Monthly Archives: September 2022

Are we on the cusp of yet another internet revolution? We are, according to technology experts gathered in Berlin for a conference organized by digital learning platform ada.

New technology could overhaul the web as we know it in the coming decade, they said both when it comes to how it is built and how it looks.

On a technical level, tech idealists hope that blockchain technology will help build a new decentralized architecture underlying the internet. In this new "web3" era, the idea goes, users rather than a handful of tech giants would have control over their data, privacy, and what they create online.

"This reinvents how the internet is set up in the backend,"Portugal-based author Shermin Voshmgir said. "It is a complete paradigm shift."

At the same time, companies around the world are working on technology to revolutionize the way we navigate the web.

In October 2021, CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced to rebrand his tech behemoth as "Meta"

Their vision: Rather than scrolling through websites or apps, people will soon stroll virtually through a three-dimensional version of the internet dubbed the "metaverse" a digital landscape of sorts where users can work, buy things or meet their friends, and where physical and digital realities converge.

"It will be a walk-in internet, so to speak,"said Constanze Osei, who leads the society and innovation policy efforts for Germany, Austria, and Switzerland at US tech giant Meta, formerly known as Facebook.

But as companies like hers pour billions into developing that next generation of the internet, digital rights activists caution that the firms will eventually want to cash in on their investment and that this could thwart efforts to give users more power over their digital selves.

"The metaverse could become the most invasive surveillance system ever created,"said Micaela Mantegna, an Argentinian lawyer and digital rights researcher.

To understand where the next generation of the internet could go wrong, it helps to look at how we got here.

As early as the 1960s, researchers began connecting computers around the world. But it wasn't until the 1990s that the invention of the world-wide-web and web browsers made the network available to anyone who was able to afford an internet connection.

Since then, the web has upended every aspect of society, from the way people do business to how they find information or interact with each other.

"Everything has changed because of the internet,"said Miriam Meckel, CEO of ada and professor of corporate communications at the University of St. Gallen in Switzerland. "And the internet itself has changed, as well."

During the web's first phase, people browsed the web from their desktop computers and navigated it mainly via search engines. That changed in the 2000s with the emergence of social media and mobile internet, giving rise to the online world as we know it today.

At the core of this "web2,"there are online platforms such as Meta's Facebook and Instagram or, more recently, messaging services like Telegram.

Those platforms have helped dissidents in authoritarian regimes organize protests or give marginalized groups a voice. But revelations such as the 2018 Cambridge Analytica scandal have shown that they are also used to spread hate, amplify disinformation and sway democratic elections.

Meanwhile, a small number of Big Tech companies like Meta or Google's parent company Alphabet have come to dominate their respective segments of the internet economy.

To shift power back to individuals and communities, people like author Shermin Voshmgir have proposed rebuilding the web with decentralized public blockchains databases that are searchable by everyone and shared on computers around the world.

Such a "web3"would be collectively controlled by users rather than a few powerful gatekeepers, the idea goes making it easier, for example, for creatives to make money with the work they publish online.

Now, the multi-billion question is:Will this plan succeed?

Not everyone is convinced: Jrgen Geuter, a Berlin-based internet theorist known online under the pseudonym "tante,"doubts that a decentralized architecture alone is enough to shift power back to users. He pointed to cryptocurrencies, a fieldwhere already today, a few companies are making millions by developing the software necessary to access the underlying decentralized network.

"Technology is never neutral,"Geuter said.

To prevent the metaverse from being controlled by just a few influential players, experts say users should be able to interact with each otherno matter where in the metaverse they are or how they're using it. That would also be a change fromtodays web, where apps are mostly "walled gardens"that do not allow usersto send messages or money between different apps, for instance.

"There is an understanding that things need to change from web2,"acknowledged Meta's Constanze Osei. She pointed to a new initiative announced in June, with which her company, along with other tech giants and standards-setting bodies, want to discuss interoperability standards. But some big players such as US tech giant Apple are notably absent from the effort.

The metaverse could grow into a $8 trillion market by 2025, according to estimates by investment bank Goldman Sachs

At the same time, there is a certain irony in the fact that the world's largest tech giants say they want to invest in building a new internet architecture that could, eventually, curb their market power.

And some observers warn that once the companies will try to capitalize on that investment, some of the ideals of a decentralized web3 architecture could end up as collateral damage.

"The corporate version of the metaverse will be an evolution of capitalism,"Argentinian lawyer Micaela Mantegna said.

What's more, she added, the immersive nature of the metaverse could exacerbate some of the problems that plague today's web2, from disinformation to online harassment. Some users have already reported being sexually harassed in early versions of the metaverse.

And Mantegna warned that, as technology evolves, the devices used to access the metaverse could at some point begin monitoring sensitive information like the brain activity of users.

The metaverse could become "the greatest surveillance system ever," warns lawyer Micaela Mantegna

To protect such data and prevent surveillance on an unprecedented scale, governments and regulators must come up with rules for the age of the metaverse, she said.

First efforts are underway: Earlier this week, the European Union announced a global regulation initiative for next year.

But Mantegna said that governments needed to hurry up to avoid the mistakes of today's internet a web that, as she put it, "was designed with good intentions but bad implementation."

"We don't want the metaverse to become the bad sequel of the internet,"she said.

While you're here: Every Tuesday, DW editors round up what is happening in German politics and society. You can sign up here for the weekly email newsletter Berlin Briefing.

See more here:

What will the internet of the future look like? - DW (English)

If youve spent enough time in the tech industry, youve no doubt heard the term rest and vest. For years, a subset of senior technologists at some of the nations tech giants were content to sit back, do comparatively little, and still take home enormous paychecks.

Once she was in rest-and-vest mode, this engineer spent her timeattending tech conferences, working on pet coding projects and networking with friends, quietlydeveloping an idea for her next gig, a startup, is how Business Insider described life for one (anonymous) Facebook engineer on rest-and-vest and this was in 2017, when the biggest tech companies were pulling down enormous profits and swallowing up significant market-share.

On Blind, which surveys anonymous technologists on a range of issues, a number of companies have been cited as ideal rest-and-vest spots. Microsoft and Google are excellent retirement homes, a Facebook employee wrote in one thread. Others called out Adobe and Yahoo.

For the biggest tech companies, rest-and-vest has some strategic advantages. At least in theory, a resting-and-vesting senior engineer is less likely to jump ship for a big rival or a startup; it might cost the company quite a bit in salary and stock, but at least it keeps knowledge and talent firmly in-house.

But this trend might be coming to an end. At Meta (the new name for Facebook, just in case youve been sleeping under a rock for most of 2022), which faces economic headwinds and increased competition from TikTok, CEO Mark Zuckerberg has made it clear that employees are expected to perform their jobs in the most aggressive, efficient manner possible. I think some of you might decide that this place isnt for you, and that self-selection is OK with me, Zuckerberg reportedly told staffers during an internal call. Realistically, there are probably a bunch of people at the company who shouldnt be here.

At Google, any rest-and-vest culture is potentially at risk due to CEO Sundar Pichais new drive to boost productivity. Sometimes there are areas to make progress [where] you have three people making decisions, understanding that and bringing it down to two or one improves efficiency by 20 percent, he recently told the audience at the Code Conference in Los Angeles,according to CNBC.Whether that means layoffs is up to interpretationbut its clear he intends for all Googlers to do more, including senior managers.

Once a few big tech companies do something, others tend to follow. Despite the strategic advantages to rest-and-vest, companies might decide they want their senior technologists burning the proverbial candle from both endswhich means those technologists may need to ramp back up to maximum productivity (or find another job).

Membership has its benefits. Sign up for a free Dice profile, add your resume, discover great career insights and set your tech career in motion. Register now

See more here:

Is This the End of Big Tech's 'Rest and Vest' Habit? - Dice Insights

Its been just over a year since Salesforce closed its monster $27 billion deal for real-time messaging app Slack. The deal, which was one of the largest acquisitions in software history, was Salesforces attempt to enter the lucrative collaboration market dominated by the likes of Zoom, Google, Microsoft and others.

Slack not only gives Salesforce access to millions of potential new users, but it helps drive engagement amongst existing customers. While Salesforce may be the de facto CRM for many organizations, relying on a separate platform (like Webex, Microsoft or Zoom) for collaboration takes users outside of the Salesforce ecosystem, said Futurum Research analyst Shelly Kramer. Thats why Salesforce has been heads down since the acquisition, trying to integrate Slack seamlessly with its Sales and Service clouds and across its full suite of products.

As one of Salesforces most visible products, Slack will be front and center at this years Dreamforce. The biggest Slack-related announcement at Dreamforce will be a feature called Slack canvas, built from Salesforces shareable document software Quip. Its another step toward incorporating Slack into the wider Salesforce family of products, which is critical in a highly competitive communication software space.

Slack has stopped publicly releasing its user numbers, but even with its most recent daily active user total in 2020, 12 million, Microsoft Teams was eating its lunch at 75 million. Teams reported 145 million users in 2021. Then there are challenges from Google, which has its own established workplace suite, and Zoom, which has recently placed a larger emphasis on its chat function.

Im pretty scared if Im [Salesforce co-CEO Marc] Benioff with Slack, going into a recession, said Wing Venture Capital partner Zach DeWitt. I think Microsoft is going to be very aggressive on distribution and pricing over the next few years here.

With Slack, Salesforce made a huge bet on the collaboration space. But with steep competition from Microsoft and others, is an underutilized tool that brought Salesforce co-CEO Bret Taylor into the company the missing link that could help the $27 billion bet pay off?

Nate Botwick, formerly VP of product with Quip, oversaw the process of building Quips software into Slack. The fruition of that project is Slack canvas. Canvases will be collaborative documents within channels that compile files, checklists and other important information that could previously just be pinned as messages by users. Theyll link to workflows like requesting a work phone, and pull data from Salesforce Sales Cloud.

It is a more persistent space to organize around this preexisting organization of channels, said Slack senior vice president of product Ali Rayl. This is a powerful thing we get with channels, which is that the right people are already there.

Quip-turned-canvas has its roots in the Salesforce-Slack acquisition. Taylor co-founded Quip in 2012, and Salesforce acquired the product in 2016. Fast forward a few years and, according to Botwick, Slack CEO Stewart Butterfield approached Salesforce with interest in acquiring Quip.

Incorporating collaborative documents within Slack had been a part of Slacks original pitch deck when it was first getting up and running, Botwick said. But as we all know, those talks ended with Salesforce acquiring Slack instead of Slack acquiring Quip.

Both products independently had this vision of teams being able to work with both a canvas-like product and a messaging product together, but each product independently focused in different areas, Botwick said. Between Stewart and Brett, it was one of the things that they were both most excited about in this acquisition.

Quip moved into Slacks domain after the deal closed. The rest of Salesforces products, such as Sales Cloud and Service Cloud, are still external to Slack but integrated through thin work, as Rayl called it. For example, you can file a quick Salesforce expense report without leaving Slack. You're not provisioning people to a bunch of different systems just so they can access one chart or one ticket, Rayl said.

The connection to the broader Salesforce suite is a benefit for Slack, as its where employees are already working. But it's a play Microsoft also has, to an even greater degree.

Ross Rubin, principal analyst at Reticle Research, said companies are absolutely using both Salesforce and Microsoft products. The question is which ones theyre paying for, as Slack and Teams offer some features for free.

There are many companies that are Microsoft shops, Rubin said. Do they need both? Teams can be a more general platform, whereas Salesforce might build functionality into Slack thats heavily integrated into CRMs, for example.

Futurum Researchs Kramer put it more bluntly: Microsoft has pretty much won the collaboration wars, she said.

Salesforce knows it has a long road ahead if it wants to prove Kramer wrong in the collaboration space. Although co-CEOs Taylor and Benioff have called the companys integration of Slack a key priority, it hasnt all been smooth sailing. During earnings calls Benioff has alluded to integration challenges and realignments within the Slack organization.

Although there were a number of standard internal operational changes that come along with any big merger, such as moving from Slack Workday to Salesforce Workday, Rayl was quick to point out that nothing has changed about the way Slack thinks about its product.

We still have the same goals for Slack. We still build the product in the same way, said Rayl. Now the focus is, How do we just expose all of Salesforces products in the best possible way inside of the Slack that we're already planning to build?

The true measure of Salesforces strategy, however, will depend on Slacks ability to add new users and also convert free users to paid ones. But Slack is cagey about disclosing the number of users it has. The company declined to share that information with Protocol ahead of Dreamforce, although it's a data point the company has shared in the past.

Since Slack doesnt disclose its user numbers, it's not clear how many Salesforce customers are actually using Slack as opposed to, say Microsoft Teams. Slack leaders are confident the company is differentiated, but it's still expanding into the same areas as its competitors.

I see Slack in the same boat as Zoom, Kramer said. Both companies are in an uphill battle to build true collaboration hubs that you live in all day, rather than a place you pop into for a meeting or a message.

Regardless, Salesforce executives seem pretty happy about Slacks performance so far.

This is the fourth consecutive quarter weve seen more than 40% growth, said Taylor during Salesforces first-quarter earnings call. And moving forward, Slack is expected to contribute about $1.5 billion towards Salesforces full year revenue guidance.

But if Salesforce customers arent actually using Slack for their work, the vision of becoming a digital headquarters that can compete with the likes of Teams and others begins to break down. Without data on the number of users, it's impossible to tell how close to that shaky reality Slack is.

Link:

Is Bret Taylors Quip the secret weapon that can help Slack beat Microsoft Teams? - Protocol

End-to-end encrypted email provider Tutanota finally got a fix last month from Microsoft for a registration issue that had affected users who were trying to sign up to the tech giants cloud-based collaboration platform, Teams, using a Tutanota email address but only after complaining about the problem publicly.

TechCrunch picked up its complaint last month.

In a blog post confirming the resolution yesterday, Tutanota writes that Microsoft got in touch with it within a week after media outlets such as this one raised the issue with Microsoft. It had been complaining about the issue through Microsofts official support channels since January 2021 without any resolution. But after the oxygen of publicity arrived the problem was swiftly fixed last month. Fancy that!

While its (finally) a happy ending for Tutanota, its co-founder Matthias Pfau makes the salient point that this situation remains an entirely unsatisfactory one for SMEs faced with the market muscle of powerful platforms which have at best a competitive disinterest in swiftly attending to access issues and other problems affecting smaller businesses that need fair interfacing with their platforms to ensure they can properly serve their own customers.

While the issue has been resolved pretty quickly by Microsoft after the right people contacted us following the media attention, we still believe that this example shows why we need better antitrust regulations. It is not fair that a Big Tech company can ignore a small companys request to fix an issue that effects its users for months, and is only interested in fixing the issue after it received bad publicity because of this, he writes.

After all, not every small company has the option to go public, possibly because the media will decide their issue is not worth talking about or because they simply do not have established media contacts and find it hard to get through to the right people.

While we are very happy that this particular issue has now been fixed for all Tutanota users, we still believe that there must be a better way for companies to contact Big Tech and request fixes from them one where they can not simply answer to the request with Sorry, fixing the issue you are having is not feasible for us.

Platform fairness is one issue that the European Commission has been attending to in recent years but apparently not with enough of a flex to ensure all SMEs are being treated attentively by cloud giants.

Tutanota is not alone in experiencing issues with Microsofts support response to its complaint. Another SME, the browser maker Vivaldi, got in touch following our report on Tutanotas issue saying users of a webmail service it offers had reported a similar issue on Azure, another Microsoft cloud computing platform. It told us that users of its Vivaldi.net email service had been given information and possibly access to other vivaldi.net users Azure accounts. Which sounds, well, suboptimal.

The reason is that vivaldi.net is handled as a corporate domain, not an email provider domain. Microsoft has refused to fix the problem, claiming it is by design, a spokesperson for the company explained last month, adding: We have also had similar reports about other services.

Its frustrating that in 2022 to find Microsoft blatantly continues to engage in anti-competitive practices, they added.

After TechCrunch raised Vivaldis complaint with Microsoft, the SME got back in touch with us to say surprise! it had suddenly had fresh attention from the cloud giant to its complaint We are having a meeting with them this week. So they have woken up after two years. Lets see what comes out of this, its spokesperson told us a few weeks ago.

We followed up this month to see if Vivaldi has also had a resolution but at the time of writing were still waiting on a response.

Update: Vivaldi told us the meeting with Microsoft moved in a positive direction and the issues are partially fixed. Vivaldi.net is being treated as a personal email address and thats what we expect. Although its been fixed for new signups, for existing accounts that were created before they made their changes, we dont think theyve done anything yet, they also said. Hopefully, all such issues should soon be resolved.

We also asked for an update from Microsoft but havent heard back yet. But the tech giant previously said: Were in touch with Vivaldi.net to look into their concerns around data and will take action as needed to ensure that customer data is handled properly and any issues are addressed appropriately.

One thing is clear: These two complaints are just the tip of the iceberg. (Just the social media chatter around our Tutanota reporting includes a similar complaint about IBM Cloud and another that Microsoft also blocks self hosted emails from its virtual private servers without any sort of explanation, so you can conveniently get an email address from them as well, with the complainant accusing its business of always been forced dominance for e.g.)

Whats a whole lot less clear is whether or not current (and incoming) EU regulations are up to the task of protecting SMEs from cloud giants power to be totally disinterested in resolving platform problems that affect smaller competitors.

Back in 2019, the European Union agreed a regulation the blocs lawmakers claimed was pioneering in this regard aimed at tackling unfair platform business practices, with the Commission saying they wanted to outlaw some of the most unfair practices and create a benchmark for transparency. The regulation, which came into force just over two years ago, included a requirement that platforms set up new avenues for dispute resolution by mandating they have an internal complaint-handling system to assist business users.

However the EUs platform-to-business (P2B) trading regulation, which was targeted at so-called online intermediation services which provide services to business users that to enable them to reach consumers, had a heavy focus on ecommerce platforms, search engines, app stores and rental websites etc (and barely any mention of cloud computing). So its not clear whether services like Microsoft Teams and Azure are intended to fall in scope despite online intermediation itself being a broad concept.

If the regulation is supposed to apply to cloud services, the poor experiences of SMEs like Tutanota having core issues affecting their users essentially ignored via official support channels indicates something isnt working. So, at very least, theres a failure of enforcement going on here. The lack of clarity around whether the P2B regulation even applies in such cases also obviously doesnt help. So there does seem to be a communication gap if not an outright loophole.

The EU has further digital regulations incoming that are squarely targeted at ruling how platforms do business with others, with the goal of ensuring open and contestable markets via proactive enforcement of fair terms and conditions. Most notably the Digital Markets Act (DMA), which will apply to the most powerful gatekeeper platforms.

However this regulation is not yet in force application will start next year and it will require individual gatekeepers and core platform services to be designated before requirements apply, which will take many months in each case. So, well, its not going to be a quick fix.

Additionally, there have also been some concerns about whether the new regime will robustly apply to cloud giants productivity and enterprise services to other businesses. So some legal fuzziness around cloud services may persist.

Asked if its confident the DMA will be an antitrust game-changer, a spokeswoman for Tutanota was doubtful it will prove a silver bullet to resolve the baked-in power imbalance between platforms and SMEs. A better way to resolve such issues is needed, she told us. Possibly the DMA will address this but consequences in cases of negligence on the gatekeepers side must be in place; otherwise it will be easy for them to continue to ignore small competitors.

As long as Big Tech companies do not have to fear any kind of consequence be it bad publicity or drastic fines they will not be interested to invest into fixing issues of competitors users which from their business perspective is understandable. This is exactly why we need better legislation in this regard.

We expect the DMA to be a good first step into this direction, though it will probably not address all issues, she added.

The Commission was contacted with questions on these issues but at the time of writing it had not responded. Well update this report if we hear back.

Read more from the original source:

On cloud platforms and SME antitrust complaints - TechCrunch

When Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai spoke at a tech conference in Los Angeles last week, he pointed to the threat his company faced from a plucky upstart that had come from nowhere.

None of us were talking about TikTok three years ago, Pichai told the audience at the Code Conference, describing the popular Chinese social media app as one of Alphabets emerging rivals.

A day later, when Snap CEO Evan Spiegel mentioned TikTok at the same conference, he seemed to be talking about a completely different company. To hear Spiegel tell it, TikTok was a colossus, spending billions and billions and billions of dollars to grab market share and steal users from apps like Snapchat.

The two seemingly contradictory assessments underscore the extent to which the Chinese video-sharing app has captured the attention, and the fears, of Silicon Valleys most powerful players. They may not agree on the specific nature of the TikTok threat, but the tech industrys dominant companies are united in their belief that their young competitor from overseas is a clear and present danger unlike any theyve faced before.

With more than 1 billion users, TikTok has risen to the top tier of the worlds internet social media services in just a few short years. Its ownership by ByteDance, a Chinese tech company with ties to the government, has added a geopolitical twist to what might otherwise have played out as a standard shake-up in the competitive landscape.

Throughout Silicon Valley, the subject of TikTok is pervasive; at conferences and in company meetings, everyone has an opinion.

Its CCP spyware, and we are insane to allow it to operate in the USA[it] has nothing to do with competition, everything to do with influence and security, the entrepreneur and angel investor Jason Calacanis messaged Fortune when asked about Big Techs recent comments about TikTok.

The algorithm on TikTok could easily tilt a couple of percentage points in an election here in the USA, Calacanis said. Or tilt sentiment toward the Ukraine war, or the independence of Hong Kong and Taiwan.

TikToks ties to China have drawn scrutiny in the past, of course, most famously when former President Donald Trump sought to have the app banned in the U.S. That effort ultimately failed when a federal judge blocked the proposition. To many observers at the time, Trumps anti-TikTok crusade was an overreaction driven as much by personal grievance as by purported security concerns.

But as TikToks momentum has continued to grow, and as relations between the U.S. and China have remained tense, the tech industry has become increasingly agitated over the video-sharing app. To try to blunt TikToks progress, the established tech companies have at times looked erratic, shifting from denouncing the company one day to imitating it the next.

In March, the Washington Post reported that Facebook parent company Meta had hired a Republican consulting firm to spread stories raising concerns about TikToks Chinese ownership.A few months later, in August 2020, Meta launched Reels in the U.S. (on Facebook and Instagram), a short-form video product virtually identical to TikTok. YouTube, the video website owned by Google, and Snap have each released their own TikTok equivalents, called Shorts and Spotlight, respectively.

None of those copycat features appear to have replicated the success of TikTok.

On Monday, the Wall Street Journal reviewed an internal research document that showed Instagram users watch Reels for a total of 17.6 million hours each day, which is less than one-tenth of the 197.8 million hours TikTok users apparently watch daily. The document also showed that about one-third of the videos shared on Reels were originally produced on another app, typically TikTok, and bear a watermark or border designating their origin.

Mark Cuban, entrepreneur and cofounder of Cost Plus Drugs, credits TikToks success to, among other things, its strategy of relying on artificial intelligence to identify and share videos rather than the traditional social graphs of friends and acquaintances used by Facebook, Twitter, and Snapchat.

TikTok is shockingly agile. They go where the content takes them, Cuban told Fortune.

Cuban points to licensing rights as a potential weak spot for TikTok. A deep-pocketed rival could lock up exclusive rights to music, movies, and sports, he said.

There are certainly multiple paths to beat TikTok, Cuban said. They just wont happen overnight.

TikTok generated nearly $4 billion in revenue in 2021 and is projected to hit $12 billion this year, according to Bloomberg. Thats a fraction of the $28.2 billion in ad revenue that Facebook and Instagram parent Meta brought in from advertising in the second quarter of 2022, but advertising industry insiders say TikTok has the wind at its back.

Jason Rapp, a partner at strategy firm Whisper Advisors, told Fortune that Big Tech is right to be worried, whether its Disney and Netflix or Meta and Snap.

Its not just kids who are addicted to TikTok, and advertisers are paying attention, Rapp said.

Meanwhile, Americas top consumer internet firms have been announcing layoffs in waves for months as the U.S. economy has slowed and as new privacy features by iPhone maker Apple have crimped the ability to profit from targeted digital advertising. Snap laid off 20% of its workforce in late August, and Meta began layoffs by randomly selecting them with an algorithm. Thats not to say TikTok is completely unaffected by the downturn; the firm conducted its own layoffs in July as a part of companywide restructuring, according to Wired.

With the specter of a U.S. government crackdown on TikTok looming, the established internet companieswho themselves are facing heightened scrutiny from antitrust regulatorsmay get a helping hand to fend off their Chinese foe.

TikTok insists that its app is run separately from the ByteDance mothership in China, and that no U.S. user data is shared with operations in China. But U.S. lawmakers and some industry insiders are not convinced. Companies like Facebook, Google, and Twitter are banned from operating in China. Calacanis, the angel investor, believes tech executives should be taking a similar stand against allowing China into the U.S. market.

But behind some of Silicon Valleys TikTok obsession may be a recognition of the brutal reality of the internet business, developed and perfected on American soil. Consumer internet businesses rarely bounce back once users have moved on to the next hot thing. The list of fallen internet giants, including AOL, Yahoo, and MySpace, speaks to the rapid and inexorable decline that can strike even the mightiest consumer web businesses.

Cuban, who made his initial fortune selling a dotcom firm to Yahoo in 1999, knows the unforgiving nature of the internet business.

All the other big social platforms have at one time or another seemed undefeatable, said Cuban. Now, they are losing audience to TikTok.

The rest is here:

Alphabet, Meta and Snap have a shared threat unlike any theyve faced before. Why TikTok is keeping the worlds most powerful CEOs up at night - Fortune

South Korea's privacy watchdog panel has fined tech firms Google and Meta a combined 100 billion won (around $72 million USD) for tracking consumer data without consent.

According to the Personal Information Protection Commission, both Google and Meta failed to let their users know what data would be collected and why.

It's another example of how world governments are taking a stronger stance in favor of data privacy and against tech companies with long histories of questionable data collection practices.

South Korea's Personal Information Protection Commission fined Google the most: Google owes 69.2 billion won (or around $50 million), compared to the 30.8 billion won ($22 million) fine that Meta faces.

According to the fine, both companies failed to clearly inform their users of what data would be gathered, and how it would be analyzed in order to further infer how those users were behaving online.

That data was then used for custom advertisements, and since users weren't informed, they could not consent.

Spokespeople at both of the tech giants in question have already responded, according to a report from Reuters. They both had similar statements to deliver, too, with the bottom line being that they don't believe they are at fault, and they're prepared to fight the fine in court.

While we respect the commission's decision, we are confident that we work with our clients in a legally compliant way that meets the processes required by local regulations. As such, we do not agree with the commission's decision, and will be open to all options including seeking a ruling from the court. -Meta spokesperson

Google echoed this statement from the Facebook parent company.

We disagree with the PIPCs findings and will be reviewing the full written decision once its shared with us. Google spokesperson

These days, technocynicism is nothing new: Ever since news broke in 2018 of Facebook's Cambridge Analytica data scandal, the general public has taken a harder look at how much private data massive corporations have collected and what exactly they're doing with it.

Now due in part to fines like the one South Korea has just levied new laws may highlight or regulate those data collection policies. Just today, Google lost its challenge in the EU Court of Justice to a $2.42 billion fine.

Until new laws drive real change, however, your online activity is still being tracked and sold by Google and many others. VPNs won't save you here, although switching to Firefox might help.

Read more from the original source:

South Korea Fines Google and Meta for Data Privacy Violations - Tech.co

Goldman Sachs, the international investment bank and financial service provider, has updated its stance on Indian IT stocks amid the global economic slowdown and the looming worries of recession in the West. The financial services company has downgraded leading Indian tech companies like Tata Consultancy Services, Infosys, and Tech Mahindra to SELL while upgrading Wipro to BUY.

Why has Goldman Sachs updated its stance on the Indian IT industry?

Goldman Sachs noted the imminent slowdown in the economy has not been factored in by the companies yet. As per its report, the global financial services firm noted:We believe a slowdown in discretionary IT services spend around the growth and transformation agenda will be quite material and something not yet completely reflected in the street's double-digit revenue growth forecast for the industry for FY24.

Interestingly, similar thoughts have been shared byHarsha Upadhyaya, President and CIO of Equity at Kotak Mahindra AMC. While speaking to Business Today, Upadhyaya noted that contrary to the positive outlook presented by the management of the Indian IT companies, the business momentum in the industry has slipped amid the broader economic slowdown.

He said, "While the management commentary is still quite positive, we believe that things are not likely to be the same as you go forward. There is every likelihood of 2023 IT budgets to get delayed or even curtailed to some extent."

Upadhyaya stressed that margin pressure and global exposure are some of the reasons why the Indian IT sector is stalling.

"We are already seeing some pressures on the margin across companies. The hiring numbers across the industry have been quite mute in the recent times. All these things point to the fact that business momentum in the IT sector is somewhat stalling,"he noted.

Moreover,according to the earnings report released in the first quarter of the financial year 2022-23, Indian IT companies reported lower than expected profits. This has led to margin pressures and slashing of performance pay in many companies in the first quarter.

How Goldman Sachs updated its stance on Indian IT companies

Infosys

Goldman Sachs downgraded Indian IT giant Infosys to SELL from BUY. The target price set by the investment bank is Rs 1244. The bank believes that the valuations of the company are high and are not factoring in the impending downcycle.

The financial service provider also slashed the earnings per share forecasts of financial year 2023-2026 by up to 6 per cent.

TCS

Goldman Sachs has downgraded TCS to SELL with a target price of Rs 2611. Moreover, the bank has also slashed the earnings per share forecasts by up to 5 per cent.

The investment bank believes that the current valuations of TCS do not take into consideration its global exposure and upcoming downtrend.

Wipro

Unlike its other counterparts, Goldman Sachs has, however, upgraded Wipro to BUY with a target price of Rs 381.

The report read, A potential share buyback announcement over the next 6-12 months could be another positive catalyst for our Buy thesis on Wipro. Our revised 12-m TPs are Rs 381/$4.87 for local shares/ADR.

The investment bank believes that Wipro would do well in the near term. It further noted, EBIT margins to see sequential improvement through-out the remainder of FY23E and touch 17.4 per cent by 4QFY23 from lows of 14.3 per cent during 1QFY23) any potential share buyback announcement by Wipro over the next few quarters (the last one concluded in January 2021 when the stock was up 14 per cent from the announcement date to closure date).

Tech Mahindra

The financial service provider has downgraded Tech Mahindra to SELL with a target price of Rs 868. The investment bank has also cut down the company's earnings per share forecasts of financial year 2023-2026 by up to 4 per cent.

Also Read:Business momentum stalling in IT sector amid margin pressures, slowdown in hiring: Kotak Mahindra AMC'sHarsha Upadhyaya - BusinessToday

Also Read:WFH vs WFO: IT giants TCS, Infosys, Wipro reassess situation amid urban floods in Bengaluru - BusinessToday

Read the rest here:

Why has Goldman Sachs downgraded IT giants TCS, Infosys, and Tech Mahindra, while upgrading Wipro - Business Today