Al Sharqiya

NEW YORK - ALsharqiya December 14: The chairman and top Democrat of the US House Committee on China told the CEOs of Alphabet Inc., Google’s parent company, and Apple Inc. that they should prepare to remove TikTok from their US app stores on January 19. A US federal appeals court last week upheld a law requiring China-based ByteDance to divest from TikTok in the United States or face a ban. Representative John Molenaar, a Republican and chairman of the China Committee, and Representative Raja Krishna Murthy, the panel’s top Democrat, urged TikTok CEO Xu Zhiqiu to sell the short-video app used by 170 million Americans. “Congress has acted decisively to defend US national security and protect American TikTok users from the Chinese Communist Party,” the lawmakers wrote. “We urge TikTok to immediately implement the required level of divestment.” Apple, Alphabet, and TikTok have yet to comment on the move. ByteDance and TikTok on Monday filed an emergency motion to temporarily halt the law pending a review by the U.S. Supreme Court. The Justice Department said on Wednesday that if the ban goes into effect on Jan. 19, it would not “directly prohibit continued use of TikTok” by Apple or Google users who have already installed the app. But it acknowledged that the ban on providing support “would ultimately render the app unusable.”