They used to fight over oil. Now they fight over feeds. The long-running fight over TikTok has finally ended in Washington’s favour — at least on paper. ByteDance, under unrelenting US pressure, ceded its American operations to an Oracle-led consortium, with a government-approved trustee installed at the top.

A Chinese platform has done what no foreign challenger ever managed: outpace Silicon Valley on its own turf. TikTok, owned by ByteDance, cracked the monopoly of American tech by outclassing its rivals.

With 170 million US users, its algorithm left Facebook’s Reels and YouTube’s Shorts scrambling to catch up. In Washington, the panic was less about stolen selfies or shadowy propaganda and more about something far more consequential: losing control of the pipelines of attention, the a

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