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On January 18, at around 10:30 p.m., TikTok went offline in the United States and remained inaccessible to users for about fourteen hours. It then came back online. The temporary outage underscores the serious consequences that TikTok and its Chinese parent company, ByteDance, have faced since Joe Biden signed a law last April requiring a partial sale of the platform to American interests or its ban in the United States. Shortly before Donald Trump’s inauguration, he began assuring TikTok and its tech partners that a ban would not be forthcoming, even though it was his first administration that initiated action against the app over its ties to the Chinese government. On January 20, Trump signed an executive order effectively extending TikTok’s ban for seventy-five days; last week, on April 4, he extended it for another seventy-five days. This second extension puts to rest any speculation that TikTok could disappear again and makes some kind of business deal to keep the service in the US almost inevitable.
ByteDance and the U.S. government were reportedly in talks on a deal that was expected to be announced last week. The deal involved U.S. database company Oracle and technology investment firms, possibly including Andreessen Horowitz and Susquehanna, the latter of which is already a ByteDance shareholder, according to the Times and other sources. The companies would have taken larger stakes in TikTok’s U.S. unit, which would have brought China’s direct ownership below the 20 percent threshold set by law in 2024. But Trump’s announcement of steep global tariffs last week, on what he called his Liberation Day, has kept the Chinese parties from completing the deal. As of Wednesday, Trump had announced a 125 percent tariff on goods imported from China, a move the Chinese government has called a “mockery.”
TikTok has become a bargaining chip in the escalating trade war. “China changed the terms of the deal because of the tariffs,” Trump told reporters aboard Air Force One on April 6. “If I had reduced the tariffs a little bit, they would have agreed to this deal in 15 minutes.” TikTok was already in limbo before last week, but now its unusual position is intensified: it is simultaneously active and inactive, allowed to exist but technically illegal. Trump, who may be benefiting from the attention of his audience during the 2024 election, can’t afford to ban the app for fear of disappointing a young, online-minded audience and damaging his reputation as a dealmaker. ByteDance, for its part, cannot be entirely under the president’s control, and it can’t easily afford to lose its sizable American user base. The company's refusal to reach any sale or investment agreement likely confirms that TikTok's technology is as invasive and susceptible to Chinese government influence as both houses of Congress once acknowledged.
Over the past few decades, leading American tech companies have served as a catalyst for globalization. Billions of people around the world began using Google, Facebook, and Apple’s iPhone, and the success of these companies seemed to reflect the dominance of the United States on the world stage. American social media played a similar role to McDonald’s or Starbucks, as the networks spread around the world and became a symbol of the expansion of American influence by the late 1990s. In his 2024 book, Machine and Sovereignty, Hong Kong philosopher Yuk Hui described technological globalization as an era in which “modern Western technology is becoming a global phenomenon and a common goal of human progress.” Now, however, governments around the world are trying to subjugate these companies, directing them to serve nationalistic political goals rather than allowing their products to circulate freely. Global tech companies are becoming assets in the fight to establish a new world order, taking shape against a backdrop of tensions in Europe, a confident China, an expanding Russia and a United States under Trump, who seems willing to sacrifice the interdependence that defined the era of free trade.
Signs of a backlash against tech globalization extend beyond the TikTok negotiations. According to the Wall Street Journal, Mark Zuckerberg appears to be pushing Trump to use tariffs to pressure the European Union to abandon its online data privacy legislation, which, under the Digital Markets Act, sets rules that hurt Meta’s ability to sell ads in the region. The concept of “sovereign AI” — the ability of a country to develop AI technology without foreign labor or infrastructure — has been popularized by chipmaker Nvidia and adopted as a goal by various governments, which are investing in building massive national data centers. As with military drones or spy satellites, each country is seeking to develop AI models that it can control. AI technology, from the consumer level on up, is becoming an increasingly nationalistic project, with products like France’s Mistral and China’s DeepSeek challenging OpenAI’s dominance. In the early days of the public AI race, OpenAI seemed to be to AI what Facebook was to social media: a single American product for everyone on the planet. Now it faces real competition.
According to Hui, the alternative
Sourse: newyorker.com
