Category Archives: Big Tech

One of Web3s benefits, according to boosters such as Jack Dorsey, is that its censorship-resistant. Because it is decentralized, this argument goes, it is impossible to censor anyone. But it isnt true that cryptocurrency is decentralized. Right now, Web3 has a choke point: Big Tech.

Cryptocurrency has relied on points of centralization since the days of Mt. Gox. (That hack wouldnt have mattered nearly as much if Mt. Gox hadnt been processing 80 percent of all transaction volume in Bitcoin at times). As the ecosystem has expanded, so have the points of centralization, such as AWS and Google Cloud.

One problem with cryptocurrency is that the technology is fairly user-hostile, at least to normal users of the internet. And so centralized services have sprung up for the non-technical, such as Coinbase, OpenSea, Metamask, VeVe, and Rarible. Meanwhile, mainstream payment apps Venmo, PayPay, and so on have added cryptocurrency capabilities. This is likely how the general public will get involved with crypto, assuming they do so at all. These services may also be used by people who do understand cryptocurrency since even the savvy may appreciate user-friendly interfaces and protection from scams.

To get to these apps, users will go through the Google and Apple app stores. So if those centralized ways of accessing cryptocurrency want to stay in Apples and Googles app stores, well, functionally, Apple and Google will be setting the terms of content moderation for Web3.

For the purposes of this piece, I am going to focus on Apple because I didnt sit through the Epic Games v. Apple antitrust trial for nothing. (Epic Games v. Google has not yet taken place; when it does, I imagine well get much more clarity about the Google store.) Apples public relations team did not respond to requests for comment.

As Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong wrote on February 4th, For any app to be listed in the Apple and Google App Stores, it needs to play by the rules of those two companies. That means that whatever Apple and Google decide as their content policy, Coinbase will follow, Armstrong says. Our approach is to be free speech supporters, but not free speech martyrs. (Emphasis his.) So if a critical partner such as Apple or Google objects to something and requires its removal, Coinbase will remove it. Coinbases head of policy communications, Ian Plunkett, declined to comment for this story.

This position has been signaled before. In June 2020, a few employees walked out of work because they wanted an immediate response from Armstrong to the Black Lives Matter protests. Armstrong ultimately did post his support for BLM to Twitter, though those tweets have since been deleted. The following September, Armstrong made a blog post limiting political discussions at work.

In his September 2020 post, Armstrong describes the move as mission focused. After the departures, he noted in an email that [w]e have just made a decision to not engage in broader activism as a company outside of our mission. (How Coinbases attempts at a PAC fit with this framework of ideas is unclear to me.) He offered severance to anyone who objected, which wound up being about 5 percent of its employees. Clearly included in the companys values were the notions that broader societal issues and political causes were minimally important.

This is fairly consistent with ceding moderation decisions to Apple if you squint. Free speech maximalism is, after all, a political cause and thus on Coinbases minimally important list. One reason that Coinbase has stuck around as long as it has while competitors have toppled is pragmatism.

We have some sense of how Apple will moderate Web3 because we already know how it moderates in its little walled garden:

The blockchain has an inherent moderation problem: its immutable. So if someone encodes a text string that contains a URL for a website that, for instance, contains child porn, the text string is there forever. Extracting that data requires effort and technical ability, and the linked-to website itself might go down, but the text string remains. Its also possible to harass people on the blockchain in messages that cant be altered or deleted, though some level of technical ability is required for this also.

So Apples mores are perhaps less of a problem for pure cryptocurrency and more of a problem for NFTs, an area Coinbase is planning to get into this year. Nudity in an NFT? Thats a problem for anyone who displays the NFT and also wants to appear in the Apple App Store. I mean, we already know that the fine folks of Apple are terrified of naked bananas. God forbid they see an actual human titty.

Whats more, Apple can say what currencies its willing to support transactions in, and thats trouble for companies that want to take payments in, for instance, Ethereum.

Fortunately for crypto enthusiasts, Apple has a pretty good incentive to let crypto apps some, at least stay in its App Store. One reason you cant buy a Kindle e-book through the iPhone app is that Apple takes a 30 percent cut of any digital goods sold in apps that appear in its store. This means that anyone trying to buy an NFT inarguably a digital good through an iOS app is likely going to pay a premium since app designers can simply pass the charge along to users rather than sacrificing their own cut. (Amazon has chosen not to take this path, which is why you still cant buy a Kindle e-book on the iPhone app).

The flip side here is that Apple can turn the faucet off at any time. Display an NFT titty? You might be out. Try to bilk Apple out of its cut? Youre definitely out.

Coinbases content moderation capitulation here is understandable: Apple, Google, and even Amazon are going to run the show if youre trying to make Web3 a mass-market technology. Collectively, this group owns the stores where your app appears, the cloud servers you use for your service, the operating systems, and the devices. Say whatever you like about the distributed future of Web3, but for the time being, centralized Big Tech is going to continue calling the shots.

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Why Coinbase admitted Apple calls the shots - The Verge

Consider, for instance, Apples services business a division that includes, among other things, its App Store, Apple Pay, iCloud and its music and TV subscription plans. Traditionally Apple has made a huge amount of money from selling hardware. But iPhone sales have gone up and down over the past half decade, which makes sense; eventually everyone who wants an iPhone will have an iPhone, and with each new iPhone only slightly better than the last, people will have fewer reasons to upgrade. Indeed, iPhone sales in Apples holiday quarter in 2021 grew by 9 percent over 2020 solid, but nothing like the growth Apple once saw with the iPhone.

And so Apple has increasingly turned to subscriptions and other online services for growth essentially a way to grow not just by selling more iPhones, but by getting more money from each iPhone user. The plan is working spectacularly well. Apple reported that during 2020 its App Store billing and sales revenue grew by 24 percent over the previous year. Luca Maestri, Apples finance chief, told investors last month that the company now has 785 million paying subscribers to its various offerings a number that grew by 165 million in the past year. For some perspective: Netflix has about 222 million subscribers in total.

You see a similar trend across the industry Big Techs not just getting more customers for its traditional businesses, but is expanding its ancillary businesses in ways that seem impossible. Amazon, for example, is not just an indomitable retailer and the largest cloud services provider (its Amazon Web Services cloud business now has a $71 billion annual revenue run rate). The company also disclosed that its advertising business generated $31 billion in revenue in 2021, while Microsoft said its ad revenue exceeded $10 billion. Remember that ads are, in the scheme of things, a small part of the business for both companies Amazons $31 billion ad business is not even 10 percent of its annual revenue. And yet it dwarfs companies whose entire business is mainly ads Snap, for example, which had $4 billion in revenue in 2021, or Pinterest, which sold less than $2.6 billion in ads.

Dan Ives and John Katsingris, analysts at the investment firm Wedbush Securities, wrote in a recent report that what we are seeing now is only the beginning of a long-term explosion in tech earnings. They estimated that companies would spend a trillion dollars on cloud services over the coming years, meaning that there is a lot more room for tech companies to keep growing and growing and growing. Apples services business alone could be worth $1.5 trillion, Ives has estimated. He and other pundits have called the coming investment boom in tech the Fourth Industrial Revolution.

That sounds grandiose. And yet its hard to see what stands in Big Techs way. Lawmakers and regulators have expressed alarm over tech behemoths market power, but with the midterm election looming and Republicans and Democrats still at odds over what exactly to do to curb tech giants power, the window for new antimonopoly policy might be shrinking.

I wonder if a few years from now well say that when it came to anticipating the future for Big Tech, we werent thinking big enough.

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Opinion | The Rise of Big Tech May Just Be Starting - The New York Times

The new leader of a little-known agency within the Commerce Department starts the job tasked with connecting every American to the internet, but also has ambitions to tackle Big Tech issues on the horizon.

Why it matters: Alan Davidson, the newly confirmed head of the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA), will manage tens of billions of federal spending on broadband but he's also talking about helping set administration policy around app stores and privacy.

Driving the news: In his first major interview since taking the NTIA helm, Davidson told Axios his biggest priority is making sure every American has access to affordable, high-speed internet.

The intrigue: Davidson also told Axios his agency will soon launch a review of competition in the mobile app ecosystem, with a goal of producing a report this summer to help develop Biden administration policy.

Yes, but: The broadband program will take up the bulk of the agency's resources and focus, even as it takes on tech-related issues, including a review of how data privacy issues affect civil rights.

The big picture: Davidson has watched the tech industry grow up since he started Google's Washington office in 2005. (After leaving Google in 2012, he did stints at MIT, New America's Open Technology Institute, the Commerce Department, and most recently Mozilla.)

Of note: Other agencies, such as the Federal Trade Commission and the Federal Communications Commission, are tasked with tech and telecom regulation and enforcement.

Between the lines: Davidson has big ambitions for a relatively small agency that has been without a permanent leader since 2019.

What to watch: Previous leaders of NTIA have mostly come from "the telecommunications side of the house," as Davidson puts it. But the MIT-trained computer scientist turned lawyer is a "technologist at heart."

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Exclusive: Biden's new power player on broadband and Big Tech - Axios

WASHINGTON, February 15, 2022 Vint Cerf, a vice president at Google and an early developer of the internet, said more data should be collected to get a better sense of internet performance across the country.

As the Federal Communications Commission races to improve broadband maps that show what areas have what speeds, including using crowdsourced data from speed tests, Cerf said on an Ask Me Anything-style interview Friday that broader information points need to be collected to get a more accurate picture of the problem.

Today, people do episodic measurements of speed, go to speedtest.netyou run it, but usually only run it when youre not happy with the performance, and so we get this skewed data that says everything is terrible, Cerf said in the wide-ranging interview with Broadband.Money.

So, we should be running background tests that are preserving of privacy, but help us understand what does this user see in terms of performance over a period of time? What are the variations, maximum, minimum average, and so on?

Cerf also asked whether we can distinguish between poor performance as a consequence of badly configured Wi-Fi versus a poorly performing internet access point or internet access to the ISP.

Those are the sorts of things that I hope we could do better at, so that we can understand better how well are we serving users for a variety of different applications, he added.

In November, President Joe Biden signed the Infrastructure, Investment and Jobs Act into law, which puts $65 billion toward broadband. The National Telecommunications and Information Administration, an agency of the Commerce Department handling $42.5 billion of that money, will be tasked with its distribution to the states. The new legislation also raised the federal speed standard to 100 Megabits per second download and 20 Mbps upload, from 25/3.

But the holdup is the accurate maps, which Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo said could come from the FCC this summer. The FCC for its part has been working to gather more data points than the agencys reliance, historically, on internet service provider data, which in part led to a mess with the Rural Digital Opportunity Fund. That includes crowdsourcing data from consumers, including gathering speed data.

Cerf said he anticipates challenges to the deployment of funds from the IIJA, since measurement data on internet performance is not readily available.

Cerf noted that looking at components of performance in the home is not easy because Wi-Fi speeds often include input from fiber or cable and looking at performance without these components is not so simple.

Cerf also touched on what hes like to see on the digital accommodations front.

It is not just access to Internet; its not just access to the equipment that helps you use the Internet, but it also is accessibility in the sense of accommodating people who might have physical disabilities that interfere with their ability to use the technology, Cerf said.

He said inclusion must focus on more than just ensuring people have access to broadband and connected devices, stating that individuals must learn the best type of equipment to be using for their connections.

That includes what kind of equipment should I be using? Whats on the laptop? What kind of trouble might I get into? Whats phishing? Whats pharming? Whats malware? Whats the denial-of-service attack? What other kinds of content? Whats ransomware? People need to be aware of the risk factors going online, Cerf said.

Cerf suggested that state officials should play hardball with network operators and refuse to provide them with funds until they can answer the questions about broadband data that they are asked.

He also prognosticated on internet developments of the future, predicting increase in the prevalence of Internet of Things devices for data collection in industries such as agriculture should better network support be developed for the devices.

Cerf floated the possibility of centralized online logins rather than having to enter sites through individual social media accounts such as a Facebook or Google profile.

Additionally, he expressed skepticism over how revolutionary the metaverse and cryptocurrency will be in the tech sector despite stating that the ability to move money around without having a credit card is important.

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Broadcasters Go Against Big Tech With Congress Forcing Negotiations - BroadbandBreakfast.com

This story originally appeared on Zacks

Mega-cap techs recent windfall into oceans of digitally fueled capital has these firms looking high and low for ways to profitably deploy it. Stock buybacks are at record levels, but the valuation discounts that many next-generation innovators have fallen to cant be ignored.

There appears to be a Goldilocks valuation zone where big tech is looking to pick up new economy innovators after the January capitulation.

Goldilocks valuation range: $5 to $30 billion market cap, (preferably) below a 10x forward P/S, and market-disrupting potential.

Monday (2/14), the WSJ reported that Cisco CSCO was looking to acquire Splunk SPLK for over $20 billion, with designs on reinvigorating its innovative growth outlay. SPLK was the Nasdaq 100s leading Valentines Day component, with an over 9% daily rally.

Splunk currently resides in that perfect Goldilocks valuation zone to be picked up by the recently cash-rich big tech firms. SPLK has slid 45% from its peak 1.5 years ago into this Goldilocks valuation range: $19.7 Billion market cap, 6.5x forward P/S, and undeniably market-disrupting potential in AI-driven machine data management and real-time actionable analytics.

I wouldnt be surprised if other SPLK suitors came out of the fray before CSCO can lock anything in, as this leading real-time data management business begins proving a successful cloud transition.

I expect to see elevated M&A activity among young market disruptors in the coming months, so look out for companies in this Goldilocks valuation zone.

Stocks Im eying: HubSpot HUBS, Upstart UPST, and Alight ALIT.

Even if these next-gen buys dont get picked up, theyll add sizable long-term growth potential to your portfolio for the future.

Zacks Names "Single Best Pick to Double"

From thousands of stocks, 5 Zacks experts each have chosen their favorite to skyrocket +100% or more in months to come. From those 5, Director of Research Sheraz Mian hand-picks one to have the most explosive upside of all.

Its a little-known chemical company thats up 65% over last year, yet still dirt cheap. With unrelenting demand, soaring 2022 earnings estimates, and $1.5 billion for repurchasing shares, retail investors could jump in at any time.

This company could rival or surpass other recent Zacks Stocks Set to Double like Boston Beer Company which shot up +143.0% in little more than 9 months and NVIDIA which boomed +175.9% in one year.

Want the latest recommendations from Zacks Investment Research? Today, you can download 7 Best Stocks for the Next 30 Days. Click to get this free reportCisco Systems, Inc. (CSCO): Free Stock Analysis ReportSplunk Inc. (SPLK): Free Stock Analysis ReportHubSpot, Inc. (HUBS): Free Stock Analysis ReportUpstart Holdings, Inc. (UPST): Free Stock Analysis ReportAlight, Inc. (ALIT): Get Free ReportTo read this article on Zacks.com click here.Zacks Investment Research

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The Goldilocks Valuation Zone: Where Big Tech Discovers Innovative-Value - Entrepreneur

Keith Rabois minted his wealth with Elon Musk, Peter Thiel and other members of the so-called PayPal Mafia. Now, though, hes moved to Miami and become one of the citys biggest hype men. He believes Florida which has already seen an influx of tech bros, venture capital investments and cryptocurrency plays during the pandemic offers a better home to tech than California can, largely because of the politics. He tells Kara Swisher: The mayor of Miami, the governor of Florida treat citizens like customers. What can we offer you? How can we help? Thats their goal, and thats how they frame everything.

[You can listen to this episode of Sway on Apple, Spotify, Google or wherever you get your podcasts.]

In this conversation, Kara presses Rabois whether techs doubling down on Florida is all just about escaping high taxes. They also discuss whether venture capital is what investment banking was in the 2000s. And they catch up on the news, from stock fall-offs in big tech to why Peter Thiel will be stepping down from Metas board.

(A full transcript of the episode will be available midday on the Times website.)

Thoughts? Email us at sway@nytimes.com.

Sway is produced by Nayeema Raza, Blakeney Schick, Daphne Chen, Caitlin OKeefe and Wyatt Orme, and edited by Nayeema Raza; fact-checking by Kate Sinclair; music and sound design by Isaac Jones; mixing by Carole Sabouraud and Sonia Herrero; audience strategy by Shannon Busta. Special thanks to Kristin Lin and Kristina Samulewski.

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Opinion | Techs Love Affair With Miami - The New York Times

Big Tech has long felt free to help itself to the good ideas of smaller companies.

Its bad enough that these giants fiercely contest the efforts of inventors to receive fair compensation a courtroom mismatch between startup firms with a good idea but little money on one side versus behemoths valued into the trillion-plus dollars on the other.

Now Big Tech is taking the process one step further by claiming to be the real victim here.

For years Big Tech has been promoting the myth of patent trolls. This army of creatures supposedly files bogus lawsuits by the truckload to grab cash settlements from tech giants.

Now the latter have added the new wrinkle of claiming that the United States is facing a crisis of bad patents in other words, that the U.S. has been issuing patents that are too vague, too conventional, or so poorly written that its impossible to know what invention or technology the patent encompasses.

When tech giants get called out for stealing intellectual property, theyve made the same argument: they cant have committed theft because the smaller firms patents were invalid in the first place.

The claims of the Patent-in-Suit are invalid and unenforceable, pronounced Google in a recent lawsuit with smaller firm VideoShare over video-streaming technology. Google huffed that VideoShares patent was too abstract and lacked novelty. Fortunately, the jury saw through the ruse, and the court ordered Google to pay $26 million for its infringement.

Now comes the High Tech Inventors Alliance an advocacy group formed by Google, Amazon, Cisco and the like to allege that over a quarter of patents granted in the United States are invalid.

If true, that would be shocking. In fact, this claim is every bit as bogus and self-serving as the proposition that Big Tech is beset by patent trolls. The figure derives from a single decade-old study that examined just 980 patents issued from 2000 to 2010. To put that in perspective, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office granted about 2 million patents in that period.

The truth is that poor quality applications rarely get through the system. And 25 percent of U.S. patents are not bad. The United States is judicious in issuing patents. The USPTO grants patents in fewer than 35 percent of applications processed, one of the smallest percentages worldwide.

In addition, the number of patent lawsuits in the United States has remained steady for decades. If a patent crisis did exist, there would be far more than two disputes per 1,000 patents issued a rate that has not budged for nearly a century.

Our largest competitors dont think the U.S. is awash with bad patents. China is responsible for between $200-$600 billion in theft of American IP every year.

If Big Tech succeeds in its efforts to weaken intellectual property protection, the consequences will be dire, encouraging foreign theft and jeopardizing Americas global economic standing.

Our policymakers shouldnt fall for Big Techs patent crisis hoax. Theres too much at stake.

Chris Israel is the executive director of the U.S. Alliance of Startups and Inventors for Jobs and a former U.S. Intellectual Property Enforcement Coordinator. This piece originally appeared in the International Business Times.

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Why Big Tech wants you to think there's a patent crisis - Hammond Daily Star online

As part of its annual plan for this year, the Financial Supervisory Service said it would prepare Korean-style Big Tech monitoring measures to stimulate competition and innovation from Big Techs foray into the finance sector and to achieve financial stability and customer protection.

The purpose of the measures is to establish systematic monitoring to enforce adoption of healthy market rules, and actively supporting financial innovation in the era of the big blur -- a locally-used term referring to the blurring of boundaries between industries.

The FSS announcement comes as tech giants Naver and Kakaos fast-growing online and mobile financial services have become serious competitors to traditional banks. It also comes amid concerns that regulations on Big Tech companies customer protection and data use related to their financial platforms remain unclear.

To bolster transparency in online and mobile finance, the FSS seeks to check on the current state of electronic finance transaction fees and build a related data and information disclosure system. The watchdog, concerned with the lack of standards in assessing environmental, social and governance-related financial products, vowed to come up with a solid yardstick for ESG bonds. It said it would review ESG-related disclosure systems and adopt stricter assessment process for ESG-related funds.

The FSS picked customer protection as another key task for this year, saying it plans to implement stricter regulations to prevent financial institutions exaggerated marketing and selling of risky products.

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[South Korea] Financial watchdog to step up crackdown on Big Tech - Nation Thailand

Australias top banks and insurers are worried they will be caught out by a bill that aims to lift the privacy standards of big tech companies.

Associations representing the finance sector said the bills broad definition of online platforms would extend to many banks, insurers, finance providers, superannuation funds, intermediaries and other third parties."

This could lead to "complexity, potential conflict of laws and outcomes, and higher administrative costs," the Australian Banking Association, Australian Finance Industry Association, Financial Services Council and Insurance Council of Australia said in a submission (PDF) to the Attorney Generals call for consultation on an exposure draft of the bill .

The Online Privacy Bill Exposure Draft has an online platforms' code a list of new obligations for how online platforms must collect, disclose and use their customers data.

The submission said that thethe Online Privacy Bill is part of the Australian gov's response to the Australian Competition and Consumer Commissioner's 2019 Digital Platforms Inquiry, but the ACCC recommendations for Big Tech stronger privacy obligations were not intended for the finance sector.

The ACCCs Digital Platforms Inquiry defined online platforms as digital content aggregation platforms, social media platforms and search engines.

However, the online privacy bill expands the definition to any organisation that collects personal information about an individual in the course of or in connection with providing access to information, goods or services (other than a data brokerage service) by use of an electronic service (other than a social media service), and had over 2,500,000 end-users in Australia in the past year.

The online platforms code in the Online Privacy Bill, that financial entities may have to abide by if the Auditor General rejects their call, introduces a number of obligations. For example, an online platform must:

Consultation on The Online Privacy Bill is being conducted in tandem with the govs review of the Australian Privacy Act 1988.

Should the Government wish to explore any proposals for changes to the operation of privacy regimes in the finance sector, we believe this should be contemplated [in] the ongoing Review of the Privacy Act 1988, the submission said.

The terms of reference in the review of the Privacy Act has a broader scope than the online privacy bill, and has the potential to compel online platforms to abide by even stricter privacy obligations.

The review...considers options for reform on matters including..consent requirements including default privacy settings, overseas data flows, and erasure of personal information and whether a statutory tort for serious invasions of privacy should be introduced, the terms of reference reads.

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Banks say they should not be treated like Big Tech by online privacy bill - iTnews

The South African Broadcasting Corporations (SABC) technological renewal project is making considerable progress, according to the public broadcasters responses to parliamentary questions.

The SABC said that it had issued a request for a tender to implement its own Over-the-top (OTT) Platform, which would provide viewers with access to movies and TV shows by sending the content directly through the Internet.

The SABCrevealed details via a Request for Information (RFI) document of its intentions to launch an OTT streaming platform in October 2020.

Dubbed SABC iPlayer, the public broadcaster intends for its streaming service to compete against players like Netflix and Spotify.

The SABC is working towards having a presence in the OTT space, and this RFI brings the SABC a step closer to achieving this goal, it said.

Part of the digital strategy is to implement an OTT streaming platform that will allow it to enter the OTT market effectively by providing different offerings to the public with ease of access, similar to the likes of Netflix, Amazon Prime [Video], and Spotify.

In answers to questions from members of the National Council of Provinces, the SABC provided further details on the progress of its technology update.

There has been considerable progress with regards to the SABCs technological renewal plans, it said.

The old TV, Sport, and News Playout workflow systems are being revamped. The new Graphics and Branding Systems are being implemented.

The contract for the Newsroom Computer System has been awarded, and implementation plans are in place, the SABC added.

It has awarded several other tenders, including contracts for content digitalisation, a new Scheduling and Advertising Management system, a revamped Enterprise Digital Library, and the SABCs own Over-the-top (OTT) Platform.

Content digitalisation refers to preserving legacy materials content unavailable in a digital format.

The SABC also said that all of its essential TV and radio facilities were being updated and that it is working on implementing Internet Protocol (IP) Broadcasting.

IP broadcasting is another term for video streaming, like the systems used by YouTube, Netflix, and Showmax. Content is streamed on-demand to viewers rather than broadcast over a shared network like satellite or regular terrestrial TV signals.

According to the SABC, it is also about to conclude the implementation of its radio playout (Dira!) system.

Red Tech reported that CGI the company behind the new system was awarded the contract via a tender process. It says the agreement has seen the SABC invest in CGIs full Dira! Solution Suite, including Onair Player, Highlander, Scheduler, Startrack, Orion, and Broadcast Report.

The SABCs aggressive technological renewal plans align with the public broadcasters digital migration drive.

During Cyril Ramaphosas 2021 State of the Nation Address, he announced that South Africa would switch off all analogue TV transmissions by April 2022.

In May 2021, the public broadcaster began warning viewers who dont have satellite TV that they would need to register for a digital decoder to continue receiving television broadcasts.

As of 15 February 2022, the Department of Communications and Digital Technologies has successfully switched off analogue transmissions in four of South Africas nine provinces.

The first province the Free State had its last transmitter switched off in November 2021. The other provinces that have switched off their analogue transmitters are the Northern Cape, North West Province, Mpumalanga, and, most recently, Limpopo.

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Big tech upgrades at the SABC including a Netflix competitor - MyBroadband