Will a partnership with Oracle save TikTok in the U.S.?

After the White House demanded that Beijing-based owner ByteDance sell its American operations to a U.S.-owned firm, or else be blocked from doing business starting on September 20th. Oracle emerged as the company that will make it happen on late Sunday night, Bloomberg reports. This morning, Oracle confirmed that it's reached a deal to become the trusted technology provider to TikTok. The next step will be government approval.  Microsoft was in the mix to buy TikTok's U.S. operations with a plan to completely move all data to U.S. soil and take over all of its algorithms from day one. Microsoft President Brad Smith said that would protect against two key threats from TikTok: the risk of the Chinese government infringing on the privacy of American users, and the risk of the platform being used for misinformation.  Adding even more uncertainty to the equation are new reports on Monday morning. China state broadcasters are reporting that ByteDance won't sell TikTok to either Oracle or Microsoft.  Here to discuss the situation with me today is Carmi Levy, director of content marketing at Info-Tech Research Group. And we have Scott Bickley, a principal research director in our CIO group at Info-Tech. Welcome. Also joining us is Marc Mazur, a research specialist in Security at Info-Tech.