Taxing gatekeepers~I
By 2016-17, Facebook had designed a business model that aimed at maximising the ‘user engagement’, that is how much time users spent on their platform, and started collecting data on what they liked and shared.
Investment firms General Atlantic and Sequoia Capital, two major stakeholders in ByteDance Ltd., are driving Cloud major Oracle’s potential bid for the U.S. operations of the popular video-sharing app TikTok, a report on The Wall Street Journal said on Monday.
Only a few days ago Oracle emerged as a potential company, other than Microsoft, to acquire TikTok’s US, Canada, Australia and New Zealand operations.
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As per the report, Microsoft had initially invited some existing US investors to join its bids. But these two investment firms grew concerned that they would not get a suitable deal with the tech giant. And therefore, the ended up pushing Oracle’s bid.
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A report in The Financial Times last week said that Oracle was also seriously considering purchasing the app’s operations in these countries.
The pressure on ByteDance to sell TikTok’s US business increased after US President Donald Trump issued an executive order on August 6 effectively threatening a ban on the app next month over national security concerns. A subsequent executive order issued on August 14 gave TikTok an option to divest its US operation within 90 days.
TikTok filed a lawsuit on Monday challenging the first executive order.
The short video-sharing platform accused the US authorities of stripping the rights of the company without providing any evidence to justify the extreme action.
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