Last weekend, the Supreme Court upheld a law banning TikTok from the United States, a first-of-its-kind bill that would effectively shut down an app with hundreds of millions of users. However, neither former President Biden nor newly sworn-in President Trump shows interest in enforcing the law. Does that mean there’s light at the end of the tunnel for DJI?
President Trump shared that he was willing to extend the deadline for ByteDance’s sale of the app by 90 days and intended not to penalize companies that don’t adhere to the law in the US. However, the legality of the chief executive of the government not enforcing a law that was passed overwhelmingly by Congress and upheld by the Supreme Court is murky at best.
DJI is in a similar, but longer, one-year countdown to a de facto ban if no agency conducts a security assessment of Chinese drones by the end of fiscal year 2025. Rival drone maker Autel would be in the same boat.
However, if one ban can be nearly skated with an executive order, what’s the possibility another could be delayed with the same tactic?
There are a few differences: First, the TikTok ban is the forced sale of a US company, TikTok US, by a Chinese media company, ByteDance, while DJI is a completely Chinese-owned and headquartered business. While banning the drones might hurt US users in their jobs as videographers, public safety, or in mapping and inspections, it won’t hurt any US drone manufacturers, which is a huge plus.
Second, the vast scale of TikTok’s influence dwarfs what DJI or Autel pilots will have. With over 170 million users, the app was able to put together a great grassroots movement of users to call congressmen and stage protests to stop the ban. However, even that didn’t work.
Finally, TikTok and social media as a whole have begun to play a large role in politics in recent years, now being considered to be the most opportune way to win elections in the future. While critics claimed TikTok and other sites were one of the reasons Trump lost reelection in 2020, it is now being claimed to be a main reason why he has returned to the office this year.
Alongside all of that, the need to win over the minds of new voters is more important than ever as the older Republicans base dwindles. Sadly, pandering to DJI and Autel drone users does not offer these luxuries.
We’ll also have to wait and see if there are any attempts to challenge President Trump’s delay of the TikTok ban, although that seems unlikely at the moment. So it seems DJI’s best road forward is to pass a security agency’s Chinese drone assessment order by Congress. The big question is whether that can take place in a timely manner or not.
Will that stop Congress from just implementing the full Countering CCP Drone Act in a future session? I’m unsure.
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