
Two US lawmakers, including Raja Krishnamoorthi, an Indian-American, are pushing for Google and Apple to remove TikTok from their app stores before a possible ban takes effect on January 19. This demand comes after growing concerns over national security risks linked to TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, which is based in China.
Earlier this year, in April, President Joe Biden signed a law requiring ByteDance to sell TikTok by January 19, 2025, or the app will face a full ban in the US.
To make sure the law is followed, John Moolenaar, the chair of the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party, and Krishnamoorthi sent letters to Tim Cook (Apple’s CEO), Sundar Pichai (Google’s CEO), and Shou Chew (TikTok’s CEO) on Friday.
The letters urged Apple and Google to start preparing to remove TikTok from their app stores by the January deadline. They also asked TikTok’s CEO to act quickly and sell the app as required by the law.
This comes after a court ruling that supported a law called the “Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act.”
This law prevents apps controlled by foreign governments, like TikTok, from being updated or distributed in the US unless they are sold or divested from their foreign owners.
In their letters, Moolenaar and Krishnamoorthi reminded the tech companies that Congress gave TikTok plenty of time—over 200 days—to sell the app and meet the law’s requirements.
They emphasized that if TikTok doesn’t sell the app by the deadline, it will be illegal for Google and Apple to keep the app available in their stores or offer updates for it.
As the deadline of January 19 draws nearer, the fate of TikTok in the US is uncertain, leaving millions of American users unsure about what will happen to the app.