Daily Archives: July 31, 2020

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Wednesdays five-plus-hour congressional probing of the bosses of Americas tech giants did not reveal a singular gotcha moment or smoking gun email. Weve heard many of these examples of Big Tech abuse before.

But the power of this hearing and others like it was the cumulative repetition of tales of abusive behavior, and evidence of the harm this has had on peoples lives.

The spectacle also showed that the impact of congressional investigations is the digging that happens when the C-SPAN cameras are turned off.

Worries about Americas tech stars have swirled for years. Its clear now that this isnt going away. In world capitals, courtrooms and among the public, we are wrestling with what it means for tech giants to have enormous influence on our lives, elections, economy and minds.

And while what happens to the future of Google, Amazon, Apple and Facebook is anyones guess, it was clear from Wednesdays hearing that Congress was pointing the way for other branches of government to pick up the digging from here.

We saw on Wednesday old emails and texts from Mark Zuckerberg, worried about Facebook losing ground to Instagram and suggesting that buying competing apps is an effective way to take out the competition. The big deal here: Trying to reduce competition by purchasing a rival is a violation of antitrust law. (Zuckerberg said that Instagrams success wasnt assured when Facebook bought it.)

Representatives said that their interviews with former Amazon employees backed up news reports that the company used private data from its merchants to make its own version of their products.

The subcommittee discussed their conversations with companies that claimed Google funneled web searches to services it owned rather than to rivals like Yelp. Through company documents and questioning, members of Congress picked apart Apples stance that it treats all app developers the same.

My colleague Kevin Roose wrote that the tech bosses seemed to be taken off guard by the rigor and depth of the questions they faced.

The Department of Justice and the Federal Trade Commission are also investigating whether these companies abuse their power, and I bet they watched closely. The U.S. governments antitrust case against Microsoft more than 20 years ago was built, in part, on the emails of Bill Gates and other Microsoft executives discussing how they planned to kill upstart competitors.

Heres one more sign that the backlash against Big Tech has only just begun: The shouty tech critics in Congress and the tech bosses all seemed to agree that these four companies have a meaningful impact on many peoples lives.

The tech bosses focused on the good that comes from their companies size, reach and influence. A New York bakery finds customers by buying advertisements on Google. Merchants can thrive by selling their products or apps on Amazon or Apple.

The representatives pointed out examples of the dark side of Big Techs size, reach and influence. In the pin drop moment of the hearing, a House member played an audio recording of a book seller saying her family was struggling because of a change Amazon apparently made that dried up her sales there.

The subcommittee chairman said these tech powers can pick the winners and the losers. That might be stretching it. But both sides demonstrated that these four companies have a profound say in who wins or loses.

Lawmakers of all political stripes seemed uncomfortable with the knowledge that four companies have this much influence. Beyond the legal antitrust questions at issue, its this feeling of discomfort that makes it hard to imagine that nothing will change for these tech superpowers.

Wednesdays hearing was really two hearings. The Democrats mostly asked the four tech chief executives about ways their companies wielded their power and influence. Republican members largely asked about persistent concerns that Google and Facebook in particular censor right-leaning viewpoints or treat conservative figures unfairly.

Some Republican politicians complaints about political bias arent backed by credible evidence. Regardless, suspicion of bias is a thorny problem for these companies.

In a 2018 Pew Research survey, Americans who described themselves as Republicans or Republican-leaning overwhelmingly said that they believed that tech companies censor online information for partisan reasons. (A smaller, but still majority, share of Democrats said that they believed this, too.) Since then, polling has shown a growing mistrust of tech companies, particularly among conservatives.

This doesnt seem to have hurt the tech companies businesses. In fact, some Republican members on Wednesday argued that even though people dont trust Big Tech, they have no choice but to continue using these services because these companies have so much influence. It was an effective way to connect bias concerns to investigations into tech company market power. (Yes, I said earlier this week not to pay attention to bias claims. But maybe pay attention a little?)

Even if allegations of bias dont cause the companies to lose customers, the loss of faith among a large share of Americans should worry them.

Its also a problem if the tech companies overcorrect. Facebook employees and critics have said fears of being accused of bias have made the company reluctant to crack down on people, including President Trump, who spread dangerous or inflammatory messages online. Its a fine line to walk.

The really important stuff from the Big Tech hearing: House plants and bookshelves. My colleague Mike Isaac rated the tech bosses choices of backgrounds for their webcast testimony. Mike gave Amazons Jeff Bezos, who sat in front of wooden shelves with a sprinkling of books and tchotchkes, a score of 8 out of 10 for his cool Pacific Northwest dad office vibes.

Example infinity of technology as a flawed virus surveillance: A Wall Street Journal technology columnist reviewed smart watches, internet-connected thermometers and other gizmos that say our heart rate readings or other bodily data can provide early warnings of coronavirus infections. Spoiler alert: Some of this stuff holds promise but needs further research, and we still need more laboratory virus testing.

If you feel like screaming when you watch TV: Rolling Stone has a hilarious and smart rage fest on why the video streaming services can be so infuriating to use.

Best wishes forever to this tiny rabbit peeking out of a canvas bag.

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Big Techs Backlash Is Just Starting - The New York Times

It was the Wizard of Oz in digital format as the four titans of Big Tech testified via video before the House Antitrust Subcommittee. Just like in the movie, what the subcommittee saw was controlled by a force hidden from view. The wizard in this casethe reason these four companies are so powerfulis the math that takes our private information and turns it into their corporate asset.

The hearing was the next step in the subcommittees year-long investigation of Big Techs effect on a competitive market and the effectiveness of Americas antitrust laws. The witnesses, subcommittee chairman David Cicilline (D-RI) said, were gatekeepers to the economy[with] the power to pick winners and losers, shake down small businesses and enrich themselves while choking off competitors.

During nearly six hours of testimony the CEOs of Facebook, Amazon, Apple, and Alphabet (Google) dealt with a litany of diverse topics. Republicans saw an opportunity to work the referees and complain about alleged bias by social media. The subcommittees Democratic majority, however, was clearly prepared. The CEOs were forced to defend practices as diverse as their relationship with China, their acquisitions of other companies, and the myth that they protect consumer privacy.

This was a hearing to explore antitrust policies, and as such, it focused on the effects of the companies market power. Left mostly unaddressedand remaining behind the curtainwas the source of that power. That source is the collection and hoarding of the digital data that fuels the software algorithms that deliver the companies services. It is the 21st century equivalent of Rockefellers 20th century monopoly over oil.

Except that the data asset is far more valuable than industrial assets such as oil. As a result, the monopolistic control of data is even more onerous than industrial monopolies such as Rockefellers. Unlike industrial assets such as oil, data is reusable. Data is also iterative, as its use in a product creates new data. Additionally, data is non-rivalrous, in that its use by one party does not preclude its use by another.

The internet platform barons assembled at the hearing are, as a result of the nature of the asset they monopolize, infinitely more powerful that Rockefeller, Carnegie, Morgan or the industrial barons of the early 20th century. It is all about the math that is hiding behind the curtain.

The math machinescomputer algorithmsbecome more valuable and more precise as they are fed more data. Whoever controls that data, therefore, controls the market. Mark Zuckerberg, for instance, was able to take on the reigning social media service Myspace only 15 years ago, because the use of social media data to target advertising was in its infancy. Today, even if an startup had a better product, the new companys ability to sell advertising would be constrained by the amount of data Facebook collects from a user base of almost one-third of the people on the planet and the precision that data provides.

And the data that Big Tech holds in their computers is locked away behind the wizards curtain, unavailable to innovators and the potential of new competition.

But not all datathank goodnessis hoarded like Big Tech does. If scientific data were hidden away like Big Tech hoards consumer data, the COVID-19 crisis would be much worse. Sharing data and working collaboratively across an ecosystem has been a major reason why scientists have been able to ramp up vaccine efforts. Called Deep Tech, the open availability of data about coronavirus has allowed a combination of universities and startups to search for solutions. On January 7 China published the COVID genome; a month later, Moderna had the first candidate vaccine; by March 16 the first test dose had been administeredall because of access to the necessary data.

The same holds true for artificial intelligence (AI). While the Big Tech companies are developing their own AI algorithms, their fiduciary responsibilities focus the effort on the needs of the company and shareholders, not necessarily the expansion of knowledge. Yet, since AI is nothing more than algorithms sifting through vast amounts of data to reach a conclusion, the United States success in the international race to develop AI would be greatly aided if the vast amounts of data hoarded by Big Tech were shared with Little Tech companies pursuing their own innovative ideas.

Chairman Cicilline and his subcommittee are to be commended for their antitrust investigation and the important public hearing. The subcommittee has promised a report with recommendations in August. It will be an important step towards bringing antitrust law into the digital reality of the 21st century. It is not an end in-and-of-itself, however; it is also time for the federal government to pull back the curtain and investigate the abusive hoarding of the consumers personal information and its effect on a competitive market.

Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google are general, unrestricted donors to the Brookings Institution. The findings, interpretations, and conclusions posted in this piece are solely those of the author and not influenced by any donation.

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Big Tech and antitrust: Pay attention to the math behind the curtain - Brookings Institution

This week, Jeff Bezos, Tim Cook, Mark Zuckerberg, and Sundar Pichai testified for nearly six hours before the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Antitrust Law; appropriately, the executives of the four tech giants of Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google did so over video. In the most recent episode of the New York podcast Pivot, co-hosts Kara Swisher and Scott Galloway discuss the winners and losers of the most prominent tech testimony in years, and how the meeting set the stage for future antitrust action.

Kara Swisher: The whole event from [Representative] David Cicilline saying Google stole content from other sites to [Representative] Jerry Nadler pushing Facebook on its acquisition of Instagram was a little spicier than I anticipated.

Scott Galloway: Yeah, these things are typically more about spectacle than they are historic. By which I mean, theyre meant to sort of create a sentiment, which the representatives or the senators then use to feel out what public opinion is. But this felt more historic than it did a spectacle. It didnt feel as if there were any great TV moments, but it was clear that subcommittee staff, over the last 13 months or so, had actually done their homework, collecting over a million pages of documents.

I keep getting optimistic and I keep getting my heart broken, but to me this feels like the beginning of the end of Big Tech as we know it. It just seemed as if they werent really there to get information. They were confident in the information they had collected, and they were just stating their viewpoint over and over. Prior to the hearings, there was a seminal moment where you had two tweets saying, I hope these guys get broken up. Two tweets, different language, but basically the same message. One was from Bernie Sanders and one was from Donald Trump. So when you have people from both sides of the aisle wanting to break them up, even if its for different reasons even if some of those reasons arent valid it looks like we have our first bipartisan issue in a while.

Swisher: Yeah the Republicans sort of wasted their time on the other stuff because it all is related to power. If they are upset about conservative bias, make room for other people to come in and let you rant somewhere else

Twice weekly, Scott Galloway and Kara Swisher host Pivot, a New York Magazine podcast about business, technology, and politics.

Galloway: The first pattern I recognized at the hearing and Im shocked that Twitter didnt run with it was that any kind of notion of your product being anti-American was generally from the white guy to the one brown guy. And I thought, Oh, that makes sense. And no one noticed it. And I thought, How come theyre not asking the white guy, Zuckerberg, about being anti-American or about not being American?

It also struck me that the Democrats actually read the label on the door that it was an antitrust hearing. And really, I would say two-thirds of the Republican questions were for an audience of one. And it struck me that we forget how much power [Trump] has within the GOP 70 percent of Republicans still support the president. So he can basically get you reelected or not I thought, All of these guys are playing to Fox! And [now] Im like, no theyre not. Theyre playing to one guy who watches Fox.

Ranking member Jim Sensenbrenner had the kind of comment that could come back to haunt him, when he started questioning Zuckerberg on the removal of Donald Trump Jr.s [tweet about] hydroxychloroquine. Mark Zuckerberg pointed out, Sir, that was Twitter. That was the kind of moment like, Okay, you dont know what youre talking about.

Swisher: The Republicans wasted this opportunity, which is in their interest. Among the committee members, who did you think had the best day?

Galloway: Oh, the rock star here was Representative Jayapal. She was substantive, strong, forceful, not taking any shit.

At the end of the day, there will really be two moments, from a legal perspective. The first was when Nadler was essentially able to get Facebook to acknowledge that it acquired Instagram in large part to put a competitor out of business, which youre not supposed to do.

The other I was speaking about with Tim Wu, who said that probably the moment that will come back to haunt Amazon is that [Bezos] acknowledged that it purposely priced Alexa products below cost. And youre not supposed to do that. Thats the equivalent of dumping. And they dont need to. Its not like theyve got to clear the inventory. Theyre just going for market share and doing it on a consistent basis by selling below cost.

Swisher: Jayapal also got Bezos to say, What I can tell you is we have a policy against selling specific user data to aid our private label business, but I cant guarantee you that policy hasnt been violated.

Galloway: My favorite point is that in the first 93 minutes, there were more questions to Jack Dorsey than Jeff Bezos. And Jack Dorsey wasnt a witness.

Swisher: Yeah. That was Jim Jordan again. Who do you think had the best and worst day?

Galloway: I think Tim Cook probably had the best day. One, because antitrust is the dullest sword as it relates to Apple. Its just not entirely clear how hed break them up. Theyre not as angry at them. I thought he got off easy. I thought they were going to go after Tim Cook for China. I believe that there are more Apple employees now in China than there are in the U.S. He did the best by virtue of omission, and people just didnt really go after him.

Who did second best, quite frankly, was Zuckerberg.

Swisher: Oh, Zuckerberg? Really? Not Pichai?

Galloway: Pichai was largely out of the way, but Zuckerberg, I felt you could register that this was Zuckerbergs third time at the circus.

Swisher: Yeah, he always gets better.

Galloway: He knows what hes good at. He knows how to do this now. Stall, and when appropriate push back. Hes not nearly as likable. But I thought, Wow, this guy has done this before, and its starting to show. And then Sundar. And I actually thought Bezos had a tougher time. I thought he made some unforced errors. And some of the stuff that came out is going to come back to [haunt] him.

Swisher: Bezos is in trouble with the marketplace. As much as retailers and other sellers need the Amazon platform, I dont think theyre scared. Theyre like, enough is enough with them stealing our shit.

Pivotis produced by Rebecca Sananes. Erica Anderson is the executive producer.

This transcript has been edited for length and clarity.

Daily news about the politics, business, and technology shaping our world.

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Is This the Beginning of the End of Big Tech As We Know It? - New York Magazine

Representative David Cicilline, the chairman of the subcommittee, shifted the conversation to the conspiracies about Covid-19 that flourish on Facebook and didnt mince words, insisting that the platform contains deadly content, that is, content that leads the public to dangerous actions, whether its trying unsafe cures or resisting prudent measures like wearing a mask. But Zuckerbergs insistence that Facebook has a relatively good track record of fighting and taking down lots of false content as well as putting up authoritative information fails to placate users and legislators when it concerns a plague that has left 150,000 dead and counting, as opposed to, say, leaks of personal data.

To be fair, the major platforms have always insisted that there were two exceptions to their hands-off approach to the hate and misinformation that appear on their platforms: public health and democracy. Until now, they could assume that those third rails wouldnt be breached in the United States in such harmful and undeniable ways. Facebook, for example, has been credibly accused of aiding genocide in Myanmar, but that was on the other side of the globe; and Amazon and YouTube, as well as Facebook, have helped promote campaigns against vaccination of children, endangering young lives, but at nowhere near the scale of misery from Covid-19. Simply put, there is no moving on from this presidency or pandemic to the next scandal.

In January, Zuckerbergs close confidant and VP of augmented and virtual reality at Facebook, Andrew Bosworth, wrote a forthright take about his companys role in getting Trump into office. So was Facebook responsible for Donald Trump getting elected? Bosworth asked. I think the answer is yes, but not for the reasons anyone thinks. He didnt get elected because of Russia or misinformation or Cambridge Analytica. He got elected because he ran the single best digital ad campaign Ive ever seen from any advertiser. Period.

Six months later, with a deadly virus spreading unabated in the United States and a president questioning whether to hold an election, I dont think Bosworth would again write those words, never mind in such an offhand way. If polls are to be believed, Trump is substantially more disliked, and in more profound ways, now than he was at the beginning of the year. But it is interesting to get a glimpse of Bosworths thought process. Citing the moral philosopher John Rawls, he asserts that the moral way to decide something is to remove yourself entirely from the specifics of any one person involved, and this reasoning prevents him from limiting the reach of publications who have earned their audience, as distasteful as their content may be to me and even to the moral philosophy I hold so dear.

He quickly added the familiar caveats: That doesnt mean there is no line. Things like incitement of violence, voter suppression, and more are things that same moral philosophy would safely allow me to rule out.

Accountability is coming for Big Tech. Not just because Congress had an impressive hearing, but because the confluence of crises now demand action, even by these companies own hands-off logic. There is no choice but to reclaim the unchecked power these platforms wield. This is about more than Facebook spreading fake cures and voter suppression; or YouTube sending its users down rabbit holes of conspiracy and hate; or Apple and Amazon becoming so central in how we get news and entertainment, and how we conduct commerce. This is about how a nation protects its people.

Perhaps in better times we could assume the best of these platforms and be swayed by their promises to fix whatever problem crops up, but when our nation is tested as it is now, we cant accept band-aid fixes and assurances they already have a way to do better next time.

Mike Tyson had a good way of explaining Silicon Valleys current inadequacy in the face of the crises theyre up against: Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.

Photographs: Graeme Jennings/Getty Images; LMPC/Getty Images

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For Big Tech, There's No Winning This Round - WIRED

TOPLINE

Congresss grilling of top Silicon Valley CEOs Wednesday on antitrust issues reflects the American publics broad distrust of big tech companies increasing powerbut polling released throughout 2020 shows that while Americans may be wary of big tech, theyre more conflicted when it comes to what action the government should take in response.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg testifies before the House Financial Services Committee on October 23, ... [+] 2019. (Photo by Aurora Samperio/NurPhoto via Getty Images)

72% of U.S. adults believe big tech companies have too much power and influence in politics, per a Pew Research survey conducted in June, while an Accountable Tech/GQR Research poll in July found 85% of respondents believe they have too much power in general.

A Morning Consult poll released in January found that 65% believe tech companies benefits to users arent worth the industrys becoming more powerful at the expense of smaller companiesbut a majority of those respondents still enjoy big tech products, using major social media and search tools and predominantly shopping online.

Americans who distrust big tech dont necessarily support government action: 69.8% of respondents to a July poll by the Center for Growth and Opportunity/YouGov said they somewhat or completely agree that tech companies are too big, but only 44.4% agree the government should break them up.

A Knight Foundation/Gallup poll conducted in December and released in March found 50% support government intervention to break up tech companies, while 49% oppose, and the Pew survey found only 47% support more government tech regulationdown from 51% in 2018.

88% of Knight/Gallup respondents said they do not trust social media platforms to make the right decisions about what users can post, but 55% still said the companies should be making those decisions anyway, rather than the government.

A July Morning Consult poll found only 46% of Americans trust Congress to best regulate big tech companies, as compared with 57% who trust the courts, 53% trusting federal agencies and 34% who trust the president.

A national survey by The Verge released in March found that 51% believe Google and YouTube should be broken up into two different companiesbut 66% dont have a problem with Facebook owning Instagram and WhatsApp.

CEOs of worlds most powerful tech companies on Wednesday defended themselves against lawmaker accusations that their companies have too much power and stifle smaller businesses, claiming that their practices are instead part of a thriving competitive economy and that their size is essential to their value. Just like the world needs small companies, it also needs large ones, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos argued in his opening statement to the House antitrust subcommittee, while Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said Facebooks large size is an asset to its work to keep people safe on our platform, and to make sure were investing to fix our issues and get ahead of new risks.

Zuckerberg and Bezos, along with Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai and Apple CEO Tim Cook, appeared before the House antitrust subcommittee Wednesday, amid widespread scrutiny into the tech giants alleged anticompetitive practices. The companies are also facing antitrust investigations from the Department of Justice, Federal Trade Commission, state attorneys general and the European Union. The antitrust struggles come amid broader distrust of big tech companies and their role in the coronavirus pandemic, racial justice protests and impending November election, as companies have struggled to respond to growing misinformation and address hate speech and extremist groups on their platforms.

Though Americans are increasingly suspicious of big tech companies, polls show that the coronavirus pandemic may be improving their standing in the eyes of Americans. A Harris poll released in April found that 38% of respondents view of the tech industry had become more positive over the course of the pandemic, while an April report by the National Research Group found a full 88% of Americans say the pandemic has given them a greater appreciation for technologys positive impact.

Mark Zuckerberg Is Even Less Popular Than Donald Trump, Poll Finds (Forbes)

The Verge Tech Survey 2020 (The Verge)

Techlash? America's Growing Concern With Major Technology Companies (Knight Foundation)

Most People Dont Like Giving Big Tech More Power, but They Rely on Its Services (Morning Consult)

Most Americans say social media companies have too much power, influence in politics (Pew Research Center)

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As Tech Giants Face Congress, Heres What Americans Actually Think Of Big Tech - Forbes

Every Friday, Law Decoded delivers analysis on the weeks critical stories in the realms of policy, regulation and law.

The concept of monopoly will reign in todays Law Decoded. As a fundamental principle, blockchain technology is about distributing both inputs and outputs of information securely. In its still very young lifecycle, the technology has proven to have boundless applications on the basis of this fairly simple principle.

A secondary principle is decentralization, and in this way, blockchain technology seems inherently opposed to monopolies. The big challenge of Bitcoins white paper was finding a way to move value across parties without getting lost in either that proverbial valley between two Byzantine generals OR the trap of a third party. Thats not to say that every firm working in blockchain is morally so grounded as to turn down the opportunity to monopolize its market. But the tech is promising for addressing a huge range of concentrated power especially in a digitizing world.

This week saw antitrust conflict between paeons of big tech and government. While those encounters were hostile, they will likely not result in any major damage to anyones bottom line. It also saw some new consequences for misuse of monopolized monetary power, which is a system that is also unlikely to change soon. The great thing about a monopoly, once you have it, is that its really hard for someone else to take it from you. But these are clusters of power that seem pretty obvious as places youd look to decentralize.

Kollen Post, Policy Editor, @the_postman_

CEOs for the four horsemen of U.S. tech Apple, Amazon, Google and Facebook appeared virtually before Congress on Wednesday to face accusations of functionally acting as monopolies.

The Thursday release of Q2 earnings reports showing rising revenues for each of the firms except Google did nothing to gain these firms sympathy. This was despite efforts during the hearings by the CEOs to depict their companies and their individual biographies as the American dream come true.

The past half-decade has ravaged the public image of tech in the United States. Increasingly dystopian revelations of data-gathering practices and brutal campaigns to squash competition have led to a widespread backlash against Silicon Valley. The role of social media in the 2016 election and subsequent waves of disinformation (including COVID-19) has also ended whatever honeymoon period firms like Facebook and Twitter had enjoyed.

Meanwhile, China, whose digital payments providers are widely praised as ahead of those in use in the U.S., looks set to crack down on those providers based on similar antitrust principles. For China, however, that might be at least in part to clear the way for a broad launch of a digital yuan.

Many of these tech giants are entrenched enough that they may be getting too big to fail. It is undeniable that they provide services that have changed our way of life. As Mark Zuckerberg pointed out during Facebooks investor call last night, had the COVID-19 pandemic happened two decades ago, this shift to working remotely wouldnt have been possible, and many more people would be dying. However, recent events should be getting a lot of people thinking about whether these giant firms are the best we can do and whether we might be better served looking at decentralized alternatives.

Also in the U.S., the Federal Reserves printer continues to go brrr, beating out the countrys total money printing over the first two centuries of its existence in the space of a month. The dollar is, for the first time during this pandemic, looking to be on the ropes.

Quantitative easing the formal term for the Feds use of inflation as a source of funds at the expense of all dollars already out there is a recurring villain in Bitcoin narratives. The idea is that it has to result in a monetary collapse eventually.

The extraordinary expenditures in the U.S. over recent months have seen the dollar stubbornly resisting this narrative, but according to recent analysis, thats changing. Early in the pandemic, global financial institutions and governments scrambled to stock up on dollars, buoying demand and value despite outlays. But this week, as Congress considers another huge stimulus bill, the dollar dipped to its lowest level since May 2018.

Were not witnessing a collapse in the monetary system, but certainly, a strain that, if it continues, will call into question whether the Fed really knows what its doing. At the same time, the head of the countrys major banking regulator is calling for blockchain-based challengers to the Feds central role in payments.

As China and the U.S. dominate headlines focusing on potential central bank digital currencies, and different European Union banks are launching their own trials, the remaining two of the five major currencies in the world have taken major steps indicating the same interest.

The Bank of Japan announced that it had appointed its top economist to a team doing research on the digital yen. The Bank of England, meanwhile, tapped Accenture to update technology for the U.K.s payments system not explicitly referring to a CBDC, but Accenture is deeply involved in the development of CBDCs around the world, including the digital dollar.

The dollar, the euro, the yen, the pound sterling and, as of 2016, the yuan form the basis for the International Monetary Funds Special Drawing Rights and form the backbone of global reserves. None of the five are transacting as CBDCs yet, but its clear that they are all worried about being left out. CBDC technology is not yet standard, but at the very least, research into it has become necessary to those currencies looking to maintain their prestige.

The American Enterprise Institutes visiting crypto expert, Jim Harper, talks digital dollars and new payments systems.

Coin Center, a leader in lobbying and research on decentralized networks, has updated its educational resources.

Kelman Law runs down the basics of paying taxes on both earnings in cryptocurrencies and capital gains on trading in the United States.

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Law Decoded: Big Tech, Central Banks and the Hunt for Monopolies, July 24-31 - Cointelegraph

Theres a contradiction in the Trump, and by extension Republican, deregulatory agenda that could inadvertently threaten the recovery of an already wavering economy.

That aberration is the continued reflexive embrace of antitrust regulation, an original sin of the administrative state with vast, potentially destructive societal costs.

With antitrust intervention, politicians and bureaucrats do not merely push companies around; they also directly or indirectly dictate business models and can even inappropriately influence the trajectory of entire economic sectors in non-market directions.

A picture taken on August 28, 2019 shows the US multinational technology and Internet-related ... [+] services company Google logo (top L), US online store application Amazon (top C), US online social media and social networking service, Facebook (top R) and US multinational technology company Apple logo application (down C) displayed on a tablet in Lille. (Photo by DENIS CHARLET / AFP) (Photo credit should read DENIS CHARLET/AFP via Getty Images)

The big tech news this week is a hearing in the House Judiciary Committees Subcommittee on Antitrust, Commercial, and Administrative Law.

Called "Online Platforms and Market Power: Examining the Dominance of Amazon AMZN , Apple AAPL , Facebook, and Google, GOOGL " the hearing will feature the CEOs of each, appearing remotely: Jeff Bezos, Tim Cook, Sundar Pichai, and Mark Zuckerberg, respectively. This hearing is the committees sixth in a series.

Its bad news when both parties favor economic regulatory intervention and thats the state were in now with antitrust. While international regulators and state attorneys general have their sights on these companies, all are targets of federal antitrust investigation by the Justice Department and the Federal Trade Commission in the Trump administration. (Attorney General Bob Barr, separately testifying in Judiciary this week, is taking a lead role.)

In a joint statement, House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.) and Antitrust Subcommittee Chairman David Cicilline (D-R.I.) said:

Since last June, the Subcommittee has been investigating the dominance of a small number of digital platforms and the adequacy of existing antitrust laws and enforcement. Given the central role these corporations play in the lives of the American people, it is critical that their CEOs are forthcoming. "

The subcommittee will ultimately issue a report based on more than a year of information gathering, but will likely downplay letters for the record and inconvenient testimony from antitrust skeptics. How do we know that? A headline on Drudge referred to an APPLEFACEBOOKAMAZONGOOGLE Reckoning. Other articles refer to the CEOs facing a "grilling."

The very notion of monopoly power in intangible code, in ones and zeros, seems perverse, though. And here we observe not one monopoly but four companies (other giants could have also been invited to testify) vigorously competing against one another in various ways. That would seem to exemplify competition rather than the stifling of it with which big tech stands accused.

The chief internal contradiction of antitrust is that it decries bigness and excess power but then urges that the biggest and most powerful entity of all the government wielding the life or death power over all the CEOs domains impose a subjective remedy.

And government enjoys that power not just in the present case, but enjoyed it in all those that came before, and will in all those interventions to come after. That is a truly awesome power.

So we go through this theater with the dominant firms of the day every so often (AT&T, IBM IBM , Microsof MSFT t). Google is accused of favoring its own content in search results, Apple of downlisting rival apps, Facebook (and non-invitee Twitter, too) of suppressing conservative speech. Other gripes will be aired.

If the companies are so bad and the claimed consumer harm the only condition that could justify intervention is real, the more honest approach of the grandstanders would simply be to directly forbid consumers from using any of these companies services. Consumers would surely thank Congress for its protection, right?

An antitrust subcommittee doing antitrust stuff is one thing; whats more striking is the degree to which Trump himself has energized and legitimized tech attacks, especially regarding issues like content moderation that will ride along at what is ostensibly an antitrust-centric hearing. (One GOP member wants the aforementioned Barr to investigate Facebooks Zuckerberg for allegedly lying about to Congress about anti-conservative bias in prior hearings.)

On the one hand, and consistent with the Trump administrations well-known and broad deregulatory agenda to energize business, the administration took early steps to cut merger review times overall, and to speed up bank merger approvals via internal streamlining at the Federal Reserve and at the Comptroller of the Currency.

But often, President Trump has threatened antitrust action against tech and telecom firms, a stance conflicting with that deregulatory agenda and an especially dangerous tinkering with the marketplace and peoples portfolios and 401(k)s in todays crisis-rocked world.

We could see it coming, though. As a candidate, Trump proclaimed, AT&T T is buying Time Warner, a deal that we will not approve in my administration because it is too much concentration of power in the hands of too few. We will look at breaking that deal up and other deals like it. The Justice Departments attempt to block the merger ultimately failed.

Similarly, Trump tweeted in 2018 thatComcast CMCSA may be violating antitrust laws. However, after mulling it over (such delays of business transactions themselves impose heavy regulatory costs, something Trump recognized with respect to infrastructure approvals during his July 2020 White House South Lawn deregulation celebration), the Justice Departmentultimately did not investigatethe Comcast-NBCUniversal alliance.

With respect to the big tech players in the hotseat now, the president said in 2018 that Google, Facebook, and Amazon may be in a very antitrust situation, and said he was in charge and looking at it. Even then, politicians and pundits across the political spectrum were calling for thebreakupof these companies. Forcible breakup calls for an even bigger entity to wield the axe, as noted; but one will not likely find that contradiction expressed in grillings.

Some Republicans wanted Twitter at the Judiciary hearing also. Trump fought bitterly earlier this year with that company and has on numerous occasions threatened to regulate social media. In May, he followed though by issuing an executive order targeting their alleged censorship.

The online speech debate and the antitrust debate are highly intertwined, and in addition to cutting big tech down to size, both the right and left want to change underlying rules that protect platforms from liability for user postings. This battle too will doubtlessly emerge at the hearing and continue thereafter.

While the Judiciary committee was conducting the months of investigations culminating in this weeks Super Bowl hearing, the administration was doing similarly. Back in early 2019, the Federal Trade Commission announced a technology task force to assess tech sector antitrust violations and to go beyond current practice in scrutinizing transactions. In the wake of that, and in contrast to the administrations recognition of agency misuse of regulatory guidance documents elsewhere, the FTC is now in the process of drafting guidance on how the antitrust laws apply to the technology sector and defending its own role in policing it.

In other antitrust developments, this year, the FTC requested data from top tech companies on their business acquisitions over the last 10 years. The commission is also pondering an injunction against Facebooks procedures for interoperability across platforms, and is in the early stages of investigating Amazon, having started interviews in 2019 with businesses that sell on the site.

Still other signals point to a potentially expanding Trump administration antitrust agenda by the Department of Justice and FTC beyond big Internet tech firms. The FTC, for example, has been challenging an aquisition transaction in DNA sequencing.

While the DoJ and FTC did issue a Joint Antitrust Statement with respect to collaborative activities among firms during the pandemic, expedited advisory opinions still constitute playing Mother-May-I.

America may have some real troubles right now, but so-called monopoly power among competing firms in media and online sales and services are not threats to the country calling for coercive intervention from this unfortunate alliance of Democrats and Republicans.

The reality is that the infrastructure needed in tomorrows world of smart cities, autonomous vehicles, robotics and artificial intelligence, and space travel and more will require firms of far larger scale than any that we today call big tech and fret over.

These giants of the future will likewise be competitive non-monopolies, unless government grants them monopoly power or license.

Having just celebrated years of regulatory cuts at the White House, now would be a good time for President Trump back off his counterproductive flirtations with one of the worst forms of economic intervention, antitrust regulation. Congress? Thats not so simple.

Read more here:

Antitrust Showdown In Congress: Big Tech, Meet Big Government - Forbes

The heads of Facebook, Apple, Google and Amazon appeared before angry lawmakers Wednesday as Congress prepares to weigh new anti-monopoly regulations, including possibly breaking them up. Facebooks Mark Zuckerberg turned to a familiar argument, saying that breaking up the big tech companies would hurt U.S. competitiveness against China in developing new technologies and Americas ability to curb Chinese influence globally.

So are U.S. tech giants an asset to the U.S. in its competition with China or a hindrance?

Google CEO Sundar Pichai answered several questions about his companys loyalty to the United States by recounting its expanding work with the Defense Department. Ever more, he attempted to cast Google as an engine of U.S. innovation.

Our engineers are helping America remain a global leader in emerging technologies like artificial intelligence, self driving cars and quantum computing, he said.

Zuckerberg contrasted between what he described as Facebooks American values and ideas with those of China. China is building its own version of the internet focused on very different ideas, and they are exporting their vision to other countries, he said in his prepared testimony.

He is not alone in this view. Daniel Castro, director of the Center for Data Innovation at the libertarian-leaning Internet Technology and Innovation Foundation, told Defense One, Breaking up U.S. tech firms would undercut American innovation. At a time when Chinese companies are growing more dominant in the global digital economy, U.S. policymakers should not hamstring successful tech companies.

Eric Schmidt, Googles former CEO who now chairs the Defense Innovation Board, has made similar statements, telling the Telegraph in May, Chinese companies are growing faster, they have higher valuations, and they have more users than their non-Chinese counterparts...Its very important to understand that there is a global competition around technology innovation, and China is a significant player and likely to remain so.

But not everyone agrees. David Segal, co-founder of the left-leaning group Demand Progress, took a categorically different view, telling Defense One, Far from stifling innovation, antitrust enforcement is necessary in order to enable it. He pointed to what he described as kill zones or areas of technology development that are too close to the products that the giants produce to attract venture capital.

Legal scholar Ganesh Sitaraman argues that conflating big tech with American innovation is part of the problem. Big tech, he says, is too intricately intertwined with China to be purely American.

The claim that big American tech companies are somehow an alternative to Chinese dominanceor, in the more extreme form, that they are competing with China on behalf of the United Statesis largely backwards he argues, in a January article for the Knight First Amendment Institute. Big techs integration with China thus supports the rise and export of digital authoritarianism; deepens economic dependence that can be used as leverage against the United States in future geopolitical moments; forces companies to self-censor and contort their preferences to serve Chinese censors and officials.

Lawmakers of both parties love to hate on big tech and its poster-child representatives, like those summoned to Wednesdays hearing. Conservatives routinely claim that Google is censoring their speech, a line they returned to repeatedly on Wednesday. Liberals argue that Facebook doesnt do a good enough job of calling out misinformation, especially if it might anger conservatives. Some observers worry that all of those resentments get in the way of a functional discussion about whether or not the companies are too big.

Im not confident that in the current environment you would see constructive solutions put forward that are not based on political retaliation, rather than a principled approach, said Mieke Eoyang, vice president for national security at think tank Third Way.

There is ample reason for lawmakers to be suspicious of how the big tech interacts with the Chinese government. A May report from London-based research firm Top10VPN shows that Amazon provides web services to Chinese companies on a Commerce Department sanctioned Entity list. Google has an AI research effort in China.

Facebook, which is effectively banned in the country, is arguably the least reliant on the Chinese market. Hong Kong-based TikTok is a major competitor to Facebook-owned Instagram. But that doesnt tell the whole story. Facebook is such a large gamer marketplace, it still makes money off of China from companies like Tencent that need Facebook's users to play their games.

From the Pentagons perspective, American tech giants do offer a unique technological resource, one that does produce innovation and that arguably would not exist if they were broken up. Consider the Pentagons JEDI cloud program. Smaller cloud providers complained that the programs requirements were tilted toward Amazon, the only company that many believed could meet them. Part of the reason that the JEDI contract came down to a race between Microsoft and Amazon (after Google pulled out) is because those are the companies with the largest cloud offerings, able to provide the highest level of security. It was only after visiting them that former Defense Secretary James Mattis realized that what Americans private big tech firms were doing with cloud computing was decades ahead of what the government was doing with smaller, patchwork capabilities. He also realized that cloud computing at enterprise scale was essential to real innovation in AI.

The size of that cloud capability and the amount of data available plays a big role in a companys ability to develop next-generation AI products. Googles compute power, and access to a massive dataset of online video footage via YouTube, was vital to the development of deep learning technologies. Facebooks compute power and its access to billions of biometric facial records pictures of faces allowed it to createunique facial recognition technology to rival the human brain.

These companies developed the worlds largest compute capabilities in order to become the worlds largest companies. Busting them up could eliminate something that doesnt exist anywhere else and actually is a driver for innovation, one that arguably requires more regulation and oversight but also that cant be replicated at a smaller scale.

The unique resource of big tech firms is what Congress is consideringin the context of these companies overall effects on the market, individuals, and tangled U.S. relations with China. How to do that? The answer is carefully and case by case. While Republicans and Democrats love to vilify big tech, these companies are very different from one another, even if they do have anti-competitive practices.

I think these companies are all differently situated based on their business models. So when it comes to discussions around breaking them up, the implications are all different, said Eoyang, as are the unintended consequences of doing so.

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Busting Up Big Tech is Popular, But Here's what the US May Lose - Defense One