After almost four years of debating a law that would force ByteDance, the Chinese company that owns TikTok, to sell the app or be banned in the US, Congress finally passed legislation that does exactly that (I’ve written for CJR a number of times over the years about the back-and-forth in Washington regarding a TikTok ban, including here and here and here.) So what happens now? Before ByteDance either sells TikTok or is banned, there are a number of hurdles, roadblocks, and potential landmines that stand in the way—including the Chinese government, which has made it clear that it will not allow ByteDance to relinquish control of TikTok without a fight.
Just a few weeks ago, a sale-or-ban law looked to be doomed. The House of Representatives voted overwhelmingly in favor of one version of the law on March 13, but then it seemed to lose momentum in the Senate. Some senators said they supported the ban, but Maria Cantwell—a Democrat who chairs the Senate Commerce Committee—seemed skeptical of the law, saying she wasn’t sure that it could withstand a legal challenge. She also criticized the House bill for only giving ByteDance six months to find a buyer or face a ban, but when the House introduced a new version of the TikTok bill that increased the length of time that ByteDance had to find a buyer to as long as a year, Cantwell and others changed their minds and voted in favor.
Washington sources believe that ByteDance made a “series of miscalculations” in its attempts to forestall the passage of such a law. They told the Wall Street Journal that Shou Zi Chew, TikTok’s CEO, failed to build support on Capitol Hill, and instead relied on negotiations with the Committee on Foreign Investment in the U.S. over “a complex restructuring that never panned out.” Chew testified before Congress and ByteDance felt that he did well, and the company got support from the Club for Growth, a group backed by Jeff Yass, a major TikTok shareholder. But despite these successes, the Journal wrote, opinion on Capitol Hill was “already shifting against” the company.
Note: This was originally published as the daily email newsletter for the Columbia Journalism Review, where I am the chief digital writer
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