Daily Archives: April 19, 2021

Sen. Josh Hawley on Monday will introduce a billto "bust up" Big Tech, which willtarget massive companies like Google and Amazon, includingby banning them from simultaneously running an online marketplace and selling goods on that marketplace.

The bill, titled the Bust Up Big Tech Act,follows a bill Hawley introduced last week that would ban mergers of companies worth more than $100 billion, which was targeted more broadly than just at the tech industry.

Hawley's new, more focusedbill would also ban companies that ownonline marketplaces or search engines from owning online hosting services, Hawley's office told Fox News.

"Woke Big Tech companies like Google and Amazon have been coddled by Washington politicians for years. This treatment has allowed them to amass colossal amounts of power that they use to censor political opinions that they don't agree with and shut out competitors who offer consumers an alternative to the status quo," Hawley said in a statement. "It's past time to bust up Big Tech companies, restore competition, and give power back the American consumers."

Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., plans to introduce a bill Monday that would ban major tech companies from selling products on an online marketplace that they run. (AP)

JOSH HAWLEY REVEALS PLAN TO BREAK UP BIG CORPORATE POWER: 'NO CORPORATION' SHOULD CONTROL POLITICS

Hawley's office provided two specific examples of what the Bust Up Big Tech Actwould do if enacted. It would ban Amazon from being able to sell Amazon-branded products on Amazon Marketplace, where its competitors also do business. The bill would also ban Amazon from simultaneously owning a large amount of the cloud computing services that many online companies use and continuing to run its ubiquitous retail business.

The bill would also give the Federal Trade Commission authority to monitor compliance with the law and allow state attorneys general and individual citizens to sue tech companies they believe are in violation of the law.

There are multiple other efforts in Congress to rein in the power of Big Tech, including from Democrats. It's unlikely Hawley's bill will be passed on its own without amendment, especially with Democrats in control of the House and Senate. But Hawleysaid he's open to working with Democrats where their interests align in battling tech companies.

"I'm willing to work with her and anybody of any party and any background," Hawley told Reuters last week when asked about a bill proposed by Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., that is similar to his previous legislation banning mergers for certain companies.

Amazon's dominance in both online cloud computing and online retail is being targeted by a new bill from Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo. (Paul Hennessy/NurPhoto via Getty Images)

Some,however, are suspicious of Hawley's efforts to regulate the tech industry, a sector that's revolutionized how Americans live.

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"[H]is claims that the industry, hasnt been a success for the American economy, dont ring true for so many Americans that are employed by or invested in these economic powerhouses, not to mention the millions of consumers who enjoy tech products,"Jessica Melugin, the director of theCompetitive Enterprise Institute's (CEI) Center for Technology and Innovation, said of Hawley's merger-banning legislation.

CEI Senior Fellow Ryan Youngcalled Hawley's broader anti-tech efforts "feel-good populism" that is "just another culture war issue."

Hawley, meanwhile, frames his effort as one aimed at bringing balance back to the American economy.

"[Amazon] should be broken up," he tweeted last week,"no one company should be able to control e-commerce AND privilege its own products on the same platform AND control the cloud."

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Hawley to introduce bill to 'bust up' Big Tech, targeting companies like Google and Amazon - Fox News

The radio industry roared onto the American scene a century ago, filling the nations airwaves with music and news, but also with commercials, wave piracy, and technological chaos. Radio quickly affected all corners of society, changing the nature of the national conversation, how products were marketed, and speeding up cultural trends with its instantaneous reach. Radio no doubt helped make the Roaring Twenties roar. Virtually nobody listened to radio in 1920. By the late twenties, practically all Americans were tuned in.

Concerns grew for what this newfangled medium meant for the nation. Nobody really knew what kind of power was suddenly in the hands of the booming radio corporations. Into this setting rode President Coolidges Secretary of Commerce, Herbert Hoover. Hoover had a background in engineering and was fascinated by the new medium. He was also concerned about the potential influence of the electronic media and its unregulated growth.

Hoover invited scientists, educators and public service leaders to a series of conferences to study radio and its influence. These conferences set the stage for Congress to pass the Radio Act of 1927 and establish a federal agency (todays Federal Communication Commission) to oversee electronic media. The foundation of the legislation was the impact rationale, the notion that mysterious and powerful media could be so influential that the government should necessarily take a role in overseeing them on behalf of the public. Even today, radio and television broadcasters are mandated to serve the public interest, convenience and necessity.

The nation could use a Herbert Hoover today to take on Big Tech and to look out for the interests of average Americans.

Hoovers regulatory designs for the electronic media of that era were far from perfect, but at least there was some mechanism to confront technological forces on behalf of the citizenrys interests, rather than letting huge corporate interests throw their weight around with impunity.

Hoovers regulatory structure has withstood court scrutiny and the test of time. Regulations to referee political advertising on radio and TV, for example, remain today, along with controls regarding ownership. The public interest standard has been watered down, to be sure, but the FCC still rides herd on broadcasters, despite the waning influence of that industry.

Today, the Big Tech and social media giants rummage around in the nations politics and culture, getting fat financially and running amok with consumer privacy. These giants were set up largely as public forums and got the government to shield them from legal liability under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996. Thus, these tech firms avoid the responsibility of being considered publishers, as a newspaper or broadcast station would be. The problem is these Big Tech giants do act as publishers, making content decisions and anointing themselves as supreme deciders of who speaks and about what.

The Big Tech behemoths are exactly what the impact rationale was designed to corral.

Finding a regulatory framework with which to address Big Tech influence will be much more difficult than what Hoover faced in the early days of broadcasting, but somebody has to grow some guts and begin the process. Hoover, too, went into uncharted territory, unafraid to address the fast and furious influence of radio.

Supreme Court Justice Clarence ThomasClarence ThomasWe need a Herbert Hoover to reel in Big Tech Trump-era grievances could get second life at Supreme Court Joe Biden's surprising presidency MORE has issued an invitation for the next Hoover to emerge and take on Big Tech. Thomas wrote a concurring opinion as the Court recently tossed out a lower court ruling about then-President TrumpDonald TrumpGraham: 'I could not disagree more' with Trump support of Afghanistan troop withdrawal GOP believes Democrats handing them winning 2022 campaign Former GOP operative installed as NSA top lawyer resigns MORE blocking people on Twitter. He wrote about the unprecedented and concentrated control of so much speech in the hands of a few private parties. He went on to warn, We will soon have no choice but to address how our legal doctrines apply to highly concentrated, privately owned information infrastructure such as digital platforms.

The key for the Supreme Court will be to assess the First Amendment rights of Big Tech bullies to control and manage the flow of information in a democracy versus the rights of regular Americans to have a true public sphere in which citizens fuel the dialogue of the nation. Jumping into this fray is Indiana Attorney General Todd Rokita, who announced this month he is investigating how Big Tech giants such as Google, Facebook and Twitter may be harming Indiana consumers through practices Rokita calls abusive and unfair. Rokita, a Republican, is mostly concerned with the suppression of conservative points of view, of course, but his concern for the interests of tech consumers is noteworthy.

Rokita will need a bigger army to make any headway. One Attorney General from a Midwestern state will have trouble finding traction. But Justice Thomas has helped set the stage for the battle against Big Tech. He just needs to find enough would-be Hoovers to throw some punches, knowing they will probably be de-platformed in the process.

Jeffrey McCall is a media critic and professor of communication at DePauw University. He has worked as a radio news director, a newspaper reporter and as a political media consultant. Follow him on Twitter@Prof_McCall.

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We need a Herbert Hoover to reel in Big Tech | TheHill - The Hill

Big Techs battle against disinformation can start with a long look in the mirror.

While tech executives have often warned that unfounded claims on social media damage our democracy, theyve been the loudest peddlers of misinformation against Parler, an up-and-coming social media platform.

Corporate executives at Apple, Amazon, Google, and Facebook all claimed Parler did nothing to stop the riots at the United States Capitol. This was their justification for effectively de-platforming Parler and its 15 million users. These claims even became the foundation of a Congressional investigation into Parlers role during the riots.

The investigations findings so far are bad for Big Tech and vindication for the small startup.

In a letter to the House Oversight and Reform Committee, Parler revealed that it was monitoring users to identify potential threats, despite claims from Big Tech executives that Parler failed to moderate content. Not only did Parler identify dangerous content, but it also warned the FBI more than 50 times about potential threats against the Capitol.

Parler also highlighted the arrest records from the Department of Justice showing that Facebook was mentioned by alleged rioters nearly 11 times more often than Parler. YouTube, a product of Google, and Instagram, a product of Facebook, received more than double the mentions of Parler, as did Twitter.

The reality is the opposite of the narrative that Big Tech corporations quickly spun after Jan. 6. At the time, Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg speculated -- without evidence that small platforms like Parler were the platforms of choice for the rioters. Google and Apple cited Parler's alleged failure to moderate content as the justification for its removal.

Why did these corporations each take steps to disparage and de-platform Parler when their own platforms were just as culpable if not more?

There are both profit and ideological motives. Big Tech, which overwhelmingly donates to left-wing politicians, could kill two birds with one stone by snuffing out the platform of choice for many conservatives.

Facebook, Google, Apple, and Amazon each spread disinformation about Parler to justify its elimination from the internet. Yet Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube are all still on the Apple app store. (YouTube, conveniently, has returned to the top of the charts.)

As a reminder: The decisions to purge Parler were made in a single weekend. Somehow, three massive tech companies, their lawyers, and public relations staff each managed to make these independent decisions within 48 hours. Coincidence or conspiracy? We may never know.

We can, however, find out if there are better ways to prevent social media from being used to coordinate riots in the future. But we can only find these answers if the largest social media websites are investigated by Congress, as well. Parler asked Congress to include Facebook, Google, and Twitter in its investigation. Congress should follow the advice.

If Big Tech wants companies to be punished for failing to moderate content, then lets have that discussion. Google-owned YouTube failed for years to adequately moderate creepy comments on child videos. The New York Times called the platform an open gate for pedophiles. Twitter was sued in January for failing to remove child pornography. A full accounting of Big Techs culpability on this and other matters is needed.

If the Democrat-led House Oversight Committee wants to prove its investigation into Parler is a serious effort to stop future misdeeds rather than a punitive exercise against a right-leaning company based on misinformation from its competitors, it must expand its investigation to include Facebook, Google, and Twitter. Then, perhaps, we can find a fair standard that we can apply to all companies big and small.

Richard Berman is the executive director of the American Security Institute, a nonprofit responsible for ChallengeCensorship.com.

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OPINION | Congressional probe reveals Big Tech deception | Op-Ed | livingstonparishnews.com - The Livingston Parish News

Digital Ethics & Privacy

Despite the United States seeing an overall decline of over 32% in economic growth in 2020, share prices among tech giants soared and profits saw a boost compared to the year before. And yet, antitrust concerns and a growing emphasis on privacy have proliferated, leading to probes, lawsuits, and infrastructural changes.

To understand the implications this holds for the future of digital advertising, I spoke with Gowthaman Gman Ragothaman, Chief Executive Officer at Aqilliz, a first of its kind technological infrastructure that ensures privacy-compliant personalization.

In addition to his time at Aqilliz, Gman cemented his career in the traditional advertising industry for over two decades at the WPP group of companies. Leveraging his passion for privacy and his expertise, we also looked at new data from Prosper Insights & Analytics 2021 survey on privacy attitudes and concerns among US consumers which involved over 17,000 respondents segmented across boomers, gen-X, millennials, and gen-Z.

Gary Drenik: Much has been said about the dominance of big tech in the digital advertising ecosystem. Tell us more about the market dynamics in this area.

Gowthaman Ragothaman: What were seeing today is a very crowded content landscape where consumers are constantly bombarded with marketing messages. Brands then rely on personalization to get in front of the right audiences at the right time. To gain access to these audiences, brands and advertisers have come to rely on platforms which has led to the rise of walled gardens. However, regulators are enacting new frameworks that demand a more stringent approach to how consumer data is collected, used, and shared with and by advertisers.

Meanwhile, consumers then contend with uncannily accurate ads or irrelevant marketing messages. In fact, according to a survey from Prosper Insights & Analytics, disdain was equally expressed among boomers, gen-X, millennials, and gen-Z consumers in response to whether they liked it when advertisers used their personal data for audience targeting and personalization. Boomers and gen-X consumers expressed the most negativity with over 80% and over 63% respectively, against the practice.

Prosper - Advertisers Who Buy Personal Data

There are two fallouts from these developments, which are now seeking a correction:

Drenik: Walled gardens are distinguished for their large-scale repositories of consumer data. Is there a future for digital advertising without the dominance of these players?

Ragothaman: Consumer consent is the new mantra. More than a future beyond the dominance of big walled gardens, the focus should be self-regulation. With the incoming elimination of third-party cookies by 2022 on Google Chrome, brands have been forced to rethink their targeting strategies. With Apples latest IDFA updates on its mobile devices, one would expect that Android would follow suit as well.

In anticipation, were already beginning to see the formation of publisher-driven first-party data pools. In an ideal scenario, publishers will work together as part of a broader consortium, allowing brands to address ethically obtained first-party data points rather than navigating disparate data repositories.

Drenik: Google announced that it would not be supporting "independent user level identifiers". What will this mean for brands and consumers?

Ragothaman: In my view, Googles announcement to move to aggregated insights via cohorts rather than user-level identifiers are a step in the right direction. However, we still dont know how this will play out. For one, it was recently revealed that Googles Federated Learning of Cohorts model couldnt run in countries where GDPR and the ePrivacy Directive are in effect. Despite this being an alternative that supposedly offers greater privacy for users, regulators are arguing that it isnt enough.

We need to strike a balance between privacy and profit, and this trade-off significantly varies between markets therein lies the challenge for platforms in developing common standards and technologies. Theres also the issue of the omnichannel customer journey. In fact, Prosper Insights & Analytics found that across all generations, the opposition to the use of cross-channel data to personalize ads is significant. Despite their preference for authentic messaging, even 56.3% of gen-Z consumers stated they were against the practice, along with 64.7% of gen-X consumers.

Prosper - Attitudes Towards Use of Personal Data

There are new terms like Privacy Budget that are being talked about but one thing is for sure: independent user level identification will give way to cohort level communication for a large part of advertising unless and until there is explicit consent from that individual that he or she would like to receive promotional communications and they can be tracked.

Drenik: Is there a promising "universal ID" solution out there that can be adopted just yet?

Ragothaman: The concept of a universal ID is a big one. Cookies were free and they did not carry any liability on behalf of the participants in the digital supply chain on consumer preferences or consent. They were just free and open source. What is expected now is a universal ID which is not free and is capable of capturing and carrying consumer consent across the digital supply chain. At Aqilliz, we are working on a solution to address this - providing an approach to cookieless identifiers for a collaborative, compliant data sharing network.

Drenik: Should brands and advertisers better communicate their privacy-oriented initiatives to consumers?

Ragothaman: Information asymmetry on privacy is still an issue. According to a recent Prosper Insights & Analytics survey, an average of 66.6% of consumers across all generations are in favor of legislation that prevents technology companies selling their personal data to advertisers. Among them, boomers felt most strongly about the issue with almost 80% of all respondents in favor of more privacy-oriented measures.

I wont be surprised if some brands decide to take a high ground on this and self-regulate themselves by declaring their privacy standards. As such, were beginning to see an approach similar to nutrition labels which brands can provide to keep their customers informed.

Drenik: Theres been several data collection initiatives as part of public health strategies during the pandemic. Why do you think some people have been hesitant to part with their personal data for this, yet we all seem content to share our information online?

Ragothaman: Privacy is poorly understood. The language around consent is often hidden in greatly overlooked terms and conditions. Beyond accessibility barriers, theres also significant variations in cultural understandings of privacy which results in fragmented regulatory guidelines in disparate geographies. What this shows is a dire need for standardization in this space. In my view, when such initiatives are structured properly with concerted outreach to educate the consumer, there has been very little resistance.

Drenik: Thank you, Gman this was certainly an eye-opening discussion on the challenges that brands, consumers, and platforms are all contending with in an increasingly digital-first age. As new regulatory milestones continue to unfold across the globe, American businesses need to take these into account given the borderless nature of the digital landscape. To read my previous Forbes articles on changing consumer behavior, predictive analytics, machine learning, data privacy and more, please click here.

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From Privacy To Antitrust, Regulatory Scrutiny Of Big Tech Is Growing. What Does This Mean For Digital Advertising? - Forbes

BERKELEY, Calif. (Project Syndicate)In 2009, in the midst of the global financial crisis,Paul Volcker, the former Federal Reserve chair, famouslyobservedthat the only socially productive financial innovation of the preceding 20 years was the automated teller machine. One wonders what Volcker would make of the tsunami of digitally enabled financial innovations today, from mobile payment platforms to internet banking and peer-to-peer lending.

Volcker might be reassured: like the humble ATM, many of these innovations have tangible benefits in terms of lowering transactions costs.

But as a critic of big financial firms, Volcker presumably also would worry about the entry of some very large technology companies into the sector. Their names are as familiar as their services are ubiquitous: e-commerce behemoth Amazon AMZN, +0.60% in the United States, messaging company Kakao 035720, in Korea, online auction and commerce platform Mercado Libre MELI, -0.48% in Latin America, and the Chinese technology giants Alibaba BABA, -0.17% and Tencent 700, -0.79%.

In an old parable about banks and regulators, the banks are greyhoundsthey run very fastwhile the regulators are bloodhounds, slow afoot but faithfully on the trail. In the age of the platform economy, the bloodhounds are at risk of losing the scent.

These entities now do virtually everything related to finance. Amazon extends loans to small and medium-size businesses. Kakao offers the full range of banking services. Alibabas Ant Financial and Tencents WeChat provide a cornucopia of financial products, having expanded so rapidly that they recently became targets of a Chinese governmentcrackdown.

The challenges for regulators are obvious. Where a single company channels payments for the majority of a countrys population, as does M-Pesa in Kenya, for example, its failure could crash the entire economy. Regulators must therefore pay close attention to operational risks. They must worry about the protection of customer datanot just financial data but also other personal data to which Big Tech companies are privy.

Breaking news: Partisan battle brews over granting crypto, other firms new fintech banking charters

Moreover, the Big Tech firms, because of their ability to harvest and analyze data on consumer preferences, have an enhanced ability to target their customers behavioral biases. If those biases cause some borrowers to take on excessive risk, Big Tech will have little reason to care if it is merely providing technology and expertise to a partner bank. This moral hazard is why Chinese regulators now require the countrys Big Techs touse their own balance sheetsto fund 30% of any loan extended via co-lending partnerships.

Governments also have laws and regulations to prevent providers of financial products from discriminating on the basis of race, gender, ethnicity, and religion. The challenge here is distinguishing between price discrimination based on group characteristics and price discrimination based on risk.

Traditionally, regulators require credit providers to list the variables that form the basis for lending decisions so that the regulators can determine whether the variables include prohibited group characteristics. And they require lenders to specify the weights attached to the variables so that they can establish whether lending decisions are uncorrelated with ethnic or racial characteristics once conditioned on those other measures.

But as Big Tech companies artificial intelligence-based algorithms replace loan officers, the variables and weights will be changing continuously with the arrival of new data points. Its not obvious that regulators can keep up.

In algorithmic processes, moreover, thesource of bias can vary. The data used to train the algorithm may be biased. Alternatively, the training itself may be biased, with the AI algorithm learning to use the data in biased ways. Given the black-box nature of algorithmic processes, the location of the problem israrely clear.

Finally, there are risks to competition. Banks and fintechs rely on cloud-computing services operated by the Big Tech firms, rendering them dependent on their most formidable competitors. Big Techs can also cross-subsidize their financial businesses, which are only a small part of what they do. By providing a range of interlocking services, they can prevent their customers from switching providers.

Regulators have responded with open banking rules requiring financial firms to share their customer data with third parties when customers consent. They have authorized the use of application programming interfaces that allow third-party providers to plug directly into financial websites to obtain customer data.

It is not clear that this is enough. Big Techs can use their platforms to generate large amounts of customer data, employ it in training their AI algorithms, and identify high-quality loans more efficiently than competitors lacking the same information. Customers may be able to move their financial data to another bank or fintech, but what about their nonfinancial data? What about the algorithm that has been trained up using ones data and that of other customers? Without this, digital banks and fintechs wont be able to price and target their services as efficiently as the Big Techs. Problems of consumer lock-in and market dominance wont be overcome.

In an old parable about banks and regulators, the banks are greyhoundsthey run very fast. The regulators are bloodhounds, slow afoot but faithfully on the trail. In the age of the platform economy, the bloodhounds are going to have to pick up the pace. Given that only three central banks report havingdedicated fintech departments, there is reason to worry that they will lose the scent.

This commentary was published with permission of Project SyndicateThe Challenge of Big Tech Finance.

Barry Eichengreen is professor of economics at the University of California, Berkeley, and a former senior policy adviser at the International Monetary Fund.He is the author of many books, includingThe Populist Temptation: Economic Grievance and Political Reaction in the Modern Era.

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How Big Tech's disruption of finance is a threat to us all - MarketWatch