| TikTok is back online — sort of. But also it’s still banned. Huh? You probably have some questions about this whole thing with TikTok. I (sort of) have answers. Wait, there’s still a ban on TikTok? Yup. The law banning TikTok is in effect. So why can I use TikTok right now? On his first day in office Monday, President Donald Trump issued an order telling the Justice Department not to enforce the TikTok law for at least 75 days. Trump’s order also tried to assure TikTok’s technology service providers, including Oracle, Apple and Google, that they’re off the hook for legal liability. Under the TikTok law, they could face fines of hundreds of billions of dollars — that’s not a typo — for helping a banned TikTok. Some companies, even before Trump was inaugurated, seem to have decided that Trump’s assurances were enough to reduce their legal risk, said Glenn Gerstell, a former top lawyer at the National Security Agency and a senior adviser at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a policy research organization. On Saturday night, before the ban was in effect, TikTok went dark for U.S. users — but it was mostly restored after about 14 hours. Apple and Google, however, have not returned TikTok to their mobile app stores as of Tuesday afternoon. If Apple and Google continue to stick to the TikTok ban, existing TikTok apps on your phone could get buggy or unsafe over time. Apple put up a post online this weekend saying it needed to comply with the law. Oracle, Apple and Google haven’t responded to requests for comment. Is it legal for the president to say, “Nah, don’t worry about that law?” “Probably, yes,” Gerstell said. (There are unanswered legal questions about a president not enforcing a law passed by Congress and ruled legal by the Supreme Court.) But companies helping keep TikTok online in the United States are still taking a legal risk, said Gerstell and Ryan Calo, a professor at the University of Washington’s law school. Calo said they could be sued by their stockholders for taking the risk of ignoring the TikTok ban, or by state attorneys general for breaking state laws. Trump (or a future president) could change his mind and try to retroactively sue companies for defying the ban. How weird is this whole thing with TikTok — on a scale of one to Insane Clown Posse? “It’s by far the weirdest internet law issue I’ve ever seen,” Calo said. Isn’t that an exaggeration? I need you to understand how bonkers this is, legally, politically and financially. Starting in 2020, TikTok slipped past repeated threats of banishment. (Trump tried to ban TikTok. So did Montana.) If we use the meme of Lucy yanking the football away from a hapless Charlie Brown, TikTok was Lucy. Every elected official in the United States was Charlie Brown. Inexplicably, though, all the suspicion about TikTok and China crystallized last year into a magic potion that overcame Congress’s penchant for inaction. In April, a law passed to ban TikTok unless it was sold to a non-Chinese owner within months. A sale was extremely unlikely. By last week’s deadline, no concrete deal was happening and the Supreme Court cleared the way for a nationwide ban. But President Joe Biden, who signed the TikTok law, didn’t want anything to do with a ban. Neither does Trump. So here we are. We banned an internet site! In the United States! That’s a new one. But few people in power want the ban to actually ban TikTok. Is it possible that TikTok might still disappear for real? Sure. The only certainty about TikTok is uncertainty. Could TikTok be sold instead? Trump told reporters Monday that he wants to see TikTok sold off to keep the app alive for good, though he was fuzzy on details. China’s government, which would have to approve a sale of TikTok, signaled in recent days that it no longer absolutely hates the idea, according to the Wall Street Journal. That’s new. It’s worth mentioning that Trump oversaw a deal in 2020 that wasn’t quite a sale of TikTok out of Chinese ownership but was apparently close enough. The deal never happened. Is any Chinese tech company safe from the ban hammer? America’s suspicions of China, and particularly of Chinese technology, might mean no Chinese technology is assured of survival in the United States. Supreme Court justices this month quizzed lawyers about the risks of vast data collected by Chinese-origin internet companies other than TikTok, including e-commerce app Temu. Officials have also worried about the national security threats of cars with software or other parts from China, popular WiFi routers and drones, port cranes with Chinese software and even Chinese-grown garlic. American internet companies are mostly banned in China, and they’re fine. Maybe TikTok and other globe-trotting Chinese technology companies could thrive without America, too. “They’ve written off the U.S.,” Samm Sacks, a Chinese technology policy specialist with the New America think tank, said about some Chinese tech stars. China’s Xiaomi, the world’s third-largest smartphone maker, and electric vehicle powerhouse BYD have focused on the rest of the world outside the United States. The United States is probably the largest market for Temu but “just barely,” said Juozas Kaziukenas, founder of the e-commerce research firm Marketplace Pulse. Xiaomi, BYD and Temu didn’t respond to requests for comment. | 
