Any TikTok Deal Must Separate It from China

National Review Online

Thursday, September 18, 2025

 

Here we go again.

 

As we wrote in January, April, and August, the Trump administration is obligated by law to ban ByteDance from operating TikTok in the United States unless President Trump grants the company a one-time, 90-day extension if there is “significant” progress toward a sale and “there are in place the relevant binding legal agreements to enable execution of such qualified divestiture” during the extension period. Trump is well beyond the 90 days he was permitted by the law — which passed Congress on a bipartisan basis and was unanimously upheld by the Supreme Court — and he keeps extending it without complying with its conditions.

 

There has never been significant progress toward a sale when previous extensions were granted. There has never been a binding legal agreement. In the meantime, all of the national security threats posed by China’s operating the company are allowed to flourish, including the platform’s promotion of content aimed at dividing us into politically warring camps that are apt to start shooting at political figures.

 

Now, a deal may finally be near — but what sort of deal? Trump said on Tuesday, “We’ve got a deal on TikTok. I’ve reached a deal with China. I’m going to speak to President Xi on Friday to confirm everything.” The Wall Street Journal reports that a deal is being negotiated by which “TikTok’s U.S. business would be controlled by an investor consortium including Oracle, Silver Lake and Andreessen Horowitz,” which “would create a new U.S. entity to operate the app,” with “an American-dominated board with one member designated by the U.S. government” and “U.S. investors holding a roughly 80% stake and Chinese shareholders owning the rest.” Under this framework, TikTok would be relocated to a new app, but with “content-recommendation algorithms for the app, using technology licensed from TikTok’s parent ByteDance.”

 

The devil is in the details, but there is plenty of devilry to suspect here. Would the algorithm, once licensed, be exclusively controlled and modified from the United States — as the law requires? Would the new U.S. entity be barred from sending user data back to China? ByteDance took the position, in challenging the law, that the algorithm simply cannot work unless it is continually given feedback from American user data, and that this function cannot be relocated out of China. If so, then this deal is a sham. If not, then the law should have been enforced months ago. American investors, the American board, and other American personnel should face grave consequences if they circumvent those mandates.

 

If the deal goes through, Congress should carefully investigate its compliance with the law. And if it doesn’t, Congress should demand that the president finally shut down TikTok.