ByteDance, the Chinese parent company of TikTok, has chosen Oracle over Microsoft, to be its U.S. technology partner in the U.S.
ByteDance let us know today they would not be selling TikTok’s US operations to Microsoft. We are confident our proposal would have been good for TikTok’s users, while protecting national security interests… To do this, we would have made significant changes to ensure the service met the highest standards for security, privacy, online safety, and combatting disinformation, and we made these principles clear in our August statement. We look forward to seeing how the service evolves in these important areas. — Microsoft blog post
President Trump has said repeatedly that he wants an American company to buy the operations.
The Trump administration has threatened to ban TikTok by mid-September and ordered ByteDance to sell its U.S. business, claiming national-security risks due to its Chinese ownership. The government worries about user data being funneled to Chinese authorities…
The White House has cracked down on a range of Chinese businesses, including telecom equipment makers Huawei and ZTE and messaging app WeChat, over worries that they would enable Chinese authorities to get U.S. user data. Republican and Democratic lawmakers have also raised concerns about censorship and children’s privacy.
MacDailyNews Take: Microsoft loses, again. 🙂 Shockingly, the Walmart partnership didn’t help put them over the top. (smirk)
Walmart + Microsoft. Now there’s a marriage made in hell.
Walmart + Microsoft = Myspace. — MacDailyNews, August 27, 2020
Walmart can't even figure out how to offer Apple Pay. How are they going to handle TikTok? Oh, yeah, Microsoft plans to help them. 🤣🤣🤣#Microsoft #Walmart #TikTok #Myspace2020
— MacDailyNews (@MacDailyNews) August 27, 2020
Certainly, Oracle can handle TikTok. Of note, Larry Ellison, the Executive Chairman and CTO of Oracle, was, famously, a “friend of Steve’s” who sat on Apple’s BoD until September 2002.