Can Donald Trump circumvent a TikTok ban?
Gus Hurwitz, director of law and economics at ICLE, offered perspective in this The Guardian story on President Trump’s legal authority surrounding a U.S. ban on TikTok. Read the full story here.
The way the TikTok ban works is that rather than targeting TikTok or ByteDance, it will punish the companies that distribute and host the app. That means Google and Apple could see billion-dollar fines if they continue to offer TikTok in their app stores. But, legal scholars say, Trump could indicate he won’t go after them either.
“Big tech companies could say: ‘Trump has told us he wants TikTok, and we want to be in good with the president,’” said Gus Hurwitz, an academic director at the University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School. He said the companies could continue to allow downloads of TikTok and trust the justice department won’t sue them.
Hurwitz said this could get tricky, however, because the president could just as easily change his mind. This whole situation “isn’t about the law”, he said. “This is about political judgments and business judgments that the companies are going to be making.”