Rob Larew and Diana Moss Published 11:45 a.m. CT Feb. 5, 2021

Consolidation has given a few large companies control of proprietary, multi-level systems of traits, seeds, agrochemicals and digital technology.(Photo: Jessica Reilly, AP)

Amid Congressional investigation and federal, state and privateantitrust cases, all eyes are on Big Tech. The step up in antitrust enforcement against the digital technology behemoths and their alleged abuses of market power is, by all accounts, good news. Successful cases could restore competition, which would benefit smaller businesses and American consumers alike. And after decades ofunder-enforcement of the antitrust lawsin the United States, these cases could deliver some base hitsand even home runsfor a critical area of law enforcement.

But the outsized media, political and social attention paid to the tech industry has diverted focus from other important sectors. There are monopolies and domestic cartels elsewherein healthcare,pharmaceuticals, media and communications, as well as food and agriculture. These industries produce goods and services that are essential to the health, safety and well-being of consumers, and even to our national security, which is why antitrust laws must be enforced against violations in these sectors, too.

The food system has been particularly fertile ground for rising concentration, the emergence of dominant firms and formation of domestic cartels. Some of the largest players have been allowed to engage in anticompetitive mergers and practices that are as serious, if not more so, than those of which Big Tech stands accused.

Rob Larew(Photo: NFU)

Much like their counterparts in the tech sector, many of the largest food and agriculture corporations haveacquired their way to dominanceby gobbling up rival businesses. This has occurred across the food system, including digital farming startups, biotechnology firms, food manufacturers,flour millers, farm machinery manufacturers and grocery store chains. But nowhere has it been more pronounced than agricultural inputs.

In acquiring competitors both small and large, the six biggest agricultural biotechnology firms collapsed rapidly into the Big ThreeBayer, DuPont and ChemChina. This wave of consolidation, which was met withlittle resistancefrom antitrust authorities, gave these corporations control of proprietary,multi-level systemsof traits, seeds, agrochemicals and digital technology that limit farmers choices and lock them into limited cropping systems.

But some parts of the agricultural sector are rife with other damaging antitrust violations that we havent seen in Big Tech. This includes alleged conspiracies to fix prices and allocate marketspractices that are made possible by high levels of consolidation and concentration.

One of the most notable examples of this is in beef packing, where thetop four firms now control about 85 percent of the national market. Given the market power that the packers possess, it comes as no surprise that they have allegedly abused it:On multiple occasions, these packers have been accused of colludingto pay ranchers less for cattle and charge consumers more for beef.

Diana Moss(Photo: American Antitrust Institute)

However, this behavior isnt unique to the beef-packing sector. Similar allegations of price fixing have been leveled against tuna, chicken, turkey, egg, pork and peanut producers, among others. These cartels are especially egregious because processors allegedly collude on both the sell and buy sides, hurting both farmers and consumersincluding independent restaurants and grocery stores.

Beyond anticompetitive practices, rising concentration has implications for our national food security. Concentration-driven bottlenecks along the supply chain make the entire food system vulnerable to disruption, a fact that has become painfully obvious during the pandemic. Following a rash of COVID-19 outbreaks at meatpacking plants, national meat processing capacity declined bynearly half, resulting insupply chain breakdowns and price gouging that affected millions of Americansmany of whom were already experiencing food insecurity.

If disruption in the food supply system werent enough, the communities that support our food system are also at risk.Foreign companies now owna non-trivial portion of the United States farmland and food system. These entities not only resist food labeling and regulations that protect and inform consumers, they also take jobs and resources out of rural communities, accelerating social and economic decline and suppressing the growth of independent businesses that would contribute to revitalization.

Kudos to antitrust enforcers for finally taking aim at Big Tech. Monopolization casesif they produce meaningful resultswill improve the welfare of hundreds of millions of people that engage in online search, social networking and shopping. But we should not stop there. Americans depend on a safe, functional and resilient food system at least as much as they depend on their social medianetworks or ability to search the internet. Antitrust enforcers must turn their attention there next.

Rob Larew is president of National Farmers Union, which represents 200,000 family farmers and ranchers across the country.

Dr. Diana Moss is the president of the American Antitrust Institute, which is devoted to promoting competition that protects consumers, businesses and society.

Read or Share this story: https://www.wisfarmer.com/story/opinion/2021/02/05/dont-stop-big-tech-we-need-bust-big-agriculture-too/4395476001/

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Dont stop at big tech we need to bust big agriculture, too - Wisconsin State Farmer

A bombshell report by Time magazine Friday proves the existence of "a real and vast conspiracy to unseat" former President Donald Trump, Laura Ingraham claimed Friday.

In describing the report by Time national political writer Molly Ball, "The Ingraham Angle" host focused on what she called an "unholy trinity" of anti-Trump forces.

"First is Big Tech," she said."It's no secret that Facebook's MarkZuckerberg and Twitter's Jack Dorsey are rabid leftists andsupported Biden."

That support, Ingraham argued, was most obvious when Facebook and Twitter limited circulation of the New York Post's reporting on documents detailing Hunter Biden's overseas business interests that were recovered from a misplaced laptop.

TIME REPORT TOUTS 'CABAL OF POWERFUL PEOPLE' BEHIND 'SHADOW CAMPAIGN' TO SHAPE 2020 ELECTION

"A poll from November found that4.6% of Biden voters would nothave voted for him had they beenaware of the Hunter Bidenscandal," said the host. "Biden only beat Trump by 4.4% ofthe vote."

"Of course," Ingraham added, "we can't leave outthe fact that Zuckerberg was key to realizing mass mail-inballoting.He donated $300 million to localelection offices and the liberalactivists masquerading asnonpartisanvoter educators.They expanded vote by mail andenrolled millions of voters."

The second part of the trinity, she continued, was Black Lives Matter, who Ingraham described as "loyal Biden foot soldiers."

The third anti-Trump force in the trinity, is Big Business, Ingraham said. She noted that the ostensibly pro-business U.S. Chamber of Commercebacked23 vulnerable Democratic House freshmen last year, 18 of whom are on record supporting a$15 minimum wage.

"The Chamber's overture to pro-union Dems may havebeen greasing the skids for what came next: Time reports that aweek before Election Day,AFL-CIO adviser Mike Podhorzerreceived an unexpected message:The U.S. Chamber of commercewanted to talk," the host explained.

"They began to discuss a jointstatement pledging theorganization's shared commitmentto a fair and peaceful election."

However, the real reason for the meeting, Ingraham argued was to ensure "access tocheap foreign labor andendlessstreams of people coming acrossthe border."

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"Trump kept labor markets tightby clamping down on work visasand securingour border," she continued."That was great for Americanworkers.The Chamber of Commerce hatedit."

"Democrats have control [of Washington] at least two more years, "Ingraham concluded. "The more we learn about how they gotthere and the more we see thedisastrous results of theirpolicies in this collaboration,the easier it will be to endthat control and give it back tothose of us that want to empowerAmericans; not just manipulate them."

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Ingraham: Big Tech, Big Business and BLM exposed as 'unholy trinity' behind Biden win - Fox News

Senior House Republicans say that, left by Democrats with few other options, their party is entertaining the idea of breaking up Big Tech companies like Facebook in the hope of countering what they say is consistently unfair censorship of conservatives on social media.

I do think there is an appetite amongst Republicans, if the Democrats wanted to try to break up Big Tech, I think there is support for that," said Republican Rep. Greg Steube of Florida.

Steube said that Republicans have no other options" because Democrats have stymied all other actions for holding social media platforms accountable.

I think something needs to be done to show these Big Tech companies they can't run over people and censor them, said Steube, a member of the House Oversight Committee.

Early last week, Steube and the top House Oversight Committee Republican, James Comer of Kentucky, asked the Democratic chairwoman of the committee, Rep. Carolyn Maloney, to investigate Facebook and Twitter for their role in the Jan. 6 Capitol attack, alongside social media platform Parler.

The Republicans say they have been rebuffed so far.

Maloney and I speak on the phone every week, and I keep bringing our Parler letter up, Comer told the Washington Examiner. "And we've got nothing. No response yet from her."

Comer said that he was among several Republicans who had been driven to considering breaking up tech companies because of the lack of support from Democrats in battling unfair social media censorship.

"We've got a problem with Big Tech right now. My constituency is concerned about Big Tech. So we've got to do something, Comer said.

A majority of Republicans now favor the government regulating social media giants and breaking up Big Tech, according to a poll released Thursday.

Comer said he wanted to have a committee hearing to discuss the increasing censorship on social media outlets and the possibility of breaking up these platforms. Democrats have the power to schedule hearings.

Prominent Democrats such as Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren and House Antitrust Subcommittee Chairman David Cicilline have aggressively supported breaking up Big Tech companies.

Comer and Steube said that the Demcorats' all-or-nothing stance has forced Republicans into the position of considering breaking up firms.

If we can't get our bills done, and the Democrats bring a bill to break up Big Tech to the floor, I wouldn't be surprised if they would have bipartisan support, said Steube.

Republicans, who generally say they oppose government intervention in private businesses, say that the drastic increase in online censorship in the past few weeks has changed the political reality.

Steube said that most Republicans are not in favor of using antitrust enforcement to break up big companies because we have a free market system." Nevertheless, he said, the banning of former President Donald Trump and other conservatives has shifted his perspective. However, contrary to Republican complaints, a recent study showed that most social media outlets have helped amplify right-of-center content rather than censor it.

Republicans are also considering repealing Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, the tech liability shield, as a way to get Big Tech platforms to stop unfair and unnecessary censorship.

I understand the majority of Republicans in the Energy and Commerce Committee are for repealing Section 230, said Comer.

There are 26 Republicans on the Energy and Commerce Committee, which deals with many Big Tech issues due to its Communications and Technology subcommittee.

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House Republicans say they're being forced into considering Big Tech breakup - Washington Examiner

Heres the Great Tech Founder Story we have been told over the years: Brilliant, quirky dude (always a dude) has a flash of inspiration, sets off on a quest to build something earth-changing, gets doubted along the way, and eventually steers his company to massive success success that comes directly from his leadership.

And here is the Great Tech Company Story we have also been taught over the years: That even though these massively successful companies have grown way beyond their humble roots, they continue to win because they keep the focus and ferocity they had at the beginning.

But just because we all know these stories doesnt mean they are true. A more honest version goes like this: Once one of these companies attains a certain size and status, its very, very hard for the company and its founder to keep that single-mindedness. More importantly: They probably dont have to.

Which might be the takeaway from Tuesdays news that Jeff Bezos is stepping down from the CEO job at Amazon, 27 years after starting the company.

Bezoss 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.

You can chalk that up to the initial insight, breakthroughs, and drive that got them to the place where the founder could hand the reins to a protege and no one would miss them much. Or you could argue that at some point, these companies are so swollen that they make their own gravity and plot their own path, beyond the control of any single person. Probably a mix of both.

But in any case, its clear that most of Big Tech has become so Big and entrenched that it no longer needs the men who made it.

That doesnt mean they dont pay lip service to the idea that theyre still the scrappy startups they once were: Bezos, in his step-down note to employees, insisted that it is still Day 1 at Amazon. Thats a reference to the companys insistence that everyone at the company a $1 trillion company that hired more than 250,000 people in 2020 alone should act as if theyre at a just-launched startup. Amazon also fetishizes the desks that Bezos and his early co-workers made out of wooden doors, which are supposed to symbolize the companys lean, stay-hungry mentality.

The counter to all of that lip service: Theres a serious antitrust movement afoot that wants to break up, or at least slow down, Google, Apple, and Amazon. (Microsoft, which faced its own antitrust breakup case 20 years ago, has largely avoided the wrath of politicians, regulators, and activists this time around.)

There are still plenty of caveats to consider as we look at what happens when founders separate themselves from their companies. Steve Jobs didnt leave the Apple CEO job to Tim Cook because he was bored with Apple he did it because he was too sick to run Apple, and he died months after the handoff. Bill Gates stepped down as Microsoft CEO in 2000, but he stuck around and watched as the company meandered for years under successor Steve Ballmer; it didnt regain its footing until 2014, when Satya Nadella took over and Gates had truly moved on. Larry Page didnt formally leave his company until 2019, but he definitely handed over operating control in 2015, and folks inside Google will tell you he had been detached for some time before that. Reed Hastings hasnt actually stopped being the CEO of Netflix hes moved over to become co-CEO with Ted Sarandos.

But investors, at the very least, have learned to live with Big Tech companies run by someone other than their founders. You can see the performance of Google/Alphabet, Apple, and Microsoft once their CEOs stopped running the companies day to day; Netflix is the counterexample, but its a story still in its very early days Hastings didnt make his side-shuffle until the middle of last year, and the overall market has been on a crazy tear for a while now.

The big outlier to this trendlet is Mark Zuckerberg, who has been running Facebook since its founding 17 years ago and who is still only 36 years old. He doesnt look remotely ready to leave: Not only is there is no obvious succession planning underway, but by all accounts Zuckerberg has been extremely hands-on during the last few years, trying to convince regulators and employees that theres a way for his company to connect 2 billion people and dominate the market for digital ads without destabilizing the planet.

He could leave, of course. He controls a majority of Facebooks voting shares, and can do almost anything he wants. And maybe Facebook, like its other Big Tech peers, could chug along for some time without him. Even though the company is constantly battered in the press and by politicians, it continues to hoover up ad dollars without any sign of flagging. Like its Big Tech peers, its a perpetual money machine that never seems buffeted by the outside world: Last year, it generated $85.9 billion in revenue, up 22 percent from the year before.

But for right now its impossible to see Zuckerberg letting go not when the US government is suing to break up the empire hes built, and not when there are genuine questions about whether Facebook and civil society can coexist. Facebook certainly isnt a scrappy dorm-room startup anymore, but its also still tightly tied to the man who created it. Which will be true right up until the time it isnt.

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Amazon's Jeff Bezos is the latest Big Tech founder to leave his company - Vox.com

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Stocks were mixed Wednesday morning as stellar earnings from Amazon.com and Google gave the Nasdaq a boost, but had no impact on the Dow.

Futures on the Dow Jones Industrial Average were off 2 points, while S&P 500 futures had risen 0.3%, and Nasdaq Composite futures had gained 0.7%.

Big moves in big tech stocks were supporting the market-cap-weighted S&P 500. Amazon.com (AMZN) rose 3% after it smashed quarterly earnings expectations. The company said it earned $14.09 per share, against estimates of $7.23 on revenue of $125.5 billion, versus a forecast of $119.7 billion. Google parent Alphabet (GOOGL) rose 8% after the company beat estimates. The company earned $22.30 per share, better than the expected $15.90, while revenue was $56.9 billion, against a forecast of $53.1 billion.

Big Tech wasnt the only thing moving on Wednesday morning. Nvidia (NVDA), for instance, rose 0.5% after New Street Research upgraded the stock to Neutral from Sell.

Kohls (KSS) rose 1.5% after Cowen upgraded the stock to Outperform from Market Perform.

Beyond Meat fell 2% after D.A. Davidson downgraded the stock to Underperform from Neutral.

Hyliion Holdings (HYLN) has dropped 6.7% after getting cut to Sell from Neutral at Goldman Sachs.

Alibaba Group Holding (BABA) has risen 3.9% after Ant Financial reached a deal with Chinese regulators.

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

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Alibaba Stock Jumps, Hyliion Slumps, and the Stock Market Loves Big Tech Earnings - Barron's

That means new tools and increased funding for the Justice Department and the Federal Trade Commission, the agencies tasked with enforcing antitrust laws. Klobuchar said she planned to reintroduce several pieces of legislation that sat dormant while Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, who is skeptical of new antitrust laws, controlled the subcommittee.

I've had a good working relationship with [Lee], but I'm looking forward to finally having the gavel to be able to mark up bills and send them to the floor, Klobuchar said.

She wont have to wait long. A power-sharing agreement for the 50-50 Senate brokered this week by Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer, D-N.Y., and Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., means control of the Judiciary Committee will pass to Democrats soon.

With the gavel in hand, Klobuchar doesnt plan to waste time. Market dominance in the technology industry has harmed consumers, she said, and even helped lead to the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol by former President Donald Trumps supporters.

This concentration of power has raised troubling questions about personal privacy, the security of our elections, and the spread of toxic disinformation, she said, including the type of disinformation that helped convince a violent and deeply misinformed mob to storm our Capitol and desecrate the temple of our democracy.

Continued here:

Klobuchar, incoming antitrust chair, eager to take on Big Tech - Roll Call

Rod Sims, Australia's top antitrust watchdog, has been at the forefront of Australia's push against Google, which is threatening to pull out of the country. Theres no question this is high stakes.

Updated: Rod Sims was perhaps one of the only people in Australia who didnt flinch last month when Google threatened to pull its Google Search from the country. As Australias top antitrust watchdog, Sims and the agency he leads, the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission, has been behind a law that will force it to pay news publishers for featuring articles on its site.

Google, which is valued above $1 trillion, almost as much as the entire GDP of Australia, and holds a 94% share of the online search market there, has waged an aggressive lobbying campaign to prevent the law from going ahead. Facebook, too, had also vowed to withdraw its news service from Australia if the law is passed.

Even the United States, which is leading its own multi-agency antitrust campaign against Big Tech companies, has sided with Google and Facebook, attacking the Australian proposed law as fundamentally imbalanced and suggesting it could violate the U.S.-Australia free trade agreement. Instead, the U.S. government suggested Australia scrap the law in favor of a voluntary requirement.

Sims, however, says precedent supports the necessity for legal action.The only way this is going to work is if this is mandated, a forcing device, Sims tells Forbes, speaking from his office in Sydney via Zoom. And weve seen this around the world with Google and Facebook: the only time theyve been moved is when theyve been forced to.

Desperate threats and mounting pressure from Google and Facebook, with backing from the U.S., have also signalled that the tech giants are beginning to take the Australian antitrust effort as a serious threat, with outsized implications to their monopoly power if other countries follow Australias lead.

Now, another tech giant is taking advantage of the conflict: Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella recently told Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison that his company is ready to ramp up operations of its Bing search in the country.

If Google does decide to stop Google Search in Australia, I guess people will get a quick education on alternative search engines, Sims says. But what Google has to watch out for is if people do transition...then how does that look to the rest of the world?

He adds: Theres no question this is high stakes, but its high stakes on both sides.

In response, Google, said in a statement that it had proposed solutions to add to the code. Withdrawal is our worst case scenario if the Code remains unworkable and the last thing we want to have happen, Google spokesperson Matt Snelson wrote.

Facebook did not respond to a request for comment.

Sims has more than once been called Australias most hated regulator a title that he has occasionally embraced. A no-nonsense 70-year-old who on first appearance carries a similar demeanor as former FBI director and special prosecutor Robert Mueller, Sims has been on the world antitrust stage since the 1990s. After multiple stints at government advisory groups, agencies and think tanks, he was appointed ACCC chairman in 2011. He's always been candid, straight shooting, and not afraid to do what he's convinced of, says Bill Baer, a former FTC commissioner who recently advised the Biden transition team, and has worked with Sims on transnational regulation.

Since then, Sims agency has stood alone in many of its pursuits against Big Tech firms. It forced Apple to pay $7 million in 2017 after determining that a software update slowed older iPhones, forcing consumers to upgrade models. Now, the ACCC is pursuing two lawsuits against Google, one for misleading consumers over the use of personal information and another for falsely describing how it collects location data from Android phones. In December, the agency sued Facebook, accusing it of collecting user data without permission. And now it is considering a $400 million fine against Google following the companys December acquisition of Fitbit, putting it at odds with the European Union which approved the merger, based conditionally on the data usage of the fitness bands EU-based users.

Outside of Australia, Sims agency has made its mark through its 2019 Digital Platforms Inquiry, a definitive study that documented Google and Facebooks dominance on the online ad revenue markets, which sapped revenue streams from local newspapers, forcing many to close. The study recommended, among other things, that the companies be mandated to pay news publishers for featuring their content on their platforms. The report was widely considered as a founding block of the U.S. House Judiciarys tech antitrust report released in October, and the ACCC was cited more times than any other international regulator. The ACCC was really a landmark report, says Maurice Stucke, a former Justice Department prosecutor in the antitrust division.

Now, Australia is on track to largely adopt those recommendations as law, with a mandatory code that will force Google and Facebook to reach agreements with local publishers. And its not something that can be ignored: under the code, Australia will be able to levy penalties of 10% of locally-generated revenue a substantial sum considering Google generated $3.5 billion revenue in Australia in 2019.

For months, Google has fought unsuccessfully to bend public opinion. In August, itclaimedthat the new law would put free services such as Google Search and YouTube at risk to Australia users, prompting the ACCC to issue astatement saying the law would not force Google to charge for its free services. The company also claimed that it would be made to share sensitive personal data with third-parties.Though it has struck some deals with small publishers as a show of goodwill, it was forced todenyit was behind an ominous YouTube video that led to thousands of emails sent by constituents to lawmakers demanding that they vote against the law.

Though it has struck some deals with small publishers as a show of goodwill, it was forced todenyit was behind an ominous YouTube video that led to thousands of emails sent by constituents to lawmakers demanding that they vote against the law. Though it has struck some deals with small publishers as a show of goodwill, it was suspected of being behind thousands of emails sent by constituents to lawmakers demanding that they vote against the law.

This effort by Google has only strengthened the bipartisan resolve of lawmakers to move ahead with the law. Part of the Australian character is about the little guy, Sims says. Theres been a backlash to the thought of [Google and Facebook] using their weight to resist this wide body of opinion.

Under the shadow of Googles threat to pull out of Australia, Sims and his agency are showing no signs of slowing down. Last week, the ACCC issued another report, this time taking aim at Googles dominance over the advertising technology market, and recommended breaking up Googles advertising datasets to level the playing field for other providers.

Sims says he doesnt know at all whether Google will leave Australia over the news-agreements law. But he appears to be gambling with some pretty good odds: the same day Google threatened to leave Australia, the company struck a deal to pay publishers in France, after regulators there refused to budge.

Correction: This article has been updated to clarify a public statement Google made in response to the proposed Australian law. It did not claim that it would be forced to charge for free services such as Google search, as previously stated, but said the product was at risk to Australian consumers.

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Unfazed By Antitrust In The U.S., Big Tech Faces A Growing Nuisance From Down Under - Forbes

For their part, YouTube, Twitter, Facebook and others have little interest in being information gatekeepers. When incidents of hate speech bubble to the surface, for example, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg often trots out the right to free speech enshrined in the U.S. First Amendment (although since this only applies to the actions of government its not clear how this is relevant to a private company).

YouTube, Twitter, Facebook and others have little interest in being information gatekeepers

But it would be better to describe the speech on these huge platforms as algorithmically mediated speech. Google, Facebook and others make money by selling product. The product is us and the customer is advertisers. As Jaron Lanier told PBS in 2018, (t)he economic problem is very simply that weve designed a society where if you and I talk over social media, the only way that can happen is if its for the benefit of a third party whos paying for it. And their only possible benefit is getting us to change our behaviour.

But so what? Facebook and Google are private companies. They dont pretend to be honest brokers of information. What really worries Facebook is what will happen to its business model after changes in Apples mobile operating system that will ask users for specific permission to be tracked, an option they evidently believe most people will decline.

But events in the past years have demonstrated that disinformation and conspiracy theories have real-world consequences. After the carnage at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6 it became clear that there are evidently thousands (or maybe tens or hundreds of thousands) of people who genuinely believe the U.S. election was stolen, despite the lack of evidence to support this claim, as noted by many rather conservative-minded officials and judges. And over the past months, Canada, the U.S. and elsewhere have also seen protests against mandatory mask-wearing rules, many of which have been organized on Facebook. A recent investigation by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism revealed that there are still hundreds of Facebook pages, followed by 45 million people, that are using Facebooks tools to raise money while spreading misinformation about the COVID-19 pandemic.

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Tackling Big Tech: The real-world consequences of social media's assault on good journalism - National Post

The Biden administration is matching actions to words on climate assembling the most impressive team of pro-climate experts, strategists and policy leaders ever, making the goal of a just climate policy a top priority of the 2021 legislative agenda in Congress.

But leading companies in the tech sector are failing to match their own pro-climate commitments with lobbying action, according to a new report from InfluenceMap. (Note: the author is a member of the Advisory Board of InfluenceMap.)The report finds that Big Tech, the most powerful business voice for climate, is mostly missing in action on Capitol Hill just as this urgent issue nears a policy showdown.

The new data shows that Big Techs track record of engagement on climate policy has thus far been negligible: across the board, InfluenceMap finds that only 4 percent of Big Techs disclosed lobbying activity was devoted to climate-related policies. This compares with an average of 38 percent for Big Oil companies.Sen. Sheldon WhitehouseSheldon WhitehouseDemocrats weigh expanding lower courts after Trump blitz OVERNIGHT ENERGY: Biden signs series of orders to tackle climate change | Republicans press Granholm on fossil fuels during confirmation hearing Hawley files ethics counter-complaint against seven Democratic senators MORE (D-R.I.), the point person on climate policy in the Senate, puts it bluntly, Big Tech has refused to lift a finger to push comprehensive climate action in Congress.

Big Techs failure to show up matters; were going to need all hands on deck for this climate fight. While Congress sweeping pandemic relief bill contained some climate provisions that won bipartisan support, no one is expecting all future pro-climate proposals to get a kumbaya welcome. Even with a narrowly Democratic House and Senate, passing pro-climate legislation wont be easy whether its under special reconciliation rules or traditional ones.It will require mustering business support to bring swing Senators of both parties behind it and thats where the challenge will lie.

Big Oil will be girded for battle in 2021. They heard the warning shot last fall in then-candidate Bidens debate statement about making a transition from the oil industry.Despite President TrumpDonald TrumpBiden reverses Trump last-minute attempt to freeze .4 billion of programs Trump announces new impeachment legal team after reported departures Republicans scramble to unify heading into next election cycle MOREs all-out efforts to make this clear statement into a gaffe, candidate Biden didnt pay a real political price for calling for oils demise. Yes, the fossil fuel industrys new public relations strategy is to change its tune on the climate narrative. But Big Oil still has the powerful Chamber of Commerce (doing its own deft repositioning on climate to shift slowly away from outright climate denial) to back them up when deals are cut.

What business sector is powerful and influential enough to counter Big Oil?The obvious answer is Big Tech.With an historic showdown on climate coming, we need full throttle engagement from the strongest, most vibrant business proponent of saving the planet the tech sector.To their credit, Big Tech firms have made great progress advancing sustainability in operations and taking vocal stands on the issue. Its now time for them to walk the walk on climate policy.

But whether or not they will is an open question. Obviously, the public affairs teams of the leading tech firms have more narrow concerns on their mind in 2021s Washington like Facebooks big antitrust problems.As a former Big Tech executive, I know climate policy too often slips down the priority list. It is zero hour on climate policy we have run out of time for inaction. The failure to pass significant climate legislation in 2021 would be devastating to the future of the planet not just our businesses, but our families and our very survival.We are now in a very narrow window of time when our actions can still keep global warming below the 1.5 degree threshold recommended by science to prevent the most severe outcomes.This is the moment for bold policy and for the whole team to join the fight.

With the fate of the climate hanging in the balance, if Big Tech stays out of this struggle, they will lose credibility not just with the Biden administration, but with their own pro-climate employees. As they try to recruit idealistic students, they will find that these bright, savvy young tech workers expect them to stand tall on climate policy and environmental justice and that they are increasingly outspoken.Time is running short for Big Tech to step up, honor their pro-climate pledges and make their workforce proud. Lets hope they do.

Bill Weihl is a former sustainability executive at Google and Facebook. He is the founder and executive director of ClimateVoice, a non-profit initiative.

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New evidence that Big Tech is 'MIA' on climate policy | TheHill - The Hill

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SAN FRANCISCO Jack Dorsey, Twitters chief executive, publicly wrestled this month with the question of whether his social media service had exercised too much power by cutting off Donald J. Trumps account. Mr. Dorsey wondered aloud if the solution to that power imbalance was new technology inspired by the cryptocurrency Bitcoin.

When YouTube and Facebook barred tens of thousands of Mr. Trumps supporters and white supremacists this month, many flocked to alternative apps such as LBRY, Minds and Sessions. What those sites had in common was that they were also inspired by the design of Bitcoin.

The twin developments were part of a growing movement by technologists, investors and everyday users to replace some of the internets fundamental building blocks in ways that would be harder for tech giants like Facebook and Google to control.

To do so, they are increasingly focused on new technological ideas introduced by Bitcoin, which was built atop an online network designed, at the most basic level, to decentralize power.

Unlike other types of digital money, Bitcoin are created and moved around not by a central bank or financial institution but by a broad and disparate network of computers. Its similar to the way Wikipedia is edited by anyone who wants to help, rather than a single publishing house. That underlying technology is called the blockchain, a reference to the shared ledger on which all of Bitcoins records are kept.

Companies are now finding ways to use blockchains, and similar technology inspired by it, to create social media networks, store online content and host websites without any central authority in charge. Doing so makes it much harder for any government or company to ban accounts or delete content.

These experiments are newly relevant after the biggest tech companies recently exercised their clout in ways that have raised questions about their power.

Facebook and Twitter prevented Mr. Trump from posting online after the Capitol rampage on Jan. 6, saying he had broken their rules against inciting violence. Amazon, Apple and Google stopped working with Parler, a social networking site that had become popular with the far right, saying the app had not done enough to limit violent content.

While liberals and opponents of toxic content praised the companies actions, they were criticized by conservatives, First Amendment scholars and the American Civil Liberties Union for showing that private entities could decide who gets to stay online and who doesnt.

Even if you agree with the specific decisions, I do not for a second trust the people who are making the decisions to make universally good decisions, said Jeremy Kauffman, the founder of LBRY, which provides a decentralized service for streaming videos.

That has prompted a scramble for other options. Dozens of start-ups now offer alternatives to Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Amazons web hosting services, all on top of decentralized networks and shared ledgers. Many have gained millions of new users over the past few weeks, according to the data company SimilarWeb.

This is the biggest wave Ive ever seen, said Emmi Bevensee, a data scientist and the author of The Decentralized Web of Hate, a publication about the move of right-wing groups to decentralized technology. This has been discussed in niche communities, but now we are having a conversation with the broader world about how these emerging technologies may impact the world at quite large scales.

Bitcoin first emerged in 2009. Its creator, a shadowy figure known as Satoshi Nakamoto, has said its central idea was to allow anyone to open a digital bank account and hold the money in a way that no government could prevent or regulate.

For several years, Bitcoin gained little traction beyond a small coterie of online admirers and people who wanted to pay for illegal drugs online. But as its price rose over time, more people in Silicon Valley took notice of the unusual technical qualities underlying the cryptocurrency. Some promised that the technology could be used to redesign everything from produce tracking to online games.

The hype fell flat over the years as the underlying technology proved to be slow, prone to error and not easily accessible. But more investments and time have begun to result in software that people can actually use.

Last year, Arweave, a blockchain-based project for permanently storing and displaying websites, created an archive of sites and documents from the protests in Hong Kong that angered the Chinese government.

Minds, a blockchain-based replacement for Facebook founded in 2015, also became an online home to some of the right-wing personalities and neo-Nazis who were booted from mainstream social networks, along with fringe groups, in other countries, that have been targeted by their governments. Minds and other similar start-ups are funded by prominent venture capital firms like Andreessen Horowitz and Union Square Ventures.

One of the biggest proponents of the trend has been Mr. Dorsey, 44, who has talked about the promise of decentralized social networks through Twitter and has promoted Bitcoin through the other company he runs, Square, a financial technology provider.

His public support for Bitcoin and Bitcoin-related designs dates to around 2017. In late 2019, Mr. Dorsey announced Blue Sky, a project to develop technology aimed at giving Twitter less influence over who could and could not use the service.

After shutting down Mr. Trumps account this month, Mr. Dorsey said he would hire a team for Blue Sky to address his discomfort with Twitters power by pursuing the vision set out by Bitcoin. On Thursday, Blue Sky published the findings of a task force that has been considering potential designs.

Twitter declined to make Mr. Dorsey available for an interview but said it intended to share more soon.

Blockchains are not the only solution for those in search of alternatives to Big Techs power. Many people have recently migrated to the encrypted messaging apps Signal and Telegram, which have no need for a blockchain. Moxie Marlinspike, the creator of Signal, has said decentralization made it hard to build good software.

The experimentation with decentralized systems has nonetheless ramped up over the last month. Brave, a new browser, announced last week that it would begin integrating a blockchain-based system, known as IPFS, into its software to make web content more reliable in case big service providers went down or tried to ban sites.

The IPFS network gives access to content even if it has been censored by corporations and nation-states, Brian Bondy, a co-founder of Brave, said.

At LBRY, the blockchain-based alternative to YouTube, the number of people signing up daily has surged 250 percent from December, the company said. The newcomers appear to have largely been a motley crew of Trump fans, white supremacists and gun rights advocates who violated YouTubes rules.

When YouTube removed the latest videos from the white supremacist video blogger Way of the World last week, he tweeted: Why do we waste our time on this globalist scum? Come to LBRY for all my videos in HD quality, censorship free!

Megan Squires, a professor at Elon University who studies new computer networks, said blockchain-based networks faced hurdles because the underlying technology made it hard to exercise any control over content.

As a technology it is very cool, but you cant just sit there and be a Pollyanna and think that all information will be free, she said. There will be racists, and people will shoot each other. Its going to be the total package.

Mr. Kauffman said LBRY had prepared for these situations. While anyone will be able to create an account and register content on the LBRY blockchain that the company cannot delete similar to the way anyone can create an email address and send emails most people will get access to videos through a site on top of it. That allows LBRY to enforce moderation policies, much as Google can filter out spam and illegal content in email, he said.

Even so, Mr. Kauffman said, no one would lose basic access to online conversation.

Id be proud of almost any kind of marginalized voice using it, no matter how much I disagreed with it, he said.

See the article here:

They Found a Way to Limit Big Techs Power: Using the Design of Bitcoin - The New York Times

But the court shifted again, Lakier says, toward interpreting the First Amendment as a grant of almost total freedom for private owners to decide who could speak through their outlets. In 1974, it struck down a Florida law requiring newspapers that criticized the character of political candidates to offer them space to reply. Chief Justice Warren Burger, in his opinion for the majority, recognized that barriers to entry in the newspaper market meant this placed the power to shape public opinion in few hands. But in his view, there was little the government could do about it.

Traditionally, conservatives have favored that libertarian approach: Let owners decide how their property is used. Thats changing now that they find their speech running afoul of tech-company rules. Listen to me, America, we were wiped out, the right-wing podcaster Dan Bongino, an investor in Parler, said in a Fox News interview after Amazon pulled its services. And to all the geniuses out there, too, saying this is a private company, its not a First Amendment fight really, its not? The law that prevents the government from censoring speech should still apply, he said, because these companies are more powerful than a de facto government. You neednt sympathize with him to see the hit Parler took as the modern equivalent of, in Burgers terms, disliking one newspaper and taking the trouble to start your own, only to find no one will sell you ink to print it.

One problem with private companies holding the ability to deplatform any speaker is that theyre in no way insulated from politics from accusations of bias to advertiser boycotts to employee walkouts. Facebook is a business, driven by profit and with no legal obligation to explain its decisions the way a court or regulatory body would. Why, for example, hasnt Facebook suspended the accounts of other leaders who have used the platform to spread lies and bolster their power, like the president of the Philippines, Rodrigo Duterte? A spokesman said suspending Trump was a response to a specific situation based on risk but so is every decision, and the risks can be just as high overseas.

Its really media and public pressure that is the difference between Trump coming down and Duterte staying up, says Evelyn Douek, a lecturer at Harvard Law School. But the winds of public opinion are a terrible basis for free-speech decisions! Maybe it seems like its working right now. But in the longer run, how do you think unpopular dissidents and minorities will fare?

Deplatforming works, at least in the short term. There are indications that in the weeks after the platforms cleaned house with Twitter suspending not just Trump but some 70,000 accounts, including many QAnon influencers conversations about election fraud decreased significantly across several sites. After Facebook reintroduced a scoring system to promote news sources based on its judgment of their quality, the list of top performers, usually filled by hyperpartisan sources, featured CNN, NPR and local news outlets.

But theres no reason to think the healthier information climate will last. The very features that make social media so potent work both to the benefit and the detriment of democracy. YouTube, for instance, changed its recommendation algorithm in 2019, after researchers and reporters (including Kevin Roose at The New York Times) showed how it pushed some users toward radicalizing content. Its also telling that, since the election, Facebook has stopped recommending civic groups for people to join. After Jan. 6, the researcher Aric Toler at Bellingcat surfaced a cheery video, automatically created by Facebook to promote its groups, which imposed the tagline community means a lot over images of a militia brandishing weapons and a photo of Robert Gieswein, who has since been charged in the assault on the Capitol. Im afraid that the technology has upended the possibility of a well-functioning, responsible speech environment, the Harvard law professor Jack Goldsmith says. It used to be we had masses of speech in a reasonable range, and some extreme speech we could tolerate. Now we have a lot more extreme speech coming from lots of outlets and mouthpieces, and its more injurious and harder to regulate.

For decades, tech companies mostly responded to such criticism with proud free-speech absolutism. But external pressures, and the absence of any other force to contain users, gradually dragged them into the expensive and burdensome role of policing their domains. Facebook, for one, now has legions of low-paid workers reviewing posts flagged as harmful, a task gruesome enough that the company has agreed to pay $52 million in mental-health compensation to settle a lawsuit by more than 10,000 moderators.

More here:

Why Is Big Tech Policing Speech? Because the Government Isnt - The New York Times

The coordinated actions of Big Tech against Parler, a free-speech competitor to Twitter , have attracted much attention and debate. Some argue that deplatforming Parler was necessary to stop further violence after the riot at the Capitol on Jan. 6. Others see political discrimination at work, given that Facebook , YouTube and Twitter also host bad actors. Everyone seems to agree that the actions by Big Tech caused great harm to Parler.

On the contrary, there are strong economic reasons to think Parler will benefit in the long run. The value of the free publicity will ultimately far outweigh the loss of revenue from being shut down for a few weeks. Parler has become a household name. It was a company; now its a cause.

The attack on Parler follows a long history of incumbent monopolies trying to raise costs on new rivals. Once Parler gets new servers up, however, using a phone to sign up or log on through a browser rather than an app is a small barrier to entry. Many highly profitable websites have no apps.

The benefits to Parler from Big Techs actions come in the long haul. The value of any company stems from the present value of its future earnings. An investment raises this present value when the up-front cost is dwarfed by the gains in future earnings. Big Tech has made an implicit investment in Parler by imposing a short-run cost that is smaller than the more lasting future gain in earnings enabled by the free marketing campaign.

The growth in future users doesnt have to be large to raise the value of Parler. It seems safe to assume that the number of users will be larger in March this year than it would have been without the Big Tech effort. And the growth doesnt have to be huge to make a big difference. Losing 100% of a months earnings to switch servers is easily made up by a long-run gain of a few percentage points of monthly users afterward. Such a small gain seems more than likely given the multiples of 100% growth in Parler users after Twitters suppression of stories about Hunter Bidens business dealings.

Read more here:

The Big Tech Crackdown Is a Gift to Parler - The Wall Street Journal

Wondering about the health of the internet, both globally and in the US? Mozillathe company behind the Firefox browser and moretoday released its fourth Internet Health Report, which covers topics that impact the internet and big tech companies, such as accountability, labor, andas we'll discuss hereracial justice issues.

The hard numbers are above, pulled from tech companies' own reports, as charted by Wired. Among the biggest fourApple, Facebook, Google (Alphabet), and Microsoft (Amazon isn't listed)the stats on Black, Latinx, and Native representation among the workforce in each are practically unchanged after five years (see update below). The only real change is the minimal increase in the number of Asian employees, up 12% at Apple, 11% at Facebook, 9% at Google, and 4% at Microsoft. The report flatly states that even in that case, caste discrimination happens.

Gender diversity isn't making great strides, either. Women are still woefully underrepresented at those same four companies; increases have been very small since 2014.

The racial biases of having a primarily white workforce persist: for example, skewing perspectives on artificial intelligence, as evidenced by all the white plastic humanoids in a typical search.

The report includes a spotlight article titled "Decode the Default," which looks at the recent phenomenon of trying to call out the "racial inequities of data and algorithms," and the backlash and denials that arise when it happens. For example, the 2008 launch of a web browser called Blackbird (built on Mozilla code) as a "browser for Black people" faced accusations of segregationeven from the African-American community. Other examples include:

Over a decade ago, it was discovered that searching "black girls" on Google lead mostly to imagery from pornography.

Facial-recognition gets things woefully wrong for people who aren't white.

The "mainstream notion of a 'default' user" is typically believed to be white, cisgender, male, and American.

Many of these race-based problems and more in the tech community point back to the graphic at the top: The big tech companieson which the small tech companies are almost wholly dependent"fail to create work environments where people of color and women want to stay." Without that diversity internally, tech companies don't really know how to work and improve beyond their limited worldview.

There's much more to read in "Decode the Default" and the entire Internet Health Report, including sections on the labor rights movement in tech (in particular for "gig economy" workers) and the lack of transparency that prevents us from holding these companies accountable.

Update 1/30/2021: Microsoft says the Mozilla report pulls data from its 2019 report. It has since published anew diversity reportfor 2020, which cites "modest gains since 2019 including among women who now represent 28.6% of the global Microsoft workforce, an increase of 1.0 percentage point since last year.However, racial and ethnic minority communities have largely seen incremental progress and there is still much work to be done."

Further Reading

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Algorithms Still Have a Bias Problem, and Big Tech Isn't Doing Enough to Fix It - PCMag

U.S. stocks fell sharply on Wednesday amid disappointing earnings, while concern about heightened speculative trading activity deepened.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average lost 633.87 points, or 2.1%, to 30,303.17 for its worst day since Oct. 28. The S&P 500 dropped 2.6% to 3,750.77, slipping from a record high and suffering its biggest drop in three months. Wednesday's steep losses wiped out the 2021 gains for the S&P 500 and it's now down 0.1% on the year. The tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite slid 2.6% to 13,270.60.

Boeing fell nearly 4% after its earnings report showed its 2020 net loss hit a record of $11.9 billion amid the 737 Max grounding and the coronavirus pandemic. Shares of AMD tumbled more than 6% even after the chipmaker posted revenue and earnings that beat Wall Street's already high expectations.

But it was intensifying speculative behavior among retail investors that was causing the most concern. Heavily shorted names, including GameStop and AMC Entertainment, continued to be pushed higher by amateur day traders in online chat rooms. Some investors are worried about mounting losses by hedge funds spilling over to other areas of the market as those funds sell other securities to raise cash. Investors are also concerned the speculative behavior is a sign the market is overvalued and a pullback is near.

"We've run up so much and this is healthy profit taking," said John Davi, founder and CIO of Astoria Portfolio Advisors. "There has been a tremendous market melt-up in the past two months. When the market goes up parabolically, you will see speculative behaviors from a lot of investors."

GameStop shares exploded again, more than doubling on Wednesday. CNBC learned Melvin Capital, the hedge fund targeted by the retail investing crowd on Reddit had sold out of its short position. More hedge funds were facing big losses because of their losing short positions, CNBC's David Faber reported on Wednesday.

"Market participants have watched the GME phenomena with curiosity and amusement, but the days-long surge in it is eroding market confidence and creating some positioning-driven dislocation," Adam Crisafulli, founder of Vital Knowledge, said in a note.

AMC soared more than 300% Wednesday. More than one billion AMC shares traded in the name during the session.

TD Ameritrade midday Wednesday said it put in place restrictions on certain transactions involving GameStop and AMC "in the interest of mitigating risk for our company and clients."

Stocks fell as a "surge in heavily shorted stocks like GME and others [is] creating substantial margin calls for funds short these positions," said FundStrat's Tom Lee in an email. This "forced selling" by hedge funds is causing a bit of turmoil in the markets and likely leading all active managers to get into a risk-off mode, Lee said. A margin call is when a broker mandates an investor hold more cash to cover losses.

But the strategist added that the sell-off Wednesday was temporary and stocks would resume their upswing soon.

The Cboe Volatility Index, known as the VIX or Wall Street's fear gauge, jumped above 30 on Wednesday, hitting its highest level since November.

"The Big Short" investor Michael Burry said in a now-deleted tweet Tuesday that trading in GameStop is "unnatural, insane, and dangerous" and there should be "legal and regulatory repercussions."

The Federal Reserve failed to stem the market sell-off even as it said it would kept interest rates unchanged near zero, while maintaining an asset purchasing program with at least $120 billion buying a month.

Microsoft gained 0.3% after reporting a stellar quarter. Sales grew by 17% on a year-over-year basis in its fiscal second quarter, while its cloud business accelerated.

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Dow drops more than 600 points for its worst day since October, S&P 500 goes red for the year - CNBC

Executive Vice President Margrethe Vestager talking to media in Brussels, Belgium.

Thierry Monasse | Getty Images News | Getty Images

LONDON The European Commission is about to propose a "revolutionary" overhaul of digital regulation that could hurt the business models of Big Tech, industry experts told CNBC.

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. Broadly, the EU wants to make tech giants more responsible for the content on their platforms, and to ensure that competitors have a fair chance to succeed against the big firms.

"It's revolutionary," Thomas Vinje, a partner at the law firm Clifford Chance, told CNBC Tuesday.

The upcoming rules are "likely to require dramatic changes in the business practices and even business models" of Big Tech, he said.

Last month, Europe's competition chief Margrethe Vestager outlined some of the changes that could be included in the new regulation.

"The new rules will require digital services, especially the biggest platforms, to be open about the way they shape the digital world that we see. They'll have to report on what they've done to take down illegal material," she said.

"They'll have to tell us how they decide what information and products to recommend to us, and which ones to hide, and give us the ability to influence those decisions, instead of simply having them made for us. And they'll have to tell us who's paying for the ads that we see, and why we've been targeted by a certain ad."

This would be massive for tech firms, which have refused to disclose their algorithms for years.

"The strict prohibitions in discussion in the DSA are a tsunami in terms of how platforms do business in Europe," Nicolas Petit, competition law professor at the European University Institute said.

In recent years, the European Commission has launched high-profile investigations into companies like Amazon, Facebook, Apple and Google over concerns that their market dominance is hindering competition. These probes have been mostly been led by Margrethe Vestager, who took over the competition portfolio in 2014.

But real change as a result of these investigations is often elusive, with European officials frustrated by lengthy legal action.

Perhaps the biggest challenge we face with enforcement is making sure that we have the right legal framework and powers to keep digital markets competitive and fair.

Margrethe Vestager

European Commission Executive Vice President

For instance, in 2017, the European Commission fined Google 2.4 billion euros ($2.81 billion) for promoting its own shopping comparison service rather than allowing similar access to rival companies. Google made some changes in the wake of that case, but a study by Lademann & Associates showed in September that not much has changed. According to the study, less than 1% of traffic through Google Shopping was transferring users to rival shopping websites.

More recently, the Commission's decision to ask Ireland (a member of the EU) to recoup 13 billion euros in unpaid taxes from Apple has been challenged. The EU's general court decided in July that the Commission had failed to prove that the Irish government had given a tax advantage to Apple. The Commission has appealed that ruling, but it could be difficult for it to meet this burden of proof.

"Perhaps the biggest challenge we face with enforcement is making sure that we have the right legal framework and powers to keep digital markets competitive and fair," Vestager said in late October.

Speaking to CNBC on Monday, Georgios Petropoulos, research fellow at the Brussels-based think tank Bruegel, said that tech giants were "anxious" about the upcoming rules.

Google has already voiced its concerns.

Karan Bhatia, Google's VP of global government affairs and public policy, issued a statement to CNBC last week that said in part: "As we've made clear in our public and private communications, we have concerns about certain reported proposals that would prevent global technology companies from serving the growing needs of European users and businesses."

In a blog post, Bathia explained that Google is worried about how the new rules may, for example, prevent its search platform from showing nearby restaurants and the option to book a table. "While we support the ambition of the DSA (Digital Services Act) to create clear rules for the next 20 years that support economic growth, we worry that the new rules may instead slow economic recovery," he wrote.

The regulation also is expected to hit Facebook, Amazon and Apple, and even some smaller players too.

Petit from the European University Institute said that "many European startups, merchants, or developers are not too hot" on the upcoming rules.

"If, by any chance, one of them was ever to make a killing on the market, the DSA rules would apply to it too," he said.

Whatever the European Commission proposes next month will have to be signed off by member states and the European Parliament.

"It should take several months before we have full legislation, which is an issue in a fast-moving tech market, but more importantly, the rules are only step one, with enforcement of these rules the key issue," Dexter Thillien, senior industry analyst at Fitch Solutions, told CNBC via email.

He added that Big Tech firms "will use the legislative process, and some have already started, to highlight the negative impact on innovation and the overall economy, to try and make the final rules less strict than the initial proposals."

Apart from some lobbying, however, there is nothing the tech giants can do to stop the new rules in the short-term, Clifford Chance's Vinje said. "They don't really have any friends here."

Originally posted here:

The EU is about to announce new rules for Big Tech and theres not much they can do about it - CNBC

If you follow the financial or business news, you may have seen or heard the term FAANG thrown around. No, it's not a misspelling of an animal's tooth. It's an acronym that stands for five big companies some might say the big companies in the high-tech industry.

The FAANG quintet consists of:

These corporations all American, but with a global presence are not only household names, they're financial behemoths. Their combined market capitalization is over $4 trillion. The blue-chip stocks of the tech sector, they collectively make up 15% of the Standard & Poor's 500 (an index of the largest public companies in the US). So they represent not only one of the US' most significant industries, but a sizable chunk of the US stock market itself.

FAANG actually began as FANG. The origin of the acronym has been attributed to Jim Cramer, the financial TV host and co-founder of The Street.com. Known for his slangy abbreviations and catchy phrases, Cramer coined the term in 2013 to represent four tech stocks with outsized market appreciation. Cramer believed that these companies belonged together because they are all high growth stocks that share the common threads of digitization and the web.

Cramer's original term was just FANG it didn't initially include Apple. The company joined the ranks in 2017, reflecting the growth of internet services (iCloud, Apple Music, Apple Pay) to its revenues. So the acronym became FAANG.

And it's remained so, even though Google's official corporate name is now Alphabet.

They need no introduction: The five stocks of FAANG are all familiar brands, whose products and services permeate our lives daily. They are also American corporate success stories each has seen its stock shares experience triple-digit growth since 2015, and year-to-year as well.

Just to put these numbers in context: the S&P 500 has grown 57% in the last five years. So FAANG stocks have been at the forefront of the longest bull market in US history, significantly outperforming the overall market.

For investors, the tech sector has become increasingly important as a wave of high-technology companies have recently gone public through initial public offerings (IPOs) or SPACs. Tech stocks are now the go-tos if you want capital appreciation in your assets and be in on the next big thing.

While the FAANG stocks are fairly mature companies, they still seem to have a great capacity for growth. They dominate the technology-oriented Nasdaq Composite Index. And the fact that they account for roughly 15% of the S&P 500, a bellwether for the entire stock market, means their performance often heralds trends in the US economy as a whole.

There are several ways to sink your investment teeth into FAANG.

The FAANG gang is viewed by many as modern-day blue-chip stocks, not just tech companies. Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix, and Google are firms that retail investors know and interact within their daily lives.

FAANG stocks have done well over the last several years, often beating the standard indexes. They also led the stock market's rebound during the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020. While historical growth isn't a clear predictor of future growth, it does appear these tech stocks will continue to have a broad influence over the market in general, given their substantial presence in the S&P 500.

However, these stocks are expensive, trading for more than $100, sometimes even $1,000, per share. An alternative option for investors is to find the next high-growth, market-moving stocks.

Given the influence of tech across industries and the recent string of IPOs, maybe there will be a new acronym in the near future.

Excerpt from:

What is FAANG? The 5 big tech stocks and their importance - Business Insider - Business Insider

CNBC "Mad Money" host Jim Cramer said that Big Tech stocks like Apple, Alphabet, or Amazon are much better repositories of wealth than bonds, owing to their strong balance sheets and financial performance.

The TV personality and former hedge fund manager made that claim in a recent episode of the CNBC show, and used the Big Tech stocks as a example of why investors may need to "re-think [their] notions about stocks versus bonds."

"This year we're witnessing the passing of the torch. Bonds were the safest assets back in '82, back when treasuries yield double digits," Cramer said. "Now they're risky assets, maybe riskier, riskier than anyone thinks."

Cramer said that for many major companies that he follows, the equity side is much safer than bonds. That translates to big tech stocks like Facebook, Apple, Amazon and Microsoft being a "much safer repository for wealth."

Although he cautioned that this isn't the case for all companies, he said that the Big Tech stocks are sitting on more cash than most countries. Microsoft has $138 billion, Alphabet has $133 billion, and Apple has $192 billion.

"They survived The Great Recession, and what happened? They came out stronger. The countries didn't," Cramer said. "In the great pandemic, they're not just thriving but they are actually putting up unbelievable numbers."

Cramer added that Facebook, Apple, Amazon, and Microsoft are the "Fort Knoxes of our era."

Although the "Mad Money" host admitted that this is a brand new thesis, he said that the real lesson of the era is that "stocks are the ones that don't need government help here."

"That means if you're a young, wet-behind-the-ears broker at Goldman Sachs, I would tell you to forget all those bond ideas," Cramer concluded. "Just tell your clients to buy the stocks of terrific companies with nation state-sized balance sheets. You'll do much better with a heck of a lot less long-term risk and more dividends."

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Big Tech stocks are better repositories of wealth than bonds, says Jim Cramer - AppleInsider

The days -- and possibly weeks -- after Election Day will be a huge test for platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Google's YouTube. Doctored videos that could potentially be spread by anyone; fake accounts that could pop up anywhere; and tweets from President Trump himself could all contribute to undermining the result of the election and perhaps even stoke offline violence.

CNN Business spoke to more than a dozen people who are either employees at the major social media platforms working on the teams countering misinformation and extremism or people who work directly with those teams at the companies.

CNN Business granted them anonymity so they could speak about their work more freely.

"My biggest fear at this point is something totally unexpected happening that no one predicted," one Big Tech employee said. "This year we've all been preparing and working through scenarios for every possibility that we can think of, but this year has taught me not everything can be predicted."

Hyping the idea of the threat of the "other side" is something Big Tech employees are expecting around Election Day.

Multiple people who work for the tech platforms said they see a potential for domestic groups to stoke tensions and violence on the ground and then for foreign groups to possibly exploit that and fan the flames.

But the top concern for two of the Big Tech staffers who spoke with CNN Business wasn't foreign actors, nor some faceless anonymous account. It was Trump. One said, "the biggest threat to [the] democratic process -- and to societal stability as a whole -- is the President and his party."

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Here's what Big Tech employees are worried about on Election Day - CNN

California lawmakers had the chance last year to strike a deal with app-based companies to boost the benefits and protections that workers on their platforms would receive. They didnt, and in hindsight, that looks to be a terrible mistake.

On Tuesday, California voters overwhelmingly backed Proposition 22, a measure to treat app-based drivers for Uber, Postmates and the like as independent contractors eligible for more limited benefits and protections than the Legislature provided last year in Assembly Bill 5. The proposition was sponsored by the app companies, which spent more than $200 million to persuade voters to approve it. That was about 10 times as much as opponents largely organized labor spent to try to defeat the measure.

In doing so, the propositions sponsors laid out a road map for how companies can write their own employment laws and regulations through the ballot box. Californians should take that as a warning.

AB 5 codified a 2018 state Supreme Court ruling that required companies to treat more independent contractors as employees. Instead of creating a third category of protections for gig workers, which would have been the farsighted thing to do, labor-friendly Democrats in the Legislature spurned overtures from Uber et al. and, in essence, required those workers be treated as employees eligible for minimum wage, overtime pay, unemployment insurance, workers compensation and other state-mandated protections.

These terms would clearly be better for drivers on those platforms. But the app companies many of which have not been profitable argued that they wouldnt be able to afford the increased costs unless they radically changed their business models. Instead of allowing drivers to work on demand, when they wanted and where they wanted, they would have to schedule driver shifts and territories. Plus, they contended, they would need dramatically fewer drivers, given that the vast majority of gig workers now put in only a few hours a week. The Yes on 22 campaign augmented their pitch with drivers in television ads urging voters to let them continue to do the jobs they need and love the way theyd been doing them.

That left the No on 22 campaign struggling to explain why the state should force changes in the app companies business model that threatened those jobs. After all, the proponents argued, no one is forced to work for Uber or Postmates. People who didnt like the miserly pay and limited benefits provided by Proposition 22 dont have to drive for those companies.

So the app-based transportation and delivery services will no longer have to worry about AB 5. And they will continue to offer their drivers great flexibility, along with some new benefits a wage floor that translates into about 20 percent less than the state minimum, insurance that covers them to some degree in the case of on-the-job injury or death, and the chance to earn subsidies for health insurance. Its not nothing.

And for the tens of thousands of Californians who count on doing a few hours of gig work occasionally to help pay the bills or spend a bit more, the passage of Proposition 22 means that those opportunities will still be there. But for the workers whove chosen gig driving as a full-time job the ones the apps rely on to deliver the bulk of their services, and who would be most likely to keep their gigs if Proposition 22 failed the result is a perpetuation of their second-class treatment.

Those drivers in fact, all gig drivers deserved a better deal, one that ensured them the same level of protection that the states minimum-wage laws and workers compensation system provide employees, and the chance to unionize. But its probably too late now for the Legislature to provide that; under Proposition 22, it would take an impossibly large seven-eighths majority to change the terms approved by the voters.

Just as ominously, the app companies have provided a template for future efforts, in California and elsewhere, to use the ballot box to reclassify employees as contractors and cut their benefits. Before we see the next Proposition 22, lawmakers should do the work they could have done last year and create a new category in state employment law for gig workers that provides the protections that those who make a living at these jobs need without sacrificing the flexibility and choice that make these jobs attractive in the first place.

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Another View: Big Tech gets a roadmap on how to write its own labor laws - Press Herald

A recent Senate hearing on the Section 230 publishing protections that big tech platforms enjoy did not produce much in the way of productive results, but did formally open a federal-level dialogue on the subject.

Section 230 regards big tech social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook as something other than a traditional publisher, shielding them from legal responsibility for content that platform users generate (such as posts and comments). A debate about this protected status has fomented during the run-up to the 2020 election as the big tech platforms have been accused of blocking and censoring speech for political reasons.

Passed into law as part of the Communications Decency Act of 1996, Section 230 codifies the idea that internet websites and platforms cannot be treated as the publisher or speaker of content created by their customers. The responsibility of sites and platforms is essentially limited to removing materials involved in the commission of a crime; the good faith provision also gives sites latitude to remove things like harassment, hate speech and obscenity without stepping into the role of publisher.

The basic argument for Section 230 has always been simple; if sites and platforms are held legally liable for everything that users say, then user-generated content becomes virtually impossible to maintain. That means putting an end to things like free publishing platforms, video services and potentially even something as basic as comments sections.

The debate over Section 230 has been brewing for some time, but has become acutely inflamed in recent months with the approach of the 2020 election. The recent flare-up dates back to Donald Trumps surprise victory in the 2016 election, and the belief that foreign intelligence and data brokers played a part due to the resistance of Big Tech platforms to moderating their actions. This has recently shifted to a belief that Big Tech has overcorrected, so to speak; American conservatives in particular argue that platforms like Twitter and Facebook are very quick to censor political speech associated with them, while granting more leeway to controversial speech that associates with progressive politics and Democratic candidates.

That was the mood going into the recent Senate hearings, which saw politicians from both sides of the aisle using it more as an airing of personal and political grievances than as an opportunity to have a substantive discussion about the future of Section 230. The subjects of this animus were Big Techs biggest names: Google CEO Sundar Pichai, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg. The tech CEOs endured four hours in front of the Senate Commerce Committee, with most senators focusing on specific posts that they personally objected to.

The Republican position on Section 230 is complicated, with broad dislike for it but differing ideas on how to address it within the party. President Trump encapsulated this by calling for a repeal of Section 230 as the Senate hearing was going on, when previously he had expressed desire for it to be reformed specifically to encompass the handling of political speech. Interestingly, Biden has been expressing a similarly extreme position on Section 230 since early in 2020 before he became the Democratic nominee. Biden also wants Section 230 revoked, but on the basis of a belief that platforms need to more aggressively remove a wider range of harmful content.

Though the Senate hearing was not particularly illustrative of the immediate future of Section 230, it did provide a little insight into how Big Tech leadership would like things to be handled. Zuckerberg suggested that Facebook was willing to be more transparent about how it moderates user content, while Dorsey felt that the present regulations were adequate but that Twitter and other platforms needed to address a growing problem with user trust.

A second Senate hearing with the three Big Tech CEOs has already been scheduled for next month, this one to focus specifically on each platforms content moderation policies.

The prospects of meaningful Section 230 changes seem very limited so long as lawmakers are focused on immediate and politically convenient personal matters, however. But this hardly means that Big Tech is free and clear of the prospect of related regulation, something that there is increasingly strong public sentiment for. Google is facing an immediate antitrust lawsuit over the bundling of its search app with phones, and the FTC is in the final stage of deciding whether or not to bring a similar suit against Facebook over its acquisitions to consolidate social media market power. There is also an expectation that 2021 will see a serious push for federal data privacy laws that would apply to the entire big tech landscape.

Debate over #Section230 and #BigTech has been brewing for some time, but has become acutely inflamed in recent months with the 2020 election. #respectdataClick to Tweet

The question of Section 230 is still very much up in the air, however, as both political parties seem more interested in airing personal issues with the tech platforms than in coalescing behind a concrete policy proposal. Perhaps the next Senate hearing will be more productive in this regard.

See the article here:

Senate Hearing on Section 230: A (Small) Step Towards Treating Big Tech Platforms as Publishers? - CPO Magazine