TikTok’s Future In US Hinges On Indian American Judges
Photo: Sri Srinivasan (Left), Neomi Rao (Right)
India-West News Desk
WASHINGTON, DC – A lawyer for TikTok and Chinese parent company ByteDance faced tough questions on September 16 as a U.S. appeals court heard arguments in their lawsuit seeking to block a law that could ban the short video app used by 170 million Americans as soon as January. 19.
Judges Sri Srinivasan, Neomi Rao and Douglas Ginsburg of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia began hearing arguments in the suit filed by TikTok and ByteDance in May seeking an injunction barring the law from taking effect.
The judges questioned TikTok’s outside lawyer Andrew Pincus, who argued that the U.S. government had not demonstrated that TikTok poses national security risks and that the law violates the U.S. Constitution on several grounds including running afoul of First Amendment free speech protections.
“The law before this court is unprecedented, and its effect would be staggering,” Pincus told the judges. The law gives ByteDance until January 19 to sell or divest TikTok’s US assets or face a ban in the United States. Driven by worries among American lawmakers that China could access data on Americans or spy on them with the app, the U.S. Congress passed the measure with overwhelming support.
The White House has said it wants to see Chinese-based ownership ended on national security grounds, but not a ban on TikTok. Trump, who first unsuccessfully tried to ban TikTok in 2020, has now said if elected in November he would not allow TikTok to be banned.
The law prohibits app stores like Apple and Alphabet’s from offering TikTok and bars internet hosting services from supporting TikTok unless ByteDance divests TikTok by the deadline. Under the law, Biden could extend the deadline by three months if he certifies ByteDance is making significant progress toward a sale.
The case is playing out during the final weeks of the presidential campaign. Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris, his Democratic rival, are active on TikTok, seeking to court younger voters.
The Justice Department has said TikTok, under Chinese ownership, poses a serious national security threat because of its access to vast amounts of personal data on Americans, asserting China can covertly manipulate information that Americans consume via TikTok.
Indian Americans
Judge Srinivasan was born to Tamil parents. The family first moved to the United States in the late 1960s when his father became a Fulbright scholar at the University of California, Berkeley. After a brief return to India, they permanently immigrated to the US in 1971, when Srinivasan was four years old. They settled in Lawrence, Kansas, where his father was a professor of mathematics at the University of Kansas, and his mother, Saroja, taught at the Kansas City Art Institute before working at the University of Kansas’s computer science department. Srinivasan attended Stanford University, graduating in 1989 with a Bachelor of Arts degree with distinction. From 1989 to 1991, he worked as a management analyst for the San Mateo County manager’s office. Srinivasan later pursued a JD–MBA at Stanford Law School and the Stanford Graduate School of Business, graduating in 1995.
Rao was born in Detroit, to Zerin and Jehangir Narioshang Rao, Parsi physicians from India who immigrated to the United States in 1972. She grew up in loomfield Hills, Michigan, and attended Detroit Country Day School, graduating in 1991.
Rao went on to study ethics, politics & economics, and philosophy at Yale University, earning a Bachelor of Arts degree, cum laude, in 1995. She later pursued her legal education at the University of Chicago Law School. (with Reuters inputs)
