TikTok has hired a powerful new voice to fight its corner, as it steps up its fight against a congressional ban on the app.
The Chinese owned video sharing platform appears to be gearing up for a lengthy legal fight which could reach the Supreme Court after President Joe Biden signed a bill which in April which requires it to be sold off to a US company within nine months.
Longtime general counsel and policy expert at NetChoice, Carl Szabo, is leaving the company — one of DC’s top tech lobbying groups — to jopin TikTok’s government relations department, as the company looks to win favor in the courts.
“It certainly signals that the company expects that the fight will land in the Supreme Court and are gearing up, given its poor showing [so far] in the DC Circuit,” Joel Thayer, a tech policy lawyer and president of the Digital Progress Institute told The Post.
Calls to ban TikTok were first raised by politicians concerned about data privacy and what information the app sends back to the Chinese Communist Party about its users, and how it could potentially be used.
“TikTok is still trying to deny their reality that a law passed by Congress bans them — they’re going to throw everything and the kitchen sink at it with unlimited money from China,” added Nathan Leamer, a former FCC policy adviser and CEO of Fixed Gear Strategies.
“Given our parent company is predominantly owned by global institutional investors and our employees — including thousands here in the US — that comment is utterly ridiculous and simply false,” a TikTok spokesperson told The Post.
NetChoice, a right-leaning tech lobbying group which works with a variety of tech companies including Amazon, Netflix, Meta, had represented TikTok until immediately after the ban. At that point it kicked the social media giant out of its roster.
Szabo has been instrumental in bringing lawsuits against legislation cracking down on tech companies. Earlier this year, he warned “the lawsuits are coming” after California passed a law designed to protect younger users, according to a report.
Szabo’s departure was announced in a statement Thursday from NetChoice president Steve DelBianco, “I am profoundly grateful to Carl for helping NetChoice grow from a 2-man team to become America’s top tech trade association over the past 14 years.
“Thanks to Carl’s dedication to advancing our mission, NetChoice now has a best-in-class government affairs team and a renowned litigation center to carry our cases forward.”
Szabo did not respond to a request for comment from The Post.
TikTok has appealed to the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia to overturn the law that would either force its divestiture from Chinese parent company ByteDance or ban the app.
“For the first time in history, Congress has expressly targeted a specific US speaker banning its speech and the speech of 170 million Americans,” an attorney for TikTok Andrew Pincus argued.
The law is expected to go into effect Jan. 19, 2025 the day before the presidential inauguration.
