Category Archives: Big Tech

The coronavirus pandemic has wrought economic disruption on a global scale, but one sector has marched on throughout the chaos: big tech.

Further evidence of the industrys relentless progress has come in recent weeks with the news that Apple and Amazon both raked in sales of $100bn (72bn) over the past three months 25% more than Tesco brings in over a full year.

Amazon also revealed that its founder, Jeff Bezos, is to step down as chief executive. It was a big moment for the company founded in Seattle 26 years ago. But the shares barely stuttered, and few expect the company to, either.

The relentless rise of the big six tech firms - Facebook, Amazon, Netflix, Google owner Alphabet, Apple and Microsoft, now known as the Fangam stocks powered US markets last year.

The S&P index the barometer of corporate America ended the year up more than 18%, an extraordinary outcome given the market crash of March. But two-thirds of that gain was entirely down to the increases in value registered by the six Fangam stocks.

The gains are eye-watering. Amazons share price is up 62% over the past year, valuing the business at $1.7tn, $650m more than a year ago. Apple stock is up 70% over the same period, an increase which has taken its valuation up by more than $1tn, to $2.3tn.

Results published so far in 2021 show no sign that the gains will let up. Apple in January reported its most profitable quarter ever, and Facebook also said the pandemic had helped it grow.

Amazon recorded sales of more than $100bn for the first time in the last quarter of 2020 allowing Bezos to sound a positive note as he changed roles to focus on his ambitions in space, his Earth Fund and his ownership of the Washington Post and Alphabet posted record revenues for the second successive quarter.

The eye-catching performance of big tech has prompted increased political scrutiny and the threat of heightened regulation from Washington, especially now that the Democrats have won control of the Senate.

There is now a real possibility that President Biden will take on tech companies over issues such as privacy, liability and market dominance. And such is the collective scale of the US tech titans, it will be difficult for them to hide.

Apple became the worlds first trillion-dollar company in August 2018 (barring a few state-owned oil companies whose true valuations remain murky). Just over two years later in the midst of the pandemic in August 2020 Apple notched up the $2tn (1.5tn) milestone.

The extraordinary size of these companies can be difficult to comprehend. Alphabets $162bn of revenues outweighed the size of Hungarys economy in 2019.

Apples $67bn earnings before tax from its last financial year would pay for the UK governments combined spending on defence and transport.

Amazons army of workers worldwide now numbers 1.2 million and it is rated the third biggest employer in the world, after Walmart and the China Petroleum & Chemical Corporation.

A late (and perhaps debatable) entrant to the big tech ranks is Tesla. Investors appear to be valuing the US electric car manufacturer more like a tech platform, in the hope it will use its brand and nascent autonomous driving software to dominate transportation in the future.

That logic has propelled it into the ranks of the worlds most valuable companies (and has recently made its chief executive, Elon Musk, the worlds richest man). Its shares have rocketed from $86 at the start of 2020 to $845 now, with some investors fearing it is in the throes of an investment bubble.

One common complaint about the stock market is that it is disconnected from economic reality, with booming growth in share prices even as economies suffer historic recessions.

The flip side is the argument that these companies are more connected to our new reality than ever before: in fact, between them the big tech companies are involved in a huge proportion of human interactions with digital tech every day, from mobile phones for locked down families to the computers used in businesses all over the world.

The electric car technology pioneered by Tesla will play a key role in fighting the climate crisis and investors have belatedly got on board.

But big techs fate has become disconnected from the rest of the corporate world. As Jeremy Grantham, a high-profile investor, pointed out last month, Teslas stock market value is equal to about $1.25m for every car it sells over a year. At rival carmaker General Motors, the company is valued at $9,000 per car.

Techs rise has meant the concentration of market value in the five biggest companies has returned to levels last seen in the early 1970s.

Back then the stock market was dominated by the old industrial economy: photographic film company Eastman Kodak, ExxonMobil predecessor Standard Oil, and General Motors were in the top five, along with IBM and AT&T. Big tech has completely displaced older industries in the top five.

The rise of big tech has created the biggest personal fortunes ever seen, and a new class of hyper-rich: the centibillionaires. Almost all of that wealth comes from shares retained by founders of the business.

During the pandemic that wealth has increased at a phenomenal rate: in 2020 both Bezos and Musk gained more than $100bn apiece or about $3,000 per second.

But there are other beneficiaries. Among the biggest shareholders in all of them are Wall Street and City investment companies such as BlackRock, Vanguard and Legal & General. While those asset managers earn juicy fees by charging clients such as pension funds a percentage of stock market gains from the growth of big tech, their growth also benefits the ultimate owners including the pension funds providing for hundreds of millions of people saving for retirement.

UK fund manager Baillie Giffords investments in Tesla have made an extraordinary $29bn (21bn) for investors including pension funds, foundations and charities, according to figures released to the Guardian. Scottish Mortgage Investment Trust, which is managed by Baillie Gifford, began buying Tesla heavily in 2013 when the shares were changing hands at about $6 each, compared with todays $840. That soaring share price led Scottish Mortgage to be admitted into the FTSE 100 index of the UKs biggest listed companies in 2017 and last year the price rise made Scottish Mortgage the best-performing company in the FTSE 100.

With size comes power. A simple change in an algorithm can wipe out smaller companies reliant on tech companies platforms or even nascent industries. Changes to Facebooks algorithm in 2018 hit some viral publishers revenues hard, while the complexities of negotiating Amazons search rankings have spawned an advisory industry.

And the companies have also sought increasingly to influence politics. Google overtook Goldman Sachs as the biggest spender on political donations for the first time in 2014. The six tech companies total spend on lobbying in the US had risen to $64m in 2019, according to the US Center for Responsive Politics. While that amount is tiny compared with the companies profits, its rapid rise represents big techs increasing attempts to influence policy directly.

Big techs increasing size gives it another big advantage: the bigger it becomes, the harder it is to challenge.

This has always been a problem with dominant companies, who are able to use their scale to win better deals and lower prices. But with the tech platforms such as social networks or Amazons retail network, the more users they have, the faster their value grows. It is what economists call the network effect.

Some of the big tech companies have been able to avoid any major competition enquiries in part because they offer consumers cheaper services than ever before. However, there is increasing scrutiny of monopolistic practices.

One area of focus has been their willingness to pay what seemed like very high prices for fast-growing competitors.

Emails unearthed by US Congress showed that Mark Zuckerberg said Facebook should buy Instagram in part to neutralise its threat. Facebook has contravening previous pledges started to slowly combine Instagrams messaging technology with its other social network, Whatsapp.

Google faces intense antitrust scrutiny in the US over its dominance of internet search, which the EU in 2017 found it had abused by boosting results for its own services.

Apple is facing a growing backlash by companies trying to sell services to iPhone users. Epic Games, the maker of the wildly popular Fortnite franchise, and music streaming platform Spotify have both launched legal complaints against Apples insistence that it takes a 30% cut of all sales made through the app store including music streaming subscriptions that Spotify and many other third-party app developers have long complained is an unfair tax.

One controversy is common to all of the US tech companies (although by no means confined to them): tax avoidance techniques that critics see as aggressive and unfair to smaller competitors.

All of the big tech companies use subsidiaries in low-tax countries such as Luxembourg, Bermuda and Ireland to sell services to end markets such as the UK. Fair Tax Mark, a non-governmental organisation, last year singled out Amazon in particular for its opaque tax structures and low amounts of tax paid relative to profits.

Globally, Fair Tax Mark calculated, the six big tech companies had paid $100bn less cash in taxes over a decade than they had provided for in their accounts, primarily by shifting profits to tax havens and using creative accounting techniques that are legal, but are usually unavailable to smaller companies.

The companies paid $155bn less than might be expected under headline tax rates money that could have been used to fund public services and infrastructure around the world.

Complex legal structures make it impossible to work out precisely how much profit the big tech companies shift out of individual countries, but Tax Watch UK, a campaign group, estimated that Google, Facebook, Apple and Microsoft, as well as network tech company Cisco, avoided 5bn in UK corporation tax between 2012 and 2017.

None of the companies have confirmed such data, although all have said their tax structures follow the law.

World leaders are acutely aware of tax issues in particular, and there has been some progress on moving towards a global tax regime to reduce profit shifting from country to country. The US government has up until now looked askance at efforts coordinated by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development to allow other countries to tax American tech champions more. However, a Biden administration may make a limited deal more likely.

Individual countries have tried to target big tech, including the UK with its digital services tax. But Amazons revelation that it will not itself pay the levy but will pass it on to other sellers which use its platform shows how difficult it is for one country to strike out on its own.

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The most likely challenges to the big tech companies are likely to come from policymakers in their two biggest markets: the US and the EU.

The EU has won some notable victories against the tech companies, but has also some painful defeats such as a court ruling last year that Apple did not have to pay a 13bn (11.4bn) Irish tax bill. More onerous regulations in the second biggest market could be costly for tech companies.

In the US, businesses have been forcibly broken up in the past. Most famously, in 1911, the Sherman Act of 1890 was used to force Standard Oil to split into 34 separate companies. It was used again to force the breakup of the AT&T telephone company in 1984 and against Microsoft in 1998, though an order to split that company into two was later overturned on appeal.

More recently in the US Congress a committee report found big tech has too much power, and Google and Facebook face significant if limited antitrust actions by US regulators and prosecutors. In October last year, the US Department of Justice filed an antitrust case against Google and said it was again enforcing the Sherman Act to restore the role of competition.

However, these complex cases could last years, and it is likely that the authorities would settle for remedies short of a complete breakup.

There is growing consensus on both sides of the bitter political divide that some of the big tech companies need more oversight, although finding consensus on solutions will be much more difficult.

Kamala Harris, then a US senator, said in 2019 that there needed to be more regulation. Whether that attitude is picked up by Joe Bidens White House now Harris is the vice-president is the biggest question facing big tech over the next four years.

Graphics by Glenn Swann, Paul Scruton, Finbarr Sheehy and Cath Levett

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Is big tech now just too big to stomach? | Technology ...

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PARIS The French government wants to beef up EU rules for Big Tech and that means wresting power away from Dublin and Luxembourg, the two capitals that have so far been responsible for enforcing them.

According to briefings with French officials and documents seen by POLITICO, Paris plans to rework the EU's content moderation bill so that it doesn't have to rely on other countries' regulators to police and if required, punish the biggest platforms.

Paris does not want to be "completely dependent on the responsiveness, the willingness to move quickly of the country-of-origin's regulator," an official from the economy ministry told reporters Wednesday.

Paris's proposals come just as the EU's economy ministers pore over the EU's content moderation rules and its proposal to curb the largest tech companies' market power known respectively as the Digital Services Act and the Digital Markets Act.

France hopes EU countries will assent to its proposals when it takes over the Council of the EU's rotating presidency in January. The government aims for an agreement on the Digital Markets Act under its presidency, but French Secretary of State for Digital Cdric O acknowledged earlier this week that the Digital Services Act, which is more contentious, might take some more time. On Thursday, O said that France still aimed to take the DSA to the finish line.

"Not everything is a red line [for France], but these proposals are contributions to the debate which we hope can create common ground ahead of the French presidency" of the EU, the economy ministry official said.

In the Digital Services Act, the European Commission kept an EU provision known as the "country-of-origin principle," which states that companies are regulated by the authority of the country they're legally based in. For almost all Silicon Valley giants, that means either Luxembourg or Ireland.

Paris said it does not want to overhaul the principle, but to buttress local regulators alongside the lead authorities, according to amendments seen by POLITICO. That means allowing local regulators to impose interim measures in case of emergency, for example.

French officials, including O, have regularly indicated that the Irish authorities are not doing enough to crack down on U.S. tech giants for potential violations for the EU's data protection rules. They want to ensure the same doesn't happen under the DSA.

"We have learned from the experience of the previous texts currently in force, and we need to invent somewhat innovative mechanisms," an official from O's cabinet told reporters Wednesday, in an apparent reference to the EU's data protection rules, which are governed by the so-called one-stop shop principle that has faced criticism from regulators and EU lawmakers as being inefficient.

On Thursday, O doubled down. "France supports the country-of-origin principle. But it seems to us that the General Data Protection Regulation experience, albeit a great political success, [shows there is a need for] improvements when it comes to cooperation between EU countries," he told reporters.

"We see with GDPR that appeal mechanisms ... and case resolutions are insufficient," he added.

The French government wants the lead regulators to be required to share data with other authorities, with the possibility of reallocating cases "by mutual agreement."

In practice, the reallocation plan would mean national authorities French ones, for example would ask their Irish counterparts whether they plan to investigate any suspected infringement in France by a big platform like Google, Facebook or Twitter (all of which are legally established in Ireland) and would launch an investigation themselves if Ireland doesn't reply within three weeks.

If the Irish authorities do decide to open a probe, they would have to grant access to all the information from the proceedings and involve the French authorities in the final decision. France could also raise a "reasoned objection" if it doesn't like Ireland's initial decision.

The network of EU country representatives the so-called Digital Services Coordinators should settle disagreements between national authorities if one believes action wasn't taken or the outcome of an investigation wasn't satisfactory.

Further, where "serious harm is likely to occur," France argues that local authorities should be able to impose interim measures on online platforms as well as to request an "emergency binding decision" from Digital Services Coordinators, to be adopted within two weeks.

Despite the proposed changes, O said: "France does not want content regulation based on the country-of-destination, but we want to see some form of efficiency."

In addition to empowering its own regulator to police Big Tech, France also wants to impose stricter rules than what the Commission has already proposed, especially those concerning online marketplaces like Amazon and eBay.

Currently, the Digital Services Act requires online marketplaces to collect information about the seller, also known as Know-Your-Business-Customer obligations.

But France is worried the current rules might not go far enough. Other EU countries and the European Parliament agree with Paris, said O, who met with the Parliament's lead negotiator Christel Schaldemose Thursday.

The French government pitches four obligations for online marketplaces, according to a document seen by POLITICO: Ensure consumers have access to the necessary information related to products before the products are put on sale; prevent dangerous or non-compliant goods from being put on sale; ramp up the fight against counterfeit products; and ensure cooperation between national authorities when dangerous products have already been sold.

Online marketplaces would be required to prevent products without the necessary information from being posted online, and to check goods against publicly available databases before they're put on sale to ensure they haven't been flagged as dangerous. They would also be required to warn consumers and arrange recalls if the seller of a dangerous product is unresponsive.

The rules would not apply to micro and small enterprises, and Paris said is willing to be somehow flexible about which online marketplaces the rules would apply to.

"We need to keep in mind that, on product safety issues, we can't afford to have too broad exemptions," said the official from O's cabinet, "we'll have to see whether adjustments on a case-by-case basis are possible."

Alongside its work on content moderation, the French government has also lined up a host of amendments to a separate bill that regulates digital competition, known as the Digital Markets Act. The bill's purpose is to rein the market power of the most powerful companies, which the bill will designate as gatekeepers, and applying specific rules to them to ensure fair competition.

The French plan, seen by POLITICO, including widening the bill's scope to include web browsers (Google's Chrome and Apple's Safari, for example) and voice assistants (Apple's Siri and Amazon's Alexa). It also wants to ensure that the practice of self-preferencing, where a company favors its own product over its competitors, also applies to app stores.

The plan is likely to get backing from Berlin, which has raised similar concerns about web browsers and voice assistants.

In a paper signed with Germany and the Netherlands published Thursday, France called on the Digital Markets Act to be strengthened to require regulators to assess all mergers and acquisitions by gatekeepers. The three countries also want the bill to determine whether a company qualifies as a gatekeeper if it offers "an ecosystem of services."

Paris wants businesses and users to be able to alert the Commission of potential infringements to help with the bill's enforcement. To that end, it proposed a process dubbed a "reporting mechanism" that would facilitate speedy communication between them.

Unlike its efforts with the Digital Services Act, France said it is happy with leaving enforcement of digital competition to someone else, as long as EU countries can request market investigations. The Commission is largely responsible for ensuring fair competition in the bloc.

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France's plan to rein in Big Tech (and Ireland and Luxembourg) - POLITICO.eu

A coalition of big EU states is cranking up the pressure on Brussels to do more than just spell out new rules for the tech sector and start cracking down on bad behavior.

In a letter published on Thursday, Germany, France and the Netherlands took the rare step of explaining what they felt was wrong with the EUs proposals regulating digital competition, the Digital Markets Act (DMA).

The DMA aims to rein in the market power of juggernauts like Google, Amazon and Facebook. But the capitals said the proposal as currently written lacks ambition when it comes to so-called killer acquisitions when big companies gobble up promising startups to neutralize potential rivals.

We have to strengthen and speed up merger control in particular towards certain gatekeeper platforms, stressed the letter, which overshadowed the Competitiveness Council, a gathering of EU ministers in Brussels on Thursday to discuss the DMA and another set of rules on content moderation.

The letter came as officials in Germany, France, Italy and other countries are increasingly taking tech regulation into their own hands, and pushing for new powers to crack down on big players.

Taking aim on Tuesday at the EUs new proposed rules for online content, called the Digital Services Act (DSA) Berlin called for a much tougher approach including an all-out ban on targeted advertising to minors, according to a Council document seen by POLITICO. At the EU ministers meeting Spanish and Danish ministers also pressed for more action.

Frustrated by what they perceive as slow-moving or ineffective enforcement of rules, the capitals that signed the letter calling themselves the Friends of an Effective DMA are also seeking to bring more powers into their own hands.

The importance of the digital markets for our economies is too high to rely on one single pillar of enforcement only, blasted the Friends of an Effective DMA in the letter. Therefore, a larger role should be played by national authorities in supporting the Commission.

Several EU countries have echoed those concerns with regard to the DSA, saying regulators could become overwhelmed by monitoring online services. They were likely referring to watchdogs in Ireland and Luxembourg, which oversee many Big Tech companies as a result of the blocs enforcement system.

Asked about the apparent split between Brussels and the capitals, the EUs top digital regulator Margrethe Vestager pushed back on criticism.

The legal basis wasnt really supportive for demands for tighter merger control, she told the Competitiveness Council on Thursday.

We already have the first of these acquisitions on our working table and that is due to excellent cooperation with national competition authorities, she added.

This refers to the probes the EU Commission has opened against the acquisition of health and education chatbot company Kustomer by Facebook, and the acquisition of cancer test-startup Grail by biotech company Illumina.

We cannot wait for the proposal to watch for this kind of acquisitions, Vestager said, in a subtle reminder to the ministers that the DMA and the DSA are on a tight schedule.

The aim is to conclude both of them under French presidency, in the first half of next year. An all-too-heavy attack on the legal basis and enforcement mechanisms could potentially threaten that timeline.

Leonie Cater, Laura Kayali and Clothilde Goujard contributed reporting.

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Paris and Berlin urge EU to crack down on Big Tech - POLITICO.eu

Welcome to The Political Fix by Rohan Venkataramakrishnan, a newsletter on Indian politics and policy. To get it in your inbox every week, sign up here.

If you missed our Q&A last week, we spoke to Sumitra Badrinathan about the mechanics of misinformation in India and what it will take to tackle the problem.

Indias second Covid-19 wave is a huge story. Help our small team cover the big issues. Contribute to the Scroll Reporting Fund.

The ongoing battle between Big Government and Big Tech in India calls to mind the tagline to a 15-year-old Hollywood film that pitted two insatiable creatures against one another: Whoever wins, we lose.

Over the last week, two of the globes social media behemoths Facebook, though its subsidiary WhatsApp, and Twitter decided to take issue with the Indian governments efforts to exert more control over them.

The two cases are slightly different, so lets tackle each one by one:

Summarising Government of India vs Twitter, at least in its most recent iteration, is fairly simple:

The Indian government threw a tantrum after Twitter labeled propaganda from the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party as manipulated media. It even sent an anti-terrorism unit of the police to Twitters offices, and then complained about India being defamed when the social media company referred to these intimidation tactics.

The full story is a bit more convoluted, as I explained here.

The BJP, struggling to contain the political fallout of its Covid-19 mismanagement over the last two months, put out what it said were embarassing strategy documents of the Congress that revealed the depths the Opposition party would go to in an effort to criticise Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

Fact-checkers concluded that the more controversial bits of this toolkit were apparently forged, featured instructions with a date well after they would have been useful without actually having been used by Congress handles, and bore a striking resemblance to right-wing talking points on a Twitter thread.

Twitter promptly declared the material manipulated media, without offering any further explanation.

The BJP, however, could not stand to see its propaganda given this critical label. The government complained to Twitter, asking it to remove the tag though it has no powers to demand this.

It made the deeply questionable argument that Twitter could not arrive at a conclusion on the content while it was still under investigation. For perspective, imagine if social media networks had to wait for an executive or judicial order before taking down suspected fake news messages or videos.

And it assigned the forgery case, filed by Congress leaders, to the Delhi Police Special Cell which usually investigates terrorism and has a chequered, political past. Instead of looking into the forgery, the police seemed more interested in going after Twitter, which may be why the Congress leaders now want the case to be investigated by Chhattisgarh Police. The important context here is that Twitter caved in to demands to censor social media handles earlier this year during the farmer protests, when the Indian government threatened its local staff with jail time.

This forgery case has now led the government of India to declare that Twitter is attempting to declare terms to the worlds largest democracy.

WhatsApps lawsuit against the government is a somewhat larger version of the same battle the BJP-run governments attempt to exert control on Bigh Tech though with more systemic implications.

In short: Controversial new executive rules from the Indian government require apps like WhatsApp to break privacy rules, and allow authorities to identify originators of messages whenever they want. WhatsApp has now filed a lawsuit in the Delhi High Court arguing that this is a violation of the fundamental right to privacy and the fundamental right to speech.

Like Twitter, this isnt the first run-in between WhatsApp and Modis government. Just last week, the government threatened to take legal action against the Facebook-owned messaging service if it did not roll back its controversial new privacy policy.

On that issue, the Indian state is portraying itself as the entity defending the privacy of Indian citizens. On end-to-end encryption, however, WhatsApp is the one citing privacy and the state is claiming that its demands are reasonable.

WhatsApps lawsuit has global implications.

If the service is forced to break end-to-end encryption in India, it might face similar pressure from governments elsewhere, starting in Brazil where authorities have been pushing for a very similar outcome. The result also will not be limited to WhatsApp, since the rules apply to all messaging services, including others like Signal and Telegram, believed by some to be safer from surveillance.

Modis government has over the last few years sought to weaponise the conversation around the potentially pernicious influence of Big Tech on democratic societies all over the world.

Civil society all over the world, including many in India, have pointed out the dangers of letting these companies amass unchecked power over our communication and commerce, with little regard for privacy or individual rights. This is, after all, the country that saw a large-scale mobilisation against Facebooks attempt to break net neutrality. Those criticisms are exactly why Facebook set up an Oversight Board, to help govern its platform.

Piggybacking on the civil society criticism of Big Tech, the BJP has added the language of nationalism to these debates, referring to the social networks as digital colonisers and contemporary versions of the East India Company. In this worldview, any pushback from Facebook or Twitter amounts to challenging Indian sovereignty, proof of how little the companies care about Indian citizens.

But instead of putting the Indian citizen at the centre of its approach towards tech regulation, the BJP wants to hand more power to the authorities, with little in the way of checks and balances. Its aim is to take power away from big tech and hand it to the government, not the citizen.

Some have argued that this will still be useful, since the government may be more answerable to its people. But, does anyone trust this government infamous for its treatment of criticism as sedition, its willingness to censor inconvenient information, its readiness to switch off the internet at the drop of a hat to judiciously build a regulatory framework for technology that will benefit Indians?

Consider:

What happens if it is allowed to exercise more power over social media?

We already have a sense, thanks to Facebook. As the Wall Street Journal and the Guardian have reported, Facebook overruled its own guidelines on hate speech and fame accounts including not taking down content calling for Muslims to be shot simply because that material was uploaded by the BJP. Remember, Home Minister Amit Shah once argued that his party was capable of delivering any message, real or fake, to the public by making it go viral.

Meanwhile, social media networks routinely silence accounts critical of the BJP on the governments instructions, with little transparency or opportunities to challenge these actions.

It is clear that the power held by Big Tech at the moment is tremendous and the frameworks to hold them accountable cannot come from Western societies and contexts alone. Some of Indias new rules do take some steps forward on this front, as Apar Gupta writes. But the vast majority of the moves from the BJP-run government seem like a naked power grab, in the hopes of neutralising dissent and exercising even more control over the populace.

If the government gets its way then, we could have the worst possible outcome: No real checks on the data-hungry ways of Big Tech, even as Big Government gets to do as it wishes. Whoever wins...

Thanks for reading the Political Fix. Send feedback to rohan@scroll.in.

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The Political Fix: Does anyone trust Modis government to genuinely place checks on Big Tech? - Scroll.in

This bloodless technocratic language should sound familiar: Its the same attitude exhibited by the V.C. at that tech conference a few years back, and it is totally removed from peoples fundamental material needs. Theres talk of ease of access and furnishing better care but little discussion of what really matters: universal care thats free at point of service. Nor do Silicon Valleys would-be health care entrepreneurs evince much concern for concepts like health care justice, reproductive rights, or repairing systemic inequities. New algorithms may hold out promise for processing masses of medical images, but even these supposed breakthroughs come with deficiencies, often owing to biased training data. One New England Journal of Medicine study found that algorithms used in a variety of medical contexts can reinforce racial biases, compromising care. In this arena, disrupting health care doesnt mean repairing a broken system; it means leveraging that systems vulnerabilities to innovate new delivery systems and new forms of profit.

That V.C.s dream of Americans spending more of their income on health care may have been ghastly in its insensitivity to peoples real concerns, but it remains a sad market reality. U.S. health care spending grows consistently, reaching $11,582 per person in 2019. Insurance premiumsand insurance company profitshave risen far faster than workers wages. One study found that Americans now spend double on health care what they did in the mid-1980s. Tales of Americans refusing health care for fear of billspassing on an ambulance ride or delaying treatment for an acute conditionare legion. Medical bills remain one of the leading contributors of consumer bankruptcya novelty for large swathes of the world where no one must pay for medical care, much less risk bankruptcy.

The solution, as its long been, is clear: a universal health care system that provides free care. The principle is as simple as the fire department or the local libraryshared services that everyone pays into and are free when they need thembut its one that would likely be lost on most politicians today. (If public libraries were proposed now for the first time, how many Democrats would join Republicans in voting against them?)

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Amazon, Google, and Big Tech Want to Eat Health Care Next - The New Republic

On Monday, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis signed a Big Tech Bill that he says is designed to combat Orwellian censorship by companies such as Facebook, Twitter, and Google. The law requires companies to publicly disclose their moderation policies (something most, if not all, already do) and to stick to those policies consistently. If they dontor if users think they dontthe companies can be sued for up to $100,000 per offense.

For the past several years, everyone from Sacha Baron Cohen to Elizabeth Warren to Donald Trump has advocated for strict new regulations on tech companies, with conservatives in particular charging these companies with censorship. Is DeSantiss new law the big win for free speech that he says it is, or is it the very sort of rights violation the governor claims to be fighting?

Its no secret that tech CEOs support the political left; Mark Zuckerberg called Silicon Valley an extremely left-leaning place. Senators Josh Hawley and Ted Cruzalong with such commentators as Dennis Prager, Ben Shapiro, Dave Rubin, Eric Weinstein, and Sam Harrisclaim that the moderation practices of social-media companies demonstrate an unmistakable anti-conservative bias. And many, including DeSantis, say this bias is a form of censorship.

If Big Tech censors enforce rules inconsistently, to discriminate in favor of the dominant Silicon Valley ideology, says DeSantis, they will now be held accountable. He tweeted: Floridas Big Tech Bill gives every Floridian the power to fight back against deplatforming and allows any person to sue Big Tech companies for up to $100,000 in damages. Today, we level the playing field between celebrity and citizen on social media.

Theres no denying that tech companies have tremendous power over what users see on their platforms. And given that, as the Pew Research Center reports, some 72 percent of Americans use some form of social media, platforms certainly have a hand in shaping debates. So its understandably maddening when these companies use their platforms to help one group push an agenda that many others consider destructive, promoting the content of some while shadow-banning others.

Thus, conservatives, seemingly the special target of the Silicon Valley elites, as DeSantis calls them, have long been attempting to fight back against this so-called censorship. In May 2019, President Trump tweeted: I am continuing to monitor the censorship of AMERICAN CITIZENS on social media platforms. This is the United States of America and we have whats known as FREEDOM OF SPEECH! We are monitoring and watching, closely!! Six weeks later, Senator Hawley introduced a bill to amend the Communications Decency Act, revoking the legal protection that keeps social media companies from being sued for things that users post. Hawley failed to change the federal law, but DeSantis has succeeded at the state level with a more targeted set of regulations.

Tech companies have yet to respond, so we dont know whether they will play ball, oppose the law in court, or exit markets as they have in some countries, leaving usersincluding many businesses that rely on social media for advertisingwithout service. What is clear though, is that the law inserts government into the process of social-media moderation. Elected officialsbeholden to their parties and constituents, always vying for re-electionwill now have a hand in refereeing what is politically neutral and what is not. Is this a rational means of fighting censorship, or is the law itself an indirect means of instituting censorship? Further, are social media companies actually censoring people by moderating the use of company property as they see fit?

Suppose you use your time and resources to build an actual wall and then invite your neighbors to graffiti it as they wish. Some are talented like Banksy, creating interesting works of art, whereas others defile it with the equivalent of fifth-grade toilet humor. Most are somewhere in between. Its your property, and you decide to paint over all of the crude stuff, plus some things you just dont like. Could this properly be called censorship? Does it violate anyones right to free speech?

Definitely not. The reason the Founding Fathers wrote into the very first amendment that Congress shall make no law . . . abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press is because they understood that government has a monopoly on the legal use of force. If you dont do what the government tells you, it can take your property or put you in jail. Censorship means restrictions on speech backed by forcethat is, by government.

Private companies, on the other hand, may use their property however they see fit, but they cannot force you to do anything. As Ive written elsewhere,

Its not censorship if a Christian publisher rejects an atheists book, or if a left-leaning newspaper doesnt hire (or fires) a freedom-loving columnist, or if a Romantic art gallery refuses to display a banana duct-taped to a wall, or if a social-media platform bans Alex Jones. The right to speak ones mind is not a right to a book contract, a newspaper column, a gallery exhibit, a social-media platform, or to any product of another persons effort. A persons right to speak his mind is not a right to another persons property or support. There can be no right that violates another persons rights.

Love or hate their policies or politics, every successful tech entrepreneur started with a vision for providing value to users, then invested massive amounts of time and effort bringing that vision to life. They poured their life and property into their products and services, which they rightfully own and may use or moderate as they see fit.

If people dislike a companys policies, they have plenty of options. They are free to stop dealing with that company, to convince others to boycott it with them, to try getting a job at that company where they can advocate change from within, or to start a competing company. What they cannot rightfully do is use government power to force others to supply them with a platform moderated according to their preferences.

DeSantis is not leveling the playing field as he says, but rather trying to use government power to constrain how companies use their propertyand, in so doing, hes carving a role for government in moderating speech. If we want a free and fair internet, we must respect the rights of tech companies, vote with our screen timeand reject DeSantiss move toward a truly Orwellian world.

Continued here:

DeSantis's 'Big Tech Bill' Is Actually a Step Closer to the World Orwell Feared | Jon Hersey - Foundation for Economic Education

Americans trust traditional banks more than government agencies or fintechs - and far more than Big Tech - to safeguard their personal data, according to a BIS survey.

The survey of around 1300 US household heads asked respondents to give sectors a score of between one (no trust at all) and seven (complete trust) when it comes to safeguarding data such as bank transaction history, geolocation and social media data.

For Big Tech - Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple - the median respondent assigns a value of two, with three quarters of all respondents choosing a value in the range of one and three.

Government agencies and fintechs like PayPal, score a median level of four, although there is a greater dispersion than for big tech.

Banks, meanwhile, score a median value of five. Over three quarters of respondents give traditional FIs at least a four, with over 25% giving them six or higher.

There are differences across demographic groups: respondents from racial minorities have less trust in financial institutions, while younger people trust fintechs relatively more. Female, minority and younger respondents are more concerned about implications of data-sharing for their personal safety.

A quarter of respondents say Covid-19 made them less willing to share data. In this group, nearly half became less willing to share with big techs, with concerns centred on identity theft and abuse of data.

BIS says that the digital shift during the pandemic might "impose disproportionate harms on some groups, which may also lead to differences in digital adoption".

Concludes the paper: "Understanding and addressing these concerns through sensible regulation is essential if digital technologies are to be used in a safe and inclusive way for all in society."

Excerpt from:

Americans trust banks over fintechs and Big Tech with personal data - Finextra

Comedian Russell Brand slammed the media and Big Tech for their coverage of the 2020 presidential race, accusing them of conspiring to keep information away from you because it was not convenient to their agenda.

"For me, revelations that there are financial connections between energy companies in Ukraine, energy companies in China, and the Biden family are troubling," Brand said on his Under the Skin podcast in reference to the suppression of a bombshell report on Hunter Bidens business dealings leading up to the election.

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"That should be public knowledge, Brand continued. And its even more troubling that Twitter and Facebook and the media at large deliberately kept it out of the news because they didnt want it to influence the election."

Brand explained that he is not particularly a fan of former President Donald Trump and doesnt believe hes the answer but also doesnt believe that President Joe Biden can be trusted.

I dont think Donald Trumps the answer, but Im sad to realize that I can no longer even claim to believe Joe Biden or the Democratic Party might be the answer because look at how they behave, Brand said. And look at the relationships between media, social media, and that party. They conspired to keep information away from you because it was not convenient to their agenda.

CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER

Brand continued, The fact is that this information was stimy-stifled controlled because it didnt suit the shared agenda of these three pillars of power. That almost concerns me more than the nature of the revelations themselves. I dont really have high expectations of politicians. The idea that information is being controlled thats not democracy. Thats not freedom. Thats manipulation of elections.

More here:

Russell Brand: Big Tech and media suppressed Hunter Biden story 'because they didn't want it to influence the election' - Washington Examiner

Crypto trading volumes continue to increase, but several countries central banks are keen to ignore it, with Denmark being the latest to join the crypto is negligible narrative. Lars Rohde, governor of the countrys central bank doesnt see the rise of crypto trading as a serious economic threat.

I could be tempted to ignore it, he told Bloomberg. I think the term currency is badly used here. Most currencies store value or are means of transactions. There is no stability, no guarantee about the value of cryptocurrencies.

Crypto is a speculative asset at best, he added.

When asked about the central banks moves to reduce speculative rivalry from crypto, he admitted he is more watchful of major tech companies moves in the payments field. Big techs invasion of the currency area is much more interesting, he opined.

Denmark was one of the earliest countries to explore the possibility of a central bank digital currency, or CBDC. The Danmarks Nationalbank discarded the idea following a one-year study from 2016 to 2017, deciding that a CBDC solution would do little to improve the current financial infrastructure of the country.

The central banks opinions dont seem to have had much of an affect on other banks in the country, however. This week for instance, Denmarks Saxo Bank announced that they are launching a new crypto FX product. This will enable users from the Middle East and North Africa, or the MENA region, to trade major cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin (BTC), Ethereum (ETH), and Litecoin for fiat currencies from a single margin account.

Other central banks around the world have voiced different takes on cryptocurrencies. The Central Bank of Kuwait issued a warning on crypto usage last week, whileCanadas central bank said it considers Bitcoin and other crypto-assets to be high risk because their intrinsic value is hard to establish.

De Nederlandsche Bank NV, the Dutch central bank, took a neutral stance on crypto trading in a recent statement which noted, A crypto does not represent anything. Its not a share in anything. Its not a loan which is returned with interest.

Read this article:

Big tech, not cryptocurrency, is the real threat to central banks autonomy, Danish central bank governor says - Cointelegraph

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Big tech has been downright disappointing this year for investors used to big gains from their stocks. They might also be worth buying right now. The reason: They offer strong growth prospects at reasonable prices.

The FAANGM group Facebook (FB), Apple (AAPL), Amazon.com (AMZN), Netflix (NFLX), Alphabet (GOOGL), and Microsoft (MSFT) isnt very expensive right now. The median forward earnings multiple is just under 30 times, according to FactSet data, above the S&P 500s average multiple of 21.5, but the group has traded at a far higher premium to the S&P 500 in the past. Considering the pace at which AAPL/AMZN/NFLX/GOOGL and MSFT are growing earnings and the long-term prospects for these companies, valuations are reasonable, writes Tom Essaye, founder of Sevens Report Research. These names could be considered GARP, which stands for Growth At Reasonable Price, says Essaye, who favors these stocks over the less profitable, smaller capitalization names.

Reasonable valuations mean earnings growth can take the older tech names higher. Expected earnings growth for 2022 in the FAANGM group, which the market will be pricing in by the end of the year, can provide at least acceptable returns. Facebooks earnings, for example, are expected to grow 17%, while Amazons are expected at 30%. That compares to just 12% for the S&P 500.

Does that mean the value rally will fizzle out? No, just that investors who dont want to put all their eggs in one basket can find opportunity in big tech. Value stocks, which dont have the same secular growth prospects but are sensitive to changes in the economy, have had a strong run. The Vanguard S&P 500 Value Index Fund ETF (VOOV) has outpaced the broader index by about 8 percentage points since the end of September, the start of a larger rally in economically-sensitive assets. As the economy keeps rebounding, value stocks could continue their run, but FAANGM stocks could act as protection against that outcome. And even if value keeps outperforming, FAANGM could still keep pace, Essaye notes.

And that should be good enough.

Write to Jacob Sonenshine at jacob.sonenshine@barrons.com

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Apple and the Rest of the Big Tech Stocks Might Be Ready to Rally. Here's Why. - Barron's