Washington: Two influential US lawmakers, including Indian-American Raja Krishnamurthy, have written to Google and Apple asking them to remove TikTok from their app stores. Under a bill signed by President Joe Biden in April, Chinese company ByteDance, which owns TikTok, will have to separate from TikTok by January 19, or face US sanctions. Molnar and ranking member Krishnamurthy on Friday wrote letters to Apple CEO (CEO) Tim Cook, Google CEO Sundar Pichai, and TikTok CEO Sho Ji Chew. The lawmakers asked Cook and Pichai to prepare to remove TikTok from their Play Store by January 19. In their letter to TikTok’s CEO, they asked Chew to immediately submit a divestment proposal that he could accept.
They will appeal the decision in the Supreme Court
The statement by US lawmakers comes as a federal appeals court refused to intervene in a law passed by Congress under which TikTok must sell its US business to a local company by mid-January or it will have to face restrictions. The company had appealed the US government’s decision and requested that implementation of the decision be halted until the final decision of the Supreme Court was issued, which was rejected by the Federal Court of Appeal. It is believed that TikTok and its parent company ByteDance may appeal the Court of Appeal decision in the Supreme Court.
