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Category: Big Tech

  • Republicans Are Using Antitrust Reform as a Trojan Horse to Attack Democracy

    Senators Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley attend a Senate Judiciary Committee markup in the Hart Senate Office Building on June 10, 2021.

    Over the past year, we have seen a tidal wave of support to address and rein in monopolies like we haven’t seen in decades. As companies like Amazon and Facebook have demonstrated the dangers of having too much power concentrated in one company — and as corporate consolidation has upended entire sectors of our economy, from farms to pharmacies — regulators and elected officials have taken unheard-of new steps to stop the spread of unchecked corporate power.

    These past few weeks, the Biden administration and Congress have signaled strong support for greater antitrust action: the appointment of Google critic Jonathan Kanter to lead the Department of Justice’s antitrust division, the advancement of leading anti-monopoly scholar Lina Khan’s nomination to the Federal Trade Commission, a slate of House bills targeting Big Tech’s corporate power, and a strong executive order on competition from the Biden administration.

    But as antitrust reforms have grown in popularity, they have found an unlikely set of backers: far right politicians like Senators Ted Cruz, Tom Cotton and Josh Hawley who, just months ago, openly supported a white nationalist insurrection and have voted time and again to cut taxes for corporations.

    Some might be tempted to welcome their support — a sign, perhaps, of newfound bipartisanship under the Biden administration. It is a temptation we must resist at all costs.

    Supporters like these won’t make it easier to win meaningful antitrust reforms that help us build a functional, multiracial democracy. By framing the antitrust fight as solely an economic populist one, they will doom the project altogether and could pave the way for a dangerous alliance between big business and government that will ease the path to power for white nationalists.

    To understand why, we need to understand the history of anti-monopoly policy making.

    The Incompatibility of Monopolies and Democracies

    In the late 19th and early 20th century, a handful of megacorporations like Standard Oil and U.S. Steel rose to dominance, growing powerful enough to dictate terms to lawmakers. Their rise was accompanied by the erosion of worker and consumer protections, ruthless tactics to wipe out competitors and, unsurprisingly, massive economic and racial inequality.

    Starting in the early 1900s, lawmakers increasingly began to push back and through a series of new laws and court decisions, broke up monopolies and placed some limits on their power. In Europe, by contrast, powerful monopolies were put into power and then co-governed with genocidal dictators in Germany, Spain and Italy. Fascist state power was propped up by corporate monopolies.

    While the antitrust reforms of the early 20th century and a militant labor movement helped stave off corporate consolidation and unchecked power, in the 1970s, a bipartisan pro-business effort came together to eliminate guardrails that had prevented businesses from gaining too much power. It’s no surprise that decades later, monopoly powers are on the march again — and neoliberalism is bringing to power leaders with fascist tendencies like Donald Trump. Tim Wu, who is Biden’s special adviser on competition policy, noted these contrasts in the opening of his book, The Curse of Bigness: Antitrust in the New Gilded Age: “Extreme economic concentration yields gross inequality and material suffering, feeding an appetite for nationalistic and extremist leadership.”

    It would be naive to think that somehow, in the wake of Trump’s defeat, that democracy is safe and we can repair the harms done to our multiracial society. What is clear is that there is a rising strain among certain Republicans who are Trump’s strongest supporters and have taken up the populist mantle of antitrust — as though they hadn’t been corporate America’s allies in Congress for years.

    We should not be fooled. When Senator Hawley and Senator Cruz call for breaking up corporate power, they are co-opting antitrust language to both punish “woke corporations” taking anti-racist stances, and to build up their base — especially people and communities facing unemployment, wage stagnation and disinvestment. They are not true believers in multiracial democracy — antitrust is merely a tool for them to play out a personal agenda against perceived tech bias against conservatives.

    I’ve seen this strategy in action myself. Growing up in India in the early 1990s, I was witness to the rise of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), the Hindu nationalist party that rules the country today. The party fused an economic program of national self-sufficiency and economic populism with Hindu nationalism and ruthless attacks on Muslims. As a child, my friends and I canvassed for the BJP, having been recruited by a neighbor with a few rupees and some candy. The election propaganda we distributed lured regular people in with the promises of a more prosperous future — what they left out was that their reforms were designed only for upper-caste Hindus in clear rejection of a secular democracy.

    I didn’t understand that the result could only be the violent social, economic and political exclusion we see in India now.

    This is the future that awaits us if we buy Hawley and Cruz’s snake-oil promises and normalize their economic policy platforms. Our dream of building a multiracial democracy will be destroyed as fascists and monopolists consolidate power.

    There is a better way to do antitrust. Rather than submitting to the swan song of bipartisanship, we need to ground antitrust work within an explicitly anti-racist framework and show how monopolies disproportionately harm real people in Black and Brown communities. In their groundbreaking paper on race and monopoly, the group Liberation in a Generation noted the need to make antitrust work more accessible and intersectional: “These technical conversations cover up the human pain and the racism responsible for that pain, often purposely … this is one way that racism is removed from economic discussions and debates.”

    At the Action Center on Race & the Economy (ACRE) where I work, we’ve targeted, with our Black and Brown partners, Amazon for blatantly profiteering off of communities of color. From sales of smart surveillance technologies — like Rekognition and Ring, that ramp up racial profiling of Black and Brown people, to data-sharing partnerships with 2,000 law enforcement agencies — Amazon entrenches its monopoly power through its surveillance empire. Monopoly power is what lets Amazon continue to get away with this racist business model, by insulating the company from both popular opinion and regulators.

    In India, too, people are showing how unabated corporate power worsens systemic racism. Last year, for example, Indian farmers and their unions rose up to protest new farm bills from the BJP-led government that would have left them at the mercy of big agriculture corporations. Their uprising ripped the veneer of economic populism off of Hindu nationalism by showing how it impoverishes working people in the country.

    What gives me hope in the face of Hawley’s rhetoric, and the dangers it presents, is activists and organizers in the United States, India and worldwide who are coming together and standing up to fight corporate monopolies and anti-democratic state power in a multiracial struggle.

    Democratic lawmakers and regulators who are currently evaluating solutions to limit monopoly power, whether in Big Tech or other industries, need to be vocal that this work is happening to build up a multiracial democracy. They need to take their cues from these activists, especially those of color, and center anti-racism in their analysis and policies, rather than chasing the mirage of bipartisanship. This is the time to be having briefings and hearings on Capitol Hill that bring in the voices and solutions from activists, workers, farmers and small business owners, especially those of color. Without that, anti-monopoly will just be another tool that clears the path for white nationalists to win state power.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Dominello urges multinationals to ‘buddy-up’

    NSW Customer Service minister Victor Dominello has urged multinational tech companies seeking access to the state’s extraordinary $2.1 billion Digital Restart Fund to “partner up” and help build local tech and digital capability.

    Although NSW had not mandated local participation rates in government procurement, Mr Dominello said there was a clear expectation that big tech multinationals find ways to build partnerships with local SMEs and startups that resulted in capability uplift.

    The NSW government unveiled a $1.6 billion Digital Restart Fund last year as both an economic stimulus measure to rebuild after the lockdowns and disruptions of 2020, and also a lever of industrial policy to build and strengthen local companies.

    An additional $500 million was added to the fund last month, an unprecedented pool of money being directed at tech uplift.

    “That’s a lot of grunt we have in the engine now that we didn’t have before,” Mr Dominello told InnovationAus during a wide-ranging interview on the Commercial Disco podcast – to be published via this site and Podbean on Friday.

    Victor Dominello
    Victor Dominello: Wants the tech giants to do more in building local capability

    But Mr Dominello poured cold water on widespread push among local tech suppliers for governments to mandate a level of local participation in public sector tech procurement contracts as the best means of building sovereign capability in key tech supply chains.

    He also dismissed the notion of imposing a ‘Retained Economic Benefit’ criteria to tech procurement decisions, confirming to InnovationAus that the advice from the federal Trade department that such a yardstick would breach Free Trade Agreements that the Commonwealth had signed with partners, including the United States.

    By including a Retained Economic Benefit measure in procurement decisions – with criteria such as where the supplier is ultimately domiciled, where its intellectual property resides, where it pays taxes, and where it employs researchers – would potentially be tipped toward Australian companies.

    Mr Dominello said that the rhetoric behind the creation of a ‘Made in Australia’ office was “fine”, but in practical terms it would not work. The Australian Information Industry Association last month called for the federal government to create a Made in Australia office as a way to encourage sourcing from local tech companies.

    The NSW government formally adopted adopted local procurement targets recommended by its ICT/Digital Soveriegn Procurement Taskforce: a minimum 25 per cent of contract of contracts valued at $3 million or more must be directed to locals SMEs (via subcontracting arrangements) 30 per cent of NSW government total spend on ICT must be with SMEs.

    These are not mandated targets, but remained the best way to build SME participation, Mr Dominello said. And there was a clear expectation that the multinational tech giants get on board.

    The reality is that the state government – and other governments around Australia – needed to work with these highly innovative tech companies from the US and elsewhere, Mr Dominello said.

    “But when they come here and they want to play in our patch, my message to them is that they need to partner-up,” he told InnovationAus. “You can come here and just be an island [without local partners], but that’s of no value to us.”

    “That means you must buddy-up with SMEs in NSW in order to access part of that $2.1 billion [digital restart fund]. That’s the most important lever that we have.”

    Mr Dominello said in the context of geopolitical strategic tensions and COVID tech supply chains issues, that big tech multinationals should see building local capability as being in their own self-interest – even invoking the key strength of the so-called Five Eyes intelligence sharing network if the US, Australia, New Zealand, Canada and the UK.

    “You do not want Australia to be a passenger. As part of the Five Eyes, you want Australia to be a strong participant,” he said.

    “It is absolutely great that the tech giants from the US in particular are doing so well and innovating and forging ahead. But truly, you need to make sure that you’re partnering up with us to make sure that we can build our capacity as well.’

    “Because a strong Australia becomes a part of a strong network – and if we’re just a passenger, that puts a lot of weight on [them],” Mr Dominello said.

    “They understand that, and that’s probably the biggest lever we’ve got; to make sure the big tech’s are helping us cultivate our local environment as well.”

    The post Dominello urges multinationals to ‘buddy-up’ appeared first on InnovationAus.

    This post was originally published on InnovationAus.

  • Biden Elevates Fight Against Monopolies as Next Step in Economic Revival

    President Joe Biden speaks during an executive order signing regarding competition in the State Dining Room of the White House, July 9, 2021, in Washington, D.C.

    Over the past couple weeks Joe Biden has been honing a progressive economic message that borrows both from the Progressive Era in the early years of the 20th century and the New Deal years of the 1930s and 1940s. In his embrace of antitrust politics this summer, he is going further than either Bill Clinton or Barack Obama did to take on entrenched economic powerhouses and to craft a progressive-economic governing philosophy. Six months into his presidency, despite compromises on his infrastructure bill that have alienated the left of his party, Biden is still thinking big and strategizing ways to alter the balance of power within the American economy.

    Front and center in this is an effort to go after large monopolies, in particular in the hi-tech sectors, and to use the power of the government to essentially jump-start competition in key sectors of the economy that, to borrow from the lexicon of mid-century economists, could be considered “commanding heights” and that are currently controlled by a tiny number of companies.

    On July 9, the president spoke about the need to break up the great monopolies of our time, and to regulate how they use their dominance to put the squeeze on competitors and to foist hidden fees and other costs onto consumers. He framed his administration’s response not as an attack on capitalism, but much as FDR framed the New Deal, as a way to save capitalism from itself. At a time when the U.S. and its geopolitical allies are in an increasingly unpredictable Cold War-styled conflict with China, these nations see a need to promote their political systems as capable of spreading wealth simply by tweaking the ground rules of capitalism — and protecting the system from its tendency to cannibalize all that stands in the way of maximizing short-term profits. “The heart of American capitalism is a simple idea: open and fair competition,” he opined. But in recent years, he averred, big companies have taken shortcuts. “Rather than competing for consumers they are consuming their competitors. Rather than competing for workers, they’re finding ways to gain the upper hand on labor.” He continued, “let me be very clear: Capitalism without competition isn’t capitalism; it’s exploitation.”

    In his speech, Biden talked about how Teddy Roosevelt took on the oil and railway magnates and beat them. He referenced how Franklin Roosevelt “ramped up antitrust enforcement eightfold in just two years.” Biden then talked about how, for the past 40 years, presidential administrations have pulled back from enforcing antitrust laws and have let monopolies concentrate power again.

    Shortly after he finished talking, Biden signed an executive order containing more than 70 provisions aimed at stimulating competition and helping consumers, in an array of industries that are currently beholden to a few corporate behemoths — from Big Pharma through to social media and internet services. These provisions include making it easier for Americans to buy cheaper pharmaceutical drugs from suppliers in Canada, making it harder for tech giants to collect data on their users’ internet habits, and stimulating competition amongst broadband internet providers.

    All of this came fast on the heels of an effort by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to bring an antitrust case against Facebook, arguing that Facebook’s ownership of Instagram and WhatsApp was giving it monopoly powers. In dismissing that case, a federal court in late June found that Facebook hadn’t violated current antitrust laws, and that it had achieved something approaching monopoly powers through legitimate business practices and competition. The FTC, the judge ruled, had stepped over a line in attempting to roll back the fruits of a successful business strategy.

    Following that decision, a wide range of political figures — from populist Democrats such as Senators Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) and Elizabeth Warren (D-Massachusetts), to far right politicians such as Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Florida) — call for an overhaul of the country’s antitrust laws to give government the necessary legal tools for taking on the combines of our age. A consensus is growing — one that started taking root during the Trump era — that corporations such as Amazon and Facebook, and business titans such as Bezos and Zuckerberg, exercise the same sort of stranglehold over the economy today as did the railway and oil and steel companies of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. And, emerging out of that realization, a consensus is also taking root that it is past time to update the U.S.’s antitrust laws so as to make it easier to break up companies that now rival mid-size countries in terms of the economic clout they wield on the global stage. Biden’s executive order should, in this context, be viewed as the starting gambit in a much larger, and longer, struggle. It should also be viewed in the context of rising geopolitical tensions with China — which have the potential to spill over into war at some point in the next few years — and as a defense of the notion that capitalist democracies can continue to deliver needed reforms and material well-being to the majority of their citizens.

    The executive order also came as the Biden team was pushing countries around the world to sign onto the idea of a global minimum corporate tax, to prevent big companies from simply relocating to tax havens, which allow them to avoid paying higher tax bills in their home countries.

    This idea has long been championed by progressives — along with globally coordinated financial transaction taxes aimed at raising tax revenues off of the extraordinarily high volume of trades in stocks, bonds, and other financial instruments in this era of automated, artificially intelligent trading systems. Now, however, it is moving off of the utopian wishlists of radical economists and into the mainstream, and the Biden administration seems willing to employ the U.S.’s diplomatic clout to forge a new, and surprisingly progressive, Washington consensus around global tax rules.

    The shift away from Clintonian, and, to a lesser extent, Obama orthodoxies on the economy is profound; and it is long overdue. Clinton came to measure his economic success largely by the performance of the stock market, and Obama by levels of economic growth following the devastating financial crisis unleashed in 2007-08. Both of those measures do tell us something about the broader state of the economy, but by themselves they are woefully inadequate. They do not speak to issues of inequality — or, more particularly, unequal access to basic resources such as affordable and fast internet connections, or life-saving medicines. In choosing their economic priorities, both Clinton and Obama shied away from tackling tendencies toward monopoly in the sparkling new hi-tech growth sectors of the economy.

    Biden, by contrast, is dancing to a different tune. His team seems unintimidated by the prospect of taking the fight to big business. To the contrary: They seem to have concluded that the public is with them in this fight and that they stand to benefit politically from promoting antitrust, anti-monopoly policies.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Warren Urges Investigation Into Potential Antitrust Practices by Google

    Sen. Elizabeth Warren speaks to reporters in the Senate subway during a procedural vote on June 22, 2021, in Washington, D.C.

    Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Massachusetts) has sent a letter to the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) urging the agency to investigate Google for potentially engaging in anti-competitive practices by manipulating and exerting wide control over the online advertising market.

    In April, as part of another Texas antitrust case brought against the company, it was revealed that Google was running a covert operation to monitor online ad bids by other companies and using the information to bolster its own ad-buying program. “Project Bernanke,” which was not disclosed to bidders, evidently generated hundreds of millions of dollars a year for Google.

    The Justice Department is probing Google over that project and other potentially anti-competitive online practices around advertising. But Warren says in her letter that she believes the CFTC, which regulates commodities and the derivatives market in the U.S., should conduct a broader scrutiny of the company.

    “Today, the advertising market is functionally unregulated. It is a market worth hundreds of billions of dollars per year, and it is the main revenue driver for some of the country’s largest companies,” she writes. “The market for digital advertising has become perhaps the most actively traded commodity exchange in the world.”

    Though the market is largely unregulated, Warren writes, “The market is subject to private regulation, however, by the dominant player in the market — Google. Google exercises that regulatory power to benefit itself and to exploit other market participants, both large and small.”

    The senator then cites the 15 states and territories that are part of the lawsuit filed by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton following the original discovery of “Bernanke” to bolster her argument that Google exercises undue power over the online advertising market.

    “Imagine if the financial markets are controlled by one monopoly company, say Goldman Sachs, and that company then owns the [New York Stock Exchange], which is the largest financial exchange, that then trades on that exchange to advantage itself, eliminate competition, and charge a monopoly tax on billions of daily transactions,” the states and territories wrote. “That is the world of online display advertising today.”

    If these allegations are true, then they represent “deeply troublesome market manipulation” by Google, Warren says in her letter. The behavior is made especially concerning, Warren says, by the fact that the company doesn’t appear to be trying to hide their potentially anti-competitive practices.

    “Given the power of a company like Google to unilaterally manipulate the online advertising market, it is critical that the CFTC ensures these new digital commodities are traded fairly and without harmful manipulation,” Warren concluded.

    Online marketing is indeed largely unregulated, holding up a veil of secrecy to advertisers and their clients. This can cause undue harm, advocates have said for several years, to politics and the larger mission to fight disinformation online in general.

    Warren’s letter is a continuation of a push from Washington, D.C. and other state and local governments to try to rein in tech companies. D.C. Attorney General Karl Racine filed an antitrust lawsuit in May against Amazon for artificially inflating prices and the Federal Trade Commission recently lost an antitrust case against Facebook.

    Warren herself is also involved in several efforts to break up big tech companies. She has mounted an effort to break up huge companies like Facebook, Google and Amazon. Advocates argue, as Truthout’s Mike Ludwig reported last month, that the companies hold too much political and market power while largely going unregulated.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Australians among world’s most ‘data surveilled’

    Australians are the tenth most “data surveilled” citizens in the world, according to analysis of data requests by government authorities to Big Tech companies over the last eight years, a period where Australia has introduced several pieces of controversial national security legislation.

    Australian authorities have made around two data requests for every 1000 people since 2013 and access requests are also trending up, according to VPN provider Surfshark, which overnight released analysis of 66 countries’ request for user data from Apple, Google, Facebook, and Microsoft.

    Adjusted for population, Australia ranks 10th, with Malta, Singapore, Germany, the UK and US in the top five.

    The 66 countries analysed have made more than 3 million data access requests to Big Tech in the eight-year period, with the companies more often than not providing partial or full disclosure to authorities.

    Australian government authorities have made nearly 50,000 requests for user data to Big Tech companies since 2013. Source: company reporting/Surfshark analysis.

    But the four companies vary in compliance with requests. Facebook disclosed information for 76 per cent of authorities’ requests while Apple only handed it over 55 per cent of the time. Microsoft has trended down and now discloses information for 61 per cent of requests after being as high as 79 per cent in 2013.

    Amazon was not included in the analysis, which is based on the companies’ self-published data, because the ecommerce and data giant does not consistently report the information.

    Facebook’s own transparency data shows Australian authorities have steadily made more requests for user data since 2013, including a jump last year that saw more than 3,000 requests, including nearly 150 “emergency disclosure requests”.

    Facebook gave Australian authorities data for 80 per cent of their requests last year, and says the “vast majority” of requests related to criminal cases.

    The rise in requests has come as digital platforms rise in popularity and countries introduce or amend laws to allow increased access to communications for national security and law enforcement reasons.

    In late 2018 the Australian Parliament passed controversial “encryption busting” laws allowing authorities to compel encrypted communications from providers. While used sparingly so far, the new powers have potentially wiped billions from the economy.

    Along with more recent legislation for content takedown and data sharing with international authorities, civil and digital rights groups have warned the mission creep of data access powers is pushing Australia further towards a surveillance state.

    Surfshark chief executive Vytautas Kaziukonis said the latest analysis showed digital surveillance is growing around the world.

    “During the past years, the world has witnessed widespread adoption of physical and online surveillance tools,” he said.

    “An increasing number of governments are deploying a range of surveillance technologies under the promise of maintaining order and public safety. However, it is evident that the seek to track and monitor citizens can be far more overreaching and infringe people’s privacy.”

    The post Australians among world’s most ‘data surveilled’ appeared first on InnovationAus.

    This post was originally published on InnovationAus.

  • Scheer Intelligence: What Has Silicon Valley Done To Our Food?

    Companies such as Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods have started to become household names, producing meat substitutes that taste as close to meat as their scientists have been able to engineer. In the midst of a climate crisis that threatens our very existence, plenty of scientists have been recommending that we all look for ways to cut down on our meat intake because cows produce large amounts of methane that has a significant negative environmental impact. Eating animal products also brings up animal rights questions. One of the main selling points of these Silicon Valley companies is essentially that we can save the planet and eat ethically without sacrificing taste. Yet, there is a key question few people seem to be asking about these new products: Are these meat substitutes good for our health?

    The post Scheer Intelligence: What Has Silicon Valley Done To Our Food? appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Online Safety Bill is a way forward online

    It’s been widely said the tech companies are the railroads or oil companies of the 21st century. These companies wield enormous power. They have done much good, but they have the potential to do much harm.

    It’s why the Online Safety Bill is an important piece of legislation currently before the Senate. It’s a very welcome initiative. It brings to bear a simple, single framework for online safety.

    Setting out the basic online safety expectations and arming the eSafety Commissioner with power to effectively ensure people are protected should be broadly welcomed.

    The fact is people are being bullied and abused often under the cover of anonymity. There’s nowhere else in our society where you can, under the cover of darkness, pretend to be someone else and attack people.

    So it’s important we look to increase penalties for the use of a carriage service to menace, harass or cause offence, from three to five years.

    Over the past few months, the Morrison Government has introduced world-leading media bargaining code legislation. Australia has led the world in trying to ensure publishers and public interest journalists are paid for their work.

    Just as large tech companies cannot threaten a country, nor can they have more power than any other non-state actor in the world today where they can bully and defeat a country.

    As a government we’ve been prepared to intervene to ensure consumers are protected. I am not in favour of regulation for regulation’s sake but there is much content on social media which already contravenes our laws.

    As I said in the Senate chamber, social media really has become the wild west.What we need to do is balance civil liberties against the desire to protect people and these are judgements that should be exercised by a minister and they should be disallowable.

    Australia’s eSafety Commissioner was the first dedicated online safety regulator to be established in the world and acts as a safety net for when online services fail to keep Australians safe online.

    The Commissioner, Julie Inman Grant, is doing a great job but the framework of having the minister set the regulation is an important one.

    Ultimately, we want to have a system where Australia is not a backwater. We want to see technology used but we also want to make sure people are protected.

    We don’t want to see people bullied and harassed online, we don’t want to see people attacked under the cover of anonymity.

    We have laws in New South Wales against anti-incitement and defamation, so social media should not provide a back door to breaking the law.

    What I want to see is a scheme that is ultimately going to protect people from cyberbullying and image abuse in a way which balances out the privacy concerns which are understandable and legitimately held.

    Australia had a big win with the media bargaining code. We now need to build on that.

    This government has a great record of being prepared to intervene where there’s consumer detriment or broader community detriment in relation to tech companies.

    We should use this opportunity to lead the world again.

    The post Online Safety Bill is a way forward online appeared first on InnovationAus.

    This post was originally published on InnovationAus.

  • Scheer Intelligence: Has Silicon Valley Made It Impossible For Us To Listen?

    At a time in which distractions seem to multiply by the second thanks to the omnipresence of screens and social media, and COVID-19 pandemic has isolated us further, we’re all having a hard time truly listening to one another and connecting. Silicon Valley veteran Ximena Vengoechea wants to change that with her new book “Listen Like You Mean It.” On this week’s installment of “Scheer Intelligence,” host Robert Scheer speaks to the User Experience designer about her work at Twitter, LinkedIn, and Pinterest, and the role tech companies have had on our ability to listen to one another.

    “I think some of how we lost [our ability to listen] has been the sort of moment that we’re in, which is this culturally, politically divided moment, this technologically accelerated moment,” says Vengoechea…

    The post Scheer Intelligence: Has Silicon Valley Made It Impossible For Us To Listen? appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Regulator to investigate Facebook’s use of data over ‘unfair advantage’ concerns

    The UK’s competition regulator has launched a fresh investigation into Facebook over concerns that the tech giant might be abusing a dominant position in digital advertising.

    Monopoly

    The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) will look into how the social network gathers and uses certain data and whether it may provide an unfair advantage over rivals in the online classified ads and online dating space. As well as Facebook’s advertising services, Facebook Login – a feature that allows people to sign into other websites and apps – will also form part of the probe.

    The regulator said it will assess whether data from both offerings enable the firm to benefit Facebook Marketplace, a part of the platform where users can place classified ads, and Facebook Dating.

    The announcement comes as the European Commission (EC) launched its own investigation into the company’s use of data.

    Chief executive of the CMA Andrea Coscelli said:

    We intend to thoroughly investigate Facebook’s use of data to assess whether its business practices are giving it an unfair advantage in the online dating and classified ad sectors. Any such advantage can make it harder for competing firms to succeed, including new and smaller businesses, and may reduce customer choice.

    We will be working closely with the European Commission as we each investigate these issues, as well as continuing our coordination with other agencies to tackle these global issues.

    By The Canary

    This post was originally published on The Canary.

  • Tech Workers at Google, Apple and Amazon Show Solidarity With the Palestinians

    A protestor holds a placard saying "Jews for Palestinian freedom" during a demonstration in Reno, Nevada, on May 16, 2021.

    For the first time, tech workers at three major tech companies in the United States have taken public direct action to show solidarity with the Palestinian struggle against apartheid. Workers at Google, Apple, and Amazon have released open letters calling on management to publicly acknowledge the illegal occupation and human rights abuses by the Israeli government, support their Palestinian workers and the rights of their workers to speak freely about Palestine in the workplace, and (in some cases), review business contracts with the Israeli government. These actions, at companies with little presence or history of organized labor (save the notable exception of the very nascent Alphabet Workers Union), came after eleven days of bombings and arrests by the IDF in Gaza and the West Bank, as well as street violence against Palestinians by extremist Israeli civilians.

    On May 18th, Google workers from an organization called Jewish Diaspora in Tech circulated a petition calling on the management of Google’s parent company, Alphabet, to review all contracts with and donations to “Institutions that support Israeli violations of Palestinian rights, such as the Israeli Defense Forces,” as well as to listen to Palestinian workers’ demands, donate funds to Palestinian relief organizations, and recognize, “The harm done to Palestinians by Israeli military and gang violence.” On May 20th, workers in the Apple Muslim Association (a group of Muslim workers at Apple) circulated a similar letter internally at the company, demanding Apple’s management publicly recognize the illegal occupation of Palestinian territory by Israel, as well as affirm the importance of language around the occupation (demanding that management not use the terms “conflict,” “clash,” or “both sides”). On May 25th, workers at Amazon released a similar letter. Collectively, the petitions have gathered several thousand signatures.

    This particular moment is leading to an increase in activism from within the tech industry in part because of increased awareness of the occupation and support for Palestinians globally. “This time for me has been different than all the previous intifadas,” a Palestinian Amazon software engineer (who wished to remain anonymous) told Left Voice. “Where there wasn’t as much social media coverage to help show the other side of the story. Before, one side was always more dominant in the media and was kind of controlling the narrative.” A Palestinian hardware engineer at Amazon (who also wished to remain anonymous) agreed, saying “we hope that our message will also be carried into other tech companies like Facebook and Twitter, because those two companies control the content that is shared on their websites, especially when it comes to the Palestinian narrative.”

    The Amazon software engineer, who grew up in the West Bank, said that sharing that narrative more widely in these workplaces is a high priority for these tech workers, who feel a lot of pressure to not discuss the Palestinian struggle in the workplace. “One thing we are asking for, working at Amazon, is to normalize talking about the Palestinian cause and Palestinian human rights and the sufferings that Palestinians go through back home,” he said. “It’s polarized. You might not get shut down, but it’s preferred not to talk about it, let alone going the extra mile and trying to organize a Palestinian event at Amazon where you talk about your culture and have people wearing Keffiyehs.” And being able to talk about the experiences of Palestinians under occupation is the first step, he believes, to organizing to end it. He believes there has to be an understanding of what’s happening on the ground — that we cannot ignore the history behind the occupation if we want justice to be done. “Peace should be established on justice,” he said. “And once this is established for everyone, and everyone understands the real issues, then we can talk and we can do things that would guarantee a better future for everyone.”

    Ariel Koren, an organizer with Jewish Diaspora in Tech, told me that her group had formed in the summer of 2020 following an enormous amount of pressure internally in the Jewish employee resource group (an employee organization set up by management) at Google to not express anti-zionist views. Koren had posted links from the Movement for Black Lives in the group’s listserv that included statements of solidarity with the Palestinian struggle, and she was all but censured for it. “This would be less concerning,” she said, “If it weren’t for the fact that the institutionalization of zionist, pro-occupation views has had actual economic and funding implications.”

    Those economic implications include a $1.2 billion contract for cloud computing services that Google and Amazon secured with the Israeli government last month. The United States sends $3.8 billion of taxpayer money in aid to the Israeli government each year. The Israeli government then turns around and sends billions of dollars of that money back to American companies who, in turn, provide the Israeli government with weapons, cloud computing services, and software that the Israeli military uses to improve their security and surveillance technology. The Israeli military tests that technology out on Palestinians, sells it back to the United States, and trains ICE and U.S. police forces on how to use it.

    Workers at these tech companies are increasingly speaking out about the connections between their everyday work in the tech industry and the use of the tools they build, especially by capitalist states, to repress the working class and oppressed around the world. Gabriel Schubiner, another organizer with Jewish Diaspora in Tech, said “I’ve seen how Israel, and the media speaking on Israel’s behalf, use both technology and academia as a form of political tech-washing that seeks to validate Israel as a progressive, Western-style capitalist democracy, in opposition to how Palestine and the Arab world are portrayed. I’ve also seen that there are deep engagements between the technology sector and the military industrial complex, and that technology sector is very much being weaponized.” A Muslim Amazon worker in a finance role (who wished to remain anonymous) said that similar conversations have been ongoing at her workplace, too. “Engineers have kind of had side conversations in different groups, like kind of asking each other, ‘What do you do if you’re asked to work on something like this?’ Or, you know, kind of asking each other, ‘Do you tell your managers that I won’t work on anything that’s relating to Israel or to “X”, whatever situation or cause or government?’” Schubiner put it more bluntly: “I don’t want my labor to be involved in militarizing the world and causing death and destruction,” they told me, “Like, it’s a very basic principle.”

    The workers in Jewish Diaspora in Tech put together their letter to show solidarity and welcome both Jewish and non-Jewish coworkers into conversations about the occupation, while forcefully rejecting zionist talking points that equate anti-zionism with antisemitism. “It’s really empowering to see that we’re finally able to talk openly about the consequences of the false conflation of anti-zionism and antisemitism in the workplace.” Koren said. She emphasized that it is important for Jewish workers in the tech industry to use their voices to amplify the Palestinian struggle. “Many Jews are speaking out now because they are tired of being spoken for by a vocal and pretty extremist minority that doesn’t represent them. We understand that as Jews, we have have a certain amount of privilege in this conversation, that our Palestinian colleagues in many cases are not afforded.” Those actions of solidarity have been noticed, as the Amazon finance worker stated, “A lot of the efforts that started here were a group of either Muslims or Arabs, or more specifically Palestinians. And we felt that it was very important that there was a broader voice behind this, because we feel like oftentimes it’s just ourselves pushing for something. And that’s why we thought that it was so great to see that the letter that came out from Google employees was from a Jewish diaspora group.”

    Garnering further support beyond the few thousand workers already involved in this organizing effort may be an uphill battle. Not only are zionist voices within these companies already loud, but the workforce in the tech industry in the U.S. is notorious for practices that stop workers from organizing among themselves. “There was a pretty common refrain from people, I think broadly at Google, but specifically within the Jewish ERG,” Schubiner said, “Where people who took issue with our letter felt, like, ‘Why are you trying to bring politics into our workplace? Why are you trying to make this political? Can we just, like, show up here and work?’ When you work at a tech company like Google, it’s easy to feel like, yeah, this is just my job. This is where I work. I go here and I tap on a computer every day and I’m in my little zone and it’s easy to forget that Google is one of the dominant centers of power in the world right now.” The growing understanding of the strategic placement of tech workers in both the global economy (central to communications, social media, banking, education, medicine, and more) and in the power of police states the world over is a major part of growing organizing efforts all over the tech sector. “I think there’s a broad perception,” Schubiner said, “That our work is separate from politics, but it never has been. All of the work that you’re doing deeply affects the world and I feel like more and more tech workers are learning to appreciate their work through an ethical and moral lens.”

    The Amazon finance worker agreed: “If we feel that something that the company is doing is wrong, we should not be complicit in that. And we should speak out and organize to the best of our abilities.” She continued, “I think that we’ve seen a very powerful tool in many instances in history was to say: I’m not going to do this, until you make a change. Even in Palestine,” referring to the recent day-long general strike by Palestinians in Israel, Gaza, and the West Bank, from which tech workers may gather inspiration for future actions. She continued, “At the end of the day, we really are the ones that are making the money for the company. And we can decide that we won’t do what we’re supposed to do every single day. And that’s the most, I think, powerful pressure that workers collectively can have.”

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Gaetz Says Supporters Should “Use” the “Second Amendment” Against Tech Companies

    Rep. Matt Gaetz speaks at an America First Rally also attended by Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene on May 27, 2021, in Dalton, Georgia.

    During a so-called “America First” rally in Georgia on Thursday, Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Florida) advocated for violent actions against tech companies that have banned certain right-wing users.

    Gaetz railed against so-called “cancel culture” during the rally, asserting that conservative voices are being silenced online. In reality, a number of companies (such as Facebook and Twitter, among others) have removed users from their sites over a number of issues that go against their stated terms of service, including harassment and the threat of violence. (Many have suggested that usage of the term “cancel culture” is really a complaint over having to face consequences for harmful actions.)

    “The internet’s hall monitors out in Silicon Valley, they think they can suppress us, discourage us,” Gaetz said during the rally. “Maybe if you’re just a little less patriotic. Maybe if you just conform to their way of thinking a little more, then you’ll be allowed to participate in the digital world.”

    The Florida Republican went on to imply violence was a remedy to the issue.

    “Well you know what? Silicon Valley can’t cancel this movement, or this rally, or this congressman. We have a Second Amendment in this country, and I think we have an obligation to use it,” Gaetz said.

    Gaetz’s comments came just one day after a gunman in San Jose, California — a city deeply entrenched in Silicon Valley — killed nine individuals in a mass shooting event.

    Perhaps responding to stunned reactions to his comments on social media, Gaetz tweeted on Friday that he believed “the Second Amendment is about the ability to maintain, within the citizenry, an armed rebellion against the government if that becomes necessary.”

    He added, “I hope it never does.”

    But both Gaetz’s comments at the rally and on Twitter go against the Second Amendment’s real intention, according to historians, who say the amendment’s original intent was about preventing the need for a standing army while also securing the country against the threat of invasion. Gaetz’s words on Thursday wrongly implied the amendment should also be used against private companies to contest their policies.

    Gaetz, who is an outspoken acolyte for former President Donald Trump, suggested he may run for president himself in 2024 if Trump declines to.

    “I support Donald Trump for president. I’ve directly encouraged him to run and he gives me every indication he will,” Gaetz said this past week. “If Trump doesn’t run, I’m sure I could defeat whatever remains of Joe Biden by 2024.”

    But Gaetz’s political future is in doubt, as he’s mired in a number of controversies. Most notably, he is the subject of a federal investigation that is looking into alleged sex-trafficking crimes. Gaetz denies the allegations are true, but a former associate of his, Joel Greenberg, recently pleaded guilty to six federal charges, admitting he himself had paid for sex with a teenager below the age of consent, and has suggested in the past that Gaetz paid for sex with underage teens as well. Several financial transactions of Gaetz’s also heavily imply the inappropriate and potentially illegal actions happened, and Greenberg is now said to be cooperating with federal authorities in the inquiry against Gaetz.

    Responding to Gaetz’s latest comments on the Second Amendment as well as the current investigation targeting the Florida Republican, Rep. Ted Lieu (D-California) sent a tweet on Thursday night, addressed to House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-California), telling him Gaetz’s actions warranted removal from committee assignments.

    “Dear @GOPLeader: You need to remove Rep Matt Gaetz from the House Judiciary Committee,” Lieu wrote. “It’s a conflict of interest for Gaetz to have oversight over the [Department of Justice] that is investigating him for sex crimes. Also, Gaetz is urging people to shoot Silicon Valley employees.”

    CNN national security analyst Carrie Cordero also took note of Gaetz’s comments advocating violence against Silicon Valley-based companies, and tweeted that they were worth taking seriously.

    “One of the biggest mistakes many observers made a few years back was not taking Trump’s words seriously,” Cordero wrote, comparing Gaetz’s words to the former president’s incendiary rhetoric over the years. “They don’t hide the ball, folks. They put it all right out there.”

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Washington, DC Lawsuit Claims Amazon Violates Antitrust Laws by Inflating Prices

    An employee places boxes at the distribution center of online retail giant Amazon in Moenchengladbach, Germany, on December 17, 2019.

    Attorney General Karl Racine of Washington, D.C., has filed a lawsuit against Amazon claiming that it breaks antitrust laws by artificially inflating prices and discouraging competition.

    The lawsuit claims that Amazon abuses its wide control over the online retail market by forcing third-party sellers to offer products at lower prices on Amazon than they do elsewhere — even on their own websites — and then charging the sellers as much as 40 percent of the product’s price in fees. This causes prices to be inflated across the board, according to the lawsuit.

    “Amazon has used its dominant position in the online retail market to win at all costs. It maximizes its profits at the expense of third-party sellers and consumers, while harming competition, stifling innovation, and illegally tilting the playing field in its favor,” said Racine in a statement.

    Amazon controls between 50 to 70 percent of the online retail market, Racine says, so sellers will often turn to the website to sell their products. But the company is creating an “anticompetitive” environment by indirectly controlling prices set by third-party sellers, according to the lawsuit.

    “We filed this antitrust lawsuit to put an end to Amazon’s illegal control of prices across the online retail market. We need a fair online marketplace that expands options available to District residents and promotes competition, innovation, and choice,” Racine continued.

    Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Massachusetts) praised the lawsuit, tweeting, “Many small businesses feel like they have to sell their products on Amazon for their survival – but Amazon abuses its size and power to bleed them dry. I’m glad the District of Columbia is fighting back.”

    As Wired reported, Amazon stops listing third-party sellers on competitive sections of their webpages if sellers offer lower prices on other e-commerce sites like Walmart, leading to dramatic declines in sales for those sellers.

    “Because of its size and strength, and because sellers can’t keep their prices low on their own channels, Amazon is literally inflating the entire online economy,” former Amazon seller Jason Boyce told Wired.

    Amazon had previously had a “price parity” provision that stopped sellers from offering lower prices elsewhere. The practice came under enough scrutiny in the U.S. that the company dropped it in 2019. But Racine and sellers said that the practice never went away — the company just replaced it with a similar policy with the same name.

    The lawsuit, filed on Tuesday, is one of several antitrust lawsuits from states and the federal government filed against large tech companies over the past year. Though the suit was filed in D.C., it echoes complaints about the company from the rest of the country.

    Antitrust claims can be hard to prove, but The New York Times reported that Tim Wu, scholar and influential big tech critic, pointed to claims over the company’s pricing mechanisms as the best way to go after Amazon on an antitrust front. The Biden administration also appears to be prepared to take on big tech monopolies with Wu as an National Economic Council adviser and Lina Khan, progressive antitrust champion, on the Federal Trade Commission.

    “This suit is another indication that the tide is shifting — both policymakers and the public want Amazon’s outsized power to be curtailed,” Stacy Mitchell, Institute for Local Self Reliance co-director, a technology nonprofit and advocacy group, told Recode.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Warren and Progressives Mount Major Push to Break Up Facebook and Amazon

    Sen. Elizabeth Warren

    Facebook and other social media companies face intense criticism from both the right and left these days, but the biggest threat to giants like Facebook, Amazon and Google may be increasingly diverse coalitions led by progressives that are renewing a push to break up big tech monopolies.

    Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Massachusetts) and Rep. Mondaire Jones, a Democrat on the House Judiciary’s anti-trust subcommittee, are expected to announced a new push to break up Facebook and Google this week alongside Freedom From Facebook and Google, a growing coalition of advocacy groups that argues the companies are two of the world’s “most dangerous monopolies.”

    Warren campaigned for president on breaking up big tech, and advocates see the senator as key to pushing the Biden administration to enforce anti-trust regulations and Congress to write new rules. Democratic members of the anti-trust subcommittee released a groundbreaking report last year with a number of ideas for breaking up big tech companies and updating anti-trust regulations for digital commerce after years of allowing tech corporations to grow into alleged monopolies.

    “We’re seeing an unprecedented level of momentum within the federal government — and at the state level, as well — to address the power that these platforms have and the harms that they are causing to democracy and to civil rights,” said Morgan Harper, director of advocacy and policy at the American Economic Liberties Project, in an interview. “You have to address the business model to also address the harms these platforms are causing.”

    Meanwhile, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Republican, signed a bill on Monday supposedly targeting “censorship” of political candidates by social media platforms, but the new law was quickly panned by critics and legal experts as a show of loyalty to former President Trump that has little chance of holding up in court. Trump was permanently banned from Twitter and his Facebook account was suspended for lying about the election he lost and stoking violence after a mob of his supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol on January 6.

    While conservatives accuse Facebook of “censoring” them as the company attempts to clamp down on misinformation, progressives say the company is not doing enough to prevent overtly racist messages and violent conspiracy theories from proliferating on its platform. However, for progressives, this issue is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the mammoth social media company, which also owns the Instagram and WhatsApp platforms.

    On Tuesday, a separate coalition of progressive watchdog and media justice groups released a litany of 70 public complaints against Facebook. The complaints range from mass surveillance and alleged privacy violations that feed the company’s targeted advertising schemes to the silencing of Palestinian activists critical of the Israeli occupation. Like Google and Amazon, critics say Facebook has raced to secure monopoly power over its respective markets by developing “predatory” business practices that harvest user data for profit and leave minorities open to discrimination online.

    The list represents a broad range of grievances from various ideological interests, but they agree broadly that Facebook’s own efforts to appease critics have not gone far enough, because profit remains the company’s top priority. For example, the groups say Facebook has intentionally amplified racist, sexist, antisemitic and ageist messages and disinformation because they boost engagement — a far cry from the right’s complaints about censorship. The business model of “surveillance capitalism,” they argue, is simply incompatible with human rights and democracy.

    “Now, instead of being a tool for social movements fighting for justice and liberation, Facebook has become a machine used to advance tyranny, corruption, and greed,” said Evan Greer, an organizer with the digital justice group Fight for the Future, in a statement. “By using algorithms that are optimized to generate ad revenue, they amplify some of the worst content on the internet, while at the same time actively silencing and suppressing the voices of marginalized people, activists, artists and creators.”

    The coalition, which also includes groups, such as Accountable Tech and Data for Black Lives, is calling on Congress to breakup Facebook into smaller companies and write regulation that “forces Big Tech companies to find a new business model that does not rely on intrusive surveillance of users,” according to Robert Weissman, president of Public Citizen.

    “Facebook’s ongoing operations, let alone expansionist designs, are incompatible with the functioning of a democratic society,” Weissman said in a statement on Tuesday as activists delivered the complaints to Facebook. “The company has too much political power, too much surveillance capacity, too little regard for its users, too little respect for communities of color and oppressed groups around the world, and far, far too little self-restraint.”

    Facebook gets a lot of attention for its outsize role in the social media universe and a seemingly endless stream of political controversy, but activists and anti-trust lawyers are also moving to break up Google and Amazon, which are also alleged monopolies that control vast swaths of the internet. If Congress writes anti-trust legislation with Facebook in mind, the rules would likely also apply to other tech giants that squeeze out competition and use data surveillance to generate massive profits.

    The fight has already made its way into the courts. On Tuesday, the Washington, D.C. attorney general’s office filed an anti-trust lawsuit against Amazon alleging the e-commerce giant unlawfully maintains monopoly power by preventing independent sellers from offering their products at lower prices on other platforms, according to The Verge. Google faces multiple anti-trust lawsuits over its alleged dominance of the search engine business, including a lawsuit filed by the Department of Justice in October.

    The big tech industry is clearly aware of the growing movement to hold it accountable. In March, Public Citizen reported that Facebook and Amazon are now the biggest individual corporate lobbying spenders in the United States, surpassing traditional lobbying powerhouses such as tobacco firms and fossil fuel producers. (The analysis looks at individual companies and excludes trade groups that aggregate lobbying spending for the pharmaceutical and insurance industries, for example.)

    During the 2020 election cycle, big tech companies spent a collective $124 million on lobbying and campaign contributions, more than ever before. Amazon’s spending increased by 30 percent while Facebook’s spending spiked by 56 percent, according to the report.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Facebook’s Oversight Board Isn’t Enough. The Government Must Regulate Big Tech.

    Former President Donald Trump will continue to stay off Facebook after the company’s oversight board ruled Wednesday that his ban was justified for creating “an environment where a serious risk of violence was possible.” Trump was banned shortly after the January 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, which he helped foment by promoting baseless claims of election fraud. The oversight board also said Facebook should reassess its ban and make a final decision in six months. Shoshana Zuboff, professor emerita at Harvard Business School and author of the book The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, says that Facebook’s recent moves follow years of inaction by CEO Mark Zuckerberg. “He showed that he was willing to do just about anything to appease Trump … to keep regulation at bay,” Zuboff says.

    TRANSCRIPT

    This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

    AMY GOODMAN: Here on Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The Quarantine Report, I’m Amy Goodman, with Nermeen Shaikh. You can watch, listen and read transcripts using our iOS and Android apps. Download them for free from the Apple App Store or Google Play Store today.

    Former President Trump’s Facebook account will remain suspended — at least for now. On Wednesday, an oversight board set up by Facebook upheld the January 7th ban, saying Trump’s rhetoric created a, quote, “serious risk of violence.” But the board said Facebook should review whether the ban should be indefinite.

    For more, we go to Shoshana Zuboff, professor emerita at Harvard Business School, author of the book The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power.

    Professor Zuboff, welcome back to Democracy Now! Your reaction to the Facebook-appointed board’s decision?

    SHOSHANA ZUBOFF: Well, you know, it looks like this so-called oversight board, which of course, everyone should understand, was set up by Mr. Zuckerberg with a $130 million endowment and really is a device to help keep him free of public law, help keep him free of regulation. So, we know that Mr. Zuckerberg didn’t do a very good job taming political speech. He allowed political speech to go free of fact-checking. And the worst example of this, of course, was Mr. Trump, who became a clear and present danger to our democracy. So, rather than grappling with that, this decision was given to this so-called oversight board, and now it looks like they’ve kicked it back to Facebook.

    The real issue here, though, Amy, is that in kicking it back to Facebook, they’ve actually kicked it back to the Biden administration. And here’s why I’m going to say that. First of all, why did Mark Zuckerberg indulge and appease Donald Trump for so many years, and especially in that last year of election season as things became more bizarre, inflammatory and dangerous? Well, there were — the key reason was political appeasement. Just as the oversight board, so-called, is set up to keep him free of regulation, he showed that he was willing to do just about anything to appease Trump, appease the Trump administration, appease the conservative allies, to keep regulation at bay. And in appeasing Trump, all that Zuckerberg really had to do was not intervene in his economic machine, surveillance capitalism, which is programmed, engineered to maximize engagement and data extraction by circulating and amplifying what turns out to be the most inflammatory, the most bizarre, the most dangerous, the most threatening, the craziest content. So, by keeping Trump going, he satisfied his political goals, and he also satisfied his economic goals.

    Now, as we saw yesterday, very, very quickly, Trump is back on his microphone — not on Facebook, not on Twitter, but he’s got plenty of other outlets. And what was the first thing he started to do? Threaten Zuckerberg with regulation. Threaten Zuckerberg with Republican retaliation. Right? So, now we are back in the political arena. And this means that the Biden administration, that team, is going to have to take a stand, because the thing that’s going to keep Mr. Trump off Facebook and save American democracy is going to be a situation where Mr. Zuckerberg fears the Democrats as much as he fears the Republicans. And so far that has not been the case. So, we are now back into a political power match. And that’s going to really change the dynamics of these next few months.

    NERMEEN SHAIKH: Professor Zuboff, could you respond to those who have criticized the decision by Facebook to indefinitely suspend Trump’s account? It’s not just conservatives in this country, but also several European leaders who have said that tech companies have no place in making decisions like this; this decision and decisions like it should be in the hands of governments.

    SHOSHANA ZUBOFF: Well, that is absolutely true. You know, Mr. Zuckerberg and his so-called oversight board are running around the rim of a donut chasing each other’s tails, looking for solutions, when the solution space is in the hole. And the problem is that surveillance capitalism, companies like Facebook that depend upon the secret extraction of behavioral data, which gets turned into targeting and targeted ads, you know, this is a very pernicious, extractive, dangerous, anti-democratic economics that has taken hold in the last 20 years, the last two decades.

    And it’s done so because democracy has failed to act. And it’s not only true in America, but the liberal democracies around the world have failed to develop a distinct vision of how do you design and deploy and apply the digital world, digital technology, in a way that advances democracy and allows democracy to flourish. So, we’re not China, but instead we’ve allowed these private companies to create a different kind of surveillance state in our surveillance society in America and in the West that operates under private capital.

    So, we are long overdue for the same kind of period of tremendous creativity and invention that we saw in the 20th century. You know, the first part of the 20th century, the employers, the owners of the great industrial enterprises, they had all the power. They had all the decision rights. Everything that happened, happened based on their private property rights. That’s the same situation we’re in today. And in the 20th century, you know, we created these huge behemoths, the monopolies, the cartels, the trusts, and it looked like ordinary citizens, and even democracy itself, had no chance. And we were looking forward to a century of extreme inequality and serfdom. But, ultimately, beginning in the third and especially the fourth decades of the 20th century —

    AMY GOODMAN: We have 10 seconds.

    SHOSHANA ZUBOFF: — democracy fought back. And we created the rights, laws and institutions we needed to tame industrial capitalism, tether it to democracy. We can do the same thing today. This third decade is now. Our opportunity for citizens and lawmakers to come together, we need to bring the digital into democracy’s house. And —

    AMY GOODMAN: Professor Zuboff, we’re going to do Part 2 of this discussion, post it online at democracynow.org. Her book, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism. I’m Amy Goodman, with Nermeen Shaikh.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • ACMA gets $4m for bargaining code oversight

    The federal government has allocated more than $4 million to the oversight of the big tech media bargaining code, despite no companies being designated under it yet.

    Communications Minister Paul Fletcher announced on Wednesday morning that next week’s federal budget will include $4.2 million for the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) to undertake its role to oversee the news media bargaining code.

    The bargaining code, passed by Parliament in late February, requires designated companies to enter into “final offer” arbitration to determine commercial revenue-sharing deals with Australian media companies.

    Paul Fletcher
    The govt has handed ACMA $4M to oversee the news media bargaining code

    While the code has been passed into law, it doesn’t fully come into effect until the Treasurer moves to designate either Facebook or Google, which is yet to happen.

    Both tech giants moved to ink a series of commercial deals with the big Australian media companies in the lead-up to the legislation passing, while Facebook also briefly blocked all news content for Australian users.

    It’s unclear when or if the federal government will move to designate any company under the bargaining code.

    The new funding for ACMA will allow it to administer an eligibility scheme under the code, register news businesses and maintain a register of arbitrators, Mr Fletcher said.

    “Digital platforms have fundamentally changed the way that media content is produced, distributed and consumed, which is why the Morrison government introduced this world-leading code, to support a diverse and sustainable Australia news media sector,” Mr Fletcher said in a statement.

    “We welcome the reports that Google and Facebook have reached commercial agreements with some news businesses for the use of their content, and encourage the parties to continue to negotiate deals in good faith. This is powerful evidence the code is already doing its job.”

    The code also automatically allows smaller media companies to negotiate collectively with the tech giants over commercial deals, but this is also not in effect as no companies have been designated.

    Last week the competition regulator authorised Country Press Australia members to bargain collectively with the tech companies to secure revenue sharing deals, the first authorisation of its kind in Australia.

    Smaller publishing firms are required to apply to the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) before they bargain collectively without the code being in force.

    There are concerns that these smaller companies have not been able to secure revenue sharing deals with Facebook and Google and that they won’t be assisted by the code.

    ACCC chair Rod Sims has backed the government’s claims that the presence of the code is helping media companies secure deals with Facebook and Google.

    “We welcome the fact that both Facebook and Google appear to be successfully reaching voluntary deals with Australian news businesses, including a number of smaller publishers, following the passage of the bargaining code,” Mr Sims said last week.

    “The onus now remains on Facebook and Google to continue to negotiate in good faith with news businesses of all sizes.”

    The post ACMA gets $4m for bargaining code oversight appeared first on InnovationAus.

    This post was originally published on InnovationAus.

  • Facebook tracks teenagers for alcohol, gambling

    Facebook is tracking Australian teenagers online and selling their profiles to alcohol, gambling and smoking advertisers, according to new research that warns Australia needs new regulation to protect kids online.

    Advertisers can target Australian Facebook users based on their interest in certain things, which the tech giant knows by monitoring their activity on its platforms and by tracking them elsewhere online.

    The practice is routinely found to be out of step with community expectations, but currently there are not explicit laws regulating it or how it applies to minors in Australia.

    Mark Zuckerberg
    Facebook is offering advertisers children audiences that have shown an interest in smoking, drinking, gambling and weight loss.

    Democracy and rights advocate Reset Australia set up test advertising campaigns to examine Facebook’s reach of young audiences and how it compares to what is on offer with adult audiences.

    The group says they found little difference, with Facebook giving them the option to target users as young as 13 based on their ‘interest’ in things like smoking, gambling, alcohol or extreme weight loss.

    Advertisers can direct targeted advertisements to thousands of children based on these interests for only a few dollars. For example, the group said they had the option to target one thousand underage users interested in alcohol for as little as $3.03.

    What advertisers can send children is also inappropriate, according to Reset Australia, which had several deliberately ‘dubious’ ads approved by Facebook for campaigns targeted at children but did not send them for ethical reasons.

    Reset Australia executive director Chris Cooper said the public is increasingly aware their data is collected online but lacks an understanding of how it is monetised and the long term risks the model creates.

    “We’re sort of sleepwalking into these problems because we’ve accepted the status quo, business as usual approach of big tech companies,” he tells InnovationAus.

    In 2017 leaked Facebook documents revealed the company was identifying and exploiting vulnerable young people by allowing advertisers to target 14-year-olds based on when they feel “worthless” and “insecure”. When revealed by The Australian, Facebook apologised and said it would investigate the practice.

    Facebook was contacted about the Reset Australia report but did not provide a response.

    Mr Cooper argues tech platforms’ failure to protect children is a consequence of the company’s fundamental business model which relies on packaging up audiences for targeted advertising. In that regard, Facebook has little incentive to clean up the practice and the consequences are potentially profound.

    “I think it’s really difficult for them to shift their business model,” said Mr Cooper.

    “The model as it sits is insanely profitable. And so the incentive to undermine that or shift that is not there. And that’s why, in our view, you need regulation.

    “Because that’s the stick that helps to enable that kind of shift and I think without that incentive it’s very unlikely that these companies will move.”

    While other countries have moved to regulate the collection of children’s data and its use to profile them for advertising, in Australia Facebook enjoys a “policy gap”, according to Reset Australia.

    Last year the UK’s Information Commissioner introduced a statutory code of practice for online service providers requiring them to take into account the best interests of the child and minimise data collection on children by default.

    Ireland is also moving to introduce similar data protections for children while a UN Committee on the Rights of the Child has recommended member nations should prohibit by law the targeting of children for commercial purposes based on digital records.

    Australia’s latest online safety legislation focuses on content removal and cyber bullying rather than targeted advertising. Any new protections for Children would likely come in the upcoming reforms to Australia’s Privacy Act, currently being considered by the Attorney General’s Department

    Reset Australia is working with other civil society and privacy groups to contribute to the review, including arguing for specific set of privacy protections for young people.

    The reforms will be needed to drag Facebook “kicking and screaming across ethical lines”, according to Mr Cooper, who says big tech is broadening its data ambitions.

    “Data itself is used to shape your life experience [like] the content we’re served by the algorithms and Ultimately what version of truth and morality we get on the platform.

    “And so, there’s already a number of indications there around what we see is driving polarisation in society, and a kind of breakdown of the public square and a shared set of common facts that were always operated around.”

    On Thursday Facebook reported revenue of $US26.2 billion for the quarter, far beyond analysts expectations, sending share up six per cent in late trading.

    The post Facebook tracks teenagers for alcohol, gambling appeared first on InnovationAus.

    This post was originally published on InnovationAus.

  • Mass legal action against Google would ‘open the floodgates’, Supreme Court told

    A billion-pound legal action against Google over claims it secretly tracked millions of iPhone users’ internet activity would “open the floodgates” to mass data protection claims if it’s allowed to go ahead, the Supreme Court has heard.

    Open the floodgates

    Former Which? director Richard Lloyd, supported by campaign group Google You Owe Us, wants to bring a “representative action” against the US-based tech giant on behalf of around 4.4 million people in England and Wales.

    He claims Google “illegally misused the data of millions of iPhone users” through the “clandestine tracking and collation” of information about internet usage on iPhones’ Safari browser, known as the “Safari workaround”.

    Lloyd and Google You Owe Us hope to win between £1bn and £3bn in compensation for alleged breaches of the Data Protection Act.

    Phone app stock
    (PA)

    The High Court initially ruled that Lloyd could not serve the claim on Google outside the jurisdiction of England and Wales in October 2018, but that decision was overturned by the Court of Appeal in October 2019.

    On 28 April, Google’s lawyers said that landmark ruling could “open the floodgates” to vast claims brought on behalf of millions of people against companies responsible for handling people’s data.

    Antony White QC told the Supreme Court that “a number of substantial representative actions have been commenced seeking compensation for breach of data protection rights” since the Court of Appeal’s judgment.

    Claims “brought on behalf of hundreds of thousands, and, at least in one case, millions, of individuals” have recently been launched against Facebook, TikTok and Google-owned YouTube, the court heard.

    “Profound and far-reaching”

    White said, in written submissions, that allowing such claims to be brought could have “profound and far-reaching implications across all civil litigation”.

    He argued that, under data protection laws, “compensation is only available for ‘damage’ suffered as a consequence of the (data) breach, and not for the breach itself”.

    White added that “the technical matters which gave rise to the ‘Safari workaround’ were rectified many years ago”.

    He told the court:

    In circumstances where the alleged breaches have long ago ceased and a remedy already exists for any financial loss or distress caused by those alleged breaches, there is no need to fashion any further remedy for individuals who have neither suffered any financial loss or distress nor experienced any ongoing infringement of their rights.

    White also said that “the true purpose” of Lloyd’s proposed claim was “to pursue a high-profile public campaign for ‘accountability’ against Google, rather than to obtain redress” for any data breaches. He added:

    The absence of any attempt on the part of any of the millions of class members to seek redress from Google is a telling reflection that the subject matter of the claim is not important to the individuals on whose behalf the claim is brought.

    Harvesting users

    Hugh Tomlinson QC, representing Lloyd, said in written submissions:

    The fundamental question in this case is whether the courts can provide access to justice and, potentially, a remedy in cases where a very large number of people are affected by breaches of their data protection rights.

    Tomlinson added that the millions of proposed claimants “will not have access to justice” if Lloyd’s claim was not allowed to go ahead. He said “data is now central to the operation of the post-industrial economy”, and that “the foundation of (Google’s) business is trading in the personal data of its users”.

    Tomlinson also said personal data is “a valuable asset” to Google, “as demonstrated by the fact that the appellant in fact exploited the data for its own economic advantage”.

    He argued that “the existing state of society with the mass trade in personal data requires the court to adapt its practice and course of proceedings to allow the victims of large-scale data breaches access to remedies”.

    Tomlinson said doing so would provide the proposed claimants represented by Lloyd “with access to justice and a remedy which would otherwise be entirely absent”.

    Divide and categorise

    Google You Owe Us and Lloyd claim Google bypassed privacy settings on Apple iPhone handsets between August 2011 and February 2012 and used the data gathered to divide people into categories for advertisers.

    They say “browser-generated information” collected by Google included racial or ethnic origin, physical and mental heath, political affiliations or opinions, sexual interests, and social class.

    Google’s lawyers say there is no suggestion the so-called Safari workaround resulted in any information being disclosed to third parties.

    The hearing, which is being livestreamed on the Supreme Court’s website, is due to finish on 29 April and it’s expected the court will give its ruling at a later date.

    By The Canary

    This post was originally published on The Canary.

  • Biden Continues Conflict With China Through The Quad

    On March 12, the heads of government of four countries, Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Japanese Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga, and US President Joe Biden, met for a virtual meeting of the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue, better known as the Quad.

    Modi’s opening remarks illustrate the emptiness of the public agenda; he called the Quad “a force for global good” with no details beyond a list of areas of collaboration (“vaccines, climate change and emerging technologies”). There was no direct mention of China during the meeting.

    In the details relating to the launching of “an ambitious new joint partnership that is going to boost vaccine manufacturing,” a more disturbing agenda reveals itself

    The post Biden Continues Conflict With China Through The Quad appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Liberal Senators’ Big Tech inquiry gets knocked back

    A Liberal Senator has failed in his second attempt to launch an inquiry into the influence of Big Tech in Australia, after the motion was blocked by Labor and the crossbench.

    South Australian senator Alex Antic moved a motion on Tuesday for the establishment of a Select Committee on Big Tech Influence in Australia, which would look into disinformation, “de-platforming”, fake accounts and the extent that the likes of Facebook and Google comply with local laws.

    But the attempt was dismissed by Labor, who said there are already too many select committees, and the Greens, who took issue with the language of the motion, which they said was used “overwhelmingly by the far right”.

    Business fibre
    Big Tech: The senate has declined to establish a new select committee to investigate

    Senator Antic had originally planned to move the motion last month, but put this on hold. This was the same day that the government announced it had reached an agreement with Facebook over its media bargaining code, with news allowed back on the social media platform.

    He tried again on Tuesday, attempting to launch a select committee that would investigate and report on the activity of major international and domestic tech firms, specifically looking at disinformation, misinformation, shadow banning, de-platform and monetisation, fake accounts and bots, the companies’ terms of service and their compliance with Australian law.

    The motion was voted down with Senators drawn at 32 votes for and against.

    Labor voted down the motion due to the amount of Select Committees already operating.

    “We were advised by the government that they are concerned at the number of Select Committees that are currently operating in the Senate and at the level of work references committees have – that Select Committees are perhaps filling part of the role that references committees had in the past – only to be given this motion on the Notice Paper,” Labor Senator Katy Gallagher said.

    “So we won’t be supporting this today, based on the government’s own advice that there are too many Select Committees at this point in time.”

    Crossbench Senator Rex Patrick also voted against the motion for this reason, saying it would mean there are 10 Select Committees, even though it is recommended there should only be three at any one time.

    Senator Patrick said he would have supported an inquiry by a references committee into Big Tech.

    The Greens voted against the motion due to the language used in it.

    “There is no doubt that we do need an inquiry into the influence of Big Tech in this country, particularly its impact on our democracy and our media and the way that Big Tech has allowed for the proliferation of far-right extremism on digital platforms in Australia,” Greens Senator Nick McKim said.

    “However, this motion contains language which concerns the Greens. It is language which is used overwhelmingly by the far right, including terms like shadow-banning and deplatforming.

    “While we won’t be supporting this motion today, we do remain open minded and of the view that we need to have a look at some of the impacts of the Big Tech sector on those areas I mentioned earlier.”

    Shadow industry minister Ed Husic last month labelled the attempted motion a “joke”.

    “On so many levels this was a joke and a poor one at that. There are countless reports gathering dust now on what needs to be done to combat some of the excesses in technology that this government has ignored,” Mr Husic told InnovationAus in February.

    “On top of that did anyone seriously think that this government that had pulled the handbrake on implementing Royal Commission recommendations against big banks was serious about a Big Tech inquiry that would produce a report that would go nowhere?”

    The post Liberal Senators’ Big Tech inquiry gets knocked back appeared first on InnovationAus.

    This post was originally published on InnovationAus.

  • Antitrust Is Back In The United States

    Chicago – President Joe Biden is signaling that his administration will get tough on monopoly. With the appointments of Columbia University law professors Timothy Wu to the White House National Economic Council and Lina Khan to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), he has selected two well-known proponents of breaking up the Big Tech monopolies.

    Moreover, these appointments come on the heels of a major antitrust reform bill that Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota introduced in the US Senate last month. Klobuchar’s bill aims to bolster antitrust enforcement in a number of ways. It would increase funding for the FTC and the Department of Justice Antitrust Division, establish new bureaucratic offices to investigate and monitor antitrust compliance and market conditions, slap new civil penalties on violators, and expose firms to liability for anticompetitive business practices that currently fall through the cracks.

    The post Antitrust Is Back In The United States appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Salesforce chief calls for truce on digital platforms

    Australian governments and tech platforms who are at loggerheads should take a step back and compromise, according to Salesforce Australia chief executive officer Pip Marlow, who says “stakeholder capitalism” has helped the software giant’s own partnerships.

    “Technology and government, [or] technology and business, we have to work together,” Ms Marlow said told the AFR business summit on Wednesday afternoon.

    “Because actually I don’t think we can make the progress that we need to [by] working in silos or working not in partnership,” she said.

    Pip Marlow
    Pip Marlow: Australia is at a sliding doors moment. Big Tech.

    The Salesforce chief said the pandemic had shown the value of public and private partnerships and what can be achieved in a crisis.

    According to Ms Marlow, Australia is at a “sliding doors moment.” It must capitalise on its relative success in managing the pandemic, which has seen increased levels of trust in government and business, notwithstanding a drop in trust in the technology sector.

    Ms Marlow said Salesforce was guided by a commitment to “stakeholder capitalism” where community, employees, government, customers and the environment factor into decisions much like shareholders do. She said some commitments made under the approach are not always met, but the company is transparent about it as it pursues “true stakeholder capitalism”.

    The software giant’s platforms have become a popular choice for governments, including to manage COVID-19 contact tracing efforts, helping the company to grow revenue 20 per cent last year and forecast similar growth in 2021.

    Salesforce’s platform was used as a replacement to Victoria’s largely manual contact tracing system, for example. It has similar contact tracing deals with South Australia, Western Australia, Victoria, New Zealand and over 30 US states.

    Key to partnering with government is a willingness to consider each other’s stakeholders, Ms Marlow said.

    “The way [Salesforce] try and get to that [partnership] point is taking that stakeholder approach,” Ms Marlow said.

    “If your number one thing that is important to you above everything else is profit, you will make decisions aligned to that. If you have a more balanced scorecard and say ‘actually it’s our role to help government, help business [to] drive customer satisfaction, you will operate differently because you have a more balanced scorecard, and that’s why we take the stakeholder approach.”

    When negotiations get tense, such as with Google and Facebook’s stoush with the federal government, Ms Marlow says it is time to take a step back.

    “If you have two parties who both have a position and you’re both pushing against each other [then] nobody’s making any progress,” she said.

    “So actually, sometimes you have to be the person to take the first step back to seek to understand the other person’s position and go ‘Right, what can I do to help you. And how can we change the dynamic here?’”

    “But waiting for the other person to make the move, if both parties are waiting for the other person to make the move, nobody’s going to make a move.”

    The post Salesforce chief calls for truce on digital platforms appeared first on InnovationAus.

    This post was originally published on InnovationAus.

  • Biden’s Trade Commission Pick Lina Khan Led Antitrust Efforts Against Big Tech

    Legal scholar Lina Khan has been nominated to the Federal Trade Commission by President Joe Biden.

    President Joe Biden plans to nominate Lina Khan, a Columbia law professor and progressive champion of the antitrust movement, to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), Politico reports. Progressives against big tech and for anti-monopolism praised this decision on Tuesday.

    Khan is a “progressive superstar,” ProPublica senior reporter and editor Jesse Eisinger wrote. She first became well known in the law and big tech spheres for her 2017 article published in The Yale Law Journal, “Amazon’s Antitrust Paradox,” which challenged American antitrust law and its ability to handle companies like Amazon.

    In the article, Khan argued that American antitrust laws are not equipped to handle a company like Amazon, which has monopoly-like power despite not looking like a traditional monopoly.

    “In her telling, monopolies don’t just exploit consumers and workers in their part of the economy. Even when they offer low prices to consumers, their influence propagates through the entire system,” wrote The Atlantic’s Robinson Meyer in 2018.

    Khan’s Yale Law Journal article was praised by experts in business and law as “remarkable,” wrote one Washington Post journalist. A New York Times profile stated that Khan’s article “reframed decades of monopoly law.” When the article was published, Khan was only in her third year of law school.

    Since then, Khan has emerged as a leading figure in the antitrust movement. Sarah Miller, director of the American Economic Liberties Project, called her the “intellectual architect of the bipartisan suits against Facebook and Google” in a statement on Tuesday.

    Last year, the FTC and Justice Department filed antitrust suits against Google and Facebook, and big tech CEOs were grilled by Congress over their company’s wide-reaching effects on the market. When the House Judiciary Committee put forth recommendations for legislation and reforms to encourage competition, Khan helped to craft that report.

    Her appointment, in combination with Biden’s pick of another outspoken antitrust lawyer, Tim Wu, as a White House economic adviser, could signal that Biden is planning to take a more aggressive stance toward big tech than his predecessors. The picks represent, as Politico wrote, “a massive shift in philosophy away from the era of Barack Obama, who proudly forged an alliance between the Democratic Party and Big Tech.”

    Biden’s plans to pick Khan for one of the five FTC spots is “the biggest news in antitrust in a year already filled with antitrust news,” wrote Brian Fung, a CNN tech reporter.

    Anti-monopolist Fordham law professor Zephyr Teachout wrote that Khan and Wu are “extraordinary, powerful choices by Biden. It gives hope that the last 40 years of consumer welfarism in antitrust could be on its last legs, and that we can start enforcing existing laws with vigor.” Short-term market decisions underscore current antitrust laws, due to a Ronald Reagan-era change that paved the way for thousands of mergers in the ensuing decades.

    Khan, along with Wu and Vanita Gupta, a Biden pick for the Justice Department who’s also been critical of big tech, could help to usher in a new era for regulation of monopolies, progressives hope. As the Justice Democrats wrote, “This is a major progressive pick by the Biden administration to check the concentration of corporate power and uplift working families.”

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Google Props Up Modi’s Corporate Takeover of Agriculture With Big Investments

    Sri Narendra Modi

    The world has been riveted for months now by the mass farmers’ strike in India against Narendra Modi’s neoliberal agriculture reforms bills. The passage of these deeply unpopular laws has overlapped with the Modi regime’s intensified crackdown of any and all dissent at home.

    But one big part of this story has gone unnoticed: the complicity of Google and other tech platforms in propping up the repressive Modi-BJP government through their huge investments in the regime’s closest allies and biggest beneficiaries.

    In particular, Google’s multi-billion dollar investment in the telecommunications company owned by oil and gas billionaire Mukesh Ambani shows how US Big Tech will stop at nothing to make a bigger profit, even if this includes legitimizing a key supporter of the authoritarian-leaning government that is now a target of mass revolt. Ambani is India’s richest man and a strong corporate ally to BJP leadership, perceived by many as a major beneficiary of the hated agricultural reforms.

    Farmer Protests, Reliance Industries and Mukesh Ambani

    In September 2020, the Indian Parliament approved the Indian Agriculture Acts of 2020, also known as the “Farm Bills.” In response, Indian farmers who opposed these bills launched one of the largest protests and series of cross-sectoral strikes that the world has ever seen.

    It’s estimated that over 250 million people have participated in protests against the passage of these bills that Indian farmers see as another phase in the continued attack on their livelihoods and an attempt to deregulate the farming industry to allow for greater private-sector control of food distribution. These changes would favor large corporations like Ambani’s Reliance Industries, who would thrive under the free market conditions that these Farm Bills would create.

    Protesters in India and among the South Asian diaspora have also held solidarity actions against the Citizen Amendment Act (CAA) and National Registry of Citizens (NRC), which were passed by the Modi-BJP government in the last 18 months. For example, students who organized en masse against the anti-Muslim and anti-poor CAA and NRC laws have joined with Indian farmers as both groups take on the right-wing, repressive Modi government.

    Farm bill protestors in India have repeatedly visited the headquarters of Reliance Industries, a global Fortune 500 company owned by India and Asia’s richest man, Mukesh Ambani, arguing that his corporation stands to profit greatly from the deregulation of the agricultural sector. Reliance owns Jio Platforms, which is a top telecommunications carrier in India. Ambani’s multi-tentacled telecommunications and digital empire also recently entered into the food and grocery delivery market through their app JioMart.

    While Ambani promises not to pursue large-scale corporate farming, protestors remain skeptical that the Farm Bills were not created to benefit the likes of Ambani and other major corporations in India.

    Google and Mukesh Ambani

    Last summer Google made headlines with its announcement that it was investing $4.5 billion in Ambani’s Jio Platforms, giving it a 7.7% stake in the company. Google says it plans to make a $10 billion investment in India over the next few years and partner with Jio Platforms to create an affordable Android phone that would give more Indians internet access.

    But Google’s desire to give more Indians internet access is no doubt motivated by its even greater desire to gain a strong foothold in India’s “emerging market” and be poised to sell its products and advertising in these markets. Google’s bread and butter is advertisement sales and growth isn’t possible without new markets to sell to advertisers.

    In truth, Google’s massive investment in India is really just an investment in a corporation owned by India’s richest man. It also signals Google’s own desire to grow its business infinitely into new markets. And Google’s big arrival in India at a time when the government has announced major new deregulation laws is no doubt music to the tech company’s ear, as it and other US tech companies have spent millions of dollars lobbying against regulation at home.

    Food and trade policy analyst Davinder Sharma told Al-Jazeera: “We are following the American model by bringing corporates into the agriculture.” U.S. tech companies are moving into India at the same time and are participating in this corporate take-over of India’s agriculture industry. In his announcement of Google’s $10m multi-year investment in the India Digitization Fund, India-born Google CEO Sundar Pichai writes that one of the key areas that investment will focus on is “leveraging technology and AI for social good, in areas like health, education, and agriculture.”

    Farmers in India are right to be suspicious and to reject the new laws that open up opportunities for corporations like Reliance and Google to further impoverish the lives of Indian farmers.

    Google and the Modi Government’s Repression

    In profiting from investment in India while standing on the sidelines and not condemning the Modi government’s human rights abuses, Google and US Big Tech can be seen to be validating the repression of protesters.

    Most recently the Modi government has come after youth climate activists like Disha Ravi, who are joining farmers on the front lines of the protests and leading the Indian chapter of the international Fridays for Future movement. After the Modi government made a request in early February to Google for information about IP addresses connected to a Google doc, Ravi and a number of other climate activists were arrested on charges of international conspiracy to “defame the country” and sedition against the Indian government for assembling a social media “toolkit” for climate activists to show solidarity with protesting farmers.

    In a recent Intercept article, Naomi Klein reports on the role that international tech companies like Google and Zoom have played in working with the Modi government to surveil climate activists in India. Klein writes of how the toolkit controversy exposes the broader attempts at chilling political dissent in India right now and says “the silent complicity of the tech companies” in cooperating with Modi’s government goes against their own self-image as harbingers of democracy and open societies.

    Indeed, if Google truly wants to “democratize” the internet in India it should also condemn the Indian government’s repeated attempts to stifle protest and dissent against Modi and his party by using internet blackouts in Kashmir, during protests over the CAA and NRC in Delhi, and now over the Farm Bills (with over 400 blackouts in the last four years, India is the world leader).

    Last month the Modi government demanded that Twitter block the accounts of users who criticized the government and their repression of the farmer strikes and the social media company complied temporarily. After Twitter blocked and then unblocked accounts — including those of activists, celebrities, and an entire news organization — the Indian government threatened employees of Twitter with jail time if they didn’t follow the government’s orders. To do all this, the Modi government invoked a 135 year old colonial-era law used by the British to quell anti-colonial uprisings. Instead of showing concern for these abuses, Google CEO Sundar Pichai has given nothing but public praise to Modi’s “Digital India” initiative at a time when digital censorship of the people and press by his government have intensified rapidly.

    Google and Facebook are making these huge investments in Indian corporations at a time when the people of India and Kashmir are engaged in non-stop protest against the Modi-BJP government. Rather than joining the people of India in calls for justice, an end to repression and censorship of the people and the press, and the right to protest, Google offers its support only to Ambani and the corporate class of India who will help Google grow its market while enriching themselves. This international alliance of the tech elite was also seen when Pichai and his wife rubbed elbows with the Indian corporate elite at the wedding of Ambani’s son in 2019.

    We’ve seen the attention that tech and social media companies have received during the past two months over their role in the January 6th white supremacist insurrection at the US Capital. Now we must extend the same attention to the role they’ve played in platforming right-wing hate speech in India and around the world, including to the recent concerns raised by Saudi activists about Google’s partnership with their own repressive government.

    As we continue to demand tech accountability in the US, we must join with other movements and voices challenging the power and complicity of Big Tech in empowering repressive regimes all over the world — and also question how much all this is simply baked into their business model.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Digital Colonialism: The Evolution Of American Empire

    In 2020, billionaires made out like bandits. Jeff Bezos’s personal holdings surged from $113 to $184 billion. Elon Musk briefly eclipsed Bezos, with a net worth rise from $27 billion to over $185 billion.

    For the bourgeoisie presiding over “Big Tech” corporations, life is grand.

    Yet, while the expanded dominance of these corporations in their domestic markets is the subject of numerous critical analyses, their global reach is a fact seldom discussed, especially by dominant intellectuals in the American empire.

    In fact, once we investigate the mechanics and numbers, it becomes apparent that Big Tech is not only global in scope, it is fundamentally colonial in character and dominated by the United States. This phenomenon is called “digital colonialism.”

    We live in a world where digital colonialism now risks becoming as significant and far-reaching a threat to the Global South as classic colonialism was in previous centuries.

    The post Digital Colonialism: The Evolution Of American Empire appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Against Big Tech’s Algorithmic Cancel Culture

    The Critical Media Literacy Conference of the Americas , the lead organizer for that is Dr. Nolan Higdon , whom I’ve worked with for years on various things. And Project Censored was a co-sponsor of this event. It was also co-sponsored by several academic institutions, including UCLA, USC, UC Santa Cruz, Stanford, and Cal State across the State of California. So, in other words, as I’ve mentioned in a couple of other interviews, Alan Macleod over at Mint Press News, did a pretty in-depth piece  on this. I know you talked about it; I think in a Black Agenda Report piece. This is an ongoing issue. This is an issue of Big Tech gatekeeping, algorithmic censorship. 

    We have not been able to get any real feedback from YouTube about what happened, except that they, in true Orwellian fashion, flipped the script, and basically tried to say that Nolan didn’t upload the videos or that the videos maybe didn’t exist in the first place.

    The post Against Big Tech’s Algorithmic Cancel Culture appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Privacy, Immigrant Rights Groups Slam Biden’s ‘Smart Wall’

    A coalition of privacy and immigrant rights groups are pushing back on the Biden administration’s proposal to deploy a “smart” wall on the southern border.

    In a statement released Thursday, first obtained by The Hill, the 40 groups slam the legislation introduced in Congress last week as a “continuation of the Trump administration’s racist border policies, not a break from it.”

    The letter pans the proposed use of “smart technology” at the border as “Trump’s wall by another name.”

    The mammoth immigration bill, which is being spearheaded by Sen. Bob Menendez (D-N.J.) and Rep. Linda Sánchez (D-Calif.), authorizes the Department of Homeland Security to develop technology and surveillance infrastructure to “manage and secure the southern border.”

    The post Privacy, Immigrant Rights Groups Slam Biden’s ‘Smart Wall’ appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

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  • Govt backs off proposed Big Tech inquiry

    A Liberal Senator has withdrawn his attempt to launch a parliamentary inquiry into the influence of Big Tech in Australia on the same day the federal government passed its controversial media bargaining code into law and Facebook reversed its news ban.

    Liberal Senator Alex Antic had planned to move a motion in the Senate on Wednesday afternoon to establish a Select Committee on Big Tech Influence in Australia, but withdrew this motion at the last minute.

    This was the same day that Treasurer Josh Frydenberg reached an agreement with Facebook to amend the news media bargaining code legislation to ensure the tech giant allowed news content back onto its platform.

    Canberra Parliament
    Re-think: The Senate inquiry into Big Tech influence no longer so interesting

    Last week Facebook went nuclear and followed through with its threat to block all news content for Australian users in response to the bargaining code, which would force it to enter into final offer arbitration to determine revenue sharing deals with media companies.

    Senator Antic used the move as further evidence that the Big Tech inquiry was needed.

    “The news today that Facebook are banning access to news publishers, TV stations and government departments highlights why I have been calling for a Senate Select Committee to be established to investigate the activity and behaviour of Big Tech,” Senator Antic posted on Facebook last week.

    But Senator Antic eventually withdrew his plan to move the motion in the Senate, just hours after the government brokered a deal with Facebook.

    Shadow industry and innovation minister Ed Husic labelled the attempted motion a “joke”.

    “On so many levels this was a joke and a poor one at that. There are countless reports gathering dust now on what needs to be done to combat some of the excesses in technology, that this government has ignored,” Mr Husic told InnovationAus.

    “On top of that did anyone seriously think that this government that had pulled the handbrake on implementing Royal Commission recommendations against big banks was serious about a Big Tech inquiry that would produce a report that would go nowhere.”

    The timing of the motion was telling, Mr Husic said.

    “It was cute timing to think a bunch of nobody senators proposing an inquiry into Big Tech would scare Facebook into a different position on the code,” he said.

    “Again, I think there are serious issues that need to be dealt with and we do need to work with tech on them, from privacy to competition law, but this was just a brain snap, a political parlor game that was never destined to go anywhere.”

    The inquiry would have looked into the management of disinformation, misinformation and malinformation, including shadow banning, de-platforming and demonetisation. Just this week the tech giants unveiled their voluntary code of conduct around misinformation and disinformation which was widely panned.

    There is also an existing Select Committee focusing on foreign interference through social media, which is expected to table its final report in May next year.

    The committee would have been tasked with investigating the prevalence of fake accounts and bots on platforms such as Facebook, along with these companies’ privacy settings and the use of data by third parties.

    The Senators would also be tasked at looking at whether these firms are complying with Australian laws. The committee is expected to table its final report in December next year.

    It came on the same day that the federal government passed its legislation launching the media bargaining code through Parliament. The code will force designated companies to eventually enter into forced arbitration to determine revenue sharing deals with media companies over the sharing of news content.

    The code was a key recommendation from the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission’s (ACCC) digital platforms inquiry, which also included a number of other policy recommendations for government.

    The ACCC has also launched a series of legal actions against Big Tech firms for a range of alleged offences.

    The Attorney’s-General Department is also conducting a review of the Privacy Act which will likely call on the tech giants to improve security and data handling practices, and give room for individuals to launch legal action against the firms for breaches of privacy.

    The Coalition has also been highly critical of tech firms offering encrypted communications, including Facebook,and moved a number of pieces of legislation aimed at undermining this.

    Laws introduced to Parliament late last year would hand sweeping new powers to the AFP to access and “disrupt” the networks of those suspected of crimes, and to even take over their accounts on Big Tech platforms covertly.

    The post Govt backs off proposed Big Tech inquiry appeared first on InnovationAus.

    This post was originally published on InnovationAus.

  • Govt backs off proposed Big Tech inquiry

    A Liberal Senator has withdrawn his attempt to launch a parliamentary inquiry into the influence of Big Tech in Australia on the same day the federal government passed its controversial media bargaining code into law and Facebook reversed its news ban.

    Liberal Senator Alex Antic had planned to move a motion in the Senate on Wednesday afternoon to establish a Select Committee on Big Tech Influence in Australia, but withdrew this motion at the last minute.

    This was the same day that Treasurer Josh Frydenberg reached an agreement with Facebook to amend the news media bargaining code legislation to ensure the tech giant allowed news content back onto its platform.

    Canberra Parliament
    Re-think: The Senate inquiry into Big Tech influence no longer so interesting

    Last week Facebook went nuclear and followed through with its threat to block all news content for Australian users in response to the bargaining code, which would force it to enter into final offer arbitration to determine revenue sharing deals with media companies.

    Senator Antic used the move as further evidence that the Big Tech inquiry was needed.

    “The news today that Facebook are banning access to news publishers, TV stations and government departments highlights why I have been calling for a Senate Select Committee to be established to investigate the activity and behaviour of Big Tech,” Senator Antic posted on Facebook last week.

    But Senator Antic eventually withdrew his plan to move the motion in the Senate, just hours after the government brokered a deal with Facebook.

    Shadow industry and innovation minister Ed Husic labelled the attempted motion a “joke”.

    “On so many levels this was a joke and a poor one at that. There are countless reports gathering dust now on what needs to be done to combat some of the excesses in technology, that this government has ignored,” Mr Husic told InnovationAus.

    “On top of that did anyone seriously think that this government that had pulled the handbrake on implementing Royal Commission recommendations against big banks was serious about a Big Tech inquiry that would produce a report that would go nowhere.”

    The timing of the motion was telling, Mr Husic said.

    “It was cute timing to think a bunch of nobody senators proposing an inquiry into Big Tech would scare Facebook into a different position on the code,” he said.

    “Again, I think there are serious issues that need to be dealt with and we do need to work with tech on them, from privacy to competition law, but this was just a brain snap, a political parlor game that was never destined to go anywhere.”

    The inquiry would have looked into the management of disinformation, misinformation and malinformation, including shadow banning, de-platforming and demonetisation. Just this week the tech giants unveiled their voluntary code of conduct around misinformation and disinformation which was widely panned.

    There is also an existing Select Committee focusing on foreign interference through social media, which is expected to table its final report in May next year.

    The committee would have been tasked with investigating the prevalence of fake accounts and bots on platforms such as Facebook, along with these companies’ privacy settings and the use of data by third parties.

    The Senators would also be tasked at looking at whether these firms are complying with Australian laws. The committee is expected to table its final report in December next year.

    It came on the same day that the federal government passed its legislation launching the media bargaining code through Parliament. The code will force designated companies to eventually enter into forced arbitration to determine revenue sharing deals with media companies over the sharing of news content.

    The code was a key recommendation from the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission’s (ACCC) digital platforms inquiry, which also included a number of other policy recommendations for government.

    The ACCC has also launched a series of legal actions against Big Tech firms for a range of alleged offences.

    The Attorney’s-General Department is also conducting a review of the Privacy Act which will likely call on the tech giants to improve security and data handling practices, and give room for individuals to launch legal action against the firms for breaches of privacy.

    The Coalition has also been highly critical of tech firms offering encrypted communications, including Facebook,and moved a number of pieces of legislation aimed at undermining this.

    Laws introduced to Parliament late last year would hand sweeping new powers to the AFP to access and “disrupt” the networks of those suspected of crimes, and to even take over their accounts on Big Tech platforms covertly.

    The post Govt backs off proposed Big Tech inquiry appeared first on InnovationAus.

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  • Prisons Prime Testing Ground For Dehumanizing Hi-Tech ‘Advances’

    Postmaster General Louis DeJoy is coming under fire again from Democratic lawmakers, as well as from the American Postal Workers Union, who are calling for President Joe Biden to pave the way for DeJoy’s removal after the Trump-appointee announced higher mailing fees and logistical changes that could further slow down mail. The US Postal Service (USPS) has already suffered a more than 50% drop in on-time arrivals for first-class mail deliveries, according to the service’s own data.

    Nevertheless, thanks to the ubiquitous presence of high-speed internet, the personal communications of most Americans don’t seem to be fundamentally affected by the problems at USPS. Excluding the mail-in-ballots controversy leading up to the 2020 presidential election, the majority of the country remains little more than a…

    The post Prisons Prime Testing Ground For Dehumanizing Hi-Tech ‘Advances’ appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Congress Escalates Pressure On Tech Giants To Censor More

    For the third time in less than five months, the U.S. Congress has summoned the CEOs of social media companies to appear before them, with the explicit intent to pressure and coerce them to censor more content from their platforms. On March 25, the House Energy and Commerce Committee will interrogate Twitter’s Jack Dorsey, Facebooks’s Mark Zuckerberg and Google’s Sundar Pichai at a hearing which the Committee announced will focus “on misinformation and disinformation plaguing online platforms.”

    The Committee’s Chair, Rep. Frank Pallone, Jr. (D-NJ), and the two Chairs of the Subcommittees holding the hearings, Mike Doyle (D-PA) and Jan Schakowsky (D-IL), said in a joint statement that the impetus was “falsehoods about the COVID-19 vaccine” and “debunked claims of election fraud.” They argued that “these online platforms have allowed misinformation to spread, intensifying national crises with real-life, grim consequences for…

    The post Congress Escalates Pressure On Tech Giants To Censor More appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.