ByteDance told Microsoft it would not be selling TikTok’s U.S. operations to the Redmond, Washington company in news announced Sunday on Microsoft's blog.
"We are confident our proposal would have been good for TikTok’s users, while protecting national security interests," Microsoft said. "To do this, we would have made significant changes to ensure the service met the highest standards for security, privacy, online safety, and combating disinformation, and we made these principles clear in our August statement."
The move leaves Oracle as next in line as the deadline imposed by President Trump comes closer. The president made an executive order to block the app as of September 20, 2020.
NBC News Business & Tech Correspondent Jo Ling Kent tweeted that Oracle has been chosen as the technology partner to acquire TikTok's U.S. operations, citing a source directly
familiar with the deal.
Reports suggest ByteDance would allow Oracle to become a “technology partner,” but it is unclear whether that meant this agreement would allow it to take an ownership stake of the app, according to one report.
TikTok is on the way to becoming a rival in the advertising industry.
Ad-Lib, a UK-based marketing technology platform that helps global brands manage and automate the production and activation of creative assets, will soon announce an integration with TikTok, according to Ad-Lib CEO Adit Abhyankar.
The integration with TikTok will be different than others, he said. For starters, the
company is less focused on personalization. They are more interested in “creative refreshes.” Similar to Facebook, they don’t want their viewers exposed to the same ad repeatedly,
Abhyankar said. It's all about the algorithms.
Oracle has not publicly commented on what it would do with TikTok, but Trip Chowdhry, managing director of Global Equities Research, has been very vocal. He believes Oracle will acquire the U.S. assets.
Chowdhry, who worked several years at Oracle in the mid-1990s fresh out of school after graduating from the University of Southern California, said Oracle was late to enter cloud services and had the opportunity to learn from the mistakes of others. The timing gives Oracle an edge when it comes to securing sensitive data.
