The United States filed a consent motion on August 21, 2026 asking a federal judge to erase the permanent injunction that has governed TikTok's predecessor since March 2019, arguing that American ownership and a monetary settlement have made continued judicial supervision unnecessary.

The Department of Justice announced a $400 million settlement with TikTok, ByteDance and affiliated entities on August 21, 2026, resolving litigation over compliance with the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act and its implementing regulations. Under the settlement, TikTok will pay $300 million immediately and a further $100 million upon entry of an order vacating the prior consent decree entered against its predecessor, Musical.ly. According to the Department of Justice, the settlement represents one of the largest recoveries ever obtained in a COPPA case.

Hours later, the mechanism arrived on the docket. A 28-page consent motion, signed by Associate Attorney General Stanley E. Woodward, Jr. and Deputy Associate Attorney General John Adams, asks the United States District Court for the Central District of California to vacate the Stipulated Order it entered on March 27, 2019 under Rules 60(b)(5) and 60(b)(6) of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure. The hearing is set for September 21, 2026 at 1:30 p.m. before United States District Judge Otis D. Wright II, in Courtroom 5D of the federal courthouse in Los Angeles. Defendants consent to the motion and, under Local Rule 7-15, have waived oral argument.

The number the filing does not name

The court document never states the figure. It refers instead to "a substantial payment in connection with the allegations in these cases" and, later, to "a significant sum of money" and "a significant amount of money for liabilities directed at conduct by predecessor companies." The $400 million total, and its split into an immediate tranche and a conditional one, comes from the Department's public announcement rather than from the brief.

That gap is not cosmetic. The $100 million second tranche is contingent on entry of the vacatur order, which means the government's motion and the government's recovery are financially linked. The brief presents vacatur as an equitable judgment about changed circumstances. The payment structure presents it as a negotiated term with a price attached. Both descriptions are accurate; only one is in front of Judge Wright.

The certificate of compliance records that the brief contains 5,553 words. The document carries case number 2:19-cv-1439-ODW-RAO in its caption while the electronic filing stamp reads 2:24-cv-06535-GW-RAO, the docket of the separate 2024 action against ByteDance.

What the 2019 order actually required

The original complaint was filed on February 27, 2019, on referral from the Federal Trade Commission. It concerned Musical.ly, a video app that launched in 2014 and required personal and contact information at registration. Until October 2016, the app carried a "my city" tab that listed other users within a 50-mile radius, whom a user could then follow or direct-message. From July 2017, the app began requesting age information at registration and blocking users who indicated they were under 13.

The complaint alleged that a significant percentage of users were children under 13, that the defendants were aware of it, and that they had received thousands of complaints from parents whose children had created accounts without their knowledge. Five specific COPPA Rule violations were pleaded: failure to give users notice of data collection practices, failure to give parents notice, failure to obtain parental consent, failure to delete personal information on request, and retention beyond what was reasonably necessary.

The Stipulated Order that followed on March 27, 2019 was not a simple fine. It contained a permanent injunction against violating the COPPA Rule, an order to delete children's personal information, a monetary judgment of $5.7 million, short-term reporting requirements, long-term compliance reporting including sworn compliance reports for ten years, long-term recordkeeping obligations, and compliance monitoring that entitled the government to interview any employee or affiliated person who agreed to be interviewed. According to the filing, the $5.7 million judgment was almost two times larger than the highest COPPA civil penalty ever paid at that point.

Roughly two and a half years of that ten-year reporting obligation would remain if the order survived. The motion would end it now.

The argument: obey the law, but without the decree

The brief's central proposition is stated plainly near the top: defendants must follow the law whether or not the Stipulated Order exists, and the remaining requirements in that order go beyond what the law itself requires. Those requirements, the United States argues, now bind "a newly formed company with new technologies and new compliance commitments" to obligations Congress never imposed.

Two standards are offered, in the alternative. The primary one draws on SEC v. Randolph, under which a court reviewing an unopposed government request to sunset a consent decree should approve it unless doing so would be "unfair, inadequate or unreasonable." The fallback applies the stricter four-part test used in contested institutional-reform cases: a significant change in factual conditions after execution, one that was not anticipated, that makes continued compliance detrimental to the public interest, with a suitably tailored remedy. The brief argues the United States satisfies each condition, and adds a third route under Rule 60(b)(6), described in Ninth Circuit case law as a reservoir of equitable power.

Running underneath all three is a separation-of-powers claim. Enforcement priorities belong to the executive branch, the filing argues, and a court reviewing a consent decree should refrain from second-guessing that judgment. Continued supervision, it adds, "could deprive the federal government of control over its discretionary functions."

The compliance record TikTok put on the docket

The factual foundation for the changed-circumstances argument is a sworn declaration from Camerin Hunt, a TikTok employee, attached as Exhibit A. It is the most operationally detailed part of the filing and the part most relevant to anyone buying audience on the platform.

According to the declaration, TikTok employs an age gate requiring every joining user to enter a date of birth. The platform once allowed account creation using third-party credentials from services such as Google or Facebook, bypassing that gate entirely; that policy has been eliminated, and all users must now pass through TikTok's own gate. To close the historical gap, TikTok ran an initiative in 2023 and 2024 called Age Gate 100, described in the declaration as prompting every user for whom TikTok held no date of birth to pass through the age gate. Users who did not respond, or who entered an age under 13, were banned.

Behind the gate sits an age-moderation layer aimed at users who lied. The declaration states that TikTok uses artificial intelligence to "scan biographies, captions, on-screen text, audio subtitles, and direct messages to surface potential underage signals." Flagged accounts pass through two levels of human review. The company, according to the declaration, "has devoted an increasing amount of resources to such efforts and today employs hundreds of personnel training in underage moderation," and "systematically bans and deletes the data of tens of thousands of suspected under-13 accounts."

No figure is given for how many of those bans are correct, how many under-13 users remain, or what the false-positive rate looks like for teenagers wrongly caught by a scan of their captions and messages. Those numbers would be the ones an advertiser assessing audience quality would want. They are not in the record.

The filing's strongest factual argument is not about age gates at all. It is about who owns the company.

The conduct at issue ran from 2014 to 2018 and belonged to a foreign-owned business. ByteDance acquired the Musical.ly defendants in December 2017, and in August 2018 the app was merged into TikTok. On August 2, 2024, the United States sued ByteDance and TikTok over similar allegations, claiming they knowingly allowed children under 13 to create accounts, collected extensive data from them, and failed to honour parental deletion requests. PPC Land reported on that complaint the following day, including the allegation that human reviewers spent an average of five to seven seconds assessing whether an account belonged to a child.

What followed was statutory rather than judicial. Congress enacted the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act in 2024. In September 2025, Executive Order 14,352 set out the terms of a qualified divestiture, requiring that the resulting entity be majority-owned and controlled by United States persons, with ByteDance and its affiliates holding less than 20 percent. On January 22, 2026, TikTok USDS Joint Venture LLC announced its formation with ByteDance retaining a 19.9 percent stake, a structure PPC Land has tracked through its effects on seller and storefront operations and on the corporate boundary between the joint venture and Pangle, which sits outside it. The filing cites a TikTok announcement dated January 23, 2026 describing a mandate to "secure U.S. user data, apps and the algorithm through comprehensive data privacy and cybersecurity measures."

The legal consequence the United States draws from this is narrow and specific. TikTok US is bound by the 2019 order only through predecessor liability. It is, in the filing's phrase, a successor to Musical.ly "thrice removed." An order aimed at a Chinese-owned company's 2014 conduct now constrains an American joint venture that did not exist when the conduct occurred.

Whether that reasoning holds is a question the court will decide on September 21. Predecessor liability is ordinarily the mechanism that prevents corporate restructuring from erasing obligations. Here it is being characterised as the reason the obligation should end.

What survives

The brief is explicit that vacatur touches only the decree. COPPA, the COPPA Rule and the FTC Act all continue to bind TikTok US, and the filing says so directly: vacatur "cannot disturb COPPA, the COPPA Rule, or the FTC ACT - all of which TikTok US must sill follow." The typographical errors appear in the original.

What disappears is the supervision layer: the sworn compliance reports, the recordkeeping requirements, the government's interview rights, and the contempt exposure that attaches to violating a court order rather than a statute. A COPPA violation after vacatur is a new enforcement action requiring new litigation. A COPPA violation under the decree was contempt.

Why this matters to advertisers

The under-13 population on a platform is not an abstraction for media buyers. It determines which inventory can carry personalised advertising, which signals must be suppressed, and where measurement stops.

That constraint has been tightening on every side. The amended COPPA Rule took effect on June 23, 2025 with a full compliance deadline of April 22, 2026, the date on which YouTube published a formal FAQ explaining why every creator must classify content as made for children or not. Google replaced its legacy child and under-age signals with a unified TFAT tag carrying a dedicated TEEN tier. The FTC issued a policy statement on February 25, 2026 granting age-verification technology a conditional enforcement shield. Enforcement produced consequences in parallel: Disney agreed to pay $10 million in September 2025 over content designation on YouTube, and in the United Kingdom the ICO fined Reddit £14.47m and MediaLab £247,590 for children's data failures.

Measurement carries the cost. Research covered by PPC Land found that presence-of-children data proves correct only 42% of the time, and that kids spend more than two hours a day on TikTok while the under-13 audience on major video platforms remains largely invisible to standard demographic reporting. A settlement that removes external verification of a platform's age controls does not change the underlying audience. It changes who checks.

TikTok's other legal exposure is unaffected. The European Commission preliminarily found the platform in breach of the Digital Services Act on February 6, 2026 over infinite scroll, autoplay, push notifications and personalised recommender systems, with potential penalties reaching 6% of global annual turnover. That followed October 2025 preliminary findingsagainst TikTok and Meta on transparency obligations. In California, a federal judge denied preliminary injunction motions from Meta, TikTok, Google and YouTube on August 5, 2026, holding that ranking by predicted engagement is not editorial judgment. A day later, a New Mexico court entered a $567 million abatement order against Meta over teen harm.

Against that backdrop, the American settlement is the outlier: the one jurisdiction where the regulatory relationship is loosening rather than tightening. Advertisers running family-adjacent categories on TikTok, and agencies writing compliance language into insertion orders, now face a platform whose age controls are documented by the company itself rather than audited under court order.

What happens on September 21

Judge Wright can grant the motion, deny it, or ask for more. Nothing in the record suggests opposition; the defendants consent, no third party has appeared, and the brief argues at length that the court's role is to check procedural propriety rather than to reweigh the executive's judgment.

If the order is entered, the second $100 million tranche becomes payable and the last formal supervision of TikTok's children's privacy practices in the United States ends seven and a half years after it began. If it is not, the government keeps $300 million and the decree keeps running until 2029.

Timeline

Summary

Who: The United States, represented by Associate Attorney General Stanley E. Woodward, Jr. and Deputy Associate Attorney General John Adams, moving against Musical.ly and Musical.ly, Inc., whose successor is TikTok USDS Joint Venture LLC. A declaration from TikTok employee Camerin Hunt supports the motion. Judge Otis D. Wright II will decide it.

What: A $400 million settlement resolving COPPA litigation against TikTok, ByteDance and affiliated entities, paired with a consent motion to vacate the March 27, 2019 Stipulated Order under Rules 60(b)(5) and 60(b)(6). Payment splits into $300 million immediately and $100 million upon entry of the vacatur order. Vacatur would end a permanent injunction, ten-year sworn compliance reporting, recordkeeping obligations and government interview rights, while leaving COPPA, the COPPA Rule and the FTC Act in force.

When: The Department of Justice announced the settlement on August 21, 2026, the same day the 28-page consent motion was filed. The hearing is scheduled for September 21, 2026 at 1:30 p.m.

Where: The United States District Court for the Central District of California, Courtroom 5D of the federal courthouse in Los Angeles.

Why: The government argues that the 2019 order addressed conduct by a foreign-owned predecessor between 2014 and 2018, that the divestiture required by the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act produced a new American-controlled entity in January 2026, and that a monetary penalty plus documented age-assurance systems constitute a durable remedy making indefinite judicial supervision inequitable and no longer in the public interest.