Time is ticking away for a deal on TikTok's survival in the US

The US complicated matters by turning it into a bargaining chip

- CATHERINE THORBECKE

The White House's TikTok deal has devolved into quite a spectacle. As the 5 April deadline (now extended by another 75 days) approached for the app to divest from its Chinese parent company or face a US ban, we still didn't have an answer on how it might do this. A flurry of last-minute interest emerged, with players from Amazon to Andreessen Horowitz and Blackstone reportedly tossing their hats in the increasingly crowded ring of potential buyers.

Some of the latest reports suggest that investors could arrange a deal that keeps ownership of the app's powerful recommendation algorithm in the hands of Beijing-based ByteDance. If that's the case, it's not clear how that would assuage one of the central concerns that spurred the ban law in the first place: That the recommendation engine could be exploited to influence the content served to TikTok's 170 million American users. This arrangement may appeal to Beijing, which tweaked its export rules to include algorithms when talks of a ban first arose. But it won't quell the fears of China hawks in President Donald Trump's own cabinet.