President Joe Biden has revoked Donald Trump’s Executive Orders seeking to ban ByteDance-owned TikTok and Tencent-owned WeChat in the US.
Trump issued two executive orders on August 6, 2020 banning the country’s citizens and businesses from undertaking any “transaction” with the Chinese-owned platforms and later that month he issued an order instructing ByteDance to divest its US TikTok business.
Yesterday (June 9), Biden revoked and replaced the orders with a new Executive Order that focuses on “a criteria-based decision framework and rigorous, evidence-based analysis” to address the “risks” posed by apps developed in China.
In a letter from Trump’s administration accompanying his original executive order, sent to the President Of The US Senate and Speaker Of The House, he claimed that TikTok “automatically captures vast swaths of information from its users”.
It added: “This data collection threatens to allow the Chinese Communist Party access to Americans’ personal and proprietary information — potentially allowing China to track the locations of Federal employees and contractors, build dossiers of personal information for blackmail, and conduct corporate espionage.”
The US Department of Commerce issued a statement on September 18 announcing that, from September 20, new downloads of WeChat and TikTok would be blocked on app stores in the US but that ban was delayed by a week after Walmart and Oracle received tentative approval from the US Government to strike a deal with TikTok parent ByteDance.
On September 27, the United States District Court for the District of Columbia granted a preliminary injunction against a ban on TikTok downloads from app stores in the US.
TikTok was given a deadline of November 12 to sell its US assets to an American company in order to resolve national security concerns, or face a ban from the market.
TikTok and ByteDance filed a legal petition on November 10 in Washington asking for Trump’s order to be overturned.
“This E.O. directs the use of a criteria-based decision framework and rigorous, evidence-based analysis to address the risks posed by ICTS transactions involving software applications that are designed, developed, manufactured, or supplied by persons that are owned or controlled by, or subject to the jurisdiction of a foreign adversary, including the People’s Republic of China.”
White House Statement
A release issued by The White House yesterday (June 9) about the new order stated: “President Biden revoked and replaced three E.O.s that aimed to prohibit transactions with TikTok, WeChat, and eight other communications and financial technology software applications; two of these E.O.s are subject to litigation.
“In their place, this E.O. directs the use of a criteria-based decision framework and rigorous, evidence-based analysis to address the risks posed by ICTS transactions involving software applications that are designed, developed, manufactured, or supplied by persons that are owned or controlled by, or subject to the jurisdiction of a foreign adversary, including the People’s Republic of China, that may present an undue or unacceptable risk to the national security of the United States and the American people.”Music Business Worldwide
