President-elect Donald J. Trump seems to be contemplating an executive order to permit TikTok to continue operating in the United States despite an impending legal ban until a new owner is found, according to a source privy to the matter. The potential executive order, reported earlier by The Washington Post, is under consideration as TikTok faces a deadline on Sunday to be banned in the United States unless it finds a new owner. The popular video-sharing app is owned by ByteDance, a Chinese company. Republicans have long seen the app, which has been downloaded onto millions of smartphones, as a national security threat. It has become a rare issue that has brought both parties in Congress together. If the Supreme Court upholds the law that will ban the app unless ByteDance sells it to a non-Chinese company, special treatment from Mr. Trump might be the only way for TikTok to continue operating in the United States in the near term. The law requires app store operators such as Apple and Google and cloud computing providers to cease distributing TikTok in the United States. An executive order might attempt to direct the government not to enforce the law or to delay enforcement to complete a deal, a tactic that past presidents have employed to challenge legislation. It remains unclear whether such an executive order would withstand legal scrutiny or persuade app stores and cloud computing companies to take steps that could expose them to substantial penalties. Alan Z. Rozenshtein, a former national security advisor to the Justice Department and a professor at the University of Minnesota Law School, suggested that such an executive order should be ‘received with a grain of salt.’ Such an order is not a law, he said, and legally would not alter the legislation passed by Congress and signed by President Biden. While some speculation suggests that the app may still function if it has already been downloaded, the law also affects internet hosting companies like Oracle and other cloud computing providers, and it is uncertain how the video loading times and functionality of the app may be affected.
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