Monthly Archives: January 2022

Martha Minow and Aris Hadjipanteli| Guest columnists

Martha Minow is 300thAnniversary University Professor at Harvard University and former dean of Harvard Law School.Aris Hadjipanteli is a second-year law student.

Democrats and Republicans agree on almost nothing, not even what to call the incident a year ago at the Capitol. Was it an insurrection or a protest? But they do agree that the technology business is failing both its users and to the media industry from which it pulls so much of its content without paying for it. Its time for Congress to turn this rare consensus into action by passing the Journalism Competition and Preservation Act(JCPA) to tackle some of the consequences of techs monopoly power.

As of 2018, Google and Facebook together had nearly four times as much revenue as the entirety of the U.S. news media (TV, print, and digital). They have only grown tremendously since then. When Google users read a news story, 65 percent do not click through to the news publishers websites. Google thus disconnects news content from its sources and leaves the journalists without compensation.

For publishers to continue investing in journalism, they need fair payment in return for the significantvalue that their content provides Google and Facebook. The demand for their content remains high news organizations reach more than 135 million U.S. adults each week yet revenue produced by U.S. news publications has dropped by more than 50 percent in recent years. Readers continue to be interested in news, but the money is going to digital platforms that dont produce it.

Is it any wonder that the U.S. is now witnessing a mass exodus of journalists? Newsrooms have lost 26 percent of their positions since 2008.Local news outlets have especially suffered. During the past 15 years, more than 1,800 local newspapers have closed.Again, thats not a function of consumer sentiment. The public trusts its local newspapers more than national ones: 73 percent of U.S adults surveyed said they have confidence in their local newspaper, compared to 55 percent for national network news. Surveys show that most Americans are unaware of this crisis in local journalism.

Facebook and Google have not just used their outsized role in mediating news consumption to squeeze out newspapers. They have also altered the media landscape. To propel their own goals of addicting users, they devalue high-quality journalism in favor of provocative content and click bait that capture attention by exploiting human frailties. Facebook, according to inside and outside reports, propels untrustworthy sources and misinformation.

Rep. David Cicilline, the Rhode Island Democrat who chairs the antitrust subcommittee in the House, designed the bipartisan JCPA to give publishers new tools to right the balance in the media marketplace while also ensuring government stays away from selecting or censoring content. The bill would dramatically improve journalism companies ability to negotiate fair compensation with Big Tech: It provides a narrow safe harbor from antitrust liability that would let news publishers collectively organize and negotiate with big tech companies for fair compensation for the use of their content.

The law would guard against leaving out any news provider, regardless of size and regardless of viewpoint. And the law would ensure the big platform companies behave responsibly and bargain in good faith in part by prohibiting them from buying off individual publications at the expense of the larger group and in part through enforcing fair market value for the bargain. Equally important, the bill would ensure fair distribution of the resulting payments to small and medium sized papers.

The U.S. Constitution mentions only one private industry by name and does so to provide it explicit constitutional protection. That one industry is the press, so central to informing the electorate and allowing all residents to gain information needed for their health and welfare. The Constitution also authorizes Congress to act to advance the general welfare.

Big Tech threatens the general welfare by eviscerating the press. At this point, the power and responsibility fall both to Congress and to its bosses we, the people. Lets hope that 2022 sees action to protect the press, fair competition, and democracy.

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Opinion/Minow and Hadjipanteli: Congress must stop Big Tech's threat to the press - The Providence Journal

Fifteen years ago, on Jan. 9, 2007, I sat on the floor of a Las Vegas Convention Center entryway and pondered the iPhone. While I was running around the Consumer Electronics Show looking at the latest LG Chocolate, Steve Jobs was over at Macworld changing the world.

I'd been covering smartphones for three years by then, and they were complex gadgets for road warriors. Apple simplified the smartphone and made it a must-have for everyone.

This wasn't solely about Steve Jobs' brilliance. He struck when several other technologies were becoming available3G for the mobile web and capacitive touch screens for finger-friendly interfaces. And he worked without the legacy-software hangovers that Microsoft, Nokia, and Palm all struggled through from the first generation of proto-smartphones.

The iPhone has made a huge number of things easy, which were previously the province of techies. Mobile social networking and image sharing apps, the great 4G applications, generally came to the iPhone first throughout the early '10s, transforming how we use our devices, interact with our friends, and see our world.

But with that has come a stifling feeling of control. Two companies, Apple and Google, now control pretty much all the mobile platforms in the US; two manufacturers, Apple and Samsung, sell the vast majority of phones. Three platforms, Facebook, Twitter, and TikTok, manage much of our discourse.

There are a bunch of things I didn't get right in my early iPhone analysis because I was looking at the phone that was, not at the future. (Also, Steve Jobs tended to lie.) Apple's AT&T exclusive, especially, distorted the market in ways that made the phone look less dominant and less revolutionary than it was. When I reviewed the first iPhone, I think I properly understood the importance of the new interface, but I got stuck on its lousy phone-calling quality and how it didn't support many desktop Web standards. Apple eventually fixed the phone calls, and in the battle between Apple and Flash Web sites, Apple won.

It's no coincidence that Apple's AT&T exclusive years, 2007-2011, saw a tremendous flourishing of competing consumer smartphone ideas: Palm WebOS, BlackBerry 10, and Windows Phone all rose during the time when the iPhone was influential, but boxed-in. Releasing the iPhone into the wild demanded a single competitor as bold and focused as Apple, and so now here we are in our duopoly.

It's a long way from the joyous if confusing welter of options in 2007, and I think the iPhone's ease and power have a lot to do with this.

In a lot of ways, that iPhone release helped herald in our current era of "Big Tech," where a few huge platform companies control so much of our software and services. Lots of other factors made it happen, to be sure, but Apple did a few key things to push our tech world into its current centralized state.

Back before the iPhone, carriers dictated a lot of the software preloaded on phones. A lot of that software sucked! But there were also a lot of carriers, which meant a lot of diversity and decentralization.

From 2007, I can think of AT&T, Cingular, T-Mobile, Verizon; Sprint and Nextel with the same ownership but different networks; MetroPCS and Cricket, both then independent companies; US Cellular, Alltel, and Dobson Cellular One. That whole list except the Big Three is now gone.

Apple broke the carrier control over softwarein consumer's favor!by loading its own Google and Yahoo! relationships onto that first phone. Big Tech now dealt with Big Tech. And as the iPhone's influence spread, especially after it became available on all US carriers in 2011, Apple's sole power to make those deals grew.

The next step came with the iPhone 3G, which introduced the App Store. Before the App Store, people bought their (relatively few) apps either from several independent stores, like Handmark, or from their carriers. In 2007, there were many more US wireless carriers than today, which meant much less centralized control there, too.

Now, if you buy apps in the US, it's almost always from one of two places: Apple or Google. Other stores exist for the Android platform, but they're little used in the US except on Amazon's proprietary tablets.

I once read, somewhere, that humans' favorite form of government is a benevolent dictatorship. The problem is, those are hard to find because power corrupts. Apple's mostly benevolent dictatorship has been great for a lot of little guys over the years.

Having a single, clean API and a single store let software developers focus on making money, and it made apps easy to discover. Having a single interface shared by tens of millions of people let network effects spread the smartphone gospel, as people could share tips, tricks, and help with their friends and family.

Of course, dissidents don't fare well under even benevolent dictatorships. Folks who wanted features or customization that Apple wasn't on board with were largely cut out.

We're very much now living in a world the iPhone madea world of user-friendly, strictly controlled platforms in the grip of a small number of private companies.

And honestly, I don't see how that changes. The current froth over "Web3" and distributed organizations misses what made the iPhone great: simplicity and ease. Given a complex, difficult system like the new blockchain-based systems versus Apple's simple user interfaces, policies, and guidance, consumers will almost certainly pick ease of use.

When the first iPhone came out, I saw it as a revolution. Revolutions, history tells us, often resolve into monarchies. Will the wheel turn again?

Be sure to check outMy Reporting Notes From the Original iPhone Launch 15 Years Ago andThe Top 5 iPhones of All Time.

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15 Years Ago, the iPhone Created 'Big Tech' - PCMag

Every month, Facebook attracts 2.89 billion active users. Every minute there are hundreds of thousands of comments and status updates. Each could be discussing anything, including extremist views, or the sale of endangered wildlife across continents.

Social media platforms have enabled wildlife traders to connect as never before. Some operate legally, within the boundaries of international laws. Others are less scrupulous. Illegal traders use private chats and groups to bypass middlemen and exchange information on how to evade law enforcement. They use the ecosystem of public and private channels on social media platforms to sell wildlife as pets or luxury artefacts. Public posts enable traders to connect with a potentially vast global customer base, but arrangements for payments and shipping, and conversations about what else may be available, can be quickly directed to private messaging services.

Some platforms have introduced strong community standards prohibiting attempts to buy or sell endangered wildlife and private sales of live animals. But it takes only seconds to find, for example, endangered parrots for sale. Dig a little deeper and you can find posts featuring wholesale quantities of parrots captured from the wild for export, in what would be clear violations of international laws.

Tackling this is critical: the wildlife trade poses a major threat to global biodiversity. It can also contribute to the spread of infectious zoonotic (passed from animal to human) diseases.

In a recent study published in the journal Conservation Biology, we examined the online behaviour of wildlife traders based in West Africa. We wanted to explore how researchers and moderators can use information scattered across different parts of social media platforms to detect posts selling wild birds.

Some of the trade we studied is permitted under international agreements. But its scale and scope, which is discussed in a forthcoming parallel study, has conservationists concerned. Trade in wild parrots from West Africa has also been linked to the global spread of infectious diseases. Some of the exporting countries in this study, Mali, Cte d'Ivoire and Senegal among them, are working to contain highly pathogenic strains of avian influenza.

Working with ornithologists, conservationists and legal analysts, we were able to identify over 80 different species in trade, some of which are highly threatened and prohibited from commercial trade under international law. Species ranged from parrots and hornbills to songbirds and doves.

We detected 400 social media posts made by known bird traders featuring or promoting birds in trade.

The majority (80%) did not contain explicit text that could be used to determine that the posts were intended to facilitate the sale of wildlife, violating platform community standards.

The application of simple algorithms searching for words such as for sale, or the names of target species, would help detect some of this activity. But admins in some closed Facebook groups have advised their members to avoid using certain key words. This means a significant amount of trade would pass under the radar of key word algorithms.

Read more: Reptiles: one in three species traded online and 75% aren't protected by international law

However, our research found that the triangulation of information available elsewhere both within and beyond social media platforms could be used to make powerful inferences about how posts facilitate trade, violate platform standards and signpost illicit activity. Such information may be found in elements such as images, profile descriptions or comments. This is why its important that experts be involved in monitoring social media for potentially illegal trade: they have the knowledge to identify the species involved and contextualise the activity within international and domestic regulations.

Different wildlife products are bought and sold in different locations online and in different ways. There is no one size fits all solution for detecting wildlife traded online, let alone all illicit and harmful goods.

Read more: Five reasons people buy illegal wildlife products and how to stop them

Our study, however, establishes a framework for thinking about how different sectors of illicit or harmful activity can be understood and monitored and moderated more effectively. Careful analyses, led by experts in specific fields, can help in the design of algorithms and approaches to moderation tailored to the situation.

Our study happened against the backdrop of major global discussions about how best to regulate social media platforms. New regulatory legislation is being planned or coming into play in major economies including China, the US, the EU, Australia and the UK, aimed at cajoling and coercing big tech to do more to protect users from harmful content.

Regulators are mindful of the need to balance the harms and benefits of the brave new world ushered in by social media. Designing moderation practices that make a meaningful impact on the vast amount of wildlife traded on the internet is no trivial undertaking. But it is clear that greater action is needed.

We propose that the solutions lie with tech firms working closely with subject matter experts to design moderation practices tailored to the trade in different species across regions. Regulators, tasked with determining if tech firms are fulfilling their duty of care (as proposed in the UKs draft Online Safety Bill), should similarly engage with subject matter experts to ensure that tech firms approaches are fit for purpose.

Carefully designed algorithms that can intelligently triangulate across multiple data sources will be part of the solution. Manual analysis will also be critical. In our study, knowing which species were in trade and the relevant local legislation was critical for understanding legality. But such tasks lie beyond the abilities of artificial intelligence and machine learning.

Collaborations and partnerships between tech firms and subject matter experts remain in their infancy. But cleverly designed legislation, savvy regulators and investment from tech firms are needed to drive solutions forward at pace.

Alisa Davies, a wildlife trade specialist at the World Parrot Trust, contributed to this article and was a co-author of the research it is based on.

Excerpt from:

Big tech, regulators and conservationists must unite to tackle online wildlife trade - The Conversation CA

A few years ago, an ambitious young entrepreneur made a big claim: she was developing technology that could diagnose illnesses from a drop of blood.

lizabeth Holmes of Theranos dazzled investors with her pitch, dressing up like Steve Jobs and talking a perfect game.

As we now know, there was no ground-breaking technology. Holmes, who was faking it rather than making it, has now been convicted on several counts of fraud.

The episode, which captured the imagination of the world, has shone the spotlight on a darker side of startup ethics how far can you stretch your startups claims of potential when looking for money? Is it still okay to fake it until you make it?

Joining Adrian to compare stories and discuss the issue is seasoned startup advisor Donal Cahalane.

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The Big Tech Show: Learning lessons from Theranos - is it okay for startups to fake it until they make it? - Independent.ie

For something that doesnt exist yet, web3 sure is getting a lot of people riled up.

Its on the tip of tongues these days in Silicon Valley. Tech scions are fighting about web3 on social media. Investors last year shoveled $30 billion into startups premised on it. And bright engineers are leaving cushy jobs at companies such as Facebook to get in early.

The very idea that theres a new frontier on the internet even has people paying millions of dollars for digital tokens themed around cartoon apes.

But so far, web3 has been more like a buzzword thats designed more to confuse than to illuminate, and its causing something like an identity crisis for the tech industry with implications for the rest of us.

Its short for Web 3.0. Its sometimes spelled with a capital W, but usually not.

The thinking goes that Web 1.0 was the first World Wide Web that took off in popularity through web browsers in the 1990s, and that Web 2.0 followed a decade later with the rise of mega platforms like Google and Facebook.

Most mentions of web3 treat it as an umbrella term, a vision of the future of the internet where ownership and power are more widely distributed. This vision is based on transparent digital ledgers known as blockchains (the technology that underpins cryptocurrencies), and it supposes that Big Tech will be rivaled by more democratic forms of internet governance where you, the user, will get a say maybe even a vote in big decisions about how platforms run.

But that definition strikes many people as pretty vague.

Tech magnate Elon Musk, the worlds wealthiest person, was recently at a loss when he tried to figure out what web3 was. Seems more marketing buzzword than reality right now, he wrote on Twitter last month.

In short, many technologists (not to mention plenty of users) worry that a handful of tech CEOs have a lot of power. The likes of YouTube, Instagram and Twitter are the hosts for a huge proportion of online content, including political speech, and those companies get to decide who gets banned. They also hoard huge amounts of data and take an increasing share of Silicon Valleys revenue.

Story continues

Its a situation that no one except maybe stockholders is really happy about, and it wasnt supposed to be this way.

We are creating a world where anyone, anywhere may express his or her beliefs, no matter how singular, without fear of being coerced into silence or conformity, activist John Perry Barlow wrote in his 1996 Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace.

Software engineers have been toying for years with alternatives. Think of the standardized, open nature of email, but for social media. So far, though, services like Mastodon, which is similar to Twitter but without a central server, havent caught fire. Twitter is tinkering with its own distributed social media project called Bluesky.

If web3 is unproved, why the optimism?

The cause of the optimism is the development of blockchain technology and cryptocurrencies. Bitcoin, Ethereum and other digital forms of money are the most concrete examples that exist of an all-online, no-one-in-charge, blockchain-based system.

And as the perceived value of those coins took off last year, with the total value of the market passing $3 trillion in November, so has the expectation that the decentralized model can be applied to other areas of online life. If Bitcoin can work, so the thinking goes, why not other blockchain-based financial products like insurance or loans?

Crypto is not only the future of finance but, as with the internet in the early days, is poised to transform all aspects of our lives, Andreessen Horowitz, a venture capital firm thats betting big on web3, said last year.

The firm defines web3 as the internet owned by the builders and users, orchestrated with tokens. And a token, in this sense, is like a deed of ownership for a small piece of the internet, whether thats an object in a video game or anything someone else might value, like art.

Maybe well all soon own lots of tokens, each one for something different and all rising in value over time, or so the thinking goes.

Thats what web3 evangelists say. But one high-profile tech founder recently threw cold water on all the preaching.

You dont own web3, Jack Dorsey, co-founder of companies Twitter and Block, tweeted last month. Instead, he said, the investor class will own it, as usual. It will never escape their incentives. Its ultimately a centralized entity with a different label.

Dorsey, who days earlier had been Exhibit A in a Wall Street Journal column about web3 revolutionaries, said in a burst of tweets that he had never been a part of web3 and he called for massive investment in free, open-source software. (Dorsey is nevertheless a Bitcoin booster who has said it may help to deliver world peace.)

His posts angered a few people. Marc Andreessen of Andreessen Horowitz blocked Dorsey on Twitter, causing a mini soap opera in the tech world.

But the early winners of web3 may in fact be big businesses. Non-fungible tokens that people are buying and selling as art including those cartoon ape tokens need to be traded in a marketplace somewhere, and OpenSea, one such marketplace, was recently valued at $13.3 billion. (Andreessen Horowitz is an OpenSea investor.)

A number of venture capital firms now specialize in crypto investments, and they put more money into cryptocurrency and blockchain startups last year than they ever had before, according to estimates from Crunchbase and Pitchbook, two research firms.

One venture capital firm, Coinbase Ventures, affiliated with cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase, made 100 different investments last year, according to Crunchbase. The startups include an Indonesian website for buying cryptocurrency and an online marketplace for buying video clips of gaming streamers. Like startups generally, most are just beginning to explore business models.

Remember those tokens were all reputedly going to have with web3? Each of those might come with voting rights.

The best example so far is a group that formed in November with the idea of crowdsourcing a pot of money to buy a rare copy of the U.S. Constitution at auction. The term for this kind of group is decentralized autonomous organization (DAO), and the group was called Constitution DAO. That off-the-wall caper failed, but if the group had succeeded, its plan was to vote on a plan to publicly display the document.

Another recently formed DAO plans to buy a golf course, with contributors getting voting rights as in a country club.

The appeal of web3 the money or the idealistic talk, or both is big enough that top engineers are jumping ship from so-called web2 companies.

Two of Facebooks top engineers on its blockchain and digital currency project left the company to join Andreessen Horowitzs crypto team in October, CNBC reported. They cited the investment firms track record of advancing the entire crypto ecosystem a more expansive mission than they had at Facebook. And last month, a vice president at Facebooks parent company Meta left for OpenSea.

Its not exactly a brain drain, but the pace seems to be picking up.

The future is always uncertain, but the tech industry is generally on the leading edge and the buzz around crypto is unmistakable, whether its a bubble or not.

Benedict Evans, a London-based tech investor, wrote this month that the crypto world is characterized by both irrational, religious hype and straw-man attacks. And he said it has helped to shift the center of gravity in tech away from, say, smartphones or social media.

Crypto is so big and potentially important, and yet so vague and so early, that we cant even agree what to call it, he said, without using the term web3.

There are other hot tech sectors including gaming, autonomous cars and virtual reality, Evans said but theres likely little that could cool off web3 hype in the immediate future without a regulatory intervention from Washington or elsewhere. Other countries, including China, have cracked down on Bitcoin mining, for example.

Still, a few more actual products would help the cause of web3 proponents.

So far: mostly debate. The Biden administration is weighing cryptocurrency regulations, and in December, Congress held hearings on possible regulation of cryptocurrencies and by extension, all the potential tokens of web3.

What do you say to the folks that say this doesnt seem like a new financial system per se but an expansion of the old one? asked Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y.

One of last weeks witnesses, Brian Brooks, was a former Trump administration official whos now CEO of blockchain tech company Bitfury. And other former government officials are being snapped up by none other than Andreessen Horowitz as part of a lobbying blitz to rewrite regulations around cryptocurrency.

Andreessen Horowitz is also predicting voters may favor pro-crypto candidates. Web3 has emerged as a major political force, it said last month, based on one survey it paid for.

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Why Big Tech's best and brightest are jumping ship to web3 - Yahoo News

TCS, Infosys, WiproIndias big tech giants hire 51,000 in Q3 alone  |  Photo Credit: iStock Images

Three of India's largest IT companies TCS, Infosys, and Wiproannounced their December quarter (Q4FY22) results on Wednesday. All three reported healthy jump in financials propelled by business growth across geographies and segments and new deal wins.

However, high levels of attrition, christened as the Great Churn or the Great Resignation in the post-Covid setting, continue to plague the industry amid heavy demand for tech talent in an all-pervasive digital transformation push.

Out of the three companies that announced their results for the quarter ended December 31, 2021, Salil Parekhs Infosys seemed to be at the receiving end of the great resignation, witnessing an attrition rate of 25.5% followed by Wipro at 22.7% while TCS managed 15.3%. To mitigate the situation, the three companies collectively hired 50,994 employees during Q3.

TCS hired 28,238 new employees during the period, Infosys hired 12,450 and Wipro added 10,306 new faces to its workforce.

Jobs & promotioms galore

TCS: TCS said it crossed a new milestone in its diversity journey in Q3, with the number of women in its workforce crossing 200,000. The company added 28,238 employees on a net basis, taking the total number of employees to 556,986 as on December 31, 2021.

Milind Lakkad, TCS, Chief HR Officer said the company also hired 34,000 freshers in Q3 in addition to 43,000 rookies it hired in H1more than the companys full-year fresher hiring numbers in prior years. It also gave promotions to 1.1 lakh workers during the period with plans for 40,000 in Q4

On the talent retention side, we continue to be the industry benchmark. By continuing to invest in our people, giving preference to internal candidates for the most exciting open positions, providing global deployment opportunities, fast track career paths linked to learning, and promotions to over 110,000 employees, we have been able to retain our best talent and overcome supply-side challenges, said Lakkad.

Infosys: Indias second-largest IT company plans to hire 55,000 freshers for FY22 as part of its global graduate hiring program.

Its total headcount as of December 2021 was 2,92,067 as compared to 2,79,617 in the previous quarter and 2,49,312 as of December 2020.

Wipro: At 22.7%, the company reported a spike in attrition as compared to 20.5% and 15.5% witnessed in second and first quarters. However, the company added 10,306 employees during Q3, taking its overall headcount to 231,671 employees. Over the last year, Wipro has added 41,363 employees to its headcount on a net basis. During the quarter, 10,306 new employees were hired by the company.

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TCS, Infosys, WiproIndias big tech giants hire 51,000 in Q3 alone - Times Now