The expansion of Polar Semiconductor’s facility would enable the company to double its U.S. production capacity of sensor and power chips within two years.
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On April 29, Senators Jon Ossoff (D-GA) and Marsha Blackburn (R-SC) proposed a bipartisan bill to protect children from online sexual exploitation.
President Biden officially signed the REPORT Act into law on Tuesday. This marks the first time that websites and social media platforms are legally obligated to report crimes related to federal trafficking, grooming, and enticement of children to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children’s (NCMEC) CyberTipline.
Under the new law, companies that intentionally neglect to report child sex abuse material on their site will suffer a hefty fine. For platforms with over 100 million users, a first-time offense would yield a fine of $850,000, for example. To ensure urgent threats of child sexual exploitation are investigated by law enforcement carefully and thoroughly, the law requires evidence to be held for a longer period, which can be up to a year, instead of only 90 days.
The NCMEC faces challenges in investigating the millions of child sex abuse reports they receive each year due to being understaffed and using outdated technology. Although the new law cannot solve the problem entirely, it is expected to make the assessment of reports more efficient by allowing for things like legal storage of data on commercial cloud computing services.
“Children are increasingly looking at screens, and the reality is that this leaves more innocent kids at risk of online exploitation,” said Senator Blackburn in a statement. “I’m honored to champion this bipartisan solution alongside Senator Ossoff and Representative Laurel Lee to protect vulnerable children and hold perpetrators of these heinous crimes accountable. I also appreciate the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children’s unwavering partnership to get this across the finish line.”
President Joe Biden’s administration is looking to fund efforts that improve semiconductor manufacturing by using digital twins.
Digital twins are virtual models used to test and optimize physical objects and systems. For example, auto manufacturers are looking to use digital twins of their factories to experiment with new manufacturing processes without disrupting production.
The Biden administration announced will be accepting applications for what it anticipates to be a total of $285 million in funding for work that includes research into semiconductor digital twin development, building and supporting combined physical/digital facilities, industry demonstration projects, workforce training, and operation of what it says will be a new CHIPS Manufacturing USA Institute.
During a press briefing Sunday, Under Secretary of Commerce for Standards and Technology and National Institute of Standards and Technology Director Laurie E. Locascio said digital twins could reduce chip development and manufacturing costs, while also enabling more collaborative processes around chip design and development.
“Currently, no country has invested at the scale needed or successfully unified the industry to unlock the enormous potential of digital twin technology for breakthrough discoveries,” Locascio said.
This funding is part of the CHIPS and Science Act of 2022, a $280 billion bill that included $52.7 billion to increase domestic semiconductor manufacturing. At the time, President Biden noted that the United States had gone from producing 40 percent of semiconductors worldwide to less than 10 percent.
Echoing another major theme in the administration’s rhetoric, Assistant to the President for Science and Technology and Director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy Arati Prabhakar said Sunday that when the CHIPS Act was passed, semiconductor manufacturing had become “dangerously concentrated in just one part of the world” (presumably referring to China).
There will be an informational webinar about applications on May 8. Organizations that can apply include nonprofits, universities, governments, and for-profit companies that are “domestic entities” (incorporated in the United States, with their principal place of business here).
TikTok faces an uncertain fate in the U.S. once again. A bill including a deadline for TikTok parent company Bytedance to divest within nine months or face a ban on app stores to distribute the app in the U.S., was signed by President Joe Biden on Wednesday as part of broader legislation including military aid for Israel and Ukraine. The White House’s approval comes swiftly after strong bipartisan approval in the House and a 79-18 Senate vote Tuesday in favor of moving the bill forward.
TikTok is based in Los Angeles and Singapore but is owned by Chinese tech giant ByteDance. That relationship has raised eyebrows among U.S. officials, who warn that the app could be leveraged to further the interests of an adversary. The bill’s critics argue that the U.S. is unfairly targeting a well-loved social network when the government could be dealing with household issues that directly benefit Americans.
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, who has the power to set the chamber’s priorities and round up Democrats for a unified vote, initially said that the Senate “will review the legislation when it comes over from the House.”
The Senate at first seemed far from presenting a united front against TikTok. Some Republican China hawks like Sens. Josh Hawley and Marsha Blackburn were pushing their chamber of Congress to take up the bill. On the Democratic side, Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Mark Warner issued a joint statement with his Republican committee counterpart, Marco Rubio, in support of a forced sale or ban for TikTok.
“We are united in our concern about the national security threat posed by TikTok — a platform with enormous power to influence and divide Americans whose parent company ByteDance remains legally required to do the bidding of the Chinese Communist Party,” Warner and Rubio said in an emailed statement. Their Senate committee, which is frequently briefed on national security matters, is particularly relevant given the nature of the concerns expressed by TikTok’s critics in Congress.
Late Tuesday, the Senate approved the $95 billion aid package — including aid for Taiwan and humanitarian aid for Gaza — that also contained the much-debated TikTok ban.
In March, the House Energy and Commerce Committee introduced a new bill designed to pressure ByteDance into selling TikTok. The bill marked a fresh push by the U.S. government to separate the company from its Chinese ownership or force it out of the country.
The bill, known as the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act, would make it illegal for software with ties to U.S. adversaries to be distributed by U.S. app stores or supported by U.S. web hosts. Within the bill’s definitions, ownership by an entity based in an adversary country, like ByteDance in China, counts.
In language of the bill, which goes on to name TikTok explicitly, “it shall be unlawful for an entity to distribute, maintain, or update (or enable the distribution, maintenance, or updating of) a foreign adversary controlled application.” If the bill became law, Apple’s App Store and Google Play could not legally distribute the app in the U.S.
The bill, which many of its detractors reasonably describe as a “ban,” would force ByteDance to sell TikTok within six months for the app to continue operating here. It also empowers the president to have oversight of this process to ensure that it results in the company in question “no longer being controlled by a foreign adversary.”
After getting wind of the bill’s swift and sudden progress in Congress, TikTok pushed back with a mass in-app message to U.S. users, complete with a button for calling their representatives.
“Speak up now — before your government strips 170 million Americans of their Constitutional right to free expression,” the message read. “Let Congress know what TikTok means to you and tell them to vote NO.”
In spite of TikTok’s decision to rile up its users — or perhaps because of it — the bill to force ByteDance to sell TikTok passed through the House Energy and Commerce Committee with a 50-0 vote. The fast-tracked bill passed a full vote in the House on March 13.
Prior to the vote, subcommittee members had a classified briefing with the FBI, the Justice Department and Office of the Director of National Intelligence at the behest of the Biden administration, Punchbowl News reported.
President Biden also explicitly said that he would sign the bill if it reaches his desk. “If they pass it, I’ll sign it,” Biden told a group of reporters. And Biden followed through with that statement in signing the bill Wednesday.
To be clear, there is currently no public evidence that China has ever tapped into TikTok’s stores of data on Americans or otherwise compromised the app.
Still, that fact hasn’t stopped the U.S. government from highlighting the possibility that China could if it wanted to. The Chinese government hasn’t been shy about going hands-on with companies in the country or keeping critics from its business community in line.
FBI director Chris Wray once cautioned that users might not see “outward signs” if China were ever to meddle with TikTok. “Something that’s very sacred in our country — the difference between the private sector and the public sector — that’s a line that is nonexistent in the way the CCP operates,” Wray said in a Senate hearing last year.
TikTok has vehemently denied these accusations. “Let me state this unequivocally: ByteDance is not an agent of China or any other country,” TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew said last year during a separate hearing with the House Energy and Commerce Committee.
To TikTok’s credit, if China wanted to get its hands on information about U.S. users, Beijing could easily turn to data brokers who openly sell troves of user data around the globe with little oversight.
Because the U.S. has not produced any public evidence to back up its serious claims, there’s a major disconnect between how politicians feel about TikTok and how most Americans do. For many TikTok users, the U.S. crackdown is just one more way that politicians are out of touch with young people and don’t understand how they use the internet. For them — and other skeptics of the U.S. government’s claims — the situation looks like pure political posturing between two countries with bad blood, sometimes with a dash of racism.
The campaign to force ByteDance to sell TikTok to a U.S. company originated with an executive order during the Trump administration. Trump’s threats against the company culminated in a plan to force TikTok to sell its U.S. operations to Oracle in late 2020. In the process, TikTok rejected an acquisition offer from Microsoft but ultimately didn’t sell to Oracle, either, in spite of Trump’s efforts to steer the acquisition to benefit close ally and Republican mega donor Larry Ellison.
The executive action ultimately fizzled in 2021 after Biden took office. But last year, the Biden administration picked up the baton, escalating a pressure campaign against the app along with Congress. Now that campaign looks to be back on track.
Oddly, former President Donald Trump, who himself initiated the idea of a forced TikTok sale four years ago, is no longer in support of a TikTok crackdown. Trump explained his abrupt about-face on TikTok by highlighting the benefit a ban or forced sale could have on Meta, which suspended the former president’s account over his role in inciting violence on January 6.
“Without TikTok, you can make Facebook bigger, and I consider Facebook to be an enemy of the people,” Trump told CNBC. Trump’s tune on TikTok may have changed following a recent meeting with billionaire Republican donor Jeffrey Yass, who owns a 15% stake in TikTok’s Chinese parent company ByteDance.
There is some strong bipartisan congressional support for regulating TikTok, but things are still pretty complex. The most obvious complication: TikTok is enormously popular and we’re in an election year. TikTok has 170 million users in the U.S. and they aren’t likely to quietly watch as Congress effectively bans their favorite source of entertainment and information.
TikTok’s creators and their followers likely won’t go quietly. TikTok accounts with millions of followers have a built-in platform for organizing against the threat to the app that connects them to their communities and facilitates brand deals and advertising income.
TikTok itself would also surely mount a strong legal challenge against the forced sale, much as it did when the Trump administration previously tried to accomplish the same thing through executive action. TikTok also sued when Montana attempted to enact its own ban at the state level, which ultimately resulted in a federal judge issuing an injunction and blocking the effort as unconstitutional.
“This legislation has a predetermined outcome: a total ban of TikTok in the United States,” TikTok spokesperson Alex Haurek told TechCrunch in an emailed statement. “The government is attempting to strip 170 million Americans of their Constitutional right to free expression,” Haurek said, foreshadowing the massive public outcry that could result.
The cultural reach of TikTok is so great that Biden is campaigning on TikTok, even as the White House calls the app a national security threat.
Even though the White House has now signed off on the legislation, the U.S. scheme to force ByteDance to sell TikTok could still fail — an outcome that may or may not result in a ban. China has previously stated that it would oppose a forced sale of TikTok, which is well within the Chinese government’s rights following an update to the country’s export rules in late 2020.
Beyond Congress and the courts, TikTok holds a direct line to a massive chunk of the American electorate and a fleet of creators who command many millions of loyal followers. Those levers of power shouldn’t be underestimated in the fight to come.
Still, it’s difficult for TikTok to more effectively organize these millions. Though the X platform, when it operated as Twitter, was highly efficient as a mechanism to share breaking news, TikTok’s algorithms make it less effective as a means of understanding what is happening minute by minute. Though TikTok users say it has become a source of news — among adults, those ages 18 to 29 are most likely to say they receive their news regularly on TikTok — that information tends to be highly targeted and asynchronous. While many users may know something is brewing in Washington, it’s likely they are less aware of the steps required to fight it, making it harder for TikTok to mobilize them.
This post was originally posted March 13, and has been updated as the legislation moves forward.
President Biden has signed a bill that would ban TikTok if its owner, ByteDance, doesn’t sell it within a year. The bill includes aid for Ukraine and Israel. U.S. Senators passed the bill 79-18 on late Tuesday after the House passed it with overwhelming majority over the weekend.
The bill gives ByteDance nine months to divest TikTok, with a 90-day extension, to complete the deal. If ByteDance doesn’t sell TikTok, it would become illegal for app stores to distribute the app.
In an emailed statement to TechCrunch, TikTok said it would challenge the “unconstitutional law” in court.
“We believe the facts and the law are clearly on our side, and we will ultimately prevail,” the statement reads. “The fact is, we have invested billions of dollars to keep U.S. data safe and our platform free from outside influence and manipulation. This ban would devastate 7 million businesses and silence 170 million Americans. As we continue to challenge this unconstitutional ban, we will continue investing and innovating to ensure TikTok remains a space where Americans of all walks of life can safely come to share their experiences, find joy, and be inspired.”
TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew shared his own video response on Wednesday, calling the news “a disappointing moment” and stating that TikTok “will keep fighting.”
Back in March, the House passed a similar standalone bill to ban TikTok or force its sale with a six-month time limit, but the Senate never took that bill up. This time, the House packaged the TikTok bill with foreign aid to U.S. allies, which essentially forced the Senate to make a decision.
TikTok has spent the last few months arguing that its platform is essential for creators and small businesses in the U.S. A few weeks ago, the company released an economic impact report revealing that TikTok generated $14.7 billion for small to mid-sized companies in the U.S.
This story is developing…
Tesla is pushing forward with a plan to build an electric big rig charging corridor stretching from Texas to California, despite being snubbed by a lucrative federal funding program that’s part of Biden’s Bipartisan Infrastructure Law. But the original scope of the project could still change, TechCrunch has learned.
The company had been seeking nearly $100 million from the Charging and Fueling Infrastructure (CFI) Discretionary Grant program under the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA). Combined with around $24 million of its own money, Tesla wanted to build nine electric semi-truck charging stations between Laredo, Texas and Fremont, California.
The corridor, if built, would be a first-of-its-kind charging network that could enable both long-distance and regional electric trucking and help clean up a big chunk of the otherwise dirty transportation sector. Without it, though, Tesla’s promise to electrify heavy-duty trucking could fall even farther behind schedule than it already is.
The project as pitched to the FHWA was called TESSERACT, which stands for “Transport Electrification Supporting Semis Operating in Arizona, California, and Texas,” according to a slide buried in a 964-page filing with the South Coast Air Quality Management District. (Tesla collaborated with SCAQMD on the application.)
But Tesla was not among the 47 recipients that the Biden administration announced in January. Collectively, those winners received $623 million to build electric vehicle charging and refueling stations across the country. This is despite Tesla winning around 13% of all other charging awards so far from the Infrastructure Act, though that has only netted the company around $17 million.
Rohan Patel, who left his VP position at Tesla this week as the company laid off 10% of its workforce, said in a message to TechCrunch that Tesla may turn to state funding opportunities, or future rounds of the CFI program. Some of the sites along the route “are no-brainers even without funding,” he said.
Image Credits: TechCrunch
The 1,800-mile route would theoretically connect Tesla’s two North American vehicle factories, as well as one that is planned — but delayed — in Mexico. Each station was originally slated to be equipped with eight 750kW chargers for Tesla Semis, and four chargers open to other electric trucks. It’s unclear how effective it would be if the company was unable to build all nine stations, which are situated at roughly equal distances along the route.
About half of the Biden administration’s choices for the CFI funding focused on building out EV charging infrastructure in “urban and rural communities, including at convenient and high-use locations like schools, parks, libraries, multi-family housing, and more.”
The other half was dedicated to funding 11 “corridor” projects, including a number on the same I-10 corridor that makes up part of Tesla’s proposed route. That includes $70 million to the North Texas Council of Governments to build up to five hydrogen fueling stations for medium and heavy-duty trucks in the Dallas, Houston, Austin, and San Antonio areas.
“The project will help create a hydrogen corridor from southern California to Texas,” the Department of Transportation wrote in a statement in January.
“Funding hydrogen stations will go down as purely wasted money,” Patel told TechCrunch this week.
While he no longer speaks on behalf of Tesla, he also criticized funding hydrogen infrastructure when he was still with the company.
“Governments around the globe are wasting tax dollars on hydrogen for light/heavy duty infrastructure,” he wrote on X in February. “Like smoking, it’s never too late to quit.”
Funding isn’t the only challenge to the project. Another complicating factor could be Tesla’s recent restructuring.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk has said the company is now “balls to the wall for autonomy,” and has reportedly already sacrificed a planned low-cost EV in favor of making a purpose-built robotaxi the company’s priority. The Semi is years behind schedule, and Tesla has only built around 100 to date.
Despite all this, the Tesla Semi program is still slowly attracting customers. Just a few days after the restructuring, the head of the Semi program Dan Priestly announced via social media a new potential customer for the trucks. Priestly also said in March that Tesla has been using Semis to ship battery packs from Nevada to the Fremont factory.
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