()President Donald Trump gave TikTok another 90 days to find a new owner, but his decision to extend the company’s deadline for a third time won’t make it any easier for the digital giant’s competitors to force enforcement.
Trump signed an executive order last week to extend the enforcement of a law requiring TikTok’s owner, ByteDance, to sell its U.S. assets or face a ban.
“I’ve just signed the Executive Order extending the Deadline for the TikTok closing for 90 days (September 17, 2025). Thank you for your attention to this matter!” Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social.
While Trump is calling his move an extension, it’s actually a nonenforcement provision, Alan Rozenshtein, a professor at the University of Minnesota Law School, told .
“An extension implies that the law is not in effect until some time, but the law is 100% in effect,” he said.
“All Trump can do is choose not to enforce the law, but while he’s choosing not to enforce the law, the company is still violating it and still accruing legal liability.”
TikTok thanked Trump after Thursday’s order.
“We are grateful for President Trump’s leadership and support in ensuring that TikTok continues to be available for more than 170 million American users and 7.5 million U.S. businesses that rely on the platform as we continue to work with Vice President Vance’s Office,” TikTok said in a statement following Thursday’s order.
Can TikTok’s competitors sue Trump?
Companies that feel Trump’s being too easy with TikTok might have a plausible case, Rozenshtein said.
“There have been situations in which competitors of companies that have been treated too leniently by the government have been able to sue,” he said.
However, it’s not clear how far the lawsuit would advance, he said, as courts have also held that some companies looking to sue don’t have standing, which is the right to demand the government prosecute someone.
TikTok has few competitors, and companies like YouTube and Facebook, which are in that position, are likely not going to go after the Trump administration, Rozenshtein said.
Neither company returned a request for comment by .
Even if a lawsuit were filed by a competitor and it moves forward, it’s not clear what the courts would do, he said.
“Courts are just so reluctant to order the executive branch to prosecute someone,” he said. “They may say they are going to observe that this non-enforcement provision is illegal, but not order the government to act.”
TikTok law wasn’t designed to protect competitors
The TikTok law wasn’t written to protect its competitors; it was written to protect American citizens so those companies don’t have standing to sue, Anupam Chander, a professor of law and technology at Georgetown University, said.
“The law was not designed with Meta, Snapchat or Google in mind. It’s really targeting one company, and potentially other companies in a similar position, so there’s no kind of unfairness that competitors can claim,” he said.
Snapchat did not respond to a request for comment by .
These companies are incidental beneficiaries of the legislation, not intended ones, he said.
The law was to protect national security, and though many legal experts argue that this is a clear violation by Trump, in this case, there really aren’t good plaintiffs to challenge it because of the “strange position of the law.”
The legislation was based on security interests, but through these delays, the president is saying this is not an urgent security concern, so the entire justification for the law has been undermined, he said.
“That makes this whole escapade kind of a much ado about nothing in some sense.”
Trump’s repeated extensions on TikTok law enforcement
TikTok dodged a possible ban a third time after going dark for one day in January.
Congress passed the law last year and it was signed by former President Biden. It was challenged in courts but the Supreme Court upheld the law in early January.
The law became active one day before Trump was sworn in.
Hours into his second term, Trump signed an executive order saying he would delay enforcing the law to give the company more time to divest from its Chinese owner.
He extended it again in April when White House officials believed they were nearing a deal to sell TikTok to a new U.S. company. That fell apart after China backed out following Trump’s tariff announcement.
Trump doesn’t want the social media giant to “go dark,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said in a statement.
Leavitt said the administration would spend the next 90 days working “to ensure this deal is closed so that the American people can continue to use TikTok with the assurance that their data is safe and secure.”
