Oracle Helped Kneecap Section 230, Then Bought 15% Of A Company That Needs It.

from the policy-by-spite dept

Six years ago, when Trump first tried to force ByteDance to sell TikTok’s US operations to his billionaire buddy Larry Ellison at Oracle, we wondered if this would finally get Oracle to change its tune on Section 230. While not as widely known outside of Silicon Valley, Oracle has been a driving force behind the scenes to get Congress to kill Section 230, appearing to do so almost entirely out of spite directed at Google.

It never made much sense. For most of that time, Oracle was busy trying to build itself into a leading cloud service provider — and cloud services rely on the exact same Section 230 protections Oracle was paying people to attack. But it’s not like Oracle is known for being particularly successful in its ability to think things out long term.

While Trump’s first attempt to hand TikTok to Oracle flopped, the second attempt (helped along by Democrats succumbing to a bogus moral panic about TikTok’s alleged dangers) resulted in Oracle ending up with a 15% stake in TikTok (as well as a lucrative hosting deal). In fact, Oracle’s long-term top lobbying exec, Ken Glueck (who was the architect of Oracle’s funding of a bunch of dark money groups that attacked Section 230) actually ended up with a seat on TikTok’s board.

And TikTok is already suffering from the attacks on Section 230. Remember, the wacky Anderson v. TikTok ruling that bizarrely said TikTok didn’t qualify for Section 230? That kind of ruling doesn’t happen without the widespread drumbeat of “Section 230 has gone too far” that Oracle spent years helping to push. TikTok is in a way worse position legally because of Ken Glueck’s advocacy. And now he’s on their board.

Meanwhile, Oracle, while not in the top tier of cloud providers — AWS, Microsoft, and Google together account for around 63% of enterprise cloud spending — is solidly at the top of the second tier. And while there aren’t that many Section 230 cases targeting the underlying cloud hosting providers, they’re not totally unheard of.

So, Section 230 protects both Oracle, and its large investment in TikTok. Yet Oracle spent years funding attacks on Section 230 (mainly just to piss off Google) and the main architect of that strategy is now on TikTok’s board.

Which puts us right back where we were six years ago, wondering if Oracle will ever change its tune. The company’s disclosures offer a partial answer. Section 230 is still under attack in DC, but the courts have been dismantling the law via judicial decisions that it’s not even clear what’s left for Congress to do. Looking at Oracle’s “Political Activity Reports” we see that while back in 2019 it was funding anti-tech groups which promoted attacks on Section 230 (like the Internet Accountability Project, the Free and Fair Markets Initiative, and the Copyright Alliance), these days it only funds the Copyright Alliance whose remit is larger than just attacking tech (though it still does that too).

Indeed, the IAP and FFMI, who were these huge fake grassroots non-profits designed to hold Google and Amazon to account, barely seem to exist any more. FFMI’s website stopped updating in 2023 and IAP’s in 2024. It’s almost as if they were astroturfed operations that suddenly became unnecessary once Ellison could get what he wanted directly, having spent $45 million to work his way deeper into Trump’s circle.

It looks like a large segment of the “grassroots” movement against Section 230 was conjured into existence with Oracle’s quiet backing, and seems to have evaporated once Oracle no longer needed it to exist.

Of course, there’s also the separate issue of the ongoing attempt by Ellison to also buy up half of Hollywood. Hollywood itself has probably been the second biggest force, behind Oracle, in the anti-Section 230 lobbying effort over the past decade. Ellison already owns Paramount, and may still end up with Warner Bros., as well, which might pull Oracle’s efforts back towards hating the open internet rather than defending the thing its own business runs on.

The simple fact, though, is that if you want a dynamic, competitive open internet, you need a strong Section 230. Gutting it won’t hurt the internet giants. They have buildings full of lawyers and can survive the onslaught of misguided lawsuits (most of which they’ll end up winning in the end). However, it will hurt all the small sites, the forums, the upstarts, the blogs that can’t afford to find out whether a case would get dismissed after a couple years and a million dollars of discovery. Who knows… perhaps that’s Ellison’s strategy all along: make the open internet weaker, so the companies he controls have way more power.

The next time Section 230 lands on the chopping block — and it will — Oracle (and, for that matter, TikTok) will have to pick a side. The smart move would be to defend it. But, then again, the smart move all along would have been for Oracle to defend it, and it chose the opposite for many years. The real question is whether Oracle’s years-long campaign against Section 230 comes back to bite it: devaluing the TikTok stake it worked so hard to get, and eating away at the legal protections its entire cloud business sits on top of.

Filed Under: grassroots, intermediary liability, ken glueck, lobbying, section 230

Companies: copyright alliance, iap, oracle, tiktok