Oracle and TikTok? That’s just weird

The competition over which U.S. technology company will win control of TikTok is heating up, and it just took a strange turn. Late Monday, the Financial Times reported that Oracle Corp. has held talks with Beijing-based ByteDance Ltd. to acquire TikTok’s operations in the U.S., Canada, Australia and New Zealand, putting the business-software developer in the running for the short-video platform alongside Microsoft Corp. and Twitter Inc. And with Oracle’s extensive history in enterprise database software, the U.S. can be assured that the company would be able to safeguard TikTok’s user data, relieving any security and privacy concerns. Last month, I wrote how Microsoft may be the best match, noting that its advertising business anchored by the Bing search engine could make TikTok a powerful third competitor against the two dominant internet ad players, Google parent Alphabet Inc. and Facebook Inc. As for Twitter, my colleague Tim Culpan wrote last week that buying TikTok would help increase the social media company’s scale and reach to younger viewers, improving the company’s ability to sell to advertisers.