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Tag: vibe

  • TikTok’s CEO did not pass the vibe check at his first Hill hearing

    TikTok’s CEO did not pass the vibe check at his first Hill hearing

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    And, of course, the battle over TikTok comes as the U.S. and China circle each other in an escalating battle for geopolitical and technological dominance around the world. On Thursday, just as the hearing was set to start, Beijing said it would fight any forced sale, and lawmakers were quick to point to the statement as evidence that TikTok couldn’t be free of governmental interference.

    Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-Ill.) said, “It’s hard to say with any certainty that China would not have any influence.”

    Chew said the company’s $1.5 billion “Project Texas” is establishing a new subsidiary — TikTok U.S. Data Security — that would ensure all U.S. data is secured and stored in U.S.-based servers run by Oracle. “The protections are storing American data, on American soil, by an American company, looked after by American personnel,” Chew said.

    Bipartisan doubts

    Over the course of several combative exchanges, it seemed that lawmakers from both parties weren’t buying his explanations or defenses.

    Rep. Frank Pallone (D-N.J.) — the top Democrat on the panel — was skeptical: “The Chinese Communist government can compel companies based in Beijing, like TikTok, to share data with the Communist government through existing Beijing law or coercion.”

    Another Democrat — Rep. Anna Eshoo of California — questioned how ByteDance’s TikTok will respond to China’s data security law that requires Chinese companies hand over data requested by the CCP. “How does TikTok convince the Congress of the United States that there can be a clean break? Why would the Chinese government side step their national law … in terms of user data?” she asked.

    “I have seen no evidence that the Chinese government has access to that data,” Chew said. “They have never asked us, we have never provided it.”

    “I find that actually preposterous,” Eshoo said. “I don’t believe that TikTok — that you — have said or done anything to convince us the personal information of 150 million Americans — that the Chinese government is not going to give that up.”

    Rep. Bob Latta (R-Ohio) asked if ByteDance employees have access to U.S. user data.

    “After Project Texas is done — the answer is no,” Chew said. “Today, there is still some data that we need to delete.”

    A TikTok spokesperson said the Project Texas deployment is still underway, and that all U.S. user data that pre-dates Oracle cloud transition last June is currently being deleted from the company’s servers in Virginia and Singapore.

    Last year, reporting found that four ByteDance employees accessed data of U.S. reporters — and the employees were later fired. The Department of Justice is reported to be investigating ByteDance’s surveillance of journalists.

    Rodgers and Pallone also said their bipartisan federal privacy bill could be a way to address data collection concerns around TikTok. The American Data Privacy and Protection Act — which advanced out of committee last year with nearly unanimous support — will be reintroduced again in the coming weeks.

    “We simply cannot wait any longer to pass the comprehensive privacy legislation,” Pallone said.

    Pallone grilled Chew on whether he’d support specific provisions of ADPPA. “I actually am in support of some rules on privacy,” Chew said. When asked, Chew said the company doesn’t collect “precise GPS data at this point,” or health data, and does not sell U.S. data to data brokers.

    But the ranking member appeared unconvinced. “The commitments that we would seek to achieve those goals are not being made today. You’re going to continue to gather data, you’re going to continue to sell data,” and continue to be controlled by the Communist party, he said.

    The politics of a popular app

    TikTok is wildly popular in the U.S. — and is the number three the most-downloaded app on the Apple app store behind two other China-based apps — the Temu shopping app and CapCut video-editing tool, which is also owned by ByteDance. TikTok is particularly in-demand with younger Americans — and that will make it politically difficult for the Biden administration to do anything sweeping. Given it’s enormous user base, only the biggest and wealthiest tech companies could conceivably afford it, and a sale to one of those giants would almost surely run afoul of Biden’s antitrust regulators, who have been waging an aggressive campaign to rein in Big Tech companies like Google and Facebook.

    Still, the White House is pressing forward. The Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States — a secretive panel made up of a number of Biden administration agencies — has reportedly told TikTok’s Chinese owners that they must sell the app or risk an outright ban. And President Joe Biden signed a bill into law last year banning TikTok on all federal devices, while more than 30 states have also banned the app on state government devices.

    At the same time, an outright ban runs the risk of angering younger voters, not to mention the various content creators who have been canvassing Capitol Hill in recent days to argue against such a move.

    Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.), chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said in comments Thursday if the app was banned nationwide, the creators will find a home elsewhere. “I absolutely believe in the market if TikTok were somehow to drop away tomorrow,” Warner said on CNN. “Whether it’s an American company, a French company, an Indian company, there will be a replacement site where people can still be creative and earn that kind of living.”

    Been tried before

    Washington has been wrangling with what to do about TikTok for years, even as the app has become deeply enmeshed in American popular culture.

    Last fall, TikTok reportedly reached an agreement with the Biden administration on setting up the TikTok U.S. Data Security entity, which would have its own board of directors that is approved by the administration and ensures all U.S. data is secured and stored on U.S.-based servers run by Oracle. But the two sides have been fighting over the potential national security risks ever since.

    The Trump administration also made its own bid, issuing an executive order in 2020 seeking to ban the app in the U.S. if it didn’t find a U.S. buyer quickly — which it failed to. That effort was swiftly struck down by a U.S. court, and any move by the current White House to outright ban the app would almost surely face similar legal hurdles.

    With those previous failures in mind, a bipartisan group of lawmakers is pushing legislation they say would help Biden successfully move forward with a ban.

    Warner used Chew’s prepared testimony to endorse his bill with Sen. John Thune (R-S.D.) — the RESTRICT Act — which would give the executive branch authority to prohibit some technology from foreign adversaries. “While I appreciate Mr. Chew’s willingness to answer questions before Congress, TikTok’s lack of transparency, repeated obfuscations, and misstatements of fact have severely undermined the credibility of any statements by TikTok employees, including Mr. Chew,” Warner said in a statement.

    There’s no House version of the RESTRICT Act yet, but Rep. Lori Trahan (D-Mass.), a member on House Energy and Commerce, said she likes the Senate bill. “It certainly seems like a better approach than legislation previously introduced in the House,” she said in an interview on Tuesday.

    The Thune and Warner teams are actively engaged with the House and would welcome a House version, a Senate aide told POLITICO.

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    #TikToks #CEO #pass #vibe #check #Hill #hearing
    ( With inputs from : www.politico.com )

  • Oil industry sees a vibe shift on climate tech

    Oil industry sees a vibe shift on climate tech

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    exxon results 25612

    “It’s blurred the lines” on what had in the past been rigid lanes that differentiate companies, Harbert said in an interview.

    The signs that the traditional oil industry is changing were everywhere. The head of Abu Dhabi’s state-owned oil company ADNOC bragged about his company’s solar power investments and admonished other companies to do more to cut their carbon emissions. The chief executive of Occidental Petroleum, one of the largest U.S. oil companies, announced its newest target was a $1 billion-plus project in West Texas to remove carbon dioxide directly from the air, and that it would look at potential nuclear power projects.

    The five-day conference that is the premier energy event in the U.S. features more sessions on hydrogen than on oil, a word that was uttered by a only a few of the speakers on the main stage during the first two days.

    Darren Woods, CEO and chairman of Exxon Mobil, spent most of his address talking up the company’s newest business line that strips carbon dioxide emissions from industrial sites. The company is also developing a large hydrogen plant to produce the fuel that many hope will help cut pollution from sectors that are hard to wring carbon dioxide from. And, almost in passing he mentioned that the world will need gasoline and diesel for the foreseeable future.

    “Our business has been to transform molecules,” Woods said of Exxon’s carbon capture and hydrogen projects. “This is an extension of that core capability.”

    This isn’t to say that the companies have forgotten their main business of pumping oil. Exxon, Chevron and other companies set new profit records last year as oil and fuel prices surged after Russia’s attack on Ukraine. ConocoPhillips CEO Ryan Lance and Hess Corp. CEO John Hess both highlighted that their companies were still making long-term investments in oil and natural gas production, though those remarks were notable for their rarity.

    Overall spending on oil and gas exploration and production in North America is expected rise nearly 18 percent this year from last, largely because of spending by independent and private companies, according to forecasts by analysts at advisory and investment firm Evercore ISI. ’s faster than the nearly 13 percent rise in spending predicted for the whole world. And many of the private or independent oil and gas producer have little interest in diversifying their business into clean energy or carbon technologies.

    The sharp ramp up in the technologies that will help fight climate change by many companies, however, does not represent a repudiation of oil and gas. The industry’s focus on clean energy technologies is a way to preserve that core business, Occidental CEO Vicki Hollub said.

    “We believe that our direct capture technology is going to be the technology that helps to preserve our industry over time,” Hollub told the audience. “This gives our industry a license to continue to operate for the 60, 70, 80 years that I think it’s going to be very much needed.”

    For many conference attendees, the new announcements show the oil industry being at an inflection point where companies see they need to adopt more clean energy businesses to survive.

    “I think the direction of travel is definitely in the direction of broadening our energy offerings and reducing our emissions,” Eirik Wærness, senior vice president and chief economist at Norway-based energy company Equinor, said in an interview. “And when you’re at an energy conference like this in the United States five months after the IRA was passed, well, industry reacts to policy signals.”

    Even some environmental advocates in the room said they noticed a vibe shift at the annual industry huddle.

    “The business is changing really fast,” said Samantha Gross, director of the Energy Security and Climate Initiative at the Washington, D.C.-based think tank Brookings Institute and former Obama administration official who spoke at a climate change panel at the conference. “Absolutely, 100 percent. They’re really serious about it. They’re looking at the future and trying to decide who they want to be in this new world.”

    A key reason for this emerging diversification was the Inflation Reduction Act that President Joe Biden and Democrats passed last year that offers billions of dollars for the technologies that companies had so far only mulled as possible carbon cutters. But those tax credits and grants are available only for the next few years, so companies are scrambling to access the money while they can.

    The raft of Biden administration officials who traveled to CERAWeek were pushing those two messages to executives — do more to cut the greenhouse gases that cause climate change, and that plenty of incentive money was available for them to do so.

    ”The IRA is a tremendous step forward,” John Kerry, White House special envoy on climate change, told the audience of hundreds of industry representatives. “It’s huge, with a major global impact that I am sensing and feeling, and I think you are, too.”

    But Kerry was quick to single out one U.S. executive — Chevron CEO Mike Wirth — who used his address to highlight a plan to increase oil production.

    “I heard how in Kazakhstan they may go up to a million barrels, and in the Permian they may go up to a billion barrels,” Kerry said. “Well, ok. Are we going to go down in emissions?”

    A Chevron spokesperson did not provide comment on Kerry’s remark.

    Over and over again, companies in Houston said they had got the message. Without the passage of the IRA, Occidental and Siemens Energy would have taken longer to unveil a large project that would suck 500,000 tons of carbon dioxide from the air every year, Siemens North American President Richard Voorberg said in an interview. The companies plan to continue to develop similar projects twice that size, Voorberg added.

    “If the incentives aren’t there, you start small, then maybe go a little bit bigger, then a little bit bigger and then it kind of grows into something,” Voorberg said. “Oxy’s taking the position they’re going to go big. … Now that becomes their standard and now they multiply it and it starts changing the world.”

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    #Oil #industry #sees #vibe #shift #climate #tech
    ( With inputs from : www.politico.com )