New push in Congress to ban TikTok or force Chinese divestiture gains steam

investing.com:

By David Shepardson

WASHINGTON (Reuters) — The U.S. House Committee on Energy and Commerce on Thursday is expected to vote on legislation giving China's ByteDance six months to divest from short video app TikTok or face a U.S. ban.

Committee approval would set up a vote by U.S. House of Representatives that represents the first significant momentum for a U.S. crackdown on TikTok, which about 170 million U.S. users.

Representative Mike Gallagher, the Republican chairman of the House select China committee, and Representative Raja Krishnamoorthi, the panel's top Democrat, on Tuesday introduced legislation to address national security concerns posed by Chinese ownership of the app.

«TikTok could live on and people could do whatever they want on it provided there is that separation,» Gallagher told reporters Wednesday, urging U.S. ByteDance investors to support a sale. «It is not a ban — think of this as a surgery designed to remove the tumor and thereby save the patient in the process.»

The bill would give ByteDance 165 days to divest TikTok; if it did not, app stores operated by Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL), Google (NASDAQ:GOOGL) and others could not legally offer TikTok or provide web hosting services to ByteDance-controlled applications.

«This bill is an outright ban of TikTok, no matter how much the authors try to disguise it,» a company spokesperson said. «This legislation will trample the First Amendment rights of 170 million Americans and deprive 5 million small businesses of a platform.»

White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre on Wednesday praised the proposal, saying the administration wants «to see this bill get done so it can get to the president's desk» saying it supports addressing «the threat posed by certain