Tony Tan, a Google shareholder, has obtained and published a set of letters the Trump administration sent to multiple tech companies, essentially saying: don’t worry about the law, the president has your back, keep TikTok online.
However, Mr. Tan disagrees. And he’s taking legal action to prove it.
A bit of back story
The TikTok ban has had more ups and downs than any busy person would care to follow.
For today’s news, here’s the part that matters: Towards the end of his term, President Biden signed the “Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act,” giving ByteDance until January 19, 2025, to divest TikTok’s U.S. operations or face a ban.
When President Trump took office on January 20, he signed an executive order halting the ban and extending the deadline to April 5. In the interim, the app had been down for a couple of days in the U.S., but access was restored after Trump’s assurance to tech companies that his deadline extension was constitutional.
On April 4, Trump extended the deadline again, this time to June 19. The next day, his team sent letters to tech companies and service providers, assuring them that under his order, they wouldn’t face legal consequences for keeping TikTok online, even if the actual law told them otherwise.
These are the letters Tan has now published, obtained through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit. One of them was sent to Apple, while similar ones were sent to Google, Akamai, Amazon, Digital Realty Trust, Fastly, Microsoft, T-Mobile, Oracle, and LG:
Office of the Attorney General
Washington, D.C. 20530 April 5, 2025 Katherine Adams
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