
Oracle Wins Bid for TikTok in U.S. - doctoboggan
https://www.wsj.com/articles/microsoft-drops-out-of-bidding-for-tiktoks-u-s-operations-11600039821
======
rladd
Here's what I am guessing it is:

\- Bytedance retains some ownership and control of the app and the algorithms

\- Oracle runs the entire back end on their infrastructure

\- Oracle guarantees to the US government that no data is going back to China
(because they control the release of the app and control the back end)

\- This satisfies the USA's (supposed) national security concerns and also
satisfies China because TikTok is not actually being "sold" to a US company.

~~~
Fej
This is a fantastic idea - the only thing missing (that I see) is that Oracle
would need to see the source code and verify that the checksum of the apps
built from that code matches the downloads from the Google Play Store and App
Store.

Otherwise the guarantee that no data is being sent to China is not airtight.
Oracle could audit the app every time it gets an update and watch network
traffic, but this would miss anything sent by code activated remotely after
the fact. It wouldn't work for long, but the US government will look for any
reason to deny this deal. I don't think Oracle will audit the app constantly
anyway. Come to think of it, that could apply to the source code too, if the
malicious code was extremely well hidden.

~~~
PeterStuer
How would they shuttle out that much traffic undetected?

~~~
dcolkitt
It is a video app. Couldn't you embed the embargoed data into the media
content using steganography. All the receiver of the data would need to do is
download a modified version of the client, then collect the data. From the
server side it would just look like a normal TikTok app watching videos.

------
kstrauser
My prediction: Oracle couldn’t care less about TikTok as an entity, but wants
their IP so they can sue everyone else who has a recommendation engine. No, it
won’t make any sense, but much of that organization’s moves are inscrutable to
me.

~~~
saagarjha
Oracle has a "Data Management Platform" (perhaps a bit better known as
BlueKai), which they might consider augmenting with stuff coming out of
TikTok.

~~~
t0mas88
And that product was just pulled out of Europe last week for privacy
violations. There is also a pending class action lawsuit against Oracle (and
Salesforce) for this type of product violating GDPR.

So I don't think this is a great step forward for US consumers.

------
turdnagel
ByteDance has said publicly that they won't be selling their algorithm
([https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-09-13/bytedance...](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-09-13/bytedance-
tells-u-s-it-won-t-sell-tiktok-s-algorithm-scmp)) -- so there's no IP angle
here. What is Oracle really getting out of the deal?

~~~
adventured
They're doing the deal as part of a consortium, Oracle is getting TikTok's
cloud hosting in the US market (at least). Assuming TikTok doesn't fade in the
next few years, it'll substantially increase the size of Oracle's cloud
business and they can use it as a marketing point.

It suggests that Oracle's cloud business has such dire traction that they
can't acquire prominent customers for it any other way than to directly buy
part of them. It also speaks to that Ellison & Co. view the cloud shift as a
terminal threat for Oracle, one that is getting worse by the day, and that if
they don't succeed at building up their cloud business, they will erode and
die (and they're right).

Oracle stayed in the game in the last round through massive consolidation,
buying up the competition one after another (eg Siebel, PeopleSoft, etc).
They'll try the same thing this time around as their organic efforts have
largely failed; we'll see how much success they have given they're far
outgunned this time around (and running from much further behind).

~~~
tootie
Has anyone actually ever used their cloud offering? I assume it's awful, but
I've never even looked at it.

~~~
ab_testing
They have the most generous free tier. 2 free VM's each with 50 GB of storage
and 2 free autonomous Oracle databases with 20 GB of storage.

~~~
Polylactic_acid
What is the catch here? That seems good enough to run most things on.

~~~
michaelt
They offer 2 free Oracle databases. The catch is they're Oracle databases.

In other words it's the same as every cloud provider: They hope you'll build a
business system that uses enough of their proprietary tech that you can't
easily move to another provider.

~~~
ab_testing
You can run mysql on any other free database on the 2 free compute instances.
It is totally up to you.

The autonomous database is Oracle's offering of their Oracle database - that
requires no DBA or tuning and runs on Exadata infrastructure. They are
offering it for free - because they want enterprises using existing on-premise
Oracle databases, to move their existing DB applications to the cloud.

Oracle Autonomous databases comes with free Oracle APEX - which is a low code
/ no code toolchain.

------
elheffe80
No one thinks this has to do with the relationship between the US President
and Oracle? Amazon is throwing a fit because they weren’t chosen to be the
Pentagons cloud provider. Now this. It’s favoritism.

~~~
ehsankia
At leas the pentagon deal was government related. Why the hell is the
government putting it's nose up private deals like this and also asking for a
cut?

~~~
newacct583
Because in this case the executive branch effectively forced the sale to
happen by threatening to ban the platform. TikTok on its own wasn't looking to
sell. Now, they _have_ to sell to an American company in order to make Trump
happy. So what else do they have to do to make Trump happy?

~~~
ehsankia
Well it's borderline acceptable to indirectly forcing them to sell by
threatening a ban, but to actively oversee the sale and micromanage it is far
beyond the line.

~~~
newacct583
> it's borderline acceptable to indirectly forcing them to sell

It really is not. One of the biggest horrors of the Trump years is the extent
to which this kind of capricious executive action has been normalized. A ban
is a ban. If you genuinely think an app poses a security risk, then you use
one of the executive tools available to shut it down.

There was no "ban" enacted here. It was a bargaining chip used to muck with
the markets in an outrageously explicit way. We don't do that in this country.
Or we never did before.

The closest equivalent to this in terms of effect would have been the trust
busting of the early 20th century. And that involved all three branches of
government working over years. This happened because One Guy decided he didn't
like TikTok.

------
yalogin
This is such a huge clusterfuck, I don't know why anyone would buy it.
Microsoft is lucky to have gotten away from it. What does acquiring the US
operations even mean? Do they get code and if so who is going to take it
forward? The engineers are all byte dance employees. They have a few engineers
outside of China but the bulk of the talent is in China, that is where the
innovation is coming from. Without them it doesn't make sense to get the
operations. The user base is going to drastically fall and it will be a write-
off in 2yrs time. All of the money is wasted.

~~~
PeterStuer
You think oracle is paying for this without it being rewarded some nice
matching government contracts or other investments/deals to match the expense?

~~~
jacobush
Yep, exactly like how Microsoft was compensated for buying Skype. This stuff
is not without precedent.

Skype was not sponsored by a foreign power but by liberal minded founders
using P2P technology. Still a "national security" threat (actually a hegemony
threat) so it had to be addressed somehow. Microsoft was happy to help.

It also helps explain a little the hapless treatment of the Skype brand under
Microsoft. Not that Microsoft hasn't bought companies and mismanaged the
assets before, but they really didn't know what to do with Skype.

------
DogOfTheGaps
This is likely explanation why Oracle was able to acquire TikTok's operation,
despite the fact it does not seem to be a good fit at all:
[https://www.businessinsider.com/look-inside-president-
trump-...](https://www.businessinsider.com/look-inside-president-trump-and-
larry-ellisons-relationship-2020-8)

~~~
jhanschoo
That's just speculation. Recall that Microsoft was rejected by TikTok leaving
Oracle as the sole contender.

See: [https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/13/technology/tiktok-
microso...](https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/13/technology/tiktok-microsoft-
oracle-bytedance.html)

~~~
Termious
> Weeks later, China issued new regulations that would essentially bar TikTok
> from transferring its technology to a foreign buyer without explicit
> permission from the Chinese government.

> The Chinese regulations helped scuttle the effort by Microsoft, which said
> the only way it could both protect the privacy of TikTok users in the United
> States and prevent Beijing from using the app as a venue for disinformation
> was to take over the computer source code underlying the app, and the
> algorithms that determine what videos are seen by the 100 million Americans
> who use it each month.

This makes it clear that China has ties to Oracle management in some form or
another, or Oracle wouldn't be the last man standing. This is going to be a
shitshow.

~~~
kergonath
> This makes it clear that China has ties to Oracle management in some form or
> another

Oracle also has ties to Trump. This stinks.

~~~
guscost
Every company at this level has ties to the executive branch, and much more.
Remember last year when the DoD wrote Microsoft a $10 billion check?

~~~
kergonath
There’s a difference with having a contract with a department and being best
buddies with an autocrat wannabe. Who then signs an executive order and
invokes national security on very shaky grounds to force a sale.

Still, I’m not saying that the $10B DoD contract and the way they tortured the
process to avoid giving it to Amazon did not stink as well. Or that Amazon as
a company is fine. There can be more than one festering carcass in a swamp.

------
tannhaeuser
It needs to be said that US admin interfering/forcing this deal citing
"national security" concerns in a situation where US companies already
dominate social platforms sends a very, very strong signal for other countries
to demand social data to be stored on their respective soil as well. It's the
end of the illusion of a competitive market in the "internet" and will have
far-reaching consequences. In which world would EU, India, South/Mid America
give a free pass to US oligopolies capturing almost all advertising revenue?

~~~
thewarrior
The US threatened to impose tariffs on India for trying to do this. US is all
free markets as long as they can win when they cannot they bully.

------
throw665439
It appears Oracle is a “tech partner” in this acquisition.

Isn’t this virtually identical to the Chinese model? For example, NetEase is
the tech partner for Blizzard, GCBD for Apple’s iCloud, Sinnet for AWS, who
does Microsoft partner with?

This appears to be a working model that the Chinese government will support. I
wonder if other nations will start to adopt it.

~~~
rfoo
Yes.

My Chinese friends are joking on this "California on Cloud" scenario. (GCBD is
called "Guizhou on Cloud" in Chinese)

------
msravi
Global Times (China's CCP-run English Language News Portal) claims that
ByteDance will NOT sell TikTok-US operations to Oracle or Microsoft.

Edit: They're probably being technically correct about "sell", but not so much
about "operations".

[https://twitter.com/globaltimesnews/status/13054102792833884...](https://twitter.com/globaltimesnews/status/1305410279283388417)

------
jrott
Well Facebook has to be happy at least. Oracle has to be the company least
likely to run TikTok well.

~~~
Barrin92
probably not because it's basically a Pyrrhic victory long-term. It'll
drastically increase the chances of Facebook facing those issues in other
countries, which would be devastating to the global business model of US
software firms, and Facebook might get regulators attention again if the only
significant competitor dies. I think Zuckerberg even said as much.

------
Fej
(Written for another post regarding the same topic, copied here)

Oracle purchasing a stake in ByteDance, and maybe handling US operations? It
sounds like one of those deals which will end up as a loss in a few years and
a write-down. The first comparison that comes to mind is the Tumblr sale, when
Yahoo wrote-down $712 million, although the companies are quite different.
However, the similarity is the culture difference between the parent and
subsidiary companies - Yahoo couldn't figure out how to turn Tumblr profitable
as they had no successful examples prior, as far as I remember. Oracle and
TikTok could not be more different: Oracle is a cold cloud technology supplier
with no business advertising to teens.

If Oracle wishes to only be the cloud partner holding US data (a possibility
mentioned in the article) it's possible that it could work out, but whether it
is possible is dependent on politics and potentially who is elected as the
next President.

------
ChuckMcM
That's hilarious, really. In my experience if you want to kill a company have
Oracle acquire it. (that may be a bit too cynical)

~~~
jennyyang
As far back as 15 years ago, Oracle had the reputation of being the company
where people would come to work, close their office door, and then work on a
second job or side project in peace and quiet. Oracle was/is powered by zero
innovation and all enterprise sales.

I thought the idea of Microsoft buying TikTok was funny, but I couldn't think
of a company more effective to dismantle TikTok than Oracle.

~~~
chrisseaton
> Oracle was/is powered by zero innovation and all enterprise sales.

Oracle has one of the last couple of proper industrial research labs left in
the industry.

It regularly publishes at the top venues in multiple fields and funds a lot of
academics.

~~~
TeeMassive
Examples?

~~~
brd529
Usually they have a paper at Sigmod

2018:
[https://sigmod2018.org/sigmod_industrial_list.shtml](https://sigmod2018.org/sigmod_industrial_list.shtml)

RAPID: In-Memory Analytical Query Processing Engine with Extreme Performance
per Watt

2020:
[https://sigmod2020.org/sigmod_industrial_list.shtml](https://sigmod2020.org/sigmod_industrial_list.shtml)

Database Workload Capacity Planning using Time Series Analysis and Machine
Learning

------
flowerlad
Depending on what part of TikTok Oracle runs this may actually be a good
arrangement that works well for both companies.

If Oracle has anything to do with the app itself or its functionality then
TikTok will not do well. But if Oracle just manages the data and cloud
operations then this may indeed work out well for both companies. Oracle is
competent when it comes to data and cloud. That's their core business after
all.

------
jeffbee
I wonder how the deal is structured with respect to employee stock
compensation. I was negotiating with them late last year and most of the comp
was going to be in funny-money of the bytedance variety, which is both highly
illiquid and hilariously valued. If US tiktok employees get converted to
shares of Oracle, that's a substantial upgrade. Of course, they work for
Oracle now, but still.

------
baybal2
That was unexpected. What Larry will do with it? Sell Oracle to teenagers?

What an irony given Oracle's own roots in USA's espionage agencies.

~~~
lowiqengineer
“Irony” or “makes complete sense?”

------
doctoboggan
This feels like such a strange acquisition for Oracle. Does anyone have
insight on how Oracle envisions the TikTok brand and userbase adding value to
the rest of the company?

~~~
dodobirdlord
I think this makes sense. Oracle isn't really acquiring TikTok, just its "US
Operations". They presumably won't be responsible for developing algorithms,
the app, or the backend, and will instead be running the service and hosting
all of the data generated in the United States. Looked at this way, it's more
like an unusually deep relationship with a cloud services provider than a
buyout, and a huge win of business and reputation for Oracle Cloud.

~~~
howlgarnish
But is it really a huge reputational win? Us geeks know that Tiktok's scale is
huge, but your average bank is not going to be terribly impressed that Oracle
is now hosting an app still widely viewed as some random frivolous teen twerk
thing.

~~~
xvector
> but your average bank is not going to be terribly impressed that Oracle is
> now hosting an app still widely viewed as some random frivolous teen twerk
> thing.

Absolutely not. If anything, the young user base makes TikTok more valuable.
It will be viewed as an analogue to Facebook before it exploded.

~~~
howlgarnish
I'm not doubting TikTok's own value, I'm questioning the assertion that owning
TikTok will have reputational benefits for Oracle as a cloud hosting provider.

~~~
xvector
It’s an application with about a billion users. The benefits are tremendous.
Banks are not dumb, they do their research before valuing corps

~~~
howlgarnish
Again, not a question of Tiktok's valuation, but whether this is relevant to
bank considering Oracle Cloud for their _own_ infra.

------
someluccc
In a way this is brilliant from ByteDance. Sell for the most money to a
company that will never grow or operate tiktok in a way that can threaten you
outside the US.

~~~
cnst
If you read the latest statement from Microsoft of how they'd have made sure
to implement all the latest "privacy" features for TikTok, it's actually a
really great news that ByteDance knows better.

What was the most visible outcome of Microsoft's takeover of GitHub? Some
software engineers who happen to live in a wrong peninsula in Europe had their
GitHub accounts shutdown with no advance notice and no recourse. So much for
the rule of law and for social coding!

I think it's great that people from all over the world have a choice of who to
give their data to. If there'd be a worldwide antitrust body, US would already
be in trouble! Remember when China blocked Twitter and whatever else? Yeah,
aren't we the China now?!

------
jacquesm
And all that because of a bunch of kids disrupting a rally. It's disgraceful
that US companies would agree to participate in this forced sale. What's next?
Volkwagen? After all, if this is now a legal way to do business I see
absolutely no reason why it would stop at TikTok.

------
Datsundere
First thing they're going to do is install their slow and really difficult to
use BI tools and the db that takes hours to download.

It's insane when I tried installing oracle db and BI tools on my laptop. It
was the worst software installation process in my life.

------
jordache
so what? oracle acquires a flavor of the month platform.. it'll be a "remember
when" type of story, in 2-3 years, when everyone is just starting to forget
tiktok

------
throw_m239339
It's very bizarre. What could Oracle possibly gain from TikTok from a business
perspective? It seems so far away from their core business. MySQL, SUN, I kind
of understand, but TikTok? Why didn't say Google or Amazon make a bid?

~~~
xvector
> What could Oracle possibly gain from TikTok from a business perspective?

Further credibility with the US government as they deepen their ties with the
NSA and US intelligence. Leads to winning more massive government contracts
and more favor from future administrations.

Oracle is ahead of the game. It has realized that ingratiating itself with the
government is a recipe for long-term success.

------
golem14
It would be interesting to know why Oracle won. Did they offer more money ? Or
is TikTok convinced that Oracle won't be able to do something decent with the
acquisition ? Other than start fights with facebook etc over tiktok lookalikes
? Oracle will be great at that.

"If we can't have it, then we want to make sure NOONE will profit from it, and
we burn that space to the ground in the US" ?

The cynic in me suspects that this is so, Oracle looked like a weird pick from
the start. It would have been super interesting to be part of that
negotiation.

~~~
mcintyre1994
Mark Ellison is the only leader in tech who openly runs fundraisers for Trump.
The cynic in me suspects that's the entirety of the reasoning.

~~~
mcintyre1994
This is of course supposed to say Larry Ellison but I can't edit.

------
neonate
[https://archive.is/55ZvG](https://archive.is/55ZvG)

~~~
cnst
[https://archive.is/55ZvG](https://archive.is/55ZvG)

> Microsoft earlier Sunday said it was notified earlier in the day of the
> decision by TikTok parent ByteDance Ltd.

> “We are confident our proposal would have been good for TikTok’s users,
> while protecting national security interests,” the company said in a
> statement. “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.”

Yeah, as a self-appointed member of the worldwide trade commission, enforcing
the antitrust rules and regulations, I'm really happy that the Microsoft's bid
has been declined!

------
airstrike
Oracle, really? M&A needs strategic fit to make real sense (for buyers other
than financial sponsors), and I don't see any

You don't just pick the highest paying bid, necessarily

~~~
tupputuppu
It needs strategic fit FOR THE BUYER, not the seller. Besides, M&A is more
driveen ny management hubris than business value anyway.

~~~
airstrike
It also matters for the seller, to some extent, because the employees will now
work at Oracle. If you're the CEO of TikTok, and now you're "Chief Social
Media Officer" or whatever title the buyer will think up, would you rather
hold that job at Oracle, Microsoft or somewhere else?

Sure, if you're the shareholder, you may not care what happens to your former
employees, but the buyer _should_ care that the value of the asset they just
paid for is inclusive of human capital, and that value depends on the opinion
of the people working on the seller's side

------
ChicagoDave
Not sure if everyone knows this, but Oracle owns and rents the largest
personal information database in the world. They have more than Facebook or so
it’s rumored.

~~~
bfelbo
Can you share more on this?

~~~
Nemo_bis
> Oracle Corp. has spent five years and billions of dollars getting really
> good at following people around the internet. Six acquisitions reportedly
> totaling at least $3 billion since 2014

[https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-02-06/oracle-
di...](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-02-06/oracle-didn-t-see-
the-data-reckoning-coming)

~~~
disgruntledphd2
More importantly, they own Datalogix, which aggregates loyalty card details
for retail.

This means that Oracle are legitimately the best people to answer the question
of which half of your advertising was wasted for offline sales.

Weird, right?

------
samizdis
Here's the arstechnica take on this:

[https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2020/09/oracle-one-of-
do...](https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2020/09/oracle-one-of-donald-
trumps-favorite-companies-wins-tiktok-deal/)

------
fqye
Well rumor circulating in China's VC / startup circle is that this ISN'T true
either.

------
maxdo
That's a very smart move, they sell it to the least competent bidder possible.
If microsoft buys it, you might have a global competitor with big number of
Hollywood stars as influencers. With oracle it will be a slow death but with
enough money not die anytime soon.

------
Nemo_bis
On The Guardian: [https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2020/sep/14/tiktok-
by...](https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2020/sep/14/tiktok-bytedance-to-
partner-with-oracle-in-us-after-rejecting-microsoft-bid)

On Reuters: [https://uk.reuters.com/article/uk-britain-eu-autos/europe-
br...](https://uk.reuters.com/article/uk-britain-eu-autos/europe-britains-
carmakers-warn-of-110-billion-euro-hard-brexit-bill-idUKKBN2640YV)

------
angel_j
Oracle must have made the most concessions of control to ByteDance. Oracle
gets a popular brand, data, and a strong entry into social networks.

------
gchokov
That’s very smart of Oracle. They will introduce ERPs to kids from early age.
I heard it’s a dream of 10years old to get into the enterprise.

------
chasd00
One thing about Oracle, either it prints money for Ellison or it ceases to
exist. I suspect tiktok will be no more in about 2 years.

------
llacb47
Plain text of the article for those behind paywall:

[https://gist.githubusercontent.com/llacb47/2beb750b56bc98a5d...](https://gist.githubusercontent.com/llacb47/2beb750b56bc98a5daa8a1257f27a2c3/raw/ec9ea9a9d73dea8017c6e165ac5bb45b202f4550/wsj-
tiktok.txt)

~~~
pabs3
For the WSJ you can just append this to the URL to bypass the paywall:

?mod=djemalertNEWS

~~~
throwawaywrench
any idea why that is the case?

~~~
pabs3
None, sorry.

------
gandutraveler
Chinese law requires that algorithms are not exported out of china. So how
would their recommendation algo work which requires processing all this data.
Will that run on Oracle cloud in US or in China ?

And how does it stop any bytedance engineer from logging into the cloud
machine or looking into the data directly

------
outside1234
"Hello Fellow Students!"

------
colesantiago
The hate around Oracle seems very emotional without reason and reminds me of
the hate around Microsoft back in the day.

Oracle's latest acquisition [0] by is a consumer video creation company called
sauce.video [1]

It could be that Oracle is looking for a new challenge in video technology to
demonstrate the capabilities of their cloud services, even Zoom chosen them
for their infrastructure [2].

[0]
[https://www.oracle.com/corporate/acquisitions/](https://www.oracle.com/corporate/acquisitions/)

[1] [https://www.oracle.com/corporate/acquisitions/sauce-
video/](https://www.oracle.com/corporate/acquisitions/sauce-video/)

[2]
[https://www.oracle.com/customers/zoom.html](https://www.oracle.com/customers/zoom.html)

~~~
dralley
> The hate around Oracle seems very emotional without reason and reminds me of
> the hate around Microsoft back in the day.

Seriously? There were plenty of legitimate reasons to hate Microsoft "back in
the day". Less of them now, but hating Microsoft in the 90s and 00s was not
"without reason".

~~~
colesantiago
> Less of them now, but hating Microsoft in the 90s and 00s was not "without
> reason".

Never said that, read what I said again.

~~~
yjftsjthsd-h
> The hate around Oracle seems very emotional _without reason_ and _reminds me
> of the hate around Microsoft back in the day_.

(emphasis mine) Okay, what am I missing? That looks like exactly the same
statement.

------
pkz
Oracle Enterprise TikTok. Licensing experts from Oracle will visit kids and
check if they are properly licensed. Multi-core phone owners will pay extra
unless their family is on Oracle Premier Support.

------
habosa
If I were Facebook I'd offer to pay for Oracle to buy it. What better way to
kill off an upstart social media app popular with young people than to have
Oracle run it! Zuck must be thrilled.

------
perseusprime11
This should not be a surprise. If you want to monkey around with the codebase
and the algorithm, which company is easier to dupe? Microsoft or Oracle?

------
wqTJ3jmY8br4RWa
Crony capitalism, anyone?

"Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison earlier this year threw a fundraiser at his
house for the president. Chief Executive Safra Catz also worked on the
executive committee for the Trump transition team in 2016."

------
syspec
This reminds me of when Yahoo! bought Tumblr.

------
znpy
"how do you do, fellow kids?"

------
throwaway189262
Hahaha! Has Oracle ever run a B2C product in their existence? Or anything ad
supported? Or anything at all that you don't buy with a contract?

I can't see any scenario where this ends well. Reminds me of Dyson's electric
car ambitions. Or the time I considered living in a van, I was quite drunk
that day.

------
bostonsre
They probably didn't want the app to survive and be competitive in the US.
They didn't want a company capable of nurturing it and expanding it to buy it
(Microsoft). They were contemplating just killing, at least this way they get
a pay out.

------
mxpxrocks10
serious question: does anyone think this is a good idea? is there an argument
that this could be a good thing?

------
pgrote
What cloud provider does TikTok use now?

~~~
dartdartdart
They signed $800 million with google cloud a couple of years ago. So probably
that with a mix of others

------
d0100
This probably means that the CPP will still continue to gather the data,
despite this "ownership" change.

------
Balgair
Ellison is a big time donor for Donny.

It never was about 'best fit' or "national security'.

It's corruption, clear as day.

[https://www.businessinsider.com/oracle-billionaire-larry-
ell...](https://www.businessinsider.com/oracle-billionaire-larry-ellison-is-
fundraising-for-donald-trump-2020-2?op=1)

~~~
throwaway4good
Also very similar to Zoom which also partnered with Oracle and immediately the
zoom-is-in-bed-with-the-chinese-communist campaign ended.

~~~
Bomberus
Ellison said that Zoom chose Oracle because “we were faster—much faster—and we
were much less expensive and we were more secure.”
([https://www.barrons.com/articles/oracle-and-tiktok-why-
ceo-l...](https://www.barrons.com/articles/oracle-and-tiktok-why-ceo-larry-
ellison-should-just-say-no-51598055844))

I wonder where I heard this speech-pattern before?

~~~
phone8675309
It strains credulity to claim with a straight face that Oracle is much less
expensive than its competitors.

------
jonstewart
Safra Catz is relatively close to the Trump administration.

------
throwaway423342
not strange

\- TikTok ruined Trumps rally

\- Facebook is threatened by TikTok growth in US

\- Zuck testifies before congress, pointing fingers at China and companies
like TikTok

\- Zuck met Trump, shaked hands under the table

\- Trump asks TikTok to sell

\- to Oracle.... best US company to curb TikTok growth

\- Facebook does nothing about Trump posts

\- Profit for Trump, less competitor for Zuck

\- Things probably staged. What is one reason TikTok "chooses" Oracle over
Microsoft?

edit: formatting

------
aptsurdist
I’m sure Trump is thrilled about this since Larry Ellison is a Trump supporter
who fund raises for him.

~~~
Olumde
Trump probably okayed the deal, or made it happen.

Now Tiktok has to please not one but two authoritarian governments.

------
Fjolsvith
A win for all the conservatives on TikTok. Larry is a big Trump supporter.

------
non-entity
TikTok Enterprise (tm)

~~~
pavlov
Oracle Funny-Clock-Sound Personal Video Suite for Youth Management (Single-
Core License)

~~~
kstrauser
(Single-Thread License. They don’t want people ripping them off with
multithreaded CPUs.)

~~~
to11mtm
They saw an article about Heterogeneous ARM cores in smartphones and just
couldn't help themselves.

------
sitkack
Did China just get access to Oracle and Oracle Cloud?

~~~
suyash
good for American company, better that data stays in US than in China

