Washington (AFP)

A US judge gave TikTok a break on Sunday night, hours before a suspension of the popular app from US download platforms goes into effect, but the politico-technological saga continues.

Update on the issues.

- What did the judge decide?

Donald Trump signed a decree in early August to ban TikTok, which belongs to the Chinese group ByteDance, unless it passes into the fold of an American company.

The government wanted to apply it, starting with a suspension of mobile application stores.

Judge Carl Nicholas, appointed to Washington by Donald Trump in 2019, ruled in favor of TikTok, which filed an appeal on September 18 but has, however, for the moment refused to suspend the total ban on the platform on American soil , scheduled for November 12.

The reasons for his decision are under seal to protect potentially confidential information, but are due to be released on Monday once the two sides agree.

"I think it's a reasonable decision on the part of the judge," responded Carl Tobias, professor of law at the University of Richmond in Virginia.

"It gives them a little more time to find a solution."

- What consequences for users?

Without the intervention of Carl Nichols, from Monday, the 100 million American users of TikTok could certainly have continued to use the application, but they would no longer have had access to the updates, necessary for its operation. good functioning.

And it wouldn't have been possible to download it for those who don't already have it.

TikTok also argued Sunday morning that this suspension of app stores could cause it irreparable damage in terms of growth, while it gained some 424,000 new American users per day at the beginning of the summer.

The mobile app is used to share short videos, between 15 and 60 seconds.

Users dance, play back their favorite songs, perform parodies, stage their animals, film themselves telling their life story or taking a stand on current affairs, among others.

They decorate their clips with numerous filters and special effects.

These short, funny formats, which surf on the music of the moment, meet with immense success, in particular with a young audience, but not only.

The pandemic has exploded its meters, the social network offering an often welcome escape during the Great Containment.

Globalized in 2018, TikTok is the international version of the Douyin application (its name in Mandarin), intended solely for the Chinese market.

Its servers, where user data is stored, are located in the United States and Singapore.

It has been downloaded over 2 billion times, and is used by nearly 700 million people around the world every month.

- What to expect now?

TikTok has offered to create a new company, dubbed TikTok Global, with Oracle as a technology partner in the United States, which would take 12.5%, and Walmart as a business partner, which would take 7.5%.

The Americans would hold four of the five seats on the board.

But the finalization depends on the goodwill of the tenant of the White House and the Chinese government.

"We are continuing our ongoing dialogue with the government to finalize this project, to which the president has given his preliminary approval," TikTok said on Sunday evening.

The entertainment app has become the new symbol of the battle between the United States and China for domination of the high-tech sector.

The White House host, campaigning for re-election, insisted that he would not give his approval if TikTok's US activities remained under Chinese control.

ByteDance, which includes American investors, announced that it had made a "request for authorization" to export technology, without specifying on what subject.

This initiative could concern the famous algorithm that made TikTok so successful: it allows users to display the content most likely to interest them, according to their tastes, and to lead them to spend as much time as possible viewing. video after video on the platform.

China refuses to let this precious computer system fall into the hands of the United States.

© 2020 AFP