Commerce Department Remembers It Was Supposed To Ban TikTok; Says It Won't Enforce For Now

from the oh,-right,-that dept

Yesterday we noted that TikTok had made a filing with the government asking what the fuck was going on with the supposed ban on their application that was supposed to go into effect this week. While a court had issued an injunction saying the Commerce Department couldn't put the ban into effect, the Trump administration basically hadn't said anything since then, and the ban was set to go into effect yesterday.

Late yesterday, the Commerce Department put out a notice basically saying that it's complying with the injunction issued by the court, and therefore not implementing the executive order and the ban:

However, on October 30, 2020, the District Court issued an Order granting the Plaintiffs' renewed motion for a preliminary injunction. This Order enjoined the Department from enforcing the Identification and the prohibition on transactions identified in Paragraphs 1-6 above.

The Department is complying with the terms of this Order. Accordingly, this serves as NOTICE that the Secretary’s prohibition of identified transactions pursuant to Executive Order 13942, related to TikTok, HAS BEEN ENJOINED, and WILL NOT GO INTO EFFECT, pending further legal developments

Of course, the Commerce Department saying it won't enforce the order doesn't answer the larger question of whether or not the US government is still demanding that it sell off all of its US assets -- or even whether or not the grifty non-sale to Oracle will suffice.

Basically, highlighting how much of a joke this whole thing was, it seems that the supposed "national security" rationale behind all of this was complete garbage, and since Trump has his hands full trying to pretend he won the election he very clearly lost, everyone's just going to let this slide until the Biden administration comes in and likely drops the executive order altogether. But kudos to Larry Ellison for getting a lucrative hosting deal.

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Filed Under: ban, china, commerce department, donald trump, executive order, injunction, wilbur ross
Companies: bytedance, oracle, tiktok


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  1. identicon
    Owen, 13 Nov 2020 @ 4:03pm

    Performative Nonsense! Please Sir, Can I Have Some More?

    Of course! It was just more of the usual performative nonsense from the narcissistic, petulant, whiny cheeto-in-charge, pandering to his base of MAGA idiots. Given he's trying to convince himself and his MAGA-idiot followers that he really DID win the election (P.S. he didn't), he has bigger and better things on his plate right now.

    link to this | view in thread ]

  2. icon
    PaulT (profile), 13 Nov 2020 @ 11:15pm

    It's quite possible that, since after the inauguration there will be even less patience with the MAGA crowd infecting Twitter and Facebook, and the likes of Gab and Parler are already infected with people even those people don't want to spend much time with, that they're leaving a path open to temporarily co-opt another popular platform.

    Or, it might that since there's now a time limit on how much actual power an orange temper tantrum over a failed superspreader rally will have, that they just don't want to bother putting in the effort to appease it.

    link to this | view in thread ]

  3. icon
    ECA (profile), 14 Nov 2020 @ 12:45pm

    I wonder,

    If this is originally the idea of China.
    Or China mentioning they had a problem WITH that program.
    And Mr. Trump took as a sideways thought, and tried to Do the SAME as China was trying.

    link to this | view in thread ]


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