Breakingviews - Trade warriors are on a TikTok collision course

Jennifer Saba - Reuters - 06/12
Threats of tariffs or banning telecommunications equipment were the easy part. TikTok illustrates what happens when the trade war gets difficult. A U.S. federal court has unambiguously supported the government's assertion that the short-form video app's relationship with Chinese parent ByteDance raises national security concerns. European allies are on guard, too. A looming January deadline is a decisive test.
NEW YORK, Dec 6 (Reuters Breakingviews) - Threats of tariffs or banning telecommunications equipment were the easy part. TikTok illustrates what happens when the trade war gets difficult. A U.S. federal court has unambiguously supported the government's assertion that the short-form video app's relationship with Chinese parent ByteDance raises national security concerns. European allies are on guard, too. A looming January deadline is a decisive test.
TikTok received two blows on Friday. First, it lost a bid to overturn a U.S. law that effectively bans the app unless ByteDance divests it. The judges opined that a multi-year, bipartisan effort by Congress to investigate the popular app was sufficiently thorough and persuasive in its argument that TikTok has ties to Beijing and that it collects “large swaths of data” on users. The ruling leaves little room for anything sh...
[Short citation of 8% of the original article]