Category Archives: Big Tech

Margrethe Vestager, European Commission executive vice president and commissioner for competition, has a game plan to protect whistleblowers. | POLITICO Illustration

Margrethe Vestager has been waiting for an administration like this the European Unions top tech cop says its a dream come true to have a president in the White House whos dedicated to reeling in Big Tech. But what will that EU-U.S. cooperation look like? Thats what host Ryan Heath wants to know. Also on the docket: Vestagers game plan to protect whistleblowers, plus her own rules for tech at home.

I think it's really, really interesting what is happening in the U.S. right now both on competition law enforcement and the signals sent there, with Lina [Khan]s appointment, with [Jonathan] Kanter, with the executive order. That is like a dream come true to see a president take that kind of interest in so many different markets. - Margrethe Vestager, European Commission executive vice president and commissioner for competition

I know this sounds like a slogan, but it's better to have 80 percent now than 100 percent never. And this is basically where you are on taxation: If you're asking for perfect, you're never going to get it. But if we could get a floor under corporate taxation and we could get sort of a fair distribution of taxing rights, we would have taken a major step towards tax justice. This ought to happen this autumn.

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Europe's top 'tech cop' is ready to take on Big Tech with America - POLITICO

Finally, weve reached bipartisan consensus on Big Tech, yay everyone! At least thats the line the press is echoing ad nauseum. Facebook Whistleblower Reignites Bipartisan Support for Curbing Big Tech, the Financial Times trumpeted last week after Frances Haugens Senate testimony on Facebook. Lawmakers Send Big Tech a Bipartisan Antitrust Message, Newsweek wrote a day later. For more than a year, but especially after last weeks US Senate hearing, the media has been increasingly suggesting that Democrats and Republicans are setting aside their long-standing disagreements on tech policy.

But beyond their triumphant headlines, many of these articles note (often clumsily) that the consensus is merely an opinion that some kind of regulation for Big Tech is needed. This is where the idea of bipartisan consensus crumbles, and where the danger in this expression lies.

Its true that in the past few years American lawmakers have become far more outspoken about Silicon Valley technology giants, their products and services, and their market practices. Yet merely agreeing that something must be done, and on that alone, is about as superficial as bipartisan consensus gets. Elected representatives of both parties still have disagreements about what that something is, why that something should happen, and what the problems are in the first place. All these factors are shaping both the proposed regulations in Congress and the path forward to making them reality.

On top of this, the media separating national politics from the tech legislation process only threatens to repeat the problems of the last several decades, where imagining technology as non-political is conducive to regulators and society ignoring dangers right in front of them. This overblown rhetoric skews analysis of the difficult road ahead to real, substantive regulationand just how many threats to democracy (and democratic tech legislation) lie from within.

For decades, liberal democracies from the United States to France to Australia consistently touted the internet as a free, secure, and resilient golden child of democracy. US leaders in particular, from Bill Clintons Jell-O-to-a-wall speech in 2000 to the State Departments so-called internet freedom agenda of 2010, hailed the webs power to topple authoritarianism worldwide. Left alone, this logic went, democratic governments could enable the internet to be as pro-democracy as possible.

The groundswell of calls to regulate Big Tech today is no small change. While its tempting to see this shift as unilateral, some parts of the media often forget that tech is not a monolith and that many disparate incidents have led to many disparate calls for regulation: the Equifax data breach, the Cambridge Analytica privacy scandal, Russian ransomware attacks, Covid misinformation, disinformation campaigns targeting Black voters, uses of racist and sexist algorithms, abusive police uses of surveillance technology, and on and on. Not all lawmakers care equally, or at all, about these issues.

Data breaches and ransomware would seem to be two areas with the greatest potential for consensus legislation; members of Congress hardly stand up to profess their belief in lowering the cybersecurity bar and making their constituents vulnerable to attacks. Earlier this year, after multiple, significantly damaging ransomware attacks launched from within Russia, members of both parties condemned the behavior and highlighted how Congress and the White House could respond by sanctioning Russian actors and investing more in domestic security. The House and Senate held ransomware hearings in July, building on important civil society work to drive bipartisan responses to the threat.

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There Is No Bipartisan Consensus on Big Tech - WIRED

I think a lot of people across the country saw candidate Biden as a centrist moderate, said Carl Szabo, vice president of NetChoice, a coalition with members including Facebook, Google and Amazon. And it turns out that he is definitely interested in advancing left-wing and progressive politics at all levels of the government, including at the antitrust level.

A flyer circulated by NetChoice in Congress last week urged senators to oppose Kanters nomination, accusing the Biden administration of trying to con Republicans into supporting a progressive advocate, NOT an impartial enforcer who would use antitrust enforcement to circumvent Congress to advance progressive policies.

Equally caught off guard were antitrust observers on both sides of the debate those who believe increased regulation would ensure competition and protect consumers, and others who say breakups and overregulation hurt innovation and U.S. global competitiveness.

After Donald Trumps victory in the 2016 presidential election, there was a genuine reflection on the approach to economic policy among the Democratic establishment and a realization that there was a critical field of policy that they never paid attention to, said Sarah Miller, executive director of the American Economic Liberties Project, which favors stricter regulations.

They needed to turn the page for their agenda to succeed, Miller said. And that, even to my surprise, is what they have done.

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Biden's nominees show embrace of progressive views of Big Tech - Roll Call

We need something like the EPA to curb the lies that pollute social media

In 1969, the Cuyahoga River in Cleveland caught fire as a result of many years of factory pollution spewing into the river. During the same period, the Charles River was off limits as a result of pollution spewed from upland sources (the Standells, Dirty Water). These events, among other episodes, spawned the Environmental Protection Agency in the early 1970s. Today, both rivers are cleaned up and represent recreational resources available to the communities they serve. I think most people would agree that the birth of the EPA was pivotal in creating the natural environment we enjoy today.

Now, in 2021, we have a different kind of pollution, spewing from far-right pundits who widely spread lies related to COVID-19, the 2020 election, the Sandy Hook school shooting, and other concerns, fueling hate and distrust among the ignorant and gullible. The minimalist approach discussed by Hiawatha Bray in his Oct. 6 Tech Lab column (Big Tech is a major problem. Big Government might make it worse, Business), I fear, would be totally ineffective. Rather, I suggest that, just as the EPA was created to fight environmental pollution nationwide, tough laws regulating so-called free speech be enacted to control todays selfish, irresponsible behavior. Holding Internet platforms that enable distribution of such filth accountable, as we did with factories of old, would be a good start.

Tom Pawlina

Melrose

Protecting public from falsehood is a legitimate function of government

In Big Tech is a major problem. Big Government might make it worse, Hiawatha Bray seems confused by the notion of truth. Citing statements by White House press secretary Jen Psaki and Senator Elizabeth Warren, he asserts that they wish to silence speech they find objectionable. In both cases, they were referring to false health claims, not differences of opinion. And while it may shock Bray, this is a legitimate function of government. Both the Federal Trade Commission and the Food and Drug Administration regularly decide the truth of health claims, protecting the American public from fraud and threats to their health. Does Bray believe that these agencies are making things worse?

Saul Tannenbaum

Cambridge

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Big Tech, Big Government, bigger concerns - The Boston Globe

Facebook has been in hot water before. But this time could be different.

In these fights to regulate telecom and tech, the tech side is coming with a much bigger and deeper army than the civil society side, and certainly much deeper pools of people than these congressional offices that are charged with writing this legislation, carrying out hearings, asking the right questions and zeroing in on the right issues, Hempowicz said. [Congress] is dramatically outmatched.

Klobuchar, who leads the Senate Judiciary antitrust subcommittee, complained Oct. 5 that legislative action on tech has stalled because of the sheer volume of lobbyists that the companies have hired. Every time I think Ive got something done, some other lobbyist pops up, she said in an interview during a break in a hearing with Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen.

Later the same day, Klobuchars deputy legislative director and counsel April Jones announced in an email to Senate staff that she is leaving to join Apples government affairs team. Im excited about my next chapter, the tech and telecom expert wrote in the email obtained by POLITICO.

Jones is far from alone. An exodus of top tech staffers has particularly struck the Senate Commerce Committee, which has jurisdiction over most tech and telecom issues.

John Branscome, the panels leading Democratic tech staffer, joined Facebook's federal policy team this month. Shawn Bone, his deputy, left for Verizon. And Lara Muldoon left the office of committee Chair Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.) this year to join the Information Technology Industry Council, a tech trade group, as its senior director of government affairs.

Such departures can make passing complicated legislation more difficult.

You always hate to lose the really talented ones that have been there a while, who not only know the policy well but know the potential pitfalls and opportunities and the best way to get your policy moved into law because it's not always a straight line, said former House Energy and Commerce Chair Greg Walden (R-Ore.), who retired last year after spending decades negotiating tech topics.

I would say these, call them old hands, they knew those opportunities really well, to get things done, added Walden, whose consulting work includes tech and telecom clients. And the leverage points.

Blame the atmosphere as well as longtime institutional struggles for retaining this talent, according to longtime watchers of Congress.

2021 created a perfect storm fueling these departures, said one of the congressional staffers who left for industry this year, who requested anonymity to speak frankly. That ex-staffer tallied the combination of Covid pandemic restrictions, the Jan. 6 insurrection by pro-Trump supporters and the breakdown in camaraderie among Democrats and Republicans. The individual also noted what may be an ideal hiring window for longtime Democrats theyre in high demand given the partys leadership role, but that window could soon close given 2022 midterm elections that could put Republicans in charge of the House or Senate.

Its also hard to avoid the significant pay disparities between Capitol Hill staffers, who typically make anywhere between $35,000 and $150,000 per year depending on their position, and industry lobbyists, who can make significantly more, particularly in the wealthy tech and telecom sectors.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi recently announced that she was raising the salary cap for senior aides to $199,300, more than almost any members of Congress earn. But aides and lawmakers have fretted that such steps may not be enough to stop staff from fleeing.

It's hard to keep very talented people here when the private sector is offering so much more money, Rep. Mike Doyle, the Pennsylvania Democrat who chairs the House Energy and Commerce telecom subcommittee, told POLITICO. They have families and careers to think about. You get people that want to come back, they go out for a while and make some money and then they want to come back.

Pelosis move to uncap staff salaries may help, though, Doyle added.

Some lawmakers argue that Congress needs additional ways to build up its dedicated policy expertise, beyond relying on any one staffer or committee, such as reviving the long-dormant Office of Technology Assessment that House Republicans defunded in the 1990s. Such efforts have faltered in recent years, despite attempts to bring back the research arm in light of the Hills tussles with tech giants.

Some lawmakers and observers say the staff churn can bring an unexpected upside by uncorking longtime impasses, at least once new employees get up to speed. Departures can free up the gears and let things move, Walden argued, pointing to the benefit of fresh eyes.

One Capitol Hill staffer who works on tech issues, who requested anonymity to speak frankly, said many of the recent departures have been institutionalists who were wary of aggressive changes, particularly on issues like overhauling the 1996 law that shields online companies from many lawsuits. The staffer expressed optimism that new aides will be less beholden to the status quo.

Another cause of Congress talent drain is the Biden administration, which has hired Democratic staffers for White House and agency jobs though Hill veterans say this too can bring policy benefits. These transitions often give senior lawmakers a familiar ear in the administration on tech and telecom issues and can harmonize approaches between Congress and the executive branch.

Multiple House Energy and Commerce tech staff have landed in such roles: Biden nominated the panels telecom and consumer protection chief counsel, Alex Hoehn-Saric, to chair the Consumer Product Safety Commission, while Doyles longtime telecom aide Phil Murphy is now a senior adviser at the Commerce Departments National Telecommunications and Information Administration, which oversees debates about expanding broadband, protecting data privacy and allocating spectrum. Cantwell aides have landed legislative affairs positions at the White House Office of Science and Technology and the Commerce Department.

Some people downplayed the turnover as normal for Congress, saying many smart individuals are ready to jump into the vacant Hill roles.

People come and go, and the place doesn't fall apart, Doyle remarked. It's amazing, isn't it?

Indeed, Cantwell just announced she is filling a committee telecom staff vacancy with a longtime staffer for Sen. Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii), and Doyle quickly filled his aides role with an ex-staffer who worked for former Sen. Mark Pryor (D-Ark.). Even so, these hires have spent years working for big industry players, a fact that will do little to soothe concerns about Washingtons revolving door. The new Cantwell senior counsel had previously spent years at Charter Communications, and Doyles staffer spent years at wireless trade group CTIA.

Walden saw a practical side to this revolving door for staffers, remarking that so many of them just get so bored in their industry jobs that they can't wait to get back into the middle of things and come back to the Hill for a lot less pay.

But others warn that Congress needs an unvarnished perspective to properly wrestle with the deep, monied interests at play. Hurd says lawmakers themselves need to develop the working knowledge to address these complexities.

We are in those moments you want your public servants to have the staff and the resources they need to effectively stand up to industry, Hempowicz cautioned.

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Big tech sweeps up Hill staffers just when Congress needs them the most - POLITICO

Former Facebook employee turned whistleblower Frances Haugen testified before a U.S. Senate subcommittee last week that Facebook and some other social media companies allow their platforms to be used for anti-democratic, divisive and hateful purposes. She also alleged, while providing documents stolen when she worked as a product manager at Facebook, that the company had in its possession research that proved this but that its leadership ignores the research because the company makes huge profits from the contentious and vitriolic content posted on its platform.

Much of this discussion has been pitched as a problem of technology and policy with global implications. But little attention has been given to the implications for local communities. I see three potential areas of concern for local-government officials: First, many fringe groups are using news feeds and content from social media to target public officials, even to the point of threatening their lives. Second, local governments are either purchasing technology or outsourcing network infrastructure to private firms that utilize some of the same technology that Facebook and others are under fire for. And finally, local governments are offering Facebook, Google and other Big Tech firms lucrative tax breaks to lure their operations to their communities.

Sadly, the issues raised by Haugen before Congress and on 60 Minutes are hard for some to understand. Facebook, Google, Twitter and other social media and search platforms collect a large amount of data on users through web cookies and other tracking technologies. What is problematic is what happens next: Facebook and other companies use the data to determine preferences and tastes and then target users with ads and content using algorithms and artificial intelligence.

Then there is the problem of content itself. The algorithmic amplification process sometimes takes users to sites they are not looking for. Recently, when I was searching for pro-civil rights sites, I was redirected to sites of organizations opposed to civil rights. I immediately recognized the problem, but what if I was a young student who was not as familiar with the topic or how Internet searches work? This problem has implications for both information integrity and education.

An equally serious problem, and one that is harder to detect, is when algorithms are set up in a way that results in discriminatory outcomes against women, racial and ethnic groups, or low-income individuals. My daughter, applying for a position recently with a technology firm, used a lot of strange jargon of which I was unfamiliar in her letter of interest. I asked her why. She told me she had read on a social media site that the initial batch of letters and rsums were screened by applicant tracking system technology that looked for certain keywords. If these words and phrases were missing, your application would be automatically kicked out.

Finally, I believe one of the most important questions local governments will have to answer is whether they should continue to subsidize the move of Big Tech companies into their communities if it is determined that any of Haugens allegations are true. Many companies come to local governments promising to bring hundreds of good-paying data center jobs and broadband for underserved communities. Facebook is building a data center in an industrial park whose campus bestrides land in three counties about 45 miles east of Atlanta, and as far as I can tell no one asked about user data or AI issues. In fact, mayors and county executives often brag about luring a big firm to their jurisdiction.

I recommend that local officials pay close attention to the congressional hearings underway and assess for themselves the larger impact these companies might be having on society. Are hate groups using the platforms to mount insurrection against our democracy? Are our most fragile residents, children and the poor, exploited by these technologies because they depend on them as their primary information source? And are the platforms deliberately separating us and making it difficult for us to form consensus and be civil to one another?

Facebook and the other titans of Big Tech, the chairman of the committee before which Haugen testified told his Senate colleagues, are facing their Big Tobacco moment. Are the dangers of this largely unregulated industry equivalent to those of the tobacco industry of the past? Tobacco companies knew their products caused cancer and were addictive, but they made huge profits, so they ignored the dangers to society. If the allegations leveled by Haugen and others turn out to be true, we might end up paying a bigger cost this time around: the loss of democracy and civilization. It's too high a price to pay.

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How Big Tech Threatens the Culture of Our Communities - Governing

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Facebook and Google will have to provide reams of detailed information on how political groups target people via online ads or face steep fines, according to European Commission draft proposals seen by POLITICO.

The proposals, which the Commission is expected to unveil on November 23, aim to protect elections from undisclosed political ads, stop political parties from misusing social media and combat the manipulation of voters through microtargeting the practice at the heart of the Cambridge Analytica scandal in 2018.

Brussels wants to boost transparency around online political ads by forcing partisan groups and the world's largest platforms to disclose more information about who is buying ads and the types of people they are targeting. These changes, it argues, could stop European Union elections from falling victim to underhanded political tactics, and allow voters to understand who is peppering them with political messaging.

But in its upcoming proposals, the EU executive stopped short of outlawing all microtargeting despite a public consultation showing strong appetite for more stringent restrictions on how political groups find would-be voters.

While the proposals could still change, the internal impact assessment study obtained by POLITICO had two main recommendations for policing political ads: The first would allow national governments to continue regulating these online messages, while pushing for greater coordination across the 27-country bloc. The second proposes an EU-wide system of transparency requirements, for both social media companies and European political parties, as well as more coordinated enforcement if groups break the law.

In the draft document, the Commission backed the second option, which "would best meet the general objectives of the intervention and would mutually establish a coherent and proportionate framework for political ads in the EU," it concluded.

Demands for the EU to overhaul the policing of political ads stem back to the 2019 Parliament elections, when major platforms imposed new transparency requirements on who could buy political ads online. But those systems turned out to be clunky, difficult to enforce and were limited to how individual EU countries enforced their own rules around partisan paid-for messaging.

EU-wide political groups and European advocacy groups were also critical, saying the rules made it hard for them to conduct campaigns.

Facebook, Google's YouTube and Twitter have implemented their own voluntary initiatives to limit interference and disinformation during elections.Twitter has banned political ads altogether, while Facebook and Google have imposed limits and a brief moratorium ahead of the U.S. election in November but still allow partisan groups to target users with ads.

Still, these initiatives did little to stem the flow of money into online political ads. Millions of euros have been spent on them in the EU since April 2019, some by the Commission itself, according to data from Facebook and Google. In comparison, billions of euros have been spent in the United States over the same period.

In response, some European lawmakers have called for an outright ban on targeted advertising. They point to concerns about the use of personal data and risks to democracy from splicing up the electorate into bite-sized groups of voters.

In the draft text, Commission officials floated the possibility of a ban on political targeted ads. In a public consultation as part of the internal assessment, EU officials also noted that 58 percent of respondents backed additional limits on targeted political ads, including a ban or opt-in by users.

But the Commission eventually decided to reject such a moratorium, arguing that smaller political groups would be penalized if they weren't allowed to target groups of voters. The EU executive branch argued in the document that greater transparency requirements, as part of new rules targeting political ads, would "allow for greater public scrutiny of differentiated political campaign messaging and will empower citizens to hold political actors more accountable for their different messages and promises.

"Ageneral ban on the use of targetingwas discarded as disproportionate," the Commission concluded.

The political advertising proposals will complement the European Union's content moderation rules, known as the Digital Services Act. That separate bill will impose fines of up to 6 percent of firms' yearly revenue if they do not comply with provisions that include regular audits of how firms are handling potential harmful content, and demand greater transparency around how algorithms promote material in people's news feeds.

As part of the proposed overhaul, the Commission wants platforms to disclose how much is spent on particular campaigns, who is the buyer and whether the ad was amplified by an algorithm. Buyers will also have to open up about the criteria used for targeting users such as their ages, gender, interests, and the time period when the ad was shown.Such requirements go well beyond what companies already provide voluntarily.

The firms already give some of that information via publicly-available databases. But Brussels believes they should give all voters and third parties granular information on how people are targeted and what data has been used to pinpoint them. These rules, when passed after consultation with the European Parliament and member countries, would be mandatory and represent a steep change in current voluntary rules associated with online political ads.

Experts argue that voluntary transparency requirements often fail to clarify who is behind a campaign.

New York University researchers found that more than half of Facebook pages that had displayed political ads in the United States during a 13-month period concealed the identities of their buyers. POLITICO also discovered evidence of political groups not being open about their partisan ties when they have targeted voters via social media.

The Commission also will recommend tech companies adopt a common standard for classifying information about online ads. Currently, the information comes in different formats, making it impossible to compare ad information between different platforms. Tech companies would also need to comply with a universal definition of what constitutes a political ad.

If the Commission gets its way, social media firms would be required to limit the microtargeting of voters if political organizations fail to notify the companies that an ad is political in nature. Those limits to undisclosed ads, which would have to be discovered by the tech giants or outside groups, could apply "beyond electoral periods," according to the document.

The Commission's proposals aren't solely limited to Big Tech, but will also apply to Europe's political parties, who will be required to disclose information about their spending on political ads and how they are targeting people via the social media platforms. The EU executive will recommend that EU countries adopt similar standards for national parties and enforce the same transparency and enforcement standards around political ads across the bloc.

"Self-regulation is not a viable option for large platforms," the Commission concluded in the draft text. "Private actors act as de facto enablers and or quasi-regulators of political ads."

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Big Tech to be forced to hand over data on political ads - POLITICO.eu

But its not the only sign the seemingly inevitable breaching of the wall of traditional finance by Big Tech companies may itself be facing enormous disruption.

"The Chinese Communist Party emphasised the priority of greater financial equality through the economy by making sure huge companies dont garner too much power.

Along with these measures in China, Google has abandoned long held plans to launch its own banking service, Plex, and the threats from Apple and Amazon seem, for the moment, to have moderated. Even on the startup front, the fintech assault has dispersed: most recently Monzo, one of the UKs highest profile neobanks, was refused a banking licence in the US while the developing trend of fintech startups being acquired or networked into incumbents continues.

However, new threats to banks do continue to emerge. The US postal service has become the latest in a long history of post offices to see banking as a potential way to enhance revenues in the franchise. The Financial Revolutionist reported the US Postal Service is launching a pilot program in four cities in an effort to deliver financial services to underserved Americans.

Idiosyncrasies

In its decision, the Chinese Communist Party emphasised the priority of greater financial equality through the economy by making sure huge companies such as Ant dont garner too much power and become too central in the social economy.

(it is) necessary," President Xi Jinping said, to "reasonably regulate excessively high incomes, and encourage high-income people and enterprises to return more to society.

These developments all have their own idiosyncrasies, whether that be governmental, corporate or regulatory. But taken together they complicate the narrative that Big Techs scale, financial resources, customer experience expertise, data, and network power would render traditional financial institutions nothing more than service providers.

Ant and Chinese rivals including Tencent, which owns WeChat Pay, are actually the most advanced tech companies in the world when it comes to integrating financial services into a much broader social media ecosystem.

They bring together ecommerce, instant messaging, mobile payments and financial services, deep networks and an extraordinary body of customer knowledge into an ecosystem far more complex and valuable than any bank.

Its not just a Chinese phenomenon, of course. Thats why Amazon, Google and Apple have all deeply embedded at least some financial services offerings into their own ecosystems whether they originated in ecommerce, search or devices.

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Big Tech bank invasion halted at the moat - BlueNotes

I keep writing about the insane amounts of dollars that big tech companies are generating in revenue and profits. Yet even more impressive is the expense that the tech giants are making to keep their businesses running and on a growth path for many years to come.

I have watched, my jaw drop, as the five biggest superstars in the American tech industry Apple, Microsoft, Google, Amazon, and Facebook have squandered on expensive investments for their businesses. That includes specialized equipment to assemble iPhones, massive data centers, underwater internet cables that send YouTube videos to your phone at full speed, and warehouses for Amazon workers to assemble and ship orders.

Spending companies on physical assets designed to last for many years capital investment, for the geek-is one of the best ways to get a glimpse of how big tech companies use their success to become even more successful.

In the past year, according to financial statements, the combined profits of these five companies rose more than 25 percent. The tech giants have the cash and the permission of their investors to spend just about anything to stay on top. It is an advantage that few companies can match.

One example: In the last year, UPS spent the equivalent of about 5 cents of every dollar of its sales on more planes, trucks, delivery warehouses, equipment to handle packages and software to manage it all, according to the companys financial statements. From the information released by Amazon, I estimate that a similar category of company spending equates to 13 cents for every dollar of its sales.

UPS and Amazon dont exactly do the same thing. Amazons top investments include technology hubs for its cloud computing business. UPS makes deliveries for many businesses, while Amazon for the most part handles package delivery from its own business.

Both companies have done excellently in the online shopping pandemic. However, UPS is reducing its spending on long-lived assets while Amazon is spending much more each year.

The good news is that this is exactly what we want rich and successful companies to do: invest a large chunk of their wealth in improving their business, for their benefit and ours. When Microsoft spends a lot of money on upgrading its computer centers, it helps all businesses that use the online versions of Excel and Outlook. When Amazon equips its warehouses with new assembly lines, orders can be moved more efficiently to our homes.

This can shock us and still make us wonder if there is someone who can be at the investment level of the big tech companies.

Article Source

Disclaimer: This article is generated from the feed and not edited by our team.

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Spending is the superpower of big tech companies - Market Research Telecast

The summer before she started her neuroscience degree at the University of Texas, Celine Halioua interned at a clinic in Germany, working with patients who had age-related brain cancer. She formed a bond with one of them. He had a large, bushy moustache and a permanent smile the picture of a kind father, she told me. My German was not great, and neither was his English, but what struck me was his kindness despite the fact he was there to discuss his terminal diagnosis.

Halioua was shadowing a doctor, and found it hard to grasp that nothing could be done for this patient. I always thought that doctors were magical that if you put the effort in, youd be able to fix it. The realisation that you cant made me feel that we dont have free will.

She resolved to find that fix: not a cure for cancer, but an end to ageing itself. Now, at only 26, Halioua is a leading light in the relatively new field of anti-ageing biotech. Im confident well have an ageing drug by the time its relevant for me, she told me. She estimated that time as within a decade, and aims to dominate the market before then. Transparently, my goal is to build the ageing pharma company there will be many. The ageing field will one day be larger than the cancer field. Halioua described ageing as deviation from optimal biological function. Optimal is subjective, of course: Olympic gymnasts peak at a much younger age than Olympic sprinters. Old is easier to define: Halioua described it as when the physical body gets in the way of the thing that you want to do.

Haliouas speech was so rapid that the internet connection from her office in San Francisco could barely keep up. She looked every inch the digital nomad in her black T-shirt and AirPods: part biogerontologist, part CEO, part Gen Z-er. Haliouas mother is Moroccan and her father German; she was born in Texas but studied in Sweden, Germany and the UK, and dropped out of her PhD at Oxford University and began to work for the venture capitalist Laura Deming, now 27, at the California-based Longevity Fund, a firm that invests in anti-ageing businesses. Halioua launched her own start-up in 2020.

The quest for eternal youth may not be new, but it is now bankrolled by some of the wealthiest individuals and corporations on Earth. PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel and Oracles Larry Ellison are among the many billionaires who are investing. Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page helped launch Calico, a Google subsidiary focused on combating ageing, in 2013. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos is in the game: not long after touching down from his maiden space flight in July, he was reported to have invested an undisclosed sum in Russian billionaire Yuri Milners Altos Labs, which will have a research base in Cambridge, UK (most anti-ageing start-ups are in the US). It is estimated that the industry will be worth $610bn by 2025.

[See also: The internet was built for connection how did it go so wrong?]

The field shouldnt be confused with the kooky subculture of life extensionism, whereby the determined and ascetic experiment with severe calorie restriction, intensely calibrated exercise and cocktails of daily supplements in a bid to extend a life that is arguably not worth living. Instead, anti- ageing science works at the level of gene therapy, cell hacking and reconstituting human blood; the medical treatments at its heart are based on bleeding edge science and aimed at the mass market. Some focus on biological reprogramming: adding proteins known as Yamanaka factors to cells, causing them to revert to a previous state. Others look at genomic instability or the way DNA damage that accumulates over time might be repaired.

The entrepreneurs in this fledgling field are determined that the end of ageing will come via therapies approved by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the European Medicines Agency (EMA). The elixir of youth wont be a single drug, but a regimen of treatments that knock out different hallmarks of ageing and allow us to get older without losing our bodies and minds. We will still die: there will be accidents as well as diseases unrelated to age (children still get fatal cancers, after all). But death will become increasingly remote, and no longer preceded by years of inevitable decline.

Its advocates argue that, once ageing is cured, the financial, medical, societal and emotional burden of taking care of the elderly will disappear. But have these entrepreneurs thought about what a post-ageing world would look like? And if they have, would anyone want to live there?

As it stands, a drug will only get regulatory approval if it is marketed as a treatment for age-related diseases such as arthritis, cataracts and macular degeneration, diabetes, certain cancers, dementia and Parkinsons rather than ageing in its own right. This, then, is where the science is focused. The thinking is that, if the ageing processes that underlie those diseases are treated, other rejuvenation benefits can be smuggled in.

Based in San Francisco, Unity Biotechnology is developing a class of anti-ageing drugs called senolytics. These work by eradicating senescent cells those that have stopped dividing and then gather in the body, spewing out factors that harm the surrounding tissue. Its a completely new way both of thinking about a disease and targeting it, Anrivan Ghosh, Unitys CEO, told me. Senolytics reprogramme the tissue. They raise the possibility that I can restore a previous state that a tissue or a body was in. It was first thing in the morning for Ghosh (we were speaking over Zoom), but he was fizzing with enthusiasm. He is 57 but looks younger, with a neat goatee and hair that is only flecked with grey.

Senolytic drugs are designed to be taken prophylactically, during what Ghosh refers to as a window of time when senescent cells are known to accumulate (this varies in different parts of the body). He was keento tell me about Unitys ongoing clinical trial in people with age-related eye disease the first evidence of a senolytic treatment working, he said. Twelve patients with severe vision loss due to macular degeneration or diabetic macular oedema (two of the major causes of age-related blindness) had been put on a course of Unitys lead senolytic. One of the patients could not see any letters on an eye chart, even with her glasses on, from four metres away. Everything she once needed help with, she can now do independently. The majority of those patients showed an improvement.

I would have been happy if they just maintained their vision, Ghosh said. It raises the possibility that you may somehow be able to reverse trajectory and restore a better state. Thats another level.

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Unity was an early success story, with Peter Thiel and Jeff Bezos signing up as seed investors. People like Thiel and Bezos arent interested in financing the kind of incremental gains a next-generation medicine might offer, Ghosh told me. They are drawn to the idea of being able to do something that changes the way we think about disease, that changes the way we live. Over time, Unitys funding has come increasingly from bigger, more mainstream investors.

Promising paradigm change can be a risky business. Unity was valued at $700m at its initial public offering in May 2018, but shares fell by more than 60 per cent in August 2020 after its flagship product, a senolytic treatment for osteoarthritis of the knee that had worked on mice, was shown to have no greater effect than a placebo in human trials. It tells you something about the translational gap in that case sometimes the animal studies do not replicate in the human case, Ghosh said. There will be many bumps before we have success.

Up to 30 biotech companies around the world are developing senolytic drugs. British biogerontologist and computational biologist Andrew Steele, who wrote his book Ageless: The New Science of Getting Older Without Getting Old (2020) while studying nematode worms at the Francis Crick Institute in London, told me he thought we were two or three years away from having the first senolytics in the clinic for specific conditions. It could be within a decade that were using these things preventatively. Like most other advocates, Steele was ambitious about the timeframe, given the relatively small number of human trials.

Ageing isnt officially defined as a disease, which is a problem for the biotech companies, Steele explained. Its currently very difficult to get a drug approved because it isnt an indication in the pharmaceutical industry. That means theres no way to say, Ive reversed or slowed someones ageing. But he remained optimistic. Were in a position, unique in human and scientific history, where weve finally got a handle on the processes. Unless youre very old or very, very unwell, theres going to be an anti-ageing drug in time for you.

For Steele, who is 36, this cant come soon enough. We have been completely ignoring the single largest cause of death, human disease and suffering, he told me. I dont think barbaric is too strong a word. Being old steals your independence: its what puts you at risk of all kinds of things not just the internal stuff like cancer and heart disease, but external threats like falls, infectious disease.

Steele told me about some 24-month-old mice (around 70 in human years) he had observed in a lab while researching his book. After a dose of senolytics, the mice thrived. They get less cancer, fewer cataracts, fewer heart problems, they are fitter and less frail, he said. Theyre cognitively younger as well. And they have better fur, thicker, plumper skin, less grey hair they just look fantastic.

Celine Halioua doesnt have to worry about the translational gap between mice and humans. She left the world of longevity venture capital in 2019 to become founder and CEO of Loyal, a biotech start-up dedicated to extending dog lifespan. It aims not simply to stretch the length of time a dog can live anything from an extra six months to three years, depending on the breed but to ensure that those months and years are healthy. (Halioua herself is a devoted dog owner, and lists her husky, Wolfie, as the companys chief evangelist on the Loyal website.) But dogs are just the beginning. Were planning to take what we learn in dogs to help pet parents and non-pet parents live longer, too, she told me.

Dogs develop the same age-related diseases as we do, Halioua explained, at approximately the same point in their life-span (the exception being heart disease, because they dont eat a lot of McDonalds or whatever). Their fur loses pigment and goes grey, just like their owners hair. They share an environment with us, and environmental factors are huge in ageing. Its also possible to see whether an intervention is working much sooner in dogs than in humans: You can do a preventative measure when theyre two or three, and youll know by six or seven, probably sooner, whether the intervention did or did not do the thing. Dogs will make the pathway to regulatory approval smoother, Halioua believes. If something can work in a complex species like a dog, that isnt super-inbred like a mouse, its a more robust justification to pursue that in people.

Significantly, dogs have devoted owners who are prepared to pay over the odds though Halioua said she was determined not to exploit that devotion. It is important to me to price our products so that they are accessible for the majority of dog owners. The final cost will depend on the materials but, order of magnitude tens, not hundreds, of dollars a month.

The first of two Loyal drugs in development targets cellular mechanism and glucose metabolism in large- and giant-breed dogs. Due to a quirk of animal husbandry, the larger the dog, the shorter its lifespan. A Great Dane might live seven to nine years on average, while a Chihuahua might live 16 to 18. Thats weird. You normally dont see a times-two differential in lifespan within the same species you dont see it in people of varying heights. This, Halioua explained, was due to an antagonistic pleiotropic effect: the thing that caused the dog to grow big quickly has a negative impact on lifespan.

The second drug targets metabolic fitness in dogs of any breed and size, in order to replicate the same effect on lifespan that calorie restriction does in mice. This will be better for late-in-life intervention. Of course, prevention is optimal, but there are people who already have grey-faced dogs and we wanted to have something for them. Trials are due to begin next year.

Other anti-ageing therapies have emerged from more gruesome animal experimentation. The biotech company Elevian, founded in Silicon Valley but now based in Boston, began 15 years ago after Harvard professor of regenerative biology Amy Wagers stitched live mice together, fusing the circulatory systems of old and young specimens, in a process called parabiosis. The mice lived fused together for four weeks before their organs were removed and studied. Elevians CEO and co-founder, Mark Allen, described an experiment that sounded like Frankenstein and Dracula combined: The old mice exposed to young blood grow biologically younger by many different measures, and the young mice exposed to old blood grow older.

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A 51-year old medical doctor turned tech entrepreneur, Allen told me he had read about Wagers work and thought it might be turned into a therapy. But its not an easy thing to translate. In the parabiosis model, the old animals are getting a continuous transfusion of young blood, 24/7, for four weeks. You cant really have a blood boy tied to you, he said, with a dark grin.

The Harvard team identified the recombinant protein GDF11, the critical factor circulating in blood that appears to be behind the rejuvenating effect. Just injecting GDF11 once daily was able to reproduce many of the different effects, Allen said. I fell in love with this work because of the breadth of effect. He reeled off a list of diseases that GDF11 might combat: emphysema, cardiovascular disease, fatty liver disease and potentially some cancers.

Still, Elevian had to choose one specific indication they could tell regulators they were targeting, and decided its best bet was stroke: the worst possible disease that we could treat for the shortest possible duration, and see clinically meaningful effects, Allen said. Stroke is the second biggest cause of death worldwide and a leading cause of long-term disability; the few treatments that currently exist need to be given within a few hours after a stroke if they are to be effective.

Allen said animal trials were looking positive. When we give GDF11 after a stroke, it significantly improves sensory motor function recovery. And we can give it late we can start it 24 hours or later when no other treatments exist. Our primary focus today is taking it into clinical trials. For Allen, this would be the start of something more ground-breaking. Part of the game is getting it to market as soon as possible and then beginning to expand its indication.

The entrepreneurs I speak to might be taking different paths to eternal youth, but they agree on one thing: ultimately, ageing will be cured. None wants to hazard a guess at how long people will live there may be some yet unknown physical side effect that we discover in our 200s but they believe the only obstacle to an infinite human lifespan is our inability to imagine what that might look like. This means that the potential negative effects can only be raised delicately. The ageing process causes two thirds of death globally, Steele reminded me. Any objection you want to come up with to say we shouldnt do something about it has to be larger than that.

But Paul Root Wolpe, 64, director of the centre for ethics at Emory University in Georgia in the USA (and a former senior bioethicist at Nasa), told me that a world without ageing would be an economic disaster. The argument some advocates make for its enormous social benefits is a misdirection, he said. I find their arguments extremely naive, sociologically unsupportable, and most importantly, deeply narcissistic. Ive never heard a single plausible argument of how radical life extension would benefit society only an egocentric desire not to die. The truth is, they want to stop ageing. They want to live healthily to 150.

In Wolpes view, anti-ageing scientists and entrepreneurs minimise or ignore the profound implications of significantly increasing the human lifespan. The International Monetary Fund has stated that an ageing population in Japan has led to a vanishing labour force, higher demands for social services, a shrinking tax pool, greater wealth disparities and thats just from living what is currently our lifespan. If we increase it, all of those things would increase exponentially.

But in the future envisaged by the biotech start-ups, we would work into our hundreds: an elderly population would still be a labour force. Wolpe had little patience for this idea. That is a profoundly elite perspective. Do you really think that the longshoreman, the hard labourer, the person who works as a clerk in a store, at the age of 65 is going to say, Great! I get to work for another 50 years! Its absurd. Polls show that large percentages of people hate their job. Elitists who work entirely with their brains are a small minority of the human population. They have a very blinkered point of view. It was no coincidence that Silicon Valleys tech billionaires were early investors, Wolpe said. This is one of the great scientific, intellectual areas to conquer. These people have already conquered the world in new ways. They are the first group to touch the lives of hundreds of millions, if not billions, of people. They have so much cash, and they dont know what to do with it.

The political ramifications of an indefinite lifespan are equally huge, Wolpe argued. The elderly vote at much higher rates than the young, and, in America at least, the highest echelons of power have become the preserve of the over-70s. Politically, young people will be squeezed, and the fresh ideas they bring to politics and innovation more generally will be suppressed.

Do you think that if the last generation or the generation before that lived to 100 or 150, there would be gay marriage, diversity inclusion movements, #MeToo? Wolpe said. The vast majority of the great innovations of the last 50 years were created by young people. A life well-lived hands its torch to the next generation. It doesnt try to override them for its own narcissistic needs.

Overpopulation and the climate crisis are other obvious counter-arguments. If death becomes rare, and humans remain at optimal health, how soon will the world run out of space and resources? Wont humans die from starvation and natural disasters instead?

[See also: Toxic relationships, burnout, productivity dysmorphia why do we medicalise societal problems?]

This is not a technology in isolation, Allen argued when I put this to him. Were figuring out how to have cleaner energy, how to have food that is healthier and less polluting, how to live more peacefully, how to travel into space. There is not a real estate problem here on Earth if we live better. Its an argument typical of Silicon Valley optimism: the solution is always more tech.

Im sanguine about overpopulation, Steele told me. If we had to work a little bit harder to solve things like climate change, resource use, land use and all those things that Im genuinely concerned about, Id happily do so if it meant suddenly no one was dying of cancer or Alzheimers.

Both Steele and Halioua dismissed the idea that indefinite fertility would lead to a population crisis, seeing it instead as an opportunity for a fairer world. Halioua pointed out that, if women want to have children, they are currently forced to make compromises at a critical time in their careers. Im going to be in my thirties soon, theoretically the ideal age to have kids, and Im not going to want kids at that age hopefully I will still be building Loyal. Thats a societal pressure that men dont have. [This] will free up 50 per cent of the population who inevitably have to take the hit.

Already, the wealthy live longer: men in the most deprived areas of England can expect to lead lives nearly a decade shorter than those in the wealthiest parts. Anti-ageing drugs will surely amplify these inequalities, when only the individuals and nations that can afford them can buy ever longer life-spans. Halioua said she had factored these concerns into her development plans: The ideal ageing drug is going to be like a statin, in terms of not being expensive. Steele added that this was a long game: expensive drugs have patents that expire after 20 years, after which generic drugs can be made at a fraction of the cost. Im not saying its right, but its normal for rich people in the West, and then everyone in the West, and then poorer countries to benefit from various kinds of medical intervention.

[See also: How life without germs has left us newly vulnerable]

I asked the anti-ageing entrepreneurs about Wolpes point that longer lives will increase intergenerational inequalities. In a future where people keep their minds and bodies, never losing their edge, how will the young ever compete in the workplace?

That kind of thinking assumes that if people were to live in good health for a very long period of time they would want to continue to do the same things, Ghosh said. I know I would not want to do drug discovery for the next 30 years. I have a bazillion other things Id like to do, and I would happily let other people take this role.

Halioua took the question personally. With Loyal, there are plenty of people who are double my age, in their 40s and 50s, completely cognisant, who have been working in ageing a long time, and didnt have the idea or desire to build this company, she said. Experienced people come with baggage and biases. Being naive has actually been one of my best traits, she said. In other words, the young will still wield their advantages.

Allen was the only anti-ageing advocate I spoke to who entertained any ethical discomfort. The biggest thing that concerns me is despots, dictators, he said. They die over time. With this, they might be able to live.

Even if we believe the claims these proponents of eternal youth make that the planet can cope, that societies will be no more unequal one problem remains: death. Its proximity directly affects our appetite for risk, making clinical trials into new vaccines possible, and encouraging billionaires to go into space. In a future where death occurs only as a result of rare disease, suicide or tragic accident, will we become paralysed by the fear of it?

For the first time, Halioua didnt have an answer. I dont know, she replied, after a long pause. I would argue that this is already a huge latent paralysis in the average human. Maybe it will get better. I dont see a world where we start becoming extra- terrified of car accidents, but maybe we will. Her face brightened: she had an idea. Maybe Tesla needs to get all their self-driving cars on the market and market it this way Number One Cause of Death Eliminated By Tesla! There it was again: the answer to a problem created by technology is more technology. The future looked bright once more and endless.

Jenny Kleeman is the author of Sex Robots and Vegan Meat: Adventures at the Frontier of Birth, Food, Sex and Death (Picador)

This article appears in the 13 Oct 2021 issue of the New Statesman, Perfect Storm

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Who wants to live forever? Big Tech and the quest for eternal youth - New Statesman