A federal judge in Los Angeles said on September 18, 2026 that he would refuse the government's unopposed request to terminate the 2019 consent order against Musical.ly, the app that became TikTok, putting in doubt the condition on which the final $100 million of a $400 million settlement depends.

In Short

In 2019, the company that later became TikTok agreed to a court order about how it handles information from children under 13, and some of its rules keep running until 2029. The US government and TikTok asked a judge to cancel that order as part of a new $400 million deal, with $100 million of the money only due if the order goes away. On September 18, 2026, the judge said he plans to say no, because nobody has shown him the rules are no longer needed.

A tentative ruling ahead of Monday's hearing

United States District Judge George H. Wu of the Central District of California issued a 16-page tentative ruling on Friday, September 18, 2026, in United States of America v. Musical.ly, et al., case number 2:19-cv-01439-GW-RAO. The document, filed as Document 19 on the docket, addresses the "Consent Motion to Vacate Stipulated Order" that the government filed as Docket No. 12. Its conclusion is stated in the first paragraph. "The Court has considered the Motion and, for the reasons stated herein, the Court would DENY it without prejudice."

The conditional phrasing matters. A tentative ruling in the Central District sets out the court's preliminary view before oral argument, and the hearing on the motion is scheduled for Monday, September 21, 2026 at 8:30 a.m. The denial, if adopted, would also be without prejudice, which leaves the government free to return with a fuller record.

The judge is not the one originally listed. When the Justice Department filed the motion on August 21, PPC Land reported the hearing as set before Judge Otis D. Wright II at 1:30 p.m., as the motion itself stated. According to the tentative ruling, the action was transferred to Judge Wu "for adjudication of the Government's Motion on August 25, 2026," under Docket No. 14. The transfer consolidates the matter before the judge who already presides over the separate 2024 enforcement action against ByteDance and TikTok and over the multidistrict litigation brought by minors, both of which carry his GW designation in their case numbers.

What the 2019 order still requires

The case began on February 27, 2019, when the United States, acting on behalf of the Federal Trade Commission, sued Musical.ly and Musical.ly, Inc. under the FTC Act and COPPA, the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act. Musical.ly was a social networking app on which users created, posted and watched videos set to music or other audio clips. According to the ruling's summary of that complaint, the government alleged that "[a] significant percentage of Musical.ly users [were] children under 13" and that the defendants "received thousands of complaints from parents that their child under 13 years old had created a Musical.ly App account without their knowledge."

Four categories of violation were pleaded: failing to give notice of privacy policies to children and parents, failing to obtain parental consent before collecting personal information, failing to delete children's information at a parent's request, and retaining that information longer than reasonably necessary.

The complaint arrived with a settlement already attached, a 17-page proposed stipulated order. Judge Wu observed the sequence dryly in a footnote: "Obviously, the parties had agreed upon a disposition of the lawsuit (subject to the Court's approval) before the action was even filed." Judge Wright entered that order on March 27, 2019.

Its obligations fall into three groups, and they bind the defendants "and their successors and assigns." The first was immediate: a permanent injunction against violating COPPA, deletion of personal information tied to then-existing underage accounts, and a $5.7 million civil penalty. The second is continuing. The defendants had to report on their deletion efforts, provide notice of corporate changes for ten years, and create compliance and data-collection records for ten years, retaining each record for five. Some of those duties, the ruling notes, remain in effect until 2029. The third group gives the government monitoring powers: it may demand additional reports under penalty of perjury, obtain discovery under the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure without further leave of court, and communicate directly with the defendants and their employees. Judge Wright closed the case in 2019 while retaining jurisdiction for the "construction, modification, and enforcement" of the order.

From Musical.ly to TikTok US

Corporate history does much of the work in the government's argument, so the ruling traces it closely. Musical.ly operated from 2014. ByteDance acquired the defendants in December 2017, and in August 2018 the Musical.ly app merged into TikTok. A footnote records the renaming that followed the consent order: Musical.ly became TikTok Ltd. in April 2019, and Musical.ly, Inc. became TikTok Inc. in May 2019.

On August 2, 2024, the United States filed a second action against those two entities and four related ByteDance and TikTok companies. PPC Land covered that complaint at the time. According to the ruling, the 2024 complaint alleged conduct beginning at least as early as March 2019, including allowing children under 13 to evade or bypass TikTok's age gate and collecting information from children using TikTok's "Kids Mode." It also alleged that TikTok Inc. and TikTok Ltd. violated the 2019 order itself by failing to keep records identifying affected accounts, documenting moderators' review of suspected child accounts and showing what remedial action was taken. That recordkeeping failure, the government said then, made the full scale of the violations hard to measure, although the available evidence indicated that millions of children had used TikTok.

Private suits followed. On April 3, 2025, the Judicial Panel on Multidistrict Litigation ordered pending and future cases transferred to the Central District of California as In re: TikTok, Inc., Minor Privacy Litigation, No. 2:25-ml-03144.

Congress, meanwhile, forced a change of owner. The Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act of 2024 gave the company until January 19, 2025 to cease US operations or complete a qualified divestiture, a deadline the Supreme Court upheld in January 2025. After a series of executive orders delaying enforcement, President Donald Trump approved a plan in September 2025 under Executive Order 14352, published at 90 Fed. Reg. 47219, under which ByteDance and its affiliates would own less than 20 percent of a new US joint venture. In January 2026, TikTok US announced that the divestiture was complete. PPC Land reported the joint venture's formation on January 22, 2026 with ByteDance retaining a 19.9 percent stake, a structure that leaves ByteDance's Pangle ad network outside the joint venture.

A settlement the court cannot see

According to the government's motion, as described in the ruling, the United States reached a settlement with TikTok US in August 2026 covering both COPPA actions. The settlement was not filed. The motion describes its terms only as a statement that "TikTok US paid a significant sum of money."

The figure is public nonetheless. On August 21, 2026, the Justice Department's Office of Public Affairs announced a $400 million settlement, with $300 million payable immediately and a further $100 million "upon entry of an order vacating a prior consent decree entered against TikTok's predecessor, Musical.ly." PPC Land detailed that split the day after the announcement. Judge Wu quotes the press release in a footnote and then sets it aside, noting that "it is the normal course for the federal judiciary to receive necessary factual material through direct filings with the court by the parties rather than through press releases issued to the public."

He does not set it aside entirely. The same footnote adds that the court "does wonder whether the press release is indicating that TikTok is already irrevocably bound to pay $300 million immediately (and without any further condition being met), but will only pay the additional $100 million should the 'prior consent decree entered against TikTok's predecessor, Musical.ly' be vacated."

The government's own papers do not settle the timing either. Footnote 13 sets two passages of the motion side by side. On page 3, "The settlement requires TikTok US to pay a substantial payment." On page 8, "TikTok US paid a significant sum of money as part of the settlement." One describes an obligation, the other a completed payment, and the ruling calls the motion "ambiguous" on whether the money has been paid or will be.

The 2024 case ended with even less on the record. The parties filed a two-sentence joint stipulation dismissing it with prejudice under Rule 41(a)(1)(A)(ii), without stating whether a settlement underpinned it, what its terms were, or whether the court should retain jurisdiction to enforce them. Judge Wu dismissed the case, as the rule required, but wrote at the time that "[g]iven the significant issues raised within this litigation and this Court's interest/curiosity in any resolution so suddenly reached by the parties, it is tempted to inquire of the parties [but] lacks the power to do so." The Musical.ly motion gives him that power, because vacating a final judgment requires his approval. The motion, the ruling adds, "does not indicate that there are any new injunctive provisions as to any of the defendants" to replace those in the 2019 order.

No deference to the executive

The government's lead argument was that a deferential standard governs unopposed motions in which the United States, with the consent of every party, seeks to sunset a consent decree binding a private company. It relied chiefly on SEC v. Randolph, a 1984 Ninth Circuit decision, for the proposition that courts should approve such requests unless they are "unfair, inadequate or unreasonable."

Judge Wu rejects the premise. Rufo v. Inmates of Suffolk County Jail, the Supreme Court's 1992 decision, states that "[n]o deference is involved" in the threshold question of whether a movant has shown a significant change justifying modification. Randolph, the ruling explains, concerned the initial approval of a consent decree in an insider trading matter, not its later modification or termination. Once entered, a consent decree is a judgment with res judicata effect. The ruling cites the Ninth Circuit's 2025 decision in Mi Familia Vota v. Petersen, in which the Supreme Court granted certiorari on June 29, 2026, for the principle that such a decree "may be reopened only to the extent that equity requires."

The separation-of-powers argument fares no better. The government invoked Seila Law's description of civil penalties as "a quintessentially executive power" and argued that refusing vacatur would interfere with it. The ruling answers that denial would neither compel the government to keep prosecuting nor restrict how it allocates resources or seeks penalties, noting that the 2024 case has already been dismissed. On the settlement's structure, the tentative ruling is direct: "The Government may condition its settlement on requesting vacatur, but that condition cannot displace the Court's independent obligation to decide whether vacatur is warranted under Rule 60(b)." A footnote goes further, observing that without the operative terms of the settlement, "it is impossible to determine whether the Government has, in fact, reasonably exercised its prosecutorial discretion."

Nor does the absence of opposition shift the burden. Citing Horne v. Flores, the ruling places it on the movant, and points to United States v. Essa Bank & Trust, a July 2025 decision in the Eastern District of Pennsylvania, as an example of a court refusing to terminate a consent order that no party opposed.

Rule 60(b)(6) folded into Rule 60(b)(5)

The government pleaded two routes: Rule 60(b)(5), which permits relief where a judgment has been satisfied or where applying it prospectively is no longer equitable, and Rule 60(b)(6), the catch-all for "any other reason that justifies relief." The second route requires "extraordinary circumstances" under the Supreme Court's 2025 decision in BLOM Bank SAL v. Honickman, and it is mutually exclusive with the first where the reasons offered fall within clauses one through five.

The government's 60(b)(6) arguments reduced, in the ruling's reading, to two assertions: that intervening developments justify vacatur and that the government acted promptly after them. Both, Judge Wu writes, fall squarely within 60(b)(5). He construes the motion accordingly and tests it under the first and third prongs of that rule, substantial compliance and changed circumstances.

Three changes, three rejections

The government identified three developments since 2019: the change in ownership, the compliance changes on the platform, and the monetary settlement. The ruling takes each in turn.

Ownership

Here the ruling finds nothing in the law that has changed the defendants' obligations. "COPPA applies without regard to whether the relevant operator is foreign- or domestically owned," Judge Wu writes, and the divestiture statute neither renders any provision of the order unlawful nor conflicts with it.

As a factual matter, the court finds the change was anticipated. The government described TikTok US as a "newly formed company" that is "thrice removed" from the legacy operations. But the 2019 order binds successors and assigns and requires ten years of sworn notice of corporate changes, including the "creation, merger, sale, or dissolution" of a covered entity. The parties may not have foreseen why ownership would change, the ruling says, but the order "certainly considered the possibility of a change in corporate structure or ownership."

A footnote turns the government's own pleading against it. Characterising the original defendants as mere "predecessor companies," the ruling notes, overlooks the 2024 complaint, which alleged that the defendants were simply renamed and that the renaming did not alter their obligations under the order.

The government's repeated references to new "compliance commitments" draw a pointed reply. "But a commitment to comply is not the same as having demonstrated actual compliance," the ruling states, citing a July 31, 2026 decision in United States v. Lakeland Bank in the District of New Jersey. Because the 2024 complaint alleged that the defendants' recordkeeping failures obscured the scale of the violations, the remaining recordkeeping and monitoring requirements are, in the court's words, "a means of measuring TikTok US's adherence to the very 'compliance commitments' upon which the Government now relies."

Platform changes

The factual record on the platform comes from a declaration by Camerin Hunt, a TikTok US employee, filed as Docket No. 12-1. According to the declaration as summarised in the ruling, TikTok now runs an age gate requiring every new user to enter a date of birth. Users could once create accounts with third-party credentials from services such as Google or Facebook without passing through that gate; that route has been eliminated. In 2023 and 2024, TikTok ran Age Gate 100, which required every user for whom it held no date of birth to pass through the gate, and banned those who failed to respond or entered an age under 13.

The court accepts that these changes occurred and finds they prove less than claimed. Self-declared age-gating was already in place when, according to the government's 2024 complaint, children evaded or bypassed it and TikTok collected personal information even from users who identified themselves as children. The same complaint alleged that the companies knew children routinely misstated their ages, and that they "possessed technology that estimated users' ages based on observable behavior but did not use that technology to identify and remove underage users." Holding tools for age assurance, in other words, is not the same as using them. "That TikTok has developed certain tools for achieving compliance with COPPA therefore does not guarantee that compliance will actually be achieved," the ruling concludes. A footnote records that the sufficiency of those tools "is still being litigated" in the minors' privacy MDL.

The settlement

The government characterised the settlement as a "durable remedy" under Horne. Judge Wu accepts that civil penalties carry some deterrent effect, citing the Supreme Court's decision in Friends of the Earth v. Laidlaw. Deterrence, however, is only part of what the order does. Its reporting, recordkeeping and monitoring provisions exist to detect violations and verify compliance, and "[a] monetary payment does not, without more, establish that those mechanisms are no longer necessary."

Without the settlement terms, the court "cannot determine what liabilities the payment resolves, whether the settlement imposes any prospective obligations, or how any such obligations would be enforced." The ruling's final paragraph of analysis states the result: "The Government has not shown that the changes in TikTok's ownership, the changes to the platform's compliance measures, or the recent settlement warrant termination of the Consent Order."

Why the ruling matters for the advertising market

For media buyers and publishers, the practical question behind any COPPA decree is who verifies what a platform says about its under-13 audience. When the motion was filed, PPC Land described the American settlement as the outlier, the one jurisdiction where TikTok's regulatory relationship was loosening. Judge Wu's tentative ruling, if adopted, reverses that direction, keeping sworn reporting, record retention and government interview rights in place until the order's remaining terms run out in 2029.

That places TikTok alongside rather than apart from the rest of the market. The FTC's 2026-2030 strategic plan, published on April 3, 2026, named children's online privacy an enforcement priority. In February 2026, the agency gave age-verification technology a conditional COPPA enforcement shield. The amended COPPA Rule reached its full compliance deadline on April 22, 2026, when YouTube published its audience-setting FAQ, and Google replaced its legacy child-directed ad request parameters with a single TFAT signal carrying a TEEN tier.

The ruling's reasoning on the age gate carries particular weight for audience data. The court's point is that a platform's claim to have tools is distinct from evidence that those tools work, and measurement research has made a similar argument from the buy side. A CIMM report covered by PPC Land found that presence-of-children data proves correct only 42% of the time. Records demonstrating how a platform identifies and removes under-13 accounts are precisely the kind of evidence that the 2019 order compels and that the government's motion would have ended.

Courts elsewhere have been moving in the same direction. On August 5, 2026, a federal judge in California denied preliminary injunctions sought by Meta, TikTok, Google and YouTube, holding that minors' algorithmic feeds are not protected speech. Weeks later, Meta's settlement with state attorneys general set daily time limits for teen accounts and attached contingency payments to whether Snap, TikTok and YouTube settle on comparable terms. In Europe, the Commission's preliminary findings under the Digital Services Act target TikTok's addictive design.

There is also a structural lesson about settlement design. Tying a quarter of a penalty to a judicial act that the parties do not control creates a risk that neither side can price with certainty. Could the government have anticipated this outcome? The ruling suggests it at least could have filed the terms. Its repeated complaint is not that vacatur is impossible but that the court has been asked to approve it blind.

What happens next

At the September 21 hearing, Judge Wu can adopt the tentative ruling, modify it, or take the matter under further submission. Because any denial would be without prejudice, the government could refile with the settlement agreement, evidence of actual compliance rather than commitments, or a proposal tailored more narrowly than full termination, which the ruling's reference to Rufo's "suitably tailored" requirement leaves open.

Whether TikTok's obligation to pay the remaining $100 million survives a denial depends on settlement terms that remain unfiled. If the Justice Department's public description holds, that sum falls due only on entry of a vacatur order, and the court has now said it is not yet prepared to enter one. The ruling's final footnote puts the gap plainly: "It is totally unclear whether the settlement agreement newly reached by the Government and all of the Defendant parties in these actions vitiates the need for the three principal categories of protective obligations that are delineated in the Consent Order."

Timeline

Summary

Who: United States District Judge George H. Wu of the Central District of California; the United States, acting on behalf of the Federal Trade Commission; and the defendants Musical.ly and Musical.ly, Inc., now TikTok Ltd. and TikTok Inc., whose US operations sit with TikTok US. A declaration from TikTok US employee Camerin Hunt supports the government's motion.

What: A 16-page tentative ruling stating that the court would deny, without prejudice, the government's unopposed motion to vacate the March 27, 2019 consent order. The court rejected a deferential standard of review, construed the motion under Rule 60(b)(5), and found that the ownership change, platform compliance changes and undisclosed settlement did not show substantial compliance or that the order's protections are no longer needed. The Justice Department's public announcement tied $100 million of a $400 million settlement to vacatur.

When: The tentative ruling was filed on September 18, 2026. The hearing is set for September 21, 2026 at 8:30 a.m. Some of the order's reporting and recordkeeping duties run until 2029.

Where: The United States District Court for the Central District of California in Los Angeles, case number 2:19-cv-01439-GW-RAO.

Why: The government argued that American ownership, new age-gating systems and a monetary settlement made continued supervision inequitable. The court found that COPPA applies regardless of ownership, that the order expressly anticipated corporate changes, that tools are not proof of compliance, and that it could not assess a settlement whose terms were never filed.