Photo-Illustration: Intelligencer; Photo: Getty Images
Last week, Akamai, a cloud computing company with a popular content-delivery network product, reported solid earnings that beat expectations. Soon after, its stock plunged by more than 20 percent and stayed there. What were investors so worried about? They were concerned, it turns out, about Akamai’s relationship with a much better-known company: TikTok. ByteDance, TikTok’s parent company, is one of Akamai’s biggest customers. One concern is that TikTok is working to become less reliant on contractors like Akamai. Another is weirder and bigger: TikTok is still sort of illegal, and working with TikTok is still sort of against the law.
To recap as quickly as possible: During his last term as president, Donald Trump helped lead a campaign to ban TikTok, starting with executive orders and ending during the Biden administration with a bipartisan law. Trump flipped on the issue during the 2024 campaign, but the law still stands. That is a problem for companies like Apple and Google, which host TikTok in their app stores and are directly implicated in the law as written. It’s also a problem for firms like Akamai, which provide infrastructure services that keep TikTok working. Trump issued an executive order asserting, with unclear authority, that the ban was paused, and the Justice Department has been offering TikTok’s partners assurances that they won’t be prosecuted.
This was enough to convince Akamai — with Oracle, Apple, Google, and others — to help restore TikTok, but the app and its partners are now stuck in a sort of legalish limbo. Is the plan for Vice-President J.D. Vance to oversee a sale? To just leave things as is and muddle along? To contrive some other arrangement and simply insist that it meets the law’s requirements? Apple and Google have stayed conspicuously quiet on the situation, successfully avoiding confrontation with the administration. Akamai, however, disclosed its risks — and to a great extent, theirs — in an annual report to the SEC. While “the Attorney General has since determined that our provision of services to this customer has not violated the law and that we can continue providing services,” the company said, “[i]t is difficult to predict whether the passed legislation will ultimately be enforced and whether any future judicial challenges brought against the executive order will be successful.” The company goes on:
Even though President Trump has extended the enforcement deadline for a ban on the Chinese application, there is no assurance that we will not be exposed to liability and we may be exposed to significant fines, litigation, indemnification claims, negative publicity, reputational harm, diversion of management attention, interruptions in our operations, financial loss and other similar harms by continuing to provide services to the Chinese application.
Some of these risks are fairly straightforward. The fines attached to the law are catastrophically severe, and the reason they’re not being levied is, basically, because Donald Trump and Pam Bondi say so. Business leaders frequently complain about regulatory uncertainty, arguing that it makes planning for the future and allocating resources more difficult. The TikTok situation both resembles and exceeds the sorts of things they’re usually referring to. It’s not just TikTok’s legal status that’s up in the air — it’s the entire relationship between different parts of the government and companies that operate on its watch and under its jurisdiction. Akamai’s “other similar harms,” in other words, involve questions like: Can the president unilaterally decide which laws are enforced? Can the president unilaterally write new laws? What is law, really, anyway?
This is a strange and miniaturizing lens for what appears to be a much broader potential constitutional crisis and isn’t likely to be the matter that ultimately triggers it (all eyes are on DOGE for that). Most people don’t know or care about Akamai, the TikTok ban was never especially popular, and the prospect of just sort of ignoring a strange and unprecedented law banning a popular app isn’t the sort of thing that’s likely to get too many people riled up. But as a matter of process, the situation is both surreal and potentially instructive. Among the risks implied but not elucidated in the filing is the possibility that as quickly and arbitrarily as the executive branch can choose not to enforce a law, it can choose to enforce it again. It’s easy enough to imagine what a motivated government led by a man who negotiates with threats might do with such leverage over a basic internet infrastructure firm like Akamai — without it, for example, TikTok couldn’t go back online. But it’s even easier to imagine what use such leverage might be when applied to Apple and Google, two of the largest and most influential tech companies on earth.
