Oracle wins the bid for Tik Tok

Oracle Corp. won the bidding for the United States operations of the video- sharing app Tik Tok, beating out Microsoft Corp.

Citing national security concerns, the Trump administration on August issued an executive order requiring that the short video app at the center of US-China tensions, be sold to a US buyer or face being shut down by Sept 15.

The Wall Street Journal reported that Oracle has secured a deal to manage Tik Tok’s US operations. Both the companies haven’t issued a statement, but the tech giant Microsoft, who was a frontrunner to acquire the app at one time has issued statement, with some pointed remarks.

Through their statement Microsoft, cryptically implied that other bids wouldn’t deal with the issue of protecting user data as seriously as it intended to:

“Byte Dance 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 Tik Tok’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 combating disinformation and we made these principles clear in our August statement. We look forward to seeing how the service evolves in these important areas.”

It is not clear whether TikTok’s partnership with Oracle would allow the short-form video app to avert the ban.

However, Chinese state media refute the rumours that Oracle secured the deal. Chinese government revised its export rules that could block the transfer or sale of Byte Dance’s artificial intelligence technologies. It is highly unlikely that China will allow this move.

The clock is ticking on TikTok’s fate.