The United States has given TikTok an ultimatum and is pressuring Chinese social network owners ByteDance to get rid of the service or ban its use in the country. Is there a real risk to national security, as the US government says? Is it intellectual property theft, as the Chinese government has said amid a trade war?

The case of TikTok it was a summer soap opera in 2020. The success of the new phenomenon of social networks, both loud and fast, did not go unnoticed by the American administration, then led by Donald Trump. A relatively recent mobile application (late 2016) that allows users to create short music videos and share them with the world, it has become a huge success in a very short time, surpassing the number of users like other big ones like Instagram.

Trump, however, just like with Huawei, labeled it as “threat to national security” for spying on the data and delivering it to the Chinese government and demanded “American TikTok”. He even chose the company to buy it, which was none other than Microsoft. Subsequently, under the Biden administration, it was vetoed by the federal and other state governments in official establishments. An extreme that was also accepted by the European Commission and with similar arguments: “protect information and cyber attacks against the Commission’s corporate environment”.

Ultimatum for TikTok

The Wall Street Journal assures that the US administration, through a lawsuit by the Committee on Foreign Investment, demanded the sale of the company as a last notice and directly aims to carry out the sale. This would mean that ByteDance is based in Beijing will have to sell TikTok to someone outside of China or risk losing its more than 100 million users in the US and, we assume, others nearby such as Canada and possibly the European Union.

A TikTok spokesperson commented forcing the sale would not mitigate security risks perceived by the Biden administration. “If the goal is to protect national security, the divestiture will not solve the problem: a change in ownership would not impose new restrictions on data flows or access.”assures.

Instead, TikTok offers a compromise alternative 1.5 billion dollars implement a system that ByteDance says would protect the personal information of American customers and platform content from Chinese government influence and data collection. “The best way to address concerns is through transparent protections based on American standards with the robust third-party monitoring, investigation and verification we already have in place.”they say.

TikTok also migrated user data from the US to Oracle servers in the country. ByteDance had hoped the transfer would satisfy Washington’s security concerns, but it appears that was not the case. In fact, TikTok’s CEO will be questioned by a congressional committee next week. We will see how the TikTok soap opera ends, another battle in the commercial war between two giants.