(Bloomberg) — Eric Schmidt, the former CEO of Google, said he explored a possible purchase of TikTok, but abandoned the idea of trying to acquire the popular video-sharing app from of its Chinese owners.
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A new federal law requires TikTok to be sold by its parent company, ByteDance Ltd., within a year or face a ban in the United States. Schmidt, who led Alphabet Inc.’s Google for more than a decade, confirmed Tuesday that he had at one point considered buying the platform — while adding that it was no longer on the market. table.
“I’m not considering that right now,” Schmidt said in an interview with Bloomberg TV. “I looked at it for a while.” He added that his personal view was that the United States would be better off regulating TikTok rather than banning it or subjecting the app to legal action.
ByteDance is unlikely to sell the core technology that determines what people see in their feeds, an algorithm that has propelled TikTok to more than 170 million monthly users in the United States. The Chinese government is expected to sign such a deal, leaving some to speculate that a buyer would seek to acquire U.S. operations and users — but not the technology behind the app.
Recreating the algorithm would be difficult and expensive. Since TikTok gained popularity during the pandemic for giving users an automatically curated stream of videos, tech giants like Meta Platforms Inc. and Alphabet have spent years trying to replicate the experience with varying degrees of success. .
Schmidt told Bloomberg that he saw the app as closer to television than social media, and that he hoped the United States would consider regulating it as such. “You can regulate television under the equal time rule,” he said, referring to the federal rule that U.S. radio and television stations must provide equivalent access to political candidates in competition. “But somehow we’re not having that conversation,” Schmidt said.
TikTok sued the U.S. government on Tuesday to try to block the law, saying the legislation stifles free speech for the app’s users. Supporters of the law say TikTok’s ties to China through its parent company open the possibility that the Chinese government could access U.S. users’ data or influence what appears on their feeds — a claim that TikTok and the Beijing officials have always rejected it.
Schmidt is the 47th richest person in the world, with a net worth of $32.2 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. Since leaving Google, he has made America’s rivalry with China a priority through an initiative called the Special Competitive Studies Project.
For now, he said, the United States has an advantage over China in the emerging field of artificial intelligence. “We’re probably two or three years ahead of China, which in my world is an eternity,” Schmidt said.
In Europe, Schmidt said he sees regulation, including a new European Union framework…
