Category Archives: Big Tech

German lessons

The Commission in its impact assessments takes into account already existing EU laws, such as the NetzDG, noted the Commissions spokesman Manoury, referring to the Network Enforcement Act, which was passed by the German parliament back in 2017.

According to the website of the German Ministry of Justice and and Consumer Protection, the law aims to fight hate crime and criminally punish fake news and other unlawful content on social networks more effectively. This includes insults, malicious gossip, defamation, public incitement to crime, incitement to hatred, disseminating portrayals of violence and threatening the commission of a felony.

In practice, all social media platforms (with more than 2 million users) that are accessible in Germany are obliged to take down or block access to manifestly unlawful content within 24 hours of receiving a complaint. They also have to offer their users an accessible procedure for reporting criminally punishable content and take immediate notice of any content that might violate German criminal law.

But German lawmakers didnt stop there. In June this year, the Budestag decided to tighten further the laws against hate speech online by requiring social networks to report to the BKA (Federal Police) and transmit some user data, such as IP addresses or port numbers, directly to the authorities.

Moreover, new rules will oblige operators of social networks to submit biannual reports on their handling of complaints about criminally punishable content. These reports must contain information, for example, on the volume of complaints and the decision-making practices of the network, as well as about the teams responsible for processing reported content. They must be made available to everybody on the internet.

Social media platforms could be liable for fines of up to 50 million euros if they fail on their reporting duties, according to a statement from the Justice Ministry.

According to the German daily Stuttgarter Zeitung, so far nine social media platforms have offered transparency reports: Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, Reddit, Tiktok, Soundcloud, Change.org and Google+. The number of complaints varies greatly. In the second half of 2019, 4,274 unsatisfied users reported to Facebook. There were 843,527 complaints on Twitter and 277,478 on YouTube. Facebook felt compelled to take action in almost a quarter of the cases. 87 per cent of these posts were deleted within 24 hours, a total of 488. Twitter took care of 16 per cent of the complaints, 86 per cent of which were removed from the network within a day, according to the German newspaper.

However, the new obligations have their critics. Some express concern that legal content will end up being deleted by overzealous platforms eager to avoid paying hefty fines, the so-called problem of over-blocking. In 2017, when the law was first passed by the German parliament, even journalism unions in Germany protested against it, fearing a new form of censorship.

Reacting to the criticisms, German Justice Minister Christine Lambrecht recently called for the introduction of a counter-presentation procedure, which would give authors of deleted content the right to ask social networks for a reassessment of their decision before any fines would be imposed.

There is also criticism that some of the proposed rules might even be in conflict with the German constitution. This particularly concerns the law intended to combat far-right extremism and hate crime, which was passed in the summer and is intended to force operators of social networks to report criminal content such as the threat of dangerous bodily harm or defamation of public figures (mayors or municipal councillors) to the Federal Criminal Police Office. It is because of those concerns that the president has not yet signed the law.

The German experience clearly shows that certain measures to combat the spread of hate speech and other form of illegal content online are relatively easy to implement, while others, like direct reporting to the police, might take much longer to build a consensus around.

That being said, even when it comes to the seemingly more trivial measures, the European Commissions mission is an infinitely more challenging one. First of all, it needs to make all member states agree on what even constitutes a hate crime on the internet. Then it has to create a set of rules that would be applicable across all member states.

According to a source in the European Commission familiar with the legislation, the first task is the easier one. There is actually a very broad agreement across the EU on the question of illegal content. Basically, what is illegal offline is also illegal online it is just a question of how you monitor it and what measures to take to make sure that the rules are followed also online, the source, who wished to remain anonymous, told BIRN.

Whatever the rules that the Commission ends up proposing in early December, the speed of the final implementation of those measures will largely depend on the legal form of the rules.

Generally speaking, if the rules assume the form of EU regulations, the final implementation might take a very long time, as regulations need unilateral agreement by all member states. If EU legislators decide to go with directives, which leave a lot of space for individual member states to translate into their own respective national laws and dont require unilateral agreement, things could go much faster.

According to the source from the Commission, half a year is an absolute minimum to expect the legislative process to take.

If you have an extremely well-drafted piece of legislation that everyone agrees on, it can take half a year. Ive never heard about anything going faster than this. It is already clear that this will not be very straightforward, the source said.

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EU Set to Take on Big Tech with New Digital Services Act | Reporting Democracy - Balkan Insight

LISBON, Portugal, Dec. 2, 2020 /PRNewswire/ --

Big tech companies are resistant to working with the US department of defense (DoD) on military innovations, largely because they fear doing so would anger China and prevent them from making money there, the founder of Anduril Industries Palmer Luckey said.

Luckey, whose company works directly with the DoD on these kinds of technologies, was interviewed by David Pierce, editor at large of Protocol, at 100,000-attendee online conference Web Summit.

Throughout history, Luckey pointed out, the most innovative US technology companies have always worked with the country's top security agencies on warfare innovations. It's only been in the last decade that that has changed, with big tech firms saying,"Not only are we not going to work on national security problems, but any companies we acquire, we'll instantly kill off their works [in this sector]," he said.

Often the reasons cited are ethical concerns, and that employees of these companies themselves don't agree with working on military pursuits.But Luckey challenged this notion during the Web Summit interview, saying that the high percentage of employee objections gets inflated.

"A lot of companies have financial and PR incentives to stay out of military work, so they're happy to use those employees as a scapegoat to say, 'We're listening to our employees.'...which contributes to this idea that workers of Silicon Valley and other tech hubs are universally opposed to this idea," Luckey said.

For anyone who thinks this is an exaggeration of consequences from Chinese backlash, Luckey insisted, "You've had companies dropped and blocked in China for far less. You say the word 'Taiwan' and that's it; it's over for you."

"China has done an incredible job of using the blocking of access to their markets as a tool to get the culture of western democracies to subvert itself to China. They don't have to come after us militarily. They don't have to cut our networks. All they have to do is invest in our companies, do partnerships with our companies, dangle this carrot of 'Maybe someday we'll allow you into China' and...then everybody bends over for them, whether they're making money now or maybe some day in the future," Luckey said.

As for tech workers who object to the companies they work for suddenly changing course to work on military advancement, Luckey urges tech companies to be upfront and honest about how employees' work will be applied.

"I'm totally sympathetic to where they would feel bamboozled when it turns out their company was using their code on the side to work with the US department of defense," Luckey said."In the same way my employees would feel bamboozled if I told them they were coming here to save lives, protect military bases, protect western democracy, and then it turns out I'm actually using their code to...lock up dissidents in China, or if I was using their technology to track theft in grocery stores. They would be totally fair in saying, 'That's not what I signed up for'."

In discussing the usage of AI in warfare, and how to properly create guidelines, Luckey said the best course of action is not to look at what AI is capable of today, but what it's capable of in the long run, then develop rules accordingly.

"It's not a good idea to outsource life and death decisions to a machine. You can't court-martial a machine. You can't imprison a computer for war crimes," he said. "What we've been focused on is building technology that gets the right information in front of the right people at the right time. Sorting through large amounts of information but not making those lethal decisions without a person very explicitly looking at the data and making the call, like they have for centuries. I think that that's a pretty good line to draw, and something we'll have to enforce against our political adversaries."

In response to the idea that the tech is ahead of regulation when it comes to AI in military applications, Luckey said the department of defense has more thinking and policy around autonomous systems than anywhere else.

"DoD has a lot more process around the use of autonomous weapons than basically any other organisation. AI, as a new buzzword, has gotten people to treat it as a brand new thing. But the reality is since the Vietnam war we've had missiles that were able to fly into an area, look for radar signatures, run into it and blow it up," he said.

About Palmer Luckey

Palmer is the founder of Anduril Industries, a startup that is building surveillance and defense systems for the US military and other agencies.He is also the founder of Oculus Rift.

About Web Summit

In the words of Inc. Magazine, "Web Summit is the largest technology conference in the world". Forbes says Web Summit is "the best tech conference on the planet", Bloomberg calls it "Davos for geeks", Politico "the Olympics of tech", and the Guardian "Glastonbury for geeks".

Useful Links:Web Summit website: https://websummit.com/Web Summit Flickr: https://www.flickr.com/photos/websummit/albums/Web Summit YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCJtkHqH4Qof97TSx7BzE5IQ

SOURCE Web Summit

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Web Summit: Founder of Anduril Industries Palmer Luckey says big tech companies are resistant to working with the US department of defense (DoD) on...

As promised, more info following yesterdays Snapdragon 888 announcement. First off, as expected, the companys next flagship SoC will arrive in the first quarter of next year. Were still waiting on specific models, but as noted yesterday, the San Diego-based chip giant already has a lineup of smartphone makers planning to employ the 765 follow-up, including ASUS, Black Shark, LG, MEIZU, Motorola, Nubia, realme, OnePlus, OPPO, Sharp, vivo, Xiaomi and ZTE.

The focuses are also what youd expect: 5G, AI, speed, security, imaging and gaming. As Qualcomm announced earlier, the new system sports the third-gen X60 5G modem, which supports both sub-6 and mmWave variations of the wireless technology with speeds up to 7.5 Gbps. Also on board is support for Wi-Fi 6 and Bluetooth 5.2.

The sixth-gen version of the companys AI Engine brings faster processing speeds at lower power consumption specifically up to 3x performance per watt, per Qualcomms numbers. Thats capable of up to 26 tera operations per second (TOPS). Compare that to the incredible 5.5 TOPS the company was talking up on the Snapdragon 765 roughly this time last year. The AI stuff is primarily used to boost camera, gaming, connectivity and voice assistants like Googles.

On the camera side, the new chip features the improved Spectra 580, sporting the lines first triple ISP (image signal processor). Thats going to go a ways toward fostering multi-camera setup, with the ability to simultaneously have three cameras at up to 2.7 gigapixels a second. The system also supports capture of three 4K HDR videos at once overkill, perhaps, but neat. Theres improved low-light support as well, to brighten up dark shots always a nice thing.

The on-board Adreno 660 GPU can do up to 35% faster graphics. The Kryo 680 based on the new Arm Cortex-X1 architecture brings up to a 25% uplift in CPU performance. Game rendering has been improved by up to 30%, and titles will get access to Variable Rate Shading a first for a Qualcomm chip. As for security, the new chip offers a number of new features aimed at protecting on-device data, including the Qualcomm Secure Processing Unit.

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Qualcomms Snapdragon 888 will land on phones in Q1 2021 - TechCrunch

This week two well known tech executives revealed they have been dabbling in bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. In a recent interview, Skype cofounder Jaan Tallinn detailed that he held bitcoin and ethereum in his personal finances, while the Intercom cofounder Eoghan McCabe tweeted on Sunday that hes jumped firmly onto the bitcoin wagon.

In 2020 a number of popular tech executives and CEOs from giant firms have revealed they hold a fascination for cryptocurrencies like bitcoin and ethereum. On Friday, the cofounder of the telecommunications application Skype discussed a couple of donations he made in the past leveraging ethereum and bitcoin. Skypes cofounder Jaan Tallinn sent 350 ETH ($158k) to the London-based organization Faculty AI and in March 2020, Tallinn donated 50 BTC ($850k) to the group.

Faculty AI won $800k from the U.K. Home Office in order to develop an artificial intelligence (AI) system that detects terrorism through social media. During his interview, Tallinn explained that the reason why he donated cryptocurrency to the organization is because he keeps a majority of his wealth in crypto assets.

He opted to donate the crypto directly because if he cashed out the digital assets he would be liable for capital gains. According to the recent interview, Faculty AIs annual accounts note that the company sold roughly $144k from the stash of ethereum in 2019.

Following the interview with Tallinn, another well known executive told his Twitter followers on Sunday that hes jumped into the bitcoin space. On November 15, 2020, the chairman and cofounder of Intercom, a well known American software firm, tweeted about the decentralized crypto asset bitcoin. Intercoms Eoghan McCabe disclosed he is holding bitcoin after messing around with the digital currency for years.

I would like to announce that after years of dabbling, Ive jumped firmly onto the Bitcoin wagon, McCabe tweeted. In a tweet that followed, McCabe noted that hes been listening to the Pomp Podcast and one in particular that features the Bitcoin evangelist Robert Breedlove. Mad love for all the Bitcoin freaks, McCabe added in another tweet. A great number of bitcoiners welcomed McCabe into the space, and a few individuals told him that he was still in the early adoption phase of bitcoin.

The Tallinn and McCabe news follows a number of prominent executives getting into the cryptocurrency space and discussing the benefits of bitcoin in 2020. Executives like billionaire Stanley Druckenmiller, the Bond King Jeffrey Gundlach, the well known fund manager Bill Miller, billionaire investor Paul Tudor Jones, and even the actor Kevin Hart jumped on the bitcoin wagon this year. Alongside this, the U.S. Senator, Cynthia Lummis, sees a lot of promise when it comes to the innovation provided by the crypto economy.

Even the traditional crypto naysayers are starting to discuss bitcoin in a more positive way. Former bitcoin doubter JPMorgans recent analysis shows institutional interest has been moving from gold exchange-traded funds (ETFs) to bitcoin. The infamous BTC hater, Nouriel Roubini (Dr. Doom), admitted that BTC might be a store of value in a recent interview with Yahoo Finance. With the way things are going, its likely a whole lot more popular tech and investor luminaries will be joining the cryptocurrency revolution. And maybe some former haters as well.

What do you think about Skype cofounder Jaan Tallinn holding most of his personal wealth in crypto and the Intercoms chairmans recent plunge into bitcoin? Let us know what you think about this subject in the comments section below.

Image Credits: Shutterstock, Pixabay, Wiki Commons

Disclaimer: This article is for informational purposes only. It is not a direct offer or solicitation of an offer to buy or sell, or a recommendation or endorsement of any products, services, or companies. Bitcoin.com does not provide investment, tax, legal, or accounting advice. Neither the company nor the author is responsible, directly or indirectly, for any damage or loss caused or alleged to be caused by or in connection with the use of or reliance on any content, goods or services mentioned in this article.

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Big Tech Execs and Bitcoin: Skype Cofounder Keeps Personal Wealth in Crypto, Intercom Chairman 'Firmly Jumps on the Bitcoin Wagon' | News - Bitcoin...

The unease regulators and politicians have about the big tech companies range from their market power, to the vast amounts of sensitive consumer data they hold, to their impacts on democracies and societies to their destabilising of pre-existing orders.

In the US both Republicans and Democrats, albeit for different reasons, have been increasingly hostile to the mega-techs, threatening not just more regulation but anti-trust actions to break them up.

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In China, the response has been to impose regulations on its tech companies that treat them more like traditional companies and institutions.

The dilemma for regulators and legislators is that the tech-based disrupters are driving innovation and consumer benefit in a tide of creative destruction of the established order that is forcing the incumbents to become more innovative and dynamic themselves. Its a productive process.

The flip side of that, however, is that it is destabilising and destructive and is occurring on a landscape tilted heavily against the incumbents.

Nowhere is that more evident, or the stakes higher, than in fintech, where the traditional and heavily-regulated banking system is being progressively unbundled by new unregulated or, at best, very lightly regulated non-bank players. Thats been increasingly the case since the global financial crisis and the dramatic increase in the burden of regulation on traditional financial institutions.

In an economy as tightly controlled as Chinas, of course, the antipathy to disruption and the ability to act decisively is somewhat greater than it is in most Western economies.

There has been explosive growth in the non-bank, or shadow-banking, sector since the GFC as new players without the capital and liquidity requirements of the regulated institutions and, with regulated access to their data, are eroding their traditional dominance.

The growth of the mega-techs is also raising a long-term question mark over the ability of the regulators to maintain the stability of financial systems and governments ability to protect consumers, protect their data, implement their own monetary policies and police money-laundering, cybercrime and tax evasion. Theres also the small matter of the tax they pay, or dont pay.

So far the authorities have tended to have a laissez-faire stance, seeing more benefit in the innovation and disruption than downside. That now, however, appears to be changing in line with the sheer scale and global market power the biggest of the tech groups have achieved.

Perhaps it isnt surprising that China, given the authoritarian nature of its governance, has been among the first to react.

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While the external focus of the suite of new regulations has been on its impact on Jack Mas Ant Group and its now-aborted IPO, they apply far more broadly and, rather than simply responding to the imminence of Ants IPO (or, as some have suggested, inflammatory comments by Ma in the lead-up to its launch) have been years in the making.

China has special concerns about fintechs and shadow banking more broadly. For at least the last four or five years it has been showing increasing angst about the growth in its non-bank financial sector, the rise, and rise, of the levels of leverage in its household and small business sector and the relationship between its banks and non-banks.

Chinas banks have used off-balance sheet lending to shadow banking institutions to circumvent their own regulation.

Last month Ma, inadvertently perhaps, put the issue into stark relief when he described Chinas banks as "pawn shops" because they required collateral and guarantees instead of using "big data" and were risk-averse.

China has proven to be less accommodating to disruptors than some of its Western peers. Credit:Bloomberg

Ant Group, spun out of Mas Alibaba in 2014, has the biggest mobile payments app in China, offering credit and unsecured micro loans through Alipay. Between Ant and Tencents WeChat Pay, the two companies control about 80 per cent of Chinas online payments. Ant has more than a billion users.

China, like regulators elsewhere, sees tech companies offering banking services and, unlike most other jurisdictions to date, has decided to regulate them like banks.

Ants model means that it originates loans but keeps only tiny fractions of them about two per cent on its own balance sheet. Its co-funders are banks and other institutions and securitised debt investors.

China now proposes that all online micro-lenders like Ant and there are hundreds of them in China should provide at least 30 per cent of the funding themselves. It plans to cap the rise of individual loans and impose loan-to-income ratios. Lenders will need special permission to operate outside their provinces.

For Ant, and others with similar models, that probably means at least trebling the amount of capital it has to hold against each loan and therefore a dramatically lower return on its capital.

Thats a significant change to what had been a very capital-light model but one that echoes, to a lesser degree, the capital requirements and leverage restrictions that banks have to meet.

Chinas crackdown doesnt just impact online lenders. It is also considering rules that would address anti-competitive and monopolistic behaviour, the use of consumer data, big tech alliances and predatory behaviours involving subsidised below-cost services.

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Alibaba has a cloud services business that is generating massive losses as it tries to establish market dominance. As the mega-tech companies diversify their offerings that kind of cross-subsidy from exceptionally profitable activities to loss-making businesses to drive out competitors and create new dominant positions isnt uncommon.

Some of the proposed new rules would apply to Alibaba and Ant and the other big Chinese tech companies but they would be economy-wide and are not out of step with the discussions and debates occurring within market economies in the West.

In an economy as tightly controlled as Chinas, of course, the antipathy to disruption and the ability to act decisively is somewhat greater than it is in most Western economies.

There will, however, be a tipping point in other major economies where the discussions shift more heavily from emphasising competition and innovation to the of disruption and dominance if unregulated mega-techs are allowed to grow unchecked. That moment is looming.

A concise wrap of the day on the markets, breaking business news and expert opinion delivered to your inbox each afternoon. Sign up for the Herald's here and The Age's here.

Stephen is one of Australias most respected business journalists. He was most recently co-founder and associate editor of the Business Spectator website and an associate editor and senior columnist at The Australian.

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Disrupting the disrupters: China is slamming the brakes on Big Tech - Sydney Morning Herald

Rep. Devin Nunes, R-Calif., on Adam Schiff, the presidential race and censorship by media and social media companies.

Barack Obama has called tech company liability protections untenable and lamented not taking a tougher stance against China during his administration.

In an interview with the Atlantic, Obama reflected on his tenure and the aftermath of his time in the White House. He spoke about how he allowed the circumstances surrounding his election to influence his decision making more than he liked particularly regarding the economy and China.

One of the things I was reminded of in writing the book was just how many of my earliest choices were premised on the very specific circumstances of being a global financial meltdown, Obama said, noting that he wasnt a knee-jerk anti-trade guy, but that he allowed China to get away with more than he would have had he not needed help during a global recession.

And if we hadnt been going through a financial crisis, my posture toward China would have been more explicitly contentious around trade issues, Obama added. But I couldnt have a trade war in 2009 or 2010.

A trade war with China has been the centerpiece of President Donald Trumps foreign policy over the past two years a policy that succeeded in reducing short term trade deficits, but then led to greater overall trade imbalance, according to the Wall Street Journal.

While Obama could wax philosophical about what he might have done, he also turned his attention towards what needs to be done: namely, he spoke of the liability protections around tech companies, calling them untenable.

BIG TECH LIKES BIG GOVERNMENT: SEN. MARSHA BLACKBURN

Those protections have come under sharp scrutiny in recent months as information control became a central issue in the U.S. presidential election. Companies such as Twitter started to flag comments that they deemed misinformation or unproven claims, drawing outrage from some circles over what many deemed outright censorship.

Tech companies have testified multiple times before Congress now, with executives from Apple, Google, Facebook and Amazon weighing in on the federal law known as Section 230, which protects social media platforms from liability for the content users post.

Former President Barack Obama speaks at a rally as he campaigns for Democratic presidential candidate former Vice President Joe Biden, Monday, Nov. 2, 2020, at Turner Field in Atlanta. (AP Photo/Brynn Anderson)

Many see the rule as outdated, particularly as the companies gather increasing influence due to their reach, but some tech executives, such as Mark Zuckerberg, believe that it is necessary to update the law, according to the Washington Post.

Obama specifically took issue with the way that social media has helped to spread disinformation at a turbocharged pace, though he doesnt hold them ultimately responsible.

This predates social media. It was already there, Obama said. The degree to which these companies are insisting that they are more like a phone company than they are like the Atlantic,I do not think is tenable.

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They are making editorial choices, whether theyve buried them in algorithms or not, the former president said. The First Amendment doesnt require private companies to provide a platform for every view that is out there.

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Obama wishes he had been tougher on China, labels Big Tech liability protections 'untenable' - Fox Business

WASHINGTON For six years, Brandon Belford worked as an economic policy adviser to President Barack Obama in the White House and federal agencies. He moved to the Bay Area when Donald Trump became president, part of a massive flight of Obama officials from Washington to Silicon Valley, Wall Street and Hollywood. He took high-ranking positions with Apple and then Lyft, where he is currently the ride-sharing companys chief of staff.

Now Belford is back, as part of one of the transition teams named by President-elect Joe Biden to restock a federal government that has been battered after four years of Trump by hiring new officials and advising the incoming administration on what its first governing steps should be.

Those steps could be timid, judging by the composition of those teams, where Obama-era centrism prevails. That has some progressives worried that Biden represents nothing more than a return to normal, at a time when many of them believe the nation is ready to embrace policy ideas well to the left of center.

The status quo is killing us, says former Bernie Sanders press secretary Briahna Joy Gray, who now hosts a podcast called Bad Faith.

Belford is joined by dozens of other Democratic operatives who have spent the past four years working at prestigious law firms and think tanks. On these agency review teams are high-ranking executives from Amazon, partners at white-shoe law firms like Covington & Burling and enough experts from D.C. center-left think tanks including six from the Brookings Institution alone to fill a center-left think tank.

Progressives knew this was coming. I am very concerned about the role Uber executives would play in this administration, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez D-N.Y., told Yahoo News. Even though she also effusively praised the appointment of Ron Klain asthe incoming White House chief of staff, Ocasio-Cortez vowed that corporate America would not pull the wool over our eyes when it came to crafting the Biden presidency.

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Some have put it less bluntly. Bidens transition team is full of wealthy corporate executives who are completely disconnected from the struggles of the working class, complains left-leaning activist Ryan Knight, whose Twitter handle is @ProudSocialist.

He was presumably referring to the two dozen agency review team officials who come from law firms like Arnold & Porter.Or to the 40 or so members of the Biden transition who are current or recent lobbyists.

The agency review teams are not exactly settling into their cubicles just yet. For one, President Trump has not yet conceded the election, and the transition has been hindered in part by Republican operatives at the General Services Administration. And agency review is an enormously complex process, one that actually began months ago. The transition teams are supposed to ensure a smooth transfer of power, in large part by making sure that capable officials are ready to get to work in their respective agencies the moment Biden lifts his hand from the Lincoln Bible.

Speaking on the condition of anonymity, one member of the Biden campaign working on agency-related matters says teams were primarily tasked with surveying the landscape of the federal bureaucracy. She says that the transition teams would make some hiring recommendations, but only as a secondary function.

With a single exception, the agency review team members mentioned in this article did not respond to requests for comment.

One with a typically impressive biography is that of Aneesh Chopra, who served as the U.S. chief technology officer for Obama before starting his own medical data logistics company, CareJourney. Now he is on the transition team for the U.S. Postal Service, where he will presumably work to undo the alleged damage by another logistics maven: Trump appointee Louis DeJoy.

Of course, most progressives are glad that theres a Biden transition to speak of, instead of a second Trump term. But they also recognize their own role in the Democratic candidates victory.

Everyone fell into line and did everything they could to get Joe Biden elected, says Max Berger, a progressive activist who worked for Elizabeth Warrens presidential campaign and Justice Democrats, the group that helped elect Ocasio-Cortez to the House in 2018.

Berger recognizes that progressives will be a junior partner to the establishment Democrats with whom Biden has been ideologically and temperamentally aligned for a good half-century. They want to be partners all the same, not just the loyal opposition.

Many are cheered by some of the agency review teams. For one, they are notably more diverse, a stark contrast to Trumps reliance on white males for so much of his advice. On the transition team for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration is Jedidah Isler, the Dartmouth professor who in 2014 became the first Black woman to earn a doctorate in astrophysics from Yale. The transition team for the Small Business Administration includes Jorge Silva Puras, a political leader in Puerto Rico who also teaches entrepreneurship at a community college in the Bronx.

The presence of labor officials throughout many of the groups is notable, says David Dayen, executive editor of the American Prospect. In the Department of Education team, for example, are several executives from the American Federation of Teachers.

He called the Federal Reserve and Treasury teams all-stars, a sentiment shared by other progressives interviewed for this article. On the Treasury team is Mehrsa Baradaran, a progressive economist who has written on the racial wealth gap. She is also on the Federal Reserve team, along with Reena Aggarwal, a corporate governance expert.

Progressive strategist Elizabeth Spiers says the finance-related teams are not not quite Elizabeth Warren levels of aggressiveness but also not stuffed with finance people. Bidens advisers appear to have learned the lessons of his former boss. During Obamas first year, he relied on banking executives to help quell the financial crisis. They did so in ways that steered the new president away from progressive proposals, such as nationalizing those very same banks.

There is not a single current executive from Citibank or Goldman Sachs on any of the transition teams. Bank of America has also been shut out. JPMorgan can boast a single toehold in the agency review process: Lisa Sawyer of the Pentagon team. A spokesman for JPMorgan told Yahoo News that the bank was following the appropriate election laws and that Sawyer was not on an agency review team that will touch any banking issues.

I think the Biden administration is going to be surprising to progressives in some ways and disappointing in others, and the agency review teams reflect that, Dayen says. During the summer, the American Prospect published a lengthy expos about Bidens foreign policy advisers lucrative foray into corporate America. Many are set to return to the highest echelons of official Washington.

I have to be cautiously optimistic, says Waleed Shahid, communications director for the Justice Democrats.

Relatively young progressives like Shahid are less likely to wax romantic about the way things were in Washington. They are less interested in experience than conviction. But for many in Bidens camp, a lack of experience was among the several fatal flaws of the Trump years.

Everyone right or left has made the mistaken assumption for years that governing is easy, says The Death of Expertise author Tom Nichols, who teaches at the Naval War College and is an ardently anti-Trump Republican.

After having a bunch of nitwits and cronies loose in the government, Nichols wrote in an email, I think a lot of people on the left are really giving in to the assumption that as long as youre not Trump, or not a complete idiot, anyone can do it.

Given the title and theme of his book, Nicholas cautioned against that approach. Its a childish and silly approach to government, but its a bipartisan problem, he told Yahoo News.

While progressive may not see their stars like Sens. Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren occupying the Treasury Department, they do very much hope that a Biden presidency amounts to more than a third Obama term. It was unaddressed economic inequality, they believe, that bred the populist resentment that gave Trump an opening in 2016. The coronavirus has only made that inequality worse. That will only increase populist resentment, they worry, to be exploited by a Trump acolyte or perhaps Trump himself, again in 2024.

Addressing that inequality, for now, falls to transition team officials like Mark Schwartz of Amazon and Ted Dean of Dropbox, as well as Arun Venkataraman of Visa and David Holmes of defense contractor Rebellion Defense, in which Eric Schmidt of Google is an investor. Many of these officials are veterans of the Obama administration or Democratic offices on the Hill.

There is a lot of corporate influencethere, says Maurice Weeks, co-founder of the Action Center on Race and the Economy. And that is troubling. But he is encouraged by the presence of hard-core progressives like Sarah Miller, a former Treasury deputy who is both an anti-Facebook activist and the executive of the American Economic Liberties Project, which seeks to curb corporate power. She is now on the Treasury transition team.

In some ways, the difference is between former Obama officials who, like Miller, went on to become activists and those who moved on to become rich. The latter did only what many government officials had done before them. But at a time of mass unemployment, a stint at the corporate law firm Latham & Watkins (three transition team members) may not seem as impressive as it may have when Obama was president.

We dont just want to rewind the clock by four years, Weeks says.

For many progressives, Trump was a singular threat to important institutions of the federal government, but rebuilding those institutions is simply not as important as rebuilding entire communities shattered by economic, social and racial inequalities.

It doesnt help matters that, today, tech giants are distrusted by conservatives and progressives alike. Firms that were run out of Palo Alto garages now chafe at antitrust laws like the railroad companies of a century ago.

And like those companies, they know how to use their influence. In 2019 alone, two of the biggest and most influential technology firms Amazon and Facebook each spent $17 million on government affairs, better known as lobbying.

Ocasio-Cortezs reference to Uber may have been a subtle warning to the incoming administration: The brother-in-law of Vice President-elect Kamala Harris is Tony West, who worked for the Department of Justice under President Bill Clinton and is now the chief counsel at Uber.Jake Sullivan, another top Biden adviser, also worked for Uber.

The company recently won a major victory in California with Proposition 22, a successful response to legal efforts to make Uber drivers and other gig workers employees, not contractors. Thats exactly the kind of labor policy, Ocasio-Cortez says, the Biden administration must avoid.

Many top Obama staffers went to Silicon Valley in 2017. They could be returning to Washington with a new appreciation for free market capitalism at a time when socialism is no longer a dirty word.

Joe Bidens transition is absolutely stacked with tech industry players, noted Protocol, an online publication that covers technology.

Thats exactly what worries Jeff Hauser, executive director of the Revolving Door Project, which tracks what Trump has called, without much affection, the swamp. He notes that the transition team for the Office of Management and Budget appears to have borrowed rather avidly from Silicon Valley, with team members hailing from Lyft, Airbnb and Amazon.

The budget office wields an enormous amount of power, says Hauser, including in both how congressionally appropriated money is doled out and how certain rules are implemented. Though it had a supporting role in Trumps impeachment drama over foreign aid, OMB is otherwise obscure, making it a perfect site for covert exercises of federal power.

Hauser also didnt like the prevalence of Big Law talent on the Department of Justice team, which signaled to him that the Biden administration could go soft on corporate malefactors.

Watching the transition, Gray, the former Sanders adviser, recalled an old saying: The fish rots from the head. The head, in this case, is Joe Biden, of whom Gray has long been a skeptic.

Hes a fundamentally conservative man, Gray says. She reasons that if Biden was unmoved by the largest protest movement in American history to endorse Medicare for All, he cant be trusted to do much for conservative causes like a $15 minimum wage and the Green New Deal.

Still, she believes that Biden can be made to hear the voices of progressives if, Gray says, they are loud enough. She points out that there is widespread support for progressive legislation like the $15 minimum wage in Florida, even though Trump won the state.

Biden easily won Oregon, but a push to legalize small amounts of drugs, known as Measure 110, was even more popular than he was.

She sees that as evidence that progressive ideas are more popular than Biden himself. Progressives should never stop screaming that reality from the rooftops, Gray told Yahoo News. And she vowed to keep fighting, even with Trump gone and a Democratic president in the Oval Office once again.

I dont accept resignation, she said.

Cover thumbnail photo: Jonathan Ernst/Reuters

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Big Tech and Big Law dominate Biden transition teams, tempering progressive hopes - Yahoo News

The coronavirus pandemic has made having a stable and reliable internet connection a matter of extreme urgency, as people all over the world struggle to work, access education, and participate in society while staying safe. Yet universal affordable access is far from being achieved; indeed, half of the world still lacks access to the Internet, despite sustained efforts from governments and corporations.

One popular proposal for ubiquitous connectivity comes from Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellite constellations.LEO boosters claims that such satellites will have the ability to deliver high-speed broadband anywhere on the planet. These satellites provide internet access from space, and require placing thousands of satellites into orbit at a much closer proximity to Earth than traditional satellites.

The prospect of a globe-encircling mesh of broadband communication satellites has attracted the interest and investment of billionaires ranging from Bill Gates in the 1990s to Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos today. Currently there are at least four major LEO initiatives from the US and Europe, including Starlink (SpaceX), Project Kuiper (Amazon), OneWeb, and Telesat. China has announced at least three LEO constellations, and Russia one. The size and scope of these projects are massive. To put current LEO satellite ambitions in context: the currenttotal number of satellites of any kind orbiting Earth is just over2,500.Starlink, who already have nearly 900 satellites in orbit, recently petitioned the US communications regulator for permission to launch a total of 12,000 satellites. Not to be outdone, OneWeb recently applied for permission to launch 48,000 satellites.

So what's not to love?

While the goal of these companies to ensure broadband anywhere and everywhere is laudable, the technology and the approach to connectivity are not free from concerns. Recent history, especially the development of the Internet itself, has shown us that simply having the capability to build something doesn't necessarily make it a good idea. The Silicon Valley ethos of "move fast and break things," perhaps valid in developing small applications, becomes irresponsible when the consequences of failure may be catastrophic and irreversible. Criticism of LEO constellations to date have focused on practical concerns around a variety of issues, including: the economic viability of the constellations, the occlusion of the night sky from astronomers, wireless interference between different constellations, and the potential chain reaction of collisions from a single error in satellite trajectory, leaving near-space an inaccessible junkyard of debris.

Beyond that, LEO constellations have deeper and longer-term implications that have yet to find their way into mainstream public debate. For one, LEO constellations are part of a larger process in which space exploration is being redefined and reframed in military and commercial terms. Closer to Earth, LEO constellations raise important concerns around the potential for the further entrenchment of a global internet oligopoly that increases inequality and disempowers citizens.

The scramble for space

Over the past seven decades, as our ability to explore beyond our planet has evolved, national security interests in space have aligned with commercial ones to an extent that they are nearly indistinguishable today. In the United States, private space launch companies like SpaceX and United Launch Alliance are major recipients of government contracts and now provide the bulk of US launch capacity for both scientific and military missions. While close ties between the defense and aerospace industries is nothing new, we are in a decidedly new phase of this relationship due to technological advancement, new policy priorities and the rise of private actors.

As commercial launch capacity has increased and space exploration technologies have advanced, the decades-old agreements around how we treat space and recognize our solar system as a commons for the benefit of all humanity are beginning to unravel. One clear example of this is the White House's recent "Executive Order on Encouraging International Support for the Recovery and Use of Space Resources,"which emphasizes that "the United States does not view outer space as a 'global commons'" and refers to the Moon Agreement as "a failed attempt at constraining free enterprise."

It is necessary to better understand the deep ties of LEO companies to the hegemonic designs of national governments on near space. Recently, in exchange for $28 million USD, Starlink provided the services of its satellites for live-fire demos with the US Air Force to test its Advanced Battle Management System and lay the groundwork for a military Internet of Things. Speaking after the latest live-fire demo, William Roper, Air Force acquisition chief, opined that "the military needs to be ready to play a strategic role because we need communications in many areas of the world that there are no commercial providers . . . we can be the stability case for companies like SpaceX and others who want to sell communications worldwide."

SpaceX's connections to the military-industrial complex were made clear incomments by SpaceX president Gwynne Shotwell in 2018, who stated that her company would be willing to launch a space weapon to protect the US, in contravention of established space norms. Only weeks ago, SpaceXsigned a contract with the Pentagon to jointly develop a rocket that can deliver up to 80 tons of cargo and weaponry anywhere in the world in just one hour.

The Internet, too, from its very inception until today, has proven to be a useful tool for pursuing military and security objectives. Of these, surveillance remains at the heart of Silicon Valley's highly profitable business model of manipulating our attention and preferences for the sake of profit. This profit model facilitates the designs of space-obsessed billionaires like Jeff Bezos who make it no secret that their ultimate goal and passion is the human colonization of other planets in our solar system. In general terms, with material and economic support from taxpayers through defense spending, the profits from the colonization of our data-bodies are being invested in the militarization, privatization and colonization of space.

Telecommunications: driving inequality or empowering citizens?

The telecommunications sector has always been a battleground for regulation. While the early days of the Internet seemingly teemed with competition and diversity, power and control has ultimately become concentrated with the growth of giant internet companies that now dominate our online life. The consequences of unregulated, technology-fueled expansion of globalization and inequality can now be seen in almost every aspect of life.

Digital technology plays a critical role in amplifying inequality, highlighting the need to reframe how we approach network technology development. Some governments and citizen groups understand the connection between economic mobility and tech skills development.

One great example of this comes from Broadband for the Rural North (B4RN), a cooperative in Northern England, that delivers 1 gigabit-per-second fiber-optic capacity to homes in a region deemed economically unviable by the incumbent telecommunications giant. B4RN's ability to build and sustain an affordable internet service at speeds many times that of commercial offerings is based upon the investment they make in both community engagement and the development of local capacity. Contrast this with the prospect of a broadband service from a LEO constellation, in which the role of the citizen is that of a consumer only. It is also worth noting that B4RN's profits are reinvested locally, while revenues from LEO constellations are beamed straight out of the country.

The failure to invest in alternatives that build local capacity replicates itself at the national level as well. LEO constellations have the potential to further abstract Internet service to a supra-national level in a manner that disempowers not just individuals but nation-states themselves in terms of domestic expertise and infrastructure. Investment and deployment costs for LEO constellations are so "astronomical," and in many cases so tied to national/military investment and subsidies, that only a small handful of corporations/countries will be capable of owning and managing their own constellation. This is likely to open up a new front in the ongoing wrangling by geo-political power blocs over the future of the Internet.

Furthermore, it is far from clear that LEO constellations have either the capacity or the economic model to deliver on their claims of providing affordable connectivity to the unserved in most parts of the world.Consider that the half of the world's population that remains unconnected to the Internet are the most economically disadvantaged. As such, most people will not be direct consumers of LEO services but will instead need to rely on a telco building infrastructure and using LEO as backhaula scenario which already exists with conventional satellite services. A further concern is that LEO constellations may ultimately create a disincentive to investment in rural connectivity, based on the assumption by service providers and governments that LEO constellations will address that gap.

It is troubling that companies like Amazon and Google (the third largest shareholder in SpaceX), which already wield tremendous power and influence over society, are vying to expand their dominance by becoming global internet service providers with support from taxpayers via subsidies and military spending. With their hands in essentially every layer of the communication stack, it will prove challenging to regulate or even know about the data they harvest and how those are used to competitive advantage in other areas of their businesses.

Recovering a spirit of cooperation

At the time of their emergence, both space exploration and the Internet served as beacons of hope and of potential transcendence for humanityone of shared imagination and resources, and of cooperation in human development. In both cases, that hope has been dimmed in a quest for profit and geo-political power. If we want to recover a sense of shared purpose as a species, the question as to "who gets to put their satellites into low earth orbit?" is more important than we might think. Is space for everyone, or just a few huge corporations and global superpowers? This is the question we ask when we ask who gets to park their satellites in orbit.

There is an opportunity to return to the spirit of internationalism that infused the early days of space exploration in which space was held as a shared resource to be protected and guarded from exploitation. Similarly, here on Earth, we see successful efforts to manage Internet infrastructure as a commons in contrast to Silicon Valley's model of surveillance capitalism. Recognizing that individual and collective empowerment and agency are as important as the actual infrastructure itself is the key to a more egalitarian Internet. LEO satellite networks may deliver connectivity (although many doubts remain), but they are less likely to empower people and move us toward a more equitable world. The development of a healthy Internet that actually benefits humanity involves not just the end result of affordable access, but also the process through which people gain that access.

Excerpt from:

Big Tech is leading the new space race. Here's why that's a problem - Salon

The Week

President-elect Joe Biden is calling for access to the Trump administration's COVID-19 vaccine distribution plan, saying "more people may die" if there's no coordination with his transition team.During an address on Monday, Biden celebrated the "great news" that COVID-19 vaccines from Moderna and Pfizer appear to be more than 90 percent effective, but said "the sooner we have access to the administration's distribution plan, the sooner this transition would smoothly move forward." As President Trump continues to refuse to concede the 2020 presidential election, Biden's transition team "does not have access to the administration's COVID-19 data and vaccine distribution plans," CNN reports.Asked what is the biggest threat of Trump obstructing a smooth transfer of power, Biden said, "More people may die if we don't coordinate." It's crucial for his transition team to know what the "game plan" is for the "huge undertaking" of vaccinating over 300 million Americans, he added."If we have to wait until January 20th to start that planning, it puts us behind, over a month, month and a half," Biden said. "And so it's important that there be coordination now, now or as rapidly as we can get that done."Ron Klain, Biden's chief of staff pick, previously emphasized the importance of the transition being able to access the administration's vaccine distribution plan, saying, "Our experts need to talk to those people as soon as possible so nothing drops in this change of power we're going to have on January 20th." And asked on Sunday whether it would be best if health officials could begin working with Biden's team, Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation's top infectious disease expert, told CNN "of course" it would be, adding, "That's obvious." > "More people may die if we don't coordinate," Biden says about Trump administration's refusal to help his transition and COVID-19 plans https://t.co/kFrcNHA9Vf pic.twitter.com/BVDTk1mu7y> > -- CBS News (@CBSNews) November 16, 2020More stories from theweek.com 7 scathingly funny cartoons about Trump's refusal to concede Trump is reportedly 'very aware' he lost the election but is putting up a fight as 'theater' Texas senator suggests it's too soon to declare Biden the winner because Puerto Rico is still counting votes

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Big Tech really, really wanted a Biden administration: Joe Concha - Yahoo News

With the Democrats' victory virtually in the bag, talk on social media has shifted to what to do with the current presidents accounts. Rules rolled out pre-election point to deletion, but that could prove a yuge own goal.

Trump has long escaped the worst of Twitter and Facebooks heavy-handed censorship thanks to his presidential position, which allows him to play by looser rules than the choking thicket of edicts that has frustrated so many of his followers. But if hes replaced in January by Biden, hell be just another user, subject to the same rules as the hoi polloi.

Many of his enemies cant wait for that day, predicting Twitter and Facebook will pull the plug on his account as soon as theyre allowed. #DeactivateTrump was trending on Sunday night as users complained the president was post[ing] false information and mislead[ing] the country with lies and false claims that he was the one who reallywon the election, that voter fraud had been rampant in the swing states, and so on.

Personally I dont want to see his sh*t anymore, one user sniffed, apparently forgetting the platform has both mute and block functions, while others used the argument that any other person would have been banned by now.

Yet their glee omits that many of the strictest regulations rolled out in recent months across Big Techs major platforms were deployed precisely because of Trump and his supporters, with an eye to suppressing their influence in the coming election. Horrified by 2016s outcome, Facebook, Twitter, and Google (as well as its YouTube subsidiary) tied themselves in knots to prevent a repeat performance and appear, at least so far, to have achieved their goal. With their mission accomplished, removing Trump serves no clear purpose other than inflaming his supporters many of whom have already either been kicked off the major platforms or left in disgust. It could trigger a mass exodus - or worse, a revolt.

Deplatforming Trump could easily be the last straw for many conservative social media users sick of having their own posts and those of their ideological comrades censored. Competing apps like Parler and Gab have seen their subscriber numbers explode in recent weeks, and some influential MAGA types have made it clear that the president is their only reason for putting up with the increasingly onerous censorship and thought-policing.

The establishment is aware of this problem. Over the weekend, a pearl-clutching CNN segment deemed conservatives mass departure to right-wing-friendly echo chambers like Parler and Gab a threat to democracy.

Correspondent Pamela Brown fretted that users were getting fed a diet of lies a hilarious complaint from an outlet that has become famous for the lies it feeds its own viewers. Last week, unreconstructed Russiagater Dave Troy even tried to claim Parler - which has topped the charts for most-downloaded social media app for weeks - was actually a Russian influence operation, supporting his allegations with such ironclad proof asone of the founders is married to a Russian woman.

Such smears are part of a wider pattern to suppress alternatives to Big Tech, which have nevertheless flourished. Gab, another Twitter alternative, has thrived despite being deplatformed from the Google and Apple app stores years ago amid questionableallegationsit fostered extremism, while YouTube competitor Bitchute has blossomed despite its links being banned from Reddit and heavily censored on Twitter. MeWe, an anti-Facebook that claims to neither censor nor use targeted advertising, has also attracted unprecedented numbers of new users, reaching #2 on the app charts. The smears arent working - and they may be driving even more users whod otherwise never have heard of the platforms to join, a phenomenon known as the Streisand Effect.

Big Tech has more reasons to keep Trump around, however. Without him, many of the policies passed in recent months become at best redundant. Already enforced in a lopsided fashion (Biden is allowed to claim victory, but Trump is not), they will completely lose their meaning if their target - the Bad Orange Man - is completely banned. Platforms enforcement against left-leaning wrongthinkers long ignored as commenters focused on the Big Tech hates conservatives narrative will be exposed for all to see, and if the anti-establishment Left and Right start comparing notes, the ruling class is in deep trouble.

As the increasingly-nonfictional totalitarian system of Orwells 1984 realized, its much easier to keep citizens in line when theres an enemy to vent their frustrations on. Trumps tweets have thus far served as the equivalent to the Orwellian Two Minutes Hate, allowing liberals to hurl their anger at an easy target while the forces really responsible for the countrys problems are free to operate behind the scenes. Take that away and the population might start waking up.

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The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of RT.

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Big Tech may silence Trump when he leaves office but who will they use for their two minutes hate without the Bad Orange Man? - RT