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Business|TikTok Asks Court to Temporarily Freeze Sale-or-Ban Law
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/09/business/tiktok-temporary-pause-ban-supreme-court-trump.html
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The company is requesting a pause on a law that requires the app to be sold or face a ban in the United States by mid-January, aiming to buy time for the Supreme Court or the incoming Trump administration to rescue it.
Dec. 9, 2024Updated 2:59 p.m. ET
TikTok asked a federal court on Monday to temporarily freeze a law that requires its Chinese parent company to sell the app or face a ban in the United States, as it looked to the Supreme Court and the incoming Trump administration to rescue it.
The company and a group of its users suffered a blow on Friday, when judges in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit unanimously denied their petitions to overturn the law. TikTok asked the same court on Monday to temporarily block the law until the Supreme Court decided TikTok’s planned appeal of that decision.
It isn’t clear whether the Supreme Court will agree to hear the case, though experts say it is likely.
TikTok, which is owned by the Chinese company ByteDance, is facing new peril under the law that, citing national security concerns, calls on ByteDance to sell the app or face a ban on Jan. 19. TikTok, which boasts 170 million users in the United States, has said that a sale is impossible in part because of restrictions from the Chinese government and that a subsequent ban would violate the First Amendment rights of users.
TikTok also suggested in its filing that the temporary freeze would give President-elect Donald J. Trump more time to try to rescue the app, as he has pledged to do. Right now, the ban would take effect a day before his inauguration. TikTok has asked the court to decide on the freeze by Dec. 16.
The government has already pushed back on TikTok’s emergency request for the freeze, called an injunction. Lawyers for the Department of Justice said in a filing on Monday that the court should deny the request, and allow TikTok and its users to directly ask the Supreme Court for the injunction.
