The Supreme Court could announce the fate of TikTok Friday morning, two days before the popular video app could be effectively banned in the U.S. without the court’s intervention.
Although the justices are not scheduled to take the bench, the court said on its website Thursday it may release an opinion electronically at 10 a.m. Friday.
The court does not announce in advance which cases its deciding. But the justices are up against a Sunday deadline Congress set last year when passing a law requiring TikTok to cut ties with China.
Unless TikTok divests from ByteDance, its China-based parent company, app stores and internet hosting services can be fined for supporting TikTok.
The high court could put the law on hold, could decline to intervene for now or could definitively rule on whether the law is constitutional.
The justices seemed likely to uphold the law when it debated the issue for about two-and-a-half hours last week.
“Are we supposed to ignore the fact that the ultimate parent is, in fact, subject to doing intelligence work for the Chinese government?” Chief Justice John Roberts asked TikTok’s attorney.
If the court backs the law, attention will turn to President-elect Donald Trump.
Trump, who tried to ban TikTok during his first administration, has since promised to “save” the wildly popular platform, though it’s unclear how he could do so.
The art-of-the-deal president-elect had urged the Supreme Court to pause the ban to give him time to “negotiate a resolution.”
