The deal is done. The questions are just starting.

So TikTok isn't getting banned! Hooray! American investors swooped in, Trump signed off, and 170 million users can keep doom-scrolling in peace. Crisis averted, right?

Well. Let's talk about what actually happened here, because I have questions. A lot of them.

We got TikTok USDS Joint Venture LLC, a very lawyerly name for a very lawyerly solution. American and international investors, including Oracle, Silver Lake, and the UAE's MGX, now own about 80 percent of this new entity. ByteDance keeps roughly 20 percent. On paper, it's majority-American-owned. On paper, the data stays here. On paper, content moderation happens under U.S. oversight.

Paper is lovely.

Ah, there it is. The beating heart of TikTok, that eerily prescient recommendation engine that knows you want to watch a third video about cottage cheese ice cream before you know it yourself, still belongs to ByteDance. The joint venture licenses it. It doesn't own it.

TikTok says it will "retrain and review" the algorithm under American eyes. What does that mean, exactly? Who's doing the reviewing? How deep does "retraining" go when you're essentially renting the core product from a company headquartered in Beijing?

These are not rhetorical questions. I genuinely don't know. And I suspect neither does anyone else, including the people who negotiated this deal.

Congressman John Moolenaar, who chairs the House China Committee, doesn't think so. He's been banging the drum that any structure keeping ByteDance's algorithm in the picture, even via licensing, leaves the door open for Chinese Communist Party influence. He's not wrong to raise this. The whole point of the original legislation was to sever the app from Chinese control. Did this accomplish that, or did it accomplish the appearance of that?

Look, I'm not a national security hawk by nature. But the statute that nearly killed TikTok specifically bars "cooperation" with ByteDance on the algorithm. Is licensing cooperation? The lawyers say no. The skeptics say come on.

TikTok USDS says it's responsible for securing U.S. user data, apps, and the algorithm through data-privacy and cybersecurity controls. Oracle is the technical backstop. This is Project Texas, basically, but with more equity shuffling.

Here's my question: If ByteDance still owns the algorithm and you're feeding it American data to "retrain" it, where exactly is the firewall? Data is the fuel. The algorithm is the engine. If someone else owns your engine and you're pouring your fuel into it, who's really driving the car?

ByteDance keeps those. The global ByteDance entities will continue running e-commerce, advertising, and marketing. Cross-border interoperability stays intact. Your American small business can still sell to someone in Jakarta. Creators can still go viral worldwide.

This is actually the part that makes sense. A purely domestic TikTok would be worth dramatically less, to creators, to advertisers, to everyone. The magic of TikTok isn't just the algorithm; it's the global audience. Cutting that off would have killed the product as surely as a ban.

For now? Sure. The legal cloud has lifted. You can plan campaigns without wondering if the app will vanish on January 19th.

But "for now" is doing a lot of work in that sentence. The governance remains murky. The algorithm independence remains theoretical. And here's the part that should keep CMOs up at night: if a future administration decides this deal doesn't actually comply with the law, we're back to ban talk. Again.

I'll tell you what I think. This deal was engineered to solve a political problem, not a national security one. The Trump administration wanted TikTok to survive. The President himself went from wanting to ban it to taking credit for saving it in the span of four years. American investors wanted a piece of the most valuable social platform on Earth. And ByteDance wanted to keep its golden goose producing eggs, even if it had to share the omelet.

Everyone got something. Whether the American public got what it was promised, a TikTok genuinely free from Chinese influence, remains very much an open question.

The app stays. The concerns stay too.