The chair and top Democrat on a U.S. House of Representatives committee on China told the CEOs of Google-parent Alphabet GOOGL-Q and Apple AAPL-Q on Friday they must be ready to remove TikTok from their U.S. app stores on Jan. 19.
Last week, a U.S. federal appeals court upheld a law requiring China-based ByteDance to divest TikTok in the United States or face a ban. Representative John Moolenaar, a Republican and chair of the committee, and the top Democrat on the committee, Representative Raja Krishnamoorthi, separately urged TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew to sell the short-video app used by 170 million Americans.
“Congress has acted decisively to defend the national security of the United States and protect TikTok’s American users from the Chinese Communist Party. We urge TikTok to immediately execute a qualified divestiture,” the lawmakers wrote.
Apple and Alphabet did not immediately comment. On Monday, ByteDance and TikTok made an emergency bid to temporarily block the law pending a review by the U.S. Supreme Court.
But a U.S. appeals court on Friday rejected that bid.
A TikTok spokesperson said after the ruling that the company plans to take its case to the Supreme Court, “which has an established historical record of protecting Americans’ right to free speech.”
The companies had warned that without court action, the law will “shut down TikTok – one of the nation’s most popular speech platforms – for its more than 170 million domestic monthly users.”
“The petitioners have not identified any case in which a court, after rejecting a constitutional challenge to an Act of Congress, has enjoined the Act from going into effect while review is sought in the Supreme Court,” the D.C. Circuit said.
The law also gives the U.S. government sweeping powers to ban other foreign-owned apps that could raise concerns about collection of Americans’ data.
The U.S. Justice Department argues “continued Chinese control of the TikTok application poses a continuing threat to national security.”
TikTok says the Justice Department has misstated the social media app’s ties to China, arguing its content recommendation engine and user data are stored in the U.S. on cloud servers operated by Oracle while content moderation decisions that affect U.S. users are made in the U.S.
The DOJ said on Wednesday if the ban takes effect on Jan. 19, it would “not directly prohibit the continued use of TikTok” by Apple or Google users who have already downloaded TikTok. But it conceded the prohibitions on providing support “will eventually be to render the application unworkable.”
TikTok said in response on Thursday the law, absent a court order, means TikTok will disappear from mobile app stores on Jan. 19 and “be unavailable to the half of the country that does not already use the app.” It warned ending support services will “cripple the platform in the United States and make it totally unusable.”
ByteDance and TikTok noted president-elect Donald Trump has vowed to prevent a ban on TikTok.
Republican Senator Josh Hawley said in an interview he hopes ByteDance will sell TikTok because the law leaves no wiggle room. “The statute is what the statute is,” Hawley said. “The main issue is it’s subject to Chinese oversight, Beijing oversight – that’s the problem.”