U.S. District Judge Carl Nichols on September 27 granted a preliminary injunction against the ban on new downloads of the video-sharing network, which would have gone into effect at 11:59 p.m. in Washington. The judge declined to grant an injunction on a separate set of prohibitions scheduled for Nov. 12 that are designed to further curb the app’s use in the U.S.

Tik Tok’s owner ByteDance Ltd. requested the hold after the president ordered the app out of American stores unless the company sold a stake in its US operations to a domestic buyer. Tik Tok has been downloaded by more than 100 million Americans.

It’s the second legal ruling against the Trump administration’s efforts to crack down on popular apps with Chinese owners. Trump has called for bans on both TikTok and WeChat, owned by China’s Tencent Holdings Ltd., arguing that the apps could give China’s government access to millions of Americans’ personal data.

WeChat users won a court injunction against a ban last week. The bans are part of Trump’s stringent approach on Beijing as the presidential election approaches.

Meanwhile China is planning to take actions to prevent Tik Tok and its technologies from falling into the US’ hands.

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Mr Trump told reporters he had given his “blessing” to a partnership between TikTok and US firms Oracle and Walmart.

The president had ordered the app to be banned in the US, citing national security concerns. US security officials fear data collected by TikTok’s owner may be handed to the Chinese government.

TikTok’s owner, ByteDance, has denied accusations that it is controlled by or shares data with China’s ruling Communist Party.

#WeAreTikTok and we are here to stay! pic.twitter.com/AaA8OhpvGx

— TikTok US (@tiktok_us) September 19, 2020

On September 19, Mr Trump said the deal would ensure the data of the estimated 100 million Americans who use the app was safe, telling reporters: “The security will be 100%.”

“I have given the deal my blessing,” Mr Trump said as he left the White House ahead of an election rally in North Carolina. “I approve the deal in concept.”

President Trump’support for the deal comes days after his administration said it would bar people in the US from downloading Tik Tok through any app store from Sunday.

Hence the US Department of Commerce decided that it is postponing TikTok ban until September 27. The decision was taken as the US President gave green-signal for the Oracle-Tik Tok deal.

Oracle will be TikTok’s “trusted technology provider,” meaning Oracle will house the entity’s data in its U.S. servers — a boon to a cloud computing business that has lagged behind those of Amazon.com Inc., Alphabet Inc. and Microsoft.

It will also get access to monitor TikTok’s source code and algorithms.

Walmart Chief Executive Officer Doug McMillon will sit on Tiktok Global’s board and is discussing a commercial partnership with TikTok.

TikTok Global will likely be headquartered in Texas and will hire at least 25,000 people, Trump said, without mentioning a timeline for those hires.

ByteDance would retain a majority stake in TikTok’s assets and control the closely guarded algorithm that determines what clips users see.

The new company will hold an initial public offering in about a year.

Oracle Corp. is the winning bidder for a deal with Tik Tok’s US operations, after main rival Microsoft Corp. announced its offer of the video app was rejected.

However, the deal still needs to get the approval of China, where ByteDance. is based.
Oracle plans to take a 12.5% stake in a round of financing that would precede an IPO

TikTok also said that together, Oracle and Walmart Inc. could end up with as much as 20%.

The new company, called TikTok Global, will seek a U.S. IPO and raise a pre-IPO round of financing.

Existing Bytedance investors that could participate in the pre-IPO round include Sequoia Capital, General Altantic and Coatue Capital.

A host of other companies made proposals or considered bidding. Microsoft Corp. was rebuffed because it wanted to control all of TikTok in the U.S., a condition that didn’t sit well with Beijing.

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Citing national security concerns, the Trump administration on August issued an executive order requiring that the short video app at the center of US-China tensions, be sold to a US buyer or face being shut down by Sept 15.

The Wall Street Journal reported that Oracle has secured a deal to manage Tik Tok’s US operations. Both the companies haven’t issued a statement, but the tech giant Microsoft, who was a frontrunner to acquire the app at one time has issued statement, with some pointed remarks.

Through their statement Microsoft, cryptically implied that other bids wouldn’t deal with the issue of protecting user data as seriously as it intended to:

“Byte Dance let us know today they would not be selling TikTok’s US operations to Microsoft. We are confident our proposal would have been good for Tik Tok’s users, while protecting national security interests. To do this, we would have made significant changes to ensure the service met the highest standards for security, privacy, online safety and combating disinformation and we made these principles clear in our August statement. We look forward to seeing how the service evolves in these important areas.”

It is not clear whether TikTok’s partnership with Oracle would allow the short-form video app to avert the ban.

However, Chinese state media refute the rumours that Oracle secured the deal. Chinese government revised its export rules that could block the transfer or sale of Byte Dance’s artificial intelligence technologies. It is highly unlikely that China will allow this move.

The clock is ticking on TikTok’s fate.

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With Reels, Instagram users can share short videos with their followers on feed and, if they have a public account, make their reels available to the wider Instagram community through a new space in Explore.

Instagram is used by over a billion people globally across many surfaces — Feed, Stories, IGTV and Live.

With Reels, people can record and edit 15-second multi-clip videos with audio, effects and new creative tools on Reels.

The feature will start rolling out to users in India from 7.30 pm from Wednesday and at the onset, will be populated with content from a diverse set of public figures and creators, such as Ammy Virk, Gippy Grewal, Komal Pandey, Arjun Kanungo, Jahnavi Dasetty aka Mahathalli, Indrani Biswas aka Wondermunna, Kusha Kapila, Radhika Bangia, RJ Abhinav and Ankush Bhaguna.

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The app however was briefly removed from Google Play Store apparently for “technical policy violations.” After the issue was fixed, the app re-emerged on Google Play. The Bengaluru based- app on Tuesday claimed that about 40million videos are viewed on the platform per hour while nearly one million new videos are created perday.

Founded by two computer science engineers, Shivank Agarwal who is an alumnus of Indian Institute of Technology Roorkee and Anish Khandelwal, an alumnus of Visvesvaraya National Institute of Technology in Nagpur, Maharashtra, the app was launched in April this year.

“It is incredibly exciting to see nearly one million new videos created per day on the Mitron platform,” Agarwal said in a statement.

The app provides an easy interface for users to create, edit and share their videos and at the same time browse through a library of top videos on the platform.

Mitron announced a seed funding round on July 1, led by 3one4 Capital and a LetsVenture syndicate led by Arun Tadanki.

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The ByteDance-owned Chinese app has expressed their concern and said they will exist Hong Kong in a few days owing to the fear that the new law could force them to comply with China’s harsh censorship standards. This move has been taken to possibly avoid sharing user’s data with the government.

Google, Facebook, and Twitter have already made a similar move by stop sharing user’s data with the Hong Kong government in view of rising privacy and security threats.

Meanwhile, TikTok has long been arguing that it never shares data with the Chinese government, the new Hong Kong law would have undermined the company’s case if it continued to operate in the region.

Last week, India banned TikTok alongside 59 other Chinese apps amid increasing tensions between the countries.

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According to various media reports, Pompeo told a leading US news channel that “it’s something we’re looking at.”

The move comes amidst tensions between China and the US on a range of issues. The top US diplomat has led Trump administration officials in criticising Beijing for a lack of transparency and disinformation campaign on the coronavirus since it emerged in the central Chinese city of Wuhan.

US experts had called for the ban on Tik Tok citing the handling of user data and threats posing to national security. Tik Tok owned by the Chinese company Bytedance, has been trying to solve the issues by disassociation with their origin country. Australia also has been vocal about the need to ban Chinese social media apps.

India had banned Tik Tok along with 58 other Chinese apps after the border clash between India and China at Galwan Valley.

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