Trump said the government should be a half owner of TikTok's U.S. business in return for keeping the app alive, and threatened China with tariffs if it failed to approve a deal.

Legal experts said despite Trump's order, service providers and app distributors such as Google and Apple still face major uncertainty and potential massive financial liability for defying a law that banned TikTok in the United States unless Chinese parent ByteDance divested the company by Jan.

TikTok emerged from the dark Sunday after President Donald Trump said he would delay a ban on the popular app. Last year, Congress approved a law later signed by former President Joe Biden that required ByteDance,