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WASHINGTON: An American judge in Washington late on Sunday (September 27) temporarily blocked an order from the Trump administration prohibiting Apple and Google from offering the Chinese-owned short video sharing app TikTok for download at 11:59 p.m. Sunday. , local time.
Federal District Judge Carl Nichols, nominated by President Donald Trump, who joined the court last year, said in a short order that he was issuing a preliminary injunction to prevent the TikTok app store ban from entering. validity.
Nichols refused “at this time” to block other Commerce Department restrictions that go into effect on November 12 and that TikTok warned would have the impact of rendering the app unusable in the United States.
Nichols’ detailed written opinion is expected to be released Monday.
John E Hall, a lawyer for TikTok, had argued during a 90-minute hearing Sunday morning that the ban was “unprecedented” and “irrational.”
“How does it make sense to enforce this app store ban tonight when there are ongoing negotiations that could make it unnecessary?” Hall asked during the hearing.
“This is just punitive. This is just a blunt way of hitting the company … There is simply no urgency here.”
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US officials have raised national security concerns that personal data collected about 100 million Americans using the app may be obtained by the government of the Communist Party of China.
ByteDance said on Sept. 20 that it made a preliminary agreement for Walmart and Oracle to take stakes in a new company, TikTok Global, which would oversee operations in the United States. Negotiations continue on the terms of the agreement and to resolve the concerns of Washington and Beijing.
The agreement has yet to be reviewed by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS) of the US government.
The Justice Department said that a preliminary injunction allowing Americans to continue downloading the TikTok app would be “interfering with a formal national security judgment of the president; altering the landscape regarding the ongoing CFIUS negotiations; and continuing to allow sensitive and valuable user information flows to ByteDance regarding all new users. “
On September 19, the Commerce Department delayed the ban to give companies an extra week to finalize a deal.
TikTok argues that the restrictions, amid mounting tensions between the United States and China under the Trump administration, “were not motivated by genuine national security concerns, but rather by political considerations related to the upcoming general election.”
Another US judge in Pennsylvania on Saturday rejected an offer from three TikTok content creators to block the ban, while a California judge has blocked a similar order from taking effect on Tencent Holdings’ WeChat app.
