TikTok Oracle and Walmart won’t be ByteDance(ing)just yet
Update: On Wednesday TikTok filed a motion in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. stating that “There is no plausible reason to insist the prohibitions be enforced immediately.”
The “prohibitions” that the motion refers to are blocking residents of the United States from downloading or updating TikTok apps, “but will otherwise largely preserve the status quo with respect to Plaintiffs and their existing U.S. users.”
TikTok called out U.S. President Donald Trump who stated that TikTok causes “national security” concerns and threatened to shut down the app unless its ownership is transferred to American buyers. TikTok in its motion argues that Trump is motivated “by political considerations relating to the upcoming general election” and that there is “ simply no genuine emergency here that would justify the government’s precipitous actions.”
The U.S. Department of Justice responded by telling the court that a ruling is “unnecessary and unwarranted” and that it needs a week to respond to TikTok’s lawsuit. In that case, the scheduled deadline of 11:59 PM ET on Sunday, September 27, 2020 will be missed and the schedules prohibitions will go to into effect.
The U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia is expected to hold hearings at 10 a.m. ET Thursday to discuss the issues.
When the news media received an announcement saying that Oracle founder and CTO Larry Ellison wouldn’t appear on Fox Business News (FBN) on Wednesday morning as planned, it was only reasonable to assume that something in the deal between ByteDance, Oracle,TikTok and Walmart had gone awry. A few hours later news came that China would be unlikely to approve the deal.
Not long after, an editorial appeared in China Daily headlined: “No disguising proposed TikTok deal is a dirty and underhanded trick.”
Ellison neither shaken nor stirred
The unknown author compared the United States’ earlier decision to ban TikTok as “the same as a gangster forcing an unreasonable and unfair business deal on a legitimate company.” The author also went on to attack the United States,
“National security has become the weapon of choice for the Washington when it wants to curb the rise of any companies from foreign countries that are out-performing their US peers.”
The China Daily goes on: “The US administration has set traps from the very beginning in its efforts to get ByteDance to sell TikTok to a US company. Now it is trying to give the impression that it has not wielded the cosh by okaying the deal on the cards. But it is just a trick to finally take over TikTok.”
It’s questionable whether things will get better later in the day because television business reporter Maria Bartiromo revealed that part of Ellison’s news concerned the new company’s board of directors which was to be composed of four Americans and a Japanese deal maker Masa Son. Not only is it unlikely that that was the kind of decision China was looking for, but Oracle now denies knowing anything about it.
Go figure.