US Supreme court upholds TikTok ban

In an unprecedented ruling on Tik Tok ban, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the app has to be sold to an outside entity by January 19, 2025 or be banned in the United States.

This move follows TikTok's challenge of an April last year law during U.S Elections 2024, citing national security concerns over the app's ties to the Chinese government.

It may be a familiar story because, in 2020, India also removed TikTok and several other Chinese apps on similar grounds.

The US Supreme Court ruled in favour of a rule ordering TikTok’s parent, ByteDance, to sell the US app to a third party by 19 January 2025.

Many times the Biden administration has asked about TikTok’s data collection and ties to the Chinese government. Biden had signed a bipartisan TikTok bill that gave China’s parent company, ByteDance, six months to sell its majority or face US blocking. This is yet to happen.

With the removal of TikTok, Apple and Google are assumed to cease providing the app to new users and not delivering security patches to existing customers.

But things remain to unfold, as Donald Trump will become president on Monday, January 20, 2025.

President Biden announced that the Trump administration would decide what to do with TikTok. While Trump had formally endorsed the ban, on 27 December 2024, he had asked the Supreme Court to put off the imminent ban while he developed a "political solution".

The measure, passed in April last year, allows TikTok CEO ByteDance until 19 January 2025 to sell the US version of the app to a third party to avoid a blanket ban.

That would mean Apple and Google will either stop distributing the app for new users from Sunday or offer it any security patches to existing users - potentially wiping it out altogether.