Daily Archives: May 9, 2022

The Department of Homeland Security revealed last week that it was creating a Disinformation Governance Board to distribute "best practices" for countering disinformation. The new board joins a growing choruswhich includes President Biden and former President Barack Obamathat views disinformation disseminated on social media as one of the biggest threats facing our democracy.

But there's a much bigger threat to democracy coming out of Silicon Valley and it's this: America's largest financial and tech increasingly act as independent countries, routinely exporting jobs, money and technology to our most significant global adversary. These companies, their assets, and increasingly their workers, exist wholly outside of America's democratic borders and under the auspices of China's anti-democratic ones. And they are bringing these undemocratic pressures back home with them, subverting our democracy from within.

Apple Computers, once the ultimate expression of American entrepreneurial innovation, epitomizes this new corporate mindset. With ever-increasing dependence on Beijing, the company is much more in line with Xi Jinping's promised "China dream" of greater wealth and technological supremacy than it is with the American Dream. The company may be based in Cupertino, but it produces two-fifths of its products in China, four times more than the share made in the U.S., and despite rising concerns about China's ascendancy, Apple is doubling down on its support for the emerging authoritarian world-state.

In 2016, Apple negotiated a $275 billion deal with China that guarantees the firm's continued dependence on the Middle Kingdom, with additional promises to share vital technology with our most important global adversary. The company recently announced plans to source some of its chips in China, and Apple also contributes to and profits from China's ever-expanding surveillance system.

But the growing divergence between Apple's interests and America's is not unique. As economic power consolidates here, some companies, notably Wall Street and the tech giants, have grown so large and powerful that they have become in essence their own nation states.

By 2020, the five largest tech companies had total revenue amounting to half of those of all state governments combined. In January this year, Apple's market cap was larger than the GDPs of all but seven countries. But this is not exceptional. Microsoft's market cap is larger than that of Canada, Brazil, Russia, Korea, or Mexico. Amazon does about the same.

But these companies don't employ masses of Americans to make their money; production is generally shifted elsewhere. Those non-elite jobs which do exist are often dangerous, short-term and driven by relentless monitoring. And even when it comes to tech workers, Big Tech goes elsewhere for (cheap) talent: Some 75 percent of Silicon Valley's workforce are not U.S. citizens. Many have H-IB visas, which make their holders essentially indentured servants, brought into the U.S. on short-term contracts to do work for tech companies that evade the burden of paying wages as high as they would to American workers.

Meanwhile, businesses like Apple have profited handsomely from China's industrial expansion. Throughout the period between 2004 and 2017, our reliance on Chinese inputs doubled. According to the Economic Policy Institute, this has cost as many as 3.7 million jobs since 2000.

We saw the high cost of this dependency during the pandemic, when we could not even get basic medical supplies, and you can see it now in the seemingly endless shortages that continue to bedevil the economy, going a long way toward causing the staggering inflation we're experiencing.

Yet rather than increase our capacity to meet our own needs, Apple, Microsoft and the other tech giants and Wall Street firms are much less interested in American resilience than in benefiting from "a Chinese century."

It's China's future they are buildingwhile undermining ours.

This comes out in bizarre hypocrisies that go beyond resources and economics. Grandees will pay lip service to Black Lives Matter and the progressive race industry out of one side of their mouths, then happily look the other way when it comes to gross violations of human rights in China. Ray Dalio, founder of the giant Bridgewater Associates hedge fund, infamously dismissed China's repression of its Uyghur population and its crackdown on democratic sentiment in Hong Kong as the result of a "sacrosanct" desire for sovereignty. Facebook and Google partner with the Chinese Communist Party whose priority is to track down and punish dissenters. Here in the U.S., systemic racism is detected in the most minute form, but massive repression in China produces only excusesand assistance.

Similarly, the Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) requirements pushed by Wall Street on U.S. companies reflect a de-nationalized globalism; the enlightened oligarch's "net zero" demands, celebrated by the media and many progressives, effectively place greater burdens on U.S. firms to cut carbon while demanding little from China. This bolsters the Middle Kingdom's notoriously high carbon supply chains in a country that emits more greenhouse gases than the United States and the EU combined.

The hypocrisy of financial firms like Blackrock calling to shut down U.S. energy while sending cash to China, which continues to build new coal plants, seems extreme even by Wall Street standards.

Given the size and might of these firms, only powerful entities like individual states or the U.S. government can curb their power. They mustthough it won't be easy; Wall Street has long wielded power in both parties, and tech firms are now among the most powerful lobbies in Washington, employing lobbyists on both the Right and Left. They recently dragooned a host of former defense and intelligence officials to sign a letter arguing that these companies are essentially "national treasures" and should not be subject to anti-trust or other regulatory curbs.

Not surprisingly, many of these worthies, including former Obama Defense Secretary Leon Panetta and former Trump Director of National Intelligence chief Dan Coats, have close ties with firms that count Big Tech among their biggest clients.

Curbing the powers of Apple and the other Chinese satraps and bringing productive industry home can only be accomplished by looking out for fundamental American interests. This is not socialism or ultra-nationalism but common sense: Big companies are not intrinsically "post-national" and some, like Intel, are investing heavily in U.S. production. They should be encouraged to do so and rewarded for it. Returning to anti-trust enforcement would also provide running room for startups and help slow what one analyst described as "the transformation of disruptive tech companies into rent seeking monopolies."

Only a bipartisan opposition to Big Tech on the grounds of U.S. interests will achieve crucial goals like restoring competition and fending off Chinese assaults on this critical sector. And we've been missing the mark because our conversation about how to curb Big Tech has been too polarized, pitting a censored Right against a woke Left that enjoys censorship and fears any threats to it.

To stand up against such wealth and power will require a melding of the two populist movements, the right-wing nationalists and the traditional, pro-worker Left. Traditional progressivesnot the woke Astro-turf version funded by oligarchsmust eschew intersectionality if they wish to make common cause with an increasingly Republican working class. Similarly, Republicans need to recognize their constituents are not instinctively pro-business; if in 2020, 57 percent of Republicans said they were satisfied with big business, today it's only 31 percent.

While the oligarchs of both parties may struggle to understand the threat of the globalism embraced by Apple and other companies, the American people are wise to it. Public opinion toward China has cratered in the past five years from over 50 percent positive to barely 20 percent. Already both parties now include factions that favor more robust efforts to meet China's mounting challenge in science and technology, such as the U.S. Innovation and Competitiveness Act, which passed the Senate by a wide margin.

Unfortunately, the Biden administration has produced distinctly contrary signals by seeming to favor anti-trust and backing U.S. competitiveness but also pushing the appointment of pro-Beijing acolytes and weakening patent protection.

But this is more than the story of one administration. It's far more fundamental. We are at a crossroads right now with a major question that every American must answer for his or herself: Are we a nation with an economy, or just a convenient address for a few large, global companies who act essentially as nation states?

A democracy cannot work as a concert played by a few privileged players; it only works as symphony that includes the diversity and breadth of the citizenry.

It's time for the U.S. to reign in its Big Tech companies. They, not "disinformation," are the biggest threat to our democracy.

Joel Kotkin is the Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University and executive director of the Urban Reform Institute. His new book, The Coming of Neo-Feudalism, is now out from Encounter. You can follow him on Twitter: @joelkotkin.

The views expressed in this article are the author's own.

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The Independent Republics of Big Tech Are the Biggest Threat to Democracy - Newsweek

Hello, and welcome to Protocol Policy! Today, were talking about tech platforms responsibility in fighting misinformation in a post-Roe world. Plus, the Biden administration strikes a deal with ISPs, and Trump loses a court battle.

It took about a day from the leak of the Supreme Courts Roe decision for internet sleuths to decide theyd figured out whodunnit.

It started with a Twitter thread, which sent searches for the clerks name soaring moments later. Pretty soon, posts about the alleged leaker were lighting up Facebook. According to social media monitoring firm Brandwatch, mentions of the alleged leakers name (which were not sharing here) spiked by 7,300% within a few days.

The Supreme Court marshal is now investigating the leak, and its anyones guess whether this social media-fueled theory will turn out to be true. The question is: What responsibility do platforms have in the event that its not?

The Roe decision is about to become techs next big infowar and charting a path forward isnt going to be easy. Take the leaker posts.

Its not just about the leaker. Its also unclear where platforms will draw the line when it comes to medical misinformation about abortion. Its already popping up in ads.

Its no big surprise that tech giants arent interested in drawing bright lines around one of the most polarizing issues in America. Meta, Twitter and Google all directed Protocol to their existing policies but as in all things, your interpretation of how those policies apply to abortion misinformation probably depends a lot on your views about abortion.

None of these questions are exactly new. Pro- and anti-abortion groups have been fighting it out on social media for years, and fighting it out with picket signs for even longer. But with in-person clinics expected to evaporate across wide swaths of America, the ability for people to get reliable information about abortion online has arguably never been more critical.

Twenty ISPs will dramatically cut costs for low-income Americans after striking a deal with the Biden administration. The providers, including AT&T, Comcast and Verizon, will offer high-speed plans for no more than $30 a month. That deal, combined with the $30 monthly broadband benefits in the infrastructure law, means eligible Americans should be able to get high-speed service for free.

A federal judge dismissed Trumps censorship lawsuit against Twitter, which argued that the company had violated the former presidents First Amendment rights. Plaintiffs are not starting from a position of strength, the judge wrote.

Tesla is suing a former engineer, alleging he stole confidential information about Teslas efforts to build an in-house supercomputer. The company says the engineer then tried to pass off a dummy computer for inspection.

Oral arguments began in Texas appeal of a ruling against its social media law. The law was already blocked on the grounds that it was unconstitutional after Texas was sued by NetChoice and the Computer and Communications Industry Association.

New polling shows that American voters do not see regulating tech companies as a priority. Their top concerns are strengthening the national economy (38%), followed by controlling inflation (37%). By contrast, only 5% of respondents prioritized regulating tech companies.

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The fossil fuel industry is pushing a new (factually dubious) narrative on Facebook. According to an analysis by Media Matters, some of the industrys most popular recent posts focus on the need for energy independence to justify more drilling, even though the U.S. is a net exporter of liquid natural gas. Only two of the 100 posts analyzed had climate misinfo labels attached.

Could labeling junk news discourage people from reading it? Not likely, according to new research from NYU. The study found that rating news outlets by reliability didnt nudge most people to more reliable outlets unless they were among the most voracious readers of unreliable news to begin with.

Google is blocking paid app downloads in Russia, citing payment system disruption. While sanctions prohibit certain financial transactions, free apps and other free Google services are still available there.

COVID-19 restrictions in China have forced Apple to rely on local engineers to oversee its manufacturing operations in the country. The company had previously sent U.S. engineers to China to do the work, but limits on foreign visas during the pandemic prohibit that kind of travel.

An analysis of Russian state media shows how the country is using its vast propaganda network not only to mislead Russian people about the war in Ukraine, but also to confuse them to the point of not knowing what to trust.

Former U.S. TikTok employees say they averaged 85 hours of meetings a week while working for the company, which has adopted a grueling work environment, according to the Wall Street Journal. If I knew that working at TikTok would cost me this much, I would never have taken the job, one former employee wrote in a Medium post.

Uber is cutting costs and treating hiring as a privilege, according to a leaked email to employees from CEO Dara Khosrowshahi. Khosrowshahi wrote that the changes are a response to a seismic shift in the market. Meta made a similar declaration about hiring last week.

New polling shows voters' top tech policy concerns are cybersecurity and data privacy. Only 7% of respondents prioritized antitrust action and 1% prioritized changes to app store rules. In fact, the majority (58%) believe the pending tech antitrust legislation would cause more harm than help to consumers.

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Elon Musk might want to think twice about banning bots on Twitter: Theyve been awfully good to Tesla, after all. According to The Washington Post, researchers at the University of Maryland found one account in particular, @danrocks4, that has posted about Tesla, on average, every three hours for more than six years.

Thanks for reading see you Wednesday!

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Techs not ready for the post-Roe infowar - Protocol

Microsoft news recap is a weekly feature highlighting the top Microsoft news stories of the past week. Sit back, grab some coffee, and enjoy the read!

Microsoft introduces new Learn Educator Center

Microsoft's Learn Educator Center, previously Microsoft Educator Center, has been introduced. Whilst the new Learn Educator Center is very similar to its predecessor, in that it has the same content, it is different in that it has custom pathways geared, which is aimed at helping students develop professional skills equipped for the 21st-century.

Fortnite comes to Xbox Cloud Gaming for Free on Android, PC, iOS, iPadOS

In an interesting twist, Fortnite has arrived on Xbox Cloud Gaming, allowing people to stream Fortnite to a whole array of devices across Android, PC, iOS, and iPadOS. But this is particularly interesting because it allows iOS and iPadOS users to play Fortnite, despite it having been removed from the App Store.

Apple, Google and Microsoft come together to expand support for passwordless sign-in

Microsoft has teamed up with other tech giants to work to expand supportfor "a common passwordless sign-in standard created by the FIDO Allianceand the World Wide Web Consortium."

HoloLens not dead yet, as Microsoft partners with Volkswagen on "Moving Platform" mode

A partnership between Microsoft and Volkswagen has been formed, as Microsoft announced a new "Moving Platform" mode for its HoloLens 2 headset. The new mode aims to train drivers on how to handle challenging road conditions through the use of holograms that show up in the real world.

That's it for this week. We will be back next week with more Microsoft news.

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Microsoft news recap: Fortnite arrives on Xbox Cloud Gaming, teams up with other tech giants to expand passwordless sign in, and more - OnMSFT.com

In February, Markham McIntyre agreed to leave his job as the vice president of the Seattle Chamber of Commerce to lead the Seattles Office of Economic Development (OED) as its new interim director.

In a city facing record economic and social upheaval, he knows he has his work cut out for him, from downtown crime and the return of workers to the thorny relationship with Amazon. Given the size of the citys tech community, he also knows that some of the solutions to the citys issues will be found through an improved relationship with that community.

McIntyre recently spoke with GeekWire to explain why he took the gig, what hed like to fix first, working with the tech industry, and more. The interview was edited for brevity and clarity.

GeekWire: Why did you take the job?

Markham McIntyre: Because I deeply love this city. Im a Seattleite born and raised. Coming from the Chamber, I have some ideas about how to improve OED. This is just an incredibly crucial moment for Seattles future as we come out of the pandemic and start returning to the office and start figuring out the economy, what the opportunities are, and making sure that the city is doing its best to try and make sure that Seattle continues to be an area of prosperity. Its just an incredible opportunity for the for the city for the region, and for our residents.

What do you think the city needs to do to better communicate and innovate with the tech community?

If we can be more clear about what the city can and cant deliver, then we can bring other partners to the table whether its at the private sector through philanthropy or other kinds of public bodies into those shared objectives and common problem solving. The citys got to be willing to get uncomfortable in those conversations because I know theres a lack of trust sometimes between the city and our tech community.

Weve got to repair that trust. Weve also got to be willing to talk about some of these thorny, difficult issues. Whether theyre social or economic, issues that dont necessarily have easy answers or cant be solved with a quick product or an app. Workforce diversity, wage disparities, and affordability issues. We should have those conversations and be willing for it to be a little bit messy. I think thats going to be crucial for us to stay at the forefront of kind of the innovation economy.

Do you feel like that is a priority for the first few months in office? Or do you feel like youre going to be more focused on post-pandemic economic recovery?

Weve got to do both. Weve got certain industries and certain businesses that still require some level of emergency relief and recovery type efforts. And then weve got some businesses and industries that made it through the pandemic much better and are well poised to take off. In the OED, weve got to have strategies that address both. Again, were not going to do that in a silo and expect that the city or this office is going to be able to do it alone. Weve got to do that through partnerships, through communication, and through trust building with some of those other players throughout the region.

Speaking of such, some downtown companies are not bringing their workers back to the office, citing crime as a concern. Other tech companies have relocated to Bellevue, saying its a panacea for business. How does the Office of Economic Development respond to this? The businesses are not really speaking to problems that are specifically within your purview.

The citys got to be willing to get uncomfortable in those conversations because I know theres a lack of trust sometimes between the city and our tech community.

Economic recovery for the region and for the state wont happen until weve got demonstrable improvement on the streets in downtown Seattle. Downtown Seattle is a huge economic driver for the state and to the region. And its really the symbol of our prosperity.Until we have progress, both on the public safety and also on issues around people experiencing homelessness, its going to be really hard to say that were recovering, or that were turning the corner into a city thats thriving again.

Were working with our partners. Were working with the mayors office, the Seattle Police Department, and the Department of Neighborhoods on what we can do and how we can play a positive role. We can communicate what businesses are saying to us about what theyre hearing and what their needs are. Weve got to get a handle both on the short-term acute problems that people are dealing with right now like broken windows for businesses and problems with public safety around the transit corridors.

But weve also got to stay focused on the long-term solutions about getting people more economically stable with pathways for upward mobility. I see the OEDs role as helping coordinate with those other departments that have a more direct role in public safety.

How important is it to get people back in the office in downtown Seattle?

I think its pretty darn important. Not just for those employers. I think its also important for those main-street businesses that are going to rely on foot traffic as people return to the office. Looking at it as an ecosystem, that foot traffic drives a lot of small business prosperity. Without that there, it does create a gap. I dont know that everyones going to be returning to the office five days a week. Were going to go through a little bit of a messy period as people adjust to returning to the office, and figuring out what that means for some of those main street businesses. But I think its vital to the future of downtown.

Lets talk a little bit about the natural tension within the clients of your office. What is good for Amazon isnt necessarily good for a small company and vice-versa. How do you deal with the inherent tension of serving the big tech companies in town, the skyscraper-established businesses, and the smaller ones as well?

Businesses are unique and you cant just group them by size and assume that it really explains what their needs are or where theyre going. Different-sized businesses are going to need different things and different levels of resources. How do we help small businesses grow into mid-sized businesses? And then how do we help those mid-size businesses grow into future giants? We tend to focus a lot on startups. And we tend to focus a lot of time and energy on the big guys. Theres less attention paid to some of those folks in the middle. Thats super important and an area Id like the OED to explore what those opportunities look like.

Id also say that for OED, we also need to recognize that a lot of those larger businesses have staff that deal with public policy or community affairs or government affairs. A lot of the smaller businesses dont. Weve got to be intentional about how we bring some of those smaller businesses to the table and make sure that they have a voice in some of these economic development discussions, knowing full well that theyve got businesses to run. And its not necessarily their top priority to come sit at our table. Weve got to figure out a way to make sure that theyre included so were not (only dealing with) the big guys who have staff that are paid to do this stuff.

We cant pit our large employers against our small employers.

What should the tech community be doing to work better with OED?

Thats a two-part answer. I think actually it does start with us, because I think the city doesnt have great trust with our businesses generally, or the tech community specifically. I think weve got to figure out how to repair that trust. And I think that starts with us listening, and communicating better, who we are, who we serve, why do we serve them and how. So I think weve got a role to play in repairing that relationship.

But what I need from the tech community is true engagement. I would love to see more public-private partnerships, where we can actually work on some of these shared objectives, and bring to bear what the tech community does really well and bring to bear what the city does really well and play to our strengths.

Give me an example of a partnership between the city and the tech community that you think addresses an existing problem?

Ill give you an existing partnership that I think is a good example of what Id love to see more of: theHousing Connectororganization. Thats a great example where the city and the county were having trouble interfacing with landlords because theres a little bit of a trust issue. But the city came to the Chamber and said, Hey, weve got some funding to think about how we set this up differently. Can we work together to do this? We said yes, because we had a bit more trust with the landlords. Very quickly it became apparent that Zillow also cared deeply about this issue, and it had some technical expertise to bring to the table as well as resources.

By using the city and county funding to catalyze this new-look organization and then Zillow coming in and being able to supercharge it with both talent and their resources, its now housing people here locally and in Pierce County and its growing into potentially a national model. And it exists outside of either the citys or Zillows portfolio; it spun off and now its a healthy organization unto itself. As I said earlier, its using the leverage, the resources from the city and the county, and then the expertise from Zillow to build something thats durable and can scale up.

Would you like to see the tech community also identify those partnership areas, or do you feel like thats OEDs job?

I think theres this weird thing in Seattle, where the tech community gets kind of othered. And the reality is, Im pretty sure the tech community wants what most Seattleites want, which is high functioning governments, beautiful and safe neighborhoods, lots of lovely restaurants and kind of vibrancy to the city. I think theres a huge opportunity, theres plenty of shared objectives that we could find.

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Q&A with Seattles new economic development chief on working with the tech industry - GeekWire

Written by Technically Media CEO Chris Wink, Technical.lys Culture Buildernewsletter features tips on growing powerful teams and dynamic workplaces. Below is the latest edition we published. Sign up to get the next one.

Masks in one, none in the other. Limitations on businesses in one; economy open in the other, the founder told me. Now this.

The this is a leaked memo, first reported by Politico, that seems to confirm what has been discussed for months: The Supreme Court will likely overturn its landmark Roe v. Wade decision that secures the right to abortion across the United States. A 59% majority of Americans say abortion should be legal in all or most cases, according to the Pew Research Center, and nearly two-thirds of women do. But if Roe is overturned, as many as 23 US states would institute bans, according to the Center for Reproductive Rights, including 13 that have so-called trigger laws which would immediately make abortions illegal entirely, or severely curtail them in all but the most extreme circumstances.

That set off a slew of company responses. Amazon will reimburse its employees up to $4,000 of abortion-related travel expenses, according to a memo leaked to Reuters. Citi, Yelp and Uber will, too, and other financial services giants like Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan Chase are considering their own policies.

To say that many of these companies employees could afford their own travel misses the point. These are acts of employer branding, of company leaders betting this is the bold and declarative stance that most of their current and future employees will appreciate. Its fueling a battle between big tech companies and Republican lawmakers. Anti-abortion policymakers are threatening to test the legality of abortion travel bans, and Florida Sen. Marco Rubio introduced a bill that would bar companies from deducting any travel-reimbursement expenses from their federal taxes.

All this makes for a thorny spot for employers, especially for tech companies that want to grow the percentage of women on their staff. Nearly one in four American women are estimated to have an abortion in her life. The number of abortions in the United States has been declining for decades, primarily due to better education and fewer overall pregnancies, but it remains a core issue for many regarding womens health. In 2019, almost 630,000 abortions were conducted, according to the CDC.

Where those abortions take place would change with the overturn of Roe v. Wade, and could have implications for tech employers. Before its own trigger law was passed, more than 50,000 abortions took place in 2020 in Texas, which hosts fast-growth Austin. Florida, with on-the-rise Miami, has also further curtailed abortion. These laws are especially challenging for poorer women and their families, who are least able to travel for a procedure and so unlikely to move. Tech workers and other higher-salary professionals have considerably more options at their disposal, though. Would overturning Roe v. Wade precipitate a wave of politically inspired relocations?

It would fit a national trend. Though Americans are moving less for jobs, increasingly we do move for politics. Its been called The Big Sort, and its one of many factors said to contribute to our nations era of political polarization. Redfin, the real estate brokerage, predicted that in 2022, people will vote with their feet, moving to places that align with their politics.

Such variety in abortion access across states could continue the trend. That goes both ways politically. According to an analysis, one in 10 people moving to Texas during the pandemic was from increasingly progressive California.

Opening that office in Texas or Florida for the warm weather and low income taxes will increasingly come with polarizing consequences. Those states are also at the vanguard of climate change resistance and anti-abortion sentiment.

What is an employer to do?

If abortion access is especially important to your company, make that clear. If this isnt a key issue, it may still be important enough of a national conversation to acknowledge it with your staff. You may still want to send a message that conveys leadership is monitoring how changing legislation could impact your employees lives.

Longer term, for some, this may be another point for remote work. Last year, music streaming service Spotify announced its Work from Anywhere initiative. Last week Airbnb followed suit. Clearly neither were primarily designed to avoid the polarizing dynamics of where employees live, but it may allow them to avoid these messy politics. What about the rest? US Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis popularized the idea that US states are laboratories of democracy that each state ought to try new policies and whatever results in greater prosperity wins out. Demands for company activism have surged in recent years. Increasingly, individual tech workers and entrepreneurs will be forced to navigate it all.

This will prove fraught for tech hubs. Austinites often pride themselves on being a weird blue dot, and something important happens when states mix a range of political attitudes. Austin will endure, but The Big Sort may further spread innovation density.

That CEO with a Texas office told me the companys leadership team initially responded to that states abortion trigger law with an eye roll because they viewed it as primarily election-year politicking. Obviously yesterdays news is much more troubling, the CEO said. Id expect us to follow closely.

Link:

Can a tech hub like Austin survive the overturn of Roe v. Wade? - Technical.ly

Many platforms, and the creators who spoke on their behalf, stressed to marketers the importance of developing long-term partnerships with creators and allowing creators the creative freedom to authentically deliver brands to their audience.

You have to have a long-term view on how youre building a relationship with a creator and their communities. Brands should stop chasing individual trends and focus on the creators and community where these trends come from," said Earnest Pettie, trends insights lead at YouTube.

While YouTube won't make its formal pitch to advertisers until later in the month, during the week traditionally owned by TV networks, YouTube executives still appeared on the NewFronts stage to lend some insight into the creator economy.

TV Upfronts and Newfronts 2022 calendar

The biggest change I've seen in the last few years in regards to creators is two-fold, Tara Walpert Levy, VP of YouTube, Americas, said in an interview. First, the number of creators, and two, the breadth and types of content they are making.

Creators also present an opportunity for brands to more authentically reach diverse consumers and learn from these communities.

Paula Castro, multicultural creative business partner at Google, gave the example of Bobbi Brown using A/B testing with its influencers. The cosmetics brand found that creators more often used the word color instead of shade when talking about foundation. As a result, Bobbi Brown changed marketing materials to use color. Brands should go beyond marketing script, the cultural voice is powerful, Castro said.

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Below Ad Age has rounded up the creator-related announcements from this week.

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How digital publishers are using creators to try to steal TV ad dollars - AdAge.com

Today's technology landscape is dominated by a small cadre of massive corporations with the likes of Meta, Amazon and Google snapping up fledgling startups before they can grow into potential competitors, ignoring labor laws that don't suit their immediate needs, and generally operating like the dystopian corpro-villains Johnny Mnemonic warned us about. Traditionally, state regulation has acted as a gentle brake against American industries' more problematic tendencies, however the speed at which modern computing and communications technologies advance has overwhelmed the government's capacity to, well, govern them.

In their new book, Access Rules: Freeing Data from Big Tech for a Better Future, Viktor Mayer-Schnberger, Professor of Internet Governance and Regulation at Oxford, and Thomas Ramge, author of Who's Afraid of AI?, argue passionately against the data-hoarding practices of today's biggest tech companies and call for a more open, equitable means of accessing the information that these companies have amassed. One such method, explored in the excerpt below, involves addressing Big Tech's monopoly power directly, as the Biden administration has in recent years, though the efforts have not been particularly effective.

UC Press

Excerpted from Access Rules: Freeing Data from Big Tech for a Better Future by Viktor Mayer-Schnberger and Thomas Ramge, published by the University of California Press. 2022 by Thomas Ramge and Viktor Mayer-Schnberger.

Early into his term, President Biden appointed Tim Wu, who had argued in favor of breaking up Facebook and written popular books on the dangers of Big Tech market concentration, to the National Economic Council as a special assistant to the president for technology and competition policy. Putting one of the most outspoken advocates of Big Tech trustbusting into a top advisory role is a powerful signal the Biden administration is taking a far more confrontational course.

Wu isnt alone. His appointment was followed by the choice of Lina Khan for chair of the Federal Trade Commission (FTC). Khans youth she was in her early 30s when nominated belies her intellectual power and political credentials. A professor at Columbia Law School like Wu, Khan had authored influential papers on the need to fight Big Techs unchecked power. And she had explained why existing antitrust law was ill equipped to deal with Silicon Valley platform providers. But Khan isnt just a Big Tech critic; she also offered a radical solution: regulate Big Tech companies as utilities, much like electricity providers or the venerable AT&T before telecom deregulation. With Khan at the FTC and Wu as advisor having the ear of the president, Big Tech could be in serious trouble.

Not just antitrust experts serving in government like Tim Wu and Lina Khan fear that the monopolistic structure of American tech dominance could turn into its Achilles heel. Think tanks and advocacy groups on both left and right have been joining the critics. Disruptive entrepreneurs and venture capitalists such as Elon Musk and Peter Thiel regard the well-rehearsed dance of Big Tech and venture capital with increasing skepticism, concerned that the intricate choreography is thwarting the next generation of disruptive founders and technologies. Taken together these voices are calling on and supporting regulators and legislators to prevent the most obvious cases of large companies removing potential competitors from the market by acquiring themcases comparable to Facebooks takeover of Instagram or Googles acquisition of Waze. And they call on venture capitalists to take on the role for which Joseph Schumpeter originally conceived this class of investment capital, the role that the venture capitalists on Sand Hill Road in Menlo Park fulfilled up to the first decade of this century: financially support the bringing to market of new, radically better ideas and then enable them to be scaled up.

The antitrust tide is rising in the United States. And yet its questionable that well-intentioned activist regulators bolstered by broad public support will succeed. The challenge is a combination of the structural and the political. As Lina Khan herself argued, existing antitrust laws are less than useful. Big Tech may not have violated them sufficiently to warrant breaking them up. And other powerful measures, such as declaring them utilities, require legislative action. Given the delicate power balance in Congress and hyper-partisan politics, its likely that such bold legislative proposals would not get enough votes to become enacted. The political factions may agree on the problem, but they are far apart on the solution. The left wants an effective remedy, while the right insists on the importance of market forces and worries about antitrust action micromanaging economic activity. That leaves a fairly narrow corridor of acceptable incremental legislative steps, such as post-acquisition lockups. This may be politically palatable, but insufficient to achieve real and sustained success.

The truth is that the current game based on exit strategies works only too well for everyone involved, at least in the short term. The monopolists continue to increase their rents. Entrepreneurs get rich quickly. Venture capitalists reduce risk by optimizing their investments for exiting through a sale. And government? It too earns money on every Goliath buying David transaction. Preventing such transactions causes annoyance for everyone involved. Any politician mounting a serious attack on Big Tech USA exposes themselves to the charge of endangering the great successes of American technology companies on global marketsa charge few politicians could fend off.

Despite renewed resolve by the Biden administration to get serious against Big Tech overreach, substantial change still seems elusive in the United States. In contrast, European antitrust authorities have been far more active. The billion-dollar fines lobbed at US Big Tech by Commissioner Vestagers team surely sound impressive. But, as we mentioned, most of them were reduced on appeal to an amount that the superstar companies with huge cash reserves and skyrocketing profits could easily afford. The European Parliament may not suffer from hyper-partisanship and be willing to strengthen antitrust rules, but their effectiveness is limited by the very fact that almost all Big Tech is not European. At best, Europeans might prevent US Big Tech from buying up innovative European start-ups; the necessary laws for this are increasingly being enacted. But that will do little to break Big Techs information power.

The challenge faced by European regulators is shared by regulators around the globe, from the Asian Tigers to the Global South: how can national regulators effectively counter the information might amassed by Silicon Valley superstars? Sure, one could prohibit US Big Tech from operating. But that would deprive the local economy of valuable services. For most nations, such binary disengagement is not an option. And for nations that to an extent can and have disengaged, such as China, their homegrown Big Tech companies confront them with similar problems. The huge fines levied on Alibaba in 2021 surely are surprising for outside observers, but they, too, are targeting symptoms, not the root cause of Big Techs power.

Sooner or later, regulators and legislators will have to confront the real problem of reining in Big Tech: whether we look at Draconian measures like breakups or incremental ones like fines and acquisition lockups, these target the symptoms of Big Techs information power, but do little to undo the structural advantages the digital superstars possess. Its little more than cutting a head off Hydra, only to see a new one grow.

To tackle the structural advantage, we have to remember Schumpeter. Schumpeters nightmare was that the capacity for innovation would become concentrated within a few large companies. This would lead to a downward spiral of innovation, as major players have less incentive to be disruptive and far more reason to enjoy market power. Contrary to Schumpeters fear, this concentration process didnt occur after World War II, mainly because entrepreneurs had access to abundant capital and could thrive on disruptive ideas. They stood a real chance against the large incumbents of their time, a role more than a few of them took on themselves. But money is no longer the scarce resource limiting innovation. Whats scarce today is access to data. More precisely, such a scarcity is being artificially created.

In the data economy, were observing a concentration dynamic driven by narrowing access to the key resource for innovation and accelerated by AI. The dynamic therefore turns on access to data as a raw material. Economic policy to counteract market concentration and a weakening of competition must focus on this structural lever.

If we want to avert Schumpeters nightmare, preserve the competitiveness of our economy, and strengthen its capacity for innovation, we have to drastically widen access to data for entrepreneurs and start-ups and for all players who cant translate their ideas into innovations without data access. Today, they can only hope to enter the kill zone and be bought up by one of the digital giants. If data flows more freely through broader access, the incentive to use data and gain innovative insights from it increases. Wed turbocharge our economys capacity for innovation in a way not seen since the first wave of Internet companies. We would also learn more about the world, make better decisions, and distribute data dividends more broadly.

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Hitting the Books: US regulators are losing the fight against Big Tech - Engadget

In the last few years, the volume and value of digital data has skyrocketed. Amidst ongoing digital transformation, modern organizations and nation states are increasingly reliant upon digital platforms as part of their operations, with intellectual property predominantly existing in a digital form. Whilst digitalization has brought considerable opportunity, theres no reward without risk: the theft of data is a very real one that organizations are facing on a daily basis.

About the author

Rob Elliss, VP of Sales, EMEA at Thales.

Cyber-attacks are on the rise, with our recent research showing that one in five businesses have paid or would pay a ransom for their data. Its clear that the data, hardware, and software that we rely upon and create are becoming increasingly high-risk, and therefore increasingly protected, commodities.

With The World Economic Forum estimating that over 92% of all data in the western word is stored on servers owned by US-based companies, theres been an escalating anxiety over the location and ownership of such data. Indeed, the fear of foreign entities compromising sensitive data has meant that ensuring it doesnt fall into the wrong hands without permission has become a heightened priority for many.

Whats more, until recently the misaligned jurisdictions of the EUs GDPR law and the US FISA act invalidated the US-EU Privacy Shield, the legal protection umbrella that formerly enabled global enterprises to safely work and transfer data between the European Union and the United States. Although The European Commission and the United States recently announced a new Trans-Atlantic Data Privacy Framework to sufficiently manage such data exchanges, compliance within this ever-changing situation remains an overwhelming challenge. Indeed, with 1,800+ global compliance laws in force, the protection, privacy, and exchange of data sits within an incredibly murky landscape at present.

This general nervousness and surge in regulation in recent years has ultimately prompted a shift towards localization and the home ground containment of data. Tech giants are already building localized data centers to circumnavigate geographical barriers to business, whilst also benefitting from having the ability to store and access their data within their own country providing complete oversight. With this data management trajectory set to continue, the issue of data sovereignty and digital destiny remains a multifaceted one.

Indeed, organizations must navigate the rollout of cloud technologies and the UKs divergence from GDPR as both challenges to and enablers of localization. Amidst this backdrop, therell not only be a move towards data sovereignty, but also an expectation of operational and individual sovereignty as a pre-requisite of data exchange, with consumers and organizations alike becoming progressively data-literate.

Its no news that the last few years have seen a substantial increase in cloud investment across organizations and nation states, with it almost unanimously considered a future-proof technology. In fact, 32% of IT leaders recently stated that around half of their workloads and data resides in external clouds. But to support the shift towards the localization of data, there will be an even greater push for investment in the cloud infrastructure of nation states, driving forward their ongoing digital transformation journey.

Hosting data within native cloud networks and data centers, rather than outsourcing from outside of the UK, will give both governments and businesses alike that much-desired autonomous, centralized control over their own databases. This will empower them to avoid the complexities of cross-border data exchange to their greatest ability.

The issue of data sovereignty has become a hot topic of considerable debate as of late. As a result of Brexit, the UK has become increasingly interested in the effort to take independent control of how data is used and stored. However, any new regulation would need to allow for free, easy, and secure transfer of information across international borders. With the UK still set to pave its own way, this could mean a huge overhaul of current business processes, and companies with data in both the EU and the UK will need to rethink how they tackle compliance.

With the globalization of organizations on the rise, and the number of distributed workforces higher than ever (partly as a result of the pandemic), CIOs are grappling with how to secure their business data across borders. The challenge is therefore not only where the sensitive data resides geographically, but also who has access to it.

This complex landscape throws into question the access allowances for international and remote employees residing across borders, the deployment of select data in certain regions, and the ability to physically move data, contracts, and hardware across boundaries.

With businesses unsure whether third party cloud service provider can sufficiently ensure compliance with data residency requirements, many will turn to in-house containment and will begin to migrate their workloads to reside within their own organization.

For those who dont have the capacity to make this move, the pressure will be on for cloud providers and tech vendors to enable their clients to have adequate operational and software sovereignty of their data. Organizations will demand complete visibility and control over their data, as well as oversight of where its located. From a software sovereignty perspective, organizations will strive to store and run their workloads without dependence on a providers software to maximize performance, flexibility, and overall resilience.

With consumers becoming increasingly data-savvy and more aware of the challenges at stake, individual data sovereignty is on the horizon. Individuals will become increasingly empowered to take control of where their data is and how it is used, strengthening the correlation between identity and data protection.

Some steps in have already been taken in this direction, GDPR already provides individuals with a certain amount of power over their personal data, as well as holding organizations to account for what they do with an individuals data. However, this is likely only the beginning. In a predominantly digital world, individuals are increasingly aware of the immense value that their data holds, and the importance of protecting it.

We list the best cloud storage providers here.

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Data sovereignty: The move toward localization - TechRadar

When it comes to tech partners, it would appear that Microsoft is the top choice for local government.

Thats the impression created by an analysis of last years Digital Cities and Digital Counties surveys run by the Center for Digital Government* (CDG). The surveys, which included participation from large and small county and city IT departments across the country, asked respondents to rank their top five IT partners for the year.

CDG then took those responses and aggregated them, giving higher weight to vendors ranked higher on each respondents list.

Heres a sampling of the type of work each company did with the survey respondents.

*The Center for Digital Government is a part of e.Republic, which is Government Technologys parent company.

Ben Miller is the associate editor of data and business for Government Technology. His reporting experience includes breaking news, business, community features and technical subjects. He holds a Bachelors degree in journalism from the Reynolds School of Journalism at the University of Nevada, Reno, and lives in Sacramento, Calif.

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Here Are the Top 5 IT Partners for Local Governments - Government Technology