Sometimes I'm truly baffled over the stories that the HN readership ends up mostly ignoring. When I heard about this news elsewhere, I came here fully expecting this to be high on the front page with hundreds of comments discussing it. For comparison's sake, the story about Tiktok shutting down[1] and then restoring service[2] in the US each had over 2500 comments. Meanwhile, 3 hours after this story was posted, this is the 14th comment.
Oracle owning TikTok is one of the most unintentionally funny things to ever happen.
drewbitt · 2h ago
Reminds me of Yahoo buying Tumblr. Mismatched. Their best bet is to change little to nothing, but not sure the administration will let them.
HackerThemAll · 1h ago
Oracle is then going to mandate license fees from every user, together with 22% support fees with 8% increase every year.
They'll then rewrite TikTok in Java, and migrate to Oracle Database.
1970-01-01 · 1h ago
The Android .APK files are already Java.
tensorlibb · 8m ago
I think this is a massively good step forward.
However, TikTok is still a brain rot slop machine and we would be right to question Ellison's motivations.
Tarsul · 1h ago
so US users will be cut off from the rest of the world? Wow. Thats crazy.
hollerith · 2h ago
>A new company will be created to operate TikTok, with U.S. investors holding a roughly 80% stake and Chinese shareholders owning the rest, the report said.
It would've been better for the mental health of our country if it had been banned (along with Instagram Reels and Youtube Shorts).
acheron · 2h ago
The good news is, I can’t see “being owned by Oracle” as anything other than a death sentence.
SilverElfin · 2h ago
I doubt it. Oracle has a booming datacenter and cloud business right now. Their role is to host the data in a US jurisdiction, which they can do. It won’t affect the success or failure of TikTok. And frankly it won’t give TikTok users privacy since the data can still be accessed by software written by Chinese employees.
miohtama · 2h ago
LawyerTok
SilverElfin · 2h ago
What does this “stake” get America at all? Will they be able to change the algorithms or censorship or amplification on TikTok? The point of the ban was to avoid national security issues from having an adversarial state (China) controlling speech in America. Banning it entirely is the best way to avoid these problems.
As a reminder, TikTok forces staff to sign pledges to support China’s political system in order to work there and get stock awards:
“America” is an abstraction. It gets the people who will own the new entity something, and its gets the government decisionmakers something, and that’s, in practice, more important than what it gets “America”.
Fade_Dance · 2h ago
>Banning it entirely is the best way to avoid these problems.
Too popular to ban. Political constraints.
>Will they be able to change the algorithms or censorship or amplification on TikTok?
"An Asia-based investor of ByteDance said the new US TikTok entity would use at least part of the Chinese algorithm but train it in the US on American user data."
________________
I'm not sure you're looking at this the right way though. This isn't some conclusion of a search for the optimal way to address the situation (which would probably be an actual digital privacy framework). The ban couldn't go through because the app was too popular and Trump liked the attention he was getting on it. So if the ban has to be backed out of, what's the second best option? A "deal" of course, from the world's best deal maker. It's no more complicated than that.
The Intel stake is the same - barely thought out. If you haven't noticed, this has been a common theme in many policy decisions lately.
[1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42753396
[2] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42759336
They'll then rewrite TikTok in Java, and migrate to Oracle Database.
However, TikTok is still a brain rot slop machine and we would be right to question Ellison's motivations.
It would've been better for the mental health of our country if it had been banned (along with Instagram Reels and Youtube Shorts).
As a reminder, TikTok forces staff to sign pledges to support China’s political system in order to work there and get stock awards:
https://dailycaller.com/2025/01/14/tiktok-forced-staff-oaths...
“America” is an abstraction. It gets the people who will own the new entity something, and its gets the government decisionmakers something, and that’s, in practice, more important than what it gets “America”.
Too popular to ban. Political constraints.
>Will they be able to change the algorithms or censorship or amplification on TikTok?
"An Asia-based investor of ByteDance said the new US TikTok entity would use at least part of the Chinese algorithm but train it in the US on American user data."
________________
I'm not sure you're looking at this the right way though. This isn't some conclusion of a search for the optimal way to address the situation (which would probably be an actual digital privacy framework). The ban couldn't go through because the app was too popular and Trump liked the attention he was getting on it. So if the ban has to be backed out of, what's the second best option? A "deal" of course, from the world's best deal maker. It's no more complicated than that.
The Intel stake is the same - barely thought out. If you haven't noticed, this has been a common theme in many policy decisions lately.