TikTok Appellate Judges Signal Skepticism of Trump’s Ban on App
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A panel of judges on the U.S. appeals court in Washington signaled skepticism of the Trump administration’s continuing efforts to ban new downloads of the Chinese-owned video-sharing app TikTok.
At a hearing Monday, two of the three judges suggested they disagreed with the government’s legal rationale for a ban on TikTok, which is owned by ByteDance Ltd. The U.S. is arguing to reinstate an order removing of TikTok from app stores run by Apple Inc. and Alphabet Inc.’s Google, which a lower court blocked in September as an “indirect regulation” of communications prohibited by federal law.
The government is relying on “a fairly narrow definition of indirect regulation,” U.S. Circuit Judge Patricia Millett said at Monday’s hearing.