Credit: DANIEL CONSTANTE / Shutterstock
A federal judge in Los Angeles has tentatively refused to lift the consent decree imposed on Musical.ly, the app ByteDance bought and turned into TikTok. Vlad Savov and Josh Sisco reported the ruling for Bloomberg, which said Judge George H. Wu intends to keep oversight of the company’s privacy practices.
Wu wrote that the order imposed obligations neither TikTok nor the government had shown to be obviated. The ruling is tentative and can change.
Why $100m is riding on it
The Justice Department announced the $400m settlement in August, resolving a children’s privacy case it filed in 2024. The structure is the part worth reading closely.
TikTok pays $300m immediately. The remaining $100m falls due only on entry of an order vacating the Musical.ly decree.
So a quarter of the headline figure is contingent on a court agreeing to stop supervising the company. Read one way, the government negotiated an extra $100m if it could deliver that. Read the other, release from oversight was worth $100m to TikTok.
What the 2019 order actually did
The Federal Trade Commission settled with Musical.ly in February 2019 for $5.7m, then the largest children’s privacy penalty it had obtained. The money was the smaller part.
The decree required the company to comply with the children’s privacy law going forward, take offline every video made by a user under 13, and destroy improperly collected data or obtain parental consent for it.
Those are continuing obligations enforceable by a court. The sum now offered to end them is roughly seventeen times the original penalty.
The government argued for ending it
The Justice Department’s own announcement made the case. It said TikTok had undergone significant changes to its ownership, management, compliance functions and privacy practices since the complaint was filed.
Those developments, it argued, had materially advanced the public interests underlying the litigation. That is an enforcement agency telling a court its supervision is no longer necessary.
Wu has tentatively disagreed with the party that brought the case. TNW reported the settlement in August, including the conditional structure now in question.
Why a judge might be unpersuaded
The record since 2019 is not thin. A Texas judge found TikTok liable for telling parents its app was safe for children while knowing it was not.
There is also the question of what the company did with a fix it already had. A sealed document showed TikTok withheld a safety feature from 15 million US users by design, keeping them as a control group.
None of that is before Wu in this proceeding. It is the context in which a court decides whether a company’s compliance improvements have made judicial supervision redundant.
The money in proportion
$400m is one of the largest recoveries ever obtained under the children’s privacy statute, which says more about the statute than the sum. Penalties are capped per violation and the law dates from 1998.
Compare the exposure elsewhere. Meta agreed to pay up to $16.68bn to settle a youth safety case brought by 29 states, roughly forty times as much.
State consumer protection law and product liability claims have proved more expensive than the federal privacy statute written for the era of the family computer.
The European position is the opposite
Brussels is adding supervision rather than removing it. The European Commission has charged TikTok with failing to protect children under the Digital Services Act.
The structural difference matters more than the amounts. A DSA proceeding produces continuing obligations under a regulator, where a US settlement converts conduct into a payment and, if the court agrees, an exit.
That is why the tentative ruling is interesting beyond this case. The judge is the only actor in the American process holding the supervisory line.
What is not decided
TikTok has admitted nothing. The Justice Department states plainly that the resolved claims are allegations only and that there has been no determination of liability.
The $300m is not affected. If the vacatur is finally refused, the government collects less and the 2019 obligations continue.
What to watch
Watch whether the tentative ruling becomes final, and what the parties file in response. A tentative ruling is an invitation to argue, and both sides have a reason to.
Watch whether the compliance terms in the settlement are treated as a substitute for the decree. The government says they strengthen age controls and parental oversight, and a court that keeps the older order will have both running at once.
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