Category Archives: Big Tech

Tech entrepreneurs often tellMalle Gavetthatempathyis a weakness in business that kindness gets in the way of making tough decisions, or that bruised egos and hurt feelings are a necessary cost to changing the world.

Gavet couldn't disagree more. "If you define corporate empathy as the ability of a company and its leadership to understand what's happening in the world around them and how their decisions impact people inside and outside the company I think you actually have a better company," said the 42-year-old tech executive, speaker, and author during a roundtable discussion and Q&A at the Fast CompanyInnovation Festival on Wednesday.

And she should know: A former Priceline executive and CEO of Ozon, Russia's version of Amazon, Gavet wrote a book on corporate empathy, "Trampled by Unicorns: Big Tech's Empathy Problem and How to Fix It," published last Tuesday. Plenty of tech companies, she said, work hard to take care of their employees and plenty have empathetic people working for them. None of that is enough, she argued: "It has to include your customers, and it has to include your local community and your community at large."

Gavet, who most recently served as the chief operating officer at New York City-based real estate startup Compass, pointed to Facebook as the epitome of a unempathetic company, because of its seeming inability to make decisions that benefit anyone other than Facebook itself. An inverse example, she said, is Nike, which used employee feedback to launch a line of athletic maternity clothes last month and quickly sold out.

"Empathy and being human-centric is actually good for business," Gavetsaid. "I'm a capitalist. I'm not telling all these companies to become nonprofits. I'm just saying that if you want to have a company that's still going to be around 20, 50, 100 years from now, you have to take into account the well-being of the world you rely on."

Such a transformation probably won't happen overnight. Still, Gavet recommended three actions for any company tech or otherwise looking to improve:

Empathy requires access to a diverse set of life experiences, and standard job descriptions tend to attract the same types of job candidates. Work to attract candidates who can talk to others, understand varying points of view, and translate that into their work whether they're designers, engineers, or anything in between.

Most companies, Gavet said, issue promotions or raises purely on the basis of results allowing jerks to rise through the ranks. "Your behavior matters," she noted. "I'm continually shocked by the number of companies that reward employees exclusively on results."

At universities, research projects are governed by ethics oversight boards yet no such requirements exist in the business world. "When an engineer launches a test, that should be discussed with someone who isn't looking at it from a pure code perspective," Gavet said. "Is it ethical? Should we actually be testing that?"

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How to fix the tech industry's empathy problem, from a former exec - Business Insider - Business Insider

(Reuters) Japan will join forces with the United States and Europe to take on any market abuses by the four Big Tech companies, the new head of its antitrust watchdog said on Monday, a sign Tokyo will join global efforts to regulate digital platform operators.

Kazuyuki Furuya, chair of Japans Fair Trade Commission (FTC), also said Tokyo could open a probe into any merger or business tie-up involving fitness tracker maker Fitbit if the size of such deals are big enough.

If the size of any merger or business-tie up is big, we can launch an anti-monopoly investigation into the buyers process of acquiring a startup (like Fitbit), he told Reuters. Were closely watching developments, including in Europe.

EU antitrust regulators in August launched an investigation into a $2.1 billion deal by Alphabet unit Googles bid to buy Fitbit that aimed to take on Apple and Samsung in the wearable technology market.

Japan is laying the groundwork to regulate platform operators. Among them are the big tech giants dubbed GAFA (Google, Apple, Amazon, and Facebook) that face various antitrust probes in Western nations.

Multi-national companies like GAFA have similar business practices across the globe, which makes global coordination crucial, Furuya said.

Well work closely with our U.S. and European counterparts and respond to any moves that hamper competition, he said.

This is an area I will push through aggressively, he said, adding that the FTC was ready to open probes if digital platformers abuse their dominant market positions against consumers.

Furuya, who assumed the post in September, also said the FTC would conduct research into Japans mobile phone market to see whether there is any room for improvement to spur competition.

Any such move would help Prime Minister Yoshihide Sugas push to slash Japans mobile phone charges, which he has repeatedly criticized as too high.

Furuya countered the view that helping the government meet its policy priorities could undermine the FTCs position as a body mandated to act independently from political meddling.

If theres a policy priority for the government, theres no doubt the FTC should think about what it can do on that front, Furuya said.

By participating in the governments debate on policy issues, we have been reflecting [on] our thinking in the process. This is something our organization should do.

(Reporting by Leika Kihara and Takahiko Wada. Editing by Chang-Ran Kim and Gerry Doyle.)

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Japan to join the U.S. and Europe in regulating Big Tech over market abuses - VentureBeat

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Letter to the editor: Trump's opponents media, big tech - TribLIVE

Many of the world's biggest tech and telecom companies, like Google, Amazon, Microsoft and AT&T, are licensing the Associated Press' election results to power their voice, video and search products, executives tell Axios.

How it works: Because tech firms need to answer millions of unique voice commands and search queries in real time, the results will be coded through an API an interface that a computer program can read designed to handle "not enough results in yet" and "too close to call" cases.

Why it matters: Many election outcomes are expected to be delayed for at least a week. Given the enormous growth of smart home devices and voice assistants during the pandemic, users are going to expect accurate, real-time updates via those platforms.

The big picture: The uncertain nature of this year's election and the pandemic-driven shift to mail-in voting has put more pressure on companies like AP as well as their decision-desk counterparts at TV networks to proceed with caution when calling races. Some media companies have opted not to predict election results at all.

Details: AP provides tech companies with election updates via a proprietary API that tech companies can plug into with a subscription.

To address new use cases, AP had to not only convert all of its election data into easily-accessible code, but also to consider different types of math and data sets when determining results.

Details: Each tech company will route the results to different products.

Between the lines: For years, AP provided election results mostly to media companies for them to publish to their audiences. But today, any company that delivers information is expected to provide answers.

The bottom line: "This stuff was typically prepared by elections researchers for other elections researchers," says Scanlon. "It was never thought of this way when it was built. We have to think about a different end user now."

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Exclusive: AP to call elections for Alexa and other Big Tech channels - Axios

The past few years have seen big tech becoming involved in a number of financial products that span deposits, loans and credit cards and that trend will come to the world of real-time payments.

Google plans on launching a consumer bank account in collaboration with Citibank because they are interested in sitting on top of their financial infrastructure and expertise with their Google Pay technology. In 2019, Apple debuted a credit card created in partnership with Goldman Sachs. Like Google, the company has left much of the financial legwork to its bank partner, while designing the card and integrating it with its digital wallet app.

Well see this infiltrate the real-time payments space: Big tech players will focus on maintaining the customer relationship, experience and capturing more customer activity, searching and buying behavior, but will remain a distributor, essentially leaving the business of payments products to financial institutions.

I cant say this one enough: Were going to see the data economy mature further, removing the emphasis on payments products or services.

Data will become the core driver of value for payments systems. One is by predicting user behavior and by optimizing recommendations for payment services. These analytics can help payment providers plan and prioritize future product roadmaps.

As the number of payment vehicles and schemes continue to grow, they add to the already cluttered set of choices a customer has to make. Most personal and corporate users lack the subject matter expertise to decide which payment scheme is best to use.

An intelligent payment platform can use a rule-based engine, data analytics and other intelligence tools to help route transactions to either the lowest cost or fastest payment scheme available.

While there are differences in actual implementation across markets, the goal remains the same: to improve the speed in which funds move from account to account. Increasing real-time payment adoption rates and continual development and evolution of real-time infrastructures around the globe speak to the staying power of real time and indicate the true potential that is just beginning to emerge.

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Big tech's the big player in real-time payments - PaymentsSource

Six years ago, Silicon Valley decided to own up to its diversity problem. Apple, Facebook, Google, and Microsoft all began releasing annual diversity reports, providing public transparency into the stark underrepresentation of Black and Latinx workers at their companies, promising to do better. The move would help hold the industry accountable, so they claimed, in meeting their latest round of diversity goals.

It didnt work. The share of technical workers who are Black at Facebook, Google, and Microsoft has inched up less than one percentage point since 2014 and still sits below 4% at each company.

Today, the industry is experiencing a moment similar to what it saw in 2014: Large companies are lining up to announce new diversity pledges, and it genuinely seems like many leaders want to change. The last few months have forced systemic racism into the sightline of business leaders, and companies are also finding that diversity is good for their bottom line. Heres the problem: They also know that theyre probably going to come up short again.

The root cause is not just the low number of Black students who are trained in software engineering, which makes up about 6% of all computer science graduates. The problem comes down to our whole system for training, finding, and retaining underrepresented engineers.

In college, faculty shortages have led to enrollment restrictions for computer science majors, while dated curricula fail to cover many of the industrys most in-demand specialties, such as app development or cybersecurity. Black and Latinx students find that introductory courses were designed to weed out students without prior coding experience, and theyre about one third less likely to stick with the major. Many who do graduate have trouble getting in front of companies who largely recruit applicants from a few elite colleges or are stonewalled by the daunting technical interview, which tests esoteric concepts rarely covered in class.

Finally, the few Black engineers who make it past those barriers feel isolated in an industry that relies so heavily on personal connections. The sense of cutthroat competitiveness makes those who did not have access to social capital or computer science education feel that they cannot seek support. When they do, it is often painted as a weakness.

The problem isnt failing to identify the hidden gems with untapped potential. The problem is that the system was not built for us.

One of the problems with the way we look at Black success within white-dominated fields is how we paint the few who break through as somehow exceptional; as if they have stumbled upon something other Black folks havent figured out yet. But Im a Black man who made it from poverty to Silicon Valley, and I can confirm this: The problem is not that Black kids arent smart or determined enough. And the problem isnt failing to identify the hidden gems with untapped potential. The problem is that the system was not built for us.

When I was growing up in rural Maine, I didnt have access to computer science education or even to a computer. My underfunded school and overworked teachers certainly could not make up for my lack of resources. And yet, I made it to college, began working on startups, and became a successful entrepreneur.

People always want to find a reason that the rare few make it through a system that was not designed for them, and here it is: Systems are not precise, and sometimes people will bring the right personality to the right place at the right time. I had mentors who guided me through the industry and supporters who opened up doors for me. I got lucky.

All this means that, for the latest round of diversity initiatives to have any hope of succeeding, tech companies have to rebuild the pipeline. They should start early, channeling their massive lobbying and funding power to ensure that every student has access to quality computer science courses before graduating high school.

Then, companies should help to compensate for the college computer science faculty shortage by offering industry-relevant curricula for professors, funding initiatives that expand teaching capacity in key disciplines, and dedicating capacity within their own employees to teach and mentor aspiring software engineers. They should also create ongoing workplace training programs, so that promising applicants with knowledge gaps can take time to fill in missing skills instead of just being turned away.

Some of this work is already happening. For instance, the City University of New Yorks Tech-in-Residence Corps invites professional engineers to teach industry-based courses, and the IBM Q Network is bringing together a consortium of companies, education institutions, and research labs to develop a quantum computing curriculum. Community colleges have been partnering with local employers to align courses with job openings for years. But industry-informed, engaging computer science courses are still too few and far between.

Its not enough to just send recruiters to historically black colleges or build a special onboarding program for underrepresented talent. The United States computer science education system was designed 50 years ago to teach a few students how to become researchers or professors, and its now being used to cultivate a workforce for one of the countrys fastest-growing professions. Thats always going to mean that students without early exposure to tech pathways, mentors, and resources to learn outside of the classroom will be the last ones in and the first ones out.

For years, Silicon Valley has talked about diversity as the end goal. But diversity is just a snapshot. Diversity efforts that examine how many people of different colors are funneled through the hiring process are set up to fail because they neglect to consider what kinds of inequities applicants have to overcome just to get in the door.

Its time we stop asking for diverse companies and start asking for an equitable pipeline, recognizing that diversity will follow. Its time that companies stop looking for ways to compete over a few hundred industry-ready Black software engineers graduating each year and start figuring out how to train the next million Black software engineers.

Michael Ellison is the CEO and cofounder of CodePath, a nonprofit focused on increasing diversity in tech through computer science education for underrepresented minorities.

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The broken promises of Big Tech's lateset diversity reports - Fast Company

Millions of employees of the nations largest tech firms have been working remotely since the COVID-19 pandemic began in March, but 68% of them report feeling more burned out at home than they ever did while working in the office.

According to a survey of more than 2,500 employees of more than 30 of the largest U.S. tech firms, 67% report working more hours while at home, while the vast majority are unable to make time for activities that help avoid burnout, like exercise, hobbies, dining out or taking vacations.

Employees at PayPal (90%), Facebook (81%) and Google (79%) reported feeling more burned out since the pandemic began. Only two companies employees reported feeling less burned out during the pandemic: JPMorgan Chase (47%) and Wayfair (42%).

Employees at every company surveyed reported working as much or more since the pandemic began. Among the largest tech companies, employees at Walmart (81%), PayPal (80%), Expedia (79%), Intel (78%), Oracle (76%), Apple (73%) and Microsoft (70%) reported working more hours.

Employees were almost equally split51% to 49%on whether employers were understanding of mental health needs during the pandemic.

The survey of 2,574 employees was conducted by the professional network Blind between Oct. 1 and Oct. 6.

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More Than Two-Thirds of Big Tech Employees Feeling Burnout At Home - Nextgov

Niall Ferguson, Senior Fellow at Hoover Institution, spoke with Brian Kilmeade about the controversy with big tech censoring republicans on Facebook, Twitter & Google. Ferguson, who predicted big tech's systematic censorship of conservatives in his 2017 book "The Square and the Tower" said the censorship is not surprising because the big tech companies were shocked at President Trump's victory and have been rethinking about the way they would handle the next election. Ferguson says conservatives only have themselves to blame for big tech becoming far too political because they waited until the last months of President Trump's first term. When asked if it is worth it for big tech risking alienating half the country with their bias, Ferguson believes with big tech swimming in money, the pressure they're going to be under between now and Election Day will be entirely worth it if the outcome is the blue wave landslide Biden victory that they fantasize about.

Click here to order The Square and the Tower: Networks, Hierarchies and the Struggle for Global Power

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Niall Ferguson: The Costs Big Tech Are Prepared To Incur Will Be Entirely Worth It For Them If The Outcome Is A Landslide Biden Victory - FOX News...

(Jon Nazca/Reuters)Legislators ought to incentivize entrepreneurs to innovate, and stay out of the way.

It is true, as Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis famously wrote, If there be time to expose through discussion the falsehood and fallacies, to avert the evil by the processes of education, the remedy to be applied is more speech, not enforced silence. But not in the way some Republicans calling for regulating social-media platforms mean it. They are sacrificing the bedrock conservative principle of property rights Twitter and Facebooks platforms are privately owned for short-term political gains and this will be to the detriment of the Internet and its future users.

Last weeks controversial decision by Twitter and Facebook to limit distribution of a story from the New York Post that contained an unconfirmed claim about Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden added more fuel to the drive for social-media regulation. Several Senate Republicans set out on the war path against the platforms and called for Twitters CEO to be subpoenaed. The next day Federal Communications Commission chairman Ajit Pai announced the agency would move forward with a rulemaking to clarify [Section 230s] meaning.

As a practical matter, content moderation at scale is impossible to do perfectly. With half the world screaming at Twitter and Facebook to take down dangerous content instantaneously and the other half indignant about being censored, theres little room for these platforms to make informed and consistent decisions in real time. Furthermore, there could never be such thing as an absolutely objective arbiter of bias or accuracy to write and enforce the rules. (And even if there were, he or she sure as heck wouldnt be a politician.) There is no way to avoid some amount of bias or inaccuracy if content moderation is going to occur. If content moderation is going to be prohibited, Facebook will be Pornbook within 24 hours.

So what to do instead?

Back to Justice Brandeiss point about more speech: The solution to content-moderation bias on platforms isnt pretending it can be prevented, but instead to let competition do what it does. There will come a point when bias in moderation will drive subscribers to other platforms, and, for that matter, encourage entrepreneurs to establish platforms where that bias doesnt exist.

That involves protecting property rights. With respect to its very limited role in Internet governance, the core public-policy duty for Congress ought to be fostering the creation and expansion of private-property rights and an abundance of communication on existing and future platforms. The long-term health of free speech and the Internet ought to count for rather more than perceived short-term political advantage.

Such an approach is almost completely the opposite tack of those (very vocal) Republicans now seeking to treat successful social-media platforms as if they are public utilities simply because they are big.

With luck, speech on the Internet can recover from regulatory incursions by those without much respect for property rights in general. But when presumed champions of free enterprise and the First Amendment abandon principle and go full-interventionist, its not so easy to be optimistic. A conservatism that turns its back on private-property rights in relatively simple social-media disputes over bias and in the end thats what we are talking about will render itself unable to defend against leftist attacks on property rights in future right-leaning networks. Take that to the bank.

The unforced abandonment of core principles when it comes to relatively easy matters such as the handling of online bias by what may turn out to be transitory players (remember MySpace?) on an infinite Internet makes it far more difficult to stop the state from either blocking the expansion of institutions that promote economic and other liberty or, alternatively, regulating them into insignificance. This is by no means the only instance of this error, and it has resulted in sector after sector being consigned to progressive control. The conservatives who place trust in the Federal Communications Commission, Justice Department, and Federal Trade Commission to rein in bias shouldnt forget that those agencies are not always run by conservatives.

Some on the left and some on the right, including many in Congress as well as the president, regard social media as a public forum and, by ignoring the reality that these are spaces created by private companies, effectively ignore the property rights that ought to go with that. The fact that the Internet is an inexhaustible resource appears to have passed them by. The judiciary, too, has magnified this problem. According to the Second Court of Appeals in mid 2019, President Trump cannot block users on Twitter. It ruled that it was a violation of the First Amendment for him to do so. As the Wall Street Journal pointed out at the time, under the Second Circuits ruling, politicians would have to choose between abandoning social media which would limit their ability to communicate with voters and tolerating harassment and lies. The decision also opens a potential legal avenue by which regulators and federal courts could become the speech arbiters for online platforms.

Everybody hates Big Tech now. That ought to mean that the time is right for alternatives. If anything, the underlying functionality of the Internet has reached even higher levels than in the pre-Google and pre-Facebook era. The potential to offer users new ways of doing things on new platforms has not gone away and may even have been enhanced. All politicians have to do is preserve the property rights that incentivize entrepreneurs to innovate, and stay out of the way.

Wayne Crews is vice president for policy at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, where Jessica Melugin is associate director of the Center for Technology and Innovation.

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Beware the Regulatory Crackdown on Big Tech - National Review

WASHINGTON For all the divisions in Washington, one issue that had united Republicans and Democrats in recent years was their animus toward the power of the biggest tech companies.

That bipartisanship was supposed to come together this week in a landmark House report that caps a 15-month investigation into the practices of Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google. The report was set to feature recommendations from lawmakers to rein in the companies, including the most sweeping changes to U.S. antitrust laws in half a century.

But over the past few days, support for the recommendations has split largely along party lines, said five people familiar with the talks, who were not authorized to speak publicly because the discussions are private.

On Monday, the Democratic staff on the House Judiciary Committee delayed the reports release because they were unable to gain Republican support. Representative Jim Jordan of Ohio, the top Republican on the committee, has asked his colleagues not to endorse the Democratic-led report, said two people with knowledge of the discussions. And Representative Ken Buck, a Republican of Colorado, has circulated a separate report titled The Third Way that pushes back against some of the Democrats legislative recommendations, according to a copy obtained by The New York Times.

The Republicans chief objections to the report are that some of the legislative proposals against the tech giants could hamper other businesses and impede economic growth, said four people with knowledge of the situation. Several Republicans were also frustrated that the report didnt address claims of anti-conservative bias from the tech platforms. Mr. Buck said in The Third Way that some of the recommendations were a nonstarter for conservatives.

The partisan bickering has cast a cloud over what would be Congresss most aggressive act to curtail the power of technology companies since Microsoft stood trial on antitrust claims two decades ago. And while the House report may still be released this week, it is likely to lose some of its force if Democrats, led by Representative David Cicilline of Rhode Island, the chairman of the antitrust subcommittee, are unable to gain many signatures from Republican members.

The turmoil gives Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google a reprieve, even if only temporarily. The House committee was expected to accuse them of rising to the top of the global economy by gobbling up nascent rivals, bullying businesses that needed them to reach users and reducing competition across the economy, said three people familiar with the report.

The report was also expected to kick off other actions against the tech giants. The Justice Department has been working to file an antitrust complaint against Google, followed by separate suits against the internet search giant from state attorneys general.

Mr. Cicilline declined to comment. Russell Dye, a spokesman for Mr. Jordan, also declined to comment.

I agree with Chairman Cicilline that big tech has acted anti-competitively, Mr. Buck said in a statement. But, he added, with a problem this significant, Im not surprised that theres a variety of legislative options.

The House Judiciary Committee began its investigation into the four tech giants in June 2019 with bipartisan support. The committee interviewed hundreds of rivals and business clients of the platforms, such as third-party sellers on Amazon and developers who distribute their apps through Apples App Store.

In July, the chief executives of the tech behemoths Jeff Bezos of Amazon, Tim Cook of Apple, Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook and Sundar Pichai of Google testified in a hearing with the committee to defend their companies. Republican and Democratic lawmakers directed sharp questions at the chief executives, repeatedly interrupting and talking over them.

But the bipartisanship has eroded. Mr. Jordan, who became the committees top Republican this year, has been publicly skeptical of the investigation. He spent much of his time in the July hearing attacking the chief executives for their platforms alleged bias against conservatives, straying from the sessions stated focus of antitrust laws and Silicon Valleys market power.

Last week, the committees Democratic staff made its draft report available to all members of the committee who wanted to review it, said a person with knowledge of the proceedings. The lawmakers were not allowed to take a copy of the draft with them, the person said.

On Friday, staff received new evidence about Facebooks 2012 acquisition of Instagram to include in the report, which also delayed it, according to a person familiar with the investigation.

Mr. Jordan now has no plans to sign on to the Democrats report, one person said. His reluctance to endorse the report may cause other Republicans on the committee to withhold their signatures.

Mr. Buck shared his separate report, The Third Way, in recent days. It supports several recommendations made by the committees Democrats, including giving more resources to federal antitrust agencies and making limited legislative changes to empower enforcement of antitrust laws. But it pushes back against other proposals, like not allowing companies online to compete on platforms they operate, calling it a thinly veiled call to break up Big Tech firms, according to the draft obtained by The Times.

Mr. Jordans office was not involved in the drafting process for Mr. Bucks Third Way, said a person familiar with the matter. The document was reported earlier by Politico.

Antitrust laws last underwent a major alteration nearly 50 years ago, when new rules were enacted around merger reviews. The Hart-Scott-Rodino Act of 1976 required companies to notify the Federal Trade Commission and Justice Department the main antitrust enforcement agencies of large mergers. Those laws are now regarded by techs critics as insufficient in accounting for the companies power to quickly expand across new markets and kill off young competitors.

William Kovacic, former chairman of the Federal Trade Commission, said the House Judiciary Committees antitrust report has the potential to be the most influential study of its kind since the 1970s. He added, It could lead to really big changes, but any changes would come slowly.

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Big Tech Was Their Enemy, Until Partisanship Fractured the ...