(CNN Enterprise)TikTok’s deadline to finalize a US purchaser has been prolonged for the second time in lower than a month.
The Trump administration on Wednesday gave the short-form video app’s Chinese language proprietor, ByteDance, till December 4 to conclude a proposed takeover deal by Oracle and Walmart, in accordance with a spokesperson for the Treasury division.
“The Committee on Overseas Funding in the USA (CFIUS) has granted ByteDance a one-week extension…to permit time to evaluation a revised submission that the Committee just lately acquired,” the spokesperson stated.
In an executive order this summer time, Trump set November 12 because the exhausting deadline for ByteDance to divest TikTok, which has greater than 100 million customers in the USA. However because the deadline got here and went, confusion reigned over what penalties may be in retailer for TikTok. Trump’s government order didn’t say that TikTok can be banned if it missed the deadline; in truth, it outlines no penalties in any respect.
Earlier this month, the US authorities quietly extended that deadline by two weeks to this Friday, November 27, and has now kicked the can additional down the highway.
TikTok didn’t instantly reply to a request for remark.
Trump has labeled TikTok a danger to national security — a declare the corporate has denied and cybersecurity experts doubt — he issued another executive order in August that will have made it unlawful to have any enterprise dealings with the corporate.
The US Commerce Division tried to implement that order by attempting to ban downloads of the app in September. The company additionally stated that by mid-November, web firms can be banned from carrying TikTok’s visitors.
Each of these measures have been quickly blocked by federal judges after TikTok and TikTok content material creators sued in separate circumstances to stop them from going into impact.
ByteDance’s proposed resolution to the order, the cope with Walmart and Oracle, would see TikTok reorganized as a brand new, international firm headquartered in the USA, with US traders accounting for a majority of the brand new firm’s possession.
Trump tentatively approved that deal in September when it was introduced. However the association has but to be finalized by the US authorities. (It could additionally nonetheless must be greenlit by Chinese language regulators.)
For now, till subsequent Friday, TikTok customers will nonetheless be capable of entry the app whereas the Trump administration’s ban stays suspended resulting from litigation.
CNN’s Vivian Salama, Sherisse Pham and Brian Fung contributed to this report.
