The U.S. government is going back to court, seeking an appeal of recent judicial decision to restrict the administration’s move toward blocking the use of the Tik-Tok platform in the United States.
We’ve been hearing about this for months as the U.S. Department of Commerce, under the president’s direction, tries to blacklist Tik-Tok for reasons ostensibly related to national security.
A December 7 ruling found this activity to be “arbitrary and capricious,” but now a new U.S. Attorney General, Jeffrey Rosen, is pushing the appeals process.
To many outside observers, the process does seem to be both arbitrary and capricious. The U.S. administration has argued that Tik-Tok could be used by the Chinese government to spy on U.S. citizens. However, no hard and fast evidence has supported this theoretical concern.
For its part, Congress has not been an active partner in this comprehensive blacklisting, although legislators have generated bills to prevent Tik-Tok on the phones of government workers.
There’s also quite a bit of speculation of how this is going to play out when a new administration comes to power only weeks from now.
“Officials briefed on the matter told Reuters it is increasingly unlikely the government will resolve the fate of TikTok in the United States before Trump leaves office on Jan. 20,” reports David Shephardson.
With rumors that members of Biden’s extended family use the Tik-Tok platform, and the notion that many of the current administration’s more extreme activities will be reversed, it makes sense to wonder if, from the end of January onward, the U.S. government will still be trying to ban Tik-Tok.
The greater context includes similar blacklisting efforts for Chinese firm Huawei and ongoing tariff wars between China and the U.S. In past years, China has been the dominant supply chain provider for American consumers, and it may be that a more moderate U.S. administration will return to a more symbiotic trade platform with the Chinese, putting some of these abrasive issues to rest. Investors, take note.