Oracle spent years quietly funding campaigns to dismantle Section 230, the legal framework that shields online platforms from liability over user-generated content.
The technology giant has been described as a driving force behind the scenes, pushing Congress to kill Section 230 in efforts that appeared to be motivated almost entirely out of spite directed at Google.
The campaign never made obvious strategic sense, given that Oracle was simultaneously working to establish itself as a major cloud service provider.
Cloud services rely on the exact same Section 230 protections that Oracle was paying people to attack, creating a striking contradiction at the heart of the company’s lobbying strategy.
Oracle has never been widely regarded as a company known for its ability to think things out long term, and its Section 230 positioning appeared to confirm that reputation among critics in Silicon Valley.
The situation has now taken a further ironic turn, with Oracle ending up with a 15% stake in TikTok following a protracted political and legal saga spanning two presidential administrations.
Trump’s first attempt to force ByteDance to sell TikTok’s US operations to Larry Ellison’s Oracle failed, but a second push ultimately proved successful.
That second attempt was helped along by Democrats succumbing to what critics described as a bogus moral panic about TikTok’s alleged dangers, smoothing the political path for a deal to proceed.
Oracle also secured a lucrative hosting deal alongside its equity stake, making the TikTok arrangement a significant commercial win for the company beyond the shareholding alone.
Ken Glueck, Oracle’s long-term top lobbying executive and the architect of the company’s funding of dark money groups that attacked Section 230, ended up with a seat on TikTok’s board.
TikTok, as a major platform hosting vast quantities of user-generated content, depends heavily on the kind of legal protections that Oracle spent years and considerable resources trying to strip away.
The episode stands as a remarkable example of a company actively undermining the regulatory environment that would later underpin the value of one of its most significant investments.