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LONDON Britain's super-regulator is about to inherit ministers' biggest tech headache.

In its attempt to tackle the long-lamented "wild west" of the internet, the U.K. government is putting its faith in Ofcom the existing telecoms and broadcast regulator which is rapidly expanding its remit, and size, to take on the job of Britain's newest tech sheriff.

Ofcom will be given new powers to shape tech companies' safety policies, and to investigate and issue large fines to search engines and social media platforms they judge have not done enough to protect their users from harm under proposals in the draft Online Safety Bill, which is due to be debated by MPs before Christmas.

The regulator has been on a recruiting spree in recent months as it gears up for its new role, and it will need an extra 300 people beyond its 1,000-strong workforce, Chief Executive Melanie Dawes told MPs last month. The staff it needs to fulfill its new remit will make it "by far the biggest beast" in online regulation, said Andrew Murray, a law professor specializing in technology at the London School of Economics.

Supporters of the proposals say an independent Ofcom will play a vital role in protecting internet users from harm which, until now, has been largely left to tech executives based in Silicon Valley. But some observers question whether politicians should be leaving an unelected regulator to work out the fine print of a groundbreaking law which will attempt to balance free speech with safeguarding users.

It is a situation they say will leave Ofcom in the eye of an inevitable political storm in the years ahead.

Ofcom is no stranger to controversy, and as the U.K.'s broadcast regulator it has long pondered issues of free speech. The watchdog occasionally creeps into the public consciousness as an adjudicator when there's a big television bust-up.

Earlier this year the regulator received a record 58,000 complaints after the controversial television host Piers Morgan went on the offensive against royal Meghan Markle. Ofcom ultimately ruled thatrestricting Morgan's views would be a "chilling restriction" on free expression.

But, unlike its broadcast role, the regulator will not look at direct complaints about whether individual pieces of content should or should not remain online. Instead, it will be more broadly tasked with deciding whether social media platforms have the right systems in place to protect their users.

One figure who worked on the bill earlier this year said that while independent regulation, and taking the U.K. government itself out of the equation, is the right thing to do, there is a risk ministers will turn their fire on the regulator during inevitable online controversies in the years ahead.

"When you have a whole load of horrific cases you will have a government minister standing at the despatch box saying: 'well these companies told Ofcom they were compliant.' Either the government will be forced to attack the regulator, or they will be forced to attack social media companies. If they attack the social media companies they are admitting that our own legislation doesn't work," they said.

But while they admitted the situation was imperfect, they challenged critics to come up with a better solution.

"Obviously independent regulation is the right thing to do because you don't want government regulating free speech," they added.

Under the draft bill, Ofcom will agree codes of practice with the tech companies governing how they tackle online harm. But Murray, of the London School of Economics, warns the legislation as currently drafted leaves Ofcom to fill in the gaps and do a lot of policy-setting.

They are going to set codes of practice and standards and values which then the platform will have to enforce through technology and human moderation, or a mixture of both probably, he said.Are Ofcom going to be sufficiently accountable for what is going to have a huge impact on peoples lives?"

"There is a real concern this is being done by the regulator and not by parliament. Parliament is saying you have got to do this, we are giving you the framework and the powers, now go away and do it. This is alarming, he said, arguing that such a move weakens the link between voters and big decisions.

With the exception of judicial review, or another form of direct enforcement through the courts, there is very little either the regulated industries or individuals can do in terms of accountability. You cant vote for your Ofcom chief executive every five years, or your Ofcom chairman, Murray warned.

Tech firms themselves have also warned that the proposals could leave them flat-footed. In its submission to MPs looking at the law, Google said a "lack of legal clarity" risks uncertainty that could detract from "quick and effective action to protect users."

"Some definitions are unclear and, with substantial details being left to Ofcom, a real operational burden will be placed on the regulator to implement this Bill in full, which could further delay a compliance regime being put in place," Google warns.

Opposition Labour MP Darren Jones, who sits on one of the parliamentary committees scrutinizing the Online Safety Bill, acknowledged the tricky balance to be struck in letting the regulators do their job and ensuring a democratic link.

He asked: "Parliament is unable to deal with defining issues that change quickly but who will hold the regulators to account for their decisions in a routine and timely way?"

Jones pointed to another controversial clause in the draft law which gives senior ministers the power to direct the regulator and said this is "not the answer either."

"We will need to consider what new checks and balances will be required," he said.

An Ofcom spokesperson insisted that only parliament can decide the scope and nature of the online safety laws, but said it was right the nominated regulator should be among those offering technical expertise and advice.

"Ofcom is independent from government, but we are fully accountable, both to parliament and the courts, he added.

A spokesperson for the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) said: "The Bill defines the harmful content companies will need to tackle and caters for harms that dont exist now but may do in future. It provides a clear framework for Ofcom to operate in, with checks and balances to ensure ministers and parliament are given appropriate oversight."

Putting the right people in place at Ofcom will also be crucial, those on all sides of the debate agree.

Sachin Jogia, who worked on developing Amazon's voice-activated technology Alexa, was recently appointed as the regulator's chief technology officer. But the recruitment of online safety policy principals in Tony Stower, a former lobbyist for children's charities the NSPCC and the 5Rights group, and former NewsGuard managing director Anna-Sophie Harling, have raised "red flags" among some in industry because of their previous advocacy against Big Tech, according to one lobbyist.

"Harms campaigners would rightly be upset if the team was staffed by former tech lobbyists. This is the equivalent," they said.

The Ofcom spokesperson quoted above pointed out that the organization has hired new colleagues from "Google to the NSPCC."

Murray, meanwhile, believes Ofcom has a really good executive team and some good specialists," including economists and technical experts.

Ofcom chief Dawes, a former Whitehall permanent secretary, is "not afraid of a fight," according to one former colleague, and will not shy away from "knotty, difficult decisions and arguments."

She is "personable" but "nobody's fool," the colleague added, pointing out the skills in "politics with a small p" she would have needed to get to the top of the U.K. civil service.

But Murray warned it would still be a challenge for the regulator to recruit people who understand so-called smart moderation technology which often uses artificial intelligence to automatically moderate posts.

They are never going to pay the same salaries as the likes of the platforms pay," he warned. "There are not enough good people who know this technology inside out, and those that do are highly in demand. It is a problem for any regulator in this sphere."

Ofcom is acquiring new skills and talent, both through training and by hiring specialists in areas like data and online technology, the Ofcom spokesperson said, adding it has also opened a new technology hub in Manchester to help attract skills and expertise from across the UK.

"We continue to work closely with Ofcom to make sure it has the resources to carry out its role as it recruits people with the necessary skills and policy expertise," the DCMS spokesperson said.

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UK hands Big Tech headache over to super-regulator - POLITICO.eu

Every time a dramatic, unforeseen political event happens, there follows a left-field fixation that some out-of-control technology created it. Whenever this fear about big tech comes around we are told that something new, even more toxic, has infiltrated our public discourse, triggering hatred towards politicians and public figures, conspiracy theories about Covid and even major political events like Brexit. The concern over anonymity online becomes a particular worry as if ending it will somehow, like throwing a blanket at a raging house fire, subdue our fevered state.

You may remember that during the summers onslaught of racist abuse towards black players in the England football team, instead of reckoning with the fact that racism still haunts this country, we busied ourselves with bluster about how cowards online would be silenced if we only just demanded they identify themselves.

We resort to this explanation, that shadowy social media somehow stimulate our worst impulses, despite there being little evidence that most abuse is from unidentifiable sources. After Englands defeat in the Euro 2020 final, Twitter revealed that 99% of the abuse on its site directed at England footballers was not anonymous.

The same arguments were made in the aftermath of MP David Amesss killing that doing something about online abuse would make politicians safer. It was a rehash of a 2018 moment when Theresa May pledged to regulate online behaviour because a tone of bitterness and aggression has entered into our public debate.

Good old social media, always there to paper over the giant cracks of our political failures. Bad tech is a convenient fall guy for a whole gang of perpetrators. It has been particularly useful in recent years, when Brexit has enabled rightwing politicians and press to engage in the most divisive, dangerous rhetoric, particularly towards the countrys political and legal institutions, then point to social media when that rhetoric serves its purpose of eroding tolerance and trust.

But when parliament and the supreme court attacked by the media and politicians for variously being saboteurs, traitors and opponents of the will of the people come under fire from members of the public, that is an entirely different matter. The faceless public becomes the only protagonist. This allows everyone, from the mainstream press to publishers of far-right conspiracy theories, to distance themselves from the scene of the crime and innocently propose earnest-sounding solutions to our countrys crises of racism and loss of faith in our politics.

The corrupting influence of technology companies is also a compelling explanation for them because it means that something can be done. This is partly down to a sort of dominant liberal technocratic sensibility that reaches for a tool kit to fix social and political problems, as one would approach a broken machine. The result is solutionism, the belief there is a technological remedy for most issues, because human behaviour is essentially rational and can be mapped out, analysed and then adjusted.

Its all so much easier than squaring up to the gnarly facts that the world is messy; humans are infinitely suggestible and manipulable; and most of the time our political behaviour is a manifestation of long-term currents spread by political parties and dominant economic ideologies. This reluctance to trace how we arrived at a place we dont like was clearly demonstrated by the stubbornness with which so many people held to the belief that Brexit was an aberration. Not acknowledging that it was, in fact, a culmination of a campaign that lasted years, and the result of our failed economic model and of decades of anti-immigration obsession. Someone must have cheated, these people told themselves, so a sort of tech calamity thesis carried the day. And the perfect culprit presented itself in the form of Cambridge Analytica and a convenient cartoon cast including shady Russian powers, Nigel Farage and Dominic Cummings.

The right, too, loves a tech panic to explain away unhappy results. Tech growing faster than it can be controlled and then turning on its creators is a universal bogeyman, a nervousness captured in Isaac Asimovs first law of robotics in 1942: A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.

When companies reach the scale and reach of Facebook, they can appear, to the right, a little too much like big governments infringing on individual privacy and freedoms. This fear is then easily capitalised on, and all sorts of unlikely victims can claim they are silenced by platforms biased against their politics. When Donald Trump intends to launch a new social media network to stand up to the tyranny of big tech, he is echoing the whine of many across the political spectrum. Those who, rather than admit their thinking is less popular than they would like, prefer to believe they are simply conspired against.

Social media companies do regularly fail in their responsibilities to manage the kind of hate speech and abuse that poses a danger for everyone from vulnerable children to ethnic minorities and members of parliament. It is clear that the management of harmful content online cannot be left to tech platforms themselves and that some form of regulation is now long overdue. One hopes the current UK online safety bill will now address that.

But fixating solely on reforming big tech risks turning into a huge displacement exercise. While we rightly focus on the excesses of tech platforms that have turned abuse and lies into lucre, we must also realise that the bad robot theory is tempting because it places the problem not only outside of our institutions, but outside of our very selves. There are other anonymous players who need to be named in this crisis of discord those parties in our politics and our media who have created so much discontent and hostility that it all regularly overflows in the sewers of social media.

Nesrine Malik is a Guardian columnist

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Our society is troubled. Beware those who blame it all on big tech - The Guardian

Traders on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) in New York, on Wednesday, Aug. 11, 2021.

Michael Nagle | Bloomberg | Getty Images

An earnings avalanche is coming in the week ahead that could put the stock market's recent gains to the test.

Apple, Microsoft, Alphabet, Facebook and Amazon the biggest of big cap tech are among the 30% of the S&P 500 companies reporting. A third of the Dow also releases results, including Caterpillar, Coca-Cola, Merck, Boeing and McDonald's.

"Next week is the real test," RBC head of U.S. equity strategy Lori Calvasina said. "We're getting a little bit in every sector."

Of the companies that have already reported, nearly 84% beat estimates. Earnings are so far expected to be up 34.8% over last year, based on actual reports and estimates, according to I/B/E/S data from Refinitiv.

"The tug-of-war in good versus bad earnings reports has landed in favor of the market with the S&P hitting an all-time high [Thursday]. That may run into difficulty next week," National Securities chief market strategist Art Hogan said. "We may finally be seeing some cracks in the earnings season."

The S&P 500 and Dow Jones Industrial Average notched fresh records this week, and the indexes have solid gains for the week. The S&P 500 gained 1.6% to 4,544, while the Dow ended the week up 1.1% at 35,677, the first record close since Aug. 16. Some strategists view the return to those highs as a signal the market is on track for a year-end rally.

The Nasdaq Composite was also 1.3% higher for the week, but it was down 0.8% on Friday as tech stocks declined.

"I think we're going to learn a lot from this reporting season," Calvasina said. "So far, so good. Better than feared, with no change to underlying demand. Companies are still managing through for the most part. Investors are punishing companies that aren't, but they're not punishing the whole market. The market seems very rational right now."

For instance, Intel shares were pummeled, falling more than 11.6% on Friday, after the company's sales missed expectations. Intel warned an industry-wide component shortage hurt its PC chip business. But other semiconductor stocks did not get pulled down in the decline. The VanEck Semiconductor ETF was down about 0.8%.

But Snap sent an industry-wide warning Thursday when its quarterly revenues missed expectations. The company reported that Apple's privacy changes introduced earlier this year affected its advertising business. The company also said that advertisers were holding back due to supply chain disruptions and labor shortages.

Facebook's earnings on Monday will be closely watched for any similar comments, as will reports from Alphabet and Twitter Tuesday. The three stocks fell Friday as Snap plunged 26.6%. Facebook lost more than 5%.

"Facebook has been the more broken name. It had the Instagram problem. It had the kid problem. It's had a hard time going up post-earnings. It will be interesting to see if all these problems are priced in or does it go even lower," T3Live.com chief strategic officer Scott Redler said.

Redler said the Snap news was a big surprise, since traders viewed social media as immune to supply chain problems. Even though social media was under pressure as a whole Friday, he said stocks have been able to diverge within sectors recently.

"Tesla was able to make a new high, and Netflix is at an all-time high. Every group has winners and losers, but overall the participation is better than it's been in a while. Five stocks aren't driving the S&P to the all-time highs," he said. "It's a bunch of stocks in every sector."

Traders are now watching the Russell 2000, since a breakout in small caps would be a positive for the overall market, he said. Redler trades the the iShares Russell 2000 ETF (IWM) which closed slightly lower at $227.41 Friday. "If the IWM gets above the $230 to $234 area, it could be a signal for more risk on at the end of the year," he said.

Redler said the market could be challenged in the coming week. "You just had a big 10-day move up. You would think there will be some digestion," he said. "I don't want to chase the market here. It feels like we could rest a little bit next week. If it could digest here, and we could get some individual stock movement, that would be healthier than the pain trade, which is straight up."

There are a few important economic reports in the week ahead, including durable goods Wednesday; third-quarter GDP Thursday and personal consumption expenditures Friday. Friday's data includes the PCE deflator, the preferred inflation gauge watched by the Federal Reserve.

The closely watched 10-year Treasury yield continued to edge higher in the past week, touching 1.70% before falling to 1.64% Friday. Market pros are watching to see if the yield will reach 1.74%, the closing high from March, and whether it will begin to worry stock investors. The 10-year yield hit this year's intraday high of 1.776% on March 30.

"I would say over the next week or two, it's possible we test it, but I would be a little surprised at this stage if it sustainably breaks through," NatWest Markets' John Briggs said. He noted that yields have been moving higher, as investors now anticipate the Federal Reserve could raise interest rates next year and as the market anticipates more inflation.

"I get a sense that people are more interested in buying here rather than selling," he said. Bond yields move inversely to price. It could be a busy week in the market, as investors adjust for the end of the month

Briggs notes the front end, or the 2-year note yield, has moved faster than the longer end. He said that reflects the market's increased expectation for rate hikes next year, with two hikes expected by the market in the second half of the year.

Monday

Earnings: Facebook, Restaurant Brands, Otis Worldwide, Kimberly-Clark, Owens-Illinois, HSBC, TrueBlue

Tuesday

Earnings: Alphabet, Microsoft, Visa, Advanced Micro Devices, Texas Instruments, Twitter, Chubb, 3M, General Electric, Robinhood, Eli Lilly, UPS, Novartis, JetBlue, Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, Archer Daniels Midland, Sherwin-Williams, Invesco, Hasbro, Boston Properties, Teradyne, Fortune Brands, Hawaiian Holdings, NCR, Boyd Gaming

9:00 a.m. S&P/Case-Shiller home prices

9:00 a.m. FHFA home prices

10:00 a.m. New home sales

10:00 a.m. Consumer confidence

Wednesday

Earnings: Coca-Cola, McDonald's, Boeing, General Motors, Ford, Bristol-Myers Squibb, Kraft Heinz, Norfolk Southern, Glaxo SmithKline, General Dynamics, Brink's, Automatic Data, CME Group, International Paper, Penske Auto Group, eBay, Cognizant, Extra Space Storage, KLA Corp, Aflac, Harley-Davidson, Flex, Suncor, BioMarin, Community Health Systems, iRobot

8:30 a.m. Durable goods

8:30 a.m. Advance economic indicators

Thursday

Earnings: Apple, Amazon, Caterpillar, Comcast, Merck, Northrop Grumman, Altria, Intercontinental Exchange, Sirius XM, Yum Brands, American Tower, Gilead Sciences, Starbucks, Molson Coors, T. Rowe Price, Airbus, Anheuser-Busch InBev, Sanofi, STMicroelectronics, Volkswagen, Royal Dutch Shell, Stanley Black & Decker, AllianceBernstein, Check Point Software, Brunswick, Oshkosh

8:30 a.m. Jobless claims

8:30 a.m. Q3 advance real GDP

10:00 a.m. Pending home sales

Friday

Earnings: Chevron, AbbVie, Colgate-Palmolive, Lazard, Booz Allen Hamilton, Weyerhaeuser, Church and Dwight, CBOE Global Markets, Newell Brands, W.W. Grainger, Cerner, Aon, Charter Communications, Phillips 66, Daimler, Nomura, Eni, BNP Paribas

8:30 a.m. Personal income/spending

8:30 a.m. Q3 employment cost index

9:45 a.m. Chicago PMI

10:00 a.m. Consumer sentiment

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Big Tech earnings in the week ahead could test stocks' recent rally - CNBC

Traders work on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) in New York City, U.S., October 20, 2021. REUTERS/Brendan McDermid

Oct 21 (Reuters) - The Dow on Thursday eased from a record high hit in the previous session as IBM shares fell after its quarterly report, with the potential impact of supply chain disruptions and labor shortages on profits taking the center stage this earnings season.

The benchmark S&P 500 index (.SPX) edged lower, but was just about 10 points short of its early September record, while the Nasdaq (.IXIC) drew support from a rise in mega-cap growth companies.

"Stocks are climbing to new highs and anytime the market is trading at or near its all-time high, it is not unusual to see a little bit of more intraday volatility...and it should not concern investors," said Tom Mantione, managing director, UBS Private Wealth Management in Stamford, Connecticut.

Six of the 11 major S&P 500 sectors were trading lower, with energy stocks (.SPNY) falling the most.

IBM (IBM.N) tumbled 8.2% after it missed market estimates for quarterly revenue as its managed infrastructure business suffered from a decline in orders. read more

Investors are keeping a close eye on growth outlook from companies facing rising costs, labor shortages and supply chain constraints, with analysts expecting profit of S&P 500 companies to rise 33.7% from a year earlier, according to Refinitiv data.

"They (supply chain constraints) definitely are a concern. Things like semiconductor chips in particular have held back the economy to some degree and have put some upward pressure on inflation," said Jon Adams, senior investment strategist for BMO Global Asset Management.

Tesla Inc (TSLA.O) erased early declines to rise 3.0% as investors digested the EV maker's upbeat earnings, despite the company warning of supply-chain hurdles. read more

Other growth stocks including Facebook Inc (FB.O), Microsoft Corp (MSFT.O) and Amazon.com Inc (AMZN.O) were higher by early afternoon trading.

Data showed the number of Americans filing new claims for unemployment benefits dropped to a 19-month low last week, pointing to a tightening labor market, though a shortage of workers could keep the pace of hiring moderate in October. read more

At 12:00 p.m. ET, the Dow Jones Industrial Average (.DJI) was down 111.47 points, or 0.31%, at 35,497.87, the S&P 500 (.SPX) was down 2.15 points, or 0.05%, at 4,534.04 and the Nasdaq Composite (.IXIC) was up 38.84 points, or 0.26%, at 15,160.52.

American Airlines (AAL.O) rose 1.2% after posting a smaller-than-expected quarterly loss, while Southwest Airlines Co (LUV.N) fell 1.5% after it said it expected current quarter profits to remain elusive.

HP Inc (HPQ.N) gained 5.9% as brokerages raised their price targets on the stock after the personal computer and printer maker forecast upbeat fiscal 2022 adjusted profit and raised its annual dividend.

Declining issues outnumbered advancers for a 1.60-to-1 ratio on the NYSE and for a 1.22-to-1 ratio on the Nasdaq.

The S&P index recorded 48 new 52-week highs and no new low, while the Nasdaq recorded 84 new highs and 24 new lows.

Reporting by Shreyashi Sanyal and Devik Jain in Bengaluru; Editing by Arun Koyyur

Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

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Dow hit by IBM results, Nasdaq rises on gains in Big Tech - Reuters

If you need evidence that Big Tech firms are starting to worry about the growing movement to diffuse their immense market power, look no further than their newest scare tactic: using China as an excuse to avoid antitrust scrutiny.

Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple, and the nonprofit proxies they pay to defend them have put a lot of effort into trying to convince America that subjecting Big Tech to more stringent antitrust enforcement or regulation would have dire consequences. Theyve warned that innovation would suffer, but that rings hollow when so many of the new innovative companies are already being bought up (and then often shut down) by Big Tech.

Theyve suggested that antitrust action might result in the loss of the free services weve come to depend upon. But how do they call their services free when we pay for them by giving them all of our personal data, which they store and monetize, and when they rely on our content to make their platforms valuable in the first place?

Big Tech firms have told us we should be grateful for the superior quality of their services, which could suffer if they were broken up. But then again, one could argue that Google Search was better before it was filled with ads.

YouTube was better before its algorithms tried to corrupt our children and amplify the reach of terrorists. Facebook was better before it censored people of faith and conservatives, while protecting those who post revenge porn. Instagram was better before it drove our teenagers to anxiety and depression. Amazon was better before it silenced conservative authors and raised questions about its influence on a multibillion-dollar defense contract.

Having failed with each of those claims, Big Tech has turned to a new bogeyman: China. Antitrust enforcement actions against Big Techor legislation aimed at restoring and protecting competition in Big Tech marketswould risk crippling Americas ability to combat the growing threat from Communist China, or so the line goes. The cynicism would be offensive if the argument werent so laughable.

Its not just lobbyists bringing these arguments to my office and others on Capitol Hill. Earlier this summer, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt said in an interview, These gross proposals like breaking them up and so forth, its not going to be helpful because its going to set us back against China.

Last month, the National Security Institute began a series examining the national security implications of antitrust challenges at home and abroad. The first panel featured Big Tech defenders suggesting the antitrust laws were written for late-19th-century monopolists and are too outdated to deal with Big Tech, and that Big Tech is a driver for research that is essential to national security. Antitrust scrutiny, they implied, might hinder the companies ability to compete with China, who wont be imposing the same restraints on their own companies.

Like every other excuse Big Tech has made, this too rings hollow and we should flatly reject it. That doesnt mean the antitrust laws should be enforced in the absence of actual anticompetitive harm. Nor does it mean that we should radically alter our antitrust laws to embrace a big is bad philosophy. But the idea that Big Tech should be treated with kid gloves makes no sense. The fact is, American ingenuity is strong enough to compete and win on the merits without coddling or amnesty from our antitrust laws.

Competition, and the innovation and disruption that facilitate it, are what made these companies American success stories. That same competition, innovation, and disruption are what will keep them at their best or make way for the next great American success story. You see, competition in Big Tech doesnt threaten American, it threatens the monopolistsand that makes America stronger.

Insulating American companies from competition out of a fear of foreign competitors will do the opposite of what Big Tech claims to want: we will be stuck with stagnant monopolists too complacent either to benefit American consumers or to protect us from foreign threats.

In fact, it is Big Tech companies themselves that pose the greatest threat when it comes to China. They not only cant protect us from foreign threats, but in some cases actively cooperate with them.

Google has been accused of working with the Chinese military, and has acknowledged developing a filtered version of its search engine to satisfy Chinese censors. Amazon has been working with a Chinese partner to expand its web-hosting services in the highly censored country.

The New York Times revealed earlier this year that Applewhich assembles nearly all of its products in China has stored data on Chinese government servers, shared customer data with the Chinese government, removed apps from its App Store to appease the Chinese government, and banned apps from a critic of the Chinese Communist Party. The Times also alleged that Facebook was courting the Chinese government in 2016 by developing a censorship tool. Facebook has admitted to sharing data with Chinese state-owned companies, and last year it undertook to expand its Chinese ad business.

These are the benevolent corporate heroes who are going to save us from the Chinese threat? Give me a break.

Far from saving us, it seems like the habits of their new Chinese friends are rubbing off on our Big Tech big brothers. In a way, Silicon Valley is helping America keep up with China: now we too have censored speech on the internet, constant surveillance, and tightly controlled marketplaces.

Instead of embracing the very crony capitalism that has been so destructive to American prosperity in the past, American firms should spend more energy competing on the merits for Americans business, and less time cozying up to Chinese bureaucrats. The free market should pick winners and losers, not Communist apparatchiks.

This whole episode leads me to only one conclusion: insisting that antitrust enforcers pull their punches or risk impairing our ability to face the threats from China is nothing short of corporate extortion, a protection racket at a global scale. What we need is more competition, and less protectionism. The only way we will defeat the economic threat of communist China is by empowering American businesses to challenge and disrupt the would-be Chinese collaborators that make up Big Tech.

The hypocrisy is glaring: Big Tech wants to assist Communist China in exchange for access to its economy, while pointing to the Chinese threat as an excuse for anticompetitive and monopolistic conduct in the United States. Americans deserve better, and we should refuse to entertain this disingenuous and insulting excuse.

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Big Tech Falsely Claims They're Protecting Americans From China - The Federalist

Another former Facebook employee on Friday submitted a complaint to the U.S. government, bolstering whistleblower Frances Haugen's recent criticism of the company in testimony to Congress and other formal complaints, and sparking fresh calls for accountability.

"It's time for immediate action to hold the company accountable for the many harms it's inflicted on our democracy."

The new whistleblower affidavit submitted to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) was obtained by The Washington Post, which reports that the unidentified ex-employee accuses Facebookwhich may get a new name in a rebranding as early as next weekof prioritizing growth and profits over limiting the spread of problematic content.

"Facebook cannot govern itself," said Eric Null, U.S. policy manager at the group Access Now, in response to the Post's reporting. "The company repeatedly fails to live up to its promises, and, thanks to the whistleblowers and other prominent research, we have the receipts."

Null and other critics of the company were quick to reiterate demands for action by U.S. lawmakers and the Federal Trade Commission (FTC).

"Given what we now know about Facebook's singular focus on growth over addressing its destructive behavior, and that it has been perpetuating and causing civil rights-related harms, Congress and the FTC need to crack down on Facebook and all big tech companies," Null said. "Legislation, or FTC rules, should include strict data protection provisions that put an end to the pernicious hyper-targeting and data-obsessed advertising business model. Without it, Facebook, and Big Tech in general, will continue to wreak havoc at home and around the world."

Free Press Action co-CEO Jessica Gonzlez similarly said in a statement that "the latest whistleblower revelations confirm what many of us have been sounding the alarm about for years. Facebook is not fit to govern itself."

"The social-media giant is already trying to minimize the value and impact of these whistleblower exposs, including Frances Haugen's," she said, accusing the company of "conducting a serial cover-up of practices that put communities of color and other minorities at great risk for hate, harassment, violence, and disinformation campaigns."

Taking aim at the company's CEO, Gonzlez added that "not only are Mark Zuckerberg and other Facebook executives failing to protect our elections and keep our communities safe, they are failing to fulfill their responsibilities to the company's shareholders."

"Zuckerberg has made multiple appearances before Congress and nothing has changed," she said. "It's time for Congress and the Biden administration to investigate a Facebook business model that profits from spreading the most extreme hate and disinformation. It's time for immediate action to hold the company accountable for the many harms it's inflicted on our democracy."

The Post reports that the SEC affidavit alleges Facebook officials "routinely undermined efforts to fight misinformation, hate speech, and other problematic content out of fear of angering then-President Donald Trump and his political allies, or out of concern about potentially dampening the user growth key to Facebook's multibillion-dollar profits."

As the newspaper explains:

Friday's filing is the latest in a series since 2017 spearheaded by former journalist Gretchen Peters and a group she leads, the Alliance to Counter Crime Online. Taken together, the filings argue that Facebook has failed to adequately address dangerous and criminal behavior on its platforms, including Instagram, WhatsApp, and Messenger. The alleged failings include permitting terrorist content, drug sales, hate speech, and misinformation to flourish, while also failing to adequately warn investors about the potential risks when such problems surface, as some have in news reports over the years.

"Zuckerberg and other Facebook executives repeatedly claimed high rates of success in restricting illicit and toxic contentto lawmakers, regulators, and investorswhen in fact they knew the firm could not remove this content and remain profitable," Peters said in a statement.

The "most anguished line in the affidavit" relates to military officials in Myanmar using Facebook to spread hate speech during mass killings of Rohingya people, according to the Post. The whistleblower wrote that "I, working for Facebook, had been a party to genocide."

In a statement to the newspaper, Facebook spokesperson said that its "approach in Myanmar today is fundamentally different from what it was in 2017, and allegations that we have not invested in safety and security in the country are wrong." Asked about toxic content more broadly, she said that "we have every commercial and moral incentiveto try to give the maximum number of people as much of a positive experience as possible on Facebook."

Just hours after reporting on and reactions to the new affidavit, The New York Times revealed Friday evening that internal Facebook documents show "employees sounded an alarm about misinformation and inflammatory content on the platform and urged action" both before and after last year's U.S. election, "but the company failed or struggled to address the issues."

One internal report highlighted by the Timesand previously published in full by BuzzFeed Newswas about Facebook Groups, which, according to the new whistleblower, the company fails to adequately police. The report was specifically about users exploiting the Groups feature to "rapidly form election delegitimization communities on the site" leading up to January 6, when a right-wing mob stormed the U.S. Capitol.

"Hindsight being 20/20 makes it all the more important to look back," the internal report said, "to learn what we can about the growth of the election delegitimizing movements that grew, spread conspiracy, and helped incite the Capitol insurrection."

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New Whistleblower Sparks Calls to 'Crack Down on Facebook and All Big Tech Companies' - Common Dreams

Tesla CEO Elon Musk on Wednesday took a dig at big tech companies such as Google. Musk said, "most big companies in tech have turned into places where talent goes to die."Musk's tweet was in response to a tweet posted by user JD Ross, who accused Google of turning brilliant young techies into complacent careerists.This is not the first time that the tech billionaire has called out big tech. Earlier, Musk had blamed Facebook in a tweet for the violence at the US Capitol in January.On Tuesday, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey threw shade at Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his recent announcement about the metaverse. Dorsey commented on a tweet giving the etymology term "metaverse," describing it as, "a virtual world owned corporations where end users were treated as citizens in a dystopian corporate dictatorship".

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Most big tech firms have become places where talent goes to die: Elon Musk - Economic Times

The stream of Facebook privacy scandals may have you questioning how much the social network and other tech giants actually know about you.

Here's a hint: practically everything.

WebsiteSecurity Baronexamined the privacy policies of Facebook, Google, Apple, Twitter, Amazon, and Microsoft and put together a handy infographic showing the types of data each company admits to collecting. For Facebook and others,data is money. But just how much these tech giants actually know about you might be surprising.

As you can see in the infographic below, Facebook is particularly data-hungry: It gathers information about your work, income level, race, religion, political views, and the ads you click in addition to more commonly collected data points such as your phone number, email address, location, and the type of devices you use.

"Facebook is unusually aggressive," Security Baronpointed out. "This data can be exploited by advertisers and (hopefully not nefarious) others."

Twitter, in comparison, is "comparatively hands-off," the site notes. The microblogging service, for instance, doesn't collect your name, gender, or birthday (as Facebook, Google, and Microsoft all do), but Twitter does know your phone number, email address, time zone, what videos you watch, and more.

Google and Microsoft are the other big players when it comes to collecting data.

"With Cortana listening in and Gmail seeing all of your emails, the ubiquitous nature of Google and Microsoft gives them access to an uncomfortably large amount of your information," Security Baron wrote.

Check out the full infographic to see what Facebook, Google, Apple, Twitter, Amazon, and Microsoft may know about you. For tips on securing your digital privacy, check our story, "Online Data Protection 101: Don't Let Big Tech Get Rich Off Your Info.

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What Does Big Tech Know About You? Basically Everything - PCMag AU

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Hello and welcome to Daily Crunch for October 21, 2021! News today was all over the map, including a number of items dealing with a very particular former U.S. president. TechCrunch has all the details, along with lots of crypto-focused news, product updates from Big Tech and a cacophony of startup items. Lets go! Alex

Kicking off our startup coverage today, founder and operator group The Fund is putting together The Fund XX, which TechCrunch reports will become a community of women investors and entrepreneurs that will make pre-seed and seed-stage investments. Something to keep an eye on.

Next, well take a look at a triple threat of crypto stories, and then dig into a host of discrete startup news items:

And now, the rest of the news:

The tide is high for startup founders who are looking to raise their first round in October 2021.

But easy money can create special pressure for early-stage founders, according to Lightup.ai founder Manu Bansal.

You cant speed up GTM with more money. If valuations go up astronomically, I remind myself that I have to deliver performance, he says.

If I cannot show traction, sooner or later this beast will come back to haunt me. Id rather avoid the price runners.

(TechCrunch+ is our membership program, which helps founders and startup teams get ahead. You can sign up here.)

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Daily Crunch: To stand up to the tyranny of Big Tech, Trump launches social network - TechCrunch

Bill Gates speaks during the Global Investment Summit at the Science Museum on October 19, 2021 in London, England. Leon Neal - WPA Pool /Getty Images

Climate tech, a term encompassing everything from electric vehicles to battery innovationto space meat,is not only the key to saving Earth and humanity, but also a lucrative investment opportunity, according to Bill Gates.

Speaking atthe virtual SOSV Climate Tech Summit on Wednesday, first reported by CNBC, the retired Microsoft founder said investing in climate tech in the long run could produce returns comparable to gains achieved by the worlds largest tech companies today.

There will be eight Teslas, ten TeslasThere will be Microsoft, Google, Amazon-type companies that come out of this space, Gates said. As of today, he is the worlds fourth richest person with a net worth of $133 billion, according to Bloomberg Billionaires Index. The top two on the list are owners of Tesla and Amazon.

For the winners, anybody who invested in Tesla is feeling very smart, Gates said, noting that Teslas market value has skyrocketed 2,000 percent in the past five years.

However, just like those Big Tech success stories, climate tech is a long gameand its also risky. Even for Tesla, the company was losing money for 16 years before turning a profit. It took Amazon and Google three decades to grow from garage startups to trillion-dollar tech conglomerates.

Likening the current stage of climate tech to the early days of the internet bubble, Gates warned that we may see a high failure rate despite the fact that the sector has no shortage of promising ideas. Somebody who cant afford risk or if you expect near-term returns, you know, I would look elsewhere, he said.

Much of the climate technology we see today is at the lab level, Gates noted. Cutting-edge areas like nuclear fusion, nuclear fission and energy storage, for example, would require hundreds of millions or, in the case of nuclear, billions [of dollars] to test out. And even then, Youre not quite sure whether [those technologies] are going to be able to contribute or not, he added.

Gates himself has invested heavily in early-stage climate tech startups. Some of them have gone public, fetching multibillion-dollar valuations, despite the fact that most of them dont yet have an actual product or a viable business model. Gates private VC firm, Breakthrough Energy Ventures, is an investor behind EV battery startup QuantumScape, energy storage startup ESS, hydrogen plane maker ZeroAvia, among others.

QuantumScape went public through a SPAC merger in November 2020. After an initial surge in its first weeks of trading, share price has stayed flat during this year so far. ESS went public through a similar reverse merger structure earlier this month.

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Bill Gates Says Climate Startups Have Big Tech PotentialBut Theyre Not for Everyone - Observer