[ad_1]
Washington, however, leaves a door open to TikTok, very popular with young people to share short videos, before completely banning it from operating in its territory.
“President [Donald Trump] leaves until November 12 to resolve national security issues raised by TikTok. The bans could be lifted if necessary, “said the Commerce Department.
As for WeChat, an official from that same agency said that “Will be closed” in the country as of midnight on Monday.
The announcement comes as negotiations with Chinese parent company ByteDance to sell its activities on US soil to a local group are stalled.
“The Communist Party of China You have shown that you have the means and the intention to use these applications to threaten national security, foreign policy and the economy of the United States “, argued the US department in a statement.
“On TikTok, the only real change from Sunday night will be that you will not have access to application improvements, updates or maintenance“Explained Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross on Fox Business.
This means that soon users will have to deal with an application with a poor service, which could make her a lot less attractive.
Nowadays, TikTok is hugely popular with teens and has around 100 million users only in the United States and about 1,000 million worldwide.
Technological domain
Ross assured that “the basic TikTok will remain intact until November 12”, but if there is no agreement before that date, the application “will be closed”.
U.S thus fulfills the threat made by Trump against these two Chinese applications, in a context of great tensions between the two economic giants.
At the beginning of August, the president had already imposed an ultimatum on TikTok, which he accuses of industrial espionage by Beijing without publicly showing tangible evidence.
Trump gave his parent company, ByteDance, until September 20, that is, Sunday, to sell its TikTok activities on US soil to a company “made in the USA”.
But two days before the deadline, the negotiations have yet to bear fruit.
A first project involving Microsoft and the distribution giant Walmart was rejected by the Chinese company last weekend.
On Monday, US Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin formalized the name of a potential new partner, Oracle, based in California.
Some media mention a minority stake (up to 20%, according to CNBC) by Oracle, specializing in software and services for companies. ByteDance would retain a majority stake.
The supermarket giant Walmart also made it known that it intends to participate in the new project.
A national security committee of the United States government is tasked with examining Oracle’s offering, after Republican lawmakers warned about giving the green light to a deal that would continue to leave the company under Chinese control.
In the background of the TikTok issue, there is the battle for technological dominance that is being fought between the United States and China.
Some experts point to the difficulty of finding an agreement that can simultaneously satisfy the interests of the two major world powers.
Dispelling both countries’ concerns about the security, algorithms, and other key technologies used by TikTok seems like a tough task to accomplish.
“Although the threats posed by WeChat and TikTok are not identical, they are similar. Each collects significant amounts of user data, ”the Commerce Department noted.
The WeChat platform, which belongs to the Chinese giant Tencent, is ubiquitous in the lives of Chinese people for messaging, remote payments and reservations, among other uses.
[ad_2]
