Monthly Archives: May 2021

Tech hasnt always had a great image when it comes to climate and eco responsibility. If its not data centres sucking up power from the grid, its the environmental impact of global ecommerce, raising emissions as packages are shipped all over the world. Or the mining activity for rare earth minerals scarring the earth, and the growing pile of electronic waste as a testimony to our insatiable appetite for new electronics.

But things are starting to shift. Major companies such as Apple, Microsoft, Amazon and Google are backing initiatives that will cut their environmental impact, making an effort to be seen as environmentally conscious and responsible. Apple plans to be carbon neutral through a series of green energy and recycling initiatives by 2030. Thats the same year Microsoft has targeted to become carbon negative. Amazon, like other tech giants, is turning to green energy to power its data centres, while Google has pledged to use only carbon neutral energy sources by 2030. Amazon owner Jeff Bezos has pledged $10 billion to fight climate change.

Driving this push for sustainability is the growth in awareness at a consumer and investor level about the impact we are having on our environment. Its not only good for corporate consciences; its good for business too.

Karen ORegan. managing director at Accenture, said research by the company has shown 65 per cent of consumers are asking and demanding greater responsibility from companies for driving sustainable action in the future.

Smart companies are the ones who put their consumers at the centre and if you are listening to consumers, that is what you are going to be doing, she said.

However, while companies have been recognising they have responsibilities with regards to sustainability, Covid may have threatened to derail some of the progress made as companies cut costs and scaled back spending in response to the tough business environment.

The pandemic hasnt dampened in any way the importance of sustainability, particularly for consumers, investors and employers, said ORegan.

Particularly at the very beginning [of the pandemic], there was a priority on cost protection and on what companies were doing to get through the next few months. The question was around new investments they were going to make in the area of sustainability and were they going to be able to afford those.

I think as we moved through the pandemic, what became obvious from a lot of the research was that consumer sentiment didnt change. And if anything, it proved consumers were making an increased link between sustainability and the pandemic, and resilience going forward.

So despite the pandemic, the trend for technology to shift towards a greener and more environmentally responsible future is continuing. In March, 24 chief executives of major companies operating in Europe signed a declaration to take action in a number of areas, including to invest in the development and deployment of greener digital technologies and services that are energy and material efficient and to join with NGOs to develop tools to measure the net impact of green digital technologies on the environment

Among the signatories were Microsoft, escooter company Bolt, IBM, Ericsson, Nokia and SAP. The companies also pledged to become carbon neutral by 2040. Microsoft has said that by 2030 it will be taking more carbon out of the air than it emits.

Delivering on those promises will be crucial. Companies are very conscious of being accused of green washing, which is designed to make people believe that companies are doing more than they actually are. It gives a thin veneer of eco responsibility, with little substance to back it up.

Investors have got much smarter in knowing how to measure ESG [environmental, social and corporate governance]. There are lots of ways in which sustainability and the claims you make in the market can be measured, said ORegan. Companies are becoming very fearful of greenwashing. Weve seen a number of organisations called out for that approach. If you go down that route, you can damage your brand very significantly.

The fear of potential backlash and brand damage has held some companies back from engaging in sustainability at all. Theyre afraid of being tarnished with the greenwashing label, said Dr Cara Augustenbourg, environmental policy fellow at University College Dublin.

Where Ive seen success is where there is full transparency across the businesss supply chain; where they recognise there are impacts across the supply chain, from the products they use to build their widget all the way to the retailers they transport the widgets to. And they publish the lifecycle analysis of those impacts in a fully transparent way, and admit imperfection.

Payments company Stripe launched Stripe Climate in 2020, a way for businesses to easily invest in technologies that support climate action, by diverting a fraction of their revenue towards initiatives that permanently remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

Initially available to US businesses, it launched the product globally with a beta in January before opening it up more widely in February.

For Stripe, the project was an easy climate win. Businesses running on the platform can back projects with a few clicks. All funds contributed through Stripe Climate will go to the development of carbon removal technologies, with Stripe forgoing any transaction fees on the contributions.

We tried to make it as easy as possible for businesses. Its literally two or three clicks, said Ryan Orbuch, who leads the project at Stripe . For Stripe, the interest in climate responsibility wasnt a new thing. The company originally had been looking into a corporate offset programme, but became more interested in the idea of removing the carbon from the atmosphere altogether. In 2019, it committed to spending $1 million a year to support carbon capture technologies.

The hypothesis was that there was a really significant gap in demand for permanent removal as a whole, said Orbuch. There are some scientists and entrepreneurs working on solutions that could capture CO2 out of the air and permanently store it in a variety of different methods. But those solutions, we hypothesised, were slow to scale, and there were less people working on them than there should be because theres no demand. No one ever said well come out, well pay you what it costs to run your carbon capture machine, to run your new solution and help it scale up.

Orbuch believes carbon capture will play a key role in fighting climate change.

If we want to keep to something like a 1.5-2 degree warming target were going to need to do dramatic emissions reductions across sectors, energy, industry, transportation and so on. But were at a point now where additionally we need to do significant carbon removal, he said.

There are some solutions today that can cover some portion of the problem. But the world does not have the portfolio of solutions that are going to be needed to actually solve this at reasonable cost.

Stripes Climate fund is attempting to stimulate the demand needed to make these solutions scale up and become cheaper. It has so far chosen four companies in which to invest its money, but it plans to expand that further. In March, it opened a new round of applications, the results of which are imminent, and expects to add more each year.

Among the current crop is CarbonCure, which reduces the carbon impact and water footprint of concrete production; Climeworks, which is developing a carbon removal plant in Iceland; Project Vesta, which is boosting investments in research; and Charm Industrial, which has developed a bio-oil sequestration process.

Were really trying to take a portfolio approach with this, said Orbuch.

For Dr Augustenbourg, the climate situation is now urgent and getting people to recognise that is key.

Before Covid, companies werent generally doing enough to meet the Paris climate target of 1.5 degrees. That ambition now has to be ramped up even more, and everybody has to do their fair share to meet that target. That means radical emissions reductions and change in business practices to align with the Paris Agreement and the circular economy.

The problem is that the target is steep. To have even a 66 per cent chance of staying below the 1.5 degree limit we have to reduce emissions by 50 per cent between now and 2030.

Thats the bare minimum, that everyone is trying to halve their emissions by 2030 and move to net zero by 2050, she said.

The definition of sustainability is that it is to allow future generations to avail of the same resources we have today, so its living within the limits to growth, to conserve those natural resources. If we could limit our consumption to the level that those resources are available in 100 years time for future generations, then officially were being sustainable even though we are making an impact.

Originally posted here:

Big tech firms say they are turning green but can they deliver? - The Irish Times

Yesterday afternoon, the phrase #FireMeghanMcCain was trending on Twitter. What terrible, awful thing had she said to warrant trending on Twitter? The co-host of The View had done something few others have: decried an alarming spike in anti-Semitism.

Its not surprising, if youre familiar with Twitter, to see how an outspoken defender of the Jewish people may find herself in its cross hairs. This is a place where variations of the phrase Hitler was right were posted more than 17,000 times (according to the Anti-Defamation League) in just a one-week span in May. As in-person violence against Jews has spiked, so too has hatred against Jews online.

They are not disconnected phenomena, but part of the same ecosystem of hate that has blossomed along with the increase in tensions in the Middle East.

Writing for the Jewish Journal, Pamela Paresky and Alex Goldenberg described some of the research theyve compiled about anti-Semitism online. They wrote, According to the Network Contagion Research Institute (NCRI), where both authors are affiliated, extremist hashtags and slogans are upstream predictors of real-world violence and unrest.

In a disturbing example, the anti-Semitic hashtag #Covid1948 has been trending on Twitter in several countries, including the United States. Often accompanied by nakedly anti-Jewish content, the hashtag likens the birth of the state of Israel in 1948 to the COVID-19 virus. According to the NCRI, the hateful hashtag was shared up to 175 times per minute for over four hours on May 13. It often appears alongside #FreePalestine and is associated with other anti-Semitic hashtags like #Hitlerwasright and #Zionazi.

While weve seen President Donald Trump and countless numbers of his supporters booted off Twitters service, purveyors of Jew hate like Irans Supreme Leader Imam Sayyid Ali Khamenei, Hamas leader Ismail Haniyyeh, and Louis Farrakhan are still regularly posting. Adeel Raja posting in praise of Hitler throughout his time on Twitter finally lost him a gig as a freelance CNN contributor but didnt even warrant a suspension, let alone ban, from the social media service.

Over the last year, weve seen official and viral social media campaigns for Black Lives Matter and Stop Asian Hate. Social media companies and their users stood up to hatred and promoted content designed to stand athwart prejudice. And now with an increase in online and in-person hatred against Jews, were met with silence.

Around the world, weve seen violent attacks on Jews walking down the street, dining at kosher restaurants, at synagogues, and demonstrating in support of Israel. The videos of incendiary devices thrown at Jews standing in the Diamond District or dining outside are jarring and the muted reaction online, with the only vocal response coming almost entirely from the Jewish community, has been perhaps even more alarming than the attacks themselves.

These arent just an isolated set of events with a handful of bigots roaming the streets looking for Jews to target; no, we are witnessing a wholesale abandonment of the Jewish people at the hands of these mobs both in the streets and on the web.

The popularity of these anti-Semitic messages, the silence of social media companies and their users in response to these attacks, and their outrage that someone like Meghan McCain would dare speak up against it speak volumes about our priorities as a society. While we may stand against some forms of hatred, the oldest form, Jew hate, is still fair game.

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17,000 tweet 'Hitler was right,' and Big Tech barely reacts - New York Post

Despite 2020 acting as a major reality check for the entire business world, many Chief Information Officers (CIO) in the UK still believe theyre not completely prepared to help their organizations survive another similar disruption.

These are the conclusions of a new study from digital transformation service provider Genpact. Polling 500 CIOs and technology leaders all over the world, the company found that CIOs can be sorted into three categories: pilots, co-pilots and engineers.

Pilots are said to drive the transformation journey, innovate and help their business achieve greatness despite difficulties, but make up only one fifth of all CIOs in the UK. Co-pilots, who are seen as the ones to modernize the business, but need to partner up with business leaders to shape and deliver transformation, are the most numerous at 57 percent. The remaining 23 percent are classed as engineers; those who simply execute and dont drive transformation.

A CIOs ability to properly drive digital transformation can make or break a business, the report argues, claiming that those who migrated data centers into the cloud, automated processes, upskilled employees, adopted AI and ML, as well as advanced analytics, were the ones to adapt to the pandemic most successfully.

Transformation pilot CIOs who drive alignment across the C-suite and put the organizational focus on building resilience and innovation will be the co-creators of new business models and future-ready companies. CIOs who do not will see their organizations struggle, said Sanjay Srivastava, Chief Digital Officer at Genpact.

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Most companies aren't ready for the next big tech disruption - ITProPortal

In 2017, Saadia Madsbjerg, Managing Director of the Rockefeller Foundation, reflected on the billions of dollars in economic value generated each year from corporations buying and selling consumer personal data, and posited why the imposition of a tax on the revenues of companies that sell consumer personal data is the best way for consumers to at least share in some of the financial benefits obtained from the use of their data.

In February of this year, Maryland became the first state to pass a digital advertising tax into law. Known as the Digital Advertising Gross Revenues Tax, Marylands new law imposes a sliding-tax on the annual gross revenues of large companies derived from digital advertising services in the state.2 Digital advertising services is defined under the law as any advertisement services on a digital interface, including advertisements in the form of banner, search engine, interstitial, and other comparable advertising services." 3

New York now joins Maryland, Washington, Oregon, and Connecticut, as states that are currently considering (or have passed, in the case of Maryland) new data or digital advertising tax laws in 2021. Specifically, New Yorks legislature has taken up Bill S1124, titled the Digital Ad Tax Act (DATA), which would: (i) establish a tiered tax (of 2.5% to 10%) on the annual gross revenues derived from digital advertising services in the state for any person with global annual gross revenues of $100 million dollars or more; and, (ii) require each person that has annual gross revenues derived from digital advertising services in the state of at least $1 million to file a sworn return.4 S1124 actually revives an earlier bill version introduced in March 2020, and is modeled after Marylands Digital Advertising Gross Revenues Tax. A key distinction between the New York and Maryland digital ad tax laws, however, is that, under the proposed DATA, the term digital advertising services is expressly limited to those advertisement services that use personal information about the people to whom the ads are directed.

These proposed data and digital advertising tax laws face significant administrative and legal hurdles. For one thing, identifying the situs of a companys digital advertising services and/or sales of personal data for taxation purposes can be virtually impossible. Moreover, as currently being litigated in Chamber of Commerce of the U.S.A. v. Franchot, 5 -- an action challenging Marylands Digital Advertising Gross Revenues Tax, these proposed data taxes may violate various federal laws, including the Internet Tax Freedom Act, the Due Process Clause, Commerce Clause, and dormant Commerce Clause of the U.S. Constitution. New York and the other states have so far sought to address the sourcing and federal law issues through the inclusion of certain registration and self-reporting requirements, and certain exceptions and carve-out language. Time and Franchot will tell if those workarounds are enough.

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Revived Legislative Bill Adds New York to Growing Number of States Seeking to Tax Big Techs Digital Advertising and Sales of Consumer Personal Data -...

The Ringers Bill Simmons shares his thoughts on another stellar Luka Doncic performance in the Mavericks Game 2 win over the Clippers, putting the Mavericks up 2-0 on the series (2:45). Then Bill talks to business and tech analyst and Milwaukee Bucks fan Ben Thompson about the Bucks Round 1 series vs. the Heat, the Bucks 34-point victory in Game 2, the hypothetical Round 2 matchup vs. the Nets, and more (16:00). Next they discuss AT&Ts announcement to merge Warner Media and Discovery, streaming giants, Epic Games vs. Apple, and more (42:00). Finally, Bill talks with singer, songwriter, and Counting Crows frontman Adam Duritz about the origin of the band, their iconic first album August and Everything After, behind the scenes stories about some of their most beloved songs, adjusting to a meteoric rise in the early 1990s, maintaining artistic integrity over three decades, Counting Crows new album, Butter Miracle, Suite One, and more (1:09:00).

Host: Bill SimmonsGuest: Adam Duritz, Ben ThompsonProducer: Kyle Crichton

Subscribe: Spotify / Apple Podcasts / Stitcher / RSS

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Luka! Bucks, Tech With Ben Thompson. Plus Adam Duritz of Counting Crows - The Ringer

Indeed, not everyone shares in Facebooks particular vision of free communal info-abundance underwritten by bulk data collection and addictive algorithms. Nor do they care for what Facebook has become. From political disinformation to authoritarian state propaganda to surveillance-as-a-business-model to the hollowing out of arts, culture, and media, Facebook, and its influence on the internet, has been a net loss for the world. The company aspires toward liberalish valuesfor instance, Zuckerberg talks about voice rather than free speechbut all of this has been window-dressing for its own destructive pursuit of scale, power, and profit.

Following a pattern that weve seen in the more contrite recent statements from platform superpowers, Clegg seems to say that Facebook wants to do betterit just needs help. As society grapples with how to address misinformation, harmful content, and rising polarization, Facebook research could provide insights that help design evidence-based solutions, writes Clegg, as if Facebook, with its endless reams of data, insight into its own networks, and $62 billion in cash on hand couldnt be doing far more to tackle these problems. In helping address these concerns, Clegg also offers support for a digital regulatorsomething that would be useful but potentially no more so than the Federal Trade Commission or the Department of Justice, which have wide powers to sue Facebook, initiate antitrust proceedings, and enforce the law. (In working to shape government regulation, Facebook spent almost $20 million on D.C. lobbying last year, more than any other tech company.)

Parsing Nick Cleggs statementsand the overall sincerity of Facebooks pledgesmay be a fools game. The answer to regulating the internet, as Jillian C. York noted, is to keep Facebook out of any and all decisions about regulating the internet. Companies dont give up power voluntarily; they cede ground knowing they can make it up elsewhere. Cleggs op-ed has all the hallmarks of this kind of bait and switch. It offers a few paper-thin reforms that might pass bipartisan musterif Congress can find its better angelsthat will surely be undone after lawyers and lobbyists begin chiseling away at them. If theres to be a future open and global internet, it should represent everything Facebook is not. The scary and exciting thing is that we dont yet know how to bring that into being.

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Big Tech Wants to Write the New Rules on Internet Regulation - The New Republic

The massive digital platform market has until recently been dominated by a handful of US-based companies such as Facebook and Google. However, as foreign governments and competing platforms try to erode this domination, platforms are becoming a new sphere of geopolitical maneuvering.

The European Union wants to gain more control over international tech companies and achieve more independence in the digital arena. India has banned 177 Chinese apps on the grounds they are prejudicial to the sovereignty and integrity of India.

And in 2020, the then US President Donald Trump spent months attempting to ban the Chinese-made video-sharing platform TikTok or force its sale to an American owner. While some claimed Trump was piqued by a supposed prank against him by teenage TikTok users, a look at statements from US government officials over the course of the year shows geopolitical concerns were the main driver.

If governments continue to be driven by digital nationalism, the US-based big tech companies are likely to continue to dominate.

TikTok is the first social media platform born outside the United States to become a significant rival to Silicon Valley incumbents such as Facebook and Instagram. The short-form video platform rose to prominence in 2019 and, by early 2020, was the most downloaded app globally.

Since its rise, TikTok has come under intense criticism from governments around the world, who question whether ByteDance, the company that owns TikTok, sufficiently protects users data against access by the Chinese state.

However, the way TikTok treats user data is not very different from what its US counterparts do. There is little to suggest the platform poses any singular national security threat.

The company releases transparency reports similar to those of Google and Facebook. A CIA assessment reportedly concluded there was no evidence the Chinese government had intercepted TikTok data.

TikToks Chinese origins can be used to oversimplify the platforms actual territorial connection to China. ByteDance was founded in China but it is incorporated in the Cayman Islands and operates as a multinational with subsidiaries in Australia, the US, the UK and Singapore.

The backdrop to Trumps stance towards TikTok was an intensifying contest between the US and China over the strategic value of the digital environment. Who gets to extract economic value from the platform economy? Who gets to exert ideological influence through vast sociotechnical systems? Who enjoys strategic advantages from control over and access to data and infrastructure?

As todays global tech platforms have developed, they have largely mirrored the shape of classical geopolitics: the US has dominated. Recently, however, Chinese technology firms have flourished, expanding Chinas economic and strategic capacities.

TikTok teens may have successfully pranked Trump, but his actions and rhetoric fit within a geopolitical agenda articulated by others within the administration.

On June 24, 2020, US national security advisor Robert OBrien spoke publicly on the topic of the Chinese governments ideology and global ambitions. He warned China posed a threat to US citizens and explicitly implicated TikTok.

Two weeks later, on July 6, US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo suggested TikTok should be treated like Huawei, the Chinese telecommunications company that is effectively banned in the US.

On July 31, 2020, Trump announced he was planning to ban TikTok.

Several days later, Microsoft released a statement explaining that its representatives had spoken to Trump directly regarding the acquisition of TikTok. When questioned about his talks with Microsoft, Trump stated:

[] it cant be controlled, for security reasons, by China. Too big, too invasive, and it cant be.

On August 5, 2020, the US Department of State announced an expansion of its Clean Network program, which has the stated objective of guarding our citizens privacy and our companies most sensitive information from aggressive intrusions by malign actors, such as the Chinese Communist Party.

Expansions to the program included five policies aimed at reducing the presence of China in the US. These policies limited the use of Chinese telecommunication carriers, applications sold in app stores and pre-installed on devices, cloud services and undersea cables.

The following day, Trump issued an executive order forcing the sale of TikTok to a US company on the grounds that TikTok posed a threat to the national security, foreign policy, and economy of the United States.

Ultimately Trumps executive orders were blocked in the courts and the ban and forced sale never implemented.

TikTok provides welcomed competition to the platform incumbents. If real competition in the sector were to increase, requiring the incumbent platforms to compete for users, we might see further innovations in the platform market and a less concentrated tech sector.

So far, however, the US government has explicitly focused on the geopolitical implications of the rise of a Chinese platform. Whether the Biden administration will continue this approach remains to be seen.

Both the US and China have a long history of shielding strategically important industries. For those concerned with increasing competition and diluting the concentrated power of the dominant technology firms, the rise of digital nationalism is a new obstacle.

Moving forward, policymakers may need to overcome nationalistic impulses if they are to increase global competition in the international platform market. And both US and Chinese rule must be rejected if we are to decentralize power within the digital environment.

This article byJoanne Gray, Lecturer in School of Communications, Chief Investigator Digital Media Research Centre, Queensland University of Technology,is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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How digital nationalism threatens to entrench Big Tech - The Next Web

Facebook shares have recovered along with most big tech names recently as the Nasdaq plays catch up to the broader market. The Fed's continuing reissuing of the mantra that all inflation is transitory has helped technology and high growth names to recover. Facebook has taken the lead and bounced strongly from the $300zone. All big tech companies reported strong Q1 2021 earnings numbers, but most have slipped back post the earnings releases. Many retraced to areas of strong support and look to have invoked the buy the dip mantra to recover. Facebook is poised near record highs of $331.81 from April. Facebook finished Tuesday up just under 1%at $327.79.

Facebook has hit the headlines on Wednesday as several news outlets report that EU antitrust regulators maybegin an investigation into Facebook's online marketplace. While the news is not confirmed and any results unknown and unclear, the recent bullish sentiment toward Facebook has pushed the shares near record highs, so Wednesday's reaction will be key. Separately, big tech and news companies may face challenges from a new code of practice to be issued by the European Commission."Disinformation cannot remain a source of revenue. We need to see stronger commitments by online platforms, the entire advertising ecosystem and networks of fact-checkers," EU industry chief Thierry Breton said in a statement.Vera Jourova, Commission Vice President for Values &Transparency, said the issue was in urgent need of attention."A new stronger code is necessary as we need online platforms and other players to address the systemic risks of their services and algorithmic amplification, stop policing themselves alone and stop allowing them to make money on disinformation, while fully preserving the freedom of speech," she told Reuters. The original code was introduced in 2018. Facebook was one of the signatories to the code along with several other big tech companies as well as advertising, tech lobby groupsand other tech companies, according to Reuters.

FB shares gapped up initially aftera strong earnings release on April 28. Earnings per share reported at $3.30 versus a consensus estimate for $2.35, a 40% beat. Facebook shares rallied 7% post the release and created a nice gap on the chart. As often happens, the gap needed to be filled, and FB shares duly obliged, retracing the entire gain by May 10. The Relative Strength Index (RSI) and the Commodity Channel Index (CCI) both signalled the sell-off with both momentum oscillators enteringoverbought territory, highlighted. Facebook did find support just around the $300 level and hasformed a tentative bullish channel formation. The key is to remain above the 9-day moving average at $318. A break of this would likely see a retracement to support at $303.67 and trend line support at $306, as well asthe lower trend line at $299. Once again it is showing a strong support zone around $300. There is nothing too strong or high conviction around current levels. The RSI and CCI are trending with price and in neutral zones, the Moving Average Convergence Divergence (MACD) did give a crossover buy signal on Monday, but nothing else confirmed this. Indicators are far from perfect, so if one gives a signal it is always preferable to have confirmation from another indicator.

At the time of writing, the author has no position in any stock mentioned in this article and no business relationship with any company mentioned. The author has not received compensation for writing this article, other than from FXStreet.

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Facebook (FB) stages strong recovery near record highs as big tech recovers thanks to Fed doves - FXStreet