U.S. President Donald Trump said Thursday that he will not extend the deadline for China’s ByteDance to sell the U.S. assets of its video-sharing app TikTok. The deadline for TikTok will not be extended,” he told reporters before leaving for Michigan.
Republican Senator Josh Hawley, Trump’s close ally in Congress, also said he did not support an extension or any option other than a full sale. He said, “I’m not sure there’s a back door in the programming code, but ‘ByteTok’ certainly knows, so it has to be a clean, clear, full separation.”
Trump signed two executive orders in August, forcing ByteTok to sell or split its U.S. business before Sept. 15, otherwise U.S. individuals or entities will be banned from doing business with TikTok starting Sept. 20. TikTok filed a challenge to Trump’s “blocking order” in a U.S. court in late August.
A consortium of U.S. retail giants Wal-Mart and Microsoft, as well as technology company Oracle, had the best chance of winning TikTok, which was expected to cost about $20 billion to $30 billion. But China late last month added “personalized push message service technology based on data analysis” to the “China Technology Catalogue of Export Restrictions,” causing uncertainty in the selling price as the deal must first be approved by the Chinese government.
Bloomberg quotes that the sale of TikTok has been complicated by China’s Commerce Ministry restricting the export of push technology and other technologies, and that TikTok’s parent company ByteDance may not be able to sell its U.S. business before the deadline set by the U.S. government on the 20th of this month.
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