TikTok US joint venture seen resembling Apples China iCloud deal
TikTok has officially launched a US joint venture tasked with “safeguarding the American content ecosystem”, with commercial activities such as e-commerce, advertising and marketing remaining under the company’s existing US entities. The arrangement has been widely compared with Apple’s 2018 move to transfer mainland Chinese iCloud user data to Guizhou-Cloud Big Data (GCBD), according to…
The arrangement has been widely compared with Apple’s 2018 move to transfer mainland Chinese iCloud user data to Guizhou-Cloud Big Data (GCBD), according to Chinese media. GCBD is a project owned by the Guizhou provincial government-backed company AIPO Cloud (Guizhou) Technology.
Media outlet The Paper noted that Apple did not own a stake in AIPO Cloud, while Beijing-based ByteDance retained algorithms and intellectual property rights and remained the largest single shareholder of the new joint venture.
The Chinese government approved the deal, according to two people familiar with the matter. Beijing previously opposed a direct divestiture, revising the export control list in 2020 to include technologies like TikTok’s recommendation algorithm, which require official approval for export.
