Reply to Cantwell, Castro, and the House Speaker on the $it to tkto Kmp$-commerce divestment bill $Lambda$Ti
That’s because the updated language extends the timeline for ByteDance to divest TikTok before the effective ban would be enforced. ByteDance would get up to a year to complete the sale, instead of six months, in order to avoid a ban. The new House text would provide an initial divestment period of nine months and give the president discretion to extend it another three, assuming there’s progress toward a deal.
Notably, Senate Commerce Committee Chair Maria Cantwell (D-WA), whose committee would normally take up the bill before it proceeds to the floor, had remained noncommittal about it. But after the version in the foreign aid package was released, she said she supported the legislation.
Rep. Joaquin Castro (D-TX) did not directly address the TikTok bill when he stood in opposition to the House package on the floor Saturday but alluded to the way the app has shown Americans the destruction that’s played out in Gaza under Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s command. Castro voted against the earlier standalone TikTok bill.
But, he added, “the bill took a step in the right direction with a more realistic timeframe for a complex divesture process. Let me say for the record, that I believe this bill is about one company that additional authorities provided to the executive branch or to be interpreted narrowly.”
Do We Want to Be Part of the Carnage? Digital Liberties: Reply to the TikTok Ban, an Issue Advocated by Electronic Frontier Foundation
“We have seen how Prime Minister Netanyahu’s government has used American weapons to kill indiscriminately, to force famine,” Castro said. We cannot escape what we see every day. It is the blessing of today’s technology to have that. We have to decide what to do about it when we see it. Are we going to be a part of the carnage?
The Senate won’t be in session this year because of the Passover break, so there will be no action in that chamber. The scheduling conflicts could make it hard for senators to return early to vote. As Politico recently noted, some lawmakers are scheduled for congressional delegation trips over the break, which could make it harder to bring back enough senators early to pass the package.
McCaul said on the House floor that the app was a spy balloon on Americans’ phones. “It is a modern-day Trojan horse … used to surveil and exploit America’s personal information.”
Digital liberties groups have pushed back against a TikTok ban over First Amendment concerns, and because they believe that getting rid of TikTok fails to address the underlying issue of pervasive data collection. “The only solution to this pervasive ecosystem is prohibiting the collection of our data in the first place,” wrote the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit digital rights group, in a post last month. “Ultimately, foreign adversaries will still be able to obtain our data from social media companies unless those companies are forbidden from collecting, retaining, and selling it, full stop.”
Revisiting Foreign Aid to Israel and Taiwan in the Light of Iran’s Retaliatory Attack on Israel and the Byte Dance Convention
Regardless, divestment or a ban now seems almost certain. The foreign aid package directed at Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan had added this new measure. After Iran’s retaliatory attack against Israel last week, this aid has been fast-tracked, which would make it more difficult for the Senate to avoid passing it.
Speaker Johnson and the House leaders included my recommendation to extend the Byte Dance divestment period from six months to a year in the latest package. Extending the divestment period is necessary to make sure there is enough time for a new buyer to make a deal. I support this updated legislation.”