Trump gives nod to Oracle buyout of TikTok in US | Hacker News Reader

Trump gives nod to Oracle buyout of TikTok in US

bbc.com

123 pointsreddotX207 comments

... When I think "youth market monetization", no one knows "the kids" like Oracle does....Its fresh.

yeah this one makes no sense at all. Enterprise sales and massive legal departments to appeal to the kids.

Just think of all the strengths Oracle brings to the table:

* They're not currently under scrutiny for antitrust after having brought too many competing social networks.

* Absolutely no need to clean house if they find TikTok's success relies on a bunch of shady stuff, Oracle is cool with whatever makes money.

* Um....

* That's it.

this made me lol, well done

As an ex-Oracle engineer, I can attest to the accuracy of this statement.

Oops, it looks like you weren't licensed to disparage Oracle. We can settle this now for $100,000. Sorry for your confusion on our incredibly clear terms and conditions which change so rarely and are easy to find. (SARCASM)

Well put!

I am missing a reference here. Can you expand?

Oracle sells enterprise software, and it has a pretty bad reputation in some engineering circles due to their aging technology and bad business practices. They don’t have any significant business lines in social or consumer tech AFAIK.

In this sense, they seem like they would have no clue about the needs and wants of teenagers, therefore making an odd match for TikTok

Even one of their few products useful to sole traders and very small SMBs, VirtualBox, is impossible to purchase in individual license (in the UK at least). They're almost openly hostile to anything smaller than Enterprise.

I host my stuff on Oracle cloud.Free 10TB monthly traffic and price per GB 1/10 of other clouds. S3 compatible API

Do you host it there because it's free, or because you are paying for it, and it provides the best value for your business?

Because its free but if i needed to go above quota i would pay because competition is 10x more expensive.

Imagine if a company like Eastman Kodak were selected to rebuild the national stockpile of medical supplies that were depleted by COVID. It's kinda like that.

Your comment made me chuckle as I pictured Larry Ellison with his MAGA hat turned backwards, a "Music Band" shirt, and a skateboard slung over his shoulder saying "How do you do, fellow kids?" on a TikTok video.

You’ve made the common mistake of anthropomorphizing Larry Ellison, there’s no need for that here, this is a safe space :)

Oh, of course Larry is a human. And a young one at that. Just look at how tight his face is. That's how you know how young a human person is... the tightness of their face skin. Just like the tight faces of other youthful humans.

Ellison must know something otherwise he probably wouldn’t be a Tesla board member.

Their new "enterprise" customers

Apart from all the political discussions, I have no idea how the buyer is supposed to buy out just some regional markets.

Would development still be done by the original company, and the new owner just operates regional data centers? But without inter-connectivity? Without being able to influence development, or offer access to the developers for debugging and ops? Seems exceedingly unlikely.

Otherwise, do they get a code dump of a huge, complex code base, and are supposed to continue development on their own? With the original TikTok still operating in other parts of the world, and slowly diverging? I can't see that happening either.

Would they buy the brand name too, and the rest of the world would start using a different name?

That all seems pointless. The only thing that makes sense to me is taking over globally.

Yes all of this, how does a regional split work?

Affiliate revshare? Doesn't really fit but the idea is baffling to me anyway

That's a good point. It's going to be a lot more complex to sell just TikTok's US operations than the whoe company, for all the reasons mentioned.

Still, I guess there is a positive to all this complexity. It's a perfect test case for what splitting up Google/Facebook/Apple/Microsoft/whatever would be like, assuming an antitrust cause goes ahead. You'd likely have many of the same issues there, so this could be a chance to see how things might play out in such a situation...

They're literally different apps with different names, user bases that don't interact with each other.

Yes, in China, it's a different app, called Douyin. (This is probably why the icon looks like a letter 'd'.) ByteDance says they're operationally separate from TikTok as of 2019.

https://apps.apple.com/cn/app/%E6%8A%96%E9%9F%B3%E7%9F%AD%E8...

https://www.cnbc.com/2019/11/27/tiktok-moves-to-separate-app...

I wasn't talking about China. All the leaks so far have only mentioned buying out the US / NA (or at most all English speaking) markets, not all of TikTok.

Reliance Jio is rumored to be purchasing TikTok’s operations in India as well. Seems even more complicated given Facebook and Google’s investments.

The huge hypocrisies here is that the sell must be done to a US company, not a European or an Indian one for instance but specifically a US one. I think that's a good lesson for the rest of the world, and a big warning.

Btw I think that following this and the Huawei little war, Apple is about to suffer from it. It's very probable that the Apple store will be forbidden in China. This will destroy Apple in China (impacting 18% Apple revenue), and it will at the same time preserve the image of China as the factory of the world. This is just the beginning of a long war.

Expect an escalation if that happens and more bans on Chinese companies.

Exactly this. The ban itself was fine. But to force sale of assets to a US company (which reduces bidding prices significantly) is just corrupt thuggish politics. At this point, a third country should be wary of doing any business in the US.

Weakening the dollar makes our exports look more attractive and encourages more spending at home.

> Weakening the dollar makes our exports look more attractive and encourages more spending at home.

How is this relevant to app bans and mafia sales?

I took that as a big warning message, and started to reduce my US exposure as much as I can. I was already going self hosted so it’s easier for me. The only new requirement is avoiding American companies as much as possible.

What? its not worse than a ban, its so not worse that ByteDance could simply not sell its US operations and stop being present in the US, making it just like a ban. A ban would leave no option.

This is pretty much what China does, but for every service.

> This is pretty much what China does, but for every service.

Since when did we aspire to become more like China?

> its not worse than a ban, its so not worse that ByteDance could simply not sell its US operations and stop being present in the US, making it just like a ban

The difference is, why should a US entity own this asset for it to have operations in the US? Why can't it be a EU entity or Australian entity or Canadian entity or Ugandan entity?

Does this mean that US government is going to erratically force foreign businesses to sell US assets when they want?

The equivalent of this would be EU asking Apple to sell all EU operations to Nokia or whatever to be able to operate in that market. Does this sound business friendly?

This is not what China does.

China requires a proactive censorship policy and all Chinese data to be hosted in China. If the company complies, they can operate in China.

This is why Skype and iMessage work in China.

China very often does it to the US though. It’s just tit for tat.

This isn't the beginning, the beginning was years ago.

> It's very probable that the Apple store will be forbidden in China. This will destroy Apple in China (impacting 18% Apple revenue), and it will at the same time preserve the image of China as the factory of the world

China has already forced Apple to hand over iCloud to a local Chinese company. iCloud in China is operated by GCBD (AIPO Cloud (Guizhou) Technology Co. Ltd).

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT208351

First it was getting Kodak to manufacture pharmaceutical chemicals. Now it's getting Oracle to buy tiktok. Is there a reason behind these baffling choices by the current administration? Why are they giving sweetheart deals to dinosaur companies? Is there some insider trading angle? Did those companies have better lobbyists?

>Is there some insider trading angle?

for kodak, the answer is a very blatant yes. for oracle, it might be as simple as Larry Ellison is a Trump donor.

I don't mean this as a joke but it will probably sound like one: Maybe Trump wants to punish TikTok and their users by having the second most unlikeable man in America run it.

At least some people actually like Trump. Is there anyone who even likes Mr Oracle?

I'm sure Larry is a pretty big fan of himself. Outside of that...

I think he's less hated if only because he's less known.

I mean I read the article and Trump simply said they'd be a good buyer. There is nothing about "sweetheart deals" or any actual facilitation of the deal whatsoever.

Perhaps “sweetheart” isn’t the best description but he did make an executive order specifically targeting TikTok putting the company in position where their bargaining power is more limited. TikTok having to choose between fighting the current administration in court or selling to an American buyer within some fixed time period likely is advantageous to the buyer no matter who buyer is.

It’s certainly fair to consider nefarious reasons, but it’s also important to consider less interesting reasons, like Kodak already (historically) dealing heavily with chemical production and Oracle making a bid to pivot and stay relevant. Who else might want to pay the most for TikTok US? From FAANG, only Facebook seems like a fit but Facebook won’t pay “market” rate for TikTok because they already have Reels, Microsoft and AANG don’t seem like fits. Outside of those, it’s some private equity group but they would need to spin up an operation around actually running and developing TikTok, that’s complicated.

Or it could all just be sweetheart deals.

How is Oracle a better fit than Microsoft? At least Microsoft deals with customers and not only businesses.

It is a better fit because they can pay the most.

I believe Microsoft is a far better fit than Oracle.

Microsoft already has products that appeal to younger customers: Minecraft, Xbox, several game studios, etc.

What does Oracle currently offer the younger market?

MSFT has business interests in China and ORCL doesn't.

Github is a social network, and Microsoft hasn't manged to screw it up yet.

What's the N, is it a typo from an Avatar fan?

'N' in FAANG is Netflix. They're tech-adjacent for sure, but they're mostly just in there so that the acronym isn't offensive.

Microsoft has consistently been in the top three companies by market cap — whereas Netflix is basically nowhere to be found — but I guess FAAMG just isn’t as cool!

Netflix pays engineers a lot and presents an interesting technology challenge. But you're right. They're actually a pretty amazing story. Burned 10 billion in the last 5 years and probably at least double that over their life. And they're on their third business model at this point with the first two having, more or less, failed.

I think MS was more or less at its nadir when the acronym first showed up.

GAFAM has been used when MS is swapped for Netflix. One could also drop Facebook and have MAGA.

At this point I expect the acronym to stay put (at least for a spell) even if the roll call doesn't.

I suspect that FB would pay a lot for tiktok, as reels is probably too early to have traction. The whole antitrust investigation will a) make it skittish and b) make government regulators unlikely to approve the deal.

Consider that people are pushing FB to divest instagram, something it has invested a ton in post-acquisition! Do you think the DOJ would allow FB to buy another giant social network?

> like Kodak already (historically) dealing heavily with chemical production

This baffles me. What's left over? Has that business not been dead for decades, so what relevant asset would they still have? Machinery? Supply chain? Knowledgeable people? Seems like all of it should be long gone.

Kodak still employs hundreds (or maybe thousands) of engineers, and has made substantial investments in the machinery required. https://www.kodak.com/en/advanced-materials/home

I think a much simpler explanation is: Mr. Trump has heard of these companies before. Full stop, thats the extent of his analysis.

The administration opposes economic freedom, and is attempting to replicate the sort of heavy-handed approach to meddling with private businesses that is traditionally associated with authoritarian regimes.

There is absolutely no reason to ban TikTok in the first place, and Trump's comments about the sale enriching the treasury are outlandish and should themselves disqualify him for office.

The US is giving up any shred of credibility it had with respect to fostering fair competition in US markets.

According to the Financial Times[1], it's Microsoft-envy and close ties to Trump.

“I still think it’s possible to beat Microsoft, believe it or not, for us to be a more important company than Microsoft,” Mr Ellison told the San Francisco Chronicle in 2014. Since then his nemesis in the software business has soared on the back of the booming cloud computing market, while Oracle’s fortunes have sagged.

Oracle operates in the guts of large-scale IT systems, selling the databases and business applications that are core to the way large organisations run. But it has lost ground to Amazon, Microsoft and Google as corporate computing has moved to the cloud.

The Oracle chairman has also kept close ties to the Trump administration that could pay off as the president looks for a quick resolution. Both Mr Ellison, who now serves as Oracle’s technology strategist, and Safra Catz, its chief executive, have been close to the Trump White House. Ms Catz was a member of the president’s transition team in 2016, while Mr Ellison recently hosted a fundraising dinner for the president.

Oracle is also one of only three companies to have been granted more than one seat on the president’s task force to reopen the economy following the coronavirus lockdown — Mr Ellison and Ms Catz have been granted places.

[1] Oracle’s Ellison steps out of character with approach for TikTok: Business and politics converge in pursuit of Chinese-owned video app’s US operations | Aug 19, 2020 https://www.ft.com/content/b32bf50c-2b8a-406c-97e6-4ffe4b56e...

Many here don't get the big picture. This acquisition makes total sense for Oracle. They'll be able to milk those influencers by charging TikTokers by how many cores they have on their phones and video audience size. </s>

Oracle's obviously going to pivot to video.

.. and sue every one of them if the number of cores gets misreported somehow

And here I was thinking that they'd immediately shelve it, and then spend their time litigating against influencers and copycat platforms.

I hope they provide core count factor for little cores like SPARC T1

Among all the feasible buyers, Oracle feels like the worst possible one. They are basically the real life version of Mr. Robot's Evil Corp, and they have a very bad record when it comes to acquisitions.

> they have a very bad record when it comes to acquisitions.

They bought and killed ATG, which is a net win in my book.

Yes. I hope they acquire TikTok.

Hehe. Agreed. In fact I have a list of companies that I would like Oracle to acquire.

Is Oracle on that list?

    ORA-01476 divisor is equal to zero

There is a Rust linked list joke in here somewhere but I'm stuck in a loop so I can't find it.

It would be only honorable thing for Oracle to do.

hahahahaha

I don't understand the hate for TikTok I frequently see on HN. Is it just ordinary ageism/curmudgeonliness?

I'm not in its core audience myself, but it seems to me to be a very smartly put together app, both in its core features (practically the only video remixing/editing app for mobile that retains tolerable levels of both accessibility and expressiveness) and in its platform (particularly the recommendation engine which seems to drive pretty solid engagement).

It's cognitive dissonance. America is supposed to be the good guys, but on American social media everyone is toxic and hates each other and it's all full of political and corporate AstroTurfing; China is supposed to be the bad guys, but on TikTok everyone's happy and enjoying themselves and the content is organic and largely apolitical.

The easiest way to get rid of the cognitive dissonance is not to fix US social media, but to get rid of TikTok.

Or it could be that we just don’t like apps that exist to Hoover up personal information and/or be state sponsored spying endpoints, no matter who makes them.

Correct answer, downvoted of course since this is HN. I personally don’t care about privacy too much, but the way TikTok operates and its ties with the Chinese government is more than a little concerning. The videos are fun, too bad about the content.

It would be correct if it didn’t ignore the fact that US-based companies do the exact same thing.

And I'm angry about that too.

As someone that uses Keepass on Android, I find it extremely disturbing that it was reading my clipboard without permission.

Thankfully I only had TikTok for a day (ironically copied my TikTok password to the clipboard).

That's because TikTok does pretty heavy 'auditing' - the content is NOT organic at all. Only the good-looking people and the happy videos go to the top. The others go to the bottom or are 'disappeared'

Congrats you just described society.

This has little to do with "society". Its policy.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/sep/25/revealed-...

https://theintercept.com/2020/03/16/tiktok-app-moderators-us...

https://www.businessinsider.com/internal-guidelines-show-tik...

And the policy was written by........?

>Only the good-looking people and the happy videos go to the top.

I don't know what problem the US has with it then, they've already assimilated, Hollywood would be jealous

> Is it just ordinary ageism/curmudgeonliness?

I think it's probably this? I'm "on" TikTok in that I just idly scroll through the videos, and it all seems like a bit of good fun.

Additionally, for all the nefarious stuff flying about, the app actually asks you for exactly ZERO permissions to use it for casual browsing.

60% curmudgeonliness

20% none of their friends are on it

7% they heard it captures your clipboard constantly, must be another of these spying and tracking apps

5% they heard it's got weird moderation with rules like 'no disabled people on the front page'

3% they think limited-content-length platforms prevent complex, nuanced messages and are corrosive to the national discourse

3% they heard it was all 13 year olds lip-syncing and that only perverts want to watch that

2% they only use Theora videos on FreeBSD on their OpenMoko FreeRunner

TikTok is notorious for siphoning as much private data as it can without being clear about that with the user. Apart from that the concept of TikTok has already been done in the past and it seems to me they didn't fail for technological or business reasons, but because they didn't have the money to fight against bigger players

I guess Oracle in the Tech market.

But if it was a game company it would be EA as the worst offender.

"According to those reports, Oracle was seriously considering buying TikTok's businesses in the US, Canada, Australia and New Zealand with investment firms, including General Atlantic and Sequoia Capital."

That's only 4 out of the "5 eyes".

The US is 10% of TikTok's user base but 50% of revenue. Most of TikTok's most-followed users are American (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most-followed_TikTok_a...). Canada, Australia, and New Zealand are probably another 5% of revenue. The UK may be not included because TikTok has stated that it wants to establish its global headquarters there.

There has been talk that Microsoft is interested in buying all of TikTok worldwide (TikTok isn't available in China; ByteDance has a separate, similar business there), which would be easier technically because TikTok's operations and algorithms would not need to be divided. India was TikTok's largest userbase until the recent ban; presumably a non Chinese-owned TikTok could quickly reopen there.

Does TikTok actually make any revenue itself yet? I know its top users are making millions from advertising stuff, but they don't seem to have any ads in the platform itself yet?

Yes they insert ads into your feed the same as IG or FB.

Really? I see them on FB/Instagram, but I've never seen one on TikTok.

Did you just starting to use TikTok? Many platforms show less ads to new users, in order to not scare them away and it's not until you've used it for a longer period of time that they ramp up how many ads you're seeing. Also different profiles gets different amount of ads.

For one week now I have been getting the same weird ads for a boyfriend tracker and another for Spotify.

ByteDance is said to be pulling close to 17B/year, and they have 3 main apps - Toutiao (Chinese news app), Douyin (Chinese TikTok), and of course TikTok.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/mikevorhaus/2020/05/27/bytedanc...

Sort of hard to imagine a more ham-fisted owner for something as cool as TikTok. If IBM or GE bought them it wouldn’t make less sense.

Murdoch on MySpace: 'We Screwed Up in Every Way Possible'

https://www.wired.com/2012/01/murdoch-on-myspace/

I had hoped for more there there when I looked at this article. In this case the headline is pretty much the whole of the content.

In Act III, Revenge of the Mogul, Murdoch convinces the Australian government to draft new legislation requiring Google and Facebook to subsidise News Corporation's loss making newspapers by paying him for the clicks that send readers to his own websites.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24182494

ACT II was when Murdoch convinced the Australian government to forgive $882 million in taxes.

https://www.theguardian.com/media/2014/feb/17/rupert-murdoch...

[Edit]

You might find this backstory of interest, dhosek. It's about the time a youthful Zuckerberg kicked sand in the mogul's face

https://gizmodo.com/rupert-murdochs-myspace-apparently-still...

A whole new generation will come to know the extent of Larry Ellison.

Why is tiktok cool? Or more cool than vine or imgur.

Vine doesn't exist. Imgur has a mildly toxic community and a load of porn.

Imgur has stopped allowing (new, explicit) porn:

https://help.imgur.com/hc/en-us/articles/360029648691-Mature...

Wow. Absolutely no fun allowed.

I think the implication of the question was why did TikTok become "cool" when vine didn't? They're essentially very similar.

Vine was cool - the reason it died had more to do with Twitter pretty much being in a death spiral before Trump became president. However, the biggest innovation TikTok brought was their own flavor of the algorithmic feed that made finding content a lot easier.

Vine was cool, when it existed, and there are many vine videos which got uploaded to YouTube, and there are many Vine compilations on YT with millions of views.

Yeah, this surprised me too. As sceptical as I am of TikTok and its "I can't believe it's not malware" approach to privacy I feel a bit sorry for the poor sods actually developing it. Oracle are going to beat the world record for deepest borehole with how hard they'll run the app into the ground.

Can't wait to see how they spin it as some overpriced enterprise software while it fades into irrelevancy! /s

I don't think you need the /s tag there, that's exactly what I expect to happen.

I really don't understand what Ellison is trying to accomplish here? Aside from making more money, of course, but I'd be hard pressed to think of a less synergistic combo than Oracle's aging dinosaur enterprises and TikTok's fickle teenagers.

> I really don't understand what Ellison is trying to accomplish here?

Appeasing Trump?

> Aside from making more money, of course

He can push Trump to lower the price, with the force of the United States Government behind it, then flip it to Microsoft for twice the price in 3 months when Trump loses the election.

Wait for the last minute Kodak bid (which, while improbable and bonkers, would also make at least a kind of sense)

Oracle is a fun choice. How about Circle-k corporation? Maybe Monsanto/Bayer or Halliburton?

I don't understand how the US can force a Chinese company to sell itself, can someone explain?

I think the forced part is because either they sell or stop being available in the US market due to the ban the US threatened with.

So they're not 'forced' to per se - but if they don't sell they'll lose a large part of their market. Or am I wrong?

[edit for clarity]

That makes sense, thanks.

>So they're not 'forced' to per se - but if they don't sell they'll lose a large part of their market. Or am I wrong?

Correct.

The US is 10% of TikTok's user base, but accounts for 50% of revenue. Further, most of TikTok's most popular users are American (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most-followed_TikTok_a...).

The equation is a bit similar to the one played out in the movie "Goodfellas".

You have two mobsters, the good mobster and the bad mobster, and a business. The bad mobster actively harasses the business in multiple ways, prompting the business to seek protection from the good mobster in exchange for buying into the business.

Of course, both the good mobster and the bad mobster are in the same mob, and benefit from the revenue stream from the newly acquired stake in business.

Tell that to wechat and Whatsapp ... the ccp is the bad guy.

Its not meant to be a commentary on whos good and bad on some objective scale, just an anecdote on the effects in play

They've banned US transactions with the company. This means TikTok can no longer publish to Play Store/App Store. Android users could sideload an APK but that's still a huge blow. Lastly a social media app operating in the US that can't sell ads to US marketers is pointless.

As an alternative, Trump proposed letting a US company buy TikTok to get around the ban. As you'd expect, TikTok's investors are looking for a sale so they don't lose their investment.

They also can’t pay staff in the us or have bank accounts. Once us banks ban someone the rest of the world (except a few like China and Russia) usually follow for fear of the ban coming to them next.

The legal framework is explained in the executive order.

https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/order-regard...

Bytedance acquired Musical.ly in 2017, and merged it into TikTok the next year. The administration is now blocking the sale of Musical.ly under Section 721 of the Defense Production Act. Section 721 "authorizes the President to suspend or prohibit a transaction, by or with any foreign person, that may result in control of a U.S. business by a foreign person and that may threaten to impair national security." [1] The president used this power to block the sale of Musical.ly on national security grounds.

Congressional approval is not needed for this action. The legal framework was approved by Congress with the Foreign Investment and National Security Act of 2007. The president has the legal authority to issue such national security orders. However, typically the president delegates the national security review to CFIUS, a government agency.

TikTok never received clearance from CFIUS when it acquired Musical.ly in 2017 [3]. This allows the US to preform a national security review now, three years later.

To answer your question, Bytedance is not legally 'forced' to divest their US operations. They are proceeding with the sale because the alternative is a death blow to their US operations.

[1] https://www.gibsondunn.com/cfius-guidance-alert/

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_Investment_and_Nationa...

[3] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-tiktok-cfius-exclusive/ex...

> "... and that may threaten to impair national security."

Is there any framework for independent review whether something is a genuine threat?

Many believe that this is the mechanism by which the Trump administration is using to remove Chinese influence from TikTok rather than the cause.

It’s easier to legally justify than proving the ‘security threat’ of TikTok giving the Chinese government users data.

I don’t know, but lots of people seem to think that social networks can be used to manipulate elections.

When a country say another country/company is a threat. Does it need a framework? It is all politics.

>Is there any framework for independent review whether something is a genuine threat?

I'm not sure whether that would help. Both sides are pretty anti-china atm.

Looks like both Bytedance and Musical.ly are Cayman islands, so I'm not sure how the US has any say in what they do, though I understand the spirit is "do what we want or lose the US (and possibly the world) market".

I don't know how anything the US does can affect what two companies in a different country decide to do between them, legally speaking. The executive order sounds weird to me.

Also, I don't understand how they can block a sale three years later. What's the time frame on that? Why not ten years later? A hundred?

The US can embargo the product and prevent its use in the US. This is a significant enough market to the company that they'd rather have whatever the discounted sale price of a forced sale than what they think the future value of (Tiktok - USA - India - other US Allies that get encouraged to do the same) is.

I'm not quite sure what to explain, since it is basically indistinguishable from the way any other racketeer operates. This is pretty much the same thing as asking somebody at gunpoint to sell his Rolex to you for $20, or else you take it by force. The victim is at loss anyway, but when choosing between $20 and nothing, they may as well choose $20.

US market makes up a large portion of TikTok's revenue, some say 50%. So it can threaten to destroy that market completely, for nothing, forbidding TikTok and causing the loss of what is currently 50% of its revenue. Or it can offer some money (an amount, which normally wouldn't be enough to sell) to take it, or at least a part of it. Time will tell if TikTok will find the risk worth the trouble.

> forbidding TikTok

I'm still not sure how that would work. Sure, they could forbid people from downloading new versions of the app, but the existing app is already out there on phones - would they be able to force removal of the app?

This is not what is proposed, nor is what would happen. Speech protections are very strong in the US and direct censorship of an otherwise legal application is not likely to be a legal possibility.

What the executive does have the authority to do is regulate commerce. The proposal is that ByteDance would be embargoed from doing business in the US. This means, they can't pay for app store developer licenses, sell ads in the US, buy local CDN/cloud infrastructure etc.

You could have the app, but it's not likely that ByteDance would be able to operate it in the US.

Well, I won't suggest any scenarios of how it would work right now, even though I don't think it's totally inconceivable... I'll just point out that I don't actually need a loaded gun to make you sell your Rolex for $20. I only need you to believe it's loaded.

that doesnt really matter too much. US advertisers won't be able to pay tiktok. Basically 0 money for bytedance, while plenty of trafic expenses if they keep servicing.

And ofc, apple and google can simply remove the app from your phone.

They can't, but they can prevent a foreign company from doing business in the US (and from US companies doing business with a foreign company)—which is what they're doing.

Bytedance (TikTok) can "work around this problem" by selling their US business to a US company—which is what they're doing.

It's shady, completely legal, and fully up to the President/executive branch (e.g. Trump) to set policies in this area.

This doesn't make any sense, there's no Ask.com toolbar for Oracle to bundle on phones.

I heard Oracle is deep into really shitty kinds of user tracking/spying.

So I think they hope to get two things out of it:

- Good PR with the next generation (they lost most/all? good PR with my generation as far as I can tell).

- A lot of data about young users.

Well considering they completely butchered their GDPR compliance to leverage said data overseas w.r.t digital audiences (they just had to pull out) I'd guess they would like the idea of more activity data, but don't have much confidence they'll get much value from it.

>I heard Oracle is deep into really shitty kinds of user tracking/spying.

Absolutely not defending Oracle, but who isn't into shitty user tracking and spying? It's a central part of most business models, because they give the service away for free.

I mean like more bad then what you normally get.

Like using gray legal area devices to track you in the real world even if you never signed any agb. Like tracking Bluetooth IDs in and around shopping center, like tracking the anti theft/processing pipeline RFID ships which might still be left in your closes, like adding spyware to apps which listens to ultrasonic sound bakons in the background and then phones home. Like using face recognition on security cameras in shops but potentially also in the streets around them.

I.e. all the kinds a questionable tracking which many people aren't aware of at all (as far as I can tell).

And Oracle seems to be big into bringing all this tracking sources and data from Google/Facebook/etc. and data they can get from other sources (e.g. finance institutes) together and automatically analyze it to create profiles about everyone.

Through only as far as I remember, it's a while back that I read about that. I somewhat hope that I'm misremembering tbh. Would be a nicer world.

This will be hilarious if it happens.

TikTok is terrible, Oracle is terrible.

At least it will increase the statistic on "3 Billion Devices Run Oracle Java"

This looks like yet another Petrodollar merry-go-round look-alike.

US TikTok is the price to pay for that sweet long term government contracts.

TikTok feels a completely bizarre purchase for Oracle. Especially when abandoning the UK market.

They have no synergy, no experience, no moderation infrastructure, nothing. Do they want to be Yahoo?

Literally the only justification I can think of is that they want to keep the current administration happy and see this as a quasi-bribe, in the hope of getting more work in future from them in things they actually do. But that seems crazy given the likelihood (on the basis of polling, not making any judgements on whys or wherefores) that the administration will be gone in three months.

I can’t be alone in being more creeped out by Oracle than bytedance. So we’re giving a pathological collector of software control over a huge group of easily manipulated teenagers? Yikes!

Does anyone know if tiktok has any patents or potential patents that oracle can leverage? That's even more scary to me.

As a Swede it feels so weird to read about eg. Trump meddling in such details in affairs like this.

In Sweden ministerial rule is outlawed: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ministerial_governance

Our prime minister would not be allowed to have an opinion on any specific case like this, he would rather have to have opinions on the overall legal framework or such instead and leave the interpretation and application of the legal framework to the appropriate agencies.

To me that feels like the right way to go about things like this.

I believe youre seeing an artifact of how governance is divided. It looks like sweden (and many other parliamentary systems) puts the administration & execution of law under the direction of a minister, who’s primarily a legislator.

In the USA these areas are more clearly divided. The federal legislature is comprised of a bicameral house and senate. There is a discrete executive branch charged with enforcing the law set by the legislature. The president is the head of that executive branch who enforces those laws. Thats where the aspect of specific enforcement by the president comes in.

That separation exists in Sweden as well. The parliament makes the laws while the government is the executive branch.

But yeah, slightly different as its our prime minister who sets up the government, the parliament who picks the prime minister and the people who elects the parliament – through proportional representation.

The ban on ministerial rule is an additional separation on top of the one you mention – a separation within the executive branch, that even further avoids opportunities for eg. corruption. (And confuses foreign leaders who are unfamiliar with it)

The other factor is likely the US's general lack of a professional civil service leadership. The leadership of the US civil service is largely appointed, en masse, by the new president every four to eight years. This is unusual in other developed democracies; there usually is a mechanism for the executive or legislature to get rid of senior civil service officials, but doing so is controversial, very visible, and not routine.

The US has always suffered from an extremely politicised administrative body, the extreme powers given to the president are an example of this, but in many other ways there is a lack of administrative independence as well, you can just look at all the diplomatic vanity appointments of the administration.

In pretty much every other functioning democracy diplomats and heads of agencies are trained, in the US these posts get handed out like candy to however throws the president an election party.

This is not typical in America, either, the last four years have been exceptional for a number of well-documented reasons.

One

Rich

Asshole

Called

Larry

Ellison

Among the many reasons I still turn down any Oracle offer is because of their CEO.

Everyone has a number. I wouldn't want to work for Oracle either. However, if they came to me with an offer that was several multiples of my current salary, I'm not sure I could turn it down :)

So you also refuse to own a Tesla?

Honestly, not that I'd be in the market for one anyway, but the extreme bonkers-ness of the CEO is one thing that would put me off if I was.

If I recollect correctly, Ellison is in the board of Tesla too.

Can someone explain this potential acquisition for me? I cant think of a company more unlikely to acquire TikTok than Oracle. What business need could they fill for Oracle? Is this an effort to get into social media/massive data collection in a big way? Have they tried to acquire other social apps in the past?

I just don't get it.

If the President of the USA told a US gas company to buy TikTok they would buy TikTok. That's the business need.

Up next: DuPont acquires Discord, ExxonMobil acquires Bumble, McKesson acquires Niantic/Pokemon Go...

Tiktok will be made to run on Oracle Cloud and Oracle can point to that to grow their Cloud business.

This is shrewd of Ellison to do this. He knows he is the edge as he is a trump supporter. However it’s a terrible idea for tiktok to sell to oracle, a dinosaur that has no idea how to deal with consumer tech. I still don’t know why these companies want tiktok in the first place. It will be a nightmare to disconnect them from China and even then all the Chinese employees who dreamed up the tech are not coming, what’s the point?

Also I suspect this is just election pandering from trump. Initially he gave a 45 day “chance” for companies to find a buyer and then extended it by another 45 days. That takes it close to the election or past that date. At that point he doesn’t care and can push it under the rug just like the other “harsh stances “ against China.

In that case, this might be the perfect deal for TikTok as Americans will use a VPN to access better content and apps.

This really isn't that shrewd. The outcomes are either 1) to drive up MSFT's TikTok acquisition price 2) to disrupt the sale process and harm or destroy TikTok 3) to ingratiate themselves with the current president or 4) the gambit is sincere and they successfully acquire them.

None of those address Oracle's core challenges which that they are getting hollowed out by competition in their core database market, are being outcompeted by Workday and SFDC in CRM and ERP verticals, and one just has to look at the comments here to see how they are perceived in the market. This may be temporarily gratifying, but is ultimate a distraction for them when they should not be distracting themselves.

Oracle : "it seems you have installed TikTok. Pay up or we will sue".

Oracle or their data collection subsidiary BlueKai? Strongly surprised no one mentioning them. Sounds like a perfect fit!

What happened to Microsoft? Surely if the US really wanted a fast sale then turning it into a bidding war is a stupid move?

ByteDance and their investors are going to get a nice cash infusion on their way to world domination outside the US and Oracle will promptly kill it like they did Sun.

US Zoomers will move to the next big thing.

When I was working in Oracle, there was a running gag that there were more full time attorneys employed by the company, than there were engineers.

Maybe that is what you need to run a business like that?

The world has turned into a parody of itself.

Of all the reasons not to use TikTok Oracles proposed ownership has to very high in the list.

All the kewl kids use Oracle.....

So soon enough, we'll see the TikTok logo on the back of a Facebook sign? Sniff...

All Tik-Tok ers will now receive pre-sales training for Oracle Cloud

Public corporations are inherently immoral manipulators. We shouldn’t trust any of them with massive access to the nations “youth.” At least private companies have a chance of maybe having a founder with a heart who will turn down a sketchy way to make money

How would fit TikTok into Oracles portfolio?

As a use-case demonstration for Oracle Cloud?

Good. They deserve each other.

Great news, can't wait for Oracle to buy TikTok!

In my wildest dreams I could not create a stupider headline.

I guess the idea here is that Oracle destroys everything they buy, Trump hates Sarah Cooper, so he approves of this deal.

Aren't the countries banning TikTok becoming more like China by doing this? Plus Trump comments about US gov needs to get money from this sale sounds like plain bribe.

I have not seen a convincing proof that TikTok is more of a national security threat versus FB or Twitter. What am I missing? I am also more suspicious because along with TikTok, Wechat was banned while other investments in US by Tencent where not touched supposedly because it would impact American companies. Wechat is definitely insignificant to be a security threat.

> I have not seen a convincing proof that TikTok is more of a national security threat versus FB or Twitter.

Don't make the mistake of confusing national security and privacy. FB and Twitter's operations answer primarily to US law.

TikTok should just let the US government ban them. Teenagers can figure out how to VPN to Mexico and it's better PR for TikTok. "So good the government won't let you use it" is better optics than "TikTok, now owned by some Boomer company". As a hip youngster myself, just the name Oracle makes me think of beige and grey Windows Vista era software and shitty enterprise software.

Upvoted for the perspective. Totally unrealistic view the average consumer is going to use a VPN to reach a particular service though.

The average consumer does not care(TM) and chooses convenience. And convenience will be brought by FB for example.

Most teenagers already use VPNs to get past network filters used in school WiFis and child filters on their data plans. Plus pornhub operates their own VPN so we know using a VPN to access just one service is something people already do. I think this idea of a mindless consumer is an unhealthy attitude tech people have that leads to so much shitty software. People who don't browse HN can use computers too.

I agree some might use VPNs, but most seems like a claim which needs some evidence.

The problem is that with a transaction ban, no US companies can buy ads on TikTok, removing any financial point in running the service for US customers

So be it?

Proving that TikTok is just a money-making enterprise, not a CCP tentacle manipulating foreign elections. Otherwise they you just run it at a loss, like Voice of America or RT.

> beige and grey Windows Vista era software and shitty enterprise software

That's not my image of Oracle at all. I think of a shark feeding frenzy.

A VPN wouldn't be necessary. Most of USG's totalitarian restrictions have been developed around commercial activity. Individuals are free to run whatever software we'd like, and talk with whatever servers we'd like. The user-facing choke point is Apple/Google control over software distribution.

No VPN would be necessary. The US has not proposed censoring the TikTok application, nor does the US president have the authority to censor otherwise legal speech.

Somehow it doesn’t surprise me Larry is a Trump supporter.

You used to hear a lot about this sort of concern in countries like Mexico etc, and would be slightly relieved that it was so much less common where you lived. Responsible first world governments are supposed to be neutral

Larry is a Trump supporter because he can make money through pay-for-play agreements with Trump and the administration. Oracle is not going to enjoy the long term effects of Trumps immigration policies, and once it hits Larry where it hurts (his pocketbook) he will suddenly support the DNC again...

This assumes Oracle employs software engineers. Only as a legacy positions grandfathered in.

Would it surprise you he’s also a Tesla board member?

I guess he isn't the only Trump supporter in that hoard

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