The Trouble with Big Tech

The next few years are going to be particularly challenging for companies like Apple, Google, Facebook, and Uber because they are global companies. They not only have to worry about antitrust lawsuits by the US federal government, they also face heavy scrutiny from US states and from foreign governments around the world. For the tech giants, there's a danger that a policy experiment in one jurisdiction could become a precedent that's copied around the world.

The regulation ads are part of an all-out blitz on the part of not just Facebook but also Google and Amazon. They, along with American Edge, a pro-tech lobbying group that Facebook has acknowledged backing, have been pumping ads into the feeds of the DC policy audience. A very visible part of that push has come in the form of newsletter sponsorships.

Twitter has already started rolling out Spaces, which replicates the Clubhouse experience. Facebook is working to add live audio features to its existing products and testing a stand-alone audio app, according to three sources at the company who were not authorized to discuss the plans publicly. Spotify is experimenting with live podcasting tools, a source there confirmed, and the entrepreneur and Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban is launching a live podcast app called Fireside, where speakers can sell tickets for their events.

Verge editor-in-chief Nilay Patel talks with Adi Robertson and Casey Newton about Australia’s News Media Bargaining Code, the country’s new regulation for news media on the internet.

Casey and Adi explain the deal Google is making with Australia, why Facebook walked away, and what’s at stake for the open web.

Bezos’s move means that of all the major tech companies that dominate our lives today, only one of them — Facebook — is still run by the man who started it. But the rest of them, it turns out, have done fine without their founders.

The Digital Services Act, due to be presented in early December, is expected to overhaul the management of content on platforms like Google and Facebook and is the first of its kind since 2000.

How will the political and financial biases be dealt with as legal proceedings escalate?

Alphabet’s shares actually rose Tuesday morning, as did those of Apple Inc., AAPL 1.32% Amazon.com Inc. AMZN 0.31% and Facebook Inc. FB 2.36% Big tech Investors have become accustomed to the specter of government action. - WSJ

The investigations are made more complicated by the fact that opposition to big tech has become largely politicized, with Democrats mostly targeting companies for their monopoly power and Republicans accusing them of censoring conservative speech. - The Guardian

In re FTC Facebook ruling, Dissent from Rohit Chopra

"Because behavioral advertising allows advertisers to use mass surveillance as a means to their undisclosed and potentially nefarious ends, Facebook users are exposed to propaganda, manipulation, discrimination, and other harms. In a sales pitch for its digital advertising, Facebook boasts that its advanced targeting is better than the limited options offered by other platforms because “people on Facebook share their true identities, interests, life events and more.”2 Facebook’s massive, private, and generally unsupervised network of advertisers has virtually free rein to microtarget its ads based on every aspect of a user’s profile and activity. The company’s detailed dossiers of private information includes things like a user’s location and personal connections, but it also includes the history of everything a user has ever done wherever Facebook is embedded in the digital world. Advertisers use this personal information to craft messages designed to appeal to a user’s tastes and beliefs. The flood of hyper-targeted advertising influences the company’s secret algorithms that shape and prioritize each user’s content feed in undisclosed, opaque ways. This kind of individual message tailoring can carry real-world risks when wielded with ill intent. It can be used to encourage and incite offline behavior, and shape understanding of the world and belief systems in ways that affect communities and countries. Yet Facebook’s advertising model allows almost anyone to pay for access to this powerful tool."

"While the $5 billion fine from the FTC, which Facebook has been expecting, is by far the largest the agency has levied on a technology company, the real worries for Facebook — and its investors and the companies that use it to advertise on its service — are the other restrictions and government oversight that might come with it. This goes for the other investigations as well, which span the globe from the European Union, Germany, and Belgium to New York, Canada and elsewhere."

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"The Amazon of today runs enormous swaths of the public internet; uses artificial intelligence to crunch data for many of the world’s largest companies and institutions, including the CIA; tracks user shopping habits to build detailed profiles for targeted advertising; and sells cloud-connected, A.I.-powered speakers and screens for our homes. It acquired a company that makes mesh Wi-Fi routers that have access to our private Internet traffic. Through Amazon’s subsidiary Ring, it is putting surveillance cameras on millions of people’s doorbells and inviting them to share the footage with their neighbors and the police on a crime-focused social network. It is selling face recognition systems to police and private companies."