TikTok Ban

Universal Music, the biggest record label in the world and the label for some of the most well-known artists in the world like Rihanna, Jay-Z, Lady Gaga and Billie Eilish, has pulled all of its songs from the TikTok rival video-sharing app, Triller.

The company said that Triller has "shamefully withheld payments owed to our artists" and that it refused to negotiate a license to use music legitimately.

Triller - which gained a huge following last year when under Donald Trump, the US threatened to ban TikTok - has been accused by Universal Music of "shamefully withholding payments owed to our artists and refuses to negotiate a licence going forward."

Universal Music continued "We have no alternative except to remove our music from Triller, effective immediately."

Federal Judge Carl Nichols has decided that the U.S. Department of Commerce has no sufficient legal basis for prohibiting ByteDance, the Chinese parent company of TikTok, from holding infrastructure and data for the operation of the social media application in the United States.

The Trump administration used as a basis for its action a 1977 law granting the U.S. president broad emergency powers in the event of extraordinary dangers from abroad. However, this provision expressly prohibits the president from restricting the import and export of information or information material or personal communications. TikTok clearly falls into this category, Judge Nichols now stressed.

TikTok will now have two more weeks, until Nov. 27, to reach an agreement with Oracle and Walmart and persuade the U.S. government to approve the proposed deal, a court filing on Friday showed. The company said on Tuesday that it requested an extension of 30 days to complete the sale but had not heard from the government for weeks.

Last October, the Committee on Foreign Investment in the U.S., which investigates the national security risks of certain business deals, began examining ByteDance's 2017 acquisition of Musical.ly, a Chinese-owned lip-syncing app that became a hit among teens in the U.S. and would be relaunched as TikTok. The review came at the urging of Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., who wrote a letter to Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin raising fears about political censorship and the possibility that the Chinese Communist Party could use the app to advance its foreign policy agenda.

TikTok has filed a petition in a US Court of Appeals calling for a review of actions by the Trump administration’s Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFUIS). The reason, according to the company, is that it hasn’t heard from the committee in weeks about an imminent deadline for parent company ByteDance to sell off US assets over national security concerns.

The Pakistani government decided to lift the ban on TikTok after the Chinese company agreed to moderate content and block all accounts involved in spreading "obscenity and immorality".

The spokesman for the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA) announced on Monday: "TikTok has agreed to moderate accounts in accordance with local laws."

TikTok was the third-most-popular app in the country over the past 12 months, just behind WhatsApp and Facebook, with some 20 million monthly accounts users.

Pakistan officials announced Friday a ban on TikTok after receiving complaints of "immoral and indecent" content on the popular video-sharing app.

In a press release, the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority stated that given a "number of complaints from different segments of the society against immoral/indecent content on the video sharing application TikTok, Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA) has issued instructions for blocking of the application."

Reuters quotes an official involved in the decision: "We have been asking them repeatedly to put in place an effective mechanism for blocking immoral and indecent content."

The U.S. Commerce Department on Saturday announced a one-week delay until September 27 on order to remove TikTok app from mobile application stores owned by Apple and Google. The decision came after President Trump has given tentative approval to an Oracle-Wallmart deal that will keep TikTok alive in the country.

Trump said, on Saturday, that "I have given the deal my blessing, I approve the deal in concept."

TikTok and its parent company, ByteDance, have filed a complaint in Washington federal court on Friday night, asking a judge to block the Trump administration's executive order that would block Chinese social-media networks, especially TikTok and WeChat, to do business with U.S. companies.

TikTok, which has over 100 million users in the United States, said the ban would "irreversibly destroy the TikTok business in the U.S."

Chinese-owned mobile apps TikTok and WeChat will be banned from all U.S. app stores, so the Trump administration on Friday. The ban, which will take effect on Sunday, will affect over 100 million people in the U.S. who are using the apps. The executive order prohibits any distribution or maintenance of TikTok and WeChat.

Further it will be illegal to host or transfer internet traffic associated with WeChat on Sunday and with TikTok on November 12. This means that WeChat will be shut down in the U.S. as of midnight Monday while TikTok will still function but can't be updated.

"As to TikTok, the only real change as of Sunday night will be users won’t have access to improved updated apps, upgraded apps or maintenance," so Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross. "Today's actions prove once again that President Trump will do everything in his power to guarantee our national security and protect Americans from the threats of the Chinese Communist Party."

TikTok has declined to comment, so the New York Times. Oracle hasn't responded yet.

A revised term sheet by the United States Secretary of the Treasury Steven Mnuchi has been accepted by Oracle and the TikTok owner Bytedance.

The approval of the United States and the Chinese governments are for the deal are still pending.

Oracle has confirmed that it has made a deal with ByteDance over a TikTok partnership, the company announced on Monday.

"Oracle confirms Secretary Mnuchin’s statement that it is part of the proposal submitted by ByteDance to the Treasury Department over the weekend in which Oracle will serve as the trusted technology provider," so Oracle in a statement.

"I will just say from our standpoint, we’ll need to make sure that the code is, one, secure, Americans’ data is secure, that the phones are secure and we’ll be looking to have discussions with Oracle over the next few days with our technical teams," so Secretary Steven Mnuchin, who said that the government is planning to review the deal this week.

ByteDance has decided to partner with Oracle on TikTok's U.S. operations instead of selling the U.S. arm. According to Reuters, the partnership is supposed to help navigate "geopolitical tensions between Beijing and Washington, people familiar with the matter said."

With Microsoft announcing that the U.S. operations of TikTok won't be sold to the technology company, rumours have broken out that Oracle will be the winner of the bid for the TikTok U.S. operations.

The Chinese state broadcaster CGTN has now reported that the TikTok owner ByteDance will sell its U.S. operations to neither Microsoft nor Oracle. ByteDance themselves refused to comment.

Bytedance has decided to not sell TikTok's U.S. operations to Microsoft.

"ByteDance let us know today they would not be selling TikTok’s US operations to Microsoft. We are confident our proposal would have been good for TikTok’s users while protecting national security interests," so Microsoft in a statement on Sunday.

TikTok's CEO Kevin Mayer has resigned, less than four months after joining the company. His resignation comes after the video app has been put under pressure by the Trump administration over its ties to China.

TikTok sued the U.S. government Monday in response to what it said is a "heavily politicised" executive order signed by President Donald Trump that seeks to ban the video-app from operating in the country.

The suit, filed in the Federal District Court for the Central District of California, is the most direct challenge by TikTok to the Trump administration.

In a blog post, TikTok states "The key personnel responsible for TikTok, including its CEO, Global Chief Security Officer, and General Counsel, are all Americans based in the United States—and therefore are not subject to Chinese law. U.S. content moderation is likewise led by a U.S.-based team and operates independently from China, and, as noted above, the TikTok application stores U.S. user data on servers located in the United States and Singapore."

A coalition of WeChat users in the US launched a legal challenge to the Trump administration, questioning its ban on the popular Chinese messaging app. The users claim the ban violates their constitutional rights and that the app became an essential digital service for millions of Chinese-Americans.

President Trump signed two executive orders, effective September 20, banning US transactions with WeChat, the app owned by Tencent Holdings, and ByteDance, the owner of the video app TikTok.

The US WeChat Users Alliance, the lead plaintiff in the lawsuit, claimed that the ban had been "issued in the midst of the 2020 election cycle, during a time when President Trump has made numerous anti-Chinese statements that have contributed to and incited racial animus against persons of Chinese descent — all outside of the national security context".

The United States President Donald Trump stated tech giant Oracle would be "a great company" to take over TikTok's US operations.

The President reaction comes days after media reported that Oracle would be a possible buyer of the TikTok in North America, Australia and New Zealand.

Trump ordered TikTok's owner ByteDance to sell their US business within 90 days or face being shut down by the government.

The Wall Street Journal reports that Oracle is working with Sequoia Capital and General Atlantic, investors that already have stakes in ByteDance.

The video-sharing app hugely popular with the smartphone generation will file the federal lawsuit as soon as Tuesday, according to a person who was directly involved in the forthcoming suit but was not authorized to speak for the company.

It also alleges that the administration's national security justification for the order is baseless, according to the source.

The president of the United States Donald Trump has followed through with his announcement to make a move against the social media application TikTok with the help of an executive order. In the signed executive order, Trump outlaws all transactions between ByteDance, which is the parent company of TikTok, and citizens of the United States. The reason for that are national security concerns according to Trump.

The outlined transaction ban in the executive order will become effective in 45 days and most likely prevent the application from being downloaded or updated.