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The US Treasury Department will review a proposal to revamp TikTok’s US operations with Oracle as its “trusted technology provider.” Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, in an interview with CNBC, said that the department had received a bid proposal from Oracle for TikTok’s operations. TikTok is facing a ban in the US, with the administration citing security concerns for the ban.
“We will be reviewing that at the CFIUS this week and then will be making a recommendation to the President and reviewing it with him,” he said in the interview.
TikTok had also released a statement that it has submitted a proposal to the Treasury Department. However, its statement did not directly reference Oracle.
“We can confirm that we’ve submitted a proposal to the Treasury Department which we believe would resolve the administration’s security concerns,” it said in its statement as quoted by the BBC.
“This proposal would enable us to continue supporting our community of 100 million people in the US who love TikTok for connection and entertainment, as well as the hundreds of thousands of small business owners and creators who rely upon TikTok to grow their livelihoods and build meaningful careers,” it added.
Mixed response
Oracle’s bid for TikTok has also received mixed responses. For instance, Senator Josh Hawley, in an open letter to Mnuchin called for rejection of the Oracle bid till ByteDance agrees to give up full control.
“ByteDance has no intention whatsoever of relinquishing ultimate control of TikTok. ByteDance, as TikTok’s parent company, will continue to be subject to Chinese laws that put Americans’ data at risk,” Hawley wrote in the letter.
“CFIUS should promptly reject any Oracle-ByteDance collaboration and send the ball back to ByteDance’s court so that the company can come up with a more acceptable solution. ByteDance can still pursue a full sale of TikTok, its code, and its algorithm to a US company so that the app can be rebuilt from the ground up to remove any trace of CCP influence,” he added.
Oracle will be working with the short video platform to transfer the data of American users to Oracle’s cloud-computing infrastructure and store that information only in the US, according to a Wall Street Journal report.
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