Category Archives: Big Tech

The House Judiciary committee has approved astaff report alleging that Apple, Amazon, Facebook, and Google abused their tremendous power by charging exorbitant fees, imposing oppressive contract terms, and extractingvaluable data from the people and businesses that rely on them.

The report's approval, which passed by a vote of 24-17, is seen as likely to spur new antitrust legislation.

The450-page report, released last October by the House antitrust subcommittee, alleges that the four techcompanies maintained their market dominance by copying or acquiring competitive rivals, and engaged in self-preferencing, predatory pricing, or exclusionary conduct.

Companies that once were scrappy, underdog startups that challenged the status quo have become the kinds of monopolies we last saw in the era of oil barons and railroad tycoons, thereport stated.

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Among other accusations, the report said Facebook used its data advantage to create superior market intelligence to identify nascent competitive threats and then acquire,copy, or kill these firms.

Google allegedly used its search monopoly to misappropriate content from third parties and to boost Googles own inferior vertical offerings,while imposing search penalties to demote third-party vertical providers, the report stated.

Shortly after the report was released, the U.S. government and various states broughtantitrust lawsuits against Google and Facebook.

The report's recommendations included forced break-ups, as well as new legislation that would make it more difficult for large companies toacquire other businesses.

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House Committee Approves Antitrust Report Recommending Curbs On Big Tech 04/16/2021 - MediaPost Communications

Its no secret that America spends on health care. In 2019, that spending reached $3.8T ($11.6k per person). By 2028, its projected to hit $6.2T.

To the folks in Big Tech, any number with a T means one thing: opportunity.

The company announced the $19.7B acquisition of Nuance Communications, known for its AI transcription tools for health care professionals.

Nuance has a healthy following among

Doctors can use Nuance tech which is already integrated with Microsoft Teams to record conversations and automatically transcribe notes.

Cook, Pichai, and Bezos want in, too:

Bezos has also gone one step further, debuting the Amazon Halo thats capable of calculating body fat (of which Bezos has none).

If history is any indication, Big Techs success in health care is hardly a given:

Regardless, the digitization of health care is a huge market, and Big Tech is gearing up for battle.

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Health care is the latest Big Tech battleground - The Hustle

Republican Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri has put what he called woke mega-corporations on notice, particularly tech platform giants including Facebook and Google.

However, new antitrust legislation he proposed could place drastic new restrictions on all sorts of big businesses.

Despite some similarities to a recent antitrust reform bill from Sen. Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota, bipartisan momentum behind Hawleys bill is likely to be tepid at best considering his polarizing push to contest the Electoral College vote on Jan. 6 certifying Joseph Biden as president. Still, the legislation could step up congressional dialogue around updating the governments approach to defining what anti-competitive behavior looks like in a tech-ruled era.

Hawleys bill is bold and could start a more vibrant discussion around antitrust reform in the Senate, suggestedBarry Pupkin, a senior partner focused on antitrust at law firm Squire Patton Boggs.Itseems sort of, I guess, radical, he said. I think you straitjacket a lot of possibly decent transactions, Pupkin continued, adding, I think though, it starts a dialogue.

So, whats so radical about it? Heres whatHawleysTrust-Busting for the Twenty-First Century Act,introducedon April 12, proposes:

The Democratic bill

On the other side of the aisle, anantitrust reform bill introducedin February by Democratic Sen. Amy Klobuchar, gives both the FTC and the Justice Department, the federal governments other trust-busting agency,more penalty power against companies, more resources and more money for hiring additional personnel. Heres whats important:

What the bills have in common

There is a key similarity between the two bills.Notably, said Pupkin, both Klobuchars and Hawleys proposals seek to shift the burden of proof away from the federal government to the defendant. Hawleys bill requires the party making the acquisition, rather than government regulators, to establish evidence that an acquisitions pro-competitive effects outweigh any anti-competitive impact. Klobuchars bill also would require corporations making acquisitions that are extremely large or could significantly increase market concentration to prove that snapping up other companies wouldnt harm competition.

Youre changing the burden of proof, said Pupkin. Right now, he said, The government has the burden of proving illegality.

Other big tech antitrust lawsuits are underway

Efforts related to anti-competitive practices among the big digital platforms are already underway at both the FTC and the DOJ.The FTC in December launched itsinvestigation into Facebook, alleging the company has maintained its monopoly on the social media industry by acquiring emerging rival Instagram in 2012 and mobile messaging appWhatsApp in 2014.The DOJ, several states and even a publisher group have filedantitrust lawsuits against Google, arguing that aspects of its search, digital ad business and decisions about third-party cookies are anti-competitive.

Hawleys history of fighting big techWhile Hawleys bill would affect all sorts of large companies beyond the tech industry, he has taken special interest in fighting tech platforms, arguing they have too much power and make biased decisions that stifle conservative voices.

A small group of woke mega-corporations control the products Americans can buy, the information Americans can receive and the speech Americans can engage in, said Hawley in a press statement introducing his bill.

Hawley has been a vocal critic of Facebook and Twitter for their decisions to ban prominent conservatives from their platforms for posting false or misleading information. These monopoly powers control our speech, our economy, our country and their control has only grown because Washington has aided and abetted their quest for endless power, he continued in the statement.

In addition to filing antitrust suits against Google and Facebook while attorney general of Missouri, in the last Congress he introducedreforms to Section 230, which protects websites from liabilities associated with information posted by others on their sites. His proposalwould stop large tech firms from discrimination when enforcing terms of service and allow users to sue them for breaching their contractual duty of good faith. And hesent a letter last year to TwitterCEO Jack Dorsey arguing the company did not deserve immunity under the Section 230 law after Twitter labeled as incorrect or misleading former President Donald Trumps tweets making false claims about the legitimacy of President Joseph Bidens presidential win.

Hawleys bill is unlikely to garner support from the left, butSome elements of Hawleys bill that would drastically limit business growth and advantage through acquisition might appeal to Democrats or progressives, suggested Pupkin. However, considering the senators reputation as a staunch Trump backer who led the push to block acceptance of the 2020 Electoral College results, Pupkin said the political optics would likely deter any bipartisan support or even real momentum behind the legislation.

Given Hawleys history in the last three months, particularly around Jan. 6, I think hes going to have tough time getting much of anything through, said Pupkin. A lot of Democrats might be willing to go along with legislation that prevents giant companies from growing, he suggested, but they wouldnt be able to go along with Hawley.

Cheat Sheet: What a ‘radical’ GOP antitrust bill that would kill big tech acquisitions has in common with the Democrats’ push for reform

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Cheat Sheet: What a radical GOP antitrust bill that would kill big tech acquisitions has in common with the Democrats push for reform - Digiday

A few months after its beta version went live in March last year, social audio app Clubhouse had around 1.5k users. Fast track to January this year, and it hit 2m. A month later it had reached 10m and, across the same time period, its valuation has risen from $100m to $1bn.

Clubhouse is the most famous platform, but its not the only one. Its part of a growing cohort of new social media trying to capitalise off an increasing interest in audio content.

Jeremiah Owyang, a tech analyst and investor, describes audio as the Goldilocks medium: its not as impersonal as text but also not as invasive as video something particularly important for the Zoom-fatigued user.

For Leni Andronicos, the founder of new social audio app Logcast which went live on the App Store in Sweden this week the move to audio is all about users desires for a more authentic media.

Its almost like weve done a full 360 on the media evolution, she says. I believe the reason audio has become so popular is because, ultimately, language makes us human and language is the oldest form of building community and social relationships. Its through language that we get to know each other.

But things arent all rosy in audio app land. There are reports that, after the initial flux of new joiners to Clubhouse, retention is falling and so are app downloads.

Theres also a growing number of Clubhouse sceptics, including Twitters head of product Shaan Puri who, in this thread, laid out why he thinks the app will fail.

Puri said that the app has an interesting-ness problem: apps like TikTok and YouTube have millions of pieces of content to show their users, and an algorithm to select the right stuff. Clubhouse doesnt have that, because the content shown to the user has to be live.

Users need to be shown good content within seven seconds of opening an app, Puri said, and thats hard when you only have live (and therefore less) content to choose from. There are also those who say that the app just did well initially because the world was in lockdown and people wanted someone to chat to.

So, if this new cohort of audio apps can compete with Clubhouse, can they overcome the problems levelled at it too?

Andronicos says shes grateful for what Clubhouse has done for audio content. She started building Logcast in September 2019, six months before Clubhouses team started and back then, she says, investors didnt see why they should fund social audio.

Im thankful for Clubhouse because it accelerated the social audio space by at least three to five years, and made audio one of the hottest industries for investors.

Still, she maintains, Logcast is very different from Clubhouse. The central idea is to create a more informal version of podcasting, and to make the form social.

Users record logs of up to 10 minutes and upload them onto the app. Other users can follow their favourite creators and like their content or direct message them.

In an attempt to encourage authentic content, the app doesnt allow pre-recorded uploads; instead, users have one shot at pressing the record button, recording the content and publishing.

We want Gen Z teenagers in a couple of years to say oh whats a podcast, I only log!

We see ourselves in the sweet spot between Spotify who look after full length podcasts and Clubhouse, which is about live talks and jump-ins. Logcast is in the middle, for people who dont feel comfortable recording a longform podcast, but also dont feel confident jumping into a live conversation.Logcast doesnt rely on live content so perhaps could overcome the problem that Puri suggested Clubhouse is encountering; but it would still need to curate a lot of content before it was able to offer users the same instant gratification that apps like TikTok and YouTube achieve through their algorithms.

Although Logcast is building a mobile app, the companys really building it for the Airpods generation, says Andronicos.

I really believe that the next major computing interface will be Airpods and we wont be walking around holding phones anymore, well be using Airpods to communicate, build community and share social updates, she says.

We want Gen Z teenagers in a couple of years to say oh whats a podcast, I only log!

At present, Logcasts early users include comedians, entrepreneurs, influencers, parents and wellness experts.

There are a number of other companies building social audio apps, a lot of which are based in the US.

American entrepreneur Mark Cuban is developing an app, Fireside Chat, which is described as a next-gen podcast app where users can record live conversations then record and broadcast them. The app will also have built-in analytics so creators can work out which content performs best and monetise it.

In the US, theres also Discord, which runs audio hangout rooms for groups and Chalk, which does a similar thing providing secure voice hangout rooms.

In Europe, alongside Logcast, theres Soapbox, built by a Swiss and German team.

Soapbox differs from Logcast and Clubhouse in that it wants to create serendipitous conversations between people, rather than being about semi-professionalised content creation.

Clubhouse is your conference. Soapbox is your living room, says Dean Eigenmann, the apps founder. The app places you into a conversation with strangers and provides mini games for users to play together. The next iteration of the app will match users together based on their interests.

Our mission is to provide a space for people to have naturally flowing conversations in a way that builds upon and enhances the real life experience of hanging out with friends and meeting new people, says Eigenmann.

Theres also Anyone, which, like Logcast, is based in Sweden (the country tends to do well on audio, following in Spotifys footsteps). Anyone allows people to schedule five minute conversations with people offering advice, from financial guidance to relationship support.

As well as new companies popping up to produce social audio apps, big tech companies like Twitter, Spotify and Facebook are also looking to capitalise off the interest in voice content.

In March, Spotify acquired Locker Room, a live audio app where, at present, users talk specifically about sports.

Spotify has said itll expand the areas Locker Room covers to include music and culture too, and use it to give professional athletes, writers, musicians, songwriters and podcasters opportunity to host real-time discussions with their fans.

The acquisition forms part of the companys future of formats of audio manifesto, set out in February this year, which highlighted the need for podcasting to move beyond being a one-way street from creators to listeners with little opportunity for feedback.

Twitter, meanwhile, has been working on Twitter Spaces, which is in test mode but is expected to be rolled out to more users very soon. The idea is that a host could start a room where followers can join and discuss a topic.

It was also reported that Twitter tried to buy Clubhouse itself, with people close to the matter saying a figure of $4bn was discussed.

Facebooks also reported to be working on a feature to rival Clubhouse. Last year, the company launched Rooms, which allows users to video call in groups, and its rumoured to be working on an audio-only equivalent.

Sameer Singh is an investor who also advises startups on network effects. He used to work at App Annie, and is interested in new forms of social media.

Getting the network right is still a challenge for social audio; its easy to create something that goes viral then falls off a cliff, Singh says. Building something that people flock to for the novelty is relatively achievable, but its a lot harder to make something with a network that sticks around.

People are more likely to tap into Spaces to see whats going on. That behaviour isnt likely on Clubhouse.

The biggest challenge with audio is that if you want to do live conversations, you need an audience who you know will be there. Thats hard if your product isnt very here and now already.

That puts Twitter in a strong position, Singh says. If it can figure out the strategy for Spaces, he says, Twitter will have a huge advantage because it already has a high level of live engagement on its news feed.

People are more likely to tap into Spaces to see whats going on. That behaviour isnt likely on Clubhouse.

This means apps like Logcast, which are focused on asynchronous content and arent trying to compete with Twitter on a live engagement front, could do well.

Theres room for Clubhouse to do well too, Singh says, if it focuses on being a scheduled destination app, something its moving increasingly towards. But if Twitter can work out a way to hack scheduled conversations as well, it could come to dominate on both fronts.

Freya Pratty is Sifteds news reporter. She tweets from @FPratty

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Clubhouse, big tech or newcomers: who'll win the social audio race? - Sifted

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The outlook for the branch, the need for a much better digital onboarding experience, the future of relationships between financial institutions, fintechs and big techs are all hot topics in banking. But Jim Marous says making sure your financial institution has a future comes down to one word: Google.

Marous, Co-Publisher of The Financial Brand, CEO of the Digital Banking Report and host of the Banking Transformed Podcast, is one of the leading commentators on digital change in banking. He spent some time in banking and still remembers with pleasure the smell of fresh ink on product brochures. But thats nostalgia, he admits, and not the present, let alone the future.

The reality is that you have to realize that in the world were living in now, people start shopping for financial accounts on Google, says Marous during a debate with fellow industry analyst Ron Shevlin, Research Director at Cornerstone Advisors and author of the Forbes Fintech Snark Tank blog. If they dont find your bank or credit unions offerings through paid or organic search, they will find the likes of Chime or one of the big five banks, says Marous. And after that, any institution that offers a clunky or only partly digital onboarding experience risks losing the prospect after all.

During a pair of debates sponsored by MX Marous and Shevlin debated each other (as well as the status quo) concerning the future of banking and fintech.

For his part, Shevlin says people make too much about fintechs ability to score huge wins simply by the word of mouth of ecstatic fans.

You keep hearing how they do alternative marketing and that they dont do traditional TV or print advertising, says Shevlin. But he says the really successful fintech players spend buckets of money on marketing.

Chime spends $50, $60 million a year on TV alone, says Shevlin. This is a key part of what makes fintechs repeated funding rounds so important. Getting off the ground and staying airborne demands hunks of marketing spending.

But Marous believes that even with lots of marketing dollars or great word of mouth, the growing room for fintechs isnt as wide and as deep as some bank and credit union executives might think.

Im going to argue that its hard if youre not really something new and different, says Marous. Im not so sure there are many new and different fintechs out there. There are different flavors of the same themes.

In some ways the pairs discussion revealed that even fintechs, the wunderkinds of finance for a decade, have their own challenges, including from big techs like Google, Apple, Amazon and more.

Shevlin says that many fintechs, especially those coming from overseas, insist that what they bring to the market is a better customer experience, especially on mobile devices. However, he says he doesnt see the bank experience lacking, especially not among the largest U.S. banks.

And it is not as if every fintech or challenger bank steps up to the plate and smacks a home run. For every Chime or Dave there are others that have morphed into something else or disappeared.

I think a lot of those challengers that failed did so because they were not focused on solving the right problems, says Shevlin.

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The common wisdom is that banks sit on huge amounts of incredibly valuable data that can be turned into customer insights that will yield amazing results. The argument is that banks just dont know how to extract the value.

Shevlin offers this counterpoint: A good deal of the data isnt all that valuable in the first place. Often financial institutions completely delude themselves when they think, Oh, we have so much great data internally. They dont.

However, even what they do have could be useful. To a large extent, incumbent institutions just go to market with generic products and services and dont really bake their data into it, Shevlin points out.

Marous puts it another way: Its not that banks dont have data or dont utilize it. Theyve got to move from making great reports to making great experiences. Too often data doesnt get deployed outside of the IT department.

Data comes both from without and from within, of course. As an example of a fintech that makes great use of data, Shevlin cites Aspiration. The company offers banking services to consumers who place high value on their money supporting environmentally and socially conscious activities. Part of how it enforces that is a regimented system for scoring companies for their behavior and policies.

Separately, Shevlin says that there is a great deal of hype in the market concerning lending on the basis of alternative data. Different people define this different ways, ranging from increasingly accepted measures such as a record of making rent payments on a timely basis to more unusual methods.

Im still a little bit amazed that there are people who think they can make lending decisions based on who your social media contacts are, says Shevlin.

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The debaters looked at two masters of data analytics who have had strong interest in financial services: Amazon and Google.

Marous continues to be impressed by Amazon and its ability to pinpoint products for consumers based on data. He sees Amazons revenues as the ultimate funding vehicle for competing with banking institutions.

If Amazon put together a checking account tomorrow and offered me $250 to open one, Im there, says Marous. They could open millions of accounts.

He believes banking has found itself to be in a very narrow space, in terms of the activities it can pursue, while Amazon, true to its A to Z roots, can get into nearly anything. It has already done more than nibbling in some financial areas. In fact, he says Amazons success and size enables it to do things no banking institution could.

Case in point is product returns: To cut costs, Amazon sometimes will replace an item without asking the consumer to return it. Wrong color? Wrong size? Keep it. We got this, is Amazons attitude, he says. Theres not a financial institution out there that could say that.

Shevlin doesnt see anything like Amazon Bank happening. First, he says, the regulatory burdens of actually being a bank are unappealing. Why go there when you can partner? Amazon has done that, and Google, with its Google Plex partnerships, has as well.

Beyond this, Shevlin made a picks and shovels argument. Both Amazon and Google make huge amounts of money serving the cloud computing needs of financial institutions and can reap those profits without being regulated. So why, he asks, would they endanger that?

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Fintechs have long brought unbankerly speed to the table. People have even been willing to pay much higher interest rates on small business loans, for example, in exchange for the speed that online nonbank business lenders began providing.

Shevlin and Marous were asked if speed and reliability trump security today.

Admitting to being snarky, Shevlin says they clearly do. If you have a security breach, you can always blame it on someone else, he says. More seriously, he says that consumers have grown so used to hearing about data breaches that that alone wouldnt turn them off unless the app or other service already lacked speed and reliability.

Indeed, the issue of trust in fintechs came up in this context.

Marous points out that many apps break up the monolithic banking relationship into smaller parts that do one or two things really well. More recently the movement has been for the narrower fintechs to start broadening their offerings and approaches.

If these organizations scale to different areas of banking that theyre not currently in Im going to trust them because theyve proven their worth, says Marous.

For his part, Shevlin isnt sold on trust in fintechs. They do deliver on their promises, he says, but they part ways with traditional institutions in the area of risk management.

It is built into banks culture to be risk averse, says Shevlin, but the startups in this space, especially those that go after consumers, have less of that risk aversion.

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Much of the discussion recounted above reflects very current thinking in financial services practices. The thing of it is, for every traditional institution that has been sweating to innovate, there are many more that havent done much to adapt to financial evolution.

Shevlin is pretty blunt about this: I dont think theres a single bank or credit union CEO out there who thinks that he or she and the rest of their management team has a legacy mindset. Even when they hear the word, legacy, they will tend to think of legacy computer processing.

Replacing old core systems is important, but what concerns Shevlin more is legacy thinking about financial services. Case in point: Having seen the dramatic shift to digital channels during the pandemic, many financial institutions are talking today about getting branches open again as if the last year hadnt happened.

People have to start thinking more about how technology can enable those person-to-person interactions that traditionally happened in branches, not necessarily to replace them, but to augment them, says Shevlin.

Marous says institutions have to hold onto legacy leaders experience while introducing new thinking. With their experience, the leaders have to pull the trigger to make change happen, he says.

The two experts differ markedly in their thinking of how to make change happen.

Marous portrays the typical employee base as full of scared people worried about becoming unemployed because of change. Banks and credit unions must train them for changing conditions and methods and for new roles. They still have a role, he says, because consumers want a humanized version of digital.

Such measures, and involving lower-level employees in transformation efforts, will help smooth the shifts. So will partnering up with providers who can help the institution and its people make the transition.

Shevlin believes that in recent years financial institution strategic planning has deteriorated into a budgeting exercise, with no real planning. Based on what he has seen so far, instead of taking a more serious look at all aspects of the future, post-Covid institutions seem to be focused on budgeting again.

So directors and managers need to focus harder on transformation. Shevlin says employees have a stake and ought to be involved in these discussions in some way, too, but that wont happen until leadership does its job.

Marous says the employee support will be critical once management and directors decide to get moving. A big catch-up challenge looms and he says institutions must get used to having five, six or even seven major transformation projects in motion at once.

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Digital Transformation Experts Debate Future of Banking, Big Tech & Fintech - The Financial Brand

Do social media and big tech companies have too much power when it comes to blocking political candidates from using their platforms? According to abill backed by Gov. Ron DeSantis, the answer to that question is "yes," a position that has prompted no small amount of debate among state lawmakers.

If passed, the bill would impose a daily $100,000 fine on social media platforms for de-platforming statewide candidates and a daily $10,000 fine for all other Florida candidates.

The bill also attempts to provide equal access for news organizations and political candidates to reach users free from manipulation by algorithms and give users the power to opt out of algorithms.

House Speaker Chris Sprowls, a supporter of the legislation, also spoke out about the bill during the news conference, saying how it would let Florida take back the virtual public square as a place where information and ideas can flow freely.

However, not all House members agree.

Were going to pass something that we have very strong reason to think is unconstitutional, Rep. Joe Geller, D-Aventura, said during a House Appropriations Committee hearing. Ultimately, were probably going to lose, and the people who are going to pay are really not us sitting at these tables; its going to be the taxpayers.

The main concern if the bill is passed is that it could infringe on companies right to free speech by regulating the content they publish, possibly violating the First Amendment.

However, the bills primary sponsor, Commerce Committee Chair Blaise Ingoglia, says that the bill would do more good than harm.

The bill, which the House Appropriations Committee cleared by a 19-8 vote, is now being reviewed by the House Judiciary Committee.

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Florida Big Tech Censorship Bill Takes Another Step Forward - Government Technology

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. Tackling issues in technology requires robust solutions that prioritize peoples interest, but currently, there are many roadblocks to pass legislation to accomplish this. To initiate productive conversations centered around big tech and policy, the Penn State Law, Policy, and Engineering (LPE) initiative and the Penn State Science Policy Society student organization are hosting a webinar titled "Decoding Big Tech." This webinar will discuss improved data privacy laws, anti-trust enforcement with the big tech industry and increased broadband access in rural and underserved communities.

The expert panel will discuss big tech in the context of data privacy laws, anti-trust enforcement, broadband access in rural and underserved communities, content moderation and tech-ethics. The discussion, a free virtual event, will be held online at noon on Friday, April 2.

Sandra Allain, director of the Law, Policy, and Engineering initiative will serve as the colloquium moderator. Allain is also a professor of practice and lecturer in law.

Andrea Matwyshyn, associate dean for innovation and technology and professor of law and engineering policy at Penn State Law at University Park and professor in the School of Engineering Design, Technology, and Professional Programs

Sascha Meinrath, Palmer Chair in Telecommunications in the Donald P. Bellisario College of Communications

Margaret Hu, associate dean for non-JD (juris doctor) programs at Penn State Law at University Park, and professor of law and international affairs

Daniel Susser, assistant professor of information sciences and technology

The Law, Policy, and Engineering initiative at Penn State is an interdisciplinary academic and research initiative among the College of Engineering, Penn State Law, and the School of International Affairs. The initiative will provide a transformative educational experience for students by actively integrating components of all three disciplines into the curriculum to prepare students for the competitive, interdisciplinary, global workplaces of the future.

Last Updated March 30, 2021

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'Decoding Big Tech' webinar to offer conversations around policy and big tech | Penn State University - Penn State News

A workers walk-out at Google's Mountain View, Calif., main quad, on November 1, 2018. (Noah Berger / AP Photo)

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In January, workers at Alphabet, Googles parent company, announced that they were forming a union with the Communications Workers of America (CWA). Im a technology and telecommunications lawyer and lobbyist who has worked with both tech companies and labor unions. CWA is a client of mine, and, until recently, so was Google.

I helped facilitate conversations in 2014 between Bay Area shuttle bus drivers, who were organizing to join a union so they could bargain for better pay and health care benefits, and Silicon Valley tech companies. It was a great example of what can happen when tech companies understand the value of working together with labor.

Unfortunately, Googles response to worker organizing shows that it has become trapped in an old, adversarial paradigm for labor relations. Instead of viewing the union as an opportunity to facilitate communication within the company and build a stronger, more supportive workplace, Google has retained IRI Consultants, a firm that specializes in preventing workers from organizing to join unions.

It is the workers, in fact, who are thinking outside the box. Recognizing the challenges of mounting a traditional union recognition campaign at a corporation that has unlimited resources to interfere in a union election by exploiting loopholes in the National Labor Relations Act, they have opened union membership to all Alphabet workers, including the temps, vendors and contractors upon which Google increasingly relies. Instead of focusing on winning formal recognition, they are systematically building power within the company through a transparent, democratic, worker-led process.Related Article

In announcing the formation of their union, the Alphabet workers called on Google to live up to its values, and I realized that I also need to live up to mine, so I am no longer a registered lobbyist for Google. But I have not given up hope that tech companies will update their thinking and encourage their employees to join unions.

Here are four ways that doing so could strengthen tech companies and improve tech policy-making:

At a time when so many divisions rip Americans apart, from income inequality and wealth disparities to opportunity gaps and ethnic, religious, and cultural differences, increased union membership would help to heal America by raising incomes, uniting workers, and building trust just as it did in the decades following World War II, when the USA boasted the biggest per-capita middle class in the world. What better place to start than in the heart of Americas tech industry? It would help workers, industry, and American society itself.

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Why Big Tech Shouldnt Be Scared of Unions - The Nation

The leaders of Google, Facebook and Twitter testified on Thursday before a House committee in their first appearances on Capitol Hill since the start of the Biden administration. As expected, sparks flew.

The hearing was centered on questions of how to regulate disinformation online, although lawmakers also voiced concerns about the public-health effects of social media and the borderline-monopolistic practices of the largest tech companies.

On the subject of disinformation, Democratic legislators scolded the executives for the role their platforms played in spreading false claims about election fraud before the Capitol riot on Jan. 6. Jack Dorsey, the chief executive of Twitter, admitted that his company had been partly responsible for helping to circulate disinformation and plans for the Capitol attack. But you also have to take into consideration the broader ecosystem, he added. Sundar Pichai and Mark Zuckerberg, the top executives at Google and Facebook, avoided answering the question directly.

Lawmakers on both sides of the aisle returned often to the possibility of jettisoning or overhauling Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, a federal law that for 25 years has granted immunity to tech companies for any harm caused by speech thats hosted on their platforms.

These Big Tech companies are among the wealthiest in the world, and their lobbying power in Washington is immense. Besides, there are major partisan differences over how Section 230 ought to be changed, if at all. But lawmakers and experts increasingly agree that the tide is turning in favor of comprehensive internet regulation, and that would most likely include some adjustments to Section 230.

To get a sense of where things stand, I caught up by phone with Jonathan Peters, a professor of media law at the University of Georgia, who closely follows Big Tech regulation. Our conversation has been lightly edited and condensed.

In her introductory remarks at the hearing today, Representative Jan Schakowsky of Illinois said, Self-regulation has come to the end of its road. What does she mean when she talks about an era of self-regulation on the internet? And how was that allowed to take hold?

The background of this hearing is that platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and YouTube, and big parent companies like Google, have come to have an enormous amount of power over the public discourse. And the platforms routinely conduct worldwide private speech regulation, through enforcement of their content rules and their community guidelines, deciding what may be posted, when to honor any request to remove content and how to display and prioritize content using algorithms.

Another way of putting it is that they are developing a de facto free-expression jurisprudence, against the background of the platforms business and legal interest and their self-professed democratic values. That has proved extremely difficult in practice.

The internet exists on a layered architecture of privately owned websites, servers and routers. And the ethos of the web, going back to its early days, has been one governed by cyber-libertarianism: this theory that by design this is supposed to be a relaxed regulatory environment.

What these hearings are trying to explore is the question, as you mentioned: Have we reached the end of that self-regulatory road, where the government ought to have a greater role than historically it has had in this space?

With all of that in mind, is antitrust legislation from Congress likely? How does President Bidens arrival in the Oval Office change the prospects?

Its interesting: If you look at what Biden has said as a candidate and what Biden has done as president, theyre a little bit different. As a candidate, Biden said he would favor revoking Section 230. He does not have even the Democratic votes to go through with a full revocation of Section 230, although an amendment might be possible. I think hes facing the political reality that that is going to be a harder sell than he had initially thought.

In terms of whether broad antitrust legislation might pass this Congress, it does seem possible. Antitrust issues in the social media space have generated a lot more interest in the last couple of years than they have in the last 15 or 20 combined. If I could put that in just a little bit of historical context for you: 2019 marked the 100th anniversary of a monumental dissenting opinion in a Supreme Court case called Abrams v. United States. That was a case in which Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes really gave rise to our modern First Amendment, and the enduring concept of the value in a market of free trade in ideas.

With the rise of social media, our free-speech landscape today looks exceedingly different than it did when Holmes wrote those words. He was warning of the dangers of the governments ability to censor critics or other disfavored speakers, whereas now the entities best able to restrict our speech are nongovernmental internet and web platforms.

So, many traditional First Amendment principles dont map easily onto our reconstructed speech landscape. And I think the central concern at the heart of these antitrust cases is the power that is at the heart of what these companies do. Its not that they produce widgets; they play a significant role, every day, in public discourse on matters of public interest.

Have the events of Jan. 6 and the entire experience of the 2020 election which was riddled with false information about elections and voting affected the likelihood of change? Did it really turn up the urgency in a meaningful way around web regulation?

I would say that it did. And it also clarified the differences, in terms of why the Democrats believe that reform is necessary and why the Republicans believe that it is. There is a growing consensus that we need more regulation to ensure the openness and usefulness of the web, but Democrats and Republicans disagree on why.

Democrats generally would argue that the platforms allow too much harmful user content to be hosted and spread the kind of misinformation and disinformation we saw around the 2020 election, some of which of course contributed to or caused the Capitol insurrection. I would say that Democrats are also concerned with bullying, harassment and threats; hate speech; criminal activity that occurs on social media platforms; and the presence of dangerous organizations like terrorist groups or violently graphic content, and the effect those might have.

Republicans, by contrast, have sounded some of those same concerns. But they have focused a lot more on their concern that platforms censor conservative viewpoints that the platforms are engaging in viewpoint discrimination. Im not convinced that there is evidence of that, but that claim was made more loudly after President Trump was deplatformed by several of these major social media companies. I think it gave them another arrow in their quiver to try to advance that rhetorical argument that they had been making before the Capitol attack.

From Opinion

On an average day in the United States, more than 100 people are killed by guns. Most Americans want Congress to do something about this crisis, but for years, their representatives have offered them only political theater.

Why? Its not for lack of understanding of the problem, the cause of which is actually quite simple: The United States has a staggering number of guns. Over 393 million, to be precise, which is more than one per person and about 46 percent of all civilian-owned firearms in the world. As researchers at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health have put it, more guns = more homicide and more guns = more suicide.

But when it comes to understanding the causes of Americas political inertia on the issue, the lines of thought become a little more tangled. Some of them are easy to follow: Theres the line about the Senate, of course, which gives large states that favor gun regulation the same number of representatives as small states that dont. Theres also the line about the National Rifle Association, which some gun control proponents have cast arguably incorrectly as the sine qua non of our national deadlock.

But there may be a psychological thread, too. Research has found that after a mass shooting, people who dont own guns tend to identify the general availability of guns as the culprit. Gun owners, on the other hand, are more likely to blame other factors, such as popular culture or parenting.

Americans who support gun regulations also dont prioritize the issue at the polls as much as Americans who oppose them, so gun rights advocates tend to win out. Or, in the words of Robert Gebelhoff of The Washington Post, Gun reform doesnt happen because Americans dont want it enough.

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Is there anything you think were missing? Anything you want to see more of? Wed love to hear from you. Email us at onpolitics@nytimes.com.

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Is a Big Tech Overhaul Just Around the Corner? - The New York Times

Big Tech is using the government to accomplish their own self-interested goals through a newindustry coalition rallied around progressive causes, author and biotech entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy said on Tuesday.

"It does not surprise me. I just say, follow the money. This is crony capitalism at its heart," the author of "Woke Inc."told "Fox & Friends."

Noting that the "largest tech companies in the world hired an ex-Google policy director to advance their objectives," Ramaswamy said that it "is classic crony capitalism."

Ramaswamy reacted to a Democratic tech policy executiveAdam Kovacevich launchingatech policy industry coalition called theChamber of Progress. The coalition will"tackle big questions, help usher in a progressive high-tech future, and ensure that all Americans benefit from technological leaps."

Kovacevich led Google's U.S. public policy team and served as an aide to several Democratic officials. In an effort to reject state legislative bills that would stifle Americans' voting rights, the Chamber of Progress, led by Kovacevich, recentlycalled on Congress to pass historicvoting rights legislation.

Although the coalition claims it willpush Big Tech regulation, it will advocate for public policies in economic, social, and consumer progress.

Ramaswamy accused tech giants of using progressive values to dress up self-interest as a way of capturing government.

"Thats lobbying, thats using the government as an instrument. But now, they have a new tool in their toolkit, which is blowing woke smoke to cover up exactly what is happening so that they actually deceive the public about the essence of what is really happening."

Furthermore, Ramaswamy said that the coalition is rallying behind issues that have nothing to do withtech regulation such as climate change and progressive taxation.

He asserted that the reason that they are doing this is because they "are bowing down to the party in power since Democrats control Congress, they control the Senate, they control the White House."

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"They now know where the regulatory bread is buttered and they are bowing at the temple that ultimately butters their bread," Ramaswamy said.

"They want to keep their special legislative protections intact and to the extent that they do implement big tech regulations, they are going to make sure that it is regulation that deters upstarts and keeps their own monopoly power intact."

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Big Tech 'blowing woke smoke' with new 'Chamber of Progress' coalition: 'Woke Inc.' author - Fox News