The TikTok saga isn’t over yet despite the Oracle deal being approved by the U.S. government. Reports claim China still emerges as a winner.
ByteDance has already laid out a deal for the fate of TikTok in the U.S. Unfortunately, it wasn’t with Microsoft, but with Oracle and Walmart instead.
As the reported deal entails, ByteDance will still own 80% of the stake while Oracle gets 20%. Walmart, on the other hand, is named as the app’s official “commercial partner.” The deal was laid out to appease the U.S. government.
However, reports entail that it still looks like China won over President Donald Trump on this little war.
None of Trump’s demand met?
A line from a Bloomberg article reads, “[t]he deal he’s blessed doesn’t meet his demands and gives Beijing plenty to be happy about.”
The White House has reportedly temporarily accepted the TikTok-Oracle bid last week. However, should the deal hold, “almost none” of Trump’s demands from last month will be met.
This means Trump’s demand for ByteDance to sell will unlikely happen. Which also means, “[n]o U.S. government cut of the transaction.”
Also, as ByteDance still holds 80% of the stake and source codes won’t be relayed over to the U.S. operations, there will be “no satisfying resolution to address the risk that TikTok.”
It should be reminded that the whole reason for this TikTok fiasco as there have been claims of a threat to U.S. users’ data.
The publication quotes Fergus Ryan of the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, saying:
“It’s hard to see how the biggest winner out of all of this isn’t Beijing, because Trump effectively got nothing that he asked for.”
Despite the deal already been accepted by Trump, it will still not hold in place until the Chinese government agrees to it. In a previous CNBC report, a state-backed local newspaper, China Daily, believe its government won’t accept the said deal.
The local publication used the phrases “dirty and unfair” and “bullying and extortion” as it described the deal. “China has no reason to give the green light to such a deal,” an excerpt of the piece reads.
TikTok and its injunction request
On Wednesday, TikTok requested a preliminary injunction from a U.S. judge. The purpose of the request was to put a hold on the imminent Apple and Google Play ban this Sunday, September 27.
Due to the “recent positive developments” brought by the deal talks, the U.S. Commerce Department has imposed a one-week delay on the ban order, which will expire this weekend.
However, TikTok believes that the ban order is no longer about addressing a national security concern, The New York Post reports.
TikTok believes the restrictions were:
“not motivated by a genuine national security concern, but rather by political considerations relating to the upcoming general election.”
Nonetheless, Judge Carl Nichols has already made a request on Thursday for the Justice Department lawyers to file a brief arguing TikTok’s injunction, per a separate The New York Post report.
Judge Nichols has given a deadline for the submission of the argument at 2:30 p.m. EDT this Friday. Either file an argument or agree to the injunction.
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