Facebook Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg walks past members of the news media as he enters the office of U.S. Senator Josh Hawley (R-MO) while meeting with lawmakers to discuss "future internet regulation on Capitol Hill in Washington, September 19, 2019.

Joshua Roberts | Reuters

After a 16-month investigation into competitive practices at the largest U.S. tech companies,Democratic congressional staffers laid out their findings this week in a 449-page report. They concluded that Apple, Amazon, Facebook and Google enjoy monopoly power that needs to be reined in, whether that means breaking the companies up, blocking future acquisitions or forcing them to open their platforms.

Wall Street shrugged at the news. Three of the four stocks rose the day after the report's release, reflecting investors' long-held view that regulators and politicians are in no position to squelch Big Tech's continuing rise and market share expansion.

Still, lawmakers certainly aren't putting the matter to rest. And with Joe Biden carrying a commanding lead in the polls less than a month before the Nov. 3 election, tech companies face the possibility of Democrats controlling the White House and both branches of Congress in 2021.

Should Democrats win the Senate, it would put Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders, who are among the loudest voices calling for the break up of Big Tech, in the majority.

Here's what Warren had to sayin early 2019:

"Today's big tech companies have too much power too much power over our economy, our society, and our democracy. They've bulldozed competition, used our private information for profit, and tilted the playing field against everyone else. And in the process, they have hurt small businesses and stifled innovation."

How did this happen? Just a decade or two ago, tech companies were seen as innovators, as young industry disruptors focused on making consumers' lives easier. How did they turn into the dark faces of corporate America, with their every move questioned at the highest levels of government?

There's no single answer. But here are a few key things that happened in recent years to paint a giant bullseye on tech.

Five years ago, Apple, Amazon, Google, Microsoft and Facebook were among the most valuable companies in the world, worth a combined $2 trillion. Today, that number is above $7 trillion, more than tripling over the last half-decade, while the broader S&P 500 climbed 73% over the same stretch.

The five tech giants are by far the most valuable U.S. companies and now make up over one-fifth of the S&P 500 and a whopping 46% of the Nasdaq 100.

Lawmakers have largely decided to give Microsoft a pass as they probe Big Tech for anti-competitive behavior, despite the software maker's swelling market cap and influence.

What they see in each of the other four is are companies that price out competition, exploit consumers, rip off partners or collect vast amounts of user data. Sometimes, all of the above.

The massive market cap appreciation and consolidation is the result of revenue growth, profitability and investor expectations that nothing's going to challenge the dominance of these companies. Trillion-dollar valuations and immense profit margins also foster a self-perpetuating cycle: The tech giants have such high equity value and big cash hoards, they can easily outbid smaller players.

While history is filled with companies enjoying dominant market positions and outsized market caps, the difference today is that one industry is home to all of them.

Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos

Alex Wong | Getty Images

Amazon has gone from being the everything store to the everything company.

Well past its original e-commerce roots, it's now a major player in cloud infrastructure, media, consumer hardware, grocery, payments and advertising, and has big ambitions in health care and other industries.

Even with annual revenue poised to top $350 billion, Amazon continues to report steady revenue growth and has recently started generating hefty profits, thanks to Amazon Web Services, its cloud computing business.

The extent of that business became clear for the first time in April 2015, when Amazon started reporting its finances and revealed that AWS was earning about about $1 billion a year in profits, even as the entire company was breaking even or losing money. In other words, while everybody thought Amazon was an e-retailer with a nice side business in cloud computing, it had quietly built a gigantic and profitable software business.

Last year, AWS earned more than $9 billion in profit on $35 billion in sales, making it the number-three software company by sales volume, trailing only Microsoft and Oracle.

Then, after helping spur the decline of physical retail for years, Amazon jumped into the brick-and-mortar world, buying upscale grocer Whole Foods for $13.7 billion in 2017. Would Amazon do to groceries what it did to information technology?

Amazon's physical footprint also includes its unmatched network of fulfillment centers and last-mile delivery facilities. It's now America's second largest employer and has continued to aggressively hire amid a broader economic downturn tied to the coronavirus pandemic.

Amazon upset lawmakers in 2017, when it courted proposals for its next headquarters and had cities offering up all sorts subsidies to try and win the deal. It ended up choosing two cities -- New York and Washington, D.C., only to back out of New York at the last minute because of fierce opposition from some locals.

The eccentricity and ambition of CEO Jeff Bezos has contributed to the company's mythos. Bezos spends billions a year on his private space travel company, Blue Origin. He bought the Washington Post in 2013, giving him an influential arm of the national media (although he does not exercise editorial oversight) and turning him into a favorite punching bag for President Donald Trump, as the Post frequently criticized Trump as both candidate and president. In 2017 he became the richest person in the world, and in 2019 publiclyconfronted a tabloid that threatened to publish details of an extra-marital affair.

While investors have cheered Amazon's growth, politicians from both parties have recently decried its unfettered expansion, includingits unruly marketplace and alleged anti-competitive tactics. Calls to break up Amazon peaked this summer when CEO Bezos appeared in front of Congress for the first time to answer questions about its market power and business practices.

Google CEO Sundar Pichai testifies before the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Antitrust, Commercial and Administrative Law during a hearing on "Online Platforms and Market Power" in the Rayburn House office Building on Capitol Hill, in Washington, July 29, 2020.

Mandel Ngan | Pool via Reuters

In a little more than a decade, Facebook and Google have completely reshaped the world of advertising.

Last year, the companies recorded a combined $232 billion in sales, up almost 10-fold from 2009.

EMarketer said it started using the term duopoly in 2017, but the ad industry saw the trend quite clearly before that. As of 2016, according to eMarketer's own data, the companies controlled a combined 57.9% of the digital U.S. ad market. Based on estimates provided in late 2019, that share has topped 60%.

Meanwhile, advertising dollars for the news industry plummeted from $38 billion in 2008 to $14 billion in 2018, according to the Pew Research Center. The News Media Alliance argued this year in a letter to the Department of Justice that Google had for years used news content to enhance its bottom line, pulling money from the actual content providers.

It's not just the news business that's hurting. TheWorld Advertising Research Center (WARC) predicted earlier this year that global advertisers would spend more on Google and Facebook than on television. The third-largest U.S. digital ad company is now Amazon, which doesn't help Big Tech's defense against regulators.

Business reliance on Facebook was underscored this year when a large roster of major marketers paused spending in support of a campaign called "Stop Hate For Profit," to pressure the company to take steps to stop the spread of hate speech and misinformation on the site. Some of those advertisers said they wanted to stop spending on Facebook permanently, but they ultimately couldn't afford such a drastic move.

Facebook co-founder, Chairman and CEO Mark Zuckerberg testifies before the House Energy and Commerce Committee in the Rayburn House Office Building on Capitol Hill April 11, 2018 in Washington, DC.

Yasin Ozturk | Anadolu Agency | Getty Images

In his first public appearance after Trump's election in 2016, CEO Mark Zuckerberg swiftly dismissed criticisms that his company played much of a role in the outcome.

"Personally I think the idea that fake news on Facebook, which is a very small amount of the content, influenced the election in any way I think is a pretty crazy idea,"Zuckerberg said.

Zuckerberg was quickly proven wrong. Facebookpublished a case studyin April 2017 confirming that outside groups had attempted to use its social network to sway the outcome of the 2016 election. In Feb. 2018, a federal grand jury indicted 13 Russian nationals and an accompanying FBI report detailed how they used Facebook and Twitter to wage "information warfare" against the U.S. and "sow discord" in the American political system in an effort to help Trump win.

In 2018, reporters at the New York Times and The Observer revealed that consulting firm Cambridge Analytica had improperly accessed the data of 50 million Facebook users (later revised to 87 million) and used it to try and sway potential voters towards Trump.

Around the same time, U.N. investigators determined the companyplayed a determining rolein the genocide of Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar.

"It has ... substantively contributed to the level of acrimony and dissension and conflict, if you will, within the public," said Marzuki Darusman, chairman of the U.N. Independent International Fact-Finding Mission on Myanmar.

The hits kept coming, as government agencies began digging deep into Facebook's practices.

In December 2018, the U.K. Parliament published 250 pages of internal Facebook documents, providing insight into the company's strategies against competitors. In one example, Zuckerberg instructed his staff to cut off the ability for users of Twitter's Vine social app to connect it with Facebook as a way to find their friends on the service.

Early the following year, as part of her presidential campaign platform, Sen. Warren proposed the breakup of Facebook, potentially including separating Instagram and WhatsApp. Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes echoed Warren in May 2019, when he called for splitting the company apart.

"The most problematic aspect of Facebook's power is Mark's unilateral control over speech," Hughes wrote. "There is no precedent for his ability to monitor, organize and even censor the conversations of two billion people."

The Federal Trade Commission launched an antitrust investigationin June 2019,followed a couple months later by state attorneys generaland theDepartment of Justice. In November, California State Attorney General Xavier Becerra disclosed that his state had also begun a probe into Facebook the prior year.

Consumer data is the currency of the internet. Increasingly, when people look around their house, car or office, they see or hear Google, Facebook and Amazon in every corner.

The 2018 Facebook-Cambridge Analytica scandal may have been the biggest wake-up call, but perhaps the first was when Edward Snowdenleaked details of the National Security Agency's tapping of U.S. phone calls. Consumers who had thought communications networks offered the same privacy as a quiet personal conversation realized that wasn't the case.

In 2018, a local Seattle TV network reported that a family in Portland blamed its AmazonAlexa device for recording a private conversation and then sending it to a random contact. Amazon called the event an "extremely rare occurrence" and said it was triggered because the device interpreted something the family said as "Alexa," and then followed a command that was never given.

Facebook users have for years accused it ofeavesdropping on conversations through its apps. How else could Facebook or Instagram show an ad for a product they were just talking about with a friend in a real-world conversation? But Facebook repeatedly insists it doesn't listen. That suggests its behavioral ad targeting is just frighteningly good.

Privacy has been a particularly resonant issue this year, amid the national conversation around the excessive use of force by police and fears of government surveillance. Ring, the Amazon-owned doorbell company, has faced criticism for partnering with police forces. Amazon and Microsoft both yielded to pressure to announce that their facial recognition software is not being used by police departments.

Consensus has grown in Congress over the need for a national digital privacy law to protect Americans against the exploitation of new technologies. In the meantime, we all keep handing over our data.

The congressional report does not mean that the big tech companies are going to be broken up this year, or any time soon. Instead, the report was intended as a broad recommendation to Congress to reshape the antitrust laws to go beyond their currently narrow scope of protecting consumers on pricing and competition, and instead think about "workers, entrepreneurs, independent businesses, open markets, a fair economy and democratic ideals."

Meanwhile, the Department of Justice, Federal Trade Commission and various other federal and state governments are investigating confronting the big technology companies one at a time on a wide variety of issues, from labor practices to privacy to fair competition. But those cases can take years to complete, as Microsoft's experience in the 1990s and 2000s shows, and the companies can absorb huge fines without lasting damage -- Facebook's stock actually rose in July 2019 after the FTC fined it $5 billion over privacy lapses.

Nonetheless, the fact that Congress is not afraid to issue a 449-page damning indictment of Big Tech in an election year shows how much attitudes in D.C. have changed. The clock is ticking.

WATCH: Antitrust expert breaks down Big Tech concerns

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How Big Tech became such a big target on Capitol Hill - CNBC

The major tech platforms push back against the House antitrust report, Google Assistant gets a guest mode and we interview a freshly minted Nobel laureate. This is your Daily Crunch for October 7, 2020.

The big story: Big tech responds to antitrust report

The House Judiciary Committee released its tech antitrust report late yesterday, concluding that the big tech platforms should face additional regulation. Recommendations include creating new separations to prevent dominant platforms from operating in adjacent lines of business, new requirements for interoperability and data portability and increased restrictions on mergers and acquisitions.

For now, these are just recommendations and they werent endorsed by the committees Republican minority. But they have prompted forceful responses from four of the companies targeted by the report: Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google.

Amazon, for example, dismissed the committees views as fringe notions and regulatory spitballing, while Apple said it vehemently disagrees with the reports conclusions.

The tech giants

Google Assistant gets an incognito-like guest mode With Guest mode on, Google Assistant wont offer personalized responses and your interactions wont be saved to your account.

Slack introduces new features to ease messaging between business partners One new feature: Slack Connect DMs, allowing users inside an organization to collaborate with anyone outside their company simply by sending an invite.

Instagrams Threads app now lets you message everyone, like its Direct app once did These changes are rolling out shortly after a major update to Instagrams messaging platform.

Startups, funding and venture capital

Envisics nabs $50M for its in-car holographic display tech at a $250M+ valuation The startup brings together computer vision, machine learning, big data analytics and navigation to build hardware that integrates into vehicles to project holographic, head-up displays.

Shogun raises $35M to help brands take on Amazon with faster and better sites of their own Shogun lets companies build sites that sit on top of e-commerce back-ends like Shopify, Big Commerce or Magento.

DoorDash introduces a new corporate product, DoorDash for Work DoorDash says it conducted a survey of 1,000 working Americans last month and found that 90% of them said they miss at least one food-related benefit from the office.

Advice and analysis from Extra Crunch

Transportation VCs suggest frayed US-China ties will impact mobility markets During TechCrunchs annual Mobility event, we interviewed three investors who spend much of their time focused on shifts in the transportation industry.

Unqorks $207M Series C underscores growing enterprise demand for no-code apps The no-code/low-code world could be enjoying an even sharper tailwind than anticipated.

Media roundup: Google to cut big checks for news publishers, Substack continues to draw top creators, more I do my best to highlight the latest trends, platform shifts and noteworthy funding rounds.

(Reminder: Extra Crunch is our subscription membership program, which aims to democratize information about startups. You can sign up here.)

Everything else

Nobel laureate Jennifer Doudna shares her perspective on COVID-19 and CRISPR CRISPR co-discoverer Jennifer Doudna was named a Nobel laureate in Chemistry today, so it seemed like the perfect time to post video of our interview at Disrupt.

Tech-publisher coalition backs new push for browser-level privacy controls A coalition of privacy-forward tech companies, publishers and advocacy groups has taken the wraps off of an initiative to develop a new standard that gives internet users a simple way to put digital guardrails around their data.

The Daily Crunch is TechCrunchs roundup of our biggest and most important stories. If youd like to get this delivered to your inbox every day at around 3pm Pacific, you can subscribe here.

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Daily Crunch: Big tech responds to antitrust report - TechCrunch

My girlfriend, Emily, is always telling me I have to read this or watch that. I usually resist. I have my own obsessions to indulge, like quantum mechanics. Whats annoying is that her recommendations, when I grudgingly comply with them, often turn out to be sound.

This happened with two of Emilys recent picks. One is The Social Dilemma, a documentary on Netflix. It sounded boringanother expose of the perils of social media. Ho hum, old news. But the film gripped me. Its an in-depth look at how big tech companies, by amassing more and more data on us, are getting better and better at manipulating us, with devastating results.

The film has several strands. One envisions, with actors, how social media hurt an American family. A teenage girl, stung by a casual online remark about her ears, sinks into depression, while her older brother tumbles into the rabbit hole of conspiracy theories. The film also depicts evil AI algorithms, played by three versions of a single creepy actor, ensuring that the teenage boy remains addicted to his smartphone.

These dramatizations were a little hokey. The most compelling, and disturbing, component of the documentary consists of interviews with tech insiders worried about what they have wrought. Actually, worried is too bland a word. These veterans of Google, Facebook, Twitter and other companies are freaking out. Some think digital technologies, unregulated, might destroy civilization.

Google, et. al. equip legions of brilliant engineers with vast databases and powerful AI programs to make their products as addictive as possiblethat is, to maximize the time we spend staring at a screen. The designers of these devices find them irresistible, too. Tim Kendall, former head of monetization for Facebook, recalls that after spending all day trying to boost his firms profits, he went home to his wife and kids and could not stay off his phone. Knowing what was going on behind the curtain, I still wasnt able to control my usage.

The more time we spend on our screens, the more the companies learn about us, the more money they make from advertisingcommercial and politicaltailored to our fears and desires. And once they deduce what news and (mis)information we like, or might like, online sites feed us more of it, confirming our biases. If you begin a search on, say, climate change, Google may suggest different results depending on what it knows about you and others where you live, according to a former Google designer.

This data-driven pandering not only keeps us glued to our devices. It has also contributed to the proliferation of fake news and conspiracy theories and to social schisms in the U.S. and elsewhere. We end up living in parallel universes with radically different views of global warming, race, gender, immigration, crime, abortion and COVID-19.

Some techies believed, initially, that they were creating a better world. Our entire motivation was Can we spread positivity and love in the world?, says Justin Rosenstein, who helped design Facebooks like button. The possibility that teens would be getting depressed when they dont have enough likes, or it could be leading to political polarization, was nowhere on our radar.

Yes, digital technologies yield vast benefits. During the pandemic I keep in touch with friends and family via e-mail and Zoom, and I teach my classes online. I can do research for this articlerewatching Social Dilemma and looking up reviews on my laptopright here in my apartment. When I tire of brooding over the downside of tech, I can binge on Community and Arrested Development.

Our digital era is a blend of utopia and dystopia, says Tristan Harris, who left Google to cofound The Center for Humane Technology (a phrase that sounds increasingly oxymoronic). I can hit a button on my phone and a car shows up in 30 seconds and I can go exactly where I need to go. That is magic. But Harris fears techs ill effects are outweighing its benefits. If we dont agree on truth, he says, or even that there is such a thing as truth, were toast.

One pundit insists that newspapers, radio and television didnt destroy civilization, and neither will smart phones. Another retorts that smart phones are far more addictive than previous information technologies. When many of us wake up in the morning, he notes, the only question is whether we check our phones before we pee or while we pee. And modern methods of surveillance and persuasion make those employed in the predigital era look laughably crude.

Toward the end of the film, Social Dilemma identifies capitalism as the ultimate cause of the ills wrought by big tech. Rosenstein, the Facebook designer, notes that capitalism promotes short-term thinking based on this religion of profit at all costs. This approach, which views nature as something to be mined, literally and metaphorically, for monetary gain, has given us climate change and other environmental threats.

The successful big-tech firms have figured out how to mine our attention. Were more profitable to a corporation, Rosenstein says, if were staring at a screen, staring at an ad, then if were spending our time living our life in a rich way. Rosenstein and others say the government must regulate tech firms to limit the harm they do; the companies cannot be trusted to regulate themselves.

Shoshana Zuboff, a psychologist at Harvard Business School, contends that companies should not be free to gather and sell information on customers without their consent. These markets undermine democracy and they undermine freedom, and they should be outlawed, she says. This is not a radical proposal. There are other markets that we outlaw. We outlaw markets in human organs. We outlaw markets in human slaves.

These calls for reform bring me to Emilys other recommendation, an infamous 50-year-old essay, The Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, by economist Milton Friedman. The New York Times, which printed the essay in 1970, just republished it along with commentary from scholars and businessfolk.

The essay had a huge impact on economics as well as business and politics. As the Times puts it, Friedmans libertarian economics influenced presidents and inspired greed is good. Friedmans manifesto is crediting with catalyzing the swerve of the U.S. and other western democracies toward free-wheeling capitalism, which governments encouraged with lower taxes.

Friedman rebuked calls for corporations to seek social goals, such as eliminating discrimination, avoiding pollution and whatever else may be the catchwords of the contemporary crop of reformers. Those who express support for these goals, Friedman asserted, are preaching pure and unadulterated socialism and undermining the basis of a free society. Note Friedmans equation of freedom with corporate freedom.

It is governments job, Friedman argued, to impose rules on businesses that promote general welfare, but such restrictions should be minimal. By freely pursuing profits in competition with each other, with minimal government interference, businesses produce goods, services and jobs that benefit all of society. So Friedman and his many free-market acolytes have claimed.

We are now reaping the consequences of Friedmans vision in the form of industries that pursue profits regardless of the social costs. These include big pharma, which foists drugs on us that often make us sicker; big oil, which has thwarted efforts to counteract global warming; and now big tech, which represents the apotheosis of Friedmans ideology.

Economist and Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz comments in the Times that the fallacies of Friedmans ideology are more obvious than ever. Stiglitz asks: Should Mark Zuckerberg let Facebook users spread wanton disinformation if it increases his bottom line? Friedman would say yes. Economic theory, common sense and historical experience suggest otherwise.

Friedmans rhetorical style reminds me of Marx. Both men exude supreme confidence in their judgments, the kind of confidence that inspires zealotry in devotees. Marx predicted that capitalism, by elevating profit above all other values, would inevitably bring about its own destruction. Friedman said capitalism would give us unbounded freedom and prosperity. Right now, Marx is looking more prescient.

Near the end of Social Dilemma, an interviewer asks tech-visionary-turned-critic Jaron Lanier to peer into our future. If we go down the current status quo, Lanier replies, for lets say another 20 years, we probably destroy our civilization through willful ignorance. We probably fail to meet the challenge of climate change. We probably degrade the worlds democracies, so they fall into some bizarre autocratic dysfunction. We probably ruin the global economy. We probablyhe shrugsdont survive. Asked what he fears most, Kendall, the former Facebook executive, replies, In the shortest time horizon? Civil war.

Give capitalism its due. As I acknowledge in a recent book, capitalism has boosted longevity and prosperity over the last two centuries. But our fanatical commitment to Friedman-style capitalism has burdened us with acute inequality, dysfunctional health care, surging climate change and vicious political polarization. Meanwhile we keep robotically swiping our smart phones as things fall apart.

I try to resist alarmism, as a general rule, but alarmism feels like realism lately.

Oh, and Emily, thanks a lot for those recommendations.

Further Reading:

Revolt against the Rich

The Coronavirus and Right-Wing Postmodernism

Does Optimism on Climate Change Make You Pro-Trump?

Did Thomas Kuhn Help Elect Donald Trump?

See also A Pretty Good Utopia (profile of economist Deirdre McCloskey in my free online bookMind-Body Problems)

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Big Tech, Out-of-Control Capitalism and the End of Civilization - Scientific American

One of the biggest news publishing companies in the world has slowly backed away from its harsh public criticism of Big Tech platforms, as companies like Google and Facebook have begun to open up their wallets to news companies.

Why it matters: News Corp. has for years been the driving force behind much of the regulatory scrutiny of Big Tech and its impact on the publishing industry. Now it's becoming a beneficiary of the massive pockets of several of the largest tech companies.

Driving the news: News Corp. CEO Robert Thomson put out a statement lauding Google's new efforts to pay publishers around the world more than $1 billion to license and curate their content last week.

Catch up quick: In early 2018, News Corp. Executive Chairman Rupert Murdoch released a newsy statement calling on Google and Facebook to pay trusted publishers a carriage fee for their content similar to the model adopted between cable companies and TV networks.

State of play: News Corp. now has several partnerships with Big Tech firms, including significant paid licensing partnerships with Facebook and Apple News, as well as working partnerships with Amazon, Spotify, Snapchat and Twitter.

Between the lines: In 2019, News Corp. launched its own news aggregation service called Knewz. Sources familiar with the effort say it was never intended to be a market threat to Big Tech platforms, but rather putting into reality something the company wanted to invest in as a matter of principal.

Behind the scenes, the media giant has commented or consulted on numerous investigations into Big Tech's dominance, and is continuing to press for regulatory reform.

The big picture: There was a time several years ago that media companies, with proper investment and scale, could demand big ad dollars via traffic from platforms like Google and Facebook. Today, media companies with value and investment can pull something even more sustainable from those platforms: licensing fees.

Read the rest here:

News Corp. changes its tune on Big Tech - Axios

Steve Ballmer at the GeekWire Summit 2019 (GeekWire Photo / Dan DeLong)

Twenty years after Microsoft waged its own antitrust battle with the U.S. government, former CEO Steve Ballmer is betting that Congress wont break up Big Tech this time around.

In an interview with CNBC on Wednesday (below), Ballmer was reacting to a U.S. House antitrust subcommittee report released this week that found challenges presented by the dominance and business practices of Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google.

Ill bet money that they will not be broken up, Ballmer told CNBC.

The450-page report from the subcommittees Democratic leaders concludes a 16-month investigation into the four companies as the operators of major online markets. It finds that the market power of the tech giants has diminished consumer choice, eroded innovation and entrepreneurship in the U.S. economy, weakened the vibrancy of the free and diverse press, and undermined Americans privacy.

Ballmer said he doesnt think the notionof breaking up the companies answers most of the questions or complaints that are being raised against the companies. And he thinks Facebook, Google, Amazon and Apple would do well to engage with regulators now rather than take unilateral action that they hope satisfies those calling the shots.

If Im in these guys shoes, I say, Come on, lets get down there and lets regulate me and lets get it over with so I know what I can do,' Ballmer told CNBC.

Ballmer is currently the billionaire owner of the Los Angeles Clippers NBA franchise and founder of the Bellevue, Wash.-based nonpartisan, not-for-profit civic data initiative USAFacts.

Ballmer also discussed USAFacts launch of a $10 million ad campaign, to air during the nationally televised presidential debates, aimed at illustrating the power of data and facts. The campaign, calledChange the Story,features snapshots of a diverse set of Americans and the numbers which relate back to their lives.

More:

20 years after Microsofts antitrust fight, Steve Ballmer betting that Big Tech wont be broken up - GeekWire

The so-called FAAMG stocks have been the target of Washington, D.C. all year.

Well, most of them at least.

The CEOs of Facebook (FB), Amazon (AMZN), Apple (AAPL) and Google (GOOG) were virtually questioned before Congress this summer and are now the focus of a 451-page report released this week on their business practices.

Facebook, Google and Twitter (TWTR) will be back before lawmakers later this month for a Senate hearing.

But Microsoft (MSFT) no stranger to Congressional inquiries in years past has largely managed to escape the glare.

Thats because they are now the adult in the room in some ways on this issue, said Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D., Wash.), a Democratic member of the House Antitrust subcommittee, which has been diving into Big Techs practices for the last 16 months.

The final report doesnt call for a break-up of the companies, but does talk about the need for structural separations to prohibit one part of a company from using another part of their platform to gain an unfair advantage.

The idea is a roadmap for restoring competition, improving innovation, and safeguarding democracy, say the reports Democratic authors, Reps. Jerrold Nadler and David N. Cicilline.

Jayapals Seattle district includes Amazons headquarters and the companys practices, specifically how it uses data from third-party sellers, has been one of her major focuses.

Its Congresss job to make sure a company like Amazon can't just put a small business that produces diapers out of business by taking all of that market information that nobody else has access to, and using it to subsidize losses and push small companies out, Jayapal told Yahoo Finance.

She has also had a less-than-cordial relationship with Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos. During a Yahoo Finance interview this summer, Jayapal said she had never before met the billionaire. They did talk virtually in July when she grilled him during the hearings, but she said this week that communication since then has been sparse.

Story continues

I've had an open door policy to speaking with Mr. Bezos and have invited him many times, she said. Though she has met with Amazon senior managers.

The lesson here is self-regulation doesn't work, said Jayapal. She points to Microsoft as an example that Amazon should follow, of successfully working with the government.

In 1998, Microsoft was the subject of Congressional antitrust inquiries and many wanted to break the company up. In the end, Bill Gates was able to avoid a breakup by promising to change his companys ways.

The company had to change its culture, change its lines of business, Jayapal said. The process of government involvement led to Microsoft creating a platform for other small companies to thrive, she said.

Jayapal is perhaps the most liberal member of the team charged with investigating big tech. Elected to Congress in 2016, Jayapal is seen as a mentor to freshman Democratic lawmakers like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, and Rashida Tlaib.

Jayapal also pointed to the Microsoft example as to why breaking up a company isnt always the best option.

Perhaps in retrospect, Amazon, after we've regulated them, after we've put through some of the recommendations that are in the report, we'll look back and say, "You know what? It's a good thing that that happened, she said.

Ben Werschkul is a producer for Yahoo Finance in Washington, DC.

Read more:

Big Tech, Wall Street and other topics that barely came up at the conventions

After Big Tech hearing, these changes could become priorities for Washington

Inside Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google versus the Feds

Read the latest financial and business news from Yahoo Finance

Follow Yahoo Finance on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Flipboard, LinkedIn, YouTube, and reddit.

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Microsoft is now the adult in the room among big tech: Seattle Congresswoman - Yahoo Tech

Facebook and Twitter on Tuesday censored posts by President Donald Trump that the social media platforms said violated their rules against misinformation about the coronavirus pandemic. In his posts, Trump compared COVID-19 to the seasonal flu, downplayed the deadly nature of the pandemic and said, we are learning to live with COVID.

The morning after he returned to the White House from Walter Reed Hospitalstill infectious and heavily medicatedand posed in Hitlerian fashion for a photo op on the Truman Balcony, Trump took to social media to bolster his homicidal herd immunity policy and dangerously demonstrate by example how the great leader is facing down the virus.

Facebook removed his post entirely but not before it was shared approximately 26,000 times, according to data published by the social media metrics company CrowdTangle. A Facebook spokesperson told CNBC, We remove incorrect information about the severity of Covid-19, and have now removed this post.

The action by Facebook is unusual in that the worlds largest social media platform has been reluctant to remove posts by the president in the past. In August, Facebook deleted a video of Donald Trump falsely asserting that children were almost immune from COVID-19 during an interview with Fox News, the first time the platform ever removed one of his social media posts.

In the case of Twitter, the tweet remains up but is covered by a warning that says, This Tweet violated the Twitter Rules about spreading misleading and potentially harmful information related to COVID-19. However, Twitter has determined that it may be in the publics interest for the Tweet to remain accessible, along with a link to learn more about the companys coronavirus information policy. Trumps post cannot be retweeted or shared.

The full Tweet reads, Flu season is coming up! Many people every year, sometimes over 100,000, and despite the Vaccine, die from the Flu. Are we going to close down our Country? No, we have learned to live with it, just like we are learning to live with Covid, in most populations far less lethal!!!

That Trumps comparison of the seasonal flu to the coronavirus is completely false is easily confirmed by information readily accessible on the website of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). The site contains data for every year of the seasonal flu going back to 2010-2011 and shows that the death rate among those who get sick from the flu ranges between 0.1 percent and 0.3 percent. The death rate, through July, of those who have contracted COVID-19 is 2 percent, showing that coronavirus is between 6.7 and 20 times more deadly than the flu.

Additionally, as pointed out by the Washington Post, many people who have been infected with the virus have lingering symptoms for months, including difficulty breathing, inability to exert themselves physically, recurring pain. The virus can cause long-term damage to organs other than the lungs, damage that is not common to the seasonal flu.

In response to the censorship measures by Facebook and Twitter, the President tweeted REPEAL SECTION 230!!! Section 230 contains the provisions within the Communications Decency Act of 1996 that shield online services such as social media platforms from being legally responsible for the content posted by users of their systems.

When Twitter began labeling the presidents tweets in late May, he issued an executive order making the US government the arbiter of political speech online. The order called upon the Federal Communications Commission to revise the scope of Section 230 and also empowered the Federal Trade Commission to evaluate the content moderation polices of the tech giants and determine whether or not their actions violate free speech rights.

With Attorney General William Barr standing next to him, President Trump said on that day, Were here today to defend free speech from one of the greatest dangers, before he signed the order. By empowering the federal regulatory agencies in his executive order, Trump was sending a message to big tech that attempts to censor his social media postsalong with those of his far-right and fascist allies and supporterswould result in the removal of Section 230 protections and open up the online service providers to fines and lawsuits.

Since then, the Department of Justice (DoJ) and AG Barr late last month drafted proposed legislation modifying the language of Section 230 to address concerns about online censorship by requiring greater transparency and accountability when platforms remove lawful speech. In a letter dated September 23, Barr jumbled together claims that big tech is hiding behind the shield of Section 230 to censor lawful speech with the allegation that online service providers are invoking the laws protections to escape liability even when they knew their services were being used for criminal activity.

Simultaneous with the DoJ-drafted legislation, Republican Senators Roger Wicker of Mississippi, Lindsey Graham of South Carolina and Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee introduced a bill in the Senate that calls for nearly identical modifications to Section 230 rules for online services. At the top of their list is the unsubstantiated charge that right-wing political views are being singled out by the tech monopolies for persistent online censorship.

Sunday, October 11, 7pm US EDT

The sickness in the White House

An online meeting with Socialist Equality Party candidates in the 2020 US elections, Joseph Kishore and Norissa Santa Cruz.

In moving the bill, Senator Wicker said, For too long, social media platforms have hidden behind Section 230 protections to censor content that deviates from their beliefs. These practices should not receive special protections in our society where freedom of speech is at the core of our nations values. Our legislation would restore power to consumers by promoting full and fair discourse online.

On October 1, the Senate Commerce Committee, which includes 14 Republicans and 12 Democrats, voted unanimously to subpoena the top executives of Facebook, Twitter and Google to appear at a hearing on Section 230 on October 28. After initial opposition to the subpoenas from Democratic Senator Maria Cantwell, the Republicans agreed to add the topics of privacy and misinformation to be discussed along with censorship issues.

Meanwhile, the House Judiciary Committee released a 449-page report on Tuesday on the results of its antitrust investigation into Apple, Amazon, Google and Facebook which condemns big techs monopoly power and calls for the companies to be broken up and restructured.

The coming together of the White House and Democrats and Republicans in Congress over a raft of regulations and attempt to assert government control over the Silicon Valley tech giants raises to a new level contradictions embedded within the capitalist system, not least of which is that these firms are the most valued properties on Wall Street worth trillions of dollars and a primary source of the massive fortunes being made by the financial oligarchy that controls both parties and the entire US political establishment.

Behind the frenzied efforts to reign in the powerful technologies of these firms is a growing awareness that the utilization of these systems by billions of people amid expanding class struggle internationally presents the ruling elite with a problem of revolutionary proportions.

While the ruling establishment is roiled by intense conflicts in the run-up to the November 3 electionswith Trump asserting that he intends to stay in office regardless of the outcome the Democrats and Republicans are unified in their drive to clamp down on information technologies. Their central aim is to prevent the working class from using these technologies to organize their struggles, including across national boundaries, and above all to stop the program of revolutionary socialism represented by the World Socialist Web Site from reaching the working class and youth.

Originally posted here:

Trump intensifies conflict with big tech over Section 230 protections following censorship moves by Facebook and Twitter - WSWS

Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, on stimulus, the presidents health status, Obamagate, social media and the push to break up big tech.

In case protests, riots, lockdowns and a recession didnt already have partisan tensions at their boiling point, the steaming cauldron of rhetoric around the 2020 election just got about 100 degrees hotter.

The recent passing of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg, and the resulting vacancy on the Supreme Court, has Democrats and Republicans scrambling to win the public relations battle on how and when her seat should be filled.

Once again, Americans are wondering what information to trust.In this unusually messy time, some seek the short-term comfort that comes from rubber stamping the best information, or even silencing what they dont like or agree with. But to rebuild trust in our institutions, we need the opposite.

HOUSE REPUBLICANS ACCUSE BIG TECH OF CAPRICIOUS CENSORSHIPIn just one example, claims of tradition and precedent mixed with charges of bad faith are flying fast and furious.

Senate Democrats are levying charges of hypocrisy at Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, who in 2016 blocked hearings on President Obamas election-year appointment of Judge Merrick Garland. They point to past statements from the Kentucky senator suggesting that the people should vote before a nominee is confirmed.Republicans counter that the cagey McConnell was referring only to the circumstances in 2016, when the parties split control of the Senate and White House, and that the present alignment, in which they control both, makes for a completely different situation.There is a lot to unpack there, and these are just a few of the literally dozens of arguments being thrown around.

What are concerned voters seeking the facts supposed to think?There are no easy answers, but one thing is clear: We shouldnt outsource our critical thinking to content moderators and curators, like Facebook and Twitter.

DEMOCRAT-LED HOUSE PANEL TO SEEK BREAKUP OF BIG TECH, GOP LAWMAKER SAYSLike just about everyone else, Big Tech publishers have agendas. They use questionable fact checking and algorithmic manipulation to show content that supports their preferred narratives.

At Parler, we call this an information brownout. Like a power company rationing electricity, tech oligarchs give plenty of juice to the content that supports what they want you to think, and they underpower competing viewpoints.Private or public censorship--even when convenient--has never been tolerated for long in America, and neither will technoauthoritarianism.

Everyone has the right to hear all sides of an argument and decide what to see, read, think, and share for themselves.Tensions are going to remain high in this election, and the decisions made by Americas communication platforms are sure to influence voters.

Our process, and our republic, demand that leaders be accountable for their actions at the ballot box. Voters will have the chance to make their opinions heard in six weeks, and either reward or punish politicians as they see fit.

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The people deserve to make these decisions armed with all--not some or most--of the available information.Just as importantly, trust in and respect for election results requires transparency. Americans deserve this as they deal with the difficulties of voting in a pandemic and the realities of greatly expanded vote-by-mail programs.

If a technoauthoritarian brownout undermines the free exchange of information in November, that trust could be mislaid. Twitter and Facebook have already discussed plans, in the event of various contingencies, to impose de-facto censorship and allow only approved information sources to be seen and heard.Courts are already ruling that ballots will be accepted for days after November 3. The tabulation process will no doubt be messy, and both parties are readying their spin machines to challenge or attack the process.

The 2016 presidential results were essentially decided by fewer than 100,000 votes spread across three swing states. The implications of fraud, interference, or even error in 2020 could be huge.In this environment, any technoauthoritarian brownout will be a disaster, fueling suspicions and undermining confidence in the final outcome. Americans deserve better.What we need is uncensored, real-time election coverage. We need candidates, journalists, observers, and interested citizens sharing information and commentary.

We need hubs for exit polling, poll watching, ballot counting and recounting, legal challenges, breaking news and analysis from all perspectives.

Ideally, every platform will honor the right of all individuals to speak and hear freely.While this is business as usual at Parler, we are proud to do our part this year to ensure that no candidate, Republican, Democrat, or otherwise, will be able cheat, incite unrest, or steal an election unchallenged and in the darkness.

The people deserve to vote after making their own judgments, armed with all available information. And after their votes are cast, they deserve a transparent process that they can trust is legitimate.

Lets all join together and see to it that this happens.Jeffrey Wernick is COO and Angel Investor in Parler.John Matze isCEO of Parler.Amy Peikoff is Chief Policy Officer for Parler.

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Original post:

2020 election may be messy but shouldn't be censored by Big Tech: Parler CEO Matze, COO Wernick, CPO Peikoff - Fox Business

NEW YORK On October 8, Senate Deputy Leader Michael Gianaris issued the following statement as House Judiciary Democrats released their long-anticipated investigative report on the monopolistic practices of Big Tech companies. The report specifically highlighted the need for an abuse of dominance standard which Senator Gianaris has proposed in his legislation at the state level.

Our antitrust laws were written a century ago for a radically different economy and they are in desperate need of serious updates. Corporate power has reached unprecedented and dangerous levels, and we need powerful new laws to protect the public and our economy, said Senate Deputy Leader Gianaris. "I am pleased this issue is gaining attention and I commend our colleagues in Congress, led by Rep. David Cicilline, for their thorough investigation."

New York's existing antitrust laws are more than a century old and are not equipped to regulate abuses in todays world. In the meantime, market domination has led to new uncompetitive practices such as predatory pricing and leveraging a companys dominant position to control adjacent markets.Senator Gianaris legislation - the 21st Century Antitrust Act - would allow the state to take action against companies engaging in these practices, as well as allow for class action lawsuits. The Senate held its first-ever antitrust hearing on Senator Gianaris' bill in September.

More:

Gianaris on House Judiciary Big Tech Antitrust Investigation Report - The National Herald

The Democratic leaders of the US House of Representatives Judiciary Committee released a 449-page report this week alleging a lack of competition in digital markets. The report proposes countless remedies, including specific suggestions for Google, Amazon, Apple, and Facebook. But one recommendation stands out for its simplicity and potential efficacy.

The big tech companies have strengthened their positions by acquiring lots of smaller companies, the report argues, and It is unclear whether the antitrust agencies are presently equipped to block anticompetitive mergers in digital markets. The report suggests a simple policy change to fix that:

Subcommittee staff recommends that Congress consider shifting presumptions for future acquisitions by the dominant platforms. Under this change, any acquisition by a dominant platform would be presumed anticompetitive unless the merging parties could show that the transaction was necessary for serving the public interest and that similar benefits could not be achieved through internal growth and expansion.

This idea isnt new: In merger review, its known as structural presumption. Back in 1963, the US Supreme Court established in United States v. Philadelphia National Bankthat certain mergers should be presumed to be anticompetitive, based on the market share of the companies seeking to merge.

Youre looking at the United States in the aftermath of World War II, looking at the rise of concentration in Europe, really warning that we want to avoid that, explains Maurice Stucke, a law professor at the University of Tennessee and the author of Competition Overdose.

The presumption that certain mergers were anticompetitive and so should be blocked helped judges avoid digging through complicated economic questions in cases where, it was believed, the answer was fairly clear-cut. The Court believed it should not ramble through the wilds of economic theory, says Stucke.

That presumption held through the 60s and 70s, but started to change in the 80s as the law-and-economics movement popularized the idea that judges should be considering complicated economic questions in making their rulingsincluding on questions of antitrust. What happened was [that] in other contexts a conservative Supreme Court began rambling through the wilds of economic theory, says Stucke.

Current US merger guidelines still contain a version of the presumption created in 1963, but it has become less stringent over time and today it amounts to a recommendation that courts apply extra scrutiny, not a shift in the burden of proof.

The result is that lots of harmful mergers are approved, argues John Kwoka, an economist at Northeastern University who has researched mergers in concentrated markets. These mergers give the acquiring firm more power over their market and ultimately result in higher prices. Fiona Scott Morton, an economist at Yale, reached the same conclusion in a review of the past decade of antitrust research.

The committees report recommends codifying the presumption in law. What this would do is it would shift the burden, says Stucke. So now the burden of proof is on the merging parties to show the transaction was necessary for serving the public interestthey would have to show that this merger is competitive. Doing so would make it harder for large tech companies to buy up potential competitors, as Facebook did with its acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp.

Unlike policy ideas that are specific to tech, codifying the presumption against mergers in concentrated markets would also help restore competition across the US economy.Big firms are growing more dominant in most industries and are less likely to be unseated than they once were. Making it harder to buy up smaller competitors could help reverse those trends.

Preventing acquisitions could also make big companies more innovative, according to a team of economists at Duke University and Norwich Business School. Historically, many large [corporate R&D] labs were set up partly because antitrust pressure constrained large firms ability to grow through mergers and acquisitions, they write in a recently published history of the US innovation economy. In the 1930s, if a leading firm wanted to grow, it needed to develop new markets. With growth through mergers and acquisitions constrained by antitrust pressures, and with little on offer from universities and independent inventors, it often had no choice but to invest in internal R&D.

Big US companies do less scientific research today than they once did. The major tech companies do invest significantly in research and developmentin 2018, Amazon and Alphabet were first and second, respectively, in global spending on R&Dand they publish more in scientific journals than most companies. But their scientific publishing hasnt grown in line with their revenues. At Microsoft and Alphabet, the two biggest scientific publishers of the big tech firms, scientific publications per $1,000 in sales peaked in 2009 and has since sharply declined.

Big firms ability to buy up innovation without doing it themselves has a precedent in the US, and not one that is favorable to the tech companies. In the late 19th century, US railroad companies mostly eschewed doing research, choosing instead to buy up patents from smaller firms or individual inventors. The success of their strategy helped kick off the original antitrust movement.

Read the original here:

A simple change to antitrust law that could rein in big tech - Quartz

By James Clayton, BBC North America technology reporter

The US elections could affect the global social media and technology landscape. We now have two huge clues for what Big Tech can expect in the years to come.

Photo: 123RF

In the US, both the Democrats and the Republicans now have a fixed position on regulating tech.

They are both totally different.

First off Trump.

After the US President shared a piece of disinformation on Facebook and Twitter about the relative dangers of Covid, the two companies reacted: Twitter hid his post and Facebook removed it altogether.

Trump responded by tweeting "Repeal Section 230!!!".

This is a key piece of legislation that stops companies like Facebook and Twitter from being liable for the things people post.

It essentially gives them "platform" rather than "publisher" status.

Just imagine for a second if all of the posts on Facebook - all of the accusations, all of the libellous content, all of it - was the responsibility of Mark Zuckerberg.

It doesn't work. Without Section 230 companies like Facebook, Twitter, TikTok etc couldn't function as they do now. They'd potentially have to moderate your content in real time.

Even for the most powerful artificial intelligence systems, that is not possible.

You might think: "Trump says he'll repeal Section 230, but will he actually?"

Photo: AFP

My response would be: "Look at TikTok."

Trump has well and truly followed up on his actions - without a judge's last minute intervention it would be illegal for Apple and Google's app stores to offer TikTok for download in the US now.

It's perfectly conceivable that a Trump presidency would follow through with his campaign threats.

Plenty of Republicans believe that much of social media has an anti-conservative bias. Trump would certainly find support from his own party to act.

The other big tech news earlier this week was the release of The House Judiciary Committee's report into "antitrust".

This is the idea that Big Tech has got so big it is now flouts anti-competition rules.

This is a Democrat-led committee - the report was written by Democrats.

The report concludes: "To put it simply, companies that once were scrappy, underdog start-ups that challenged the status quo have become the kinds of monopolies we last saw in the era of oil barons and railroad tycoons."

Photo: 123RF

The share price of all four companies dived as soon as the report was released.

Literally, the first recommendation is to prohibit "dominant platforms from operating in adjacent lines of business".

That would be massive. It could potentially stop companies like Google owning YouTube. Or Facebook owning Instagram.

The word "monopoly" is used 120 times in the report.

These weren't bi-partisan recommendations though - Republicans didn't support all the findings.

However, there is some common ground between the parties.

For example, Republican Ken Buck has said he agrees with much of the report.

And in terms of Section 230, Biden has also indicated he could support getting rid of it - albeit for different reasons to Trump.

And so we have two Presidential candidates, each with his own stick to bash Big Tech.

The company that perhaps is least hedged against these two approaches is Facebook. It's hard to know which option would be worse for the social network.

If Joe Biden becomes the US President, calls to break up Big Tech could grow. Photo: AFP

For others, well there's now a reasonable argument that can be made that Trump would be better.

Republican focus on social media bias would pretty much leave Apple and perhaps Amazon untouched.

The election issues in this campaign have been centred around Covid, Black Lives Matter, the economy and law enforcement.

But make no mistake, this US election is a huge event for Big Tech too.

- BBC

Link:

Big Tech: Between a rock and a hard place in the US - RNZ