The Bureau of Industry and Security is seeking public comments on priorities for export control cooperation with Japan, the agency said this week. BIS said the comments will help inform work under the Japan-U.S. Commercial and Industrial Partnership's Export Control Working Group, including efforts to ensure the two countries’ dual-use controls are “more transparent, more efficient and effective, and more convergent.” BIS said comments also will help the group identify and control emerging and foundational technologies and better enable collaboration between U.S. and Japanese research organizations.
The EU last week released the draft agenda for its annual export control forum. The forum, scheduled for Dec. 6, will feature speakers from the Bureau of Industry and Security and panels on emerging technologies, Russia's invasion of Ukraine, multilateral restrictions and more.
Semiconductor companies are still awaiting licensing decisions on their chip-related activities involving China under the U.S.’s new export controls, with some concerned that licenses awarded to their competitors could hurt their revenue. In earnings calls and filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission this month, U.S. chip and technology companies said they continue to prepare for drops in sales to China and that they fear Chinese customers may soon replace them with alternative suppliers, causing some U.S. companies to permanently lose their market share in China.
The Bureau of Industry and Security is seeking public comments on an information collection involving the procedure for entities on the Unverified List or Entity List to request removal or “modification” of their placement on either list. Public comments on the collection are due Jan. 24.
The U.S. needs to provide universities with clearer guidance on what types of research activities they can conduct and share with China, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology said in a report this week. The report, authored by MIT’s China Strategy Group, said U.S. schools face challenges managing outside “pressures” while also “preserving open scientific research,” which risks damaging American research abilities and chilling technology collaboration.
The State Department’s Directorate of Defense Trade Controls and the Commerce Department’s Bureau of Industry and Security will hold a webinar Dec. 8 to discuss information technology modernization updates. The webinar will include an overview of recent updates to DDTC’s Defense Export Control and Compliance System, BIS’s “IT Modernization roadmap” and the two agencies’ “collaboration efforts on data sharing and customer experience opportunities.”
The Bureau of Industry and Security is seeking public comments on information collection related to foreign availability procedures. BIS collects foreign availability information to determine whether U.S.-controlled exports are available from a foreign country “in sufficient quantity and of comparable quality so as to render the control ineffective.” Comments are due Jan. 23.
The Bureau of Industry and Security is seeking public comments on an information collection involving reports of requests for restrictive trade practices or boycotts. BIS said it uses the information to “monitor requests for participation in foreign boycotts against countries friendly to the U.S.” and analyzes the information to “note changing trends and to decide upon appropriate action to be taken to carry out” U.S. policy of discouraging boycotts of U.S. allies. Comments are due Jan. 23.
Vishay Precision Group, a U.S. sensor technology company, may have violated U.S. export filing requirements, the company said in a Securities & Exchange Commission filing this month. The company said it submitted a voluntary self-disclosure to the U.S. government after it determined that “certain export shipments of products from one of its subsidiaries” didn’t comply with filing requirements of the Bureau of Industry and Security's Export Administration Regulations and the Census Bureau’s Foreign Trade Regulations.
The U.S. needs to abandon the current model of multilateral export control regimes and move toward control agreements with smaller groups of allies in specific technology areas, said Liza Tobin, the National Security Council’s former China director. Tobin, speaking during an Emerging Technology Technical Advisory Committee meeting last week, also said the U.S. should look to impose technology-specific controls on items destined to China rather than end-use- and end-user-based controls, which are proving increasingly ineffective.