13 ms·

ByteDance won't sell TikTok U.S. operations to Oracle or Microsoft: CGTN

110 points by fhrow4484 6y ago

peteretep 6y ago
> and decided to pursue a partnership with Oracle in hopes of avoiding a U.S. ban while appeasing the Chinese government This makes more sense if you replace "Oracle" with "company run by a Trump ally". I'd argue this makes Trump's "hard on China" start to look pretty fishy, but I suspect anyone who cares made up their mind about who to vote for a long time ago.
- iamnotarobotman 6y ago
  Would it be fair to say 'Twitter and Facebook are associated with the Democrats given the censorship and bias against right-leaning accounts?' It wouldn't. This is how silly this guilt by association fallacy is when you associate one's views with the entire views of the company because the chairman is a 'Trump supporter'. Now you have another so called 'report' directly contradicting the entire matter of selling to Oracle. [0] An official statement only confirms or denies these 'reports'. We only know of Microsoft's official statement and not Oracle's or Bytedance's so spreading such 'rumours' or so called 'direct sources' tells us that we should wait for official statements rather than jumping into ultimate conclusions. [0] https://news.cgtn.com/news/2020-09-14/ByteDance-rejects-Microsoft-s-bid-for-TikTok-TLLgABWx56/index.html https://news.cgtn.com/news/2020-09-14/ByteDance-rejects-Micr...
  - KineticLensman 6y ago
    > another so called 'report' directly contradicting the entire matter of selling to Oracle. Not selling isn't a contradiction. The earlier story was that Oracle would become a US tech partner who host TikTok, not that they would own it.
- pjc50 6y ago
  Supporting evidence: https://www.businessinsider.com/oracle-billionaire-larry-ellison-is-fundraising-for-donald-trump-2020-2?r=US&IR=T https://www.businessinsider.com/oracle-billionaire-larry-ell... Everybody does it, but I still think that businesses fundraising for political activity should basically be regarded as corruption.
  - iamnotarobotman 6y ago
    > Everybody does it, but I still think that businesses fundraising for political activity should basically be regarded as corruption. Right. So perhaps Mike Bloomberg is corrupt then. Oh dear. Supporting evidence: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/sep/13/mike-bloomberg-spend-100m-biden-trump-florida https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/sep/13/mike-bloombe... You can also see how using 'guilt by association' here makes no sense with Oracle if we keep thinking that 'Bloomberg LP is supporting Biden.'
    - ceejayoz 6y ago
      Yes, Bloomberg is corrupt. He tried to outright purchase the Democratic nomination, and subsequently dangled all sorts of promises of political spending in further attempts to buy influence.
    - christophilus 6y ago
      Bloomberg is corrupt. In addition to his attempt at purchasing a nomination, his publication stopped writing about Xi’s family wealth in order to sell more terminals in China.
    - dragonwriter 6y ago
      > So perhaps Mike Bloomberg is corrupt then. Yes, perhaps. Perhaps also the Pacific Ocean has some water and perhaps the sky is above the land and perhaps the Sun rises is the East. Does anyone not think Bloomberg is corrupt? > You can also see how using 'guilt by association' here makes no sense with Oracle if we keep thinking that 'Bloomberg LP is supporting Biden.' But the argument here wasn't guilt by association—that some one was bad because they were associated with someone else that is bad. It was that an action was taken to appeal to Trump by dealing with a firm known to be associated with and presumed to be favored by him. No one is guilty by association in that presentation.
    - pjc50 6y ago
      Yes, having a billionaire news magnate buy his way into the Democrat party is also corrupt. (indeed, this is why Trump's "drain the swamp" pitch was so effective, despite being even more corrupt!)
3327 6y ago
Shut them down.
- Udik 6y ago
  Actually, I wonder how 80 million active users would take it if one day their app stopped working, because Trump wanted it, a few days or weeks before the elections. It might not skew votes too much, but 80 million is a lot of people.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - tonyedgecombe 6y ago
    I thought it was mostly kids on TikTok.
villgax 6y ago
At this point it's just hilarious how this issue in the name of national security for TikTok is of concern but Facebook is not similar concern for other countries.
- leto_ii 6y ago
  This is the privilege of being the only actual superpower in the world. Your national interest extends all over the world and other nations don't get to have a say in it. American control of the internet is a concern for other nations, and the ones that can do something about it (China, Russia) are working hard to become independent of it. Most nations however just get to pick what bubble they want to live in - the US one, the Chinese one, to a lesser extent the Russian one.
  - Arnt 6y ago
    And others' interests do not extend? Anyway, I question the factualality of the superpower status. The US wasn't able to impose its will on even a minor warlord such as Mohammed Farrah Aidid. He stayed, the US soldiers withdrew.
    - leto_ii 6y ago
      > And others' interests do not extend? Other countries simply don't have the power to project their interests globally. For example Iran doesn't assassinate top US generals with drones. I imagine they would like to, they just can't. If it ever became apparent that other countries were on track to developing tools that the US can't control, the US would simply strike preemptively (this applies to weapons, as well as economic matters - TikTok, Huawei etc.). > Anyway, I question the factualality of the superpower status. The US wasn't able to impose its will on even a minor warlord such as Mohammed Farrah Aidid. He stayed, the US soldiers withdrew. I don't know the case of Aidid specifically, so I can't comment on it. I do know however that if the US is interested enough in something to happen, that thing will happen almost certainly, almost anywhere. I can only assume that Somalia was not that important for US interests.
throwaway4good 6y ago
AFAIK TikTok international is running on AWS. How does moving to Oracle make things more secure?
- ulfw 6y ago
  It makes Donald Trump look like he has done something.
  - saiya-jin 6y ago
    As mentioned elsewhere it makes his donor and friend Larry Ellison get some currently-hot business. I mean there are always pretty clear reasons why business people send money directly to politicians
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- deathhand 6y ago
  Running on AWS and having control of the CI/CD pipeline are two different things. We don't expect Oracle to conduct espionage.
- searchableguy 6y ago
  See zoom moving to Oracle cloud a few months ago. https://www.oracle.com/corporate/pressrelease/zoom-selects-oracle-to-support-growth-042820.html https://www.oracle.com/corporate/pressrelease/zoom-selects-o...
  - onetimemanytime 6y ago
    US is officially behaving like a banana republic, note the "officially": Trump Lends Support To Billionaire Donor Larry Ellison As He Backs Oracle's Bid For TikTok https://www.forbes.com/sites/siladityaray/2020/08/19/trump-lends-support-to-billionaire-donor-larry-ellison-as-he-backs-oracles-bid-for-tiktok https://www.forbes.com/sites/siladityaray/2020/08/19/trump-l...
jpkeisala 6y ago
If Whitehouse is pressuring TikTok to sell US TikTok to US company does that mean US citizens will have it's own TikTok ?
- swiley 6y ago
  I thought we already did?
  - jpkeisala 6y ago
    Aren't you able to see people outside of USA today in TikTok?
mrkramer 6y ago
If Oracle really acquires TikTok's US operations what will be business model of TikTok? I guess not advertising because Oracle criticized Google's adverting business model by buying billboards that said “Internet companies betrayed you”, internet companies "sold your most sensitive and personal information for $125 billion in advertising revenue last year.” [1] [1]https://www.bizjournals.com/sanjose/news/2017/12/06/oracle-vs-google-lobbying-pr-campaign-goog.html https://www.bizjournals.com/sanjose/news/2017/12/06/oracle-v...
- bhouston 6y ago
  Honestly I was looking forward to seeing what Oracle does with tiktok. Such a weird unnatural combination. If oracle was smart they would leave it alone as much as possible but I suspect they wouldn't be able to help themselves.
- roneythomas6 6y ago
  Oracle is a big player in ad tech. Some of its notable acquisitions are Datalogix, Moat. TikTok has a pretty good algorithm for figuring what content you like. Unlike fb and ig you don't even need to have a account to use tiktok.
  - mrkramer 6y ago
    Oracle is providing business solutions like data analytics but still they are not directly selling ads like Google and Facebook are. And btw TikTok said they are not willing to sell their "algorithm". https://www.zdnet.com/article/bytedance-wont-allow-tiktoks-algorithm-to-be-part-of-a-sale-report/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/bytedance-wont-allow-tiktoks-a... https://www.scmp.com/economy/china-economy/article/3101362/tiktoks-algorithm-not-sale-bytedance-tells-us-source https://www.scmp.com/economy/china-economy/article/3101362/t...
- tonyedgecombe 6y ago
  I don't know but you can look forward to becoming an Oracle Certified TikTok Master.
GEBBL 6y ago
Whew, Microsoft really escaped something there. I don’t think tiktok would have been a good fit for microsoft. They are an even worse fit for oracle.
vergessenmir 6y ago
I'm not sure how I feel about any of this. China is a legitimate security concern. The practices of that government has always been predatory around I.P and privacy. But the US government has been very thin on details on how serious the security concern actually is, and whether moving the infrastructure to an American owned company would actually change anything. The US appears to regulate data protection under a number of sector specific regulatory acts. It will be difficult to restrict the flow of data between US and China without a recognition of social media as a sector that needs its own regulation without it affecting Google and Facebook. Considering how powerful US tech companies are I can't see this sale making Americans safer through a legal framework.
- harryf 6y ago
  > China is a legitimate security concern. The practices of the government has always been predatory around I.P and privacy. The same could be said of the US, perhaps with the exception of I.P. where there hasn’t been a real need to date. Either way, if this leads to a ban of TikTok in the US, it’s going to be interesting to see how boards of teenagers react.
  - batsigner 6y ago
    The same could be said of Germany.
  - rvz 6y ago
    > Either way, if this leads to a ban of TikTok in the US, it’s going to be interesting to see how boards of teenagers react. Take India for example. Either of the following is happening: Users use VPNs to bypass the ban, Influencers move to Triller, Instagram Reels, and YouTube Shorts, or just give up altogether. What's certain is like all social networks, the teens just find the next craze which the celebrities and influencers are. Even better if it makes them more money than before. I won't be surprised to see the same happening in the US.
- tjansen 6y ago
  "But the US government has been very thin on details on how serious the security concern actually is" Even assuming that there are no vulnerabilities in Android and iOS, the Tiktok app has access to video, audio and GPS. If the infrastructure would be hosted in the US and the Tiktok source code has been reviewed, there would still be the possibility that the Tiktop application has a hidden backdoor that allows a third party to execute code within the context of the app and to locate a user (at least when the app is open) and listen to any conversion she has.
NicoJuicy 6y ago
What worries me is this: > Investors in TikTok’s parent company are reportedly pushing for Trump-friendly Oracle to acquire the viral-video app The investors, which include Sequoia Capital and General Atlantic, see Oracle’s bid as their best bet to get “a piece of the action” in TikTok, and recognize the advantages of the company’s political ties to the Trump administration, according to The Journal. Source: https://www.businessinsider.nl/tiktok-acquisition-bytedance-investors-back-oracle-microsoft-sequoia-general-atlantic-2020-8 https://www.businessinsider.nl/tiktok-acquisition-bytedance-... Although i don't think Oracle is capable though. They probably only want it to run it on their cloud.
sudoaza 6y ago
But the free market!!!
AznHisoka 6y ago
If Oracle is just a tech partner, then how can they be 100% sure that Bytedance is going to replace all their infrastructure with Oracle’s? Bytedance could easily send spoof data to them. In addition, since replacing infrastructure takes a lot of time, they could easily keep on delaying things until the election to see if Biden is voted into the White House.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
rektide 6y ago
Hail overlord of social media moderation, Larry Ellison.
throw7 6y ago
"TikTok is an amazing thing. Whatever it may be." - D. Trump, USPOTUS

110 points by fhrow4484 6y ago

> and decided to pursue a partnership with Oracle in hopes of avoiding a U.S. ban while appeasing the Chinese government This makes more sense if you replace "Oracle" with "company run by a Trump ally". I'd argue this makes Trump's "hard on China" start to look pretty fishy, but I suspect anyone who cares made up their mind about who to vote for a long time ago.

iamnotarobotman 6y ago
Would it be fair to say 'Twitter and Facebook are associated with the Democrats given the censorship and bias against right-leaning accounts?' It wouldn't. This is how silly this guilt by association fallacy is when you associate one's views with the entire views of the company because the chairman is a 'Trump supporter'. Now you have another so called 'report' directly contradicting the entire matter of selling to Oracle. [0] An official statement only confirms or denies these 'reports'. We only know of Microsoft's official statement and not Oracle's or Bytedance's so spreading such 'rumours' or so called 'direct sources' tells us that we should wait for official statements rather than jumping into ultimate conclusions. [0] https://news.cgtn.com/news/2020-09-14/ByteDance-rejects-Microsoft-s-bid-for-TikTok-TLLgABWx56/index.html https://news.cgtn.com/news/2020-09-14/ByteDance-rejects-Micr...
- KineticLensman 6y ago
  > another so called 'report' directly contradicting the entire matter of selling to Oracle. Not selling isn't a contradiction. The earlier story was that Oracle would become a US tech partner who host TikTok, not that they would own it.
pjc50 6y ago
Supporting evidence: https://www.businessinsider.com/oracle-billionaire-larry-ellison-is-fundraising-for-donald-trump-2020-2?r=US&IR=T https://www.businessinsider.com/oracle-billionaire-larry-ell... Everybody does it, but I still think that businesses fundraising for political activity should basically be regarded as corruption.
- iamnotarobotman 6y ago
  > Everybody does it, but I still think that businesses fundraising for political activity should basically be regarded as corruption. Right. So perhaps Mike Bloomberg is corrupt then. Oh dear. Supporting evidence: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/sep/13/mike-bloomberg-spend-100m-biden-trump-florida https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/sep/13/mike-bloombe... You can also see how using 'guilt by association' here makes no sense with Oracle if we keep thinking that 'Bloomberg LP is supporting Biden.'
  - ceejayoz 6y ago
    Yes, Bloomberg is corrupt. He tried to outright purchase the Democratic nomination, and subsequently dangled all sorts of promises of political spending in further attempts to buy influence.
  - christophilus 6y ago
    Bloomberg is corrupt. In addition to his attempt at purchasing a nomination, his publication stopped writing about Xi’s family wealth in order to sell more terminals in China.
  - dragonwriter 6y ago
    > So perhaps Mike Bloomberg is corrupt then. Yes, perhaps. Perhaps also the Pacific Ocean has some water and perhaps the sky is above the land and perhaps the Sun rises is the East. Does anyone not think Bloomberg is corrupt? > You can also see how using 'guilt by association' here makes no sense with Oracle if we keep thinking that 'Bloomberg LP is supporting Biden.' But the argument here wasn't guilt by association—that some one was bad because they were associated with someone else that is bad. It was that an action was taken to appeal to Trump by dealing with a firm known to be associated with and presumed to be favored by him. No one is guilty by association in that presentation.
  - pjc50 6y ago
    Yes, having a billionaire news magnate buy his way into the Democrat party is also corrupt. (indeed, this is why Trump's "drain the swamp" pitch was so effective, despite being even more corrupt!)

3327 6y ago

Shut them down.

Udik 6y ago
Actually, I wonder how 80 million active users would take it if one day their app stopped working, because Trump wanted it, a few days or weeks before the elections. It might not skew votes too much, but 80 million is a lot of people.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- tonyedgecombe 6y ago
  I thought it was mostly kids on TikTok.

villgax 6y ago

At this point it's just hilarious how this issue in the name of national security for TikTok is of concern but Facebook is not similar concern for other countries.

leto_ii 6y ago
This is the privilege of being the only actual superpower in the world. Your national interest extends all over the world and other nations don't get to have a say in it. American control of the internet is a concern for other nations, and the ones that can do something about it (China, Russia) are working hard to become independent of it. Most nations however just get to pick what bubble they want to live in - the US one, the Chinese one, to a lesser extent the Russian one.
- Arnt 6y ago
  And others' interests do not extend? Anyway, I question the factualality of the superpower status. The US wasn't able to impose its will on even a minor warlord such as Mohammed Farrah Aidid. He stayed, the US soldiers withdrew.
  - leto_ii 6y ago
    > And others' interests do not extend? Other countries simply don't have the power to project their interests globally. For example Iran doesn't assassinate top US generals with drones. I imagine they would like to, they just can't. If it ever became apparent that other countries were on track to developing tools that the US can't control, the US would simply strike preemptively (this applies to weapons, as well as economic matters - TikTok, Huawei etc.). > Anyway, I question the factualality of the superpower status. The US wasn't able to impose its will on even a minor warlord such as Mohammed Farrah Aidid. He stayed, the US soldiers withdrew. I don't know the case of Aidid specifically, so I can't comment on it. I do know however that if the US is interested enough in something to happen, that thing will happen almost certainly, almost anywhere. I can only assume that Somalia was not that important for US interests.

throwaway4good 6y ago

AFAIK TikTok international is running on AWS. How does moving to Oracle make things more secure?

ulfw 6y ago
It makes Donald Trump look like he has done something.
- saiya-jin 6y ago
  As mentioned elsewhere it makes his donor and friend Larry Ellison get some currently-hot business. I mean there are always pretty clear reasons why business people send money directly to politicians
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
deathhand 6y ago
Running on AWS and having control of the CI/CD pipeline are two different things. We don't expect Oracle to conduct espionage.
searchableguy 6y ago
See zoom moving to Oracle cloud a few months ago. https://www.oracle.com/corporate/pressrelease/zoom-selects-oracle-to-support-growth-042820.html https://www.oracle.com/corporate/pressrelease/zoom-selects-o...
- onetimemanytime 6y ago
  US is officially behaving like a banana republic, note the "officially": Trump Lends Support To Billionaire Donor Larry Ellison As He Backs Oracle's Bid For TikTok https://www.forbes.com/sites/siladityaray/2020/08/19/trump-lends-support-to-billionaire-donor-larry-ellison-as-he-backs-oracles-bid-for-tiktok https://www.forbes.com/sites/siladityaray/2020/08/19/trump-l...

jpkeisala 6y ago

If Whitehouse is pressuring TikTok to sell US TikTok to US company does that mean US citizens will have it's own TikTok ?

swiley 6y ago
I thought we already did?
- jpkeisala 6y ago
  Aren't you able to see people outside of USA today in TikTok?

mrkramer 6y ago

If Oracle really acquires TikTok's US operations what will be business model of TikTok? I guess not advertising because Oracle criticized Google's adverting business model by buying billboards that said “Internet companies betrayed you”, internet companies "sold your most sensitive and personal information for $125 billion in advertising revenue last year.” [1] [1]https://www.bizjournals.com/sanjose/news/2017/12/06/oracle-vs-google-lobbying-pr-campaign-goog.html https://www.bizjournals.com/sanjose/news/2017/12/06/oracle-v...

bhouston 6y ago
Honestly I was looking forward to seeing what Oracle does with tiktok. Such a weird unnatural combination. If oracle was smart they would leave it alone as much as possible but I suspect they wouldn't be able to help themselves.
roneythomas6 6y ago
Oracle is a big player in ad tech. Some of its notable acquisitions are Datalogix, Moat. TikTok has a pretty good algorithm for figuring what content you like. Unlike fb and ig you don't even need to have a account to use tiktok.
- mrkramer 6y ago
  Oracle is providing business solutions like data analytics but still they are not directly selling ads like Google and Facebook are. And btw TikTok said they are not willing to sell their "algorithm". https://www.zdnet.com/article/bytedance-wont-allow-tiktoks-algorithm-to-be-part-of-a-sale-report/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/bytedance-wont-allow-tiktoks-a... https://www.scmp.com/economy/china-economy/article/3101362/tiktoks-algorithm-not-sale-bytedance-tells-us-source https://www.scmp.com/economy/china-economy/article/3101362/t...
tonyedgecombe 6y ago
I don't know but you can look forward to becoming an Oracle Certified TikTok Master.

GEBBL 6y ago

Whew, Microsoft really escaped something there. I don’t think tiktok would have been a good fit for microsoft. They are an even worse fit for oracle.

vergessenmir 6y ago

I'm not sure how I feel about any of this. China is a legitimate security concern. The practices of that government has always been predatory around I.P and privacy. But the US government has been very thin on details on how serious the security concern actually is, and whether moving the infrastructure to an American owned company would actually change anything. The US appears to regulate data protection under a number of sector specific regulatory acts. It will be difficult to restrict the flow of data between US and China without a recognition of social media as a sector that needs its own regulation without it affecting Google and Facebook. Considering how powerful US tech companies are I can't see this sale making Americans safer through a legal framework.

harryf 6y ago
> China is a legitimate security concern. The practices of the government has always been predatory around I.P and privacy. The same could be said of the US, perhaps with the exception of I.P. where there hasn’t been a real need to date. Either way, if this leads to a ban of TikTok in the US, it’s going to be interesting to see how boards of teenagers react.
- batsigner 6y ago
  The same could be said of Germany.
- rvz 6y ago
  > Either way, if this leads to a ban of TikTok in the US, it’s going to be interesting to see how boards of teenagers react. Take India for example. Either of the following is happening: Users use VPNs to bypass the ban, Influencers move to Triller, Instagram Reels, and YouTube Shorts, or just give up altogether. What's certain is like all social networks, the teens just find the next craze which the celebrities and influencers are. Even better if it makes them more money than before. I won't be surprised to see the same happening in the US.
tjansen 6y ago
"But the US government has been very thin on details on how serious the security concern actually is" Even assuming that there are no vulnerabilities in Android and iOS, the Tiktok app has access to video, audio and GPS. If the infrastructure would be hosted in the US and the Tiktok source code has been reviewed, there would still be the possibility that the Tiktop application has a hidden backdoor that allows a third party to execute code within the context of the app and to locate a user (at least when the app is open) and listen to any conversion she has.

NicoJuicy 6y ago

What worries me is this: > Investors in TikTok’s parent company are reportedly pushing for Trump-friendly Oracle to acquire the viral-video app The investors, which include Sequoia Capital and General Atlantic, see Oracle’s bid as their best bet to get “a piece of the action” in TikTok, and recognize the advantages of the company’s political ties to the Trump administration, according to The Journal. Source: https://www.businessinsider.nl/tiktok-acquisition-bytedance-investors-back-oracle-microsoft-sequoia-general-atlantic-2020-8 https://www.businessinsider.nl/tiktok-acquisition-bytedance-... Although i don't think Oracle is capable though. They probably only want it to run it on their cloud.

sudoaza 6y ago

But the free market!!!

AznHisoka 6y ago

If Oracle is just a tech partner, then how can they be 100% sure that Bytedance is going to replace all their infrastructure with Oracle’s? Bytedance could easily send spoof data to them. In addition, since replacing infrastructure takes a lot of time, they could easily keep on delaying things until the election to see if Biden is voted into the White House.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

rektide 6y ago

Hail overlord of social media moderation, Larry Ellison.

throw7 6y ago

"TikTok is an amazing thing. Whatever it may be." - D. Trump, USPOTUS