US lawmakers are considering changes to address concerns about a bill that would give the Biden administration new powers to ban Chinese-owned TikTok, the chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee who has cosponsored the legislation said on Monday.<\/p>\n
Democratic Senator Mark Warner told Reuters that aggressive lobbying by the ByteDance-owned short video app TikTok against the Restrict Act “slowed a bit of our momentum” after it was introduced in March.<\/p>\n
Warner said lawmakers have “a proposal on a series of amendments to make it explicitly clear” and address criticisms, including that individual Americans could be impacted or that the bill represents a broad expansion of government power.<\/p>\n
“We can take care of those concerns in a fair way,” Warner said.<\/p>\n
The legislation endorsed by the White House would grant the Commerce Department new authority to review, block, and address a range of transactions involving foreign information and communications technology that pose national security risks.<\/p>\n
“I will grant TikTok this – they spent $100 million in lobbying and slowed a bit of our momentum,” Warner said, adding that initially it seemed it would be almost “too easy” to get the bill approved.<\/p>\n
TikTok did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Warner’s assessment of its lobbying.<\/p>\n
In March, Republican Senator Rand Paul blocked a bid to fast-track a separate bill to ban TikTok introduced by Senator Josh Hawley, who said the Restrict Act “doesn’t ban TikTok. It gives the president a whole bunch of new authority.”<\/p>\n
The Biden administration in March demanded TikTok’s Chinese owners divest their stakes or face a US ban. Attempts in 2020 by then President Donald Trump to ban TikTok were blocked by US courts.<\/p>\n
Warner said there are a lot of conversations about the bill, adding it could be attached to an annual defense bill or could be part of a China-related bill that Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer wants.<\/p>\n
The need for legislation is clear, he said.<\/p>\n
“There have been another three or four apps that have come out that are Chinese controlled so we need a fair rules-based process to deal with this rather than kind of a one-off basis,” Warner said.<\/p>\n
TikTok, which is used by more than 150 million Americans, says it has spent more than $1.5 billion on rigorous data security efforts and rejects spying allegations.<\/p>\n
The company is fighting a ban by the state of Montana set to take effect on Jan. 1. A judge has scheduled an Oct. 12 hearing on TikTok’s request.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
US lawmakers are considering changes to address concerns about a bill that would give the Biden administration new powers to ban Chinese-owned TikTok, the chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee who has cosponsored the legislation said on Monday. Democratic Senator Mark Warner told Reuters that aggressive lobbying by the ByteDance-owned short video app TikTok against the Restrict Act “slowed a bit of our momentum” after it was introduced in March. Warner said lawmakers have “a proposal on a series of amendments to make it explicitly clear” and address criticisms, including that individual Americans could be impacted or that the bill […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-800330","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-telecom"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/telecomlive.in\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/800330","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/telecomlive.in\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/telecomlive.in\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/telecomlive.in\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/telecomlive.in\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=800330"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/telecomlive.in\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/800330\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/telecomlive.in\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=800330"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/telecomlive.in\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=800330"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/telecomlive.in\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=800330"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}