Selling TikTok – Kobo eBook

On the night of 18 January 2025, TikTok stopped working in the United States. The blackout lasted about fourteen hours.

Nine months earlier, Congress had passed a law requiring the Chinese owner of the American business to sell it or disappear from the country’s app stores and servers. In between came presidential extensions, a unanimous Supreme Court ruling, and nearly two years of negotiation.

This book reads the law article by article, follows the ruling that upheld it, and takes the final deal apart piece by piece: who put up the money, who sat on the board, what was actually transferred and what stayed exactly where it was. It also points, precisely, at the documents nobody has published.

It sets the case beside the three other roads the world tried at the same time the Indian ban, the Canadian shutdown order and the European audits and measures it against a century of forced break-ups of American companies.

When it is all over, the former owner keeps just under twenty percent of the equity, ownership of the recommendation engine, and a licence to go on providing it. That is the question the public debate never found: the power to decide what a population sees appears on no share register.

The truck changed its licence plate. The workshop is still where it was, and the deal is still being implemented.