Daily Archives: December 10, 2021

Its open season on Americas digital media marketplace, withboththe left and right lining up to take regulatory shots at tech platforms, but for very different reasons. If both sides get their way, the result will be a more politicized media sector and unprecedented government interference with freedom of speech.

Facebook, Google, Twitter, Amazon and Apple have all become political pinatas for federal and state policymakers, with legislation and lawsuits launched seemingly on a weekly basis. But there is considerable confusion in the complaints both parties make about Big Tech.

Democrats want tech companies doing more to limit content they claim is hate speech, misinformation, or that incites violence. Republicans want online operators to do less, because many conservatives believe tech platforms already take down too much of their content.

The only thing unifying both sides is a desire for greater regulatory control of media. In todays hyper-partisan world, tech platforms have become just another plaything to be dominated by politics and regulation. When the ends justify the means, principles that transcend the battles of the day like property rights, free speech and editorial independence become disposable. These are things we take for granted until theyve been chipped away at and lost.

Is there any way to make both sides happy without undermining the digital economy, which has been dominated globally by American firms for over a quarter century?

Thats unlikely, but it hasnt stopped lawmakers from introducing a flurry of bills to weaken or eliminate protections afforded bySection 230, which limits liability for platforms that host user-generated content. Implemented in 1996, it has served asthe cornerstone of Americas ascendancyin the digital world andhelped spur an avalanche of innovation. Gutting it would put all that at risk.

Without admitting it, both sides are really at war against the First Amendment, which protects the editorial decisions made by private companies. To be sure, there is problematic content to be found on digital media platforms, and there aresome legitimate complaintsabout overzealous takedown policies and lack of transparent standards. That does not mean there is an easy policy fix to those problems, however. Butcourts have held repeatedlythat the First Amendment protects efforts by private media firms to devise their own approaches.Just last week, a Texas judge blocked a law that sought to limit social media platforms editorial freedoms. That followed a court in Floridaenjoining a similar lawthis summer.

Critics like to paint large tech companies as nefarious overlords out to destroy civilization. In reality, the problems we see and hear on modern platforms reflect deeper problems in our society. If these companies are to be blamed for anything, its making human communication so frictionless that every person now has a soapbox to speak to the world. Thats both a blessing and a curse. With unbounded speech comes many wonders but also many problems.

Now, large digital intermediaries are expected to make all those pathologies go away through some magical Goldilocks formula whereby they get content moderation just right. Its an impossible task with billions of voices speaking. Bureaucrats wont do a better job refereeing these disputes, and letting them do so will turn every content spat into an endless regulatory proceeding.

It is particularly surprising that someconservatives are joining the choruscalling for common carrier regulations orFairness Doctrine-like speech mandates, which would let government micromanage speech platforms. In this debate,they areinviting comprehensive political control of communications platforms, which is antithetical to a limited government philosophy.

Moreover, why would conservatives believe theyll benefit from more regulation? Even if one accepts the notion that social media platforms discriminate against conservative speakers or viewpoints, will freshly empowered bureaucrats really help them push private platform content moderation decisions in a more pro-conservative direction? The administrative state historicallyhas not been the friendof conservative viewpoints, and regulators are not suddenly going to become more sympathetic to them.

Theyd more likely be shooting themselves in the foot. There has never been more opportunity for conservative viewpoints than right now. Each day on Facebook, the top-10 most shared links aredominated by punditssuch as Ben Shapiro, Dan Bongino, Dinesh D'Souza and Sean HannitySean Patrick HannityLeft and right take aim at Big Tech and the First Amendment Rittenhouse says he's destroying gun used in fatal Kenosha shootings Dr. Oz expected to run for Senate in Pennsylvania as a Republican: reports MORE. Right-leaning content isshared widely on Twittereach day. Websites like Dailywire.com and Foxnews.comget far more trafficthan the New York Times or CNN.

Conservatives should push formore competition and choices,not more regulation and litigation. They should again embracethe vision President Reaganset forth in 1987, when he vetoed a bill to reestablish the Fairness Doctrine: History has shown that the dangers of an overly timid or biased press cannot be averted through bureaucratic regulation, but only through the freedom and competition that the First Amendment sought to guarantee.

It remains the principled path forward.

Adam Thiereris a senior research fellow at theMercatusCenter at George Mason University and author of Evasive Entrepreneurs and the Future of Governance.

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Left and right take aim at Big Tech and the First Amendment | TheHill - The Hill

Its impossible to know which stocks will dominate the stock market in a decades time, but we can fairly confidently say which companies will not be on that list: stocks that currently top todays market-cap ranking namely Apple AAPL, +2.80%, Microsoft MSFT, +2.83%, Amazon.com AMZN, -1.12%, Alphabet (Google) GOOG, +0.38% and Meta Platforms (Facebook) FB, -0.02%.

Thats because its rare for stocks at the top of the market-cap ranking to keep their status a decade later. Not only do they usually fall out of the top 10, they also underperform the market on average over the decade.

Thats according to an analysis conducted by Research Affiliates, the investment firm headed by Robert Arnott. To show the precarious position of the markets top dogs, he calculated what happened over the decade of the 1980s to the 10 largest publicly traded companies at the beginning of that 10-year period. Eight of the 10 were not on 1990s top-10 list, and all 10 on 1980s list underperformed the world stock market over the subsequent decade.

Arnott found that the 1980s were not unique. He reached a similar result for the top stocks of the 1990s, 2000s, and 2010s. On average, a stock on any of these lists underperformed the market over the subsequent decade. In addition, there was between a 70% and 80% chance that any given stock would not be on the comparable list one decade hence.

Arnott illustrated these top companies underperformance in another way as well: He constructed a hypothetical portfolio that each year owned the worlds 10-largest companies. The performance of this portfolio is plotted in the chart below. Over the 40 years from the end of 1980 through the end of 2020, this portfolio lagged a buy-and-hold by 1.8 annualized percentage points.

Numerous investment lessons can be drawn from Arnotts fascinating results. One is that cap-weighting is not the optimal weighting scheme for your portfolio. Equal-weighting is one obvious alternative, and it has beaten cap-weighting: since 1971, according to data from S&P Dow Jones Indices, the equal-weighted version of the S&P 500 SPX, +0.95% has outperformed the cap-weighted version by 1.5 annualized percentage points.

Arnott believes there are even better ways of weighting stocks in an index beyond equal weighting. His firm maintains a number of so-called fundamental indices that base a stocks weight on fundamental characteristics such as sales, cash flow, dividends and book equity value.

Just six stocks Apple, Microsoft, Alphabet, Amazon, Tesla and Meta Platforms account for 26% of the S&P 500s total market cap

But theres another investment implication of Arnotts data that I want to focus on: His results highlight the difficulties determining the valuation of a lopsided market.

Consider the S&P 500 currently, in which just six stocks Apple, Microsoft, Alphabet, Amazon, Tesla TSLA, +1.32% and Meta Platforms account for 26% of the indexs total market cap. Imagine a situation in which those six are overvalued while the other 494 stocks, on balance, are more fairly valued. In that case, the valuation ratios for the S&P 500 as a whole could paint a skewed picture.

This situation isnt just hypothetical. The largest six stocks currently have an average price/earnings ratio of 62.0, according to FactSet, more than double the average across all stocks in the S&P 500 of 29.1 and almost triple its median P/E ratio of 21.4.

Its possible, therefore, that the stock market isnt as overvalued as we would otherwise think by focusing on valuation ratios for the S&P 500 as a whole.

Mark Hulbert is a regular contributor to MarketWatch. His Hulbert Ratings tracks investment newsletters that pay a flat fee to be audited. He can be reached at mark@hulbertratings.com

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More: When should I sell Amazon? These pro tips can help you dump your stock market darlings

Also read: If the S&P 500 cant hit new highs, brace for fresh selling

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These 6 overvalued stocks are making the S&P 500 look more pricey than it really is - MarketWatch

The seeds of surveillance capitalism are starting to sprout while Stuxnet attacks, 3D TV flops, and a 2D game of flinging furious fowl is a runaway success.

Tweets were sent in their billions in 2010, and at least some of them were about Irish showband sensations Crystal Swing. This internet-famous group was not among the stellar line-up for the second Dublin Web Summit, but founders from Twitter, YouTube, Skype and Bebo were all invited for the Irish event and its new sister conference, Founders.

As US tech was reaching across the Atlantic and landing in Dublin, an ill wind that blew in from that side of the world had left Europe shuddering. The debt crisis that followed the financial crash was taking hold across the EU, and Ireland was among the worst hit. In late November, the EU agreed to an 85m bailout package to rescue the countrys failing financial sector.

The unemployment rate continued to trend upwards, but jobs were still being created in tech as more Irish outposts were established and growing. US analytics firm Dun & Bradstreet was among them.

Dun & Bradstreet opened its software and data operations centre in Dublin in 2010 with the express intent to leverage the technical talent in the Irish market, said Donal Cavanagh, the companys present-day Dublin site lead. In the intervening decade, we have seen both the explosion of data and the critical role data now plays in the successful running of any business. Everyone is looking for growth, to manage risk, to navigate ever-growing compliance directives. Today, in a world that is digitalised, the way to connect and control these is through data.

There was still plenty of money to be made in the age of big data and, as a new decade dawned, analysis and monitoring were moving beyond the commercial and into the personal lives of individuals.

Facebook was reaching new heights in 2010, hitting 500m users just over halfway through the year. Among them was about a third of the Irish population.

Facebook had become so mainstream it was taken to the big screen. Directed by David Fincher and penned by Aaron Sorkin, The Social Network wowed critics and topped the US box office. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said the film completely misrepresented the motivation behind the social media platform, but conceded that the costuming was fastidious. Every single shirt and fleece they had in that movie is actually a shirt or fleece that I own, he said.

Meanwhile, the subject matter of future Facebook documentaries was coming to the fore. At the January Crunchies awards in San Francisco, Zuckerberg made comments downplaying users desire for privacy. He was forced to eat his words in May after a glitch was found that could make users chat messages and pending friend requests visible if exploited, and a Wall Street Journal report claimed advertisers on platforms such as Facebook were using a privacy loophole to retrieve personal information.

Zuckerberg responded with an op-ed in the Washington Post announcing new privacy controls. The biggest message we have heard recently is that people want easier control over their information, he wrote, changing his tune from earlier in the year.

This became the holding pattern for Facebook privacy concerns for years to come, as the vast trove of information offered up by the platform presented just too tempting an opportunity for data mining. Indeed, this was the year the US National Security Agency started its large-scale social mapping programme, though that wouldnt be revealed until later. In the meantime, the man who made half a billion friends closed out 2010 as Time magazines Person of the Year and with almost $2bn in revenue.

Of course, Facebook wasnt the only tech company building a lucrative business on an abundant data mine.

Google was stirring up its own privacy-centred controversy in 2010, as it was revealed that the companys Street View mapping vehicles had captured more than they should have. (And not just the odd or inappropriate moments caught on camera.)

Street View had mapped Irelands major cities in 2009 and its cars returned the next year to fill in some gaps. This was after it had emerged that unauthorised code deployed by Street View captured data broadcast over unencrypted Wi-Fi networks in more than 30 countries. This prompted investigations in the US, Spain and the UK, while the Irish Government demanded that Google simply delete the data it had intercepted.

Eventually the US investigation was closed after Google promised to improve its internal procedures. The company also promised to delete the data it collected in the UK.

In Germany, Google agreed to allow residents to opt out of the service and have images of their homes blurred out. This, however, made these homes a target for vandals.

Street View launched in Ireland at the end of September, after its cars and pedal-powered trikes finished their intensive mapping of Dublin, Cork, Limerick, Galway and Waterford. It had reached all seven continents in 2010, and even photographed several penguin colonies in Antarctica.

While controversial in its roll-out, Google was right in thinking that Street View was something that people wanted to see. What viewers didnt want, however, was 3D TV.

Spurred on by the phenomenal success of James Camerons Avatar in December 2009, TV-makers and broadcasters threw their weight behind 3D entertainment in a big way.

Sky was the first network to announce a 3D TV channel for Ireland and the UK (and SiliconRepublic.com got a pre-launch sneak peek in 2009).Sony built one of the worlds first 3D outside broadcast trucksand, by March, Samsung and LG promised at-home sets. Irelands first 3D TV broadcast, a Premier League match between Manchester United and Chelsea, was made on 3 April adding a whole new dimension to watching sports.

That same month, Samsung pointed out that 3D TV might cause motion sickness, altered vision, disorientation, eye strain and instability, among other things.

Add that to the high cost and low content on 3D TV, and the market just wasnt adding up. Even though 3D TVs were shipping faster than HD TVs in November 2010, it wouldnt be long before most 3D TV sets and services were no longer available.

But with touch-enabled smartphones becoming ubiquitous, the demand for mobile gaming was at an all-time high. And along came Finnish game developer Rovio to take a (sling)shot at this trend.

Angry Birds launched in late 2009 at the height of the swine flu epidemic, hence the antagonist pigs. It quickly rose ranks in projectile motion to become the number-one iPhone game. When it finally arrived on Android, it scored more than 1m downloads in one day as more and more users flung themselves into the action.

The Android roll-out was slightly scuppered by the fragmentation of the Google mobile ecosystem, and this would become a common issue for the rival to Apples tightly controlled iOS. But its popularity held strong and, by year end, Angry Birds was top of the app charts another feather in its cap.

Another viral success of 2010 was far less charming. The Stuxnet computer worm was first detected in the summer, described as one of the most refined pieces of malware ever discovered.

The threat it posed became clear in September when it attacked Irans first nuclear power plant. While initially described as cyberterrorism, some experts felt it had to have been a state-sponsored cyberattack due to the worms sophisticated design.

Some saw Stuxnet as a new form of cyberwarfare. Within days, a major cybersecurity exercise was set to assess the vulnerability of vital services in the US and, later, the US military created a Cyber Command to protect its networks. However, security technologist Bruce Schneier said that threats of cyber war and terrorism were grossly exaggerated and were really hindering our understanding of online risks.

By the end of the year, Stuxnet code had made its way to underground forums, while threat reports and a former CIA director predicted the rise of cyberattacks in the future.

27 January: Apple unveils the iPad, a nine-inch tablet computer with all the capabilities of an iPhone, minus the phone.

16 February: At Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Google CEO Eric Schmidt announces that the company is now pursuing a mobile first strategy.

23 March: LinkedIn connects with Dublin, announcing that it will establish its international headquarters in the Irish capital.

5 April: WikiLeaks publishes footage of a 2007 airstrike on Baghdad, which shows a US helicopter killing civilians.

30 April: Journalist Mark Little bases his social media news service Storyful (which he founded in January) at the National College of Ireland Business Incubation Centre, alongside Barracuda FX and Ian Luceys Lucey Technology.

6 May: A trillion-dollar stock market crash is triggered by a series of automated trading programs entering a feedback loop.

20 May: Scientists create the first synthetic cells in a project that took 15 years to complete.

22 May: In a big moment for bitcoins use, computer programmer Laszlo Hanyecz trades 10,000 bitcoin for two pizzas from Papa Johns. (At todays rate, those pizzas cost more than 210m each.)

27 May: Whistleblower Chelsea Manning is arrested by the US Armys Criminal Investigation Command.

11 June: The FIFA World Cup kicks off in South Africa and the deafening sound of vuvuzelas in the crowd inspires Irish start-up Restored Hearing to pitch its tinnitus treatment to football fans.

15 June: One day after the slim iPhone 4 with its high-definition Retina display is made available for pre-order, Apple and AT&T have already sold out of their initial stock.

24 June: Ergos financial software spin-off Fenergo raises 2m in funding from Enterprise Ireland and the European Investment Bank to go global.

16 July: Instagram co-founder Mike Krieger posts the platforms first photo: an artistically angled harbour view through a window. (The app would arrive on the App Store in October.)

25 July: WikiLeaks publishes a trove of more than 90,000 classified documents on US military action in Afghanistan.

10 August: Physicist Stephen Hawking says he believes that the long-term future of the human race must be in space.

10 August: The World Health Organization declares that the H1N1 swine flu pandemic is over after just over a year.

10 September: A transatlantic flight is grounded at Shannon Airport after a charging mobile phone overheated to the point of melting and emitting smoke, unbeknown to its owner.

4 October: Twitter co-founder Ev Williams announces that he will step down as CEO, to be replaced by COO Dick Costolo.

5 October: Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov are jointly awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for their groundbreaking graphene discovery from 2004.

9 October: Google announces that its self-driving cars have clocked more than 140,000 miles.

11 October: The Big Four record labels EMI, Sony, Warner and Universal fail in their bid to secure an injunction against UPC to implement a three-strike rule for illegal file-sharing.

22 October: The International Space Station outstrips Mir for the record of the longest continuous human occupation in space, passing its 3,641st day.

28 October: Chinas Tianhe-1A, packed with more than 14,000 Intel Xeon processors and more than 7,000 Nvidia Tesla GPUs, is dubbed the worlds top supercomputer with the capability to perform 2,507trn calculations each second.

10 November: Microsoft launches the Kinect for Xbox 360 in Ireland with some help from Sophie Ellis-Bextor.

17 November: Researchers at CERN trap antimatter for the first time (for a sixth of a second).

18 November: Camara recycles its 20,000th computer in Ireland.

28 November: WikiLeaks publishes a collection of more than 250,000 US diplomatic cables.

16 December: Following an international arrest warrant issued by Swedish police over allegations of sexual misconduct, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange is released on bail from a second extradition hearing in the UK.

17 December: Reports emerge that Twitter is considering Dublin as the site of its European HQ.

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2010: Big Tech is watching you - Siliconrepublic.com

Alphabet, Inc (NASDAQ:GOOGL) is a worldwide digital advertising and cloud services company. The company operates in three segments; Google Services, Google Cloud, and Other Bets. The stock has gained 62% year-to-date and 276% over the past five years.

Source: Getty Images

We all know Google, right? Need a sports score? Google it. Migratory habits of penguins? Google it. Need to see Alphabet's financial statements? You got it -- just Google it. But some of us may not be clear just how and from where Google generates its revenues. The vast majority of their revenue comes from advertisements related to Google Search, as shown below in the disaggregation of the company's revenue for the first three quarters of 2020 and 2021.

When one searches on Google, the ads shown on top are often "pay-per-click" advertisements. This means that the advertisers bid for the top ad space, and then pay Alphabet whenever someone clicks on the ad. This is very effective advertising as consumers who perform a search are often ready to buy. As shown in the table above, Google makes 58% of its revenue from search advertising. This revenue was up more than 46% year-over-year for the first nine months of 2021. This is an impressive showing, however not as impressive as the 57% year-over-year gain made by YouTube ads. More and more consumers are cutting the cord each year and YouTube benefits from this trend in a major way.

The Google Cloud is an exciting element although it currently only makes up 7% of revenues. Google Cloud has a long growth runway and related revenue was up 48% year-over-year. The Cloud Services market is currently dominated by Amazon's (NASDAQ:AMZN) Amazon Web Services and Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT) Azure . However, the total addressable market for cloud infrastructure is expected to surpass $150 billion in 2021, a 37% increase over 2020. Amazon makes up 32% of the market and Microsoft 20%. After this, several companies jockey for position with Google leading at 9% market share. With the total market growing this year by more than 30%, this is a massive opportunity for growth for Google.

Revenues at Google continue to expand impressively and are expected to reach more than $254 billion for the 2021 fiscal year. This is an increase of 39% over the pandemic tempered 2020.

SOURCE: ALPHABET

As shown above, the pandemic led to tepid growth in 2020 which has roared back in 2021, effectively filling the gap. Over the past five years revenues have grown at a compound annual rate of 23%. Margins are also healthy with the company posting an EBITDA margin of 36% over the trailing twelve months and an operating margin of 30% over this time. Both are up from 2020 where the company posted 30% and 23%, respectively.

Of the Big Tech giants who are Google competitors, only Meta Platforms, formerly Facebook, (NASDAQ:FB) has more attractive valuation metrics. This is due to the recent whistleblower accusations against Meta Platforms which have caused the stock to swoon. Meta Platforms also makes the majority of its revenue from advertising, while Amazon and Microsoft compete with Google in the cloud and advertising markets.

SOURCE: YCHARTS

Google has a very reasonable forward PE of 26.5, shown above, which suggests there is still considerable upside in the stock, especially given the expected growth. The EV to EBITDA ratio is even more attractive at 16.8. This is due to the fortress balance sheet that Google maintains. The company had $142 billion in cash and short-term investments at last report with just $12.8 billion in long-term debt. The cash and short-term investments on hand represent a whopping 7.5% of the $1.88 trillion market cap.

Google has made tremendous gains in its core advertising business year-over-year and more is expected as we turn to 2022. Search and YouTube will continue to lead the way, however the company also has a tremendous opportunity in the cloud services segment. Margins are expanding and the company maintains an impressive balance sheet. Google is being overlooked by investors judging by its modest valuation ratios. All of this adds up to tremendous value and an exceptional opportunity for long-term investors to gain an edge.

This article represents the opinion of the writer, who may disagree with the official recommendation position of a Motley Fool premium advisory service. Were motley! Questioning an investing thesis -- even one of our own -- helps us all think critically about investing and make decisions that help us become smarter, happier, and richer.

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Alphabet Is The Best Value In Big Tech - Motley Fool

With Parag Agrawal becoming Twitter CEO, now a number of Big Tech companies are headed by persons of Indian origin. Unsurprisingly, a wave of patriotism has swept across India. These people have done India proudthat is the common refrain. But that may not be true, for Big Tech today is the enemy of free speech; and Indians helping curb liberty can never be a matter of pride for their country.

To put things in perspective, lets consider the case of Jayaprakash Narayan. He can be lauded as a hero because he fought against authoritarianism during the Emergency (1975-77). But we can never and should never eulogize the otherwise admirable people for having colluded with tyranny at that time.

Big Tech is not without achievements; it has brought the gains of technology to billions of people. But it is also colluding with the enemies of freedom; this was the reason that Twitter de-platformed former US President Donald Trump, who is the greatest world leader of this century, for he is the biggest enemy of China, the most powerful and dangerous rogue state.

Social media giants censored and downplayed a lot of content that was anti-China. Concomitantly, they promoted a great deal that suited Beijing, the most important being their unflinching support to the theory that the novel coronavirus was of natural origin.

This helped a bunch of scientists to manipulate global opinionby way of a letter to the reputed medical journalLancetfor over a year into accepting the natural origin theory of the coronavirus. It was only on May 5 this year that the prominent science journalist Nicholar Wade challenged the natural origin orthodoxy (https://thebulletin.org/2021/05/the-origin-of-covid-did-people-or-nature-open-pandoras-box-at-wuhan/). The possibility of the virus birth in a lab got a leg up.

Wade also hinted at a concerted endeavor, if not a global conspiracy, aimed at proving that the origin of the novel coronavirus was natural. The recent developments not only underline the disingenuousness of some dishonest scientists but also the credulity of intellectuals all over the world who unquestioningly accepted the scientists lies as gospel.

In an article in the prestigious magazineThe Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, Wade talked about the thought leaders anti-Trump obsession supporting the natural origin theory which helped the Chinese. Another reason [for the acceptance of the natural origin theory], perhaps, is the migration of much of the media toward the left of the political spectrum. Because [former US] President [Donald] Trump said the virus had escaped from a Wuhan lab, editors gave the idea little credence. They joined the virologists in regarding lab escape as a dismissible conspiracy theory.

Wade said that at that time it was really far too soon for anyone to be sure what had happened. Yet, the scientists overwhelmingly conclude[d] that this coronavirus originated in wildlife.

The scientifically unsubstantiated assertion became an indubitable fact; and anyone, from conservative American politicians to dissenting scientists, questioning the novel coronavirus natural origin was accused of peddling a conspiracy theory. Trump and his political allies were of course hauled over the coals, but even credentialed experts were silenced. Like Chinese virologist Li-Meng Yan, who is now in the US. In September last year, Twitter suspended her account for the unpardonable sin of saying in public that China had manufactured the coronavirus in a Wuhan lab.

While the mainstream media and Big Tech acted like the Inquisition to support China, no one bothered to check the intentions of the scientists who had emphatically asserted the natural origin theory. According to Wade, It later turned out that the Lancet letter had been organized and drafted by Peter Daszak, president of the EcoHealth Alliance of New York. Daszaks organization funded coronavirus research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. If the SARS2 virus had indeed escaped from research he funded, Daszak would be potentially culpable. This acute conflict of interest was not declared to the Lancets readers. To the contrary, the letter concluded, We declare no competing interests.

Daszak, a devious manipulator, took the world for a ride for more than a yearto help the Chinese Communist Party. Just as he and others did to send American taxpayers money to the Wuhan Institute of Virology. According to Wade, From June 2014 to May 2019, Daszaks EcoHealth Alliance had a grant from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), part of the National Institutes of Health [of the US], to do gain-of-function research with coronaviruses at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Whether or not SARS2 is the product of that research, it seems a questionable policy to farm out high-risk research to foreign labs using minimal safety precautions. And if the SARS2 virus did indeed escape from the Wuhan institute, then the NIH will find itself in the terrible position of having funded a disastrous experiment that led to the death of more than 3 million worldwide, including more than half a million of its own citizens.

The propagation of a fake theory is just one consequence of the suppression of free speech by Big Tech and the mainstream media. Therefore, the fact that top executives in most Big Tech firms are Indians is not something we should be proud of.

Views expressed above are the author's own.

END OF ARTICLE

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We shouldnt be proud of Indians dominating Big Tech - The Times of India Blog

The internet remains resilient, and its underlying protocols and technologies dominate global networking but its relevance may be challenged by the increasing amount of traffic carried on private networks run by Big Tech, or rules imposed by governments.

So says a Study on the Internet's Technical Success Factors commissioned by APNIC and LACNIC the regional internet address registries for the AsiaPacific and Latin America and Caribbean regions respectively and written by consultancy Analysys Mason.

Presented on Wednesday at the 2021 Internet Governance Forum (IGF), the study identifies four reasons the internet has succeeded:

The study also argues that the early designers of the internet incorporated three critical guiding ideals: openness, simplicity, and decentralization. These ideals were applied across three design principles: layering, creating a network of networks, and the end-to-end principle that sees intelligence placed at the network edge rather than the core.

The end-to-end principle matters, because it means applications can be installed in connected devices without the need to change any networks.

Much of the study fondly recalls how the abovementioned elements have delivered decades of useful innovation.

A significant fraction of global traffic is now moved between the datacentres and edge networks of large internet companies

The document also identifies risks.

A section on technical challenges to the success of the internet points out that the architecture has weak points, and that technologies to harden them aren't being strongly adopted.

"While both DNSSEC and the BGP security extensions are important steps towards securing the internet infrastructure, significant efforts will still be needed before these protocols are widely deployed and used. Significant efforts will still be needed," the study warns.

The lack of a proper quality of service (QoS) standard is also called out, because its absence has created "concerns that the best-effort model will not be sufficient to support the needs of emerging interdomain applications such as augmented/virtual reality or interactive gaming".

Imposing a QoS standard would threaten the network-of-networks principle, the study states, adding that any attempt to change internet protocols would likely be rejected if only because the world has sunk so much effort into current networks.

But the study identifies some players that could decide to go their own way: "social media companies, video streaming companies, CDNs and cloud companies".

The document states that "a significant fraction of global IP traffic now consists of data that is moved between the datacentres and edge networks of large internet companies."

Those companies' needs, and growing networks, lead the analysts to suggest that "over time, we could see the internet transform into a more centralised system with a few global private networks carrying most of the content and services.

"In this scenario, what remains outside these private networks are primarily ISP networks that move traffic to and from end users, and the user experience would be shaped by how close a user sits to the private network of the relevant internet company.

The study also suggests Big Tech could research protocols it needs, and by doing so take resources away from work on open internet protocols. While any such work would need to be interoperable with the wider internet, and therefore preserve the network-of-networks principle the document cites development of the TCP-alternative QUIC protocol as an example of a successful private technology push it also suggests "increased centralisation could blur the distinction between network and applications, as expressed in the layering principle."

Another risk is that when private networks break, many users suffer. Exhibit A: yesterday's AWS brownout, which hurt Netflix and Disney+, among others.

The study also identifies governance issues as an emerging risk especially when nations seek to impose their own requirements on the internet.

"A development where governments gain more control over the development of the internet may involve a risk of a more fragmented system, without the common address space and global reachability we have today."

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Big Tech's private networks and protocols threaten the 'net, say internet registries - The Register

When big technology companies start to expand into different industries, they are quick to be labelled as disruptive. In the financial services sector, the circulating rhetoric has been that Big Tech is coming into the industry as a unilateral force to compete with banks.

The industry tends to talk about this kind of big tech threat as one overarching problem, and I think thats really the wrong characterization, Kate Drew, director of research at CCG Catalyst told Tearsheet.

Big Tech is a nickname given to the five biggest technology companies in the world: Apple, Google, Facebook, Amazon and Microsoft. While Microsoft just recently announced its first consumer fintech move by adding BNPL into its browser, the other four are all more established players in the space.

The sheer size and capabilities of these companies can be intimidating, as is their advantage of having an existing user base of millions of people to offer banking products to. However, the oftentimes overlooked factor is the underlying strategy behind their expansion which, upon a closer look, suggests that direct competition with banks is not really on their main agenda.

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We have no intention of becoming a bank: Is Big Tech really a threat to banks? Tearsheet - Tearsheet