White House in talks to have Oracle, US investors take over TikTok, NPR reports | Hacker News Reader

White House in talks to have Oracle, US investors take over TikTok, NPR reports

reuters.com

40 pointscdme19 comments

Sounds like a nightmare when you consider this story on the frontpage https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42825097

Exactly my thoughts. Ellison and Oracle are surveillance-friendly (after all, it's kind of in the name). Oracle has a history of of privacy violations. This deal, coupled with the new AI data center in Abilene and their past, is ominous.

i don't know if its just a historical perspective stuck in my mind, but if iread Oracle i just think about vulnerabilities and handling them really poorly.

Is it still necessary? From what I know, the Ministry of Truth has already made its way to TikTok. Users cannot post content like 'Free Palestine' anymore

TikTok is behaving much more properly now.

The consent will be manufactured.

Personally I find the concept of Oracle TikTok hilarious. I would love for them to make it all corporate and Oracle-chic. Imagining light-theme TikTok, Arial font, loading spinners, clunky page refresh when you load the next video, big ol' "contact sales" button permanently in the corner, inconsistent theme between pages, and oh my the frequently-updating terms of service.

Just thinking about it makes me chuckle.

I legitimately can't think of worse companies for this than Oracle or IBM. Words absolutely fail me.

Facebook ? (see Cambridge Analytica) /s

Given my experience with TikTok, it matches the concept of "Oracle".

Would make more sense to have the American Zoos take over ownership of TikTok.

Has Oracle ever had a consumer-facing product?

No, but it was a suitable candidate:

Under the deal being negotiated by the White House, TikTok's China-based owner, ByteDance, would retain a stake in the company, but data collection and software updates would be overseen by Oracle, which already provides the foundation of TikTok's Web infrastructure, one of the sources told Reuters

Do lawnmowers count?

Yeah, let's give Larry Ellison control over TikTok. What could possibly go wrong?

A few weeks ago China would rather shut it down than relinquish control. I wonder what they are being offered now to change their minds?

> China would rather shut it down than relinquish control

That's what I meant when I said 'Americans see Chinese as NPCs'

Chinese gov only forbidden ByteDance to export(sell) its algorithm, and pressure it due to nationalism

You guys say this like ByteDance is a department of CPC, it's not work like this

And, sincerely, Americans do need to think about what changed that made TikTok no longer a 'national security threat' now

12h ealier, it's a national security threat with votes by Democrats and Republicans, 12h later, it's just fine.

what changed?

They added a lot of censorship because there was too much wrong think happening there.

I don't know how much can be inferred from that VS brinkmanship. The louder and longer you protest that you are happy to pack up and leave, the higher the price to get you to stay.

>ByteDance, would retain a stake in the company, but data collection and software updates would be overseen by Oracle

A reasonable JV arrangement (like what PRC offers US platforms) - Trump wants TikTok US to be 50% US owned. 50% US owned =/= 0% PRC owned, which was what Biden and other PRC hawks previously wanted - to basically denationalize a PRC company from PRC.

Which frankly was retarded tier hubris that only US lawmakers makers high on American exceptionalism can make, and delulu Americans think is reasonable. That was never going to fly geopolitically because PRC would never let US normalize that kind of leverage - it's not about relinquishing control. PRC perfectly happy for US to censor the shit out of US TikTok because it only validates their internet model.

Trump as bad as business man as he is just made a not utterly stupid deal. US gets 50% with golden shares to turn TikTok into domestic US propaganda machine like other US platforms (same deal PRC offers to western platforms), PRC/Douyin gets whatever they currnetly have - it's still going to be fundamentally a PRC run company with local US office doing the filtering (censorship) and day to day in US market, despite eventual US propaganda that TikTok got "sold" to US - it's just under US version of PRC JV arrangement.

> That was never going to fly geopolitically because PRC would never let US normalize that kind of leverage

Yes and the US knew that. The goal was to ban TikTok.

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