It's exactly the kind of scenario that's already par for the course for American companies that want to do business in China (and for those, like Facebook (FB) and Google (GOOGL), that are shut out of the world's second biggest economy). Experts warn that the more Washington's playbook starts to mimic Beijing's, the more at risk the world's internet is of fracturing beyond repair with enormous implications for global business.
The deal to save TikTok's US business would see Walmart (WMT) and Oracle (ORCL) take a minority stake in a US-based company called Tiktok Global. While an announcement earlier this month implied that Beijing-based ByteDance would continue to own most of the short-form video app, developments since then have muddied the waters.
ByteDance would itself hold zero percent of the new entity, a person familiar with the deal told CNN Business earlier this week. Instead, TikTok Global would be partially owned by ByteDance's international and Chinese investors.
The agreement would make Oracle TikTok's "trusted technology partner," and give the California-based tech firm the ability to store the app's American user data and review its source code.
Other aspects of the deal have also become heavily politicized. US President Donald Trump said last weekend that he asked the companies involved to "do me a favor" by bankrolling a $5 billion education fund to teach people the "real history of our country." While it doesn't appear that such a fund will ever materialize, Walmart and Oracle have promised that the deal would coincidentally result in US tax payments totaling that exact amount.
For American companies that work in China, the broad strokes of this deal might seem familiar. Beijing often forces foreign businesses to form joint ventures with local firms and establish offshoot entities.
"I think there is some era of retaliation here, where, 'Hey, if you're going to do this to our companies — shut us out or force us to localize — then we're going to do it to you as well,'" said Dipayan Ghosh, the co-director of the Digital Platforms and Democracy Project at the Harvard Kennedy School.
More similar to China than Europe
Trump's threat to ban TikTok if the app is not sold to a US company is founded on the fear that otherwise, American user data risks winding up in the hands of the Chinese government. (Tiktok has denied this as a possibility and says it keeps US data stateside, with a backup in Singapore.)
The fight over TikTok has sparked a political firestorm in the United States. But it's not exactly an unusual concern overseas, where governments have long been worried about how much access US tech firms have to information about their citizens. That unease has increased in the years since Edward Snowden, a former contractor who worked with the US National Security Agency, revealed in documents leaked to the news media that the American government tapped into people's data through tech companies like Microsoft (MSFT), Google and Apple (AAPL).
The European Union has for years tussled with US companie
