Remember that Tiktok has closed and has disappeared from application stores? It was not so long. For about 12 hours on January 19, Tiktok was withdrawn from around 175 million American users to be saved by a decree decree of the presidency which extended the prohibition deadline of 75 days. Don’t worry; The White House promised that we would have a sale in place by then.
Guess what? Although Tiktok has several contenders, no American company, and certainly not the White House, bought part of the popular platform for sharing content from the social media in Bytedance.
Throughout this process, Bytedance – a Chinese company – has not yet commented on the potential of a sale to an American company. The American leadership of Tiktok and his CEO, Shou Zi Chew, have publicly congratulated President Donald Trump for his intervention, but have been mostly silent since then.
In the meantime, Tiktok has spent millions of television advertisements and infopmented segments praising Tiktok’s positive impact on American people and businesses, especially small businesses. The company is currently said that it had around 7.5 million companies on the platform. In a recent economic impact report, Tiktok says that small businesses have led $ 15 billion in revenues in 2023.
There is no doubt that Tiktok had a significant impact on American affairs and, above all, culture (remember the pivotal role he played during Covid?). However, the American climate and appetite for a last-minute backup of the social media platform may have changed since January.
After all, it was the literal dawn of President Trump’s second term. Since then, there have been dozens of decrees affecting almost all parts of American life (including technology; see this order linked to AI), and there is a chance that consumers can have more fish to fry.
Despite this, the fate of one of the most popular social media platforms in the world is at stake. Here is what we know what comes then:
I contacted the White House, Apple, Google and Tiktok on the current state of negotiations and what could happen if the prohibition does not obtain another extension. When writing these lines, only Google responded, but it was nothing new to share.
Although there has been no public indication for progress or real movements in the Tiktok sales negotiation process, we know that several contenders include:
Oracle already manages Tiktok American data, so it could be the main potential buyer.
The White House has often been mentioned as acquiring partial participation in the version belonging to the United States of the company. Here are already legal obstacles involved in an in -office who also runs a private or non -public enterprise.
The AI perplexity is the most interesting pretender. In a long blog article, the AI research company pleaded to “rebuild Tiktok in America”.
While Bytedance and the White House remain a mother on the details of the agreement or the progress, several American senators still urge the White House to extend the ban on postponement to October this year.
The White House said this week that an agreement would be concluded before the deadline of April 5, but had not yet offered details beyond the reiteration that there are “many potential buyers” and that they have “huge interest”.
What is the next step?
If the agreement does not occur by then, Tiktok could face a new ban, which could mean the deletion not only of Tiktok but all the American applications of Bytedance, including Lemon8 and the popular Capcut video editing application.
Apple and Google deleted applications, and even after the American president extended the ban, they remained unavailable in application stores for weeks.
Apple did not respond to my request for comments. As I noted above, Google told me that it was nothing new to share for the moment.
So the current state of play is that, although there is a lot of chatter of certain main actors and American commercial investors, there is nothing solid. There are not even any leaks from an agreement. All we have is Trump’s promises and especially the silence of Tiktok and Bytedance.
Which comes down to what you cannot buy something that is not for sale. Bytedance never publicly declared that it was open to a sale. In the United States, Tiktok, who publicly appreciated the extension, may not have control of the situation without the sale agreement of his parent company. Tiktok could be out of options.
With five days to do, everything could happen, but in reality, it has been almost a year since former president Joe Biden signed the bill that triggered the countdown of the prohibition.
Nothing material has changed and the time is exhausted.
