After yesterday’s news that Microsoft’s bid for TikTok’s US business has been rejected, rival suitor Oracle offered an update on its plans. It’s “part of the proposal submitted by ByteDance to the Treasury Department over the weekend in which Oracle will serve as the trusted technology provider”.
Note that wording: Oracle is NOT buying TikTok. Instead, if the proposal is accepted, its cloud technology will be put to use to (in the words of TikTok’s separate statement) “resolve the Administration’s security concerns” about how American TikTok users’ data is stored and handled.
Will President Trump’s administration accept the proposal though? One Republican senator has already written to the chair of the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS) claiming that the proposal shows that “ByteDance has no intention whatsoever of relinquishing ultimate control of TikTok”, and calls for it to be rejected in favour of “a full sale of TikTok, its code, and its algorithm to a US company, so that the app can be rebuilt from the ground up”.
Techdirt’s blunt verdict is also worth reading: “Performative nonsense by Trump, who was mad that some kids made him look foolish on TikTok, combined with anti-Chinese racism, to push for a deal he had no legal right to push for, resulting in a weird scramble that doesn’t accomplish what he wanted, but does shift a bunch of money to some of his vocal and wealthy supporters…”
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