Chart: Visualizing The World’s 20 Largest Tech Giants

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Social media has seeped into virtually all aspects of modern life. The vast social media universe collectively now holds 3.8 billion users, representing roughly 50% of the global population.

With an additional billion internet users projected to come online in the coming years, its possible that the social media universe could expand even further.

To begin, lets take a look at how social networks compare in terms of monthly active users (MAUs)an industry metric widely used to gauge the success of these platforms.

Heres a closer look at individual social platforms, and their trials and tribulations:

To put it mildly, Facebook has had its hands full. A flurry of companies are boycotting Facebooks ads, while the platform struggles to fend off the spread of misinformation.

Yet, its stock price continues to advance to new highs while the traditional economy faces less than rosy forecasts. Facebook still possesses the largest cohort of users, inching closer to the 3 billion MAU marka breakthrough yet to be achieved by any company.

Snapchat and founder Evan Spiegel have had a bumpy road since their IPO in 2017. The stock price reached its nadir near $4 in 2018, reflecting investor concerns tied to the introduction of Instagram Stories. In recent times, the stock has advanced past the $20 mark, although there is still long-term unclarity around monetization and profitability.

YouTube competes head on against traditional television and streaming programs for eyeballs. The platform raked in revenues of $15.1 billion in 2019, nearly double their figures in 2017.

Parent company Alphabet has invested in YouTube with new rollouts like YouTube Music (merged with what was once Google Music) and YouTube Premiuma bundled subscription-based platform providing music, ad-free content, and YouTube Originals. By the looks of it, the future of YouTube will be much more than just videos.

The biggest social platform in China, WeChat has flourished, now holding a whopping 1.2 billion MAUs. As part of the Tencent Holdings conglomerate, they belong to the BATX group that is seen to lock horns with Americas Big Tech.

There have been whispers of a Reddit IPO on Wall Street for some time now. While such an event has not yet materialized, Reddits success certainly has. With 430 million MAUs relative to 330 million in 2018, the company continues to attract a larger audience. The notion of community has taken on a different meaning in the digital age, and Reddit represents this transition with their ever-growing network of users.

Instagram has been vital to Facebooks success, since its $1 billion acquisition in 2012. The platform attracts a younger audience compared to Facebook and it has demonstrated an ability to remain versatile, specifically by implementing Instagram Stories and Reels.

Busy schedules dont seem to faze Jack Dorsey who has not one, but two CEO jobs in Twitter and Square. Twitter has been able to achieve profitability in the last two years, reporting net income figures of $1.2 and $1.5 billion in 2018 and 2019 respectively. They no doubt have their work cut out for them as they continue to combat fake news and similar controversies on their platform.

If any publicity is good publicity, then 2020 has been TikToks year. Headlines include privacy breaches with alleged ties to the Chinese Communist Party, a banning of the app by India Prime Minister Narendra Modi, and now, talks of a partial U.S. acquisition. Potential acquirers include leaders Microsoft, Twitter, and Oracle.

Despite the list of headwinds social media has faced, about half of the world is now on itand there seems to be no end in sight for future growth.

How have companies with exposure to the social media universe fared in 2020 so far?

Widespread participation in social media comes with its fair set of problems. Some companies such as Facebook have found themselves in the crosshairs on both sides of the political spectrum. As concerns grow around privacy and data, social media will be front and center in shaping the future of government, business, and politics.

Only time will tell just how high user counts will reach. The long-term trajectory suggests theres more room left in the engine. There are still parts of the world that are just beginning to possess the technological infrastructure for social media to be a possibility. Its plausible future growth will come from that avenue.

If stock prices of companies linked to social media are of relevance, their performance this year paired with the fact that they are trading near all-time highs supports such a growth thesis.

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Chart: Visualizing The World's 20 Largest Tech Giants

Tech giants are the ‘winners’ of the coronavirus crisis and should pay more tax, Europe official says – CNBC

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Big Tech has to pay a "fair amount" of taxes in Europe, especially as they are the "real winners" of the coronavirus crisis, a top European official told CNBC Saturday.

His comments come amid an ongoing rift between the United States and the European Union over the taxation of companies such as Apple, Alphabet and Amazon.

"It is a major problem," Paolo Gentiloni, European Commissioner for economics and taxation, told CNBC at the European House Ambrosetti Forum, acknowledging the difficulty in overcoming differences with the United States.

The giants of the digital platforms are the real winners of this crisis.

Paolo Gentiloni

European Commissioner

However, the former Italian prime minister added that it was no longer possible "to accept the idea that those giants, the winners of the crisis, are not paying a fair amount of taxes in Europe."

In 2018, the European Commission, the executive arm of the EU, proposed a 3% digital levy, arguing that the tax system needed to be updated for the digital age. However, the White House said a digital tax was unfair as it disproportionately impacted American firms.

At the time, the European Commission said digital companies, on average,pay an effective tax rate of 9.5% compared to 23.2% for traditional businesses.

However, in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic, Big Tech has got a boost, with many consumers relying on these companies for teleworking, shopping and staying connected.

"The giants of the digital platforms are the real winners of this crisis, from the economical point of view,"Gentiloni added. "We all experience this in our own lives."

Meanwhile, governments are in desperate need of additional funding and imposing new taxes is one key way of achieving this.

In this context, the EU is looking to propose a new digital tax in 2021 if negotiations at the OECD-level collapse by year-end.

"If we will not have decent results at the global level, the European Commission will come out next year with our own a proposal," Gentiloni said.

In a blow to negotiations, the United States pulled out of talks in June raising doubts about any feasible progress this year.

Gentiloni said there had been progress at the technical level, but the upcoming presidential election in the United States was impacting the process.

"We are in an electoral year in the U.S. and I think this also has an influence," he said, adding that, nonetheless, the EU needed "to insist on the necessity of a global solution."

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Tech giants are the 'winners' of the coronavirus crisis and should pay more tax, Europe official says - CNBC

As Tech Giants Face Congress, Heres What Americans …

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TOPLINE

Congresss grilling of top Silicon Valley CEOs Wednesday on antitrust issues reflects the American publics broad distrust of big tech companies increasing powerbut polling released throughout 2020 shows that while Americans may be wary of big tech, theyre more conflicted when it comes to what action the government should take in response.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg testifies before the House Financial Services Committee on October 23, ... [+] 2019. (Photo by Aurora Samperio/NurPhoto via Getty Images)

72% of U.S. adults believe big tech companies have too much power and influence in politics, per a Pew Research survey conducted in June, while an Accountable Tech/GQR Research poll in July found 85% of respondents believe they have too much power in general.

A Morning Consult poll released in January found that 65% believe tech companies benefits to users arent worth the industrys becoming more powerful at the expense of smaller companiesbut a majority of those respondents still enjoy big tech products, using major social media and search tools and predominantly shopping online.

Americans who distrust big tech dont necessarily support government action: 69.8% of respondents to a July poll by the Center for Growth and Opportunity/YouGov said they somewhat or completely agree that tech companies are too big, but only 44.4% agree the government should break them up.

A Knight Foundation/Gallup poll conducted in December and released in March found 50% support government intervention to break up tech companies, while 49% oppose, and the Pew survey found only 47% support more government tech regulationdown from 51% in 2018.

88% of Knight/Gallup respondents said they do not trust social media platforms to make the right decisions about what users can post, but 55% still said the companies should be making those decisions anyway, rather than the government.

A July Morning Consult poll found only 46% of Americans trust Congress to best regulate big tech companies, as compared with 57% who trust the courts, 53% trusting federal agencies and 34% who trust the president.

A national survey by The Verge released in March found that 51% believe Google and YouTube should be broken up into two different companiesbut 66% dont have a problem with Facebook owning Instagram and WhatsApp.

CEOs of worlds most powerful tech companies on Wednesday defended themselves against lawmaker accusations that their companies have too much power and stifle smaller businesses, claiming that their practices are instead part of a thriving competitive economy and that their size is essential to their value. Just like the world needs small companies, it also needs large ones, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos argued in his opening statement to the House antitrust subcommittee, while Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said Facebooks large size is an asset to its work to keep people safe on our platform, and to make sure were investing to fix our issues and get ahead of new risks.

Zuckerberg and Bezos, along with Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai and Apple CEO Tim Cook, appeared before the House antitrust subcommittee Wednesday, amid widespread scrutiny into the tech giants alleged anticompetitive practices. The companies are also facing antitrust investigations from the Department of Justice, Federal Trade Commission, state attorneys general and the European Union. The antitrust struggles come amid broader distrust of big tech companies and their role in the coronavirus pandemic, racial justice protests and impending November election, as companies have struggled to respond to growing misinformation and address hate speech and extremist groups on their platforms.

Though Americans are increasingly suspicious of big tech companies, polls show that the coronavirus pandemic may be improving their standing in the eyes of Americans. A Harris poll released in April found that 38% of respondents view of the tech industry had become more positive over the course of the pandemic, while an April report by the National Research Group found a full 88% of Americans say the pandemic has given them a greater appreciation for technologys positive impact.

Mark Zuckerberg Is Even Less Popular Than Donald Trump, Poll Finds (Forbes)

The Verge Tech Survey 2020 (The Verge)

Techlash? America's Growing Concern With Major Technology Companies (Knight Foundation)

Most People Dont Like Giving Big Tech More Power, but They Rely on Its Services (Morning Consult)

Most Americans say social media companies have too much power, influence in politics (Pew Research Center)

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As Tech Giants Face Congress, Heres What Americans ...

Why the tech giants may suffer lasting pain from their …

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Want the full play-by-play? Check out POLITICOs live coverage. With that, here are five top takeaways of what we learned Wednesday.

The House antitrust subcommittee has spent a year on this investigation collecting emails and confidential presentations, locating chat records, and reassuring small competitors that its safe to tell them of their stories of the Big Four. And some of the subcommittees top Democrats came prepared with that evidence, in a coordinated effort to poke holes in Zuckerberg's, Bezos', Pichai's and Cooks contentions that they compete fully in the letter and spirit of U.S. antitrust law.

Take Rep. Pramila Jayapals (D-Wash.) back-and-forth with Zuckerberg over whether hed threatened Instagram co-founder Kevin Systrom before eventually buying the company for a billion dollars in 2012. Jayapal pulled up a chat between Systrom and an investor in which the Instagram co-founder floated the possibility that Zuckerberg will go into destroy mode if I say no.

When Zuckerberg disputed the congresswomans characterization of those events, Jayapal swung back with a classic bit of congressional theater: I'd like to remind you that youre under oath. Underscoring the point, the subcommittee published a cache of its investigative materials, including the full Systrom chat log, midway through the hearing a way of extending the five-hour-plus hearings shelf-life even longer.

In the same vein, committee members hit Bezos with emails illuminating Amazon's motivation for buying the smart doorbell company Ring; wrote Bezos in that correspondence, "To be clear, my view here is we are buying market position not technology."

Rep. Jim Jordan speaks during a House Judiciary subcommittee hearing on antitrust on Wednesday in Washington. | Graeme Jennings/Pool via AP

The hearing got off to a bang when Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) brought out his outdoor voice to recite a litany of alleged examples of anti-conservative bias, including on the part of Twitter, whose CEO Jordan had made a show of attempting to invite to the hearing.

Perhaps anticipating Jordan would have a go at hijacking the hearing, subcommittee chairman David Cicilline (D-R.I.) was primed to shut him down: He quickly swatted away Jordans attempt to enlist a fellow Republican not on the subcommittee to question the CEOs on their threats to freedom.

That put to rest any notion that the tech executives were facing a unified bipartisan front ready to drill down on antitrust abuses.

Jordan later tried again, attempting to go to the ropes with Google CEO Pichai over whether his company would play fair during the 2020 election. Pichai seemed somewhat befuddled by Jordans line of questioning, eventually promising that, yes, Google would play things neutral. Pichai was let off the hook when the right to question passed to Rep. Mary Gay Scanlon (D-Pa.), who opened with a shot at "fringe conspiracy theories."

Jordan objected, loudly, but the hearing moved on.

Republicans did get traction here and there. Rep. Kelly Armstrong (R-N.D.), for example, got into a robust exchange with Pichai on the ins-and-outs of how the companys ad tools interact with the YouTube platform it owns. When Pichai said the companys approach was more sensitive to users' data-security concerns than other models, Kelly shot back that Google was using privacy as a cudgel to beat down the competition.

But even Rep. Ken Buck (R-Colo.), who has recently carved out a lane as a thoughtful conservative critic of Silicon Valley, touched on how Amazon engages with competitors before veering off onto a round of getting each of the CEOs to commit to not sell products produced using slave labor.

And while the hearing produced few of the full-out tech gaffes that Congress has become known for, top subcommittee Republican Jim Sensenbrenner notched one when he asked Zuckerberg about why presidential son Donald Trump Jr.'s social media account was recently taken down for a short time over a controversial hydroxychloroquine video. But that controversy involved Trump's Twitter account, not Facebook. (Zuckerberg sidestepped the platform misidentification, using it as a moment to point out that Facebook is pointedly pro-free expression.)

Zuckerberg was the target of perhaps the days toughest questioning, not simply from Jayapal but other from Democrats who homed in on Facebooks billion-dollar acquisition of Instagram in 2012. Their premise: that Zuckerberg saw the photo-sharing platform not as a neat startup that would round out Facebook's own image-sharing tools but a potential existential threat one whose absorption, then, potentially violated U.S. competition law.

New York Democrat Jerry Nadler, the chairman of the full Judiciary Committee, laid into Zuckerberg on the topic, again using internal communications in making his case. Nadler pointed out that according to documents in the subcommittees hands, Zuckerberg was prompted to dig out his checkbook because he worried that Instagram could meaningfully hurt us without becoming a huge business, and that by buying the still-small company, what were really buying is time.

Buying up a competitor simply so it will stop competing is potentially a no-no under U.S. antitrust law, Nadler pointed out, to which Zuckerberg responded that the Federal Trade Commission knew his thinking about Instagram way back in 2012, and those antitrust enforcers still signed off on the deal. But Cicilline was unpersuaded, telling Zuckerberg that "the failures of the FTC in 2012 of course do not alleviate the antitrust challenges that the chairman described.

The shorter version: Just because that one corner of the federal apparatus approved the deal some eight years ago doesnt mean Zuckerberg is out of the woods. And deals that are made can be unmade.

Facebook has bought scores of companies, of course, but Instagram is different. The visual-first platform, hugely popular in its own right, is key to Zuckerbergs vision for the future of Facebook especially as its a way of attracting a Facebook-phobic younger audience that otherwise is flocking to the Chinese-owned upstart TikTok. Washington peeling Instagram away from Zuckerbergs empire might be unlikely, but its also a future that the CEO isnt eager to contemplate. And the House antitrust subcommittee made plain that its a possibility it wants Zuckerberg to worry about.

This was, somewhat amazingly, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos first ever time testifying before Congress, despite the enormous wealth and power he enjoys. (When Bezos was sworn in today, he was ranked No. 1 on Forbes list of the worlds richest people, with $180 billion under his control. As a point of comparison, the wealthiest member of House of Representatives, Rep. Greg Gianforte (R-Mont.), was worth about one-thousandth that.)

And for a time, it looked like it would be a easy day for Bezos. Seemingly because of technical difficulties with his Cisco Webex feed, Bezos wasnt called on for questions until long after the hearing that begun. But when the technical details were sorted out, Bezos was in for it.

Some of the toughest queries came from Cicilline himself, on a topic that the chairman has been pursuing for many months now: whether Amazon uses the data of independent sellers on its platform to figure out how to best sell its own products. (The committee has questioned whether another Amazon witness misled the panel on this very point a year ago.) Bezos declined repeatedly to dig into the details, often arguing that he simply didnt know the relevant information, even though it's common for CEOs to prep thoroughly for these sort of high-profile Q&As.

After Bezos responded "I can't answer that question yes or no" when Jayapal asked whether Amazon has ever used information extracted from the experiences of its on-platform independent sellers to plan its own offerings, Cicilline followed up incredulously: You said that you cant guarantee that the policy of not sharing third-party sellers data with Amazons own line [of products] hasnt been violated. You couldnt be certain. Can you please explain that to me?

Said Bezos: We are investigating that, and I do not want to go beyond what I know right now.

At another point in the hearing, Bezos said he was unfamiliar with a startup that was featured in the opening anecdote of a Wall Street Journal story on the company's dealings with smaller competitors that appeared last Thursday.

Dont expect Cicilline to let this one go. Hes known to keep his teeth dug into topics that have grabbed his attention, and hes made clear that he takes strong offense to how Amazon has handled this key question.

Cicilline has said from the start of his tech investigation back last summer that hes eager to keep it a bipartisan affair, and somewhat remarkably he has mostly met that goal. Still, it became clear Wednesday that the subcommittee's Republicans are not on board with making major changes to antitrust law to counter Silicon Valleys power a stalemate that could give the beleaguered tech giants a legislative win by default.

Some GOP lawmakers also explicitly rejected the idea that, as the oft-heard saying goes, big is bad.

I have reached the conclusion that we do not need to change our antitrust laws, said Sensenbrenner, the top Republican on the subcommittee, who would be a crucial ally for any bipartisan drive to make transformational changes. Theyve been working just fine. The question here is the question of enforcement of those antitrust laws.

That still leaves Cicilline a plenty-big lane to have some impact on the countrys competition policy, though he will to navigate carefully to make sure that pre-election bickering doesn't rip apart the policy recommendations he has said hell release by the end of the year.

On the other hand, the November election could yield him another path to victory, by offering an antitrust legislative roadmap to the next presidential administration if that president is Joe Biden.

Leah Nylen and John Hendel contributed to this report.

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Australia vs the tech giants – Spiked

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Can Australia take on the most powerful and wealthy global companies in the world? The Pacific nation is currently squaring up to the Californian tech giants, demanding that they, finally, pay journalists for their work which they display, aggregate and host. The outcome could define the future of the Bucks Free Press and the Cumberland and Westmorland Herald as well as the entire global newspaper industry, upon which Western democracy relies.

Newspapers are no longer viable because Facebook and Google eat up more than 80 per cent of online ad revenue. Papers have been closing at an alarming rate during the coronavirus pandemic. The European Commission has made some efforts to correct this and many others are urging action, including the UKs Competitions and Markets Authority. But Australia looks to be one of the first and most determined to act, with lawmakers drafting legislation that could force Facebook and Google to pay news organisations for the value their stories generate for the platforms, by driving people on to their feeds and search engines.

The tech giants have come out fighting, with Google saying services will be restricted and plastering aggressive, bright yellow ads on YouTube videos in Australia. Facebook reacted by threatening to block news entirely from being shared to Australian audiences on the worlds largest social-media platform, as well as its subsidiary Instagram.

The Australian government insists it will not bend to coercion or heavy-handed threats. Facebook has been accused of bullying elected representatives and the Australian people, nearly 40 per cent of whom rely on Facebook for their daily news (and that figure rose during the lockdown). Imagine if, say, an oil monopoly threatened to cut off fuel or some other critical commodity to half of Australians because the government was considering a policy that would increase their costs? How would we react?

It is an unsettling and increasingly familiar response from Facebook. But the proposed Australian law is, admittedly, far from perfect.

A row is already brewing, for example, over the question of which publications should benefit from the cash from the social-media giants, which ones constitute public-interest journalism, and if publicly funded broadcasters should also be included. This law could hand far too much power to the state to decide what type of journalism survives. Facebook has defended itself by pointing out that it has been willing to fund some local newspapers already, but this is an equally unsatisfactory outcome, leaving newspapers reliant on handouts from a firm more powerful than some governments.

In truth, some of the online and local papers currently struggling deserve to go under. They failed to adapt, uncritically parroted the output of political parties who fed them headlines, and did not represent the readers who paid for them. If the new law is badly instituted, or if funding is not closely linked to the number of clicks and readers a publication has, then the Australian government could end up propping up shoddy journalism. It would be comparable to how the licence fee props up a bloated BBC, which serves a minority of people while being forcibly funded by all of us.

The potential problems are many, but it is clear that some form of action is needed, and therefore Australia deserves our solidarity. Spain tried to introduce a law in 2014 requiring aggregators like Google to pay to link to news articles, and the monopolous giant simply withdrew its news service. In France, Google responded to a law by bluntly refusing to pay and restricting news to hyperlinks, which are much less likely to be clicked on. News websites, some of which are completely dependent on search engines and often unable to speak up, need help, and governments have been failing.

Somewhat ironically, Google, Facebook and Apple are behaving more and more like the very news organisations they are strangling. Facebook tells us what is trending and hosts entire articles. Google and Android push top stories on their editorialised news apps, arranged just like the homepage of a news website, and send breaking-news notifications to our phones at all hours. Apple News now takes subscriptions and it is making editorial calls, deciding what is newsworthy, who to quote, and even writing some words. These platforms cannot, therefore, claim to be politically neutral in this debate.

But because Facebook and Twitter insist they are platforms and not publishers or publications, they dont have to take the same legal responsibility that news websites do for potentially libellous and defamatory content. In the US, at least, Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act protects them as long as they offer a forum for a true diversity of political discourse. But many now argue that they do not offer this, and Section 230 and similar protections across the world are being challenged.

More papers, I am sure, will begin to follow the New York Times, which pulled its content from Apple News in June. Similar aggregators will soon suffer unless the tech giants begin to offer a fair deal. Fortnite developers Epic Games are currently locked in a bitter standoff with Apple over the punitive 30 per cent cut it takes from sales and there is a wider feeling that a reckoning with these tech monopolies is coming. Unless they act in good faith and without coercion, corrective action on a scale not seen since the break-up of Standard Oil in 1911 is not inconceivable.

For now, the best thing readers can do is make sure that, where possible, we use alternative search engines and subscribe and get our news directly from websites we trust. If we, the consumer, can correct the market and challenge these monopolies, then intervention from governments and regulators might not be necessary. The best solution is always organic.

Liam Deacon is the Brexit Partys former head of press.

To enquire about republishing spikeds content, a right to reply or to request a correction, please contact the managing editor, Viv Regan.

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Australia vs the tech giants - Spiked

China’s driverless car upstarts see robotaxis scaling up in 3 years as tech firms race to get ahead – CNBC

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Commuters wanting to use AutoX's robotaxis can book a ride through the Amap app, which is owned by Alibaba.

AutoX

China's driverless car start-ups expect large-scale commercialization of self-driving taxis in 2023 as the country's technology giants vie to get a lead in the autonomous vehicle race.

A number of so-called "robotaxi" projects have popped up in the world's second-largest economy over the past two years, with the companies involved eyeing creating viable autonomous ride-hailing businesses.

"Robotaxis is the premier market for self-driving cars,"Jianxiong Xiao, CEO of autonomous car technology firm AutoX, told CNBC in an interview.

AutoX, a company backed by e-commerce giant Alibaba, develops hardware and software for cars that makes them driverless. It is one of the many Chinese firms that has launched a robotaxi project. Last month, the company opened its robotaxi service to the public in Shanghai, where it is headquartered. Users can book a ride through the Amap app, which is owned by Alibaba.

China has the potential to become the world's largest market for autonomous vehicles, according to McKinsey. The consultancy forecast driverless cars to account for as much as 66% of the kilometers traveled by passengers in 2040. That could generate market revenue of $1.1 trillion from mobility services and $900 billion from sales of autonomous vehicles by that year.

With the market set for explosive growth, competition is heating up.

WeRide is another start-up developing driverless car technology and launched a robotaxi project in the southern city of Guangzhou at the end of last year.It has since expanded and users can also now hail a ride through Alibaba'sAmap app.

WeRide's self-driving fleet of more than 100 vehicles and has clocked up around 2.7 million kilometers of open road testing, CEO Tony Han told CNBC. This is not solely for the robotaxi pilot.

Ride-hailing firm DiDi, search giant Baidu and start-up Pony.ai are among the other players who have working public robotaxi projects.

While autonomous ride hailing is still in its infancy and these robotaxis still have to have a safety driver in the cars, the Chinese government has been pushing the development of the technology. Cities have been granting licenses for these robotaxi projects to happen.

With the technology progressing quickly, companies are looking to create sustainable business models. As well as selling or licensing their technology to carmakers, robotaxis are one near-term revenue driver.

As the hardware costs of autonomous car technology fall, automation could replace drivers and create a viable business model.

"Robotaxi is using machine to replace human labor," Han told CNBC in an interview. "(The) price of hardware is dropping by 20% to 30% every year. Human labor on the other hand with the development of China economy and with the ageing of society ... is hijacking."

"(In the)range of 20 year or30 years we can make the taxi driver as some job that existed only in history like a typist."

Han predicts that large-scale application of robotaxis will take place between 2023 and 2025. He added that WeRide will start to make money from the business in 2025.

A car equipped with WeRide autonomous driving technology in Guangzhou, China.

WeRide

Meanwhile, AutoX's Xiao said he expects commercial usage, with no safety driver, to generate income by 2022 at the earliest but possibly in 2023, depending on regulation.

Xiao argues robotaxis make sense over traditional taxis because it eliminates the cost of the driver.

"We definitely see the robotaxi as the biggest market (for autonomous cars). At the same time it's the most easily commercialized market," Xiao told CNBC.

But there are still some challenges ahead.

"Although technology is extremely important and I think in the future if we really want to make robotaxi a reality or just a routine transportation method, we have to make sure our roads are built to a higher standard," Han said.

He argued roads need to be designed in a way that is more supportive to driverless cars. Robotaxi projects are run in one district of a city, usually a newly-developed area. Han said that when the government sees how safe and reliable the transport is, they will be convinced to improve roads and infrastructure in other parts of the cities.

"I think this is marathon, (there is) still a long way to go," Han said.

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China's driverless car upstarts see robotaxis scaling up in 3 years as tech firms race to get ahead - CNBC

Tech bloodbath aside, ride these two giants for the second half of the recovery, veteran analyst says – MarketWatch

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On no obvious catalyst, the winners of 2020 were absolutely hammered on Thursday a sea of red for the likes of Apple, Microsoft, Tesla TSLA, +2.78% and Zoom Video Communications ZM, -2.99%. And the selling wasnt limited to technology stocks small-caps RUT, and value stocks VLUE, +0.29% also fell. Only a few hard-hit travel stocks actually rose.

Stock markets got a well overdue thumping with big tech leading the way south. The technical expression is a downward correction in overbought stocks after an intense period of one-way price action higher, says Jeffrey Halley, senior market analyst, Asia Pacific, at Oanda. For the rest of us, the market was long and wrong, and now some of their P&L [profit and loss] is gone.

A chart from Bespoke Investment Group neatly encapsulates the fact that the winners were sold.

Eddy Elfenbein of the Crossing Wall Street blog says these sorts of days arent unusual in the middle of rallies. Contra-trend rallies are typical within larger rallies, but we cant say that this spells the end of the superstar stock rally. Clearly, there are nervous investors out there, and the bears have shown theyre willing to push back, he says.

Dan Ives, the veteran tech sector analyst at Wedbush Securities, isnt shaken.

While [Thursdays] massive sell off will cause some white knuckles on the Street as fears of a tech bubble and stretched valuations become the talk of the town, we continue to believe the secular growth themes around the tech sector are unprecedented with the COVID backdrop accelerating growth stories by 1-2 years in some cases, Ives says. While much good news has been baked into these names, we view pullbacks like today as opportunities to own the secular growth stories in cloud, cybersecurity, and tech stalwart FAANG names, he says, with FAANG representing Facebook FB, -2.88%, Amazon AMZN, -2.17%, Apple, Netflix NFLX, -1.84% and Google owner Alphabet GOOG, -3.09%.

Ives says the second phase of the economic rebound, during the second half of this year and into 2021, will supercharge the fundamentals and growth trajectories of well positioned tech stocks. We view this next phase resulting in Street numbers moving higher and a further rerating of tech stocks as the risk on trade and hunt for secular growth stories will be the focus for tech investors looking out as we head into the fall, despite volatility and general nervousness around U.S./China trade tensions and the November elections, says Ives.

He says investors should focus on Apple AAPL, +0.06% and Microsoft MSFT, -1.40%. For Apple, while the services business has been a Rock of Gibraltar for [Chief Executive Tim] Cook & Co., now the drumroll shifts to a massive pent-up demand for smartphone upgrades heading into its iPhone 12 5G supercycle slated to kick off in the early October time-frame, Ives says. As for Microsoft, this cloud shift and [work-from-home] dynamic looks here to stay, and the company stands to be a major beneficiary of this trend on its flagship Azure/Office 365 franchise over the coming years, he says.

The buzz

The U.S. economy added 1.37 million jobs in August, a bit faster than the 1.2 million forecast by economists, as the unemployment rate fell sharply to 8.4%. The jobs growth figure was helped by 238,000 temporary 2020 Census workers.

The broadly positive reading will provide welcome relief to jittery markets as it serves as further evidence of an economic recovery, with the fall in the unemployment rate being the highlight, said Sam Cooper, vice president of market risk solutions at Silicon Valley Bank.

Among the unemployed, the number of persons on temporary layoff decreased by 3.1 million in August to 6.2 million, but the number of permanent job losers increased by 534,000 to 3.4 million.

Outside of payrolls, Broadcom AVGO, +3.08% late on Thursday reported stronger-than-forecast earnings, as demand from cloud and telecom customers helped the semiconductor and industrial software maker.

The markets

The S&P 500 ES00, +0.61% contract was outperforming the Nasdaq-100 NQ00, -0.03% a day after the big selloff.

Asian ADOW, +0.84% stocks fell, while European stocks SXXP, +1.66% edged higher.

The yield on the 10-year Treasury TMUBMUSD10Y, 0.707% edged up 0.67% after the jobs report.

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Tech bloodbath aside, ride these two giants for the second half of the recovery, veteran analyst says - MarketWatch

These 5 Tech Giants Have Been Hurt Badly By Boycott China Movement & Have Lost Billions – MensXP.com

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After the Galwan Valley incident, the popular idea that's resonating with a lot of Indians is that they should boycott Chinese goods and services. This, mind you, is not limited to just Chinese smartphones and electronic gadgets. People are trying to boycott everything that originates from China, in order to "teach China a lesson".

Well, it's safe to say that a lot has changed since the whole anti-China movement began. Even the government has stepped in and has banned the use of a bunch of Chinese apps. Today, we'll be taking a look at some Chinese companies and how the whole anti-China movement has affected them.

Reuters

TikTok was one of the first Chinese apps to get banned in India during the first wave of the apps ban by the IT Ministry. It's been a few months since the app has been banned in India. The app's parent company Bytedance has lost a significant amount of money due to the ban.

According to a report by China's state-run media The Global Times, ByteDance could lose up to $6 billion( Rs 45k crore) after the Indian government decided to ban them.

MensXP/Akshay Bhalla

It has only been a few days since PUBG Mobile was banned in India. However, we've already started seeing its effects. Chinese technology giant Tencent lost $34 billion in market value in one day after India banned the popular battle royale game PUBG Mobile in the country. Now that's a huge number.

Reuters

Vivo's parent company, for those of you who don't know, is BBK Electronics, which is a Chinese company. Following the whole boycott China movement, a lot of people started raising questions on the BCCI asking them why they haven't taken a call on VIVO being title sponsors. It led to protests and calls to boycott the IPL itself, following which the decision was taken to drop them as the title sponsors.

There's also an on-going report that both Huawei and ZTE are to be kept out of India's plans to roll out its 5G network. This is primarily due to the rift between the two countries and the boycott China movement is not helping their case at all. This is also a massive blow to both the companies here, even though it may not seem like a huge deal to most people.

Photo: MensXP/Akshay Bhalla (Main Image)

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These 5 Tech Giants Have Been Hurt Badly By Boycott China Movement & Have Lost Billions - MensXP.com

Google’s antitrust battles: What you need to know – CNET

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Google CEO Sundar Pichai

Google is on a collision course with the government over its size and dominance.

Alphabet, Google's parent company, is a sprawling operation whose businesses include web searches, maps, the YouTube video platform and the Android mobile operating system. Google's products have become ubiquitous across the globe. Many of its services have more than a billion monthly users apiece.

Subscribe to the Google Report newsletter, receive notifications and see related stories on CNET.

Google is one of the most powerful companies in the world, and rivals have accused the tech giant of wielding its might to stifle innovation and competition. Now the US Department of Justice, state attorneys general and Congress are taking those allegations seriously. A DOJ antitrust lawsuit could be filed by the end of the month, according to The New York Times.

Antitrust scrutiny into Google isn't new. In 2013, the Federal Trade Commission wrapped up a two-year investigation into Google after allegations of biased search results. The agency, however, decided that Google wasn't violating any antitrust laws.

The renewed spotlight comes as tech giants more broadly face a reckoning over their scale and influence. Legislators and regulators are concerned over how that power might ultimately harm consumers, especially by choking off competition from smaller players in Silicon Valley.

Aside from Google, rivals Apple, Amazon and Facebook are also under investigation by federal regulators and lawmakers. In July, Google CEO Sundar Pichai appeared virtually at a hearing before the House Judiciary Antitrust Subcommittee, alongside Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos and Apple CEO Tim Cook.

Of the companies, Google is in the most imminent danger of antitrust action. Several areas of Google's business are being scrutinized, and there are nuances to the situation playing out at the DOJ.

Here's what you need to know about Google's antitrust battles:

Google's dominance in web search, digital advertising and smartphone software are the primary areas of interest to lawmakers and regulators.

The company processes around 90% of all online searches in the US. That stranglehold is the foundation of Google's massive advertising business, which generates almost all of the company's $160 billion in annual sales. Google has been accused of hurting competitors by prioritizing its own products, like shopping ads or local business listings, over the listings of rivals in its search results. Critics also complain that the tech giant takes content from publishers and other websites and uses that information in prepared answers directly on Google's search engine, rather than simply providing a list of links that send users away to other sites.

Google's ad business is also under a microscope because the company owns every step in a complicated system that connects ad sellers and buyers, which rivals say gives Google an unfair edge over the market. Much of the company's advertising prowess comes from acquisitions, including the 2008 buyout of the ad-tech firm DoubleClick.

The company also owns the Android operating system, the most popular mobile software in the world. Its dominance is hard to overstate; Android powers almost nine out of every 10 smartphones shipped globally. The tech giant has been accused of using that dominance to strong-arm partners to bundle Google's apps, like search and Maps, into their offerings.

The DOJ could file a lawsuit as soon as the end of the month, according to the Times report, but the exact timing isn't known. Attorney General Bill Barr and the 40 or so lawyers working on the case have disagreed over when it should be filed, the Times reported.

There's also an internal dispute at the DOJ over how broad the complaint should be. One team of lawyers is looking into Google's search business, while another is probing its advertising business, according to The Wall Street Journal.

It could be. Most of the DOJ lawyers on the probe argued they needed more time to build a strong case against Google, though Barr is said to have overruled their guidance, according to the Times. Some of the attorneys are concerned the aggressive timeline, with work completed before the election, is to ensure the Trump administration gets credit for taking on a big tech company. The lawyers viewed the September deadline as arbitrary and laid out their argument for a longer timeline in a memo that spanned hundreds of pages, the Times said.

Google declined to comment. The DOJ didn't return a request for comment.

Bipartisan support exists for antitrust scrutiny of Google. But some Republicans have cheered on the investigation alongside accusations that the tech giant censors conservative voices. President Donald Trump has repeatedly accused Google of foul play without evidence.

Two years ago, the president claimed that Google's search results were "rigged" to promote negative news stories on Trump. At the time, he told reporters, "I think Google has really taken advantage of a lot of people." He added, "Google and Twitter and Facebook, they're really treading on very, very troubled territory, and they have to be careful."

Last September, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton announced an antitrust probe into Google's massive digital advertising business. The investigation has the participation of AGs from 48 states, the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico. As part of the probe, Paxton's office sent Google a civil investigative demand that asked for key information about its ad operation and data collection policies. The coalition of AGs is reportedly looking into Google's Android business, too.

The states are expected to file charges against Google, but it's unclear if they will join the DOJ's complaint or file one separately.

Google -- along with Apple, Amazon and Facebook -- is the target of a broader probe by the House Judiciary's antitrust subcommittee into Silicon Valley's market dominance. One of the goals of the investigation is to explore whether the US needs new competition laws to govern the tech giants in the digital age.

The subcommittee, led by Rhode Island Democrat David Cicilline, has gathered more than 1.3 million documents from the tech giants, competitors and antitrust enforcement agencies during the more than yearlong investigation. The culmination of the probe was July's historic hearing, in which the CEOs from all four companies appeared via video chat, an accommodation of the House's rules amid the coronavirus pandemic.

A report on the subcommittee's findings is expected in coming months.

Google's antitrust woes aren't limited to the US. Last year, the search giant was hit with a $1.7 billion fine from the European Commission for "abusive" online ad practices. The commission said Google exploited its dominance by restricting its rivals from placing their search ads on third-party websites.

Two years ago, the EU's executive arm fined Google a record $5 billion for unfair business practices around Android, its mobile operating system. The investigation focused on Google's deals with phone manufacturers, requiring them to preload specific Google apps and services onto Android phones.

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Apple iCloud, Google Drive and Dropbox probed over unfair T&Cs in Italy – TechCrunch

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Italys competition authority has opened an investigation into cloud storage services operated by Apple, Dropbox and Google, in response to a number of complaints alleging unfair commercial practices.

In a press release announcing the probe, the AGCM says its opened six investigations in all. The services of concern are Googles Drive, Apple iCloud and the eponymous Dropbox cloud storage service.

As well as allegations of unfair commercial practices, the regulator said its looking into complaints of violations of Italys Consumer Rights Directive.

A further complaint alleges the presence of vexatious clauses in the contract.

Weve reached out to the three tech giants for comment.

All three cloud storage services are being investigated over complaints of unfair practices related to the collection of user data for commercial purposes such as a lack of proper information or valid consent for such commercial data collection per the press release.

Dropbox is also being accused of failing to clearly communicate contractual conditions such as procedures for withdrawing from a contract or exercising a right to reconsider. Access to out-of-court dispute settlement mechanisms is also being looked at by the regulator.

Other contractual conditions probed over concerns of unfairness include clauses with sweeping rights for providers to suspend and interrupt the service; liability exemptions even in the event of loss of documents stored in the users cloud space; the possibility of unilateral modification of the contractual conditions; and the prevalence of the English version of the contract text over the Italian version.

In recent years the European Commission has made a pan-EU push for social media firms to clarify their T&Cs which led to Facebook agreeing to plainer worded T&Cs last year, as well as making some additional tweaks, such as amending its power to unilaterally amend contracts.

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Apple iCloud, Google Drive and Dropbox probed over unfair T&Cs in Italy - TechCrunch

Worlds 10 richest tech giants shed $44 billion wealth, Jeff Bezos tops list with $9 billion loss – Moneycontrol

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The world's top 10 richest people lost a collective $44 billion due to equity devaluations amid the COVID-19 pandemic. The worlds richest man Jeff Bezos led the pack, alone shedding $9 billion in wealth as Amazon shares slumped, as per Bloomberg.

Bezos was closely followed by tech mogul Elon Musk, who lost $8.5 billion as company Tesla Inc. shares teased bear-territory over a three-day slide, the publication said.

Facebooks Mark Zuckerberg lost $4.2 billion, while Microsoft Founder Bill Gates wealth lowered by $2.9 billion. Other on the list include Steve Ballmer who lost $4.8 billion, Larry Page lost $3.6 billion, Sergey Brin lost $3.5 billion, MacKenzie Scott lost $3.2 billion, Larry Ellison lost $2.4 billion, and Jack Ma lost $1.6 billion.

The wealth reversal on September 4 was a surprise as markets had so far stayed afloat despite grim economic realities worldwide. Case in point: both Musk and Zuckerberg posted enormous $4 billion a day wealth gain; while Bezos became the worlds richest person and his ex-wife MacKenzie Scott the worlds richest woman.

First Published on Sep 6, 2020 10:42 am

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Worlds 10 richest tech giants shed $44 billion wealth, Jeff Bezos tops list with $9 billion loss - Moneycontrol

What happened to Windows 10 Mobile? – St. George Daily Spectrum

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Called Windows 10 Mobile, Microsofts phone platform boasted a similar look and feel to other Windows 10 devices, but despite dominating the laptop and desktop industries, the company was never able to build a successful place for itself in the phone business.(Photo: Nokia)

Windows 10 Mobile, which is now the thing of the past, was once believed to be the best potential replacement for Android and iOS devices when it was launched in 2015.

In January 2019, Microsoft announced that they were ending the support to Windows 10 Mobile in December 10, 2019. The reason being, there were no plans to develop new phone models for Windows 10 platform. Microsoft later delayed the end of support to January 14, 2020, which was also when Microsoft ended the support to Windows 7 operating systems.

GeorgeCox(Photo: Submitted photo)

If we look behind, Microsoft has never been successful in the Mobile industry, despite dominating the laptop and desktop industries. Every time Microsoft tried to fit themselves in the phone business, people rejected them miserably. What were the reasons that led to the downfall of Windows 10 Mobile? The reasons are many, and some of them are obvious.

Many people might not be aware of the fact that Microsoft launched their first phone back on April 19, 2000. It was named Pocket PC 2000 and was based on the Windows CE operating system. Later, Microsoft renamed it as Windows Mobile in 2003, and there were few more versions of it released till the mid-2000s. These were basically the portable, pocket versions of the popular Windows operating system.

Later on, when Apple and Android took up the mobile phone market, it forced Microsoft to discontinue Windows Mobile. However, in anticipation of taking on iOS and Android OS, Microsoft, later on, started the successor of Windows Mobile and named it Windows Phone (WP).

In October 2010, Microsoft launched the first Windows Phone and named it Windows Phone 7. Microsoft also joined hands with the former mobile giant company Nokia. Windows Phone 7 was later followed by Windows 8, Windows 8.1, and finally, Windows 10.

Both Microsoft and Nokia were expected to rule the Mobile world together, with millions of loyal customer base. However, this incorporation went on to be a disaster, with Nokia switching to Android and Microsoft discontinuing the Windows Phone.

What were the reasons that drove to this failure? What went wrong?

Despite launching the Windows OS phones when there was no Android, no iOS, that means literally no significant competition.

Despite having a humongous loyal user base, and despite being one of the biggest tech giants with thousands of top developers in the team and a visionary founder, why did Microsoft failed to capitalize on the Windows phone, especially Windows 10 Phone?

Here are the top reasons for that:

When Apple launched the iPhone in 2007, it was a warning for Microsoft to bring out the changes, but they sidelined it by relying on their traditional buyers. They did not realize that the world was over with old fashioned Windows and ready for a change brought by Apple. Soon iOS was joined by the Android, and the smartphone revolution was kicked.

Microsoft was too late for damage control, as even the customer base that they own were opting for Android and iOS. Giant manufactures like Samsung and HTC were quick to realize the potential of Android. They launched a number of Android devices in a short span, which boosted Android so much that Windows became just a PC operating system for the consumers.

When Microsoft realized the revolution and decided to bring out significant changes in its phones in 2014, it was too late.

Seven years is a huge time. In those years, iOS and Android never looked back. Especially Android. It keeps adding manufacturer partners and builds its ecosystem by launching Google apps like Play Store, Maps, etc. Microsoft only had Nokia, and that too was in the revival period.

Even their old customers discarded Windows 10 mobile and other Windows phones because the features which they were getting in Android phones were nowhere close to the features on Windows phones. Top of that, Windows phones were overpriced as compared to feature-full Android ones. Why would a sane person would go for a feature-less and overpriced phone? And that too, with an old OS.

While Windows may be a great operating system for a laptop or PC, it was never effective on phones even at the start and mid of the 2000s when it was a big deal. Though Microsoft and its hardware partner Nokia always emphasize more on the build-quality and provide the long-lasting products to the consumers, Android changed the trend after its arrival.

As technology started to change frequently, the mindset of the consumer got changed. People do not go for the long-lasting phones as it will make them behind the latest technology. People, now go for the feature-rich, latest-tech phones to keep themselves parallel to the newest trend, and for this reason the long-lasting phones are a failure.

Android phone manufacturers capitalize on this fact and launched phones with medium-range build quality but full of latest features.

Microsoft could not do the same not because they do not want to, but because Windows OS was not capable of doing it on the phone. By the time Windows OS was finally optimized for mobile phones, most mobile phone manufacturers have already partnered with Googles Android.

Android being an open-source program, was regularly optimized, and millions of independent developers contribute to making it better. It is highly customizable, and its play store has millions of applications. Any android developer can list its apps on the play store.

Windows OS, on the other hand, is not an open-source program. It is strictly developed and tested by the closed developers. That is the main reason for it being less innovative. Furthermore, developing applications for the Microsoft OS is a massive task as compared to Android apps. Android itself provides many tools for Android App Development and that too for free of cost or some at a very minimal price.

This is another main reason for the downfall of the Microsoft Windows 10 phone. Since Google owns Android, they never bothered to code their apps for the Windows 10 mobiles. So users were deprived of Chrome, Gmail, YouTube, and other major Google apps on Windows.

Google may have done this because of the professional rivalry with Microsoft. But the smaller user base of the Windows Phone must also be in their minds. Otherwise, the same could have been done with the iOS too.

Microsoft made the biggest mistake by keeping both the hardware and software with themselves, which they did not do with their PC operating systems.

On the other hand, Google just kept the operating system and application manager with them and let other manufacturers build the hardware.

Windows 10 mobile and previous Windows phones had a lot of potential in their manufacturing and OS builds. However, they came too late to the new party and kept themselves engaged in the older one. Guess what, better late than never did not work for Microsoft.

Stay protected!

George Cox is the owner of Computer Diagnostics and Repair. He can be reached at 346-4217.

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What happened to Windows 10 Mobile? - St. George Daily Spectrum

Tech Giants Are Putting PTAB’s Discretion To The Test – Law360

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Law360 (September 3, 2020, 8:23 PM EDT) -- Apple, Cisco, Google and Intel's lawsuit challenging a certain Patent Trial and Appeal Board precedent will test how far the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office's discretion stretches when it comes to instituting inter partes reviews.

The lawsuitfiled Mondayin California federal court pits the USPTO's wide discretionary power, supported by a series of recent U.S. Supreme Court decisions, against critics who say USPTO Director Andrei Iancu is fostering uncertainty and letting owners of weak patents, particularly nonpracticing entities, get away with exploiting the system.

"When some people believe the system is too patent-friendly, we get reactions like this lawsuit or the [America...

In the legal profession, information is the key to success. You have to know whats happening with clients, competitors, practice areas, and industries. Law360 provides the intelligence you need to remain an expert and beat the competition.

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Time to follow Australia’s lead and force tech giants to play fair and pay for news – Independent.ie

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The sustainability of Irish media is at a tipping point and radical action is needed by the new Government and the Communications Minister Catherine Martin.

ewspapers (in print and online), local radio and RT have been essential reading, listening and viewing respectively during the Covid crisis. Journalists and editors have been working overtime to ensure the public is up to date and informed.

However, many news organisations are on their knees financially and there is a real danger that some may not survive.

Despite occasional failings, we are well served in the main by the Irish media. You may not like all of them but they provide an essential public service in Irish democracy.

A report from the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism in July found that Irish media retain high levels of trust, bucking international trends.

Social media ranked among the least trusted sources, according to the report, with three out of five Irish adults concerned about 'fake news' online.

But the business model that supported journalism for 150 years has been battered for more than a decade by a perfect storm of changing consumer behaviour and a shift to online consumption; a collapse in advertising because of the increasing dominance of tech giants like Google and Facebook; and the failure by the news media to innovate and respond quickly to these threats.

Local journalism is in particular difficulty despite its enormous importance. Some provincial newspapers have already closed and job losses and furloughs are rife across the industry.

The national public service broadcaster, RT, is in dire straits. Staff costs have risen by 20m despite efforts to reduce headcount, and the firm has borrowings of 95m.

Paywalls have proven successful for INM, owner of the Sunday Independent, and for the Irish Times, but will not work for local newspapers or broadcasters.

We cannot blame the tech giants solely for the demise of Irish journalism but they do bear some responsibility. The near duopoly position Facebook and Google now hold in the advertising market has had a distorting impact on the ability of indigenous media to operate.

The two tech companies hoovered up an estimated 40pc of the total ad market (worth about 1.4bn) and a whopping 81pc of the digital advertising market in 2019.

It is not realistic to expect the Government could (or should) bail out the news media, given the perilous state of the public finances, but the news media do need support.

In that context, moves by the Australian government to introduce new laws to force Facebook, Google and other tech companies to pay royalties to the news media for content they produce may provide part of the answer.

The move follows a proposal by the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) which would force the Silicon Valley monoliths to negotiate a 'fair price' with news media for using their content on their platforms. If they do not, then they could be forced to accept a binding arbitration.

The Commission has also proposed new rules to force both companies to be more transparent with their algorithms, give notice of changes that might impact on news organisations' digital traffic, and be more transparent in their data collection methods.

In response both Google and Facebook have said they would remove news content from their news feeds and search results rather than pay the royalties.

Such bully-boy tactics by the two tech giants reinforce how dominant their position in the market now is, and why it's time to rein them in.

No media company can afford not to work with social media or Google. Media companies rely on these platforms to drive traffic, while the tech companies piggyback on the content created by the media companies to increase the amount of time audiences stay around, gathering terabytes of data about their behaviour and selling that to advertisers.

While the tech giants claim it's a symbiotic relationship, the reality is that it's closer to a parasitic one such is the power imbalance between them and the media.

France, Germany and Spain have also tried to force tech platforms to pay for republishing news media content but none has succeeded so far. Proposals for digital taxes have come to naught.

The new Programme for Government commits to a new Commission on the Future of Media, unifying regulation and support of media online and broadcasting, though no detail has been published yet explaining how it might operate or what powers it will have.

To be effective, this new Commission will need to have substantial teeth to bring the tech giants to heel and force them to take responsibility for the content on their platforms and the power to issue substantial fines.

Ireland may be too small to do so on its own; it may take the political muscle of EU action to bring Facebook and Google to the table, forcing them, for example, to contribute into a ring-fenced fund that could be used to support public service journalism jobs in local and national media.

The Commission will also need to look at wider issues such as protecting privacy, the role of these platforms in the promotion of 'fake news' and how we should set limits on harmful content.

One shudders to think what will be left if Google and Facebook strip their newsfeeds of quality, trusted journalism. Cat videos will thrive for sure, but on a much more sinister level, our social media timelines and search results will likely descend into a wasteland of fake news, half-truths and propaganda, where the tinfoil hat brigade, anti-vaxxers and anti-maskers will flourish.

We cannot leave our democracy to Mark Zuckerberg, it's much too important for that.

Radical and immediate action is needed by Communications Minister Catherine Martin.

So far, we have seen little to suggest she is preparing for the challenge.

Tom Felle is head of journalism and communication at NUI Galway and a former journalist and foreign correspondent

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Time to follow Australia's lead and force tech giants to play fair and pay for news - Independent.ie

Tech Stocks Slide After a Summer-Long Rally. Is It the Dot-Com Bubble All Over Again? – Barron’s

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Text size

Late summer squalls can churn up quickly and be quite violent, but they also tend to pass by swiftly.

The stock market appeared to experience something similar this past week. After the heat of the continued melt-up of the technology giants at the beginning of the week, a squall of selling on Thursday sent the entire market sliding. But, by weeks end, the winds seemed to have subsided.

The result was the erasure of $1.7 trillion of paper profits in the U.S. stock market in the final two days of the week, according to Wilshire Associates tally. But to put that in perspective, investors were still up $13.1 trillion, or 55.7%, from the lows of March 23 and $2.2 trillion, or 6.3%, since the end of 2019.

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Even with a recovery from their lows on Friday, the major averages had their worst week since late June, with the S&P 500 index off 2.3% and the Dow Jones Industrial Average off 1.8%. The technology-dominated Nasdaq Composite, at the center of the markets turbulence, slipped 3.3%, its worst week since late March.

As for what roiled the market, the suspects fingered most often were options players, both big and small. As reported by several media outlets, SoftBank Group (ticker: 9984.Japan), the big Japanese conglomerate, appeared to be a major buyer of options on megacap tech stocks, giving it the right to acquire $50 billion worth of the underlying shares.

At the same time, relatively small punters also have been actively trading options, especially short-dated, out-of-the-money calls, which effectively give them a cheap lottery ticket to play the bull market in the giant tech stocks that have led the markets advance, observes Peter Tchir, the derivatives and credit maven at Academy Securities. While he concedes that the capital controlled by these speculators is small relative to the market, in a world where volumes are distorted by the frantic trading of [algorithmic-based accounts], any real order flow has a surprisingly large impact on prices, he adds in a client note.

After the long run in tech stocks, in which some have doubled or more, both individual and institutional investors have shifted to buying call options, where their loss exposure is limited to the premium they pay for the contract, explains Mark Haefele, chief investment officer for global wealth management for UBS.

Options dealers, who have sold calls to traders, are forced to hedge their exposure. That would mean buying underlying shares as their prices rise, and selling as the shares fall. All of which can exacerbate price swings, as happened on Thursday, Haefele writes in a client note. (Colleague Al Root explains the real nitty-gritty of the options trade, complete with Greek letters describing the math that makes derivatives vastly more intellectually challenging than betting on sports.)

Despite the drop in the big tech stocks, this doesnt seem like the bursting of the dot-com bubble in 2000. As Evercore ISI points out, a perfect storm had developed then: Oil prices had doubled, and the Federal Reserve raised its federal-funds rate target sharply, by 1.75 percentage points, which inverted the yield curve, a classic sign of tight money and a future downturn. Now, by contrast, the Fed has pushed the funds rate to near zero and expanded its balance sheet by nearly 50%, while oil prices remain depressed.

Capital Economics Jonas Goltermann points to another difference: Unlike in 2000, the largest tech firms today are highly profitable, and their valuations, while punchy, dont look so obviously unsustainable. So while this correction may well have further to run, and we continue to think that tech stocks will fare less well than most other sectors as the economic recovery continues, we dont expect that a collapse in tech stocks will drag down the entire market in the way that it did in 2000-02.

Corporate insiders apparently are not waiting to cash out, however. The Financial Times reports that U.S. executives took advantage of the markets rally to sell $6.7 billion of their own companies shares in August, the biggest dollar amount since November 2015. As my illustrious predecessor in this space, Alan Abelson, was wont to observe, there are many reasons to sell a stock; expecting it to rise isnt one of them.

Write to Randall W. Forsyth at randall.forsyth@barrons.com

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Flash is being removed from Windows soon – but there’s a catch – TechRadar

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Microsoft has announced it will be ending support for Adobe Flash Player soon.

The much-maligned Flash will no longer be supported on Microsoft's web browsers after December 31 2020 as the technology firm looks to ensure customers are secured online.

Flash will be removed from Microsoft's browsers with the upcoming launch of Edge v88 in January 2021, with Internet Explorer 11 also waving goodbye alongside Microsoft Edge Legacy.

The announcement comes after tech giants including Microsoft, Apple, Google, Mozilla, Facebook and Adobe itself declared in July 2017 that Flash would gradually be phased out of the big internet players.

In a blog post, Microsoft program manager Suchithra Gopinath said the decision to remove Flash has been brought forward due to the dwindling numbers of users utilizing Flash Player, with many instead turning to more powerful and secure options such as HTML5, WebGL, and WebAssembly.

The company noted that Microsoft will continue providing security updates to Adobe Flash Player and maintain OS and browser compatibility through the end of 2020.

"As you transition away from Adobe Flash Player, we encourage you to continue to upgrade your systems with the latest security updates, while it is still in support," Gopinath added. "If you require additional assistance, please contact your Microsoft Account team."

She added that Adobe is offering some support options to companies that rely on Flash to power business applications, and that Microsoft Edge will allow Adobe Flash Player to load as a plug-in via the Internet Explorer mode feature.

However from January 2021, Flash Player will be disabled by default on Microsoft browsers, with all versions older than KB4561600, which was released in June 2020, will be blocked, and any downloadable resources related to Adobe Flash Player hosted on Microsoft websites will no longer be available.

Adobe confirmed that support for some Flash apps will continue thanks to a deal signed with Samsung's Harman group, which will offer to help customers transition from Flash to other technologies if desired.

Via The Register

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Netflix CEO Reed Hastings on Working From Home: I Dont See Any Positives – Yahoo Entertainment

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Many people have found working from home has been one of the few silver linings stemming from the coronavirus pandemic but Netflix chief Reed Hastings isnt one of them.

Hastings, in an interview with The Wall Street Journal on Monday, was asked if hes seen any benefits from having employees working from home.

No. I dont see any positives, Hastings said. Not being able to get together in person, particularly internationally, is a pure negative. Ive been super impressed at peoples sacrifices.

Also Read: Netflix Shuts Out Amazon Prime Video in Nielsen's Inaugural Ranking of Weekly Top 10 Streaming Shows

Netflix in March closed its Hollywood office after an employee was believed to be positive for COVID-19. The Bay Area-based company joined a number of other tech giants, including Facebook and Twitter, in having employees work from home to combat the viruss spread.

Hastings said having most employees away from the office has been a challenge because its made debating ideas harder to do. He doesnt anticipate Netflix will lean into a full work-from-home setup if/when a vaccine is developed, either. Instead, he told the WSJ he anticipates many companies will have employees in the office four days a week and let them work from home once a week.

And how long after a vaccine does Hastings want to have employees return to the office on a regular basis?

Twelve hours after a vaccine is approved, he said.

Read original story Netflix CEO Reed Hastings on Working From Home: I Dont See Any Positives At TheWrap

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Netflix CEO Reed Hastings on Working From Home: I Dont See Any Positives - Yahoo Entertainment

SoftBank value slumps as investors fear it may be the ‘Nasdaq Whale’ – The Guardian

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The value of the Japanese technology investor SoftBank slumped by about 7bn on Monday after shareholders were spooked by reports that the company has been making huge bets on US technology firms listed on a US stock exchange.

Over the weekend, SoftBank, which is best known for investing in young technology businesses, was reported to be the so-called Nasdaq Whale whose massive punts were behind US technology stocks moving to record highs before slipping back at the end of last week.

By the middle of last week, the US equity market had rallied by about 55% since March. In particular, tech giants such as Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google have seen their share prices soar.

SoftBanks moves in the market appear to have succeeded in the short term, with the company said to be sitting on trading gains of about $4bn (3bn) after a series of colossal bets on equity derivatives by the groups founder, Masayoshi Son.

However, the change in strategy is viewed as high risk and appears to have scared investors, who fear that markets could switch and leave the company nursing painful losses.

About 30% of SoftBank shareholders are retail investors who are still recovering from some of the investment companys high-profile failures over the past year, having invested heavily in the likes of the office space provider WeWork, which it ended up rescuing last year, and the payments group Wirecard, which filed for insolvency in the summer amidst a 1.7bn alleged accounting fraud.

Softbank is believed to have bet $4bn on call options focused on individual US technology stocks. A call option is a financial derivative that gives the owner the right to buy a share at a pre-agreed price but the trade can help drive up the value of the real stock market as the sellers of the options buy the underlying shares.

Shares in SoftBank closed down 7.2% on the Tokyo exchange. US stock markets were closed on Monday because of the Labor Day holiday. Before Mondays drop, SoftBanks shares had climbed by about a third this year.

Softbank declined to comment.

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SoftBank value slumps as investors fear it may be the 'Nasdaq Whale' - The Guardian

Apple and Google to Make It Easier to Opt In to Virus Tracing – The New York Times

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Several state governments may soon send residents an alert asking them to turn on exposure notifications.

On Tuesday, Apple and Google said they would make it easier for states to use their new technology that detects phones that come close to one another and can notify people who may have been exposed to the coronavirus.

States that sign on will be able to send a notice directly to smartphones asking people to opt in to the technology. Previous versions of the technology had required people to seek out a state health agencys app.

The new approach could spur the popularity of such virus alert technology in the United States by significantly lowering the hurdles for its use. Maryland, Virginia, Nevada and Washington, D.C., already plan to use the new system, Apple and Google said, and about 25 other states were exploring using the earlier app version.

In a statement, Apple and Google called the changes a next step in our work with public health authorities. They said the shifts would help public health authorities to supplement their existing contact tracing operations with technology without compromising on the projects core tenets of user privacy and security.

In April, Apple and Google announced they were developing the technology, which uses Bluetooth signals to enable iPhones and Android devices to detect nearby phones. If someone using the technology tests positive for the virus, that person can enter the positive result into the system using a unique authentication code. An automatic notification would then go to other phones that had opted in and had been in close contact.

As the pandemic took hold this spring, countries around the world raced to deploy virus apps to help track and quarantine people. But some of the apps were mandatory and invasive, sending users locations and health details to their governments. Many apps were also rife with security flaws.

The Apple-Google technology, by contrast, does not collect personal health details or track users locations. That has made the system attractive in Europe and elsewhere. Germany, Denmark and Ireland have already released apps using the technology, and millions of people in Europe have downloaded them.

In the United States, public health agencies in Virginia, Arizona, Nevada, Alabama, North Dakota and Wyoming have also created such apps, although the uptake has been slower. The Alabama app, released in mid-August, has had about 44,000 downloads.

To make the virus alert apps from different U.S. states interoperable, the Association of Public Health Laboratories announced in July that it would host a national server for the data. That means users of Alabamas app may someday be able to detect nearby phones when they travel to Virginia and vice versa.

Now, to use Apple and Googles technology, state public-health authorities simply need to provide certain parameters to the companies, such as how close people need to be to trigger an exposure notification and recommendations for those with possible exposures. Google would then create an app for the state, while Apple would enable the technology on the iPhone software. The system would then use approximate location data to send an alert to residents phones in that state, asking if they would like to enroll. (On iPhones, enrolling requires tapping a button, while Android users are prompted to download the states app.)

Apple and Google have said they designed their technology to protect peoples privacy. The system does not share peoples identities with Apple, Google or other users, the companies said, and it does not share location data with health authorities or the companies.

Google initially required Android users of the virus alert apps to turn on location services, which could have allowed Google to collect their location data. After health officials in Europe complained, Google said it would stop requiring location services to be on to enable the apps.

Still, security researchers have warned that the technology could also be misused to send false alerts, spreading unnecessary alarm. While they acknowledged the companies desire to help stem the pandemic, a few said they were troubled by Apples and Googles power to set global standards for public health agencies.

Ashkan Soltani, an independent security researcher, also warned that the companies could at some point turn on virus notifications by default. I continue to worry about rapidly deploying a new technology to nearly everyones device, he said, especially when the decision to do so isnt done by policymakers but unilaterally by these platforms.

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Apple and Google to Make It Easier to Opt In to Virus Tracing - The New York Times

Norwalks Lockwood-Mathews Mansion Museum virtual Starlit Gala includes talk on bioethics in the pursuit of immortality – Thehour.com

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Glenn E. McGee, PhD, will discuss biotech advances toward immortality at the Lockwood-Mathews Mansion Museum virtual Starlit Gala on Oct. 17. Tickets are $50 to $100.

Glenn E. McGee, PhD, will discuss biotech advances toward immortality at the Lockwood-Mathews Mansion Museum virtual Starlit Gala on Oct. 17. Tickets are $50 to $100.

Photo: Hamerman Photography, 2017 / Contributed Photo

Glenn E. McGee, PhD, will discuss biotech advances toward immortality at the Lockwood-Mathews Mansion Museum virtual Starlit Gala on Oct. 17. Tickets are $50 to $100.

Glenn E. McGee, PhD, will discuss biotech advances toward immortality at the Lockwood-Mathews Mansion Museum virtual Starlit Gala on Oct. 17. Tickets are $50 to $100.

Norwalks Lockwood-Mathews Mansion Museum virtual Starlit Gala includes talk on bioethics in the pursuit of immortality

Norwalks Lockwood-Mathews Mansion Museum will celebrate science and history at its virtual Starlit Gala on Saturday, Oct. 17, that will include a presentation on humanitys pursuit of immortality by award-winning expert on bioethics, Glenn E. McGee, PhD.

Along with McGees talk, the 8 p.m. event, co-chaired by trustees Trudy Dujardin and Mickey Koleszar, will honor David Westmoreland, a longstanding supporter of LMMM and its preservation.

There will be a catered dinner and silent auction. All all proceeds will benefit the museums educational and cultural programs. Tickets are $50 to $100.

During these uncertain times, this educational and cultural icon needs support from all of our communities, and the gala is a major opportunity to step up to the plate, Dujardin and Koleszar said in a news release.

McGee will discuss revolutionary advances in biomedical science technology in pursuit of immortality, and the ethical, legal and social questions they pose.

McGee is the author of three books, The Perfect Baby: A Pragmatic Approach to Genetics; Beyond Genetics; and Bioethics for Beginners, and more than 100 articles. He is the founder and served for 11 years as editor-in-chief of The American Journal of Bioethics, the leading publication in its field. He has served on the board of directors of the American Society for Bioethics and on more than a dozen federal and state advisory panels. He has received the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Cellular and Molecular Devices Advisory Panel Outstanding Service Award. McGee is Deputy Provost for the University of New Haven and received a B.A. from Baylor University and M.A. and Ph.D. from Vanderbilt University.

Born in Houston, Texas, Westmoreland graduated from Baylor University with a bachelors degree in Computer Science and worked for 23 years in the field of Information Technology at such corporations as American Airlines and Arrow Electronics. He completed his Master of Landscape Architecture at Cornell University in 2006 and is a registered landscape architect and co-owner, with Mike Mushak, of Tuliptree Site Design, Inc. in Norwalk.

Westmoreland serves the community in Norwalk in a number of roles, including: Chairman of the Second Taxing District Commission (SNEW), Redevelopment Agency Commissioner, and on the Norwalk Historical Society Board of Directors, among others. He has served as chairman of the City of Norwalks Historical Commission, overseeing the relocation and development of the new Historical Society Museum, the renovations of the buildings and park at Mill Hill, and three city-owned cemeteries, along with the historic buildings at Mathews Park, including the Lockwood-Mathews Mansion Museum.

The virtual Starlit Gala is sponsored in part by Fairfield County Bank and David Scott Parker Architects. The graphic design sponsor is Miggs B Design.

LMMMs cultural and educational programs are made possible in part by funding from LMMMs Founding Patrons: The Estate of Mrs. Cynthia Clark Brown; LMMMs Leadership Patrons: The Sealark Foundation; LMMMs 2020 Season Distinguished Benefactors: The City of Norwalk and The Maurice Goodman Foundation; LMMMs 2020 Distinguished Benefactors for Education: The Daphne Seybolt Culpeper Memorial Foundation, Inc.

For more information on the gala, visit lockwoodmathewsmansion.com.

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Norwalks Lockwood-Mathews Mansion Museum virtual Starlit Gala includes talk on bioethics in the pursuit of immortality - Thehour.com