Category Archives: Big Tech

WASHINGTON There's a growing bipartisan appetite in Congress to crack down on big tech, with progressive Democrats and conservative Republicans preparing to flex the federal government's anti-monopoly powers.

The Senate began hearings this week on antitrust law. Senators expressed different philosophies and concerns, but they all agreed on at least one key point: Tech giants like Google, Facebook, and Amazon have become too powerful.

It's the latest sign that Congress is ready to jump into a decadeslong vacuum created by marginal action from federal regulators as the tech sector became increasingly concentrated. Lawmakers discussed ways both to stop tech giants from growing larger in the future and steps that could be taken to chip away at their existing dominance.

Why should any dominant corporation be able to merge with any other entity? Sen. Josh Hawley, a Republican, said in a Thursday hearing after rattling off a long list of companies owned by Google. Why should Google, for instance, or Facebook be able to buy anything else given their dominant size?

Sen. Marsha Blackburn, also a Republican, blasted tech giants for cornering the online ad market while local newsrooms endure round after round of cuts. Three companies Google, Facebook, and Amazon take in about two-thirds of all online advertising dollars. Every one of these newsrooms have experienced the loss of reporters, which is the loss of journalism, which is the loss of insight of the people into issues, said Blackburn.

But politicians still dont agree about exactly what should be done. The Senate Antitrust subcommittees new Democratic chair, Sen. Amy Klobuchar, is sponsoring legislation to beef up government antitrust enforcement, tighten rules on which mergers are permissible, and force merging parties to prove their merger would not violate the law, among other measures. Shes trying to get bipartisan support for that and other reforms, which could include Australia-style requirements on tech giants to pay media outlets for producing news. Republicans are leery.

Sen. Mike Lee, the Republican ranking member on the Antitrust subcommittee, said at the beginning of the hearing he opposed government intervention and a sweeping transformation of antitrust laws. But before long he, too, was talking about the need to curtail big tech companies.

Lee outlined his concerns about what happened to Parler, a social media platform favored by conservatives that was removed from the Apple app store and briefly taken offline altogether.

Lee questioned whether its even possible for upstart competitors to challenge platforms like Facebook and Twitter in the current environment. Build your own sounds really nice in theory, but in this instance, Im not sure it works in practice. Do we have an entry problem? he asked.

One recurring theme from witnesses during the hearing was the once-robust enforcement of antitrust legislation that dramatically broke up rail and telecom monopolies, had fallen into disuse in modern times. At one point, Open Markets Institute Executive Director Barry Lynn argued that Amazon should be barred from both running a marketplace and selling products on that marketplace competing against other sellers all while being able to use their sales information against them.

There should never be competition between the provider of services and the customer of those services, said Lynn. Its a conflict of interest. Traditionally we have always prohibited this we can trace it back in US federal law to baking policy in the 1860s. Theres nothing new here, whats new is that we havent applied these kinds of rules to these corporations today.

The political movement toward cracking down on tech companies is anything but an organized coalition. Many Republicans have accused social media platforms of discriminating against conservative voices. Democrats have mostly rolled their eyes at this and argued that the real problem is a lack of moderation allowing disinformation and hate speech to flourish.

Klobuchar told BuzzFeed News before the hearing that she believes there is enough common ground to craft reforms that could get enough bipartisan support to pass a narrowly split Congress. This is exactly what was going on in the Gilded Age, she said, drawing a comparison from small companies trying to compete with the likes of Amazon to local farmers trying to negotiate with rail monopolies a century ago.

She closed the meeting Thursday by saying the subcommittee will hold more hearings on how to curtail monopoly power. It feels like every century we take on laws in this way, said Klobuchar. And this is our moment.

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Democrats And Republicans Alike Are Talking About Breaking Down Big Tech Monopolies - BuzzFeed News

Constellation Research founder Ray Wang on his outlook for technology stocks like Coupang and Roblox.

The Dow Jones Industrial Averageand the S&P 500 rallied to record highs Friday as tech and other high-flying growth stocks succumbed to rising bond yields.

The Dow climbed 291points, or 0.9%, and the S&P added 0.1%. The tech-heavy Nasdaq, meanwhile, slumped 0.59%.

The mixed session came as aggressive selling of longer-dated U.S. Treasurys caused the 10-year yield to rise 11basis points to 1.63%, making for the highest close since February 2020.

Looking at stocks, high-growth companies including mega-cap technology names like Tesla Inc., Microsoft Corp. and Facebook Inc. were all lower.

Financials, which benefit from a steepening of the yield curve, all gained with Bank of America Corp. and JPMorgan Chase & Co. finishing among the top performers.

Meanwhile, Novavax Inc.s COVID-19 vaccine was found to be 96% effective against the original version of the virus, according to a U.K. study. However, the vaccine was 86% effective against the U.K. variant and only 55% effective against the South African strand. Shares soared on the developments.

AstraZeneca plc and Oxford Universitys COVID-19 vaccine was suspended in Thailand due to blood clots in some recipients. The vaccine has also been put on hold in eight European countries, including Norway and Denmark.

In earnings, Ulta Beauty Inc. reported quarterly earnings and revenue that exceeded Wall Street estimates but issued disappointing full-year guidance amid concern masking and social-distancing orders will remain in place for much of 2021. The company also announced that CEO Mary Dillon will step down in June and be replaced by President Dave Kimbell.

In commodities, West Texas Intermediate crude oil fell 41cents to $65.61a barrel and gold slumped $2.80to $1,719.50 an ounce.

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European markets ended mixed with Germanys DAX 30 down 0.46%, Frances CAC 40 inching up 0.21% and Britain's FTSE 100 climbing by 0.36%.

In Asia, Hong Kongs Hang Seng index lost 2.2% while Chinas Shanghai Composite Index and Japans Nikkei 225 advanced 0.47% and 1.73%, respectively.

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Dow, S&P hits record as big tech retreats and bond yields surge - Fox Business

Technology stocks were pushing the broader market solidly higher on Thursday, as investors welcomed another reprieve from the volatility in the bond market that has dominated the conversation on Wall Street for the last several weeks.

The S&P 500 index rose 1.2% as of 10:55 a.m. Eastern. The Dow Jones Industrial Average rose 1% and the technology-heavy Nasdaq Composite was up 2.1%.

Big Tech stocks, which have been hurt this year by rising bond rates, were among the biggest gainers. Apple was up 1.5%, Microsoft rose 1.7% and Googles parent company Alphabet was up more than 2%.

The recent return of stability to the bond market has been reassuring investors after a sudden spike in long-term interest rates over the past month prompted traders to dump tech shares, which started to look expensive after months of gigantic gains.

Up until this week, bond yields have been steadily climbing higher as investors made big bets that trillions of dollars of coming government stimulus will result in strong economic growth later this year and potentially some amount of inflation. As of Thursday morning, the yield on the 10-year Treasury note was 1.53%, roughly where it has been all week. That yield struck the psychologically important 1.60% mark late last week.

The House approved thesweeping pandemic relief packageover Republican opposition on Wednesday, sending it to President Joe Biden to be signed into law. The package would provide $1,400 checks for most Americans and direct billions of dollars to schools, state and local governments, and businesses.

General Electric fell 7%, after falling sharply the day before. The industrial titan announced it would wind down its GE Capital business and merge its jet leasing business with Irelands AerCap. GE is in the midst of a multi-year turnaround plan, but investors have been concerned GE has been selling off too many of its more profitable assets.

The biggest IPO in years is rolling out Thursday on the New York Stock Exchange where Coupang, the South Korean equivalent of Amazon in the U.S., or Alibaba in China, will begin trading under the ticker CPNG. Its actually the largest initial public offering from an Asian company since Alibaba went public about seven years ago. And its the biggest in the U.S. since Uber raised more than $8 billion in 2019.

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US stocks move higher with help from Big Tech companies - WBRZ

Jackie Niam | Getty Images

Last week, Arizona's House of Representatives approved legislation to prohibit platform owners like Apple and Google from locking app makers into their own payment systems. The bill passed only narrowly, and it must be approved by the Arizona Senate and Gov. Doug Ducey before it can become law. But regardless of the bill's ultimate fate, the vote is the latest sign of a dramatic shift in public attitudes toward Silicon Valley's most powerful companies.

For the first two decades of the Internet era, there was a broad consensus that politicians shouldn't tie Silicon Valley companies down with burdensome rules and regulations. Companies like Apple, Amazon, Google, and Uber were widely admired. In 2007, presidential candidates from both parties made pilgrimages to associate themselves with Google. In 2015, Jeb Bush, Ted Cruz, and other Republican hopefuls tripped over each other to position themselves as the most Uber-friendly candidate.

But all that is changing. Products like YouTube, the iPhone, and ride-hailing apps have become banal parts of modern life. The companies behind them are widely considered entrenched incumbents. And so the public and their elected representatives increasingly treat them like other big, powerful companies. Politicians score points by railing against them. Proposals to rein them in sometimes poll well.

The next few years are going to be particularly challenging for companies like Apple, Google, Facebook, and Uber because they are global companies. They not only have to worry about antitrust lawsuits by the US federal government, they also face heavy scrutiny from US states and from foreign governments around the world. For the tech giants, there's a danger that a policy experiment in one jurisdiction could become a precedent that's copied around the world.

Back in 2016, the city of Austin, Texas, wanted Uber and Lyft to fingerprint driversa rule that already applied to regular taxi drivers in the city. The idea was approved by 56 percent of the city's voters. Uber and Lyft responded by going nuclearshutting down their Austin operations until the city changed its rules.

Austin officials argued they were simply requiring Uber and Lyft to play by the same rules as other taxi providers. But many members of the public, especially customers of the services, bought into a different narrative: that Austin officials were out of touch and hostile to modern technology. Having a significant part of the public behind them gave Uber and Lyft a lot of powerpower Uber and Lyft ultimately used to get the state legislature to override Austin's rules.

This wasn't a one-off victory. It's a playbook the companies used over and over again in their early years. Uber and Lyft would frequently swoop into a new metropolitan area without worrying too much about local taxi regulations. Spending millions in venture capital, they'd try to build up a customer base as quickly as possible. City officials feared a backlash from these customers, and they didn't want to be seen as standing in the way of progress. So they almost always relented.

This strategy has become less effective in recent years. Partly that's because activists have generated more negative press for these firms. Once the gusher of venture-funded subsidies dried up, driving for Uber or Lyft proved to be a low-paying and precarious gig. Critics have also highlighted the problem of sexual assaults occurring in Uber and Lyft vehiclesalthough it's not clear if Uber and Lyft have a bigger problem here than traditional taxis.

But perhaps the most important shift is that Uber and Lyft are no longer seen as underdogs. In the early 2010s, these companies' survival still seemed like an open question. Customers worried that incumbent taxi companies would use antiquated regulations to smother them in the cradle. So when Uber and Lyft argued that a particular regulation could force them to leave a city or state, customers believed them, and some lobbied their elected officials to back off.

As a result, the companies are finding it more and more difficult to beat back efforts to regulate their business practices. In 2019, California passed legislation requiring Uber and Lyft to treat their drivers as employees. As they've done in the past, Uber and Lyft threatened to shut down their services if voters didn't overturn the law. Voters ultimately approved a ballot measure sponsored by Uber and Lyft. But Uber and Lyft were forced to make some tactical concessions; the voter-approved measures offered gig-economy drivers some added protections.

And things are going even worse for Uber outside the United States. Last month the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom ruled that Uber can't treat its drivers like independent contractors. Courts in France and Spain have reached similar conclusionsthough Uber seems to still be resisting a switch to an employee model in France.

Last year, Massachusetts filed a lawsuit against Uber and Lyft arguing that their drivers are employees under state law. A class-action lawsuit in Ontario makes a similar claim.

In each of these jurisdictions, a key Uber argument is that enforcing traditional labor law will break Uber's on-demand business model. That argument is hard to evaluate, since Uber has mostly been successful in defeating these efforts. But Uber will very likely need to change how it does business in the UK, France, Spain, and probably other jurisdictions in the coming years.

If Uber manages to come up with a viable model that treats drivers as employees, it will face pressure to adopt the same model in other cities. Though, of course, the opposite is also possible: maybe a switch to an employee-based model will make Uber's service dramatically worse in places like France and Spain, strengthening Uber's case in future battles.

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Why Big Tech is facing regulatory threats from Australia to Arizona - Ars Technica

Mark my words: Change is coming. Laws are coming. That was the warning David Cicilline (D-RI) the House Judiciary Antitrust, Commercial, and Administrative Law Subcommittee Chairman gave on February 25th at the first in a series of hearings following the Subcommittees 16-month probe into Big Techs gatekeeping power. This one, titled Reviving Competition, Part 1: Proposals to Address Gatekeeper Power and Lower Barriers to Entry Online, focused on three proposed reforms: interoperability and data portability requirements, nondiscrimination rules, and structural separation. The majority of the hearing witnesses, ranging from the CEO of Mapbox to the Director the Competition Advocacy Program at the Global Antitrust Institute, were clear supporters for these proposed reforms. While none are new ideas, each, if passed, would be a significant sea change in competition law.

Interoperability and Data Portability

Imposing interoperability and data portability is not a new idea. It already permeates our technological world. For example, telecommunications would not be possible without one users carrier networks interconnecting with other carrier networks. The Subcommittees proposal is to impose interoperability and data portability requirements. Applied to Big Tech, interoperability and data portability would require dominant platforms to make their services compatible with other networks, and make content and information portable between them. Snap Inc.s 2019 Annual Report illustrates this concern: [T]he vast majority of our computing [runs] on Google Cloud and AWS, and our systems are not fully redundant on the two platforms. Any transition of the cloud services currently provided by either Google Cloud or AWS to the other platform or to another cloud provider would be difficult to implement and will cause us to incur significant time and expense. Witnesses testified that interoperability requirements should be tailored, requiring technical detail and frequent updates to address changing technology. There was also some support from witnesses for Congress to give an agency rulemaking authority to oversee interoperability for gatekeeping platforms. Congress may like the idea of interoperability, but implementation is another question. What will count as a gatekeeping platform? How much interoperability will be required? How will any such requirements balance a need for access without deflating the incentive to create market-changing platforms in the first place?

Nondiscrimination Requirements

The nondiscrimination requirements proposed by the Subcommittee are two-fold. First, dominant platforms would be prohibited from engaging in self-dealing. Second, dominant platforms would be required to offer equal terms for products and services that are equal. Apple, for example, can give preference to its owns apps in an app store that it also runs, to the detriment of third-party offerings. Nondiscrimination requirements is not a new idea either. They play important roles in facilitating transportation and communications. For example, the Federal Communications Commissions Open Internet Order implemented nondiscrimination principles in prohibiting internet service providers from blocking or discriminating between lawful content on the internet. Advocates of a nondiscrimination regime also support a tribunal to police discrimination, which could require a recidivist discriminator to sell off a content arm of its business, and a private right of action to victims discriminated against by dominate platforms.

Structural Separation

Structural separation would prohibit certain dominant platforms from operating in an adjacent line of business. In other words, one could not be both a platform and own the content on the platform. By mandating separation, the idea is to remove perceived conflicts of interest between platforms competing with those that depend on them for access to customers. The Subcommittee also discussed using structural separation to introduce competition where a dominate platforms could both lock in users and keep competition out by tying products and service. Structural separation has also been imposed to restore competition in the past, namely in the railroad industry, under the Bank Holding Company Act of 1956, and with the breakup of AT&Ts Bell System.

* * * *

As one witness pointed out, [t]his is not the first time that Americans have heard proposals to apply the existing antitrust laws or extend them to limit or reduce perceived excessive concentrations of economic power. Political realities are in play just as much as legal ones. Without harnessing some bipartisan support, antitrust reform is unlikely as long as the legislative filibuster remains. Interest in antitrust reform is undoubtedly on the rise, but only time will tell if we are at the dawn of a new era, or just at high noon in the constant cycle of antitrust enforcement.

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The House Judiciary Committee Takes on Big Tech - JD Supra

It's been a year since the World Health Organization first called the coronavirus crisis a global pandemic on March 11, 2020. And online, falsehoods about COVID-19 are as widespread as ever.

Conspiracy theories about the COVID-19 vaccine are shared widely in private Facebook groups. Anti-vax websites are raking in cash from online advertising via Google. Banned disinformation videos are finding their way back online through fringe social networks.

Despite the Big Tech platforms clamping down hard on coronavirus falsehoods and rumors, disinformation tactics and narratives have continued to evolve faster than Big Tech and policymakers can keep up, according to a review of thousands of online posts, videos and messages across Google, Facebook, Twitter and other platforms by the Digital Bridge, POLITICO's transatlantic tech newsletter.

At the beginning of the crisis, online users spread misinformation about the causes of the pandemic, who was most at risk and bogus cures as people scrambled for any information about a virus they didn't understand. Yet 12 months into the pandemic, with more than 2.6 million dead, such falsehoods have become more sophisticated, often tapping into well-entrenched online communities that share misinformation across borders and weaponize COVID-19 falsehoods for political gain, and which are now focusing on the vaccine rollout in Western countries.

Far-right groups in Germany and the United States have also used falsehoods about ongoing government-backed lockdowns to attack political leaders, including via narratives around QAnon, a conspiracy theory claiming prominent U.S. government officials are part of a child sex trafficking ring. Anti-vax campaigners across the European Union, the U.S. and beyond also have started to promote horror stories all debunked about alleged side effects from injections to warn people against getting them.

Mainstream social networks have responded by banning reams of such content, tweaking their algorithms to limit their reach online and working with national governments to highlight mainstream medical advice about the pandemic. These efforts have forced some of Silicon Valley's biggest names to take a more active role in moderating online content than they have ever done (or wanted to do) before.

Still, COVID-19 disinformation continues to get through these checks. The ever-evolving digital tactics make it an almost impossible task to police what's being spread online.

"It's a very difficult problem to solve," said Aleksi Knuutila, a researcher at the Oxford Internet Institute who has tracked the spread of COVID-19 disinformation, particularly on platforms like YouTube. "They are making a lot of noise about the actions they are taking. But if you go looking for questionable activity, you can easily find disinformation content."

In response, Google, Twitter and Facebook say they have collectively removed millions of pieces of COVID-19 misinformation, banned online users, groups and channels that have promoted these falsehoods, and made it easier for people to find public health information about the pandemic.

"Were focused on supporting health leaders and public officials in their work to vaccinate billions of people against COVID-19," Kang-Xing Jin, Facebook's head of health, said in a blog post last month as the social networking giant announced plans to promote government advice on where people can be vaccinated.

Till Eckert is a frontline worker in the war against coronavirus disinformation.

As a fact-checker with Correctiv, a German media organization working with Facebook to combat digital falsehoods, he has spent the last year scouring through viral posts, debunking hundreds of claims that COVID-19 is a myth and that fake cures can keep people safe.

"We've turned into a science newsroom now," he said, adding that his seven-person team had become experts in mundane details like the ins and outs of coronavirus tests. "We went from checking deepfakes and false quotes to doing straight science journalism."

Since the beginning of the crisis when little, if any, information was known about COVID-19, Eckert said his job had become somewhat less stressful as the same rumors and falsehoods began to circulate over and over again. That allowed his team to quickly jump on trending mistruths before they could take root, although even some of the biggest social media platforms like YouTube and Twitter offered few, if any, data-tracking tools to make the fact-checker's job easier.

Much of what he sees is homegrown and has high political stakes. Supporters of the Alternative for Germany, a far-right political party, are promoting falsehoods about how people can keep themselves safe, including the use of bogus cures, and turning it into fodder for campaign purposes. Such tactics are expected to flourish ahead of the country's federal election in September.

"The conspiracy theory community is growing," Eckert said. "The far right, disinformation and conspiracy theory scene are influencing each other. Those connections are growing."

To see how entrenched COVID-19 disinformation has become, POLITICO worked withresearchersfrom King's College London and the University of Amsterdam to track how videos linked to David Icke, the British conspiracy theorist; Rashid Buttar, an anti-vaxxer; and those related to Plandemic, an online documentary that promoted falsehoods about the public health crisis, were shared online.

These videos had all been blocked from the major platforms amid the yearlong crackdown on COVID-19-related disinformation. But despite these bans, many resurfaced on fringe networks like BitChute, an alternative to YouTube, where they racked up, collectively, hundreds of thousands of views, according to a review by the academics and POLITICO.

The banned videos were also reshared on Facebook via these second-tier platforms by average users, according to data from CrowdTangle, a social media analytics tool owned by Facebook. Combined, they garnered almost 600,000 online engagements such as comments, shares and likes over an 8-month period through December 2020, based on the researchers' findings. Some of the originally-banned YouTube videos were still present on Facebook months after initially being flagged, the academics discovered. That raised questions about how successful social media companies had been at removing these viral videos from their platforms.

"Facebook acts as a re-platforming platform," said Emillie de Keulenaar, a doctoral researcher at the University of Amsterdam who worked on the analysis. "It gives these videos extra life."

"We know this is anadversarial space with some people tryingto circumvent our enforcement, which is why were always working to improve our efforts," Toby Partlett, a Facebook spokesman, said in a statement. The company removed several of the banned BitChute videos from its platform after POLITICO flagged the material.

Now that vaccination programs are taking root worldwide, disinformation narratives are focused on falsehoods about how these injections could harm people's health.

POLITICO reviewed thousands of Facebook posts, Twitter messages, YouTube channels and TikTok videos, and quickly discovered scores of posts containing misinformation, as well as posts from prominent anti-vax groups aimed at convincing people not to take the vaccine.

In one, an Instagram account warned people against taking the vaccine because it could lead to people becoming sterile. In another, a Twitter user posted graphic images allegedly of his father who he said had died days after taking the Pfizer vaccine. "Please make people aware of the real truth that is happening all over the world," he wrote. The post had been shared almost 250 times.

Chine Labbe, the managing editor for Europe at NewsGuard, an analytics firm that tracks misinformation, said anti-vaccine messages from the U.S. were starting to get picked up by similar groups across Europe. Disinformation websites, too, were able to earn money via online advertising by promoting these anti-vaccine falsehoods with prominent brands, including those associated with the global vaccine rollout like Pfizer and Merck, the pharmaceutical giants, being displayed alongside COVID-19 falsehoods.

In recent weeks, she added, anti-vaccine messages from Robert F. Kennedy Jr a nephew of the late U.S. President John F. Kennedy who was banned from Instagram for promoting COVID-19 falsehoods, had been translated into French, German and Italian. Sites in these countries were now churning out a conveyor belt of disinformation linked to Kennedy and other prominent U.S. anti-vaccine campaigners that was picked up widely across social media.

"The speed at which fake narratives travel has only sped up during the crisis," said Labbe. "The purveyors of fake information have become smarter. They know how to game the system."

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Big Techs trying to stop coronavirus misinformation. Its not enough. - POLITICO.eu

Listening to a podcast

In the last year there has been over $1 billion in M&A in the audio space, as companies from Amazon to Spotify made investments in the medium, placing bets that audiences would follow suit. And thats exactly whats happening right now. With the emergence of Clubhouse as a hot new social media platform, the likes of which we havent seen in a while, audio has piqued the interest of consumers as well.

On the heels of completing a sweeping Media Behaviors and Influence study that, in part, illustrates consumers obsession with audio, I connected with Amir Hirsh, founder and CEO of Audioburst, the audio search and discovery platform. We discussed why interest in audio is experiencing an explosion, and which tech companies are best positioned to take a leading role in this particular content war.

Gary Drenik: So Amir, how did we get here? Why the sudden interest from big tech in bulking up their audio offerings?

Amir Hirsh: 2021 is quickly becoming what I like to call The Year of the Ear. But the shift to audio should be seen as the culmination of a long process, not a sudden shift. You see, content has always been king, but now it has a new throne - voice assistants.

These assistants have come a long way - technology has matured and usage has spiked. Roughly one in four adults now owns a smart speaker and 56% of Americans ages 18 and older use voice assistants according to the Media Behaviors and Influence study from Prosper Insights & Analytics.

Prosper - Personal Assistance Usage

This has led to the emergence of what is essentially a new type of operating system a voice OS. Operating systems are strategic by nature remember the big battles over the computer and phone OS? Thats why Big Tech is now fighting over voice OS market share.

And this is where audio content comes into play. The first few years of voice assistants were about getting simple functionalities right understanding the intent behind a query and providing relevant information. What time is it? Will it snow tonight?

But with the maturity we discussed, simple functionalities have become commoditized. Thats where audio content becomes the differentiator. Most of the time spent interacting with a voice assistant revolves around content consumption. And audio content consumption is steadily increasing. So, the biggest companies understand that talk audio content is the way to win the heart of the consumer.

Drenik: Why are they doing this now? Why not earlier?

Hirsh: I think many were not sufficiently aware of the capabilities and popularity of voice assistants until recently.

More interestingly, though, theres a direct correlation between voice assistant adoption and Covid-19. Its been exactly a year since the first stay-at-home order and many of us have spent more time at home than ever before, close not only to our families but to our devices, too.

Were surrounded by screens as well, but I argue that most of us are screened out, as theres a limit to the number of back-to-back Zoom calls you can be on or how much Netflix binge watching you can do. And the data speaks to this too. But the smart speakers are fresh and novel, enabling us to consume informative and entertaining audio content while we go about our daily life. Its such a freeing experience.

In short, voice technology and audio content have converged into this perfect storm of usage. Thats why I believe that this year will be defined by a battle over who will become the primary voice-first audio content provider.

Drenik: Whats so challenging about making audio data usable?

Hirsh: There are three main challenges in the way of audio becoming mainstream.

First, Audio is usually long-form, with podcasts and radio shows lasting as much as an hour. But our attention span doesnt last an hour; it barely reaches a minute. We want to skim, sample, and taste bite-sized audio nuggets, but we cant do that today.

Second, audio is much more rigid than text. It is saved in a sound format that makes analyzing it quite difficult. Todays algorithms and machines simply cannot extract meaning from sound. And without meaning, audio content cannot be searched, personalized, or recommended.

Finally, theres no protocol home for audio it doesnt have an official place on the web. There are no permalinks in an agreed-upon internet structure. This makes audio quite unusable! Sure, you can consume it once, but try sharing it on social media or saving for later and youre in for a challenge.

What does all this mean for me as a media consumer? If Im driving and I come across a fascinating few minutes of talk audio, its impossible in some cases and very difficult in others to later resurface it and share it with a friend. With the rising popularity of audio content, its astonishing that this set of challenges still exists, and this is why we founded Audioburst to organize the worlds talk audio and make it universally accessible.

Drenik: What role do voice assistants play in the audio revolution?

Hirsh: As voice assistants and voice-first interfaces are introduced to so many devices and services, users are moving to eyes-free and hands-free experiences which will require audio to answer the needs that text, images, or video answered in the past. This is why Amazon acquired Wondery and Alexa is pushing podcasts on the one hand, and on the other, Spotify is introducing voice commands.

Drenik: Whats most important for marketers to know about the audio medium?

Hirsh: First, audio content consumption is skyrocketing. According to the Media Behaviors and Influence study from Prosper Insights & Analytics, 67.6% of millennials, and 50% of the adult population in the U.S. now listen to podcasts. If you include talk radio, the numbers are much higher, and both keep climbing. I believe that consumers want to be set free from screens and so 50% of all content consumed will be audio by 2025. Bottom line nows the time to get in the game!

Prosper - Listen To Podcasts

Second, theres something extremely effective about audio marketing. Because audio is visceral and our most primal mode of communication (we hear our mothers in utero, before we see anything), audio is the most effective way to communicate and connect with consumers. Audio ads drive 24% higher recall on average than display ads and are 28% more likely to be seen as informative than display ads. Study after study shows that podcast listeners are quite likely to go out and buy a product they hear about from their podcast host.

Another reason for this is that audio ads come without the emotional friction of interrupting what consumers are trying to do. Brands can use audio to build an immersive, natural experience, delivering their message directly to a consumer, without forcing an uncomfortable experience.

One more thing marketers should realize is that its a completely new and open playing field! With the recent emergence of social audio (Clubhouse, Twitter Spaces, and others) there are fascinating new ways to reach audiences. Brands continue to experiment with podcast creation, branded and sponsored audio content of all sorts, and theres so much more that can be done. If youre a CMO, I recommend increasing audio budgets and diversifying your efforts to create positive listening experiences that make a real impact. It is sure to pay off.

Thanks for taking the time to discuss why now is such an exciting time for Audio, Amir, as well as the emotional connection this channel creates.

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Why Audio Content Is This Years Biggest Battle Ground For Big Tech - Forbes

PHOTO:Tobias Adam on Unsplash

Last September, the CEOs of four of the biggest tech companies in the U.S. faced the House Antitrust Subcommittee.

At that meeting, the CEOs of Alphabet, Amazon, Apple and Facebook (the only one missing was Microsoft's Satya Nadella) were grilled on a wide range of subjects under the broad umbrella of an anti-trust probe.

Then in October, the CEOs of Facebook, Google and Twitter all faced lawmakers again, this time to defend the legal liability shield that underpins their business models. At the end of February 2021, the judiciary committee's antitrust subcommittee met again to hear testimony from companies and other parties that claim they have been mistreated by the tech giants. And later this month, the bosses of Twitter, Google and Facebook will appear again in front of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, which is looking at the way misinformation is posted and spread by their platforms.

All of this is only on the U.S. side of the Atlantic. Cases against all these companies have already been tested in Europe with several stiff fines handed down by the European Union for anti-competitive behaviors or privacy infringements.

The charge on big tech is coming from two directions: privacy enforcement and anti-trust probes. There has also been discussion of the size of these companies and whether they should be allowed to continue to exist in their present form, but it's far from clear what actions legislators can take and whether it will have any impact on the business models of these companies.

Breaking up big tech firms will do little to change the business model that enabled Facebook, Google, and the rest to become titans, said Sharon Polsky, president of thePrivacy & Access Council of Canada, an independent professional association that offers advice on data governance and access, because their growth was enabled by laws that have nothing to do with competition or consumer protection.

Breaking the companies apart will only create a greater number of companies that will be able to do more of the same thing and obtain consumer consent according to the requirements of the GDPR, CCPA and PIPEDA (and other existing and proposed privacy laws), she said. That essential feature has enabled Facebook, Google to become what they are and spawned an entire industry of data brokers, now estimated to number in the thousands.

The essence of the problem from the consumer viewpoint is that the current consent model gives consumers the illusion of control over their information. Polsky said that illusion is perpetuated in proposed legislation that merely requires consent provisions be in plain language to enable consumers to understand how their information is collected and used. Consent clauses that span multiple pages are seldom read, so organizations collecting personal information are doing so in violation of the privacy laws that require consumers to give informed consent.

She added that consent provisions that are written in a few paragraphs of plain language are no better if they require nothing more specific than explanation that might says something like: We collect personal information from you and about you, and it might include information that reveals or includes preferences, beliefs, opinions, demographic, health, behavioral, or biometric information.

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Traditional methods of regulation are not likely to work on big tech firms as they have for other industries. Common forms of public utility regulation, including price controls like those imposed against electric and gas companies, and attempts to break up large firms will not happen, said Harriet Chan, co-founder of Singapore-based software development company CocoSign.

Breaking up a company like Facebook, where the business model relies at its core on creating a large network to connect everyone on a single platform, could ruin the business itself and harm customers. However, some forms of antitrust regulation could take aim at the scale of those companies and their ability to retain market dominance.

If the impact of mergers and acquisitions by large tech companies is that theyre blocking off future competition and innovation, then some regulation of the strategy could actually stimulate more innovation by giving small firms a chance to sink or swim into success, she said.

When the rate at which companies are merging or making acquisitions is high, the chances a startup will get bought is also higher and the incentive for more entrepreneurs to launch one and begin to innovate follows suit. While the U.S. government is trying to protect consumers by regulating these companies it could end up taxing innovation, Chan said.

Related Article: Enterprise Data Strategies in the Aftermath of the US Privacy Shield Defeat

The fact that Google has moved to stop selling ads based on specific web browsing shows that pressure can influence data-theft centric business models, said Heather Kendall of Reno, Nev.-based web42.io. The other lawsuits like the ones Facebook is currently facing regarding personal data use and targeting validity are also helpful in keeping tabs on big tech companies, she added.

Even so, it is highly likely that companies like Google and Facebook who externally make that transition will not give up sucking up consumer data for good, she said.

The result is that big companies will find ways to work around regulations that put smaller rivals at a disadvantage. "The behemoths will ultimately end up with less competition and new routes to milk consumers' digital data dry, Kendall said.

From taxes forward, regulators should roll back moves that get in the way of small- to medium-size tech companies who are working to do better and create the Web 3.0.

This is only the beginning, according to the UK-based consultancyGlobalData, which points out in a research report published last month titled "Antitrust in Tech, Media, and Telecom Industry" that big tech companies do not have much incentive to change their anticompetitive behavior despite facing large fines.

But the case for new regulation around the monopolization of user data by big tech companies is getting stronger every day. While regulators have attempted to take on big tech before, the current rules mean that companies can only be caught after or in the act. What is needed, the report pointed out, is new ex-ante (before the event) regulation that addresses the complexity of the digital economy.

"Existing antitrust rules are broad in scope and only allow enforcers to act after wrongdoing has been committed," saidLaura Petrone, senior thematic analyst at GlobalData ina statement."Big tech companies have been fined billions for their anticompetitive practices over the last decade, however, these practices are still in the spotlight after years of scrutiny.

The application of strict, transparent rules to digital platforms before they engage in any anticompetitive behavior will allow regulators to address structural competition problems without having to find an infringement of antitrust rules, she said. Petrone added that the proposed Digital Markets Act aims to abandon lengthy proceedings against large platforms in favor of ensuring the minimum conditions that avoid monopolies. Europe is leading the charge, but other jurisdictions are following suit, including China and India.

The problem is huge. According to GlobalDatas deals database, GAFAM (Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple and Microsoft) completed a total of 168 M&A deals between 2018 and 2020. Many of these deals were not investigated nor were competition authorities notified. Some regulators have introduced obligations for big platforms to notify antitrust agencies of all M&A activity, potentially resulting in more investigations and more acquisitions being blocked.

In the U.S., breaking up digital platforms has emerged as a popular remedy but thats easier said than done," Petrone said. "It is doubtful whether separating companies would increase competition in any key markets. While it would undoubtedly reduce each platform's power in the short-to-medium-term, the underlying market dynamics, such as network effects and economies of scale, would continue to favor concentration.

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Data and Privacy Pressure Increases on Big Tech Companies - CMSWire

In a new paper being presented at the Association for Computing Machinerys Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency conference next week, researchers including PhD students Nicholas Vincent and Hanlin Li propose three ways the public can exploit this to their advantage:

People already use many of these tactics to protect their own privacy. If youve ever used an ad blocker or another browser extension that modifies your search results to exclude certain websites, youve engaged in data striking and reclaimed some agency over the use of your data. But as Hill found, sporadic individual actions like these dont do much to get tech giants to change their behaviors.

What if millions of people were to coordinate to poison a tech giants data well, though? That might just give them some leverage to assert their demands.

There may have already been a few examples of this. In January, millions of users deleted their WhatsApp accounts and moved to competitors like Signal and Telegram after Facebook announced that it would begin sharing WhatsApp data with the rest of the company. The exodus caused Facebook to delay its policy changes.

Just this week, Google also announced that it would stop tracking individuals across the web and targeting ads at them. While its unclear whether this is a real change or just a rebranding, says Vincent, its possible that the increased use of tools like AdNauseam contributed to that decision by degrading the effectiveness of the companys algorithms. (Of course, its ultimately hard to tell. The only person who really knows how effectively a data leverage movement impacted a system is the tech company, he says.)

Vincent and Li think these campaigns can complement strategies such as policy advocacy and worker organizing in the movement to resist Big Tech.

Its exciting to see this kind of work, says Ali Alkhatib, a research fellow at the University of San Franciscos Center for Applied Data Ethics, who was not involved in the research. It was really interesting to see them thinking about the collective or holistic view: we can mess with the well and make demands with that threat, because it is our data and it all goes into this well together.

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How to poison the data that Big Tech uses to surveil you - MIT Technology Review

The annual meetings of the Chinese parliament and its advisory body are underway in Beijing this week. Top executives from some of China's largest tech firms are among the thousands of delegates who attend and put forward their opinions. Here is a look at what the tech bosses are proposing for China's digital economy.

More regulatory scrutiny is needed for the country's budding internet economy, Tencent's founder and CEO Pony Ma says in one of his proposals, according to a report from the state-backed Peoples Posts and Telecommunications News. As a delegate of the National People's Congress, Ma has submitted more than 50 proposals during the parliament meetings over nine consecutive years, said the report.

Specifically, Ma calls for strict governance on peer-to-peer finance, bike sharing, long-term apartment rental and online grocery group-buying, fledgling areas that have also seen businesses go bust amid cash-hemorrhaging competition.

Ma's comment comes at a time when regulators are tightening their grips on the country's tech giants. In recent months, the government has launched probes into Alibaba and other tech firms over anti-competitive practices and proposed a sweeping data law that will limit how platforms collect user information.

In China's grand plan to move up the manufacturing value chain, Xiaomi, which makes smartphones and a slew of other hardware devices, has been keen to help factories upgrade.

Xiaomi CEO Lei Jun, a delegate of the NPC, recognizes China is late to smart manufacturing, lacks home-grown innovation and is over-reliant on foreign technologies, he says in his proposal. Research and development efforts should be directed to key components such as cutting-edge sensors and precision reducers for factory robots, he says.

China also lacks the talent for advancing factory innovation, Lei points out, thus government policies should support corporations in attracting foreign talent and cultivating collaboration between industries and academia.

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As part of its artificial intelligence pivot, Baidu, China's biggest search engine service, has invested heavily in smart-driving tech. Regulation is a major hurdle for autonomous driving firms like Baidu that need large volumes of data to train algorithms, and the rate at which testing permits are issued varies greatly across regions.

Robin Li, CEO of Baidu and a member of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference, urges regulators to be more innovative and pave the way for legal and at-scale commercialization of autonomous driving. A mechanism should be created for various government agencies, industry players and academia to collectively promote the commercial deployment of autonomous driving.

In addition, Li calls for more senior-friendly technologies, greater public access to government data, and better online protection for underage users in China.

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What China's Big Tech CEOs propose at the annual parliament meeting - Yahoo Tech