TikTok Deal Could Be signed In The “Coming Days”
The White House says American companies will now control TikTok’s algorithm in the U.S. Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt spoke on Fox News Saturday and said Chinese company ByteDance will get one of the seven board seats for TikTok’s U.S. operations, and Americans will hold the remaining seats. Congress had voted to ban the video-sharing app for national security reasons unless it sold its U.S. operations. Leavitt said U.S. ownership will be led by tech giant Oracle, and that a deal could be signed “in the coming days.” Leavitt’s comments come after President Donald Trump on Friday said he and China’s leader Xi Jinping had “a very productive call” and made progress to finalize a deal that would sell most of TikTok’s US assets to American investors.
In April 2024, Congress passed a bill that banned the popular social media app, with the caveat that TikTok could continue US operations if it sold about 80% of its assets to American investors. TikTok briefly went dark in the United States on January 18, the day before the Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act went into effect and two days before Trump took office.There has been no comment from China.
US Government Gets 2nd Attempt to Break Up Google
The U.S. government is getting another shot at convincing a federal judge to break up Google. Lawyers for Google and the Justice Department will return to a federal courthouse in Alexandria, Virginia on Monday for a roughly two-week trial on how to restore competition to the advertising technology markets. This comes weeks after a DC District Court judge issued a historic ruling deeming Google a monopoly in online search. Despite the ruling the judge denied a requested sale of Google’s Chrome browser and allowed the company to keep paying for prime distribution on browsers and phones
