By Echo Wang and Paresh Dave
(Reuters) – Microsoft Corp’s offer to remove parts of TikTok from its Chinese owner ByteDance will be a technically complex company that can test the patience of President Donald Trump’s administration, they said resources close to the setup.
Trump has given Microsoft until Sept. 15 to put together a blueprint for an acquisition that safeguards the personal data of Americans stored on the short-video app, and he has issued an order to ban it if there is no deal by then.
Microsoft is negotiating a transition that will give you time to technologically shut down TikTok from ByteDance after reaching an agreement, Reuters reported on August 2.
The blank breakout trump and lawmakers can take just a year or more, resources said.
TikTok is functionally and technically similar to Douyin, owned by ByteDance, which can only be obtained in China, and stores technical resources with it and other houses owned by ByteDance, other people familiar with the subject said.
ByteDance began painting about his technological separation several months ago as a component of the U.S. government’s scrutiny, he told Reuters a source close to the procedure. He has begun to make split plans as a component of a strategy to move his strength from China, Reuters reported.
While the application code, which determines the look and feel of TikTok, has been separated from Douyin, the server code is still shared among other ByteDance products, the source said. Server code provides critical application features such as knowledge storage, algorithms for moderating and presenting content, and user profile management.
For an uninterrupted TikTok service, Microsoft will most likely have to rely on ByteDance code while reviewing and reviewing the code, and moves to a new back-end infrastructure to serve users, according to Ryan Speers, River Loop Security’s cybersecurity expert, which provides services, adding cybersecurity due diligence for transactions.
Any continued technical or operational unit of the U.S. company with respect to the Chinese company after the sale would have been unacceptable to the U.S. Foreign Investment Committee (CFIUS), said Aimen Mir, former Deputy Treasury Undersecretary to blame for CFIUS. At the Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer.
In the past, CFIUS has demanded greater protections pending a sale, separating U.S. operations from foreign distributors whenever possible, he said.
Another challenge Microsoft faces is how it will transfer what is viewed as TikTok’s secret sauce, the recommendation engine that keeps users glued to their screens. This engine, or algorithm, powers TikTok’s “For You” page, which recommends the next video to watch based on an analysis of user behavior.
TikTok uses Douyin’s independent advisory algorithms, based on two resources close to the topic. But what motivates it is the content and the user who joins the algorithm.
“Algorithms are insignificant without knowledge,” said Jim DuBois, Microsoft’s former data director. DuBois is a venture capital advisor at Ignition Partners. “Knowledge segmentation for these countries is a task.”
Microsoft’s negotiations to take over TikTok’s operations in the United States, Canada, New Zealand, and Australia complicate the separation. Not only must TikTok be separated from ByteDance, but it must also be separated from other TikTok regions. This adds to the demanding technical situations due to the amount of knowledge involved.
“The biggest part is separating the user data – both content and data about users,” DuBois said, noting hard disks of data would likely need to be transferred between ByteDance and Microsoft.
The proposed timeline makes it very difficult to succeed in an agreement, said Karen C. Hermann, Transaction Attorney at Venable LLP: “It can take months and months to simply identify the business desires of the divestment company, high-level assets and other assets. used exclusively. Array and what high-level assets and assets it stores with other corporations in the business group.”
(Report through Echo Wang in New York and Paresh Dave in San Francisco; additional reports through Katie Paul in San Francisco; edited through Kenneth Li and Grant McCool)