David Shepardson, reporting for Reuters:

TikTok’s Chinese owner, ByteDance, said Thursday it signed binding agreements with three major investors to form a joint venture to operate TikTok’s U.S. app led by American and global investors in a bid to avoid a U.S. government ban, a significant step toward ending years of uncertainty.

The craziest aspect of this whole saga is that TikTok has been operating illegally since Trump took office. Not some sort of nitpicking technicality. The whole point of the PAFACA act was to ban TikTok in the US until and unless they were sold to American owners. No cloud service. No app store downloads. Trump directed the Justice Department simply not to enforce the law … and the biggest companies in the world just said OK, sure.

This just isn’t normal. There are always edge cases in the enforcement of any law. Political leanings affect priorities. Old laws are often ignored. But PAFACA was a brand new law, with bipartisan support, specifically written to target TikTok, and the Trump administration decided to just ignore it. This wouldn’t happen anywhere in Europe or in, say, Japan. And it wouldn’t have happened under any previous US administration, Democrat or Republican. It’s not the biggest issue or worst wrongdoing of the Trump 2.0 administration, but it’s clearest indication of their disregard for the rule of law.

See also: Techmeme’s roundup of news and commentary on the deal. (Karl Bode at Techdirt: “It’s Somehow The Shittiest Possible Outcome, Making Everything Worse”.)