Above: Photo Collage / Lynxotic / Apple / Telegram
The chairman of a congressional subcommittee has asked Apple and Google to help stop fraud against U.S. taxpayers on Telegram, a fast-growing messaging service distributed via their smartphone app stores. The request from the head of the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis came after ProPublica reports last July and in January revealed how cybercriminals were using Telegram to sell and trade stolen identities and methods for filing fake unemployment insurance claims.
Rep. James E. Clyburn, D-S.C., who chairs the subcommittee (which is part of the House Committee on Oversight and Reform), cited ProPublica’s reporting in March 23 letters to the CEOs of Apple and Alphabet, Google’s parent company. The letters pointed out that enabling fraud against American taxpayers is inconsistent with Apple’s and Google’s policies for their respective app stores, which forbid apps that facilitate or promote illegal activities.
“There is substantial evidence that Telegram has not complied with these requirements by allowing its application to be used as a central platform for the facilitation of fraud against vital pandemic relief programs,” Clyburn wrote. He asked whether Apple and Alphabet “may be able to play a constructive role in combating this Telegram-facilitated fraud against the American public.”
Clyburn also requested that Apple and Google provide “all communications” between the companies and Telegram “related to fraud or other unlawful conduct on the Telegram platform, including fraud against pandemic relief programs” as well as what “policies and practices” the companies have implemented to monitor whether applications disseminated through their app stores are being used to “facilitate fraud” and “disseminate coronavirus misinformation.” He gave the companies until April 7 to provide the records.
Apple, which runs the iOS app store for its iPhones, did not reply to a request for comment. Google, which runs the Google Play app store for its Android devices, also did not respond.
The two companies’ app stores are vital distribution channels for messaging services such as Telegram, which markets itself as one of the world’s 10 most downloaded apps.The company has previously acknowledged theimportance of complying with Apple’s and Google’s app store policies. “Telegram — like all mobile apps — has to follow rules set by Apple and Google in order to remain available to users on iOS and Android,” Telegram CEO Pavel Durov wrote in a September blog post. He noted that, should Apple’s and Google’s app stores stop supporting Telegram in a given locale, the move would prevent software updates to the messaging service and ultimately neuter it.
By appealing to the two smartphone makers directly, Clyburn is increasing pressure on Telegram to take his concerns seriously. His letter noted that “Telegram’s very brief terms of service only prohibit users from ‘scam[ming]’ other Telegram users, appearing to permit the use of the platform to conspire to commit fraud against others.” He faulted Telegram for letting its users disseminate playbooks for defrauding state unemployment insurance systems on its platform and said its failure to stop that activity may have enabled large-scale fraud.
Clyburn wrote to Durov in December asking whether Telegram has “undertaken any serious efforts to prevent its platform from being used to enable large-scale fraud” against pandemic relief programs. Telegram “refused to engage” with the subcommittee, a spokesperson for Clyburn told ProPublica in January. (Since then, the app was briefly banned in Brazil for failing to respond to judicial orders to freeze accounts spreading disinformation. Brazil’s Supreme Court reversed the ban after Telegram finally responded to the requests.)
Telegram said in a statement to ProPublica that it’s working to expand its terms of service and moderation efforts to “explicitly restrict and more effectively combat” misuse of its messaging platform, “such as encouraging fraud.” Telegram also said that it has always “actively moderated harmful content” and banned millions of chats and accounts for violating its terms of service, which prohibit users from scamming each other, promoting violence or posting illegal pornographic content.
But ProPublica found that the company’s moderation efforts can amount to little more than a game of whack-a-mole. After a ProPublica inquiry last July, Telegram shut some public channels on its app in which users advertised methods for filing fake unemployment insurance claims using stolen identities. But various fraud tutorials are still openly advertised on the platform. Accounts that sell stolen identities can also pop back up after they’re shut down; the users behind them simply recycle their old account names with a small variation and are back in business within days.
The limited interventions are a reflection of Telegram’s hands-off approach to policing content on its messenger app, which is central to its business model. Durov asserted in his September blog post that “Telegram gives its users more freedom of speech than any other popular mobile application.” He reiterated that commitment in March, saying that Telegram users’ “right to privacy is sacred. Now — more than ever.”
The approach has helped Telegram grow and become a crucial communication tool in authoritarian regimes. Russia banned Telegram in 2018 for refusing to hand over encryption keys that would allow authorities to access user data, only to withdraw the ban two years later at least in part because users were able to get around it. More recently, Telegram has been credited as a rare place where Russians can find uncensored news about the invasion of Ukraine.
But the company’s iron-clad commitment to privacy also attracts cybercriminals looking to make money. After the COVID-19 pandemic prompted Congress to authorize hundreds of billions of small-business loans and extra aid to workers who lost their jobs, Telegram lit up with channels offering methods to defraud the programs. The scale of the fraud is yet unknown, but it could stretch into tens if not hundreds of billions of dollars. Its sheer size prompted the Department of Justice to announce, on March 10, the appointment of a chief prosecutor to focus on the most egregious cases of pandemic fraud, including identity theft by criminal syndicates.
The new law “will put an end to some of the most harmful practices of Big Tech and narrow the power imbalance between people and online platforms.”
Digital and consumer rights advocates on Friday hailed a landmark European Union law aimed at curbing Big Tech’s monopolistic behavior.
“This is a big moment for consumers and businesses who have suffered from Big Tech’s harmful practices.”
Negotiators from the European Parliament and European Council agreed late Thursday on the language of the Digital Markets Act (DMA), which aims to prevent major tech companies from anti-competitive practices by threatening large fines or possible breakup.
Ursula Pachl, deputy director-general at the European Consumer Organization (BEUC), an umbrella advocacy group, said in a statement that “this is a big moment for consumers and businesses who have suffered from Big Tech’s harmful practices.”
“This legislation will rebalance digital markets, increase consumer choice, and put an end to many of the worst practices that Big Tech has engaged in over the years,” she added. “It is a landmark law for the E.U.’s digital transformation.”
The European Union just struck an important deal on the Digital Markets Act, recognizing that only a just and interoperable market can ensure fair competition and more choice for users. #DMAhttps://t.co/lGcTDstagj
Cédric O, the French minister of state with responsibility for digital, said in a statement that “the European Union has had to impose record fines over the past 10 years for certain harmful business practices by very large digital players. The DMA will directly ban these practices and create a fairer and more competitive economic space for new players and European businesses.”
“These rules are key to stimulating and unlocking digital markets, enhancing consumer choice, enabling better value sharing in the digital economy, and boosting innovation,” he added.
Andreas Schwab, a member of the European Parliament from Germany, said that “the Digital Markets Act puts an end to the ever-increasing dominance of Big Tech companies. From now on, Big Tech companies must show that they also allow for fair competition on the internet. The new rules will help enforce that basic principle.”
BEUC’s Pachl offered examples of the new law’s benefits:
Google must stop promoting its own local, travel, or job services over those of competitors in Google Search results, while Apple will be unable to force users to use its payment service for app purchases. Consumers will also be able to collectively enforce their rights if a company breaks the rules in the Digital Markets Act.
Companies are also barred from pre-installing certain software and reusing certain private data collected “during a service for the purposes of another service.”
Today’s historical agreement on the #DMA taught us two things, first, that the EU is up to the challenge to reign big tech and, secondly, that Europe’s civil society can make a difference in making the regulatory framework more user-focused.
The DMA applies to companies deemed both “platforms” and “gatekeepers”—those with market capitalization greater than €75 billion ($82.4 billion), 45 million or more monthly end-users, and at least 10,000 E.U. business users. Companies that violate the law can be fined up to 10% of their total annual worldwide turnover, with repeat offenders subject to a doubling of the penalty.
“The DMA is a major step towards limiting the tremendous market power that today’s gatekeeper tech firms have.”
Diego Naranjo, head of policy at the advocacy group European Digital Rights (EDRi), said in a statement that “the DMA will put an end to some of the most harmful practices of Big Tech and narrow the power imbalance between people and online platforms. If correctly implemented, the new agreement will empower individuals to choose more freely the type of online experience and society we want to build in the digital era.”
To ensure effective implementation, BEUC’s Pachl called on E.U. member states to “now also provide the [European] Commission with the necessary enforcement resources to step in the moment there is foul play.”
EDRi senior policy adviser Jan Penfrat said that while “the DMA is a major step towards limiting the tremendous market power that today’s gatekeeper tech firms have,” policymakers “must now make sure that the new obligations not to reuse personal data and the prohibition of using sensitive data for surveillance advertising are respected and properly enforced by the European Commission.”
“Only then will the change be felt by people who depend on digital services every day,” he added.
Originally published on Common Dreams by BRETT WILKINS and republished under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).
Data-driven personalized ads are the lifeblood of the internet. To a growing number of lawmakers, they’re also nefarious
Earlier this month, the European Union Parliament passed sweeping new rules aimed at limiting how companies and websites can track people online to target them with advertisements.
Targeted advertising based on people’s online behavior has long been the business model that underwrites the internet. It allows advertisers to use the mass of personal data collected by Meta, Google, and other tech companies as people browse the web to serve ads to users by sorting them into tens of thousands of hyperspecific categories.
But behavioral advertising is also controversial. Critics argue that the practice enables discrimination, potentially only offering certain groups of people economic opportunities. They also say serving people ads based on what big tech companies assume they’re interested in potentially leaves people vulnerable to scams, fraud, and disinformation. Notoriously, the consulting firm Cambridge Analytica used personal data gleaned from Facebook profiles to target certain Americans with pro-Trump messages and certain Britons with pro-Brexit ads.
The 2016 U.S. presidential election and the Brexit vote, according to Jan Penfrat, a senior policy adviser at European digital rights group EDRi, were “wake-up calls” to the Europe Union to crack down. Lawmakers in the U.S. are also looking into ways to regulate behavioral advertising.
What Will the European Parliament’s New Regulations Do?
There’s been a long back and forth about how much to crack down on targeted advertising in the Digital Services Act (DSA), the EU’s big legislative package aimed at regulating Big Tech.
Everything from a total ban on behavioral advertising to more modest changes around ad transparency has at some point been on the table.
The bill also includes a ban on so-called dark patterns —“design choices that steer people into decisions they may not have made under normal conditions—such as the endless clicks it takes to opt out of being tracked by cookies on many websites.”
That measure is critical, according to Alexandre de Streel, the academic director of the think tank Centre on Regulation in Europe, because of how tech companies responded to the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), the EU’s 2016 tech regulation.
In a study on online advertising for the Parliament’s crucial Committee on the Internal Market and Consumer Protection, de Streel and nearly a dozen other experts documented how “dark patterns” had become a major tool used by websites and platforms to persuade users to provide consent for sharing their data. Their recommendations for the DSA—which included more robust enforcement of the GDPR, stricter rules about obtaining consent, and the dark patterns ban—were included in the final bill.
“We are going in the right direction if we better enforce the GDPR and add these amendments on ‘dark patterns,’ ” De Streel told The Markup.
German member of European Parliament Patrick Breyer joined with more than 20 other MEPs and more than 50 public and private organizations last year to form the Tracking Free Ads Coalition. Though its push for a total ban on targeted advertising failed, the coalition was behind many of the more stringent restrictions. Breyer told The Markup the new rules were “a major achievement.”
“The Parliament stopped short of prohibiting surveillance advertising, but giving people a true choice [of whether to be targeted] is a major step forward, and I think the vast majority of people will use this option,” he said.
Despite passing the European Parliament, the DSA is far from settled. Due to the EU’s unique law-making process, the legislation must now be negotiated with the European Commission and the bloc’s 27 countries. The member states, as represented by the European Council, have adopted an official position considerably less aggressive—opting for only improved transparency on targeted advertising—and, according to Breyer, are “traditionally very open to [industry] lobbying.”
Whether the DSA’s wins against targeted advertising survive this process “will depend to a large degree on public pressure,” said Breyer.
How Has Big Tech Responded?
So far, Big Tech companies have publicly tread lightly in response to the European push to limit targeted advertising.
In response to The Markup’s request for comment, Google spokesperson Karl Ryan said that Google supports the DSA and that it shares “the goal of MEPs to continue to make the internet safer for everyone….”
“We will now take some time to analyze the final Parliament text to understand how it could impact us and our different users,” he said.
Meta did not respond to a request for comment.
But privately, over the last two years, Google, Facebook, Amazon, Apple, and Microsoft have ramped up lobbying efforts in Brussels, spending more than $20 million in 2020.
The advertising industry, meanwhile, has been public in its opposition. In a statement on the recent vote, Interactive Advertising Bureau Europe director of public policy Greg Mroczkowski urged policymakers to reconsider.
“The use of personal data in advertising is already tightly regulated by existing legislation,” Mroczkowski said, apparently referencing the GDPR, which regulates data privacy in the EU generally. He further noted that the new rules “risk undermining” existing law and “the entire ad-supported digital economy.”
On Wednesday, the Belgian Data Protection Authority found IAB Europe–which developed and administered the system for companies to obtain consent for behavioral advertising while complying with GDPR—in violation of that law. In particular, the authority found that the pop-ups that ask for people’s consent to process their data as they visit websites failed to meet GDPR’s standards for transparency and consent. The pop-up posed “great risks to the fundamental rights” of Europeans, the ruling said. The authority ordered IAB to delete data collected under its Transparency and Consent Framework and has six months to comply.
“This decision is momentous,” Johnny Ryan, a senior fellow at the Irish Council for Civil Liberties, told The Markup. “It means that digital rights are real. And there is a significance for the United States, too, because the IAB has introduced the same consent spam for the CCPA and CPRA [California Consumer Privacy Act and California Privacy Rights Act].”
In a statement to Tech Crunch, IAB Europe said it “reject[s] the finding that we are a data controller” in the context of its consent framework and is “considering all options with respect to a legal challenge.” Further, it said it is working on an “action plan to be executed within the prescribed six months” to bring it within GDPR compliance.
Google and Meta may be preparing for whichever way the wind is blowing.
A handful of European companies like internet security company Avast, search engine DuckDuckGo (which is a contributor to The Markup), and publisher Axel Springer see tighter rules around data privacy as a means to push the industry toward contextual ads or tech that matches ads based on a website’s content, and to therefore break the Google-Meta duopoly over online advertising.
What’s Happening in the U.S.?
On Jan. 18, Reps. Anna Eshoo (D-CA) and Jan Schakowsky (D-IL) and Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ) introduced legislation to Congress to prohibit advertisers from using personal data to target advertisements—particularly using data about a person’s race, gender, and religion. Exceptions would be made for “broad” location information and contextual advertising.
“The hoarding of people’s personal data not only abuses privacy, but also drives the spread of misinformation, domestic extremism, racial division, and violence,” Booker said in a statement announcing the bill in January.
While there is bipartisan desire to rein in Big Tech, there is no consensus on how to do it. The bill most likely to pass the divided Congress is designed to stop Amazon, Apple, Google, and other tech giants from privileging their own products. Congressional action on targeted advertising does not appear likely.
Still, it is possible the Federal Trade Commission will take action.
Last summer, President Biden issued an executive order directing the FTC to use its rulemaking authority to curtail “unfair data collection and surveillance practices.” In December, the FTC sought public comment for a petition by nonprofit Accountable Tech to develop new data privacy rules.
Meanwhile, many U.S. digital rights activists, such as nonprofit Electronic Frontier Foundation, are hopeful that new rules in Europe will force changes globally, as occurred after the GDPR. “The EU Parliament’s position, if it becomes law, could change the rules of the game for all platforms,” wrote EFF’s international policy director Christopher Schmon.
It’s still early days, but many see the tide turning against targeted advertising. These types of conversations, according to Penfrat at EDRi, were unthinkable a few years ago.
“The fact that a ban on surveillance-based advertising has been brought into the mainstream is a huge success,” he said.
Governments increasingly use algorithms to do everything from assign benefits to dole out punishment—but attempts to regulate them have been unsuccessful
In 2018, the New York City Council created a task force to study the city’s use of automated decision systems (ADS). The concern: Algorithms, not just in New York but around the country, were increasingly being employed by government agencies to do everything from informing criminal sentencing and detecting unemployment fraud to prioritizing child abuse cases and distributing health benefits. And lawmakers, let alone the people governed by the automated decisions, knew little about how the calculations were being made.
Rare glimpses into how these algorithms were performing were not comforting: In several states, algorithms used to determine how much help residents will receive from home health aides have automatically cut benefits for thousands. Police departments across the country use the PredPol software to predict where future crimes will occur, but the program disproportionately sends police to Black and Hispanic neighborhoods. And in Michigan, an algorithm designed to detect fraudulent unemployment claims famously improperly flagged thousands of applicants, forcing residents who should have received assistance to lose their homes and file for bankruptcy.
New York City’s was the first legislation in the country aimed at shedding light on how government agencies use artificial intelligence to make decisions about people and policies.
At the time, the creation of the task force was heralded as a “watershed” moment that would usher in a new era of oversight. And indeed, in the four years since, a steady stream of reporting about the harms caused by high-stakes algorithms has prompted lawmakers across the country to introduce nearly 40 bills designed to study or regulate government agencies’ use of ADS, according to The Markup’s review of state legislation.
The bills range from proposals to create study groups to requiring agencies to audit algorithms for bias before purchasing systems from vendors. But the dozens of reforms proposed have shared a common fate: They have largely either died immediately upon introduction or expired in committees after brief hearings, according to The Markup’s review.
In New York City, that initial working group took two years to make a set of broad, nonbinding recommendations for further research and oversight. One task force member described the endeavor as a “waste.” The group could not even agree on a definition for automated decision systems, and several of its members, at the time and since, have said they did not believe city agencies and officials had bought into the process.
Elsewhere, nearly all proposals to study or regulate algorithms have failed to pass. Bills to create study groups to examine the use of algorithms failed in Massachusetts, New York state, California, Hawaii, and Virginia. Bills requiring audits of algorithms or prohibiting algorithmic discrimination have died in California, Maryland, New Jersey, and Washington state. In several cases—California, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Michigan, and Vermont—ADS oversight or study bills remain pending in the legislature, but their prospects this session are slim, according to sponsors and advocates in those states.
The only state bill to pass so far, Vermont’s, created a task force whose recommendations—to form a permanent AI commission and adopt regulations—have so far been ignored, state representative Brian Cina told The Markup.
The Markup interviewed lawmakers and lobbyists and reviewed written and oral testimony on dozens of ADS bills to examine why legislatures have failed to regulate these tools.
We found two key through lines: Lawmakers and the public lack fundamental access to information about what algorithms their agencies are using, how they’re designed, and how significantly they influence decisions. In many of the states The Markup examined, lawmakers and activists said state agencies had rebuffed their attempts to gather basic information, such as the names of tools being used.
Meanwhile, Big Tech and government contractors have successfully derailed legislation by arguing that proposals are too broad—in some cases claiming they would prevent public officials from using calculators and spreadsheets—and that requiring agencies to examine whether an ADS system is discriminatory would kill innovation and increase the price of government procurement.
Lawmakers Struggled to Figure Out What Algorithms Were Even in Use
One of the biggest challenges lawmakers have faced when seeking to regulate ADS tools is simply knowing what they are and what they do.
Following its task force’s landmark report, New York City conducted a subsequent survey of city agencies. It resulted in a list of only 16 automated decision systems across nine agencies, which members of the task force told The Markup they suspect is a severe underestimation.
“We don’t actually know where government entities or businesses use these systems, so it’s hard to make [regulations] more concrete,” said Julia Stoyanovich, a New York University computer science professor and task force member.
In 2018, Vermont became the first state to create its own ADS study group. At the conclusion of its work in 2020, the group reported that “there are examples of where state and local governments have used artificial intelligence applications, but in general the Task Force has not identified many of these applications.”
“Just because nothing popped up in a few weeks of testimony doesn’t mean that they don’t exist,” said Cina. “It’s not like we asked every single state agency to look at every single thing they use.”
In February, he introduced a bill that would have required the state to develop basic standards for agency use of ADS systems. It has sat in committee without a hearing since then.
In 2019, the Hawaii Senate passed a resolution requesting that the state convene a task force to study agency use of artificial intelligence systems, but the resolution was nonbinding and no task force convened, according to the Hawaii Legislative Reference Bureau. Legislators tried to pass a binding resolution again the next year, but it failed.
Legislators and advocacy groups who authored ADS bills in California, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, New York, and Washington told The Markup that they have no clear understanding of the extent to which their state agencies use ADS tools.
Advocacy groups like the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) that have attempted to survey government agencies regarding their use of ADS systems say they routinely receive incomplete information.
“The results we’re getting are straight-up non-responses or truly pulling teeth about every little thing,” said Ben Winters, who leads EPIC’s AI and Human Rights Project.
In Washington, after an ADS regulation bill failed in 2020, the legislature created a study group tasked with making recommendations for future legislation. The ACLU of Washington proposed that the group should survey state agencies to gather more information about the tools they were using, but the study group rejected the idea, according to public minutes from the group’s meetings.
“We thought it was a simple ask,” said Jennifer Lee, the technology and liberty project manager for the ACLU of Washington. “One of the barriers we kept getting when talking to lawmakers about regulating ADS is they didn’t have an understanding of how prevalent the issue was. They kept asking, ‘What kind of systems are being used across Washington state?’ ”
Ben Winters, who leads EPIC’s AI and Human Rights Project
Lawmakers Say Corporate Influence a Hurdle
Washington’s most recent bill has stalled in committee, but an updated version will likely be reintroduced this year now that the study group has completed its final report, said state senator Bob Hasegawa, the bill’s sponsor
The legislation would have required any state agency seeking to implement an ADS system to produce an algorithmic accountability report disclosing the name and purpose of the system, what data it would use, and whether the system had been independently tested for biases, among other requirements.
The bill would also have banned the use of ADS tools that are discriminatory and required that anyone affected by an algorithmic decision be notified and have a right to appeal that decision.
“The big obstacle is corporate influence in our governmental processes,” said Hasegawa. “Washington is a pretty high-tech state and so corporate high tech has a lot of influence in our systems here. That’s where most of the pushback has been coming from because the impacted communities are pretty much unanimous that this needs to be fixed.”
California’s bill, which is similar, is still pending in committee. It encourages, but does not require, vendors seeking to sell ADS tools to government agencies to submit an ADS impact report along with their bid, which would include similar disclosures to those required by Washington’s bill.
It would also require the state’s Department of Technology to post the impact reports for active systems on its website.
Led by the California Chamber of Commerce, 26 industry groups—from big tech representatives like the Internet Association and TechNet to organizations representing banks, insurance companies, and medical device makers—signed on to a letter opposing the bill.
“There are a lot of business interests here, and they have the ears of a lot of legislators,” said Vinhcent Le, legal counsel at the nonprofit Greenlining Institute, who helped author the bill.
Originally, the Greenlining Institute and other supporters sought to regulate ADS in the private sector as well as the public but quickly encountered pushback.
“When we narrowed it to just government AI systems we thought it would make it easier,” Le said. “The argument [from industry] switched to ‘This is going to cost California taxpayers millions more.’ That cost angle, that innovation angle, that anti-business angle is something that legislators are concerned about.”
The California Chamber of Commerce declined an interview request for this story but provided a copy of the letter signed by dozens of industry groups opposing the bill. The letter states that the bill would “discourage participation in the state procurement process” because the bill encourages vendors to complete an impact assessment for their tools. The letter said the suggestion, which is not a requirement, was too burdensome. The chamber also argued that the bill’s definition of automated decision systems was too broad.
Industry lobbyists have repeatedly criticized legislation in recent years for overly broad definitions of automated decision systems despite the fact that the definitions mirror those used in internationally recognized AI ethics frameworks, regulations in Canada, and proposed regulations in the European Union.
During a committee hearing on Washington’s bill, James McMahan, policy director for the Washington Association of Sheriffs and Police Chiefs, told legislators he believed the bill would apply to “most if not all” of the state crime lab’s operations, including DNA, fingerprint, and firearm analysis.
Internet Association lobbyist Vicki Christophersen, testifying at the same hearing, suggested that the bill would prohibit the use of red light cameras. The Internet Association did not respond to an interview request.
“It’s a funny talking point,” Le said. “We actually had to put in language to say this doesn’t include a calculator or spreadsheet.”
Maryland’s bill, which died in committee, would also have required agencies to produce reports detailing the basic purpose and functions of ADS tools and would have prohibited the use of discriminatory systems.
“We’re not telling you you can’t do it [use ADS],” said Delegate Terri Hill, who sponsored the Maryland bill. “We’re just saying identify what your biases are up front and identify if they’re consistent with the state’s overarching goals and with this purpose.”
The Maryland Tech Council, an industry group representing small and large technology firms in the state, opposed the bill, arguing that the prohibitions against discrimination were premature and would hurt innovation in the state, according to written and oral testimony the group provided.
“The ability to adequately evaluate whether or not there is bias is an emerging area, and we would say that, on behalf of the tech council, putting in place this at this time is jumping ahead of where we are,” Pam Kasemeyer, the council’s lobbyist, said during a March committee hearing on the bill. “It almost stops the desire for companies to continue to try to develop and refine these out of fear that they’re going to be viewed as discriminatory.”
Limited Success in the Private Sector
There have been fewer attempts by state and local legislatures to regulate private companies’ use of ADS systems—such as those The Markup has exposed in the tenant screening and car insurance industries—but in recent years, those measures have been marginally more successful.
The New York City Council passed a bill that would require private companies to conduct bias audits of algorithmic hiring tools before using them. The tools are used by many employers to screen job candidates without the use of a human interviewer.
Illinois also enacted a state law in 2019 that requires private employers to notify job candidates when they’re being evaluated by algorithmic hiring tools. And in 2021, the legislature amended the law to require employers who use such tools to report demographic data about job candidates to a state agency to be analyzed for evidence of biased decisions.
This year the Colorado legislature also passed a law, which will take effect in 2023, that will create a framework for evaluating insurance underwriting algorithms and ban the use of discriminatory algorithms in the industry.
Facebook Inc. has rebranded itself, now, as Meta, most likely as a means to separate the corporate identity of the social network that has been tied to a myriad of ugly controversies. The name change is meant to highlight the company’s shift to virtual reality and the metaverse.
CEO Zuckerberg spoke at the Facebook’s Connect virtual conference and commented on the name change, “From now on, we’re going to be metaverse-first, not Facebook-first.”
The new name change does not affect the company’s share data or corporate structure, however the company will start trading under the new ticker, MVRS starting December 1.
Needless to say, Twitter comments and memes instantly rolled in after the rebrand announcement:
Facebook has named itself Meta, a word that means "please forget about all the leaked internal documents that are currently showing all the horrors of social media"
While still CEO of Amazon, Jeff Bezos testified in Congress by video conference on July 29, 2020. Now, there are at least Five members of a congressional committeealleging that he and other executives may have lied under oath andmisled lawmakers.
In a press release by the House Judiciary Antitrust Subcommittee the lawmakers state that they are giving Amazon a “Final Chance to Correct the Record Following a Series of Misleading Testimony and Statements”.
CurrentAmazon CEO Andy Jassy, who, in July, succeeded Bezos is being asked to respond to the discrepancies, including information found by The Markup published in a recent article
Leaked documents reveal the e-commerce company’s private-brands team in India “secretly exploited internal data” to copy products from other sellers and rigged search results.
U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren on Wednesday renewed her call to break up Amazon after internal documents obtained by Reutersrevealed that the e-commerce giant engaged in anti-competitive behavior in India that it has long denied, including in testimonies from company leaders to Congress.
“These documents show what we feared about Amazon’s monopoly power—that the company is willing and able to rig its platform to benefit its bottom line while stiffing small businesses and entrepreneurs,” tweeted Warren (D-Mass.) “This is one of the many reasons we need to break it up.”
Warren is a vocal advocate of breaking up tech giants including but not limited to Amazon. The company faces investigations regarding alleged anti-competitive behavior in the United States as well as Europe and India. The investigative report may ramp up such probes.
Aditya Karla and Steve Stecklow report that “thousands of pages of internal Amazon documents examined by Reuters—including emails, strategy papers, and business plans—show the company ran a systematic campaign of creating knockoffs and manipulating search results to boost its own product lines in India, one of the company’s largest growth markets.”
“The documents reveal how Amazon’s private-brands team in India secretly exploited internal data from Amazon.in to copy products sold by other companies, and then offered them on its platform,” according to the reporters. “The employees also stoked sales of Amazon private-brand products by rigging Amazon’s search results.”
In India, Amazon stoked sales of private-brand products by manipulating its search results so that the products would appear ‘in the first 2 or three … search results’ when customers were shopping on https://t.co/OA0tY09fhk, an internal document shows https://t.co/1FMsAX0pza
In sworn testimony before the U.S. Congress in 2020, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos explained that the e-commerce giant prohibits its employees from using the data on individual sellers to help its private-label business. And, in 2019, another Amazon executive testified that the company does not use such data to create its own private-label products or alter its search results to favor them.
But the internal documents seen by Reuters show for the first time that, at least in India, manipulating search results to favor Amazon’s own products, as well as copying other sellers’ goods, were part of a formal, clandestine strategy at Amazon—and that high-level executives were told about it. The documents show that two executives reviewed the India strategy—senior vice presidents Diego Piacentini, who has since left the company, and Russell Grandinetti, who currently runs Amazon’s international consumer business.
While neither Piacentini nor Grandinetti responded to Reuters‘ requests for comment, Amazon provided a written response that did not address the reporters’ questions.
“As Reuters hasn’t shared the documents or their provenance with us, we are unable to confirm the veracity or otherwise of the information and claims as stated,” Amazon said. “We believe these claims are factually incorrect and unsubstantiated.”
“We display search results based on relevance to the customer’s search query, irrespective of whether such products have private brands offered by sellers or not,” the company said, adding that it “strictly prohibits the use or sharing of nonpublic, seller-specific data for the benefit of any seller, including sellers of private brands.”
Warren was not alone in calling for the breakup of Amazon following the report.
“This is not shocking. But it is appalling,” the American Economic Liberties Project said in a series of tweets. “Independent businesses have sounded the alarm for years—providing evidence that Amazon stole their intellectual property.”
4/ Months later, in April 2020, @WSJ revealed that Amazon had been stealing from independent businesses to create competing products.https://t.co/ZgsNmtExIJ
— American Economic Liberties Project (@econliberties) October 13, 2021
“We said back in 2020 that a perjury referral was in order—and it still is,” the group added, highlighting testimony from Bezos and Nate Sutton, Amazon’s associate general counsel. “But Amazon will remain an anti-business behemoth, flagrantly breaking the law and daring policymakers to stop them.”
Highlighting a report from a trio of its experts, Economic Liberties added that “it’s time to break Amazon up.”
Originally published on Common Dreams by JESSICA CORBETT and republished under a Creative Commons license (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).
ProPublica drops a second monumental article based on treasure trove of IRS, SEC & court data
Excellent reporting of tax injustices among the obscenely rich continues with a huge and revelatory piece on Peter Thiel and his “little” Roth IRA scheme. Going well beyond the previous article that detailed how Bezos, Musk, Buffet and others all use loans secured with share holdings to avoid income, and thus avoid paying tax the “Lord of the Roths” is even more explosive.
While the emphasis of the article on Thiel’s Roth IRA takes on the task of trying to somehow compare an “average” investor’s potential gains with the unimaginable magnitude of Thiel’s windfall, this is something that makes sense as a valid perspective, but the obscenity is nearly lost in the opaque fog of numbers beyond comprehension.
For example: your Peter is basically gifted 1.7 million shares by the company he was one of the founders of (along with Elon Musk and the rest of the so called “PayPal Mafia). That “purchase” costing less than $2000 based on the ridiculous price of $0.001 per share was used to found a Roth IRA.
The engineered numbers were no accident: at the time, in 1999, a Roth IRA account had a maximum allowable contribution amount of $2,000. Since the shares were “below fair value”, the fact of which was admitted by PayPal in an SEC filing from the time just before the company went public, the value increased massively, by 227,490% in the first year. Which increased the value of the paltry $2k up to $3.8 million.
Though obviously not enforced, regulations at the time forbade this kind of “stuffing”. Meaning, the initial trade that launched this scheme was possibly illegitimate, if not unlawful. Or, as ProPublica more kindly phrased it: “Investors aren’t allowed to buy assets for less than their true value through an IRA. “
As a matter of fact, according to the article, the “stuffing” was so successful that no further contributions were ever made into the account after that initial 1999 sum.
Since a Roth IRA allows a person to trade stocks within the account tax free, as long as no withdrawals are made, this large but still comprehensible sum was the start of a 20 year use of the tax statutes to build a fortune of over $5 billion without paying a single penny in tax.
Hitting $870 million in value by 2008, by 2019 the tax free enterprise, built on the less than $2000 initial contribution (stock “purchase”), ultimately ballooned to 96 sub-accounts with holdings of $5 billion.
Ok, so that’s the short summary of the mind blowing numbers. For a more detailed account, by all means visit the original article.
The numbers are outrageous, but the entitlement and arrogance is on a whole other level
The part of the story that should spark outrage is not in the numbers but begins where the almost inhuman greed, hubris and hypocrisy at this good fortune grows apace with the size of the tax free bonanza. Because Peter Tiel is not just any run-of-the-mill untaxed billionaire.
The endlessly expanding windfall he received, tax free, did not engender a mindset of charity or gratefulness at his miraculous providence.
Above: Photo Collage / Lynxotic
Instead Thiel, once the wealth lent him a position of power, preached and pushed the idea that the US government, the same one that he was able to avoid paying taxes to, was guilty of over-taxing people like him (and poor people too).
He spent millions of dollars in an effort to influence Republican politicians and groups that have anti-tax agendas, to change the laws in ways that would add even more advantages to his already preposterously privileged position. Then this: as per ProPublica: “In 2016, he became the rare Silicon Valley titan to endorse Donald Trump.”
And, in an arrogance that is as incomprehensible as the size his effortlessly expanding fortune, he espouses the belief that people like him are entitled to these kind of spoils because, after all, without him we might have to live without PayPal and….wait for it…. Facebook.
Yes, you heard that right. In 2004, Thiel used his IRA to buy $500,000 worth of shares in a, then private, company called Facebook, which was the first big outside investment in Zuckerberg’s soon to be massive monstrosity.
By using his IRA funds to buy shares of the start-up he was able to avoid tax on all the future gains of those shares. (ProPublica, in excellent investigative reporting, uncovered this tidbit by combing though Facebook court documents).
So, again, ostensibly, based on his well known statements, we are not only to congratulate him on his clever method of avoiding any taxation whatsoever on the first gambit with the PayPal shares, but we ought to effusively thank him for helping Facebook to become the dangerous purveyor of surveillance and phantom tollbooth Ponzi empire that is it today?
In perhaps one of the greatest illustrations of how power corrupts, this idea that because he was able to amass a fortune on such a massive scale without the burden of any tax whatsoever, he is somehow a hero to be emulated, is the real reason for us to be outraged.
That an average person might be lucky to turn $2000 into $250,000 over two decades, as was illustrated in detail in the article, while Thiel easily turned it into $5 billion, is outrageous, yes.
But the real “crime” is that it was done with zero benefit to anyone except him and other Silicon Valley insiders at companies like PayPal and Facebook.
Could it be argued that Facebook is a gift to humanity? Well, in 2021 that would be a tough argument to put forth without being laughed out of the room. And PayPal? It’s doubtful that Satoshi Nakamoto has to fear competition from any of the PayPal Mafia (including Mr. Musk) when the crown for greatest financial innovator of the century is awarded.
In a revelation that could have received more page inches, the article also exposes a second, possibly more plausible reason, regarding why Thiel went to great lengths to bankrupt Gawker Media, which he blamed for outing him as Gay. That politically convenient motivation could very well have covered up the real reason:
Again, as per ProPublica:
“In a story headlined, “Give Me Liberty or Give Me Taxpayer Money,” Gawker Media, citing anonymous sources, revealed that Thiel held his Facebook investment in a tax-free Roth.”
Companies built on greed and hubris create nothing and, in the end, die
Thiel believes he will live to be 120 years old. Based on his comments and writings he appears to believe that the world would benefit from that eventuality.
But when looking at the companies he helped to build, and the obscene fortune he was rewarded with for binging them into being, it seems like most of us, after accessing his life’s works and “accomplishments”, would be more thankful for the improbability of that dream coming true.
2087? That will be the year that either Utopia or Oblivion will have arrived for humanity and the planet earth. If by a miracle an earthly Utopia comes to be, it is highly unlikely that PayPal, Facebook or Mr. Thiel will have had any hand in bringing it about.
Journalists have used scrapers to collect data that rooted out extremist cops, tracked lobbyists, and uncovered an underground market for adopted children
By: The Markup Staff
The fruits of web scraping—using code to harvest data and information from websites—are all around us.
Scrapers are also the tools of watchdogs and journalists, which is why The Markup filed an amicus brief in a case before the U.S. Supreme Court this week that threatens to make scraping illegal.
The case itself—Van Buren v. United States—is not about scraping but rather a legal question regarding the prosecution of a Georgia police officer, Nathan Van Buren, who was bribed to look up confidential information in a law enforcement database. Van Buren was prosecuted under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA), which prohibits unauthorized access to a computer network such as computer hacking, where someone breaks into a system to steal information (or, as dramatized in the 1980s classic movie “WarGames,” potentially start World War III).
In Van Buren’s case, since he was allowed to access the database for work, the question is whether the court will broadly define his troubling activities as “exceeding authorized access” to extract data, which is what would make it a crime under the CFAA. And it’s that definition that could affect journalists.
Or, as Justice Neil Gorsuch put it during Monday’s oral arguments, lead in the direction of “perhaps making a federal criminal of us all.”
Investigative journalists and other watchdogs often use scrapers to illuminate issues big and small, from tracking the influence of lobbyists in Peru by harvesting the digital visitor logs for government buildings to monitoring and collecting political ads on Facebook. In both of those instances, the pages and data scraped are publicly available on the internet—no hacking necessary—but sites involved could easily change the fine print on their terms of service to label the aggregation of that information “unauthorized.” And the U.S. Supreme Court, depending on how it rules, could decide that violating those terms of service is a crime under the CFAA.
“A statute that allows powerful forces like the government or wealthy corporate actors to unilaterally criminalize newsgathering activities by blocking these efforts through the terms of service for their websites would violate the First Amendment,” The Markup wrote in our brief.
What sort of work is at risk? Here’s a roundup of some recent journalism made possible by web scraping:
The COVID tracking project, from The Atlantic, collects and aggregates data from around the country on a daily basis, serving as a means of monitoring where testing is happening, where the pandemic is growing, and the racial disparities in who’s contracting and dying from the virus.
This project, from Reveal, scraped extremist Facebook groups and compared their membership rolls to those of law enforcement groups on Facebook—and found a lot of overlap.
The Markup’s recent investigation into Google’s search results found that it consistently favors its own products, leaving some websites from which the web giant itself scrapes information struggling for visitors and, therefore, ad revenue. The U.S. Department of Justice cited the issue in an antitrust lawsuit against the company.
In Copy, Paste, Legislate, USA Today found a pattern of cookie-cutter laws, pushed by special interest groups, circulating in legislatures around the country.
The battle is getting very public and will get louder and nastier
The full page newspaper ads taken out by Facebook, where they proclaim themselves the champion of small business and attack Apple directly are interesting and curious on many levels.
It will take a series of articles to attempt to untangle the confusions and endless, often intentionally fostered, misconceptions that will most certainly arise in this battle of titans.
At the heart of the matter is, however, the largest misconception humanly possible, the idea that these monstrously huge companies, and how they operate, are anything at all related to “normal”.
The fact that all of us have seen the role of the internet in general increase over the last 20+ years, and have therefore had to deal with, and in some cases, go through and cooperate with these behemoths, may be the status quo that has developed, particularly in the last decade, but it is without precedent on many levels.
The size, power and influence is beyond comprehension and this clouds every issue
Before even beginning to contrast one giant against another one must first confront the very existence of entities of this magnitude. It’s fair to say that never in history has such a tiny group of companies, and by extension, individual humans, controlled so much of the economy and so much of that impacts the society and our experiences.
This chart is not current. If it were the disparity would be far larger and even more astounding:
This information, for a human, is so out of whack that you would have to stare at this chart for days before it could even sink in. And, as it it only a chart of size, built on company market capitalization, the power and influence, which represents and ever larger disparity, is not represented.
The dominance overall is so extreme as to be humanly incomprehensible. And by all measures the disparity between the big tech firms and “everybody else” grows literally by the second.
If you are afraid of A.I., you’re too late, the world is already controlled by computers and software via these companies
Facebook is probably the best example to illustrate the problem of market power and dominance on a level that is so far beyond traditional methods of measurement that even government antitrust investigations are barely able to begin to access the potential violations.
“The questions below might seem odd, or even absurd. But what is really absurd is that they are, for the most part, never asked. “
The questions below might seem odd, or even absurd. But what is really absurd is that they are, for the most part, never asked. Since the iPhone and later Samsung / Android revolutionized information and photo sharing, it has been accepted as a simple reality that Facebook controls nearly all the “social networking” that is done with that data. Why?
What is Facebook? Most would say they are a “social media company” but that can mean anything you want it to mean. They claim they are in the business of “connecting people” yet they derive massive wealth and profit from advertising, and “monetizing” their network, the largest network of “social users”, by far.
And if they are interested in connecting people, then what do those people own of the network that they themselves comprise? That would be nothing.
What say do they have in how they are used to “monetize” the network that they literally “are”? None.
What trust do they have to surrender to the company, which includes Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and more (all controlled 100% by a guy named Zuckerberg)? 100%
“What ‘say’ do they have in how they are used to “monetize” the network that they literally ‘are’? None.”
— D.L.
Who authorized Facebook (or Google) to amass vast databanks of private personal information from a huge chunk of the world’s population, and use that data to amass fortunes of unheard of size using secret proprietary algorithms that they have zero requirement to disclose? Well, technically, users, inadvertently and without understanding, did. Otherwise: No-one.
Well, technically all of this was “allowed” via Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, passed in 1996, and states that an “interactive computer service” can’t be treated as the publisher or speaker of third-party content. This, effectively, protects websites and “platforms” such as Facebook, from lawsuits in the case that a “user” posts something illegal. There are exceptions, for example, for copyright violations, sex work-related material, and violations of federal criminal law.
This fact does not remove responsibility for building a system that gives massive financial benefit to Facebook, Google, etc and very little, in reality, by way of return or influence to the “user”.
It’s as if a man figured out a way to use mental-telepathy to rob banks and could never be caught or prosecuted due to the fact that no one had ever robbed a bank that way before. And then he claimed that he should be allowed to continue doing it forever, with impunity.
What would Facebook and Zuckerberg have if the billions of “users” stopped using its network? Nothing.
How little sense this makes just goes on and on. There could be 100s of pages of similar questions and answers and the end result would be a slightly better understanding of the absurdity of the very existence of such a “service” or company or whatever this is.
Why absurd? In a nutshell, Facebook controls private networks that exist “inside” a more public network called, for lack of a better term, “the internet”. And, because of what could be termed a mistake of history they represent a dominant, near monopoly, in the “space” which in this case is currently called “social networks”.
The dominance and the definition of monopoly can be argued endlessly (and likely will be in the coming antitrust cases) but, in the end, the numbers don’t lie. Only one person benefits, in direct payments of trillions of dollars, from a near monopoly in social networks. The billions of people, the very people who are the network, do not.
A bleak analysis, perhaps, but is there any light at the end of this tunnel?
The current increase in antitrust cases, both in the US and Europe, is a canary-in the-coal-mine moment and the wars over all the arising issues has begun and will go on for years.
The fact that Facebook is heavily advertising that they are the “good guy” while Amazon and Google do the same, is both ridiculous and sad, since “good guys” don’t have to buy ads to draw attention to that fact.
And the fact that these companies have already started, both in word and deed, to attack each other directly, is an indication of just how serious and all pervasive these mega-wars will be. This is just the beginning.
While none of the companies depicted on the chart above can be said to be without blame for the world of injustice and malfunction that is the internet, and by extension, our world, there is one company that stands apart from the others in so many ways and for so many reasons that they, amazingly, represent some hope within the madness.
And, not coincidently, they are the one that is already being attacked, in print and software, as the wars begin: Apple.
How Apple actually represents hope to clean up the tech universe that, arguably, they are most responsible for having created, is likely a hard sell with those that want to lump all these huge companies together. Because, after all, they are all huge.
However, nothing could be further from the truth. More on this and other burning questions in our next episode, so stay tuned.
The opinions expressed “pro” or “con” regarding big tech abuses of power are both overlooking far more serious issues that lie beneath
After years of public and insider opinion gradually shifting from a state of wonder, awe and hero worship of tech giants and their founders and CEOs, toward a more skeptical stance, and now, finally, government action begins; the fundamental issues that lie beneath are still barely mentioned, let alone widely understood.
In a filing at the U.S. District Court in Washington D.C., on December 9th, 2020, the Federal Trade Commission, together with 46 states, plus the District of Columbia and Guam, alleged that Facebook employed anticompetitive tactics, allowing it to bully and bury its rivals. In a strongly worded brief it recommends that the massive company be broken up, specifically by divesting itself of Instagram and WhatsApp.
While past antitrust cases were complex and difficult to understand fully, particularly for the general public, from the little known A & P case in the 30s and 40s to Standard Oil and Ma Bell / AT&T, in each case there were complex issues to address.
However, one simple thing tied them together that could be understood by virtually anyone: businesses that have a win-at-all-costs approach to business tactics and then achieve monopoly power almost always use that power to fulfill ambitions based on self-perpetuating greed at the expense of society as a whole.
Many, from all walks of life, particularly in the U.S., worship the ethos of “winner take all” and even if they are at the lowest levels of the economic ladder still cheer on the most ruthless and morally bankrupt “winners” as heroes, using a bizarre logic, that somehow they might one day see themselves in the winners circle.
This perspective is similar to societies where dictators, such as Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines, or emperors are worshiped fervently by the very people that are most exploited and downtrodden under their regimes. Perhaps this is a hardwired genetic human trait, impossible to alter.
In the case of tech giants of the internet era, beginning with Microsoft and its antitrust case, a similar dynamic is no less present, and, no different from the steps that dictators take to encourage obedience and worship from their subjects. In this case it’s massive amounts of money and power used for required self-serving PR and the brutal economic repression of any dissenting voices.
Try to find a book on Amazon’s Jeff Bezos that is not a hero-worship nonsense-title purporting to offer you a way to become a “business genius” like him. You will find a few exceptions, of course, these purporting to offer “hard-hitting” investigative journalism and a sober look at the “real facts”.
These will be watered down, meekly subservient, weak and impotent tombs barely scratching the surface of any negative perspectives on the real problems Amazon and its founder have created, not only for millions of people around the world but for society as a whole.
Even among those that are the most incisive and have a real desire to “dig-deep” and reach the roots of the real problems, there is often still the a priori assumption that somehow, the 26 year evolution of business models that could “succeed” in internet and software based business are to be measured on a scale that presumes that the business models themselves are basically valid, simply because they were able to survive and create massive, nearly immeasurable, wealth for a tiny handful of individuals. .
Taking into account the pervasive pro-big-business bias, it is a miracle in a sense, that the public opinion has shifted so far, to the point where antitrust actions can be seen as valid, by enough of the public at large, that these giant monopolistic tech companies are called into question at all.
The miracle, if we call it that, is only a reflection of just how purely evil and out of control the situation has become, and how many people have been harmed, and in how many different ways this harm has occurred.
From teen suicides to thousands of bankrupt and struggling small businesses to privacy rights trampled in the dirt, the list of abuses and harm, if it were ever brought to light, could fill a thousand page treatise and would read like a recounting of the atrocities of war.
And then there’s the fact that the war is fought with computer code and over territory that has no physical address
Much as collateralized debt obligations and other arcane “synthetic” financial products nearly collapsed the entire world economy in 2008, partially due to the intentional complexity, which served only to hide the stupidity, complex computer algorithms are now at the heart of an ever larger and even more dangerous economic debacle that continues to unfold.
And much of the lack of any pushback against this is the simple ability to hide behind the complex computer methods and concepts that have allowed tech giants to build an even bigger and more dangerous kind of monopolistic behavior than even the so called “Robber Barons” of the Gilded Age.
Even those, in government or in the press, who are pushing back are doing so with, apparently, little understanding of the real dangers that are buried in the code and in the tricks used by very sophisticated, technologically educated people in control of these trillion dollar behemoths.
For example, Facebook is already claiming that the government should not be able to question the acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp because they already approved the mergers at the time they happened.
In his excellent article published on medium.com , Will Oremus points out:
But I looked up the FTC’s public statements following those reviews, and it states explicitly that the matter should not be considered permanently settled.
“This action is not to be construed as a determination that a violation may not have occurred,” the FTC’s closing letter said. It added, “The Commission reserves the right to take such further action as the public interest may require.” Facebook did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Also in that article, titled; ‘Competition Is for Losers’: How Peter Thiel Helped Facebook Embrace Monopoly the idea succinctly embodied in the title which refers to a Wall Street Journal piece on Thiel’s book “Zero to One” which he describes as having been “embraced as a business bible in Silicon Valley and beyond” and quotes from including this characterization:
(Thiel) made the case for monopoly as the ultimate goal of capitalism. Indeed, “monopoly is the condition of every successful business,” he asserted. With it, you’re free to set your own prices, think long-term, innovate, and pursue goals other than mere survival. Without it, you’re replaceable, and your profits will eventually converge on zero.
And this provides the context within which the current struggle unfolds. To understand the real dangers of the total domination of the internet, which has become the vital lifeline of our economy and social existence, by a handful of trillion dollar companies, that not only embrace limitless greed and dictatorial status within their industry, but see it as the divine right that they hold, and believe they are entitled to aspire toward without interference.
And in another context such behavior would be known as immoral, destructive to society and social justice, and if the laws are adequate to apply; criminal.
And there’s the rub. The antitrust statutes, possibly already inadequate to take on this new kind of robber, have also been weakened since the 80s. Add to that how the pre-existing biases are heavily slanted toward minimizing any accountability for such behavior and is follows that any real reform must rise from the public at large.
The birth of the internet was anything but immaculate
The tragi-comic farce of the story, when seen through the lens of internet history, is how Facebook, Google and Amazon all followed the same absurd arc.
From “underdogs” with massive losses and no income to ridiculously “valuable” “FANG” members championed from the rooftops as heroic winners of darwinian battles to build out the internet for profit. And, finally, after decades of unfettered expansion, being seen more and more for what they are: profit-seeking scams using each a different method to restrain competition and destroy the most valuable asset humanity has ever built: the internet itself.
The complexity of the scams is still the most useful cloak for them to hide behind, each with a different insanely complicated way to force what is a public asset, the internet, into a tool for private greed, at the expense of any real innovation. And the victims are not the competitor firms that they might have destroyed (or bought), but rather the entire population of any territory that they control, with North America being the center of the empire.
The question asked for example of Google or Facebook should not be, “do they provide any services from the public can benefit, in exchange for their obscenely privileged monopoly control over “search” and “social networking”, respectively. The question should be “are they the best possible solution, from the perspective of what is in the best interest of society, for those extremely important functions in our new digital world.
It is not enough to say that “consumers have chosen” each as their go-to tool. If any company or group of companies could do a better job of enabling humanity to communicate, interact and become educated via the internet, why should those other solutions be buried forever under a mountain of greed and self-interest?
This is the infinitely elusive point: No different than Bernie Madoff, the damage they have wrought, by destroying what could have been, will only be understood once they are either gone or forced to cease what they depend on for domination, which would lead to their ultimate demise over time, just as Peter Thiel himself stated:
Without (a monoply), you’re replaceable, and your profits will eventually converge on zero.
Or as Jeff Bezos explained, in what his become his predatory raison d’être: The competition is always one-click-away. This makes every other online seller, in his view, an enemy that must be destroyed at all costs, no matter how small, no matter how weak.
In this sick paranoid view of the world it is truly an all or nothing struggle for survival, with death of all competitors, literally and figuratively, the only acceptable outcome.
With this mindset at the heart of these companies, and with the government and most of the press taking a milk-toast submissive approach (in contrast) the struggle to rein in these monstrous, utterly corrupt empires, will take years if not decades.
However, 2020 will always be seen as the beginning of the end the the gruesome mistake of history that these companies represent.
Companies that achieved dominance and monopoly control of a system meant for public benefit, through the most destructive methods they were able to devise, and then redoubled efforts infinitely to expand using those same destructive and corrupt methods.
In the end there is only one power large enough to intervene, as already at their current size, and while, like a virus, they double in power and economic domination almost annually, and that is the power of the billions that use their platforms everyday. Change will arise when they have damaged themselves by damaging the very societies they prey on, and once damaged, those societies will have no choice but to shed them like the murderous parasites that they are.
That will not happen anytime soon. The general view of these companies, is still very mild and forgiving. And it’s important to note that each case is different and this article applies only to Facebook, Google and Amazon.
Just as most have either forgiven or forgotten the massive bailouts that criminal companies were gifted during the 2008 financial crisis, the perception that these massive tech companies are at worst mildly anti-competitive and at best harmless and just practicing good, successful capitalism, will not be changed overnight.
It can only come after much more pain at the hands of this corrupt system that currently controls the internet, and therefore, our digital lives.
Wonder why all the news outlets seem to repeat each other’s stories? Google trends might have the answer
Google has any number of tools and software services for businesses and web developers. Some fairly well known like Google Analytics, Ad Words and Ad Sense, and others less so. Google analytics helps web site owners and businesses track and quantify the traffic and behavior of their products (physical eCommerce products or intangible products such as blog posts, etc) and can give insight into who, what when and from where people are responding online.
For media producers and news web sites they offer a tool called “Google Trends”. As with many google software products it is extremely deep in what it can do and somewhat inscrutable in how to use. If you want to see what topics are likely to be showing up on your news feed over the next 24 to 36 hours you can go to the page called “Trending Searches”.
What to tool is focused on is using the google search bar as a kind of barometer for what people and wanting to read about or look at online (This tool deals with the google internet search engine, YouTube has its own separate search engine for videos only). The idea is that if, say, 100k people are looking up Paul Walker (deceased star of “Fast & Furious” films) there must be a reason.
Various trending topics and stories can be evaluated and then create a tend among news producers, based on the initial trend by the public reaction to the first story
If you were a media producer or content editor, you could look at the number of articles on the subject that have been written so far and how many eyeballs are chasing those articles.
If the ratio is good, and you think the timing is favorable based on how long you would need to research and produce a similar article, you may get your crew to “pull the trigger” on your on entry into that days “Paul Walker Sweepstakes”.
Using this example live from Google Trends, it turns out that November 30th was the anniversary of Paul Walkers tragic death and there is an instagram post commemorating the occasion put out by his daughter who was only a small child 7 years ago when her father died in a car crash.
Her post has a massive number of likes (462,410 so far) and this, then, is likely to be a story that will take off like wildfire and more and more outlets jump on it to capture views and try to enlarge their audience.
This area is separated into “Daily Search Trends” and “RealTime Search Trends”. As you’d expect the daily trends follow the large slower moving search trends that have risen to the top of the heap and shows you a sort of greatest hit top ten of what people are searching for. RealTime does the same on a minute to minute and hour to hour basis.
There are ways to dig deeper (deeper than any human would want to) into the data and, of course, you can filter by topic / category and by various countries around the world.
When browsing the RealTime data you can often find interesting articles from usual news outlets that are likely to be a big trend re-produced and written in various styles in a couple of days and seen by, possibly, millions. Or not.
That’s the fun part of this tool, even if you are now a big shot media producer you can browse stories that people are search for and finding interesting and get a glimpse of, potentially, tomorrow’s news today.
As antitrust suits loom, a digital tax appears as additional government option
Related to French “digital tax” hopes, and which may have future repercussions for other tech related regulation attempts, Google, Microsoft, and Facebook have” signs on for the “Tech for Good Call”. Amazon has declined which Apple continues to negotiate, according to reports.
A list was released by the French government with signatures of 75 executives of tech companies who have signed up to the initiative so far. Notably, the list included Google CEO Sundar Pichai, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg and Microsoft President Brad Smith. Amazon’s Jeff Bezos and Apple’s Tim Cook were absent, however.
For nearly three years President Emmanuel Macron of France has attempted to convince tech giants to begin collaborating with governments to seek remedies for a list of global challenges. Examples are; fighting hate speech online, preserving privacy or paying a so-called “digital-tax”, presumably to offset negative economic effects of the overwhelming dominance of big tech.
Reuters reports that Macron’s advisers said on Monday that the president had asked tech companies to sign up to a new initiative called “Tech for Good Call” underlining principles for the post-COVID world. This development comes as “anti-big-tech” sentiment is increasing, particularly during the massive profit spike the giants are enjoying due to a devastating world-wide pandemic.
A general publicity based initiative could be leverage for negotiations to rein in tech giants
Also, according to Reuters, the “Tech for Good Call” includes a non-binding pledge to “contribute fairly to the taxes in countries where (they) operate”; refrain & prevent the dissemination of “child sexual abuse material, terrorist or extreme violence online contents”; and “support the ecological transition”, in addition to other things.
Though not legally binding, it is expected that the French will use this tentative agreement to in negotiations during upcoming global forums on regulating Big Tech.
In addition to antitrust suits underway in the US and Europe, the idea of a “digital tax” is being explored and attempted with France and Australia leading the way.
The building chorus for regulation against Google and Facebook stem from the extremely dominant position each holds online, with Google having near total control of search traffic and advertising, while Facebooks monopoly in social media concerns its use of that position to monetize private data through advertising.
Also, according to Reuters, the “Tech for Good Call” includes a non-binding pledge to “contribute fairly to the taxes in countries where (they) operate”; refrain & prevent the dissemination of “child sexual abuse material, terrorist or extreme violence online contents”; and “support the ecological transition”, in addition to other things.
Though not legally binding, it is expected that the French will use this tentative agreement to in negotiations during upcoming global forums on regulating Big Tech.
In addition to antitrust suits underway in the US and Europe, the idea of a “digital tax” is being explored and attempted with France and Australia leading the way.
The building chorus for regulation against Google and Facebook stem from the extremely dominant position each holds online, with Google having near total control of search traffic and advertising, while Facebooks monopoly in social media concerns its use of that position to monetize private data through advertising.
“The supportive chorus of elected officials is giving assurance to [the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ)] and the [Federal Trade Commission (FTC)] that they have the political support they need to blunt [the companies’] efforts … to pressure the agencies to back off or water down their cases,” former FTC Chairman William Kovacic told WSJ.
Above:Content Discovery App – River video Clip Introduction
An Unlikely Holy Grail: User Sophistication and the Will to Exist Online
In late 2018 a small firm was looking into opportunities in organizing an online co-op for small businesses (CSSinc), similar to the co-ops created by farmers during the great depression. Where else to start than a trade show of more than 1000 small businesses in Las Vegas. In an informal test, they checked all the web sites listed in the show directory as an indicator of the state of web sophistication among the participants.
Naturally the 10% that were functioning, a few of which at a high level, were all the largest companies attending the show. With costs to set up, and even designing a company web site, at an all time low, why would so many pass up the opportunity to make use of this powerful tool?
‘This is Water’ and the internet dilemma that has swallowed the world
In 2005, David Foster Wallace addressed the graduating class at Kenyon College with a speech that is now one of his most read pieces.
In it, he argues, gorgeously, against “unconsciousness, the default setting, the rat race, the constant gnawing sense of having had, and lost, some infinite thing.” He begins with a parable:
There are these two young fish swimming along, and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says, “Morning, boys. How’s the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes, “What the hell is water?”
This oft quoted passage is about how the world around us can be easily misunderstood by lack of awareness. And, maybe, by the lack of any perceived need to notice what’s really going on.
The two most shocking things about the anecdote above, regarding 90% of small businesses lack of internet presence (or sophistication), are how this could be the case after more than 20 years of the internet being at the center of commerce and, well, life, and what it says about the “water” we are all swimming in.
2020 is the year that the internet became even more important for all our lives. Less obvious is that it is also the year that the problems and obstacles are more important than ever to overcome, and that starts with seeing the water we are all swimming in.
In this acclaimed documentary (available on Netflix) a lot of both problems and solutions focus on the dangers of the current giant-tech dominated internet environment on the “end-user” and the general public.
While that sphere of influence is a serious and growing problem, it is the control and domination by a few massive companies, to the virtual exclusion of smaller businesses, that, to a large degree caused the sick, twisted inequitable and unfair system in the first place.
The relative size imbalance is literally so massive that it is rendered incomprehensible, and, like water to the fish mentioned above, invisible.
A happy shiny logo of, say, coca-cola, looks just as harmless (or menacing, depending on the perspective) as that of Amazon or Facebook, who may be hundreds of times larger in market-cap than the soft-drink giant with long history as a “big” American company. Size of this magnitude is impossible to conceive of by most of us.
But the perception of the giants that control the internet as harmless, or even beneficial and to be admired, is rapidly changing. Therein also lies the potential for probably the only hope of positive change for small business and for society in the US and across the globe.
A Revolution of Perception is Required and already Underway
Part of the problem, one that is growing, admittedly, every day, is the sheer scale of the inequity and corruption. Why even try, as a small business, to go up against the giants that “own” the water we swim in?
Ultimately what is necessary is a sea-change (forgive the continued metaphor) within overall population, both consumers and small businesses. And that starts with the perception that it is the “people” that decide how and what the internet will be who will be “permitted” to interact. An Algorithm own as proprietary secret software by an internet behemoth? Or a decentralized more kaleidoscopic solution that was an inherent promise from the initial days of the internet’s creation?
The signs of change are all around. The “direct to consumer” trend that has produced massive success stories also paved the way for the emerging system of smaller companies being able to reach out directly and actually do business with customers with, sometimes, minimal involvement of the giants.
The signs that this can work are gradually being seen – shopify’s success in offering software and services to businesses wanting to establish a direct connection to buyers is a growing trend. There are many other companies that have recognized the trend and are trying to ride this wave toward a different method of communication between businesses and so-called consumers.
Here are some examples of companies that are taking a new approach to the way we communicate and interact online:
However, the ultimate driver of positive change in the internet will be the increased sophistication of users, both professional and at the individual level.
User Sophistication and Trust: an unlikely but all-important Grail
Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, Twitter, TikTok and more have all embraced direct in-app-shopping as a way to expand beyond content. Even Google has started a program to allow buyers to purchase from search results without leaving the platform. While these initiatives are all coming from the giant tech firms themselves, they are, ultimately, sowing the seeds of their own demise.
They are, in essence, teaching buyers to forego the now standard system of choosing between Amazon and “the rest” in online shopping. This choice, helped along by billions in losses to subsidize “impossibly low” prices plus free shipping paid for by Amazon’s loss-leader strategies, was never a fair or realistic one and created the massive, unsustainable imbalances in online commerce we see today.
The massive and very real paranoia of the giant companies is based on the clear and deep understanding that the competition is always “1-click-away”, which is the unfulfilled promise of the internet in the first place.
D.L.
The greatest obstacle has never been the massive price-dumping schemes or even the sell-at-a-loss free shipping concept that kept buyers from having a second choice in e-commerce. It has been the lack of user sophistication of the sellers and the buyers in the online forum which prevented easier movement from one online option to another.
The massive and very real paranoia of the giant companies is based on the clear and deep understanding that the competition is always “1 click away”, which is the unfulfilled promise of the internet in the first place.
So called “moats” and systems to block users from initiating and exercising choice are built-up and keep getting deeper and more complex. But sophisticated users can, and eventually will, easily just opt-out at any time, when alternatives that they prefer begin to proliferate.
And there is a growing and invisible ocean that already exists all around us. As far-fetched as it may seem “the ocean we swim in” will one day be in no way similar to the deeply problematic one we swim in today and a thorough a change from the bottom up as well as the top down will, finally, bring about a new era in online communication and commerce.
The Book and now the Man are minting TikTok Memes all night long
Using the hook line “Take this and pass it on” Barack Obama appeared in his first bonafide TikTok and, while handing his new book “A Promised Land” to someone Offscreen, he lays the tagline down.
This, if you are familiar with TikTok nomenclature and virality is an invitation to add your own video, where for example you “receive” the book he is handing off, creating the illusion that you had it handed to you by the former president, known as a Duet.
These are already being produced and many variation will be coming soon. In the meantime an organic meme has already taken hold – one of people reading passages from his book aloud, unboxing their very own copy, speaking to the camera with a loving, adoring review, showing off Barack and Michelle’s books side by side, proposals to start a bookclub with “A Promised Land” as the first title, Crying with joy as they listen to the audio-book version, repost of the audio, A Trump impersonator reading (and insulting) in Obama’s voice, A slide-show with a famous Obama speech as an audio track, and many, many more.
Although this first TikTok from the former President was posted to the Publisher Penguin’s account, there’s a lot of hope, an audacious amount of hope you could say, that Obama will create his own personal account and become a regular or at lease occasional TikTok creator.
Apple will expose the worst of predatory surveillance by Facebook, Amazon and Google with new privacy features
While wrong is wrong regardless of the perpetrator, when it comes to gargantuan tech behemoths, a company with a clearly defined mission such as Apple or Tesla are in a different category than Amazon, Facebook and Google.
While Tesla’s stated mission is to “accelerate the world’s transition to sustainable energy” and Apple’s original mission statement, written by Steve Jobs was “to make a contribution to the world by making tools for the mind that advance humankind”, predatory vultures hide behind ridiculous slogans like “aim to be Earth’s most customer centric company” (while decimating partners and competitors by any means necessary) and “don’t be evil” (don’t get caught) and “to give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together” (…all while stealing data for profit from every person on earth).
Click to See “Steve Jobs“ and to help Lynxotic and Independent Bookstores. Also Available on Amazon.
It’s just not the same – particularly as Steve Jobs, while at Apple, pushed himself and his company to invent and build many powerful examples of “tools for the mind” and Elon Musk’s Tesla brought the electric car back from the dead (after it was nearly snuffed out by big oil) and is making incredible headway in revolutionizing battery and solar technology, all with a view to literally save the planet from a climate catastrophe.
Bezos? Became the richest living human via the destruction of millions of small business and jobs all while undercutting competitors by selling virtually anything he got his hands on at a significant loss; simply to cause the demise of any competitor or partner that might threaten his rise to idiotically massive personal wealth.
Zuckerberg? Pioneered ways to suck data from virtually every human with a view to monetizing every living soul exclusively for himself and his company. Illustration? Dividing Facebook’s market cap by the number of employees it has yields the sum of $14,906,500.00 per employee. Macy’s? That’d be $16,829. (Thanks to Scott Galloway for the numbers)
Google merely owns (91.75% as of June 2020) the search entryway to all web sites. It decides if you should or should not find them. If it can boost profits by hiding one and featuring another, either through “paid search” or by pointing you toward its own properties while hiding competitors from you, it will do exactly that. Ask the European Union’s anti-trust investigators. For them, this company is a convicted law breaker.
Announced at WWDC 2020, Apple is adding serious features to its various new operating systems. One big feature in Safari is the ability to track, and block as desired, all manner of data intrusions. These are not only identified, but shown and tracked and analyzed with a kind of professional dashboard, showing just how invasive and persistent these invisible spies are.
Apple is big, with more than 1.4 billion devices. Starting in around 2021 they will all be able to identify and block data surveillance by Amazon (the largest of all spies), Google and Facebook, among others. Thanks that’s not a big deal? Think again.
…the overall stance being taken regarding online tracking and surveillance should be seen for what it is: the first step to correcting the mistake of history that allowed the internet to be kidnapped and held hostage by a handful of companies that pretend to be “free” or “customer obsessed” while they are, in fact, Robber Barons that make the Standard Oil monopoly look like Santa Claus.
– D.L.
Tracking the Trackers will Change Your Life
Tracking the trackers is a clear and aggressive privacy stance, taken by the one company among the big four, that does not have a huge stake in you being the victim of online surveillance and tracking.
Not to say that Apple is blameless. Many are complaining about its fee structure for software sold by third parties via the app stores. While this issue is certainly a valid one, the overall stance being taken regarding online tracking and surveillance should be seen for what it is: the first step to correcting the mistake of history that allowed the internet to be kidnapped and held hostage by a handful of companies that pretend to be “free” or “customer obsessed” while they are, in fact, Robber Barons that make the Standard Oil monopoly look like Santa Claus.
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Search Battle Lynxotic Predicted is about to Breakout Big time
In a year that has already offered AppleOne, 5G, and perpetual AirTag teases, Apple Inc might have yet another major project hidden up its sleeve. According to a report from the Financial Times, the tech company has recently partaken in research and development indicative of creating a new original search engine.
For years, Google has been the default search engine on Apple devices. This is part of an ongoing deal between the two companies where Google pays Apple a pretty penny to foreground their services. Now, however, Google is facing an antitrust suit from the Department of Justice. This case claims that Google has a monopoly over search and directly sites its relationship with Apple as evidence.
If the DOJ manages to win against Google, it could be the end of its search engine arriving pre-encrypted in all iPhones, iPads, and Macs. Thus, an in-house Apple search engine comes at an opportune time. Not only will it provide Apple with a new default search platform, but it will also muster some competition against Google— one of the things that the antitrust case desperately calls for.
Any Engine at All by Apple is Earth-shattering to the Status Quo of Big Tech
Nothing is set in concrete about this speculative Apple search engine yet. All we know for sure is that the latest version of iOS 14 shows signs of increased search technology. Under the upgraded operating system, iPhone users can type in questions directly on their devices’ home screens and arrive at Internet results without any middleman. This has also led to an uptick in Apple’s spidering tools, which comb and datafy the web for a smoother search experience.
These changes in iOS 14 are subtle, but given the context, they could be laying the seeds for something much larger. Tellingly, former Google head of search John Geannandrea also oversees these recent Apple advancements. Geannandrea joined Apple three years ago, and while his main focus at the company has been Siri thus far, he obviously has the expertise and experience for helming a Google-like project.
Some believe that Siri is the base of Apple’s increased search interests. Perhaps the new technologies are simply working to refine the voice assistant rather than setting up a wholly alternative Google competitor. At the same time, though, with the proper expansion, Siri could very well evolve into a worthy Google rival, especially if it becomes the one-stop search engine on all Apple devices.For now, users will just have to wait while events unfold. Experts say that the antitrust case against Google will go on for years, and if Apple is indeed developing its own search engine alternative, it will likely take just as long.
Internet giants finally receiving long overdue legal scrutiny
After months of investigation and inquiry, the United States’ Justice Department has formally accused Google of illegally sustaining a monopoly over search and search advertising in America. The Department filed the lawsuit on October 20th in the U.S. District Court, beginning what could be a turning point in the Internet economy.
Republicans and Democrats alike have been watching big tech companies for a while now, scrutinizing the big four—Google, Apple, Facebook, and Amazon – as they’ve grown into corporate behemoths and played cat-and-mouse with American antitrust laws. Only now is the federal government (along with over forty states and jurisdictions that have investigated Google) finally making a move to attempt to keep these juggernauts in check.
Antitrust laws essentially make sure that American businesses cannot develop into illegal monopolies. Monopolies are illegal if they are established or maintained through improper conduct, sfor example, exclusionary or predatory acts.
Conventionally, the laws protect consumers from situations where a single company holds all of the supply. In the current digital age, though, most of these services are nominally free to consumers. Nevertheless, they can still become hegemonic at the expense of competition.
Because the site’s ascendency has left consumers with the impression that they are unaffected, superficially, Google personnel have long been able to refute the fact that they hold a proper monopoly. However, given that eighty percent of Internet searches go through Google, many politicians (and users) suspect something legally dubious at hand.
As is also the case with Amazon and Facebook there are, like an iceberg of crimes hiding beneath the waterline, these giant firms are engaged in many practices are highly anticompetitive. The behaviors, however rampant, have either gone unnoticed or, in a purported attempt to bolster internet commerce in a general way, have been intentionally overlooked by governing bodies for decades.
In order for the case to effectively convict Google on antitrust laws, the Justice Department must prove two things. First, that Google has dominance over search. Second, that it actively stifles competition in the search market through deals with other companies.
The fact that Google has dominance over search is quite hard to argue against nowadays. To sell the second part of the case, however, the DOJ will have to look into Google’s business behaviors and deals with other companies such as Apple.
Google essentially pays Apple up to $11 billion to be the default search engine on all iPhones, iPads, and Macs. This is just one example of Google buying its way to the top of the market and making sure that other search engines do not stand a chance.
Of course, Google denies doing anything illegal or sidestepping antitrust laws. The company argues that users actually retain choice when it comes to search engines, but people consistently go to Google for quality. As for the deals with companies like Apple, Google likens it to a cereal brand paying a grocery store for a better spot on the shelf. To Google, it’s simple business.
The courts, however, might not find it quite so simple, as many politicians are reframing antitrust laws in their perspective toward the case and the online marketplace.
This is not the end of the story but barely the beginning with many revelations yet to come
American antitrust laws, and how they are applied, are severely outdated. Most of them were written over a century ago when computers (let alone the Internet) were hardly a concept. Despite a few public outings where tech moguls have had to answer before Washington, the Federal government has not taken much action against these massive modern institutions. Exceptions include a 2001 antirust case against Microsoft for maintaining a monopoly over PC software and a former near-trial against Google when the Federal Trade Commission investigated the Alphabet Inc. for antitrust in the early 2010s.
Meanwhile, other countries have been far more active in holding big tech accountable. The European Union enforces much more timely antitrust policies, and has brought three cases against Google in recent years.
In America, however, Google has been riding off of the free market since its very conceptualization at Stanford University in 1998. The same could be said for Amazon, or Facebook and their respective, nearly mythic, ostensibly humble origins. While this nation’s laws and economy give companies the unique ability to grow, thrive, and expand into global phenomenon, they also have a duty to protect the people and even the playing field when those same companies abuse freedom or gain too much power.
This case will not be a short ride. It will likely take years, but such is the slow, magnificent, changing tide of justice and progress.
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New Reports call for laws to rein in giant monopolies
Amid a zany week of political theater and election drama, the federal government has actually managed to make quiet, nonpartisan progress on an important issue. On Tuesday, October 7th, Democratic members of the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Antitrust finally released a long-awaited report concerning the dominant technological companies in America and their legally dubious corporate power.
The report comes at the end of a sixteen-month investigation into the tech giants, arriving to the conclusion that America’s four biggest tech companies—Amazon, Google, Facebook, and Apple— all partake in anti-competitive practices that could be reprehensible by law.
Essentially, with the exception of Apple, these four conglomerates have created near-monopolies in their respective fields. Amazon controls 40% of e-commerce in America, and endorses business models that squander the competition and abuse third-party sellers through data mining. Apple has argued that they do not have a monopoly stake in phones, Android (google) and Samsung, have a larger worldwide base, and in other areas Apple has an even less dominant position. Only in dollar denominated success do they hold the absolute top spot.
Google has an even larger monopoly on Internet searches, also utilizing data to bind users to their content and prioritize their services over all other websites.
Facebook, meanwhile, is a hegemonic vacuum for social media outlets, endorsing a “copy, acquire, and then kill” technique according to the report. Essentially, rather than compete with other platforms, Facebook sucks them into inescapable, self-serving positions.
Apple is not in quite as much hot water as the other three companies. The report mainly accuses Apple of binding its users to the Apple Store, which creates an extra, sometimes expensive, hurdle for App developers to get over if they want their product widely available. The report accuses Google of doing something similar with Android, saying that the software forces people to use Google on their devices.
Of course, all of these companies have denied any illegality in their actions— each citing the free market and defending their business practices as entirely fair when responding to the report.
Generally in gridlock and inept, this is one area where Government must act decisively
However, Congress does not seem to agree. In light of the recent report, many Democrats are in favor of rewriting the U.S. Antitrust Laws to better protect a fair, competitive economy. Traditionally, the Antitrust Laws keep businesses in check on behalf of consumers, but they have not been touched in decades, and capitalism has developed immensely since then.
The amount of power that these three companies have garnered demonstrates that the laws now need to consider affairs between businesses as well, lest a handful of power-hungry entities override the market.
Some Republicans, however, have pushed back against the idea of rewriting the Antitrust Laws. Notably, Representative Kelly Armstrong from North Dakota did not sign the committee’s report on Tuesday. While he agrees that something nefarious is at hand with these tech companies, his remedy focuses on greater oversight from the Department of Justice and the Federal Trade Commission, upping the enforcement rather than adjusting the laws itself.
Even if certain politicians disagree on how to address the issue, the nonpartisan support for cracking down on big-tech in America is nevertheless a milestone, and it comes at a crucial time. While thousands of Americans are facing economic strife due to the COVID-19 pandemic, billionaires (especially tech moguls) are seeing their stocks skyrocket.
According to a financial study covered in USA Today, billionaires now hold more of the world’s wealth than ever before— $10.8 trillion. Tech billionaires in particular hold $1.8 trillion of that, a whopping 42.5% increase from just a year and a half ago.
The bulk of American Antitrust Laws were written at the turn of the twentieth century. Since then, the state of the world has changed. The state of the economy has changed. And perhaps most immensely, the state of technology has changed. Algorithmic dictatorships are growing almost as quickly as class divides in America. So perhaps it is time for the law to change as well.
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“The Social Dilemma” a documentary now available to watch on Netflix, exposes some hard truths and dangers of social networking. Former employees from juggernaut tech companies including Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest and many others are interviewed, many of whom co-invented and developed the very structures and business models that are creating major problems as broken-down and discussed in the docu-drama.
Not much of a spoiler alert, but social media companies not only sell our user data, but in conjunction use all that data to create an ultra-sophisticated psychological profile, ultimately to have the powerful ability to manipulate us. Your privacy, surveillance capitalism, positive intermittent reinforcement, artificial intelligence (AI), algorithms, dopamine hits, are just some of the terms used within the film and very much prevalent in social media.
There are only two industries that call their customers ‘users’: illegal drugs and software”
Edward Tufte
We’ve curated a list of books written by the former tech employees that appeared in the documentary, as well as provided some additional information from the publisher. Click to see more book information, we’ve provided links for purchase that if interested that helps out independent books stores.
We live in the age of the algorithm. Increasingly, the decisions that affect our lives–where we go to school, whether we can get a job or a loan, how much we pay for health insurance–are being made not by humans, but by machines. In theory, this should lead to greater fairness: Everyone is judged according to the same rules.
But as mathematician and data scientist Cathy O’Neil reveals, the mathematical models being used today are unregulated and uncontestable, even when they’re wrong. Most troubling, they reinforce discrimination–propping up the lucky, punishing the downtrodden, and undermining our democracy in the process. Welcome to the dark side of Big Data.
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER – A former Wall Street quant sounds the alarm on Big Data and the mathematical models that threaten to rip apart our social fabric–with a new afterword. “A manual for the twenty-first-century citizen . . . relevant and urgent.”–Financial Times. NATIONAL BOOK AWARD LONGLIST – NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY The New York Times Book Review – Boston Globe – Wired – Fortune – Kirkus Reviews – The Guardian – Nature – On Point
Automating Humanity is an insider’s perspective on everything Big Tech doesn’t want the public to know–or think about–from the addictions installed on a global scale to the profits being driven by fake news and disinformation, to the way they’re manipulating the world for profit and using our data to train systems that will automate jobs at an explosive, unprecedented scale.
Toscano provides a critique of modern regulation, including parts of the new European Union’s General Data Proctection Regulation (GDPR) suggesting how we can create proactive, adaptable regulation that satisfies both the needs of consumer safety and commercial success in the international economy. The content touches on everything from technology, economics, and public policy to psychology, history, and ethics, and is written in a way that is accessible to everyone from the average reader to the technical expert. Click Here to See “Automating Humanity” and help Independent Bookstores. Also Available on Amazon.
The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff
In this masterwork of original thinking and research, Shoshana Zuboff provides startling insights into the phenomenon that she has named surveillance capitalism. The stakes could not be higher: a global architecture of behavior modification threatens human nature in the twenty-first century just as industrial capitalism disfigured the natural world in the twentieth.
Zuboff vividly brings to life the consequences as surveillance capitalism advances from Silicon Valley into every economic sector. Vast wealth and power are accumulated in ominous new “behavioral futures markets,” where predictions about our behavior are bought and sold, and the production of goods and services is subordinated to a new “means of behavioral modification.”
The threat has shifted from a totalitarian Big Brother state to a ubiquitous digital architecture: a “Big Other” operating in the interests of surveillance capital. Here is the crucible of an unprecedented form of power marked by extreme concentrations of knowledge and free from democratic oversight. Zuboff’s comprehensive and moving analysis lays bare the threats to twenty-first century society: a controlled “hive” of total connection that seduces with promises of total certainty for maximum profit–at the expense of democracy, freedom, and our human future. Click Here to See “The Age of Surveillance Capitalism” and help Independent Bookstores. Also Available on Amazon.
Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now by Jaron Lanier
You might have trouble imagining life without your social media accounts, but virtual reality pioneer Jaron Lanier insists that we’re better off without them. In Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now, Lanier, who participates in no social media, offers powerful and personal reasons for all of us to leave these dangerous online platforms.
Lanier’s reasons for freeing ourselves from social media’s poisonous grip include its tendency to bring out the worst in us, to make politics terrifying, to trick us with illusions of popularity and success, to twist our relationship with the truth, to disconnect us from other people even as we are more “connected” than ever, to rob us of our free will with relentless targeted ads. How can we remain autonomous in a world where we are under continual surveillance and are constantly being prodded by algorithms run by some of the richest corporations in history that have no way of making money other than being paid to manipulate our behavior? How could the benefits of social media possibly outweigh the catastrophic losses to our personal dignity, happiness, and freedom? Lanier remains a tech optimist, so while demonstrating the evil that rules social media business models today, he also envisions a humanistic setting for social networking that can direct us toward a richer and fuller way of living and connecting with our world. Click Here to See “Ten Argument for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts” and help Independent Bookstores. Also Available on Amazon.
The Righteous Mind by Jonathan Haidt
Click Here to See “The Righteous Mind“ and help Independent Bookstores. Also Available on Amazon.
Drawing on his twenty five years of groundbreaking research on moral psychology, Haidt shows how moral judgments arise not from reason but from gut feelings. He shows why liberals, conservatives, and libertarians have such different intuitions about right and wrong, and he shows why each side is actually right about many of its central concerns. In this subtle yet accessible book, Haidt gives you the key to understanding the miracle of human cooperation, as well as the curse of our eternal divisions and conflicts. If you’re ready to trade in anger for understanding, read The Righteous Mind.
In this “landmark contribution to humanity’s understanding of itself” (The New York Times Book Review) social psychologist Jonathan Haidt challenges conventional thinking about morality, politics, and religion in a way that speaks to conservatives and liberals alike. Click Here to See “The Righteous Mind” and help Independent Bookstores. Also Available on Amazon.
We all constantly interact with our iPhone in a myriad of ways. We use our phones for directions, searching for information, snapping a photo, communicating with work-family-friends-lovers, buying (drunk-dailing), accessing our financial data, enter and compiling health data…. the list goes on and on!
Apple’s newest ad highlights how important our privacy really is. Although funny, the ad also depicts what the worst case scenario could look like.
Privacy is extremely high on Apple’s list
No one would knowingly would scream out their password, but through this clever comedic device the video spotlights the scary truth that if your valuable information were to be shared continuously, the situation would be grave, indeed. Apple wants to make it clear that privacy should be a “given” and that they have taken extra steps to ensure users information will be safe.
Apple will expose the worst of predatory surveillance by Facebook, Amazon and Google with new privacy features
While wrong is wrong regardless of the perpetrator, when it comes to gargantuan tech behemoths, a company with a clearly defined mission such as Apple or Tesla are in a different category than Amazon, Facebook and Google.
While Tesla’s stated mission is to “accelerate the world’s transition to sustainable energy” and Apple’s original mission statement, written by Steve Jobs was “to make a contribution to the world by making tools for the mind that advance humankind”, predatory vultures hide behind ridiculous slogans like “aim to be Earth’s most customer centric company” (while decimating partners and competitors by any means necessary) and “don’t be evil” (don’t get caught) and “to give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together” (…all while stealing data for profit from every person on earth).
Click to See “Steve Jobs“ and to help Lynxotic and Independent Bookstores. Also Available on Amazon.
It’s just not the same – particularly as Steve Jobs, while at Apple, pushed himself and his company to invent and build many powerful examples of “tools for the mind” and Elon Musk’s Tesla brought the electric car back from the dead (after it was nearly snuffed out by big oil) and is making incredible headway in revolutionizing battery and solar technology, all with a view to literally save the planet from a climate catastrophe.
Bezos? Became the richest living human via the destruction of millions of small business and jobs all while undercutting competitors by selling virtually anything he got his hands on at a significant loss; simply to cause the demise of any competitor or partner that might threaten his rise to idiotically massive personal wealth.
Zuckerberg? Pioneered ways to suck data from virtually every human with a view to monetizing every living soul exclusively for himself and his company. Illustration? Dividing Facebook’s market cap by the number of employees it has yields the sum of $14,906,500.00 per employee. Macy’s? That’d be $16,829. (Thanks to Scott Galloway for the numbers)
Google merely owns (91.75% as of June 2020) the search entryway to all web sites. It decides if you should or should not find them. If it can boost profits by hiding one and featuring another, either through “paid search” or by pointing you toward its own properties while hiding competitors from you, it will do exactly that. Ask the European Union’s anti-trust investigators. For them, this company is a convicted law breaker.
Announced at WWDC 2020, Apple is adding serious features to its various new operating systems. One big feature in Safari is the ability to track, and block as desired, all manner of data intrusions. These are not only identified, but shown and tracked and analyzed with a kind of professional dashboard, showing just how invasive and persistent these invisible spies are.
Apple is big, with more than 1.4 billion devices. Starting in around 2021 they will all be able to identify and block data surveillance by Amazon (the largest of all spies), Google and Facebook, among others. Thanks that’s not a big deal? Think again.
…the overall stance being taken regarding online tracking and surveillance should be seen for what it is: the first step to correcting the mistake of history that allowed the internet to be kidnapped and held hostage by a handful of companies that pretend to be “free” or “customer obsessed” while they are, in fact, Robber Barons that make the Standard Oil monopoly look like Santa Claus.
– D.L.
Tracking the Trackers will Change Your Life
Tracking the trackers is a clear and aggressive privacy stance, taken by the one company among the big four, that does not have a huge stake in you being the victim of online surveillance and tracking.
Not to say that Apple is blameless. Many are complaining about its fee structure for software sold by third parties via the app stores. While this issue is certainly a valid one, the overall stance being taken regarding online tracking and surveillance should be seen for what it is: the first step to correcting the mistake of history that allowed the internet to be kidnapped and held hostage by a handful of companies that pretend to be “free” or “customer obsessed” while they are, in fact, Robber Barons that make the Standard Oil monopoly look like Santa Claus.
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