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October 22, 2020
Expensify CEO David Barrett blasted all of his customers with a message to vote for Biden to "protect democracy."
In the email, which the company has said was sent to all users, Expensify's founder said that "anything less than a vote for Biden is a vote against democracy" and urged his customer base to vote for the Democratic presidential candidate. You can read how he decided to send the email in this Protocol interview.
In the email, he equated a vote for Trump as an endorsement for voter suppression, and took issue with people who may want to abstain or vote for a third-party candidate: "I'm saying a vote for Trump, a vote for a third-party candidate, or simply not voting at all — they're all the same, and they all mean: 'I care more about my favorite issue than democracy. I believe Trump winning is more important than democracy. I am comfortable standing aside and allowing democracy to be methodically dismantled, in plain sight,'" he wrote in the email.
Barrett also said he wasn't afraid of his company taking a political stance, even at a time when some tech companies are arguing that it's better to remain neutral or apolitical. "Expensify depends on a functioning society and economy; not many expense reports get filed during a civil war," he wrote. "As CEO of this business, it's my job to plot a course through any storm — and all evidence suggests that another four (or as Trump has hinted — eight, or more?) years of Trump leadership will damage our democracy to such an extent, I'm obligated on behalf of shareholders to take any action I can to avoid it."
Some recipients were already showing anger at the email, tweeting that it was "incredibly disappointing" and that Expensify has "lost my business."
In a conversation with Protocol, Barrett said he and a team of volunteers were responding to customers' concerns.
Update: This post was updated at 8:30 p.m. PT with a comment from Expensify.
From Your Site Articles
- Expensify’s CEO explains how he made the decision to tell all his customers to vote for Biden - Protocol ›
- Expensify CEO David Barrett on the politics of tech CEOs - Protocol — The people, power and politics of tech ›
- Expensify CEO David Barrett on the politics of tech CEOs - Protocol — The people, power and politics of tech ›
Biz Carson
Biz Carson ( @bizcarson) is a San Francisco-based reporter at Protocol, covering Silicon Valley with a focus on startups and venture capital. Previously, she reported for Forbes and was co-editor of Forbes Next Billion-Dollar Startups list. Before that, she worked for Business Insider, Gigaom, and Wired and started her career as a newspaper designer for Gannett.
People
Google’s trying to build a more inclusive, less chaotic future of work
Javier Soltero, the VP of Workspace at Google, said time management is everything.
With everyone working in new places, Google believes time management is everything.
Image: Google
March 4, 2021
David Pierce ( @pierce) is Protocol's editor at large. Prior to joining Protocol, he was a columnist at The Wall Street Journal, a senior writer with Wired, and deputy editor at The Verge. He owns all the phones.
March 4, 2021
Javier Soltero was still pretty new to the G Suite team when the pandemic hit. Pretty quickly, everything about Google's hugely popular suite of work tools seemed to change. (It's not even called G Suite anymore, but rather Workspace.) And Soltero had to both guide his team through a new way of working and help them build the tools to guide billions of Workspace users.
This week, Soltero and his team announced a number of new Workspace features designed to help people manage their time, collaborate and get stuff done more effectively. It offered new tools for frontline workers to communicate better, more hardware for hybrid meetings, lots of Assistant and Calendar features to make planning easier and a picture-in-picture mode so people could be on Meet calls without really having to pay attention.
<p>Soltero joined the Source Code podcast to talk about the new tools and how he's planning for the future of work both as a team leader and a product maker.</p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="1">
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</div></p><div class="rm-embed embed-media"><iframe frameborder="no" height="200px" scrolling="no" seamless="" src="https://player.simplecast.com/c6b03386-d5b4-4fd3-97f3-648321bb9b14?dark=true" width="100%"></iframe></div><p><em>You can hear our full conversation in this episode of the Source Code podcast. The following excerpts from our conversation have been lightly edited for length and clarity.</em></p><p><strong><em></em>I was talking to somebody the other day who said, "We've never had clients ask us about burnout before." They care, but it's never been sort of a top-of-mind concern: How do I make sure my employees are happy, and that work-life balance is real, and that they're taking time off? These have just never been things that are top of mind when you think about quote-unquote productivity software.</strong></p><p><strong>But the whole universe of this stuff feels different now. And it seems like both for you as somebody who runs a large team, but then also having to build that kind of ethos into products, that would feel hugely complicated, and totally unlike anything we've ever done in this space before.</strong></p><p>Look, if you're lucky enough to love what you do for a living, you'll never work a day in your life. </p><p>Except now. </p><p>Right? Not everybody is lucky enough to work on something they're passionate about, but even to those that are, there's that new set of conflicts. You've now disassociated or disconnected work with a specific location, and that is both a blessing and a curse in its own way. And along with that, the need for time and attention management at the individual level becomes crucial. </p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="2">
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</div></p><p>Both of these things were true before the pandemic, they were just not universally experienced. They were viewed as a mere speed bump: "Oh, yeah, I can check my email on on the road," or "Hey, today, I'm working from home because I have a doctor's appointment." And then on the time and attention management front, no shortage of products and apps and devices and so forth are calling to us, for different reasons. That was also a known problem before, but when that's happening in the midst of all these other demands, and you're already also emotionally spent, then the energy that normally kept us fired up about our work is harder to sustain. </p><p>Lastly, there's the absence of human connection, which I've personally found maybe the hardest of all things. I've got two executives on my team who I've never actually witnessed in three-dimensional space. Yeah, I'm leading a team of people around the world who have experienced me through a two-dimensional piece of glass, right, which is terrible. So that the absence of that human connection, which is felt, again, universally by everyone, in their own way, also saps at that, and there are no good ways, at least for now, to remedy that. Saying "Well, let's spend more time on video calls" isn't the answer.</p><p><strong>It's an underrated feature of a physical workplace that I can just walk over to you and ask you something. And when that's gone, what do we do? I feel like that's the next big question.</strong></p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="3">
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</div></p><p>I saw some really creative applications of existing capabilities meant to try to address some of the problems that are at the heart of how this has affected us all. I'll give you a good example: I noticed that a group of people in my team were using their out-of-office email autoresponder to provide daily updates, to basically auto-reply to every message to set expectations with the sender about their working hours and their availability.</p><p>Then you get to the uneven application of that, and you ask, well, why? And part of the answer is a little scary, because it involves the courage that those people had to actually explicitly say, "No, I actually am not available, because I've got other responsibilities, other demands on my time." In pre-pandemic work culture, there was a question there about whether you will be perceived as a hard-charging, go-getter type of person, when you're even with the best of intentions trying to set expectations for other people. </p><p>And you get to the product opportunity around that. You say, well, this is a really crude instrument for this. So we've got this capability now to set working hours. And we introduced a bunch of enhancements around the minimal set of actions that I can take as an individual — to convey to others who want to collaborate with me and communicate with me — my availability. And it's really elegant and important in how we do it. </p><p>But what the usage of that feature represents is an aspect of a social contract that every company has, around how its workers behave with each other and how they respect each other's time. Very few, if any, companies that I've seen have taken the trouble to actually describe what that contract actually looks like. Much less to try and steer it.</p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="4">
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</div></p><p><strong>So do you feel some responsibility to try to have and share a right answer inside the product?</strong></p><p>No, not a right answer. That's where people get it wrong. I think with productivity software, it's a very difficult needle to thread. Because you have to have a point of view. "Productivity Construction Kit" is not an answer, because actually what it leads to is you putting the burden on the client, on the user and on the team to establish that, and not everybody is thoughtful enough or equipped enough to do that. </p><p>And I think when you see customers struggle with products you find that the diversity of options you have creates, well, less than an orderly, predictable exchange of information. So the threading the needle part is, you have to be opinionated enough and in the right places, but leave room for the individual user and ultimately the organization they are a part of to express their own approach to communication and collaboration and express that social contract. </p><p><strong>Google Calendar is a good example of that, right? Calendar feels like the space in which to solve a lot of these things that you're talking about. If one of the core things we need to do is get a better understanding of where we are and who's available, Calendar seems like the place to do that, right? I feel like you guys are getting, if not more opinionated, then at least more, I don't know, tools-y about what you think a calendar can be.</strong></p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="5">
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</div></p><p>Yes, tools-y in the sense that we know there's an opportunity, given what I told you about the time and attention management problem being crucial. Google Calendar has this unique role in being perhaps the only global-scale, personal and work calendar management service system of record. There's a responsibility, I guess, and an opportunity for us to continue to encourage people to not only use that, but to use it more effectively both in their own individual time management and in their time management across groups of people. </p><p>The best example to offer here is recurring events. I've long joked that you should be forced to do linear algebra before you are actually allowed to create a recurring event that involves multiple people. Possibly even just yourself. The reason for that is because exactly how far ahead can you plan? </p><p>You create a recurring event with the best of intentions that says, "I want to call my parents every week at 6 p.m. on Wednesday." Now, there's a segment of people for whom that proves to be very effective. They actually are rigorous enough about surrendering the entirety of their decision-making and their time management to a calendaring surface, digital or otherwise, that having that there helps. But to the vast, vast, vast majority of people, the calendar surface risks becoming a reminder of exactly how inconsistent and undependable you are as a human being. </p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="6">
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</div></p><p>And so how you approach the task is to go back to the sort of toolsy-ness of Google Calendar, because there are a million things you can add to the calendar to create the absolute perfect, most comprehensive time management thing ever. You could even employ AI to this effect and get pretty far. But it's only successful if it's actually impacting behavior and if the person is actually being able to truly manage their time. The impact that actually has is what we're interested in measuring, not just "did we give you a lot of knobs to make you feel good as some kind of GTD pro."</p><p><strong>The first insight, back when it was G Suite, was to take all of these things that were single player and make them multiplayer, right? It still looks like an 8.5-by-11 inch sheet of paper when you open a Google Doc, but you can do it with another person. And that was a fundamentally new thing. </strong></p><p><strong>But now we're getting to the point where that thing is kind of table stakes. We're not all the way there yet, but that is clearly the future where all of this is going. And the next step, it seems like, is breaking the idea that all of those should be different products at all. That Workspace should be <em>a</em> thing, not a bunch of things.</strong></p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="7">
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</div></p><p>Remember the show "Mad Men"? There's a picture I found on the internet of the set — no people — and you can see old-school intercom systems, typewriters, old-school inboxes, filing cabinets, a whole range of things. What we've done is we've digitized them, almost on a one-for-one basis. To be fair, there's been more innovation than that, but at heart, they're still treated in the same fashion. <br></p><p>We've now officially and irreparably broken away from that in a way that's going to create room for people to look at this problem space differently. It's by no means a finished job for us or anybody else. We still have to work hard to earn the right to be the choice of billions of people around the world, for all these important jobs. But yeah, I think we've kind of moved past that. </p><p>I don't want to have happy hours over video. There's a bunch of stuff about life in this particular period of time that people are going to look back and say, "Oh, that really sucked. Let's not go back to that." And I'm happy to turn the page on that.</p><p><strong>I've been talking to people all year about, what are the KPIs for remote work? The KPIs for regular work have always been just, like, "ass in chair," which is not good. But these questions of what it means to know you're working hard and doing well — or even just doing well, period — seem different now. And there are all these questions about what managers want to know versus what employees want to know and want to share. So I'm curious both for you as a boss, and you as a product maker, how you think about that stuff right now.</strong></p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="8">
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</div></p><p>I don't believe that metrics about communication volume, frequency, depth of organizational graph, how information flows through the organization — that you can actually productize those insights in a way that is sufficiently unique to a company in a way that makes it actionable. </p><p>You may say, "Javier, you spent 72 hours in meetings last week." And I don't know the judgment of whether that is good or bad. It's very subjective, right? In addition to the understandable creepiness of, how is this information being used? Is my performance being assessed from the point of view of how many minutes am I spending in email or how much multitasking I'm doing during times where I'm otherwise supposed to be in a meeting? Some cultures and organizations and job responsibilities will reward them. Others would point at that and say, "Pay attention, man." </p><p>I'd rather put more emphasis, for example, on the rhythm of work. I'm from Puerto Rico, I love music. And there's a rhythm at which work takes place, it's not a universally-described thing, not by industry, not by company. There are lots of rhythms, even within my own organization, teams that for one reason or another move faster or slower, make more heavy use of real-time communication versus asynchronous communication. </p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="9">
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</div></p><p>You don't just lay out the tools and say, "I don't know, pick what you need, go ahead!" You also don't just say, "Here's an adjustable wrench and a multi-headed screwdriver. Good luck!" You have to curate the set of tools that you offer. It's somewhere between an unbounded expanse, and a bike lane that says "This is the One True Way of collaborating." That's not not really for us or any other vendor to describe.</p>
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David Pierce ( @pierce) is Protocol's editor at large. Prior to joining Protocol, he was a columnist at The Wall Street Journal, a senior writer with Wired, and deputy editor at The Verge. He owns all the phones.
Sponsored Content
The future of computing at the edge: an interview with Intel’s Tom Lantzsch
An interview with Tom Lantzsch, SVP and GM, Internet of Things Group at Intel
February 28, 2021
Saul Hudson has a deep knowledge of creating brand voice identity, especially in understanding and targeting messages in cutting-edge technologies. He enjoys commissioning, editing, writing, and business development, in helping companies to build passionate audiences and accelerate their growth. Hudson has reported from more than 30 countries, from war zones to boardrooms to presidential palaces. He has led multinational, multi-lingual teams and managed operations for hundreds of journalists. Hudson is a Managing Partner at Angle42, a strategic communications consultancy.
February 27, 2021
An interview with Tom Lantzsch
Senior Vice President and General Manager of the Internet of Things Group (IoT) at Intel Corporation
Edge computing had been on the rise in the last 18 months – and accelerated amid the need for new applications to solve challenges created by the Covid-19 pandemic. Tom Lantzsch, Senior Vice President and General Manager of the Internet of Things Group (IoT) at Intel Corp., thinks there are more innovations to come – and wants technology leaders to think equally about data and the algorithms as critical differentiators.
In his role at Intel, Lantzsch leads the worldwide group of solutions architects across IoT market segments, including retail, banking, hospitality, education, industrial, transportation, smart cities and healthcare. And he's seen first-hand how artificial intelligence run at the edge can have a big impact on customers' success.
Protocol sat down with Lantzsch to talk about the challenges faced by companies seeking to move from the cloud to the edge; some of the surprising ways that Intel has found to help customers and the next big breakthrough in this space.
What are the biggest trends you are seeing with edge computing and IoT?
A few years ago, there was a notion that the edge was going to be a simplistic model, where we were going to have everything connected up into the cloud and all the compute was going to happen in the cloud. At Intel, we had a bit of a contrarian view. We thought much of the interesting compute was going to happen closer to where data was created. And we believed, at that time, that camera technology was going to be the driving force – that just the sheer amount of content that was created would be overwhelming to ship to the cloud – so we'd have to do compute at the edge. A few years later – that hypothesis is in action and we're seeing edge compute happen in a big way.
<p>The last 18 months have been a wild time to be in technology. We've seen edge compute come to life to help businesses adapt during the pandemic. At the same time, we are also seeing how 5G is going to drive up interest, especially from a networking perspective, rather than a use-case perspective. We also see lot of people that are focused on their data, but the <em>algorithms</em> that companies train with the data are going to be their critical assets. It doesn't matter what company or what industry; <em>this</em> will really become the differentiator for many companies.</p><p>And particularly amid the backdrop of the pandemic, we've seen how companies are using technology to either bring workers back in safely or <a href="https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/corporate-responsibility/covid-19-response-sensormatic-article.html" target="_blank">serve their customers in new ways</a>, <a href="https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/customer-spotlight/stories/brentwood-academy-customer-spotlight.html" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">educate children in new ways</a> -- all things that have accelerated the digital transformation that had been underway. I recently read a <a href="https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/strategy-and-corporate-finance/our-insights/how-covid-19-has-pushed-companies-over-the-technology-tipping-point-and-transformed-business-forever" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">McKinsey survey</a> that reported on the "speedup in creating digital or digitally enhanced offerings. Across regions, the results suggest a seven-year increase, on average, in the rate at which companies are developing these products and services."</p><p>And based on what we're seeing at Intel, those are lifesaving and industry saving investments happening today – completely re-designing the way that <a href="https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/corporate-responsibility/covid-19-response-mic-article.html" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">patients are treated</a>, and businesses operate.</p><h4>What are you particularly expecting to see this year?</h4><p>What I find most interesting is the work that combines IoT with networking capabilities – and I think this is going to be a year of expansive exploration and working with our customers to put these two things together to solve real business challenges.</p><p>When we first started the integration of networking technology and operational technology capabilities and layered that across the industry verticals, we could count the amount of interested customers and opportunities on one hand. Last year, it was five times that many and this year we see that number increasing significantly already. So, we're excited to see the industry continue to build excitement to scale those types of deployments.</p><h4>What role does AI play at the edge and in what way is Intel involved?</h4><p>An AI use case recently grabbed my attention: employees in a restaurant being screened by a device that checks temperature while the employees are washing their hands – and provides a determination on whether they'd done it adequately before they report to work. I have seen other applications using similar technology in the <a href="https://marketplace.intel.com/s/offering/a5b3b000000TiMSAA0/using-ai-to-make-construction-site-safer?language=en_US" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">construction industry</a>, where an AI algorithm scans to see if employees have their helmet, goggles, vest and other safety equipment on properly to determine if they are ready to work. And the best part is – that the employer can see aggregate data on these interactions to determine if more training on handwashing or helmet wearing is needed.</p><p>At Intel, in addition to providing the fundamental base technology to enable these applications, we work with a lot of third-party developers to create these applications. And we help the developers scale them across multiple industries with our salesforce. So, we may not make the scan technology that determines if you have the right gear on, but we orchestrate that coordination across our ecosystem with all of our partners to effectively put it into a <a href="https://marketplace.intel.com/s/?language=en_US" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">catalog</a> so that if customers are interested in that sort of application, we can provide them with different parties to make that happen.</p><h4>Is there a problem with fragmentation in the market and how can that be solved?</h4><p>It's very fragmented. I gave just two examples of totally different workers coming to work in different industries and I can give you five more that are different again. Although the base technology that Intel creates to enable this type of innovation is very horizontal in nature, the reality is that bringing those to life must be very "vertically-centered" and very "use-case centered" – and must take into account, geography. The two employee use cases I cited look very different if you are talking about employees in North America, India or Germany. So, all in all, this is a holistic ecosystem challenge – and an ecosystem solution.</p><p>At Intel, we're in a unique situation to orchestrate these solutions. </p><p><cite class="pull-quote">People tend to think of Intel as providing the technical footprint that enables edge computing – but we also have the developer reach – and we can use our ecosystem and scale to help our end customers get access to the best solutions.</cite></p><h4>What sort of challenges do customers face when they're attempting to adopt edge computing?</h4><p>There are two common challenges. One is the technical question of 'Who can I work with?' A customer may have a chip focus but actually, it's a more complex question than a chip. We like that complexity, because we can be an adviser to them and <a href="https://marketplace.intel.com/s/partners-by-industry?language=en_US" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">bring to the table partners</a> that they can work with to solve that complexity leveraging our technical knowledge and ecosystem network. </p><p>The second thing that companies struggle with is the challenge of how to fund getting into this space – even if the business case warrants the investment. The world has changed. Companies don't want to write a big capital check for these types of investments – they want a pay-as-you-go model, like you see with the cloud. We've been working with customers to find a way to make that happen – and I think that is going to be a bigger part of the conversation moving forward.</p><p>You can see it across almost every aspect of technology now. We rent compute more than we buy compute. Evidenced by the success of AWS, companies can rent compute from Amazon instead of building their own data center – and there are many benefits to that approach. In the old world, even for this video conference that we're having today we would have installed capital to do this. Now it's just a service. And I think that edge as a service is right around the corner.</p><h4>Do you have an example of that?</h4><p>A customer in Mexico wanted to deploy outdoor WiFi and add security features into it. So, it was an edge-based computing issue that was part connectivity. But there was actually way more to it than just installing it. We not only helped to solved the technological challenge creatively and coordinated the <a href="https://marketplace.intel.com/s/partners-by-industry?language=en_US" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">ecosystem of providers</a> to solve this, but we also found a way so that the customer could get into this market with a service-based model without needing to outlay a lot of capital.</p><p>Other semiconductor companies would have a difficult time partnering on both sides of that challenge, but Intel can do it because we have the scale.</p><h4>How do businesses identify which functions they do want to perform at the edge versus in the cloud?</h4><p>It really comes down to a question of what you're trying to do and how you do it at the lowest cost, highest quality and standard in computability.</p><p>If you have an application and it can perform what you need it to do in the cloud, you'll probably run it there. The cloud is a great thing - there's infinite compute and lots of choice in a well-understood developer environment.</p><p>But there are many things you can't or shouldn't do in the cloud for certain reasons. Take the camera example from earlier. Say you have eight high-density cameras, and you want an action on them immediately. You may not be able to afford the latency that comes with going up into the cloud. Or it may be a financial challenge – that its actually more expensive to send that data to the cloud over and over again, and it makes sense to invest in compute at the edge. There are nuances in the decision-making. It really comes down to what you want the application to do, how quickly and how much it should cost.</p><h4>How does Intel help developers to learn, to build and then test their solutions at the edge?</h4><p>To enable what we know to be interesting and challenging use cases at the edge, required us to change our focus on who these developers are and what they care about. We learned that they <em>really</em> don't care about what hardware they're running on. The modern developers are fairly well extracted from the hardware – they just assume the compute is going to be available for them to do their work.</p><p>To make sure we can deliver on that, we typically target developers by specific capability. The most advanced case that we've been studying on the edge recently is focused video and specifically, video inferencing and AI inferencing. We created a tool called <a href="https://software.intel.com/content/www/us/en/develop/tools/openvino-toolkit.html" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">OpenVINO</a>, which was developed in a way that developers didn't have to care about the hardware it runs on. It's a model optimization technology that enables them to easily scale out to different hardware platforms. That's proven to be an interesting value proposition to these developers.</p><p>Our goal with <a href="https://software.intel.com/content/www/us/en/develop/tools/openvino-toolkit.html" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">OpenVINO</a> is democratize AI activity and inference at the edge. We want to make it simple -- to put these tools in the hands of non-data scientists and make it work. As a part of that process, we're also creating an environment where they can develop anyplace, anytime, anywhere they want to be. We're so proud of our <a href="https://software.intel.com/content/www/us/en/develop/tools/openvino-toolkit.html" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">OpenVINO</a> community and are constantly working to grow the community and release new features and capabilities to edge developers.</p><h4>What's the possible next breakthrough that you see for Intel in edge computing and the IoT space?</h4><p>I'm looking forward to the big breakthrough when we show integrated 5G, Virtual Private Network and the edge workloads all in one unit. More to come.</p>
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Saul Hudson has a deep knowledge of creating brand voice identity, especially in understanding and targeting messages in cutting-edge technologies. He enjoys commissioning, editing, writing, and business development, in helping companies to build passionate audiences and accelerate their growth. Hudson has reported from more than 30 countries, from war zones to boardrooms to presidential palaces. He has led multinational, multi-lingual teams and managed operations for hundreds of journalists. Hudson is a Managing Partner at Angle42, a strategic communications consultancy.
Protocol | Fintech
The Biden administration has its eyes on fintech. GameStop upped the ante.
Enforcement was already expected to rise. Then last week happened.
There are opinions in this place. Will fintech like them?
Image: Bloomberg/Getty Images
March 4, 2021
Tomio Geron ( @tomiogeron) is a San Francisco-based reporter covering fintech. He was previously a reporter and editor at The Wall Street Journal, covering venture capital and startups. Before that, he worked as a staff writer at Forbes, covering social media and venture capital, and also edited the Midas List of top tech investors. He has also worked at newspapers covering crime, courts, health and other topics. He can be reached at tgeron@protocol.com or tgeron@protonmail.com.
February 1, 2021
If fintech wasn't already a top priority for financial regulators under the Biden administration, it surely is after last week.
Fintech companies were already expecting more enforcement action under the Biden administration, and the WallStreetBets GameStop episode could add to that. Scrutiny of the manipulation of public markets could even lead to a tighter grip on new financial products wholly unrelated to stock trading.
<p>"If you're a fintech company, you will be subject to whatever regulation comes out of this [GameStop] process," said Preston Byrne, partner at Anderson Kill. "But it's too soon to draw conclusions on what will come. The government is still in crisis response mode. The situation is still not over."</p><p>Congress already plans to <a href="https://www.protocol.com/bulletins/robinhood-congress-investigation" target="_self">hold hearings</a> and the SEC is looking at why Robinhood and other brokerages <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/sec-to-review-brokers-restrictions-on-gamestop-amc-trading-11611932473%20." rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">restricted</a> trading of GameStop and other stocks.</p><p>In the meantime, fintech companies had been hoping for more openness to new technologies under the Biden administration that could enable them to grow — or barring that, at least more clarity on regulations and rule-making. Last week is unlikely to change the fact that the approach of the new administration is still expected to be very different from the regime under President Trump.</p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="1">
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</div></p><p>"If nothing else, in the Trump world, whether by lack of competence or ideology that government shouldn't be involved in most things, there just wasn't that much activity on fintech or a lot of areas of technology," said Bradley Tusk, CEO at Tusk Ventures.</p><p>So companies have been reading the tea leaves on appointments and potential changes at many federal agencies to predict how things could play out down the line. Top of mind for the government, according to industry insiders and experts Protocol spoke with, will be how underrepresented groups can access financial services, how consumers can access and move their financial data between companies and how consumers can access and manage crypto.</p><h3>In the consumer interest</h3><p>The new administration is expected to foreground policies that support protections and policies for unbanked and underrepresented groups, said Andrew Klungness, partner at Fenwick & West. "The administration's going to be extremely receptive to innovation that can be seen as helping consumers who have been underemployed or underbanked, who have lacked access to the financial system," he said.</p><p>Under the Trump administration, enforcement at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau was minimal and the agency cut back on payday loan <a href="https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/498649-consumer-bureau-revokes-payday-lending-restrictions" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">protections</a>. That's expected to change, Klungness said.</p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="2">
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</div></p><p>The Robinhood drama could add to regulators' interest in pumping the brakes on anything that hurts consumers. But the SEC and other regulators are playing catch-up to figure out how to address the speed of internet mobs, Byrne said.</p><p>"The SEC will likely be faced with an enormous challenge in regulating or determining which trading activity in this stock was bona fide and which was not," Byrne said. "Regulators are going to have to increase the tempo of regulatory intervention to stop these processes before they spiral out of control. There's value to developing circuit-breakers to do that but it's not clear how they will do it."</p><p>Regulatory focus on fintech will likely increase across the board, including on crypto, and, for example, bank charters may get harder to get, said Chris Dean, CEO at startup Treasury Prime. "Scrutiny is going to become higher," Dean said. "It'll raise the level of compliance for most fintech companies."</p><p><span></span>The nomination of former CFPB official Rohit Chopra to <a href="https://www.politico.com/news/2021/01/17/biden-rohit-chopra-consumer-bureau-460086" target="_blank">head</a> the CFPB is expected to bring more focus on protecting consumers. "The expectation is a stronger focus on consumer protection and a stronger focus on using the authority that CFPB has to the fullest extent in order to protect consumers," said John Pitts, policy lead at Plaid and former CFPB deputy assistant director for intergovernmental affairs.<br></p><p>Any companies seen as predatory regarding consumers will be particularly targeted as enforcement increases, Tusk said. "Anything that smells like payday lending — that's so politically resonant — will get the lion's share of attention," he said. </p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="3">
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</div></p><p>To support innovation even as scrutiny increases, Klungness hopes for more policies such as regulatory sandboxes or other exceptions to rules for fintech or startup betas, pilots and rollouts. The CFPB in 2019 released a Compliance Assistance Sandbox to give companies safe harbor and clarity on new products or <a href="https://thehill.com/opinion/finance/465874-the-cfpbs-new-sandbox-could-help-spur-innovation-in-the-financial-sector" target="_blank">features</a>. Under this program it has issued approvals for <a href="https://www.consumerfinance.gov/about-us/newsroom/consumer-financial-protection-bureau-issues-an-approval-order-to-facilitate-employee-access-to-earned-but-unpaid-wages/" target="_blank">PayActiv</a>, <a href="https://www.consumerfinance.gov/about-us/newsroom/consumer-financial-protection-bureau-issues-approval-order-to-facilitate-the-use-of-dual-usage-credit-cards/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Synchrony Bank</a> and others. The U.K. has moved faster here: its Financial Conduct Authority has had six regulatory sandbox <a href="https://www.fca.org.uk/firms/regulatory-sandbox/regulatory-sandbox-cohort-6" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">cohorts</a>, and set up a sandbox for companies tackling problems associated with the <a href="https://www.fca.org.uk/firms/innovation/digital-sandbox" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">coronavirus</a> alongside The City of London Corporation.</p><h3>75 words to change fintech</h3><p>One key area is rule-making around an obscure area of the Dodd-Frank Act's Section 1033 that could have a major impact on fintech. </p><p>At issue are just 75 words in the law, which say that consumers have the right to access their financial data, but don't provide details of what data that encompasses, how consumers can do it or what protections they have. Because this section of Dodd-Frank is not currently well-defined, a bank is currently within its rights to deny, say, a request by a consumer to access their bank data through the Mint app. That's problematic for fintech companies, as they need the ability to send and use data to provide existing and new products. </p><p>But in October 2020, the CFPB announced plans to make new rules and requested public comment on <a href="https://www.consumerfinance.gov/about-us/newsroom/consumer-financial-protection-bureau-releases-advance-notice-proposed-rulemaking-consumer-access-financial-records/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Section 1033</a>, which will determine consumers' access to and control of their financial data. The CFPB is interested in how data is produced from financial services, how consumers can access it and how they can authorize third parties to access it. The deadline to submit comments is Feb. 4, after which the CFPB will determine if it'll issue new rules. </p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="4">
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</div></p><p>Changes to Section 1033 could affect what financial data a consumer could send to apply for a loan, or clarify what protections consumers have when using this data. "If something goes wrong, what happens and what protections do people have?" Pitts said.</p><p>Changes could also benefit minorities and underrepresented groups — a Biden administration priority — Pitts said.</p><p>For example, some fintech apps analyze consumers' cash flow in their checking accounts, rather than a credit score, to underwrite loans. (Companies such as Plaid help facilitate this.) This helps minorities and underrepresented groups that haven't been able to build up a traditional credit file. But for this to happen, banks need to allow consumers to share this data, which a new Section 1033 rule could do. "With 1033 consumer access, consumers can instantly and electronically share their own cash flow history with their lender of choice in order to qualify for a loan," Pitts said.</p><p>Consumers can access and share certain financial data now, but some of that access could be removed depending on the rule-making, Pitts said: "Some banks say no, some banks say yes. Consumer rights shouldn't change based on where you bank."</p><p>Without such access, consumers would have to print out years of checking account data to send to a lender, which greatly reduces the chance of these loans happening. "The onramp for a credit file is steeper and harder to climb for historically disenfranchised groups than the rest of the population," Pitts said. "With cash flow, if you have a bank account, it's a different source of information that fintechs especially have found are very reliable for underwriting loans. It's not based on historic credit files and whatever discrimination is baked into the system."</p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="5">
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</div></p><h3>Clarity for crypto </h3><p>While some parts of the Trump administration were seen as crypto-friendly, the crypto industry hopes for more regulatory clarity in the new administration. </p><p>"No one wants the sector regulated out of existence," Tusk said. "But no regulation is almost as big of a problem. It's an industry with a lot of bad actors, so industry relies on government to tell you who's legitimate and who isn't. If government isn't, it becomes hard for anything to have legitimacy."</p><p>Coinbase, a cryptocurrency exchange company, is looking for three things from the new administration: clarity in terms of regulation, constructive dialogue on using crypto for things like distributing stimulus funding or other money for people who are underbanked and progress toward a "fed-backed digital dollar," said Paul Grewal, the company's chief legal officer. Grewal said he was "encouraged" by the <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/17/business/gary-gensler-sec-rohit-chopra-cfpb.html" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">nomination of Gary Gensler</a> as SEC Chair and Michael Barr as comptroller of the currency. </p><p>Gensler, a former Commodity Futures Trading Commission chair who helped write the Sarbanes-Oxley Act and more recently taught a course on blockchain at <a href="https://dci.mit.edu/research/2020/2/11/blockchain-and-money-course-taught-by-dci-advisor-gary-gensler-is-now-available-on-mit-open-courseware" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">MIT</a>, could help provide clarity for the crypto industry on which tokens are securities and which aren't, Klungness said. "The SEC is trying to get closer to this answer of when is a digital asset a security and when it's not," he said. "It's been a specter over crypto for a long time."</p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="6">
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</div></p><p>The nomination of Barr, a former board member at crypto company Ripple, also seems to bode well for the crypto industry, Klungness said. The office of the comptroller of the currency has already been in "subtle ways extremely crypto-friendly," Klungness said, citing a recent order allowing banks to custody digital assets. "The mainstreaming of crypto was in a lot of ways spurred by OCC."</p><p>"While we expect we will not always agree with these important regulators, we respect their experience with crypto and hope that will lead to even more productive discussions about the best way to expand access to the crypto-economy," Grewal said.</p><p>Elsewhere, for the CFTC, which oversees derivatives markets, Georgetown Law professor Chris Brummer is <a href="https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-biden-cftc-exclusive/cftc-chair-steps-down-academic-chris-brummer-in-lead-to-replace-him-sources-idUKKBN29Q2MT" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">reportedly</a> in line to be nominated head of the commission. He's been involved with crypto for years and has a fintech <a href="https://fintechbeat.fiscalnote.com/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">podcast</a>. "That's fantastic for crypto," said Jesse Spiro, global head of policy at Chainalysis. "He has a deep working knowledge of virtual assets."</p><p>"Some political appointees named so far have very good working knowledge of crypto and domain expertise that I don't think we saw in the previous administration," Spiro said.</p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="7">
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</div></p><p>It's still early to know how crypto regulation will go, but Grewal said that the written responses given by Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen at her confirmation hearing "suggest a longer-term coordinated effort among all financial regulators."</p><p>Yellen will likely focus on repairing the overall economy first. She could also take less of a hands-on approach to crypto than Steven Mnuchin did, giving more authority to agency heads and the under secretary for terrorism and financial intelligence, Spiro said. </p><p>Still, Yellen has made anti-crypto statements, Klungness said. And in addition, FinCEN, a Treasury agency, issued a rule-making in December that many in the <a href="https://www.protocol.com/bulletins/andreessen-horowitz-fincen-crypto" target="_self">crypto industry saw</a> as overly harsh and difficult to implement.</p><p>"It'll be interesting to see how her role intersects with others in the administration who are more pro-crypto," Klungness said.</p>
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Tomio Geron ( @tomiogeron) is a San Francisco-based reporter covering fintech. He was previously a reporter and editor at The Wall Street Journal, covering venture capital and startups. Before that, he worked as a staff writer at Forbes, covering social media and venture capital, and also edited the Midas List of top tech investors. He has also worked at newspapers covering crime, courts, health and other topics. He can be reached at tgeron@protocol.com or tgeron@protonmail.com.
Transforming 2021
Blockchain, QR codes and your phone: the race to build vaccine passports
Digital verification systems could give people the freedom to work and travel. Here's how they could actually happen.
One day, you might not need to carry that physical passport around, either.
Photo: CommonPass
February 23, 2021
Mike Murphy ( @mcwm) is the director of special projects at Protocol, focusing on the industries being rapidly upended by technology and the companies disrupting incumbents. Previously, Mike was the technology editor at Quartz, where he frequently wrote on robotics, artificial intelligence, and consumer electronics.
February 23, 2021
There will come a time, hopefully in the near future, when you'll feel comfortable getting on a plane again. You might even stop at the lounge at the airport, head to the regional office when you land and maybe even see a concert that evening. This seemingly distant reality will depend upon vaccine rollouts continuing on schedule, an open-sourced digital verification system and, amazingly, the blockchain.
Several countries around the world have begun to prepare for what comes after vaccinations. Swaths of the population will be vaccinated before others, but that hasn't stopped industries decimated by the pandemic from pioneering ways to get some people back to work and play. One of the most promising efforts is the idea of a "vaccine passport," which would allow individuals to show proof that they've been vaccinated against COVID-19 in a way that could be verified by businesses to allow them to travel, work or relax in public without a great fear of spreading the virus.
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</div></p><p>But building a system that everyone agrees with — and can access — is no small task. There are several companies working on competing projects to verify vaccinations. But beyond that, there are more than a few hurdles that could prevent vaccine passports from succeeding, from antiquated medical records systems to interoperability issues and privacy concerns. Here's how they could actually succeed. </p><h3>Competing projects, similar standards</h3><p>Pretty much since the first blockchain white paper, people have been looking for perfect examples of where a distributed, immutable ledger could be valuable. There's obviously the push to use it for currencies, and companies have tried to use it for things like tracking <a href="https://www.protocol.com/ibm-blockchain-supply-produce-coffee" target="_self">food production</a> and <a href="https://www.govtech.com/products/Blockchain-Voting-Debate-Heats-Up-After-Historic-Election.html" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">voting</a>, but there are few use cases that have truly taken off, at least so far. "We've been working on this since 2014; we never thought that health care would be the kind of the use case that we take this mainstream," Jamie Smith, the senior director of business development at Evernym, a company focused on using the blockchain as a basis for verifying identities, told Protocol. </p><p>Smith said Evernym had been discussing its concepts with automakers, retailers, telcos, governments, loyalty companies and banks prior to the pandemic. One of those companies was IAG, the airline group that owns British Airways, which had been interested in the idea of contactless travel based on a single identity credential that follows you from the airport check-in to your gate. With the pandemic, that morphed into thinking about ways to verify that passengers have had negative COVID tests, and eventually, that they've received a vaccine. "From our perspective, it was a really easy lift to see," Smith said. "We're doing contactless travel, and we just added verifiable credentials for test results."</p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="2">
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</div></p><p>It's a similar genesis for IBM's Digital Health Pass initiative, which leader Eric Piscini said started about two years ago as a way to store people's entire health records in a safe, accessible platform. It also relies on the blockchain for its immutable record of proof, and both Evernym and IBM are part of an open-standards group called the Good Health Pass Collaborative, which aims to bring private credentialed vaccine records to business and people around the world. Companies are working on their own implementations of the standards, but Evernym's Smith said the data is meant to be portable from one passport to another. </p><p>Most of the companies working on passports say their systems are private by design, especially given that they're mainly working off the same open standards. In most cases, the health information only ever remains on a user's phone, but where it asks to verify that the user's information meets a system's standards — such as whether this person has had two COVID vaccines and should be allowed into an office — that information is recorded on a blockchain. "You can, using blockchain technologies, verify that someone has been tested recently, without having access to the underlying data," Piscini said. "I don't know any other technology where you can do that."</p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="3">
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</div></p><p>Similarly, the nonprofit Commons Project's CommonPass, backed by the likes of Oracle, Microsoft and Salesforce, started out as a project to bring an analog to Apple Health for Android. JP Pollak, a senior researcher at Cornell and founder of the Commons Project, first launched CommonHealth to bring the sort of data and insights that Apple Health offers to iPhone owners to Android users. Last summer, the group started building an app that could take health data and privately share it with others — in that case, it was to help truckers stuck at the borders in <a href="https://www.newtimes.co.rw/opinions/digital-technology-re-opening-africa" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">East African countries</a> who couldn't easily prove they'd taken COVID tests. This morphed into vaccine credentialing, with the group now working to pull together the various data streams needed to get a project like this off the ground. </p><p>"Health care institutions, EMR vendors, retail pharmacies, state vaccine registries, all issuing people a digital verifiable credential of their vaccination record that they could then use in the app of their choice, to be able to get access to various kinds of services," Pollak said. CommonPass is also working with the Mayo Clinic, as well as Epic Systems and Cerner, two of the largest EMR vendors. </p><h3>Something for everyone </h3><p>With so many competing efforts to become the world's digital vaccine passport, it might seem that the country is heading for some sort of VHS versus Betamax format war for proving everyone has had COVID vaccines. But given that so many of the efforts are using the same standards, and in many cases, looking to embed their tech in someone else's app rather than their own, the race might be less about the best tech winning, and more about various approaches working in different situations. </p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="4">
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</div></p><p>"The intent is not to be the only company; we don't want to be the proprietary platform that everybody has to use because they have no choice," IBM's Piscini said. "That's not who we are right now: That's the IBM from 30 years ago, not the IBM of today."</p><p>For IBM, though, the selling point is that the company already works with so many other massive companies. Why look elsewhere for a vaccine passport solution if your airline booking system is already powered by IBM? "We believe our network is going to be more valuable than any other because of our scale and our ability to integrate the platform with CRM systems, building systems or stadium systems — we can do that every day," Piscini said.</p><p class="shortcode-media shortcode-media-rebelmouse-image">
<img type="lazy-image" data-runner-src="https://assets.rebelmouse.io/eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJpbWFnZSI6Imh0dHBzOi8vYXNzZXRzLnJibC5tcy8yNTY2NTc3NS9vcmlnaW4uanBnIiwiZXhwaXJlc19hdCI6MTYyMTM1MjYyM30._ykxxCyx3_wDbZrYgCcmK0QT2Ue1tZFdP5pf60kOmPU/img.jpg?width=980" id="c81c9" class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="3967636652192acfdaad341861263bc8" data-rm-shortcode-name="rebelmouse-image">
<small class="image-media media-caption" placeholder="Add Photo Caption...">IATA's digital passport app.</small><small class="image-media media-photo-credit" placeholder="Add Photo Credit...">Photo: IATA</small></p><p>For other companies, it's about securing new partnerships with major players in the hopes of finding that scale. Evernym, for example, is working with International Air Transport Association, the airline industry's trade association, on an air travel-specific app called Travel Pass. IATA is working with airlines and local governments to ensure it has the latest requirements to feed the app's rules engine. "It will say, 'Hey, you're flying JFK to Heathrow, you need a PCR test 48 hours in advance before you can land,'" Evernym's Smith said. "And of course, those policy changes are changing every day." Qatar, Emirates and Etihad Airways are all <a href="https://simpleflying.com/qatar-iata-travel-pass-launch/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">expected</a> to start trialing the app in the next few weeks.<br></p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="5">
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</div></p><p>In other instances, the technology will live inside other companies' existing apps; why make someone download yet another app and add another hurdle to compliance? Instead, the experience will be rather like adding a loyalty account or TSA PreCheck number when booking a flight. Airlines and other venues restricting access will require uploading negative test results or vaccine records using one of these services. "You're going to be using the United or the Delta app, and they'll be using our solution or somebody else's, but you will do it via their app," IATA's Travel Pass lead, Alan Murray Hayden, told Protocol.</p><p>The World Health Organization is also working on its own offering, and recently convened the <a href="https://www.who.int/groups/smart-vaccination-certificate-working-group" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Smart Vaccination Certificate Working Group</a>. It's built upon the WHO's nearly century-old notion of the "yellow card" vaccination record, which first was used to document that travelers had been inoculated against diseases such as cholera and yellow fever. Evernym Chief Trust Officer Drummond Reed is part of the working group; he said there should be more to share in the coming months. </p><h3>What could go wrong?</h3><p>It's entirely possible that as more people start to get vaccinated, vaccine passports start to become the norm. You walk to work — still masked, of course — scan a QR code reader in the lobby, and are let in. You go out for lunch, and your loyalty card app has a discount for in-store shoppers verifying they're vaccinated. Your concert ticket is also tied to health pass information that you shared earlier in the day with Ticketmaster. But there are more than a few hurdles ahead of the companies rushing to turn these concepts into realities. </p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="6">
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</div></p><p>First off, there's the … reality … of the real world that any digital system has to contend with. For anyone without access to the internet, digital vaccine credentials will prove difficult to acquire, though all the companies Protocol spoke with said they would offer a paper-based QR code for people who don't have smartphones. But there's also the issue of having to corral so many different stakeholders into one system, especially when some health care providers are still reliant on antiquated database systems or <a href="https://www.protocol.com/manuals/health-care-revolution/electronic-health-records-after-coronavirus" target="_self">even paper records</a>. "The amount of inefficiency in the system is tremendous," IBM's Piscini said. </p><p>But in the U.S. at least, all vaccinators are required to report COVID-19 vaccines to their state. Piscini said that even for people who just received a paper copy of their vaccine records, systems like IBM's can likely link up to the state's immunization registry and allow people to import records to a vaccine passport.</p><p class="shortcode-media shortcode-media-rebelmouse-image">
<img type="lazy-image" data-runner-src="https://assets.rebelmouse.io/eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJpbWFnZSI6Imh0dHBzOi8vYXNzZXRzLnJibC5tcy8yNTY2NTc4My9vcmlnaW4ucG5nIiwiZXhwaXJlc19hdCI6MTYzNzg3MTM2M30.RZtqR7F_FuXK1S24V6jVaqUZ0xOSG-gCwj00xU3fxcM/img.png?width=980" id="b0bd3" class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="11d8002d92c0cd6ef39b12fc7b8dccf8" data-rm-shortcode-name="rebelmouse-image">
<small class="image-media media-caption" placeholder="Add Photo Caption...">How CommonPass's app shows your records. </small><small class="image-media media-photo-credit" placeholder="Add Photo Credit...">Image: CommonPass</small></p><p>And states are willing to help out, Pollak said, adding that CommonPass has started working with Hawaii to roll out its offering for would-be tourists. "We're seeing a lot of state governments stepping up and doing a really good job with this," Pollak said. "It would be surprising if there wasn't a coordinated federal effort very soon." That being said, while <a href="https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/north/iceland-covid-passports-canada-1.5904828" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">many countries around</a> the world are committing to working on vaccine passports, getting a straight answer out of the U.S. government on what it's doing has proven difficult. The State Department, which maintains America's traditional, analogue passports, referred me to Homeland Security, which referred me to the White House. The acting director and chief of staff of the White House's Office of Science and Technology Policy, Kei Koizumi, told Protocol that "OSTP can't discuss projects we are working on before they are publicly announced."</p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="7">
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</div></p><p>But even with systems in place at a federal level, there's still a fair amount of education that needs to happen before people will trust systems like these. "There's a substantial gap in understanding and knowledge of how these systems work, and people's views, in terms of who should get access to which data," Pollak said. </p><p>"We assume there's a Facebook Borg in the sky, monitoring every interaction," Smith said. "The emergence of verifiable credentials breaks down that mental model, where actually it becomes more like decentralized bits of paper that I can carry around, and no one's to know that I've been sharing this information."</p><p>"Our belief is that if you do the right thing, from a platform point of view, protecting your privacy, and giving you control and access to the platform to everybody who wants to use it," Piscini said. "I think those are very basic things that allow the core of the platform that we build to generate adoption by the individuals."</p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="8">
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</div></p><p>Even with a system that works, there may still be holdouts to this potential new normal. "Some people are saying, 'I will never get vaccinated,'" Piscini said, "and I don't know if the airlines are going to say, 'Well, maybe you will never fly again.'"</p>
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Mike Murphy ( @mcwm) is the director of special projects at Protocol, focusing on the industries being rapidly upended by technology and the companies disrupting incumbents. Previously, Mike was the technology editor at Quartz, where he frequently wrote on robotics, artificial intelligence, and consumer electronics.
Protocol | China
Biden’s plan for Chinese tech companies? It might look a lot like Trump’s.
Experts expect more polish and less chaos from the new administration, but a multilateral approach could make life harder.
Commerce secretary nominee Gina Raimondo pledged at her confirmation hearing Tuesday to take "aggressive trade enforcement actions to combat unfair trade practices from China."
Photo: Jonathan Ernst/Getty Images
March 4, 2021
Emily Birnbaum ( @birnbaum_e) is a tech policy reporter with Protocol. Her coverage focuses on the U.S. government's attempts to regulate one of the most powerful industries in the world, with a focus on antitrust, privacy and politics. Previously, she worked as a tech policy reporter with The Hill after spending several months as a breaking news reporter. She is a Bethesda, Maryland native and proud Kenyon College alumna.
January 27, 2021
If Tencent, Alibaba, ByteDance and Huawei thought they were going to have an easier go of it once Donald Trump left the White House, they may be in for a rude awakening.
President Joe Biden's team has resisted offering specifics about how it plans to approach China's tech giants after four years of hawkish, and oftentimes chaotic, relations under Trump; White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki says the new administration is currently conducting an interagency review as it seeks to develop a holistic China policy.
<p>But experts expect President Biden's China strategy to look like a more polished and multilateral version of Trump's as his team pushes forward a slew of policies aimed at curtailing the power and influence of Chinese tech companies in the U.S. </p><p>"Biden is most likely, on the technology front, going to keep things the way the Trump administration has made them," said Abishur Prakash, a geopolitics expert at the Center for Innovating the Future. "Whether it's regarding Alipay, whether it's regarding TikTok, whether it's regarding Chinese STEM students — across the board holistically, there's not a lot of space for change."</p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="1">
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</div></p><p>Biden, in the coming weeks and months, will make decisions about which Trump-era policies he wants to keep in place and which he wants to change or rebrand. For instance, the Commerce Department did not immediately respond to questions about whether it is moving forward with Trump's eleventh-hour executive order <a href="https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-china-tech-exclusive/trump-bars-u-s-transactions-with-eight-chinese-apps-including-alipay-idUSKBN29A2PA" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">banning U.S. transactions with eight Chinese apps</a>, including Ant Group's Alipay and Tencent's WeChat Pay. And officials have not yet said whether they plan to move forward with <a href="https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-trump-china-tech/trump-administration-shelves-planned-investment-ban-on-alibaba-tencent-baidu-sources-idUSKBN29I2RW" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">shelved plans</a> to blacklist Alibaba, Tencent and Baidu or follow through with the TikTok ban.</p><p>But Commerce secretary nominee Gina Raimondo pledged at her confirmation hearing Tuesday to take "aggressive trade enforcement actions to combat unfair trade practices from China," and she said she intends to "use the full toolkit at my disposal, to the fullest extent possible, to protect Americans and our network from Chinese interference or any kind of backdoor influence." She named Huawei and ZTE in particular.</p><p>Psaki said the new administration plans to hold China "accountable." </p><p>"Technology ... is of course at the center of U.S.-China competition," Psaki said on Monday. "China has been willing to do whatever it takes to gain a technological advantage — stealing intellectual property, engaging in industrial espionage and forcing technology transfer." She added: "The president's view is we need to play a better defense, which must include holding China accountable for its unfair and illegal practices and making sure that American technologies aren't facilitating China's military build-up."</p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="2">
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</div></p><p>That strategy will also involve shoring up U.S. manufacturing, an effort Biden kickstarted this week with his "<a href="https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/presidential-actions/2021/01/25/executive-order-on-ensuring-the-future-is-made-in-all-of-america-by-all-of-americas-workers/" target="_blank">Buy American</a>" executive order, which directs federal agencies to purchase products and services from U.S. workers and businesses. The effect of that order on tech's supply chains will be minimal, experts said, but the philosophy behind it will be key over the next four years. "One of the things you're going to see early on [in Biden's presidency] is a focus on investing domestically in our people, in our economy, in our democracy," said Brian Deese, incoming director of the National Economic Council, at a tech conference earlier this month.</p><p>Influential leaders, including former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, are calling for the "bifurcation" of the U.S. and Chinese sectors in a <a href="https://www.axios.com/scoop-former-google-ceo-and-others-call-for-us-china-tech-bifurcation-46fa8ca1-a677-4257-8b22-5e7fe1b7e442.html" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">new report</a> this week, advocating for the U.S. to invest in domestic infrastructure as well as "ally-centric production." </p><p>The Biden approach to Chinese technology issues will be different than Trump's in at least one key area: Biden officials have said they plan to work with other Western democracies to create a united front against China's influence. "Whether the techno democracies or the techno autocracies are the ones that get to define how technology is used — the technology that dominates all of our lives — I think is going to go a long way to shaping the next decades," Anthony Blinken, who was confirmed Tuesday as secretary of state, said last week. </p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="3">
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</div></p><p>Martijn Rasser, a senior fellow with the Center for a New American Security, predicts that the Biden administration will "rebrand" former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo's "<a href="https://www.protocol.com/newsletters/sourcecode/the-havoc-of-trumps-clean-network?rebelltitem=2#rebelltitem2" target="_self">Clean Networks</a>" initiative, which asked U.S. allies to join a pledge excluding apps and carriers owned by Chinese firms. </p><p>"By and large, a lot of our allies have already signed up for Clean Networks or at least expressed general agreement with the goals and principles of it," Rasser said. "It's more so how it's packaged, how it's portrayed in diplomatic exchanges and so forth. I think that's where the biggest change will be, not so much the substance or the goals." </p><p>Meanwhile, the Chinese government is engaged in its own <a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2020-11-17/what-we-know-about-china-s-big-tech-crackdown#:~:text=Last%20week%2C%20China's%20biggest%20tech,market%20value%20in%20two%20days.&text=Although%20Chinese%20regulators%20have%20said,even%20breaking%20up%20industry%20leaders." rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">antitrust crackdown</a> against the tech giants, proposing a new set of regulations aimed at curtailing their monopoly power. "If you're Alibaba or Tencent or Huawei or Baidu, you're already under siege at home," Prakash said. "You're already rethinking your corporate strategies, rethinking how do you expand and do anything."</p><p>And that pressure will only be compounded as the U.S. turns to allies including Japan, Australia and the EU to encourage them to stave off the growing influence of the Chinese tech giants. "If there is a unified approach by the leading democracies, that would be a significant headwind for these companies because then any growth that they would have outside of China [is] not in the most interesting markets," said Rasser. He named South America, Pakistan and Nigeria as a few places where they could expand, but he said that potential would be limited. The push could force the huge Chinese conglomerates to look more like "very large regional companies," he said. </p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="4">
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</div></p><p>And Biden likely won't choose to take on the companies one by one, predicted Adam Segal, chair in emerging technologies and national security at the Council on Foreign Relations. Instead, his administration will focus on particular industries, like semiconductors, and national security risks, like data privacy.</p><p>"The [Biden administration] will try to create a more coherent, focused domestic set of regulations that also includes the Chinese firms and other international firms as opposed to going ad hoc, whack-a-mole on specific Chinese firms," Segal said. </p><p>In other words, Biden probably won't be waging a PR battle against TikTok anytime soon. </p>
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Emily Birnbaum ( @birnbaum_e) is a tech policy reporter with Protocol. Her coverage focuses on the U.S. government's attempts to regulate one of the most powerful industries in the world, with a focus on antitrust, privacy and politics. Previously, she worked as a tech policy reporter with The Hill after spending several months as a breaking news reporter. She is a Bethesda, Maryland native and proud Kenyon College alumna.
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