TikTok’s Chinese parent company has asked a U.S. appeals court for additional time to work out a potential divestiture of the popular video-sharing app, citing a lack of communication from the Trump administration with a Thursday deadline looming.
The petition, filed by ByteDance Ltd. late Tuesday in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, said the U.S. government’s decision to force a TikTok deal was “arbitrary and capricious” and denied the company due process under the law. The company said that it had been in extensive discussions with the Committee on Foreign Investment in the U.S. to address its concerns but that feedback had essentially stopped in recent weeks.
The U.S. has argued that it is trying to prevent data on U.S. TikTok users from being shared with China’s authoritarian government, which TikTok says it would never do.
President Trump issued an executive order in August stating that TikTok must be sold to an American company or it would be banned in the U.S.
Under a preliminary deal that Mr. Trump approved in concept in September, Oracle Corp. and Walmart Inc. would take a combined 20% stake in TikTok Global, a new U.S.-based company that would run the global service. Among the major sticking points in the continuing negotiations is the size of the stake that ByteDance would get to keep in TikTok, according to people familiar with the matter.
