Good morning. 🏈 The Big Ten says it will move to a conference-only season for all fall sports, including football, due to the pandemic. As ESPN notes, it's "the first of the Power 5 conferences to make this type of a major change."

⚽ Premier League alert: NBCUniversal has announced that Peacock Premium will be the exclusive U.S. home for more than 175 Premier League matches during the 2020-21 season. (NBCUniversal is the parent company of NBC News.)

Join the Market: 🗞️ Newsletter | 🎙️ Podcast

Getty/Getty

🇨🇳 Foreign affairs

Can Trump ban TikTok?

Moving the Market: ByteDance chief Zhang Yiming is considering new steps to distance TikTok from China as President Donald Trump and other White House officials float the idea of banning the popular app in the United States. The stand-off comes amid fears that TikTok is sharing Americans' data with the Chinese government.

• "Senior executives are discussing options such as creating a new management board for TikTok or establishing a headquarters for the app outside of China to distance the app’s operations from China," WSJ's Liza Lin and Shan Li report.

• Reached for comment, Hilary McQuaide, TikTok's head of communications, told us ByteDance is "evaluating changes to the corporate structure of its TikTok business," and that it is "fully committed to protecting our users' privacy and security."

The big question: Could Trump actually ban TikTok? The short answer is that he can try, but he probably won't succeed.

• There are two ways he could try. He could sign an executive order to block TikTok's U.S. network ⁠— this is how India blocked the app — or he could try to order the Commerce Department to add ByteDance to the Entity List, effectively forcing Apple and Google to remove TikTok from iPhones and Android phones.

• Either one of these orders would face fierce legal opposition, and would likely be overturned. While the White House has banned Huawei and ZTE from doing business in the U.S., it has no legal justification for taking similar action against ByteDance, since it has yet to prove that the company shares U.S. user data with China.

• TikTok also vehemently denies the data-sharing charge. "We have never provided user data to the Chinese government, nor would we do so if asked," McQuaide said. She also noted that TikTok "is led by an American CEO, with hundreds of employees and key leaders across safety, security, product, and public policy here in the U.S."

Trump's other option, and the one he is more likely to pursue, is to try to force ByteDance to sell TikTok by leaning on the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, or CFIUS, which has been investigating ByteDance and its 2017 acquisition of Musical.ly, the company it used to launch TikTok in the U.S.

• If CFIUS were able to demonstrate that TikTok was sharing data with the Chinese government, it could try to force ByteDance to sell Musical.ly, thereby disbanding TikTok's U.S. business.

• Aneesh Chopra, who served as the first-ever Chief Technology Officer of the United States under President Barack Obama, told us "the CFIUS path is the only one that is possible."

What's next: This is where Zhang Yiming's new efforts to distance TikTok from China come in. By setting up an independent TikTok management board or creating a new global headquarters, ByteDance might start to convince a wary American government that it isn't acting as a conduit to deliver U.S. user data to Beijing.

• On that note, WSJ's Robert McMillan, Liza Lin and Shan Li have a handy explainer on the data TikTok collects, and why it may not be all that different from the data collected by Google and Facebook.

Bonus... Sign of the times: Tyler Blevins, aka Ninja, the wildly popular gamer, said yesterday that he had "deleted the TIK TOK app off all my devices. Hopefully a less intrusive company (data farming) that isn’t owned by China can recreate the concept legally."

Market Links

• Tim Sweeney gets $250m investment from Sony (VB)

• Jeff Shell may not get Peacock to Amazon, Roku (CNBC)

• Sundar Pichai faces profiling problem at Google (Bloomberg)

• Robert Allbritton struggles to get Protocol going (Digiday)

• Jeffrey Katzenberg says user flight isn't that bad (Bloomberg)

🌴 What's next: The weekend.

See you Monday.