TikTok has hired a powerful new voice to lead its fight against a congressional ban on the app.
The Chinese-owned video sharing platform appears to be getting ready for a new era. Long legal battle which can later reach the Supreme Court President Joe Biden A bill was signed into law in April that requires it to be sold to an American company within nine months.
Carl Szabo, the longtime general counsel and policy expert at NetChoice, is leaving the company — one of D.C.’s top tech lobbying groups — to join TikTok’s government relations department, as the company seeks to win favor in the courts.
“This certainly indicates that the company expects this battle to go to the Supreme Court and given its poor performance, they are gearing up for it. [so far] “This is a big problem in the D.C. Circuit,” Joel Thayer, a tech policy lawyer and president of the Digital Progress Institute, told the Post.
The calls for a ban on TikTok were first made by politicians who were concerned about data privacy and what information the app sends about its users to the Chinese Communist Party, and how it could potentially be used.
“TikTok is still trying to deny the reality that a law passed by Congress restricts them — they’re going to throw everything and the kitchen sink at them with unlimited money from China,” said Nathan Leamer, a former FCC policy advisor and CEO of Fixed Gear Strategies.
“Given that our parent company is primarily owned by global institutional investors and our employees — including thousands in the U.S. — this comment is completely ridiculous and plainly false,” a TikTok spokesperson told The Post.
NetChoice, a right-wing tech lobbying group that works with a variety of tech companies including Amazon, Netflix, Meta, and more, represented TikTok until shortly after the ban. At that time, it dropped the social media giant from its roster.
Szabo has been instrumental in filing lawsuits against legislation cracking down on tech companies. Earlier this year, she warned that “lawsuits are coming,” after California passed a law designed to protect young users. According to a report,
NetChoice President Steve DelBianco announced Szabo’s departure in a statement Thursday, saying, “I am so grateful to Carl for all the work he has done over the last 14 years to help grow NetChoice from a 2-person team to America’s top technology trade association.
“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 pursue our cases.”
Szabo did not respond to The Post’s request for comment.
TikTok has appealed to the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia to overturn a law that would either force it to split from Chinese parent company ByteDance or ban the app.
“For the first time in history, Congress has targeted a specific American speaker and banned his speech and the speech of 170 million Americans,” TikTok lawyer Andrew Pincus argued.
The law is expected to come into force on January 19, 2025, a day before the President's swearing-in.
