President Trump said Saturday that he has agreed at least in concept to a deal for video-sharing app TikTok on a partnership with Oracle Corp. and Walmart Inc. to become a U.S.-based company, appearing to end a long series of negotiations.

Moreover, Oracle said, TikTok Global, along with Oracle, SIG, General Atlantic, Sequoia, Walmart and Coatue, will create an”educational initiative to develop and deliver an AI-driven online video curriculum to teach children from inner cities to the suburbs, a variety of courses from basic reading and math to science, history and computer engineering.”

All this caps weeks of ups and downs for popular service. On Friday, the U.S. Commerce Department had issued an order requiring TikTok to be removed from the App Store and Google Play on Sunday, which means the popular video sharing service will no longer be available for download domestically. 

However, users who have already have TikTok installed would have been able to continue accessing service until at least Nov. 12.

The Commerce Department announcement follows an executive order signed by President Donald Trump in August that gave TikTok’s parent company, China-based ByteDance, until Sept. 15 to sell the app’s U.S. operations. The order specified that if a deal isn’t signed by then, a ban would be imposed on conducting certain business transactions with ByteDance. It’s this transaction ban, which among other things prohibits app stores from carrying TikTok, that the Commerce Department has now started implementing.

The executive order that kicked off the process cited national security concerns as the reason for the move. Along with TikTok, popular Chinese messaging and payments app WeChat will also be banned from U.S. app stores starting Sunday on similar national security grounds.

“While the threats posed by WeChat and TikTok are not identical, they are similar,” the Commerce Department stated in its order today. “Each collects vast swaths of data from users, including network activity, location data, and browsing and search histories.”

In the run-up to the ban, ByteDance held talks over TikTok’s U.S. operations with multiple prospective buyers. After a closely watched, and extensively leaked, negotiation process, Oracle Corp. emerged as the winner. But the proposed deal that Oracle inked with ByteDance reportedly fell short of the full sale the White House had sought.

According to Axios, the terms of the deal would have given Oracle the ability to access the source code for TikTok and review all future updates to the service. Earlier reports suggested the proposed transaction would have also entrusted the database giant with hosting TikTok’s backend infrastructure. However, these reported terms wouldn’t make Oracle the outright owner of the app as the executive order required.

Though TikTok will no longer be available for download after Sunday, the millions of U.S. consumers who already have it installed on their devices — or do so before Sunday — can still access the service until Nov. 12. That gives ByteDance and Oracle, or another buyer for that matter, a window to hammer out a deal that would be acceptable to the White House. 

“TikTok and its parent Bytedance still have time to complete a deal to the satisfaction of the U.S. government by Nov. 12, before being completely banned,” eMarketer analyst Debra Aho Williamson told SiliconANGLE. “For TikTok’s advertisers and other businesses that work with it, there is not a ban on that activity as of yet, although the ongoing drama surrounding the app’s future in the U.S. has certainly dampened advertisers’ interest in making long-term ad commitments until TikTok’s future is known.”

TikTok said in a statement today that it’s “disappointed” with the Commerce Department’s order. The company is also pursuing a legal challenge against the ban. On Twitter, interim Chief Executive Officer Vanessa Pappas tweeted that “we invite Facebook and Instagram to publicly join our challenge and support our litigation. This is a moment to put aside our competition and focus on core principles like freedom of expression and due process of law.”

Pappas’ remarks came in response to a tweet from Instagram head Adam Mosseri. The executive wrote that a U.S. ban on TikTok would be “quite bad for Instagram, Facebook, and the internet more broadly.”

The Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, a tech think tank, also voiced disapproval of the ban. “In comparison to this de facto ban, striking a deal with an American company is clearly in the best interest of all parties,” said ITIF Vice President Daniel Castro. “These actions today undermine that goal and make a deal less likely.”

If TikTok doesn’t find a buyer by Nov. 12, its access to key services such as content delivery and internet hosting will be cut off in the U.S. That would make the platform inaccessible even for users who have already downloaded the app.

With reporting from Robert Hof

Photo: Unsplash