TikTok ban looms again – what's next for the social media platform, and do we still care?

Remember that time TikTok shut down and disappeared from app stores? It wasn't that long ago. For roughly 12 hours on January 19, TikTok was stripped away from roughly 175M US users only to be saved by a Presidential executive order decree that extended the ban deadline by 75 days. Don't worry; the White House promised we'll have a sale in place by then.

Guess what? While TikTok has multiple suitors, no US company, and certainly not the White House, has purchased any portion of ByteDance's popular social media content-sharing platform.

Throughout this process, ByteDance – a Chinese company – has yet to comment directly on the potential of a sale to a US firm. TikTok's US leadership and its CEO, Shou Zi Chew, have publicly praised President Donald Trump for his intervention but have been mostly silent since then.

In the meantime, TikTok has spent millions on televised ads and infomercial segments touting TikTok's positive impact on people and US businesses, specifically small businesses. The company currently says it has roughly 7.5M businesses on the platform. In a recent economic impact report, TikTok claims small businesses drove $15B in revenue in 2023.

There's no question that TikTok has had a significant impact on US business and, especially, culture (remember the pivotal role it played during COVID?). However, the US climate and appetite for a last-minute save of the social media platform may have shifted since January.

After all, that was the literal dawn of President Trump's second term. Since then, there have been dozens of Executive Orders touching almost every part of American life (including technology; see this AI-related order), and there's a chance consumers may have bigger fish to fry.

Even so, the fate of one of the world's most popular social media platforms does hang in the balance. Here's what we know about what comes next:

I did reach out to the White House, Apple, Google, and TikTok about the current state of negotiations and what might happen if the ban does not get another extension. As of this writing, only Google responded, but it had nothing new to share.

While there have been no public indications of any real progress or movement in the TikTok sale negotiation process, we do know that multiple suitors include:

• Mr Beast
• Perplexity AI
• Oracle
• A consortium that includes Shark Tank's Kevin O'Leary
• The White House

Oracle is already managing TikTok's US data, so it might be the leading prospective buyer.

The White House has often been mentioned as acquiring a partial stake in the US-owned version of the company. here are already legal hurdles involved with a sitting President also running a private or non-public-sector business.

Perplexity AI is the most interesting suitor. In a lengthy blog post, the AI search company made an impassioned case for "Rebuilding TikTok in America."

While ByteDance and the White House remain mum on deal details or progress, multiple US senators are still urging the White House to extend the ban postponement to October of this year.

The White House stated this week that a deal would be done before the April 5 deadline but has yet to offer any further details beyond reiterating that there are "lots of potential buyers" and they have "tremendous interest."

What's next?

If the deal does not happen by then, TikTok could face a new ban, and that might mean the removal not only of TikTok but all of ByteDance's US apps, including Lemon8 and the popular video-editing app CapCut.

Apple and Google removed the apps, and even after the US president extended the ban, they remained unavailable on the app stores for weeks.

Apple did not respond to my request for comment. As I noted above, Google told me it had nothing new to share at this time.

So, the current state of play is that while there's a lot of sale chatter from some major US business players and investors, there is nothing solid. There are not even leaks of a deal being close. All we have is Trump's promises and mostly silence from TikTok and ByteDance.

What this boils down to is that you can't buy something that isn't for sale. ByteDance has never publicly stated that it is open to a sale. TikTok in the US, which has publicly appreciated the extension, may not have control of the situation without a sale agreement from its parent company. TikTok might be out of options.

With five days left, anything could happen, but realistically, it's been almost a year since Former President Joe Biden signed the bill that triggered the ban countdown.

Nothing material has changed, and time is running out.

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