle, Walmart and BytePop’s existing US investors to handle TikTok’s US user data and content review”.
A federal court has blocked other Commerce Department restrictions on TikTok, including a trading restriction set to take effect Thursday that TikTok warned could effectively ban the app in the U.S. TikTok has more than 100 million U.S. users.
Separately, the U.S. Commerce Department’s ban on Apple Inc. and Alphabet Inc.’s Google from offering TikTok downloads to new users in the U.S. was supposed to take effect Sept. 27, but that ban was also blocked by the courts.
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