TikTok's "ban reversal" hasn't changed anything
The TikTok ban is still in effect. You still can't download or update it in app stores. TikTok called the US' bluff and it's not clear whether it will work.
Imagine that you are looking for a software engineering job in 2025, and you want your job to bring you stability. You have children and a mortgage. You’d like to retire on a reasonable timeframe. So you’d like a job that will last a while.
There are a few ways that you can accomplish this nowadays:
Huge companies that have B2B or government contracts have predictable cash flows in the short-to-medium term. You could work for a company like Microsoft. They’ve survived and thrived since their founding in the ‘80s. Their individual divisions might undergo some changes, but it wouldn’t be surprising if they still existed in 100 years.
Small, profitable companies that want to stay small and sustain their profitability. 37Signals is the classic example here: a company with an evergreen product that keeps the lights on and funds the development of new products. It doesn’t have to be as famous or profitable as 37Signals, but you would want to find a product in a market that will stick around for a while.
If you have in-demand skills and have done a great job of cultivating industry contacts, you can always do consulting. This has obvious drawbacks. You need to be comfortable with a less-than-100% utilization rate, booking your time, negotiating your price, travel, etc.
In 2025, you also have the option of joining companies that are good at maintaining diplomatic ties with the Trump administration.
TikTok taking down its site in the US yesterday and reinstating it after a statement from Trump shows this. As a refresher, the “Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act”, or the “TikTok ban,” is a ban that took effect on January 19th (yesterday, for those reading on the day this got published). The ban prevented app stores for platforms like Android and iOS from distributing or updating TikTok — although old installs could continue to work. If the app stores enabled distribution or updating of the app, they would get a huge fine per user. It also forbids US companies from hosting the infrastructure that runs TikTok.
Given all of the above, TikTok could have kept operating. There would be a permanently-frozen “US Version” of the app that would degrade over time as it stopped getting new features and bug fixes, and it would have terrible latency because it couldn’t use any infrastructure within the continental US. Google and Apple just had to prevent people from being able to update the app, and any domestic infrastructure providers had to stop hosting them. It’s not even clear to me whether the read-only web version would have been banned.
So TikTok did something they were not required to do under the law: they blocked all US traffic by showing an error message. The text was pretty bland: it referenced the January 19th ban and said that they were working to restore service.
But something changed between the morning and the afternoon. Trump said that he would defer the ban by 90 days. This is a nod to the fact that the bill gives the President the right to extend the deadline by 90 days if the divestment is legally binding but has not happened yet for some reason.
As someone who doesn’t know anything about the law, it took me about 5 minutes to verify from official government sources that this isn’t how the law works. If they don’t have a binding legal agreement, then the TikTok ban is in effect. Google and Apple agree with me, since they are not allowing users to download TikTok at the moment. So the ban is still being enforced.
https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/R/R48023 - Congressional Research Service
The President can provide a one-time extension of the divestiture deadline of up to 90 days when a path to a qualified divestiture has been identified, there is evidence of “significant” progress toward executing the divestiture, and there are legally binding agreements in place to enable the divestiture.
Trump’s statements are obviously a nothingburger. There are no legally-binding agreements — or probably any kind of agreements — for divesting TikTok. There is no basis to enact this delay. In fact, if you try installing TikTok through the iOS app store at the time I publish this, you can’t find it.
Even though nothing has changed, TikTok then changed their error message to personally thank Trump, and then when it was re-enabled, added this welcome screen:
Welcome back!
Thanks for your patience and support. As a result of President Trump’s efforts, TikTok is back in the U.S.!
You can continue to create, share, and discover all the things you love on TikTok.
TikTok played this game beautifully. Everyone knows that Trump likes money. That’s why tech companies and influential individuals have been lining up to donate money to his inauguration fund. ByteDance is already under heavy scrutiny, so money is not an option. But TikTok could give Trump something else: a political win.
America is getting ready for the second Trump term. It’s clear that Trump wants to install loyalists across the executive branch and via judicial appointments. He’s also erratic and has no commitment to his prior plans. This means that by giving Trump something that he wants, the government might bend a little to give you what you want. Are you Google, and the Justice Department is a big bummer? Maybe you can throw him some money for his inauguration fund and you can keep Chrome. We don’t know if that’s the case yet, but maybe it is! Google certainly tried it.
Imagine someone in the TikTok demographic who is politically disengaged. Their experience with the world is effectively that everything is too expensive, and they spend a few hours a day on TikTok and it just got banned. But then the ban ends. The app credits Trump for ending the ban on the same day that it began. Despite benefiting — often indirectly — from Democratic accomplishments that happened over the Biden years1, this individual likely can’t name any of them. Quite honestly, I read a lot of political news and I still needed to look at a list of Democratic accomplishments over the past 4 years because I could not remember many of them. But they can name one way that Trump benefited them, and it’s the idea that he lifted the TikTok ban — even though it would take about 5 minutes to verify that he did not do this and the ban is still in effect. So thanks to TikTok, he gets a big W before he even takes office.
Who knows whether this will matter for TikTok in the long run. However, it did get lawmakers that voted to ban TikTok to publicly state the importance that it remain operational. So maybe it will pay off after all.
Things like unemployment halving over his term, the end of the COVID-19 pandemic, cancellation of student loan debt, investments in technology and manufacturing like the CHIPS act, the effects of laws like the Inflation Reduction Act.