Bytedance Ltd (字節跳動), the world’s most valuable start-up, has been allowed by a court in India to restore access of its popular TikTok video-sharing app to users in one of the Chinese company’s most promising markets.
The Madras High Court on Wednesday in an interim order lifted the ban on the app, which had been blocked by Google and Apple Inc.
TikTok was banned on concerns that the app was exposing children to pornography and other disturbing content.
The court is to come up with a final order after hearing from all involved parties.
“TikTok will update their privacy protection norms according to the court’s order and will address any complaint over content in three to 36 hours,” said K. Neelamegam, a lawyer representing the petitioner. “If TikTok does not meet the conditions set by the court, contempt of court proceedings can be initiated against them.”
The victory for China’s Bytedance, which was last year valued at US$75 billion, also came as a relief for other start-ups hoping to cash in on the world’s fastest-growing smartphone market.
It also dispelled a perception that India was adopting a draconian oversight on such companies, somewhat similar to what firms face in China.
“The court has taken the right perspective,” said Faisal Kawoosa, the founder and chief analyst at Gurugram, India-based researcher techARC. “Any other decision would have had an adverse impact on several other tech platforms.”
Bytedance told the court that the ban denied the right to free speech for millions of the app’s users in India and also caused a loss of about US$600,000 in daily revenue for the company.
Apple and Google had banned new downloads of the app to comply with an earlier court decision.
Bytedance, based in Beijing and founded by Zhang Yiming (張一鳴), said that it has hired many of China’s brightest artificial intelligence experts to develop addictive apps for everything from jokes and news to music videos.
“While we’re pleased that our efforts to fight against misuse of the platform has been recognized, the work is never done on our end,” a TikTok spokesman said in a statement. “We are committed to continuously enhancing our safety features as a testament to our ongoing commitment to our users in India.”
The company has had more success outside of China than any previous Chinese Internet company — and growth in overseas markets will help the company live up to high expectations when it decides to go public.
In India, TikTok has attracted more than 120 million users thanks to a steady stream of videos with dance moves set to Bollywood music, slapstick humor and jokes in local languages.
After starting Bytedance in 2012, Zhang’s first big hit was news app Jinri Toutiao (今日頭條), or Today’s Headlines, which became China’s largest news site with more than 700 million users.
He launched short-video app Douyin (抖音) in China in 2016 and created the international version, TikTok, the next year. Together, the apps have been installed more than 1 billion times.
ISSUES: Gogoro has been struggling with ballooning losses and was recently embroiled in alleged subsidy fraud, using Chinese-made components instead of locally made parts Gogoro Inc (睿能創意), the nation’s biggest electric scooter maker, yesterday said that its chairman and CEO Horace Luke (陸學森) has resigned amid chronic losses and probes into the company’s alleged involvement in subsidy fraud. The board of directors nominated Reuntex Group (潤泰集團) general counsel Tamon Tseng (曾夢達) as the company’s new chairman, Gogoro said in a statement. Ruentex is Gogoro’s biggest stakeholder. Gogoro Taiwan general manager Henry Chiang (姜家煒) is to serve as acting CEO during the interim period, the statement said. Luke’s departure came as a bombshell yesterday. As a company founder, he has played a key role in pushing for the
China has claimed a breakthrough in developing homegrown chipmaking equipment, an important step in overcoming US sanctions designed to thwart Beijing’s semiconductor goals. State-linked organizations are advised to use a new laser-based immersion lithography machine with a resolution of 65 nanometers or better, the Chinese Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) said in an announcement this month. Although the note does not specify the supplier, the spec marks a significant step up from the previous most advanced indigenous equipment — developed by Shanghai Micro Electronics Equipment Group Co (SMEE, 上海微電子) — which stood at about 90 nanometers. MIIT’s claimed advances last
CROSS-STRAIT TENSIONS: The US company could switch orders from TSMC to alternative suppliers, but that would lower chip quality, CEO Jensen Huang said Nvidia Corp CEO Jensen Huang (黃仁勳), whose products have become the hottest commodity in the technology world, on Wednesday said that the scramble for a limited amount of supply has frustrated some customers and raised tensions. “The demand on it is so great, and everyone wants to be first and everyone wants to be most,” he told the audience at a Goldman Sachs Group Inc technology conference in San Francisco. “We probably have more emotional customers today. Deservedly so. It’s tense. We’re trying to do the best we can.” Huang’s company is experiencing strong demand for its latest generation of chips, called
EUROPE ON HOLD: Among a flurry of announcements, Intel said it would postpone new factories in Germany and Poland, but remains committed to its US expansion Intel Corp chief executive officer Pat Gelsinger has landed Amazon.com Inc’s Amazon Web Services (AWS) as a customer for the company’s manufacturing business, potentially bringing work to new plants under construction in the US and boosting his efforts to turn around the embattled chipmaker. Intel and AWS are to coinvest in a custom semiconductor for artificial intelligence computing — what is known as a fabric chip — in a “multiyear, multibillion-dollar framework,” Intel said in a statement on Monday. The work would rely on Intel’s 18A process, an advanced chipmaking technology. Intel shares rose more than 8 percent in late trading after the