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  • Nine signs Facebook and Google content sharing deals

    Australian media giant Nine has signed content sharing deals with Facebook and Google worth tens of millions of dollars, months after the bargaining code was passed by Parliament.

    In an announcement to the ASX on Tuesday, Nine confirmed that it had inked separate deals with the two Big Tech companies after months of negotiations.

    Nine has followed News Corp, Seven West Media and the Guardian, which have already signed content sharing deals with Facebook and Google. There are still ongoing concerns that no smaller media players have secured financial deals with the Big Tech players though.

    Google Dara
    Sundry Photography / Shutterstock

    Nine’s negotiations kicked off when the federal government was attempting to get its controversial news media bargaining code through Parliament amid fierce debate, which resulted in Facebook briefly banning all news content for Australian users.

    The code was eventually passed with a number of amendments, but neither Facebook or Google have been designated under the new laws, meaning it is yet to properly come into effect.

    Despite this, Nine’s announcement said the deals were made “following the Commonwealth government’s enactment of the news media bargaining code”.

    Nine’s deal with Facebook will run for three years and will involve the supplying of news video clips and access to digital news articles to Facebook’s news products.

    The Google deal is over five years and involves the supply of news content but not video content to Google’s News Showcase service and other news products. As part of the agreement, Google will also expand its marketing initiatives across Nine’s platform, the media company’s announcement said.

    The Facebook deal involves a minimum amount payable over the three years, while the Google deal is a fixed annual fee, with “modest growth” in the early years.

    Taking into account the termination of a separate Google advertising deal and other factors, Nine said it expects its revenue to grow by between $30 million and $40 million in 2020. The Australian Financial Review, owned by Nine, reported the Google deal to be worth more than $35 million annually, and the Facebook agreement to be worth more than $15 million.

    Seven West Media has signed very similar deals with Google and Facebook in recent weeks, as has News Corp. The Australian Community Media and The Guardian have also secured deals with the tech giants, while the ABC recently announced it had signed a letter of intent with both of the companies for content sharing deals.

    No smaller publishing companies have secured such deals though, leading to concerns the government’s reforms will only benefit the big players. The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission has encouraged these companies to apply for permission to collectively bargain with Facebook and Google, and Country Press Australia became the first to receive approval for this last month.

    The news media bargaining code was passed into law in Februar, but no company has been designated under it. The government has argued that the mere presence of the code has forced Facebook and Google to land deals with local media companies for fear of being subject to it.

    The recent federal budget handed ACMA more than $4 million to oversee the operation of the bargaining code.

    The bargaining code requires designated companies to enter into “final offer” arbitration to determine commercial revenue-sharing deals with Australian media companies.

    The post Nine signs Facebook and Google content sharing deals appeared first on InnovationAus.

    This post was originally published on InnovationAus.

  • 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.

  • 30 NGOs call on Google to drop plan for a Cloud region in Saudi Arabia

    Groups call on Google to drop out of Saudi project over human rights concerns

    © Getty Images

    The Hill of 26 May 2021 reports that a coalition of more than 30 human rights and digital privacy rights groups called on Google to abandon its plans to establish a Google Cloud region in Saudi Arabia over concerns about human rights violations.

    The groups, which include Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and PEN America, wrote in their letter that Saudi Arabia’s record of tamping down on public dissent and its justice system that “flagrantly violates due process” made it unsafe for Google to set up a “cloud region” in the kingdom.

    “While Google publishes how it handles government requests for customer information and reports when requests are made through formal channels, there are numerous potential human rights risks of establishing a Google Cloud region in Saudi Arabia that include violations of the rights to privacy, freedom of expression and association, non-discrimination, and due process,” the groups said. See also: https://humanrightsdefenders.blog/2019/03/08/saudi-arabia-for-first-time-openly-criticized-in-un-human-rights-council/

    The letter also pointed to Saudi authorities who have routinely sought to identify anonymous online dissenters and spy on Saudi citizens through digital surveillance. The groups also pointed to how they themselves are believed to have been put under surveillance by the Saudi government.

    “Google has a responsibility to respect human rights, regardless of any state’s willingness to fulfill its own human rights obligations,” the letter continued, pointing to Google’s statement in which it expressed its commitment to human rights and to “improve the lives of as many people as possible.”

    In order to address these concerns, the groups called on Google to conduct a “robust, thorough human rights due diligence process” and to “draw red lines around what types of government requests concerning Cloud regions it will not comply with” due to human rights concerns.

    “The Saudi government has demonstrated time and again a flagrant disregard for human rights, both through its own direct actions against human rights defenders and its spying on corporate digital platforms to do the same,” the letter read. “We fear that in partnering with the Saudi government, Google will become complicit in future human rights violations affecting people in Saudi Arabia and the Middle East region.”

    https://thehill.com/policy/technology/555597-groups-call-on-google-to-drop-out-of-saudi-project-over-human-rights

    This post was originally published on Hans Thoolen on Human Rights Defenders and their awards.

  • 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 removed 110,000 Covid posts by Aussies

    Facebook removed 110,000 pieces of COVID-19 misinformation posted by Australian pages or accounts in the first year of the pandemic, with 14 billion posts removed around the world from March to December last year.

    The data was provided by the tech giant as part of its obligations under the voluntary Australian Code of Practice for Disinformation and Misinformation, developed by social media firms after being directed to do so by the federal government in late 2019.

    As part of the code, signatories have to produce annual transparency reports on actions they have undertaken to combat disinformation and misinformation on their platforms.

    The reports from the likes of Facebook, Twitter, Google, TikTok and Australian firm Redbubble show a significant increase in misinformation relating to COVID-19 and vaccines, with efforts to block this including removing the content entirely or labelling it with fact checks.

    Facebook
    Facebook removed a ton of COVID misinformation posted by Australians last year. Credit: Twin Design / Shutterstock.com

    Facebook’s transparency report revealed that from March to the end of December 2020 the company removed 14 billion pieces of content constituting misinformation relating ot COVID-19 around the world, including fake preventative measures and exaggerated cures.

    Of this, 110,000 posts were removed in Australia for these reasons, while 6.2 million Australian users have visited Facebook’s COVID-19 Information Centre. Globally, 2 billion people have visited this info centre on Facebook.

    Much of the focus on misinformation surrounding COVID-19 has now shifted to anti-vaccination disinformation, with Facebook moving in December to remove posts including false claims about COVID-19 vaccines and vaccinations in general.

    Facebook signed onto the voluntary code at the same time it had briefly moved to ban all news content for Australian users in response to the news media bargaining code legislation.

    Twitter’s own transparency report revealed that 1 million accounts were suspended in the first year of the pandemic, with 4.5 million posts removed for violating the company’s rules.

    From July to December 2020, more than 7000 Australian-based accounts were suspended, with 47,000 tweets removed in total.

    Less than 10 Australian accounts were suspended due to violations of the social media platform’s COVID-19 rules, with “more than 50” posts by Australians taken down by Twitter.

    In the last three months alone, Twitter has labelled tweets from 25,000 accounts around the world for misinformation.

    Google’s report under the code focused on the advertising side of its business. Last year, the search engine giant blocked and removed 3.1 billion “bad ads”, equating to nearly 6000 advertisements per minute.

    In March this year, Google blocked more than 100,000 ads from Australian companies and individuals for violating its “misrepresentation” ads policy.

    Online marketplace Redbubble – the only Australian company to have signed onto the misinformation code so far – revealed an “increased upward trend” in content uploaded to its platform relating to anti-vaccination sentiments recently.

    This spiked significantly midway through last, with sales on the platform for this content surpassing $15,000 monthly.

    In its report, Redbubble said the vast majority of this content has been removed, with 81 works in total taken down due to misinformation. About 65 of these posts were relating to anti-vaccination trends.

    Redbubble is currently working on improving its analytics around misinformation on its platform, and is using third party fraud detection software “Slift Science” to automatically block “risky” users.

    From October 2020 to March this year, social media giant TikTok removed 651 videos posted by Australian users due to COVID-19 misinformation, including 149 videos in January.

    There have been significantly more reported videos including medical misinformation on TikTok recently, with 61 reported in February and 60 in March.

    The misinformation code has previously been criticised by the Centre for Responsible Technology for being “inadequate” self-regulation that risks becoming a “digital fig leaf”, with the organisation saying it gives too much discretion to the big tech firms.

    The post Facebook removed 110,000 Covid posts by Aussies appeared first on InnovationAus.

    This post was originally published on InnovationAus.

  • Google Podcasts Is Hosting a Cache of White Nationalist Content

    A closeup of a thumb about to press the "google podcast" icon on a smartphone screen

    What facilitated the reach of both the “alt-right” and Donald Trump was the same: social media sites that allowed professional-appearing content to reach a mass audience on a shared system. Anyone could go on Twitter, create a YouTube channel or syndicate their podcast. This downloadable radio format became the “go-to” spot for the alt-right following the lead of the white nationalist pioneers at “The Daily Shoah” and their parent website, The Right Stuff. This created an interlocking network of white nationalists bound together by these multiplying media projects.

    Since 2017, a reckoning has happened with tech companies that have seen pressure from anti-fascist activists and have dropped far right members from all the platforms they had relied on for their growth. While often hesitant, the disaffiliations that tech companies made did have an effect as Amazon, Apple, Stitcher, and dozens of others stripped access to their platforms from high-profile white nationalists, conspiracy theorists and others stoking violence. The first to be deplatformed were often the low-hanging fruit, such as The Right Stuff, which is known for its open racial slurs and celebration of racist violence, including hosting “eliminationist” perspectives that advocate mass acts of genocide against Africans.

    One of the few tech companies to hold out on banning the Right Stuff’s content and multiple other white nationalist shows is Google Podcasts. While a bigger platform with Android, Google Podcasts uses the powerful Google search engine to embed individual podcast episodes, meaning you don’t necessarily have to download an app. This may mean that Google Podcasts has less control over the content that is on its system because a massive list of white nationalist shows is available on this mainstream platform.

    Google Podcasts offers “The Daily Shoah” (renamed “TDS”) available from The Right Stuff podcast network. The explosion in alt-right organizing and talking points would have been impossible without The Right Stuff, which blew open into public view in 2015 when it helped trend the hashtag #Cuckservative, which meant white conservatives who worked “against their own interests” in immigration. The Right Stuff shorted “alternative right” to #AltRight and built a mass following, linked up with white nationalist leader Richard Spencer, and hosts were the “shock jocks” of this emerging white nationalist wave. Google Play has a page for “TDS,” which embeds episodes for each play and links back to The Right Stuff’s main website page, where people can donate in dollars or Bitcoin. As of 2020, The Right Stuff’s bitcoin wallet had taken in well over $300,000 in donations, all intended to keep TDS on the air and its hosts financially secure. This is notable because it is actually quite hard to find The Right Stuff when using Google, and far right websites have often been banned from their Google’s advertising platform. Instead, what comes up are mirrored websites from archival-style pages, and Google Play. While The Right Stuff did have a podcast feed on iTunes (now Apple Podcasts), it was taken down back in 2015, as were many other far right podcast feeds.

    Also on Google Podcasts is Richard Spencer’s podcast from his website Radix, in which he hosts conversations on “culture, society and politics” from a white nationalist perspective, sharing the stage with “race realist” Edward Dutton and a young nationalist co-host from Ireland named Keith Woods (who also has old episodes of his own individual podcast hosted on Google Podcasts). Greg Johnson, who runs the largest U.S. white nationalist publishing house, Counter-Currents, has his podcast on Google Play as well. Counter-Currents sold most of its titles on Amazon, including offering some for free through Amazon Unlimited, but this declined after a mass purging from Amazon of offending titles. Today, only a few titles by Johnson appear on Amazon; the rest require a complicated series of processes and money transfers to get a hold of straight from their press.

    An investigation found well over a dozen far right or white nationalist podcasts, including white supremacist favorites like “Red Ice Radio” and “American Renaissance;” far right author Jack Donovan’s “Start The World” and other podcasts from The Right Stuff network, such as “Fash the Nation” and “Power Aesthetic” from Wolves of Vinland founder Paul Waggener; older shows from Richard Spencer and others under the name Alt Right Radio; and Groyper leader Nick Fuentes’s program, “America First.”

    Despite Facebook, YouTube and Twitter’s attempt to deplatform anything associated with the QAnon conspiracy theory, Google Play is still hosting multiple QAnon podcasts. This is especially concerning since the prominence of the QAnon conspiracy behind the violence at Capitol Hill (and around the country) on January 6 shows the effect of this misinformation. Alex Jones, the eponymous conspiracy theory leader was also deplatformed from all social media and podcast hosting systems, yet he continues to live on Google Podcast.

    When contacted with links to these podcasts to get a statement about how it intended to deal with far right content, Google did not respond. It had already taken multiple steps to try and move away from far right content, including banning far right content on its ad platforms, which is intended to be a break in the chain of monetization for far right websites. This move came after the Center for Countering Digital Hate put pressure on Google to ban certain websites that traffic in conspiracy theories or other types of far right content. After the January 6 violence, Google also pulled out of supporting the “free speech” platform Parler, where many participants in the attack planned their travel to the capitol. And since Google searches still govern who lives and who doesn’t on these platforms, changes in search algorithms have limited the capacity of websites like The Right Stuff to reach new audiences. But through the Google Play system, listeners can get a straight shot to The Right Stuff’s website and its donation prompts.

    What stops the chain of white nationalist recruitment is a total tech shutdown, and that has yet to happen with a large number of these podcast channels. While many of these white nationalist podcasts have hopped to alternative platforms like Bitchute or Gab, the white nationalists miss the fundamental piece that allowed the alt-right to recruit in the first place: these alternative platforms are not as popular as mainstream platforms. But Google Podcasts is, so if it continues to host these podcasts, then white nationalists continue to have access to the same audience that Google is attempting to recruit to Google Podcasts as a podcast platform.

    “When major tech platforms host white nationalist content, they make readily accessible to a wide audience the virulent bigotry and exclusionary ideology that has helped inspire mass shootings and other violence against immigrant, Muslim, Black, Asian American/Pacific Islander, Jewish, LGBTQ and other marginalized communities in recent years,” Ben Lorber, a research analyst with Political Research Associates who tracks the far right, told Truthout. “They amplify conspiratorial, authoritarian voices that helped inspire the storming of the U.S. Capitol and other attacks on the foundations of multiracial democracy.”

    Google Podcasts is not just sharing the newest stream of content, it has also become a lasting library of old podcast content as well, meaning that this may be the last mainstream platform that white nationalists can depend on to reach their recruits.

    Anti-fascist and anti-extremist organizations have honed in on pressuring these tech companies to take action on these issues with varied results, as many tech companies hold out either under the banner of “free speech” or display a lack of concern.

    “The logic of deplatforming is simple: the less bigots and hate groups have access to income streams, media platforms, et cetera, the fewer people they can reach,” says Abner Hauge, an anti-fascist journalist and activist with Left-Coast Right Watch. “We know the people they reach and indoctrinate into their hatred go on to organize acts of violence and terror. Therefore, deplatforming and otherwise stopping neo-Nazis like the TDS crowd materially means less people inflicting violence on others.”

    The reality is that deplatforming white nationalists was a key piece of the alt-right’s decline, which is why activists have focused on this strategy as a key component in winning the fight against white nationalism in the public sphere. Google Podcasts remains one of the last major platforms to host some of the most egregious white nationalist podcasts. Other platforms like Facebook, Amazon and YouTube are works in progress as their efforts to deplatform fascists remain partial. Left to their own internal processes, tech companies have shown that they are unable to keep up with trends on the far right and require pressure from outside activists and monitoring organizations to successfully disassociate themselves from white nationalist patrons.

    “Tech platforms must balance a commitment to free speech with a civic responsibility to uphold the values of pluralism, democracy and equality that undergird a healthy, vibrant and safe public square,” said Lorber. They are under no obligation to host white nationalist and other far right content that amounts to a full-frontal assault on these values.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Second Stage Terror Wars

    We’ll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false.

    – William Casey, CIA Director, February. 1981

    It is well known that the endless U.S. war on terror was overtly launched following the mass murders of September 11, 2001 and the linked anthrax attacks.   The invasion of Afghanistan and the Patriot Act were immediately justified by those insider murders, and subsequently the wars against Iraq, Libya, Syria, etc.  So too the terrorizing of the American people with constant fear-mongering about imminent Islamic terrorist attacks from abroad that never came.

    It is less well known that the executive director of the U.S. cover story – the fictional 9/11 Commission Report – was Philip Zelikow, who controlled and shaped the report from start to finish.

    It is even less well known that Zelikow, a professor at the University of Virginia, was closely associated with Condoleezza Rice, George W. Bush, Dickey Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, Brent Scowcroft, et al. and had served in various key intelligence positions in both the George H. W. Bush and George W. Bush administrations. In 2011 President Obama named him to his President’s Intelligence Advisory Board as befits bi-partisan elite rule and coverup compensation across political parties.

    Perhaps it’s unknown or just forgotten that The Family Steering Committee for the 9/11 Commission repeatedly called for Zelikow’s removal, claiming that his appointment made a farce of the claim that the Commission was independent.

    Zelikow said that for the Commission to consider alternative theories to the government’s claims about Osama bin Laden was akin to whacking moles.  This is the man, who at the request of his colleague Condoleezza Rice, became the primary author of (NSS 2002) The National Security Strategy of the United States of America, that declared that the U.S. would no longer abide by international law but was adopting a policy of preemptive war, as declared by George W. Bush at West Point in June 2002.  This was used as justification for the attack on Iraq in 2003 and was a rejection of the charter of the United Nations.

    So, based on Zelikow’s work creating a magic mountain of deception while disregarding so-called molehills, we have had twenty years of American terror wars around the world in which U.S. forces have murdered millions of innocent people.  Wars that will be continuing for years to come despite rhetoric to the contrary.  The rhetoric is simply propaganda to cover up the increasingly technological and space-based nature of these wars and the use of mercenaries and special forces.

    Simultaneously, in a quasi-volte-face, the Biden administration has directed its resources inward toward domestic “terrorists”: that is, anyone who disagrees with its policies.  This is especially aimed at those who question the COVID-19 story.

    Now Zelikow has been named to head a COVID Commission Planning Group based at the University of Virginia that is said to prepare the way for a National COVID Commission.  The group is funded by the Schmidt Futures, the Skoll Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation and Stand Together, with more expected to join in.  Zelikow, a member of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s Global Development Program Advisory Panel, will lead the group that will work in conjunction with the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security at the Bloomberg School of Public Health.  Stand together indeed: Charles Koch, Bill Gates, Eric Schmidt, the Rockefellers, et al. funders of disinterested truth.

    So once again the fox is in the hen house.

    If you wistfully think the corona crisis will soon come to an end, I suggest you alter your perspective.  Zelikow’s involvement, among other things, suggests we are in the second phase of a long war of terror waged with two weapons – military and medical – whose propaganda messaging is carried out by the corporate mainstream media in the pursuit of the World Economic Forum’s Great Reset. Part one has so far lasted twenty years; part two may last longer. You can be certain it won’t end soon and that the new terrorists are domestic dissidents.

    Did anyone think the freedoms lost with The Patriot Act were coming back some day?  Does anyone think the freedoms lost with the corona virus propaganda are coming back?  Many people probably have no idea what freedoms they lost with the Patriot Act, and many don’t even care.

    And today?  Lockdowns, mandatory mask wearing, travel restrictions, requirements to be guinea pigs for vaccines that are not vaccines, etc.?

    Who remembers the Nuremberg Codes?

    And they thought they were free, as Milton Mayer wrote about the Germans under Hitler.  Like frogs in a pot of cold water, we need to feel the temperature rising before it’s too late.  The dial is turned to high heat now.

    But that was so long ago and far away, right?  Don’t exaggerate, you say.  Hitler and all that crap.

    Are you thankful now that government spokespeople are blatantly saying that they will so kindly give us back some freedoms if we only do what they’re told and get “vaccinated” with an experimental biological agent, wear our masks, etc.? Hoi polloi are supposed to be grateful to their masters, who will grant some summer fun until they slam the door shut again.

    Pfizer raked in $3.5 billion from vaccine sales in the first quarter of 2021, the first three months of the vaccine rollouts, and the company projects $26 billion for the year.  That’s one vaccine manufacturer.  Chump change?  Only a chump would not realize that Pfizer is the company that paid $2.3 billion in Federal criminal fines in 2009 – the largest ever paid by a drug company – for being a repeat offender in the marketing of 13 different drugs.

    Meanwhile, the commission justifying the government’s claims about COVID-19 and injections (aka “vaccines”) will be hard at work writing their fictive report that will justify ex post facto the terrible damage that has occurred and that will continue to occur for many years.  Censorship and threats against dissidents will increase.  The disinformation that dominates the corporate mainstream media will of course continue, but this will be supplemented by alternative media that are already buckling under the pressure to conform.

    The fact that there has been massive censorship of dissenting voices by Google/ YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Wikipedia, etc., and equally massive disinformation by commission and omission across media platforms, should make everyone ask why.  Why repress dissent?  The answer should be obvious but is not.

    The fact that so many refuse to see the significance of this censorship clearly shows the hypnotic effects of a massive mind control operation.

    Name calling and censorship are sufficient.  Perfectly healthy people have now become a danger to others.  So mask up, get your experimental shot, and shut up!

    Your body is no longer inviolable.  You must submit to medical procedures on your body whether you want them or not.  Do not object or question. If you do, you will be punished and will become a pariah.  The authorities will call you crazy, deviant, selfish. They will take away your rights to travel and engage in normal activities, such as attend college, etc.

    Please do not recall The Nuremberg Code.  Especially number 7: “Proper preparations should be made and adequate facilities provided to protect the experimental subject against even remote possibilities of injury, disability or death.” (my emphasis)

    “Now is the time to just do what you are told,” as Anthony Fauci so benevolently declared.

    I am not making a prediction.  The authorities have told us what’s coming. Pay attention.  Don’t be fooled.  It’s a game they have devised.  Keep people guessing.  On edge.  Relieved.  Tense.  Relaxed.  Shocked.  Confused.  That’s the game.  One day this, the next that.  You’re on, you’re off.  You’re in, you’re out.  We are allowing you this freedom, but be good children or we will have to retract it.  If you misbehave, you will get a time out.  Time to contemplate your sins.

    If you once thought that COVID-19 would be a thing of the past by now, or ever, think again.  On May 3, 2021 The New York Times reported that the virus is here to stay.  This was again reported on May 10.  Hopes Fade for Global Herd Immunity.  You may recall that we were told such immunity would be achieved once enough people got the “vaccine” or enough people contracted the virus and developed antibodies.

    On May 9, on ABC News, Dr. Fauci, when asked about indoor mask requirements being relaxed, said, “I think so, and I think you’re going to probably be seeing that as we go along, and as more people get vaccinated.”  Then he added: “We do need to start being more liberal, as we get more people vaccinated.”

    But then, in what CNN reported as a Mother’s Day prediction, he pushed the date for “normality” out another year, saying, “I hope that [by] next Mother’s Day, we’re going to see a dramatic difference than what we’re seeing right now. I believe that we will be about as close to back to normal as we can.  We’ve got to make sure that we get the overwhelming proportion of the population vaccinated. When that happens, the virus doesn’t really have any place to go. You’re not going to see a surge. You’re not going to see the kinds of numbers we see now.”

    He said this with a straight face even though the experimental “vaccines,” by their makers own admissions, do not prevent the vaccinated from getting the virus or passing it on.  They allege it only mitigates the severity of the virus if you contract it.

    Notice the language and the vaccination meme repeated three times: “We get more people vaccinated.” (my emphasis) Not that more people choose to get vaccinated, but “we get” them vaccinated.  Thank you, Big Daddy. And now we have another year to go until “we will be about as close to back to normal as we can.”  Interesting phrase: as we can.  It other words: we will never return to normality but will have to settle for the new normal that will involve fewer freedoms.  Life will be reset, a great reset.  Great for the few and terrible for the many.

    Once two vaccines were enough; then, no, maybe one is sufficient; no, you will need annual or semi-annual booster shots to counteract the new strains that they say are coming.  It’s a never-ending story with never-ending new strains in a massive never-ending medical experiment.  The virus is changing so quickly and herd immunity is now a mystical idea, we are told, that it will never be achieved.  We will have to be eternally vigilant.

    But wait.  Don’t despair.  It looks like restrictions are easing up for the coming summer in the northern hemisphere. Lockdowns will be loosened.  If you felt like a prisoner for the past year plus, now you will be paroled for a while. But don’t dispose of those masks just yet.  Fauci says that wearing masks could become seasonal following the pandemic because people have become accustomed to wearing them and that’s why the flu has disappeared. The masks didn’t prevent COVID-19 but eliminated the flu.  Are you laughing yet?

    Censorship and lockdowns and masks and mandatory injections are like padded cells in a madhouse and hospital world where free-association doesn’t lead to repressed truths because free association isn’t allowed, neither in word nor deed.  Speaking freely and associating with others are too democratic. Yes, we thought we were free.  False consciousness is pandemic.  Exploitation is seen as benevolence. Silence reigns.  And the veiled glances signify the ongoing terror that has spread like a virus.

    We are now in a long war with two faces.  As with the one justified by the mass murders of September 11, 2001, this viral one isn’t going away.

    The question is: Do we have to wait twenty years to grasp the obvious and fight for our freedoms?

    We can be assured that Zelikow and his many associates at Covid Collaborative, including General Stanley McChrystal, Robert Gates, Arnie Duncan, Deval Patrick, Tom Ridge, et al. – a whole host of Republicans and Democrats backed by great wealth and institutional support, will not be “whacking moles” in their search for truth.  Their agenda is quite different.

    But then again, you may recall where they stood on the mass murders of September 11, 2001 and the endless wars that have followed.

    The post Second Stage Terror Wars first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • 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.

  • Time to prepare for Big Tech in the CDR scheme

    The federal government needs to get on the front foot and prepare for Big Tech to try to get involved with the Consumer Data Right scheme in order to mitigate the significant risks associated with this, a government-led committee has said.

    The Senate Select Committee on Financial Technology and Regulatory Technology tabled its final report this week, with a significant focus on the Consumer Data Right (CDR) scheme.

    The committee, which is chaired by NSW Liberal senator Andrew Bragg, admitted that the rollout of the CDR “has not been as rapid as some in the industry would like”, and made a number of recommendations going forward.

    The prospect of Big Tech firms like Google and Facebook becoming accredited in the CDR scheme was raised on several occasions during the inquiry, and the committee said the government needs to act now to “pre-empt” this happening.

    consumer
    Consumer Data Right: Its time to get ready for the entry of Big Tech

    The committee recommended the government review whether the existing processes and CDR rules are adequate to ensure there is a level playing field if this does happen, and that privacy is upheld.

    The Office of the Australian Information Commissioner (OAIC) told the inquiry that the participation of these companies in the scheme would present significant privacy risks due to the huge amounts of data they already hold, and the potential for this to be combined with other information such as financial services.

    “It would be open to accredited data recipients to ask consumers to consent to combine sensitive financial data with the extensive amount of personal information already collected by these large technology companies, to deliver products or services,” the OAIC said.

    “This would allow a large non-bank technology company accredited under the CDR to build profiles of individual consumers, and to derive and provide deep and rich insights into those individuals.”

    The committee found that the existing privacy safeguards around the scheme only “somewhat” mitigate these risks.

    “The committee considers that the giant reach of these companies, as well as their track record of utilising data in ways that may not meet community expectations, make it prudent to give further consideration to what additional rules or safeguards may be required in the event big tech firms seek accreditation under the CDR,” the report said.

    “The government needs to preempt any issues in this area by reviewing and publicly reporting on what additional rules or safeguards may be required in the event big tech firms seek accreditation under the CDR.”

    The committee also called for the government to ensure better interoperability with the CDR and other similar schemes around the world, and to “vigorously pursue” the establishment of international open banking standards.

    It also said the government should look to establish mutual recognition arrangements for accreditation between the CDR and other schemes.

    The post Time to prepare for Big Tech in the CDR scheme appeared first on InnovationAus.

    This post was originally published on InnovationAus.

  • Country Press Australia can team-up to deal with big tech

    Country Press Australia has been given permission by the competition watchdog to collectively negotiate with big tech firms Google and Facebook to secure revenue-sharing deals for its more than 80 members.

    The interim authorisation for the industry body to collectively bargain with Facebook and Google is the first of its kind to be issued by the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC), and paves the way for its members to secure commercial deals with the big tech firms.

    The authorisation is only required because, despite being passed into law, no company has been designated under the media bargaining code, which would have automatically allowed this collective bargaining to take place.

    Rod Sims
    The competition watchdog has approved Country Press Australia’s application

    Without that designation, Country Press Australia and any other smaller media company risked breaching competition laws if they had begun bargaining together.

    Country Press Australia (CPA) is an industry organisation representing independent regional and local newspapers around Australia, with 81 members and 160 regional newspapers under its remit.

    With the authorisation, its members will be able to collectively negotiate with Facebook and Google, discuss these negotiations with each other and exchange information about them.

    It took just a week for the ACCC to grant the interim authorisation, with feedback now being sought before the final authorisation is awarded.

    “The ACCC considers that allowing CPA members to bargain collectively is likely to result in public benefits by enhancing negotiations between regional publishers and digital platforms, and thereby assisting the sustainability of regional news production,” ACCC chair Rod Sims said.

    “These public benefits align with the purpose of the news media bargaining code, which was intended to allow and encourage collective bargaining.”

    Earlier this week Mr Sims said he hoped that more smaller media companies would apply to bargain collectively with Facebook and Google to secure revenue sharing deals, similarly to the ones agreed upon by the big news companies.

    “If you’ve got a collective bargaining authorised through us, then that enables you to jointly bargain with them and it sends a signal to Google and Facebook that you need to be dealt with. It benefits both sides of the equation,” Mr Sims told InnovationAus.

    “I expected a few more companies to collectively bargain. The message I want to get out there is we can, in general, without legislation, authorise collective bargaining. It’s extremely quick, it’s pretty much the equivalent.”

    Because they quickly signed agreements with the big media players, Facebook and Google have so far avoided designation under the bargaining code, but there are ongoing concerns that similar deals haven’t been signed by smaller media firms.

    Mr Sims has repeatedly said that the presence of the bargaining code and the threat of being designated has contributed to the big tech firms signing these deals.

    “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,” he said.

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

    The post Country Press Australia can team-up to deal with big tech 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.

  • Regulation ‘may be required’ for app stores: ACCC

    The competition watchdog has fired a warning shot at Google and Apple, telling the tech giants to clean up their app stores now or face regulation which will make them do so.

    The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) has spent the last seven months investigating the notoriously murky app stores of Google and Apple, finding there are “significant issues which warrant attention”.

    According to the ACCC, Google and Apple need to be more transparent about how they promote apps, offer consumers the ability to change and remove preinstalled or default apps, ensure they do not use information collected about third party apps to advantage their own, and reconsider payment systems that exclude competitors.

    Apple and Google could also “do more” to prevent and remove malicious apps from their stores, according to the regulator, which said the two US giants now have a clear “window of opportunity” to address the issues.

    Google platforms
    Australia’s competition regulator has warned Apple and Google to clean up their app stores.

    The ACCC has ongoing concerns that digital platform companies have the ability and incentive to favour their own products and related businesses, often under the cover of opaque algorithms and platforms.

    In its latest interim report on digital platform services, the ACCC examined the problems as they relate to app stores, which are dominated in Australia by Apple and Google and their respective App Store and Play Store.

    The pair’s dominance, including their ability to set the rules for who can access the app store, has the potential to harm competition and app developers and consumers, according to the ACCC.

    The latest report found Google and Apple need to do more to prevent harm and allow competition.

    “This is an area where the ACCC considers more can be done by Apple and Google, including in order to meet expectations that they should not leverage their market power, and the access they have to commercial information, to advantage themselves to the disadvantage of rival apps,” the report found.

    “This report identifies, as potential measures, those steps that could be undertaken by Apple and Google; however, regulation may be required if they fail to do so.”

    ACCC chairman Rod Sims, who led the regulator’s landmark 2019 inquiry into digital platform, said there are still serious concerns with the market power of the tech giants.

    “Apple and Google’s stores are the gateways between consumers and app developers, and it’s true that they provide considerable benefits to both groups. But there are significant issues with how this market is operating,” Mr Sims said.

    “Apple and Google don’t only run the app marketplaces, they also compete within them with their own apps. They have the ability and incentive to promote their own apps over others, and they control the terms that their competitors must comply with to gain access to their stores.”

    The ACCC has suggested a series of measures for the platform giants in response to its findings, including more rating and reviewing of apps, the ability to change preinstalled apps, app developers being allowed to inform consumers about alternative payment methods and that the data collected by Apple and Google as app store operators be “ring-fenced” from their other operations.

    “There is a window of opportunity for Apple and Google themselves to take steps to improve outcomes for app developers and consumers by adopting the potential measures we have identified,” Mr Sims said.

    The post Regulation ‘may be required’ for app stores: ACCC appeared first on InnovationAus.

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  • Lack of media deals with small firms ‘concerning’: Sims

    Smaller media companies should team up to secure commercial deals with Google and Facebook, which have so far avoided designation under the government’s big tech bargaining code yet, competition tsar Rod Sims says. 

    The news media bargaining code, which forces companies designated under it to enter into final offer arbitration to determine revenue sharing deals, was passed by Parliament in late February with bipartisan support. 

    During sustained debate around the legislation, Google and Facebook signed a series of term sheets with large Australian publishers, including News Corp and Nine, and both tech giants have so far avoided being designated under the code.

    While some smaller publishers like Private Media and Schwartz Media have also secured deals, many other small media companies are struggling to negotiate with the big tech firms without the backing of the bargaining code.

    Rod Sims: Small media companies should unite to deal with big tech

    The bargaining code was designed by the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC), and its chair Rod Sims said the presence of the code has helped with negotiations but he is concerned that smaller firms are yet to secure agreements.

    “I am concerned. Those deals certainly need to get done,” Mr Sims told InnovationAus.

    “I’m hoping that those small companies can come to us for collective bargaining and that will put them into the position to get the deals.”

    Liberal Senator Andrew Bragg has written to Google and Facebook raising concerns that the companies are yet to struck many deals with smaller media companies, saying that it’s “important that we see the colour of their money”.

    The bargaining code included a provision that smaller companies can work together to secure a deal with Facebook or Google, but this hasn’t been utilised as no company has been designated under the code.

    But Mr Sims said that companies can already apply to the ACCC to take part in collective bargaining. He urged smaller media companies to do this, with only one application having been received so far.

    “If you’ve got a collective bargaining authorised through us, then that enables you to jointly bargain with them and it sends a signal to Google and Facebook that you need to be dealt with. It benefits both sides of the equation,” he said.

    “I expected a few more companies to collectively bargain. But it doesn’t matter if it’s individual or not – they can do it on their own but I’m keen to make sure everyone can collectively bargain.

    “A lack of designation doesn’t trigger the automatic ability to collectively bargain but it really doesn’t matter. The message I want to get out there is we can, in general, without legislation, authorise collective bargaining. It’s extremely quick, it’s pretty much the equivalent.”

    The Coalition made a number of last minute amendments to the bargaining code legislation after Facebook briefly pulled all news content for Australian users. These changes were viewed by critics as a watering down of the code and as the government giving in to the demands of the big tech firms.

    But Mr Sims said changes to the code were “inevitable”, and that its fundamental elements remained intact.

    “In any negotiation you have to work out what matters to you and what matters to them, and the changes were things that mattered to the digital platforms for whatever reasons but didn’t matter as much to us. They weren’t worth dying in a ditch over,” Mr Sims said.

    “We still got the code legislated and so far we’ve got Google and Facebook doing a lot of deals, but we hope to see even more deals done. You can’t be absolutist about these things. The fundamental bits have survived, and otherwise it’s just wording changes that don’t much matter.

    “Obviously getting designated matters a lot to Google and Facebook, and there’s a chance to avoid that by doing deals. It’s in their hands if they get designated or not. If they choose to do deals and avoid that then that’s the outcome we were after. The legislation sits there anyway.”

    The post Lack of media deals with small firms ‘concerning’: Sims appeared first on InnovationAus.

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  • Caught in a Propaganda Mad House

    The fully developed bureaucratic apparatus compares with other organizations exactly as does the machine with the non-mechanical modes of production.

    The organization of offices follows the principle of hierarchy … each lower office is under the control and supervision of a higher one.

    — Max Weber, Economy and Society, 1922

    This doesn’t infer private companies, organizations, trade groups, corporations, lobbies are any better than the bureaucracies of government. In fact, the bureaucratic hell we all have been put through — those of us who do not go quietly into the night or roll over to show some yellow belly — consumes millions of lifetime lives, working us over through a very disgusting labyrinth of penury, penalties, prosecutions, persecutions and penal phalanx designed to wear down the innocent.

    If you do not have a stable of lawyers (imagine: $2000 an hour; imagine, at least 33.33 percent plus expenses for supposed civil cases of a class action variety), or a stable of lobbyists (imagine: entire companies set up to lie, steal, block, and hide for the rich, the corporations), or a brothel of politicians (imagine: how much does it cost to run for a Senate seat) — here, October 2020:

    The North Carolina Senate race is already the most expensive congressional race of all time, with $265 million spent between candidates and outside groups. The Iowa Senate race has already claimed the No. 2 spot with $218 million.  — Open Secrets

    Those small potatoes people like you and I, those underclass, those lower classes, those less than medium wage/middle class, and all those developing world classes, and all those displaced classes, and all the farmer and laborer classes, we are set up for failure, and when we do fight, we have to empty the savings accounts just to get to the courthouse.

    I won’t go into deep-deep detail, but my own family has a recent living example of this fleecing, here in good old Oregon. That person set up an LLC — limited liability corporation — when he got a job with a hospitality staffing agency back east. This agency is run by a multimillionaire, who Zooms his gig workers (all workers  have to pay the money in respective states for setting up LLC’s) from his 5,000 square foot “dream home” in Vermont, the second or third one in his portfolio. Imagine, a schmuck like me assisting my family member in Oregon to set up his LLC. It cost him $100. Some of my family member’s teammates ended up getting lawyers and CPA’s to help at a tune of not less than $450.

    The entire gig and DIY and precarious and atomized world of work, including recruiting and staffing, is full of money at the top, and worker bees at the bottom. These worker bees are usually women. Covid-19 stupidity hit, and, well, the hospitality and restaurant business caved.  This company then went after the N95 mask makers, and other industries still operating during the planned-economic-demic.

    So, you have I Can’t Breathe George Floyd unfolding, yet this multimillionaire white man did not talk about the national movement to stop the police murders of black people (Duh, restaurant workers are BIPOC). Nothing even on his company’s web site decrying pig-cop violence against blacks.

    This commission-based job went south for my family member. Fast. He did not make money, and got one commission check, $3,000 for hundreds of hours of work. Do the math. Think of the money lost, time lost, percentage of the soul eaten out.

    Now, he looked for work, paid work, and landed a job. The problem is the Oregon Department of Revenue sent a mountain-high set of letters, warnings, bills, and then penalties. You know, some people have to try and make a living. This family member also had in his past bad nightmares from the IRS coming to his family home and taking the house over, kicking the family into the streets. He was an 11-year-old. Try another incident with a repo of a car, and other such IRS crap, and this family member just could not handle all the chaos of the bureaucracies of hate, failure to file, not knowing the codes inside and out. He expected it all to be washed out at the end of the year when he filed his taxes.

    Wrong, sucker.

    I helped him out, sending in thoughtful and rhetorically-magnificent letters to stop this idiocy. No go. Still, more and more late penalties.

    I went to the Tax Court (logged on), and the only way to get a hearing in Oregon is to pay the charged (but incorrect) taxes and the added-on penalties. At more than $10,000 to pay the government, my family member had to dump two IRA Roth’s. So much for the savings.

    Now, just to get an administrative judge to hear this, another $280 check had to be written to the state of Oregon. Think of all the work we had to do to try and figure out what the hell was going on. Over $10,000 shelled out, and here it is, waiting for forms to be filled out.

    Then, on top of this, ending the LLC cost my family member, $110. That’s $100 to create a sole proprietor LLC, and another $110 to dissolve it.

    My family member did not have the bandwidth to handle this. Of course, over the years the toll of medical bills, mortgage company thieves, PayDay loan thugs, school loan sharks, real estate appraisers, auto creeps, and on and on, I have had to come to the assistance of many many people. In reality, this capitalist society — call it parasitic, diseased, disruptive, poisonous — is a wasteland of fraud, scams, and downright theft. In a real society, there would be navigators for people of all ages and ilk — free legal advice, free clinics, free social workers and services workers helping cut through the avalanche of red-tape and bureaucrats who should be — along with at least the first million lawyers on earth, and first 10 million lords of war, and the first 100 million financial real estate insurance scammers —  at the bottom of the sea.

    This is it for a broken society. Broken big time. And how do all those notices and penalty scare letters and authentication letters from courts and the revenue service and unemployment service and department of labor come to us in a small rural town?

    Yep, through the post office … the dying USPS. That that bumbling mean as a white old man Biden can hardly muster a trickle of phlegm in his words. No groundswell of legislators (sic) and policy makers (sic) and law makers (sic) putting a stop to this evisceration after evisceration.

    My family member gets the hearing, appointing me as a secondary or primary family member allowed to present “evidence.” In the first three minutes of my family member presenting evidence, it is clear the Revenue guy is a buttoned down bureaucrat on Prozac. We are talking legalese, and mentioning form x and form y to be filed, with Zeros in all the boxes, to trigger the next step of a refund for the taxes my family member didn’t owe, and then, with the waiving of penalties. My family member literally left, vomiting, and yelling.

    Did the judge hear this? Yep. Did the Revenuer hear it? Yep. This wasn’t a Zoom Doom call, but I could hear some dry voices, and then, I took over and navigated the Revenuer’s promise to the judge that all fines and penalties and interests and the initial taxes would be refunded.

    Luckily, the Revenuer had some humanity, and emailed me immediately, and we talked, too, on his personal phone, and he attempted to navigate me on some forms, sent them to me, and, alas, the forms did not work. He saw that, and he tried to get some workarounds, and this is where we are at:

    Trauma. PTSD. Past bad-bad interaction with IRS, state code men, tax folk, cops, pigs, the entire buffet of bumbling and overpaid and inhumane people. Think of the ticket guy on the street, and the pig-cop. Try and have conversations with these “public” officials about how they live with themselves. I have, in bars. They will throw down, pull a gun, call more pigs-cops. I’ve had many a yelling match. This is the cancel culture.

    Courts, Cops, DA’s, HR, Customer Service, Code Enforcers, Penalty Purveyors.

    We await the refund checks, and I will have to let the court know it was resolved once a check comes in, but not without more headaches after the administrative hearing. I will petition the court to charge back the $281 court fee to the state of Oregon, demanding a refund.

    More letters.

    And that’s where we are at — letters encoded in Digital Blockchains, on those electronic strips on the DMV license, passport, medical card, on the license plate. And that leads us to the vaccination passport, and soon, the vaccination electronic tattoo.

    All app driven, all approved by the Google-Palantir-Facebook-AI masters of the universe. With those sleazy millionaire governors and sleazier senators and congressmen.

    Those of us knew this was beyond 1984 and a Brave New World and Minority Report and The Jungle, more than a modern Grapes of Wrath, we knew all of this three decades ago, way before Plans for the Pandemic, shortened to Plan-demic.

    The horror is looking at Klaus Schwab, Bill Gates, Zuckerberg, Thiel, Musk, Fauci, and a million other toadies and Eichmann’s in their lizard eyes. The Agenda 2030 and Great Reset proverbial bulldozer of humanity? Already in second gear!

    Here we are, now Rutgers, looking for every person on campus to have been hit with the drug-thing in the hypodermic. Prove your worth, prove your jab (s). And anyone really looking at this bio-nano technology knows that the mRNA poison, and the entire suite of bad-bad brews, well, we can expect constant jabs.

    Rutgers Campus about to go 100 percent forced vaccinations!

    a group of people walking down the street

    The federal government’s assurance of vaccine supply for all Americans prompted Rutgers to make the decision, the university said in a statement.

    Brian Strom, chancellor of Rutgers Biomedical and Health Sciences and executive vice president for health affairs, said the vaccine is the key “to the return of campus instruction and activities closer to what we were accustomed to before the pandemic.”

    “The COVID-19 vaccines have proven to be safe and effective in preventing serious illness, hospitalization and death,” Storm said in the statement.

    — Source:  Market Watch

    “The Vaccine Passport Propaganda Template” by Adam Dick

    And my shitty job with shitty pay and shitty respect, oh, the managers I work with are actually breaking confidentiality rules by announcing which people have gotten the jab vis-à-vis the nonprofit, and those (me) who have not. Can you believe that shit? I have to tell them if, or if not, where and how and which one?

    Asking same said boss what the hell is his BMI? How’s that red face blood pressure going? What the hell is going on with the heavy asthmatic breathing? Those fat-laden lunches? You sure about those? Imagine, a world where they ask, or demand, or press — “You’ve gotten the vaccine, right?”

    Sure, this is the new normal, and it is their immoral code, their anti-ethics, their Scarlet Alphabet — A through Z, and many symbols stitched into the digital passport signifying the Wrong Kind of American.

    My friend does recruiting for California businesses, and that fine fucked up state is requiring vaccine passports, to get to and from work. Pigs-Cops tackling you and folding you into a squad car. That’s step one. Many more steps here to this Plan-Demic takeover.

    And this physics and chemistry high school teacher is so right, so vulnerable in this shit show called United Snakes of America:

    Today, I would describe myself as a Marxist who thinks the Russian Revolution of 1917 was the most recent example of a working class revolution but would describe its counter-revolutionary collapse as ending in state-run capitalism. I still believe the experience of the Bolshevik party in Russia is vital to look at as an example of what needs to be built today, and there are writings of Lenin and Luxemburg that I use as a political touchstone today. However, I no longer adhere to the idea that “socialism in one country” came only with Stalin, but that you can see its beginnings under Lenin in the policies of the NEP and other changes in policies of the Soviet state under Lenin. The revolution’s fate was sealed when it did not spread to Germany shortly after the socialist revolution in Russia.

    Still, I believe the only way out of the mess we are in today is another working class revolution for the establishment of socialism. But that will not take place through the ballot box. It will require mass strikes and an armed insurrection to establish it. Also, it cannot be called socialism unless working class democracy is at its center and is preserved and expanded through the course of the revolution and beyond. Overall, while I firmly believe capitalism must be dismantled, I have more questions than answers about the state of our political tradition and the process by which this mass socialist uprising will take place. Part of the reason I started “What’s Left?”, a podcast/channel I host with two friends, was to give myself an open space to investigate political questions that I am still working through.

    The last year has made the prospects for revolutionary change (which were exceedingly dim before the mania around COVID started) seem even more unlikely. I have witnessed the revolutionary Left collapse behind the capitalist state and institutions through the course of the pandemic. I am exceedingly grateful for the existence of Left Lockdown Sceptics and their attempt to fashion a Left response and oppositions to the authoritarian maneuvers of the capitalist classes across the globe. This blog has been a glimmer of hope for me in what has felt like an ocean of despair.

    —  Andy Libson

    Just how long does Andy have left in the rotting K12 school system? DV readers know the real way to beating down the masters, and beating back their toadies and Eichmann’s. You’ve read my stuff until you’ve hacked up the offal of capitalism and the rotting meat percolating from the core systems of oppression and subjugation. You know my stance on K12 and higher education.

    Solutions to homelessness, obesity, paranoia, fear, sickness, illiteracy, poverty, hunger? Shit, the entire community-based land-formed people-centered, ecosystem-dominating holism and complete person, from cradle to cradle. Every system checked against a true precautionary principle. Every move for 10 generations out. Every decision made for the good of the community.

    Art over science. Environment over economics. Ecology over commerce. All tied into a localized economy, regionalized planning, fair use, retrenchment, and ending capitalism, here, there, everywhere.

    Naïve? Shit thinking? Is believing in this warring, poisoning, thieving and murdering system of money and top owning the world better? Is that where we are — giving Musk the green light to dump satellites and space junk into orbit after orbit? Who has the right to the Moon and Mars? Just what price is that sickness, that megalomania?

    Embarrassing — sick:

    See the source image

    Read Andy’s piece. Follow his links to Alison McDowell and Cory Morningstar and  Jake Klyceck!

    That is the horror story after horror story —  Daily, more and more sad sack humans are opting for Zoom Teaching-Medicine-Social Work-Counseling-Engagement with the lighting on the best side of the face, while every Tom, Dick, Harriet and Jane are Zooming in their Underpants.

    Andy, again:

    I think we need to get back to our source of power – our workplace and centers where we congregate to do work – immediately and begin figuring out how we can stop what is coming. The remote learning experience we are going through right now is not a momentary mirage of a world trying to escape COVID. What we are witnessing and participating in (as either educator or student) is the future of education that is preparing future workers for what work will be like in the coming years: remote, on a screen, mediated through data flow and transmission, overseen, monitored and directed by AI. Students are experiencing education (separated, individualized, isolated, controlled and obscure) as they will experience their future work.

    Participating in remote learning today isn’t ‘safer’, it’s actually far more dangerous to all our futures. It means our lives will be more separated, more surveilled, more scrutinized and more controlled than ever before. Physical schools will be replaced with laptops and drop-in centers. Teachers will be replaced with screens and AI. Education itself will be a lifelong chase, not of learning, but of job skills so each worker can compete in a global labor market where ever-centralized capitalist centers get their pick of the litter to screen for and exploit workers not as a class but as an isolated worker connected via a screen.

     

    And it seems apropos to end with John Steppling, now in Norway, and an intellect on the wane, as is anyone who looks critically at the demise, whether it is art or culture.

    There is a deep anti-human agenda in Capitalism. There always has been, but today, as capitalism reaches its most dire crises (one expected, perhaps even planned) the class struggle has taken on its most profound form. And fear is the currency in play. And the most coercive aspect of this struggle is the war on children. And it is found in many forms- from the known and ignored toxicity of plastics and the poisoning of the earth and oceans, to the revanchist sex negativity of social distancing and masks, and to the addictions of screens. And the habituation to screens is, of course, also intentional.

    He cites much of Robert Bly’s work and his thinking around fantasy, art, the poet’s duty:

    As I mentioned, Bly is in his 90s now. I met him once. And he was like a shining light in the room. My old mentor Terry Ork knew him well. I learned more from Bly than probably anyone. So I feel I want to return to him a bit more right now. I found his opening remarks at the 1968 National Book Awards Ceremony…

    “I know I am speaking for many, many American poets when I ask this question: since we are murdering a culture in Vietnam at least as fine as our own, have we the right to congratulate ourselves on our cultural magnificence ? Isn’t that out of place ?

    I met Bly a couple of times, drank with him a few times — Spokane, El Paso and Tucson.

    Here, a short piece on him coming to Spokane, oh, 14 years ago. I’ve written and published a few essays on my remembrances of him, my work as a journeyman with him, and with others like William Stafford.

    Enwrapped in solitude, Bly spins ruminations shaped by other cultures, other poets — as in “Meeting the Man Who Warns Me”:

    I dream that I cannot see half of my life. “I look back, it is like the blind spot in a car.

    So much just beyond the reach of our eyes, what tramples the grasses while the horses are asleep, the hoof marks all around the cave mouth…

    what slips in under the door at night, and lies exhausted on the floor in the morning.   

    — from Haeder’s article, “Bly’s Call to Duty“

    There is that, really, seeing less than that life, blind spots, this teetering age of digital fascism, and worse. That light, barely there, now.

    The post Caught in a Propaganda Mad House first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Adelaide lands Google public sector cloud office

    Google will base its Australian public sector cloud team at Adelaide’s innovation precinct Lot Fourteen, joining AWS and Accenture in committing to offices in the city in recent months.

    Google plans to establish a hub for a Cloud Public Sector team which will work with South Australian health and medical researchers. The hub will also be a training and event venue for its customers and partners.

    The South Australian government lobbied the US tech giant in 2018 to set up its Australian headquarters in Adelaide, but was ultimately unsuccessful, with Google keeping its local base in Sydney with another office in Melbourne.

    Premier Steven Marshall has welcomed Google’s plans to set up a hub for its public sector cloud team in Adelaide’s Lot Fourteen.

    South Australian Premier Steven Marshall welcomed the establishment of the public sector cloud hub.

    “This is now the third global company to choose South Australia as its home, creating thousands of jobs in the hi-tech, digital, space and defence industries,” Mr Marshall said.

    “South Australia has world-leading capabilities in AI, data analytics and cyber security that make us globally interesting and provides digital tech companies with an opportunity to come together to partner on projects that can literally change the world we live in.”

    It is unclear how many jobs will be created through the new Adelaide hub.

    In February Amazon opened its Lot Fourteen office in the site’s North Terrace with plans to create 50 jobs by 2024. The office houses teams from Amazon’s cloud subsidiary, AWS, and its Amazon Sciences division, focusing on artificial intelligence and machine learning.

    In September last year, consulting giant Accenture announced plans to set up an Adelaide hub it claims will create 2,000 local jobs.

    Google plans to focus its work in Adelaide on health research and technology and work closely with the SA Health and Medical Research Institute, an independent institute of more than 700 researchers.

    Google Cloud AUN Director Public Sector Michael Grantham said the US tech giant is excited to work with the South Australian community and is working to bring more partners to the region.

    “I’d like to thank Premier Marshall and minister Patterson for their personal involvement in this initiative over the last 10 months. We are already working hard on attracting our first big international partner to SA expanding our partner network ecosystem and creating more Tech sector jobs in Adelaide,” Mr Grantham said.

    The post Adelaide lands Google public sector cloud office appeared first on InnovationAus.

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  • Google misled users on location tracking: Court

    Google faces fines and compliance orders after a Federal Court Judge ruled on Friday that the tech giant had misled Australian consumers when it tracked their location even after users opted out of location data.

    The court found Google continued to collect users’ location data even when they had opted out of the ‘Location History’ setting. A separate setting called ‘Web and Activity’, which is on by default on Android devices, continued to collect users location data and share it with Google.

    That setting also failed to disclose it was collecting personal location data.

    Google Dara
    The ACCC is claiming success in its battle with Google over location data – Sundry Photography / Shutterstock

    Justice Thomas Thawley ruled this was at least “partially” misleading to some reasonable users.

    “Google’s conduct would not have misled all reasonable users in the classes identified; but Google’s conduct misled or was likely to mislead some reasonable users within the particular classes identified,” Justice Thawley said in his judgment published Friday.

    The activity occurred for nearly two years from January 2017. In 2019 the ACCC instituted proceedings against the Google Australia and its parent company, alleging Google had misled consumers.

    The consumer regulator claimed the ruling as a win in its “world first” enforcement action.

    “This is an important victory for consumers, especially anyone concerned about their privacy online, as the Court’s decision sends a strong message to Google and others that big businesses must not mislead their customers,” ACCC Chair Rod Sims said.

    “Today’s decision is an important step to make sure digital platforms are up front with consumers about what is happening with their data and what they can do to protect it.”

    Judge Thawley ordered Google and the ACCC to work on an agreed resolution within 14 days. The ACCC is seeking declarations, pecuniary penalties, publications orders, and compliance orders

    “In addition to penalties, we are seeking an order for Google to publish a notice to Australian consumers to better explain Google’s location data settings in the future. This will ensure that consumers can make informed choices about whether certain Google settings that personal collect location data should be enabled,” Mr Sims said.

    The competition czar said the ruling sent a message that companies collecting data need to be up front with consumers.

    “Companies that collect information must explain their settings clearly and transparently so consumers are not misled. Consumers should not be kept in the dark when it comes to the collection of their personal location data.”

    The post Google misled users on location tracking: Court appeared first on InnovationAus.

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  • Dissenter Weekly: Amazon and Google’s Retaliation Against Whistleblowers



    In this edition of “Dissenter Weekly,” host and Shadowproof editor Kevin Gosztola highlights the turmoil at Google, which inspired a shareholder to demand the corporation adopt protections for whistleblowers.

    Amazon is in the midst of thwarting workers at a plant in Bessemer, Alabama, from forming a union. Kevin covers a ruling by the National Labor Relations Board, which concluded two Amazon employees were illegally fired for their whistleblowing.

    Later in the show, Kevin provides an update on the fallout from a scandal in Colorado involving the state’s air pollutions department, which falsified data to fast-track permits for companies. And we wish Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg, who turned 90 on April 7, a happy birthday.

    This week’s stories:

    Former Employee: Transocean Nearly Caused Oil Rig Catastrophe During Hurricane Zeta

    Colorado Groups Demand Governor Fire Air Pollution Control Director After Whistleblower Complaint

    National Labor Relations Board Says Amazon Illegally Fired Whistleblowers

    Shareholder Demands Google Adopt Whistleblower Protections

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    Send tips and feedback to editor@shadowproof.com

    This show is brought to you by Shadowproof.com, a 100% reader-funded press organization. If you enjoy our work, you can support us with a donation or by subscribing for $5/month or more: https://shadowproof.com/donate

    The post Dissenter Weekly: Amazon and Google’s Retaliation Against Whistleblowers appeared first on Shadowproof.

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  • Tech giants may get friendlier defamation laws

    Tech giants might get a friendlier defamation regime in Australia, with the options being canvassed by a significant review including a safe harbour scheme or blanket immunity similar to that offered by the US.

    The NSW Attorney-General has been leading the Defamation Working Party, which is working to modernise Australia’s defamation laws, particularly around the internet and the liability of big tech companies such as Facebook and Google.

    Last year the Council of Attorneys-General agreed to a first stage of defamation reforms and that the second stage would focus on online defamation law.

    “When the uniform defamation laws were drafted more than 15 years ago, social media was in its infancy and trolls were confined to children’s books. This review acknowledges times have changed and asks whether internet giants like Google, Facebook and Twitter should be responsible for content posted by platform users,” NSW Attorney-General Mark Speakman said.

    “Australia needs contemporary laws that protect reputations in an era when anyone can publish almost anything to the world at large with just the click of a button. However, getting the balance right is crucial to avoid online commentary being blocked unnecessarily.”

    Defamation change for digital platforms?
    Defamation change for digital platforms?

    The group released its second discussion paper this week, which proposes to separate the “internet intermediaries” into three categories with varying responsibility for defamatory content posted. The paper outlines four options for reform of the law.

    These options include doing nothing, introducing a safe harbour regime where tech companies would be free from legal ramification if they comply with a complaints process, or implementing complete immunity akin to the scheme in the US, which former US President Donald Trump last year tried to have repealed.

    The discussion paper will likely make for good reading for big tech companies, with most of the options on the table painting a better picture for them than the current situation. It could also offer somewhat of a respite for the likes of Facebook and Google following sustainable reforms from the federal government targeted at curbing their power.

    In contrast to many other jurisdictions, Australian courts have previously found Google liable as a publisher of reviews and snippets of information on its search engine.

    The discussion paper focuses on internet intermediaries and how liable they should be for defamatory content posted on their platforms and websites. The group has proposed to separate these intermediaries into three categories: basic internet services, digital platforms and forum hosts.

    Basic internet services such as ISPs are “mere conduits” in line with telephone or postal services, and are passive and content neutral, and would not be liable at all under the reforms.

    Digital platforms would include social media firms and news aggregators, while forum administrations would include a small community group hosting a Facebook page or the administrator of an instant messaging thread. The group has proposed that “any of these forum administrators is potentially liable for defamatory comments made by third parties”.

    The first option the working group is seeking feedback on is to simply leave things as is and not make any major changes to Australian defamation law. But this status quo approach means that the laws will remain “unclear and inconsistent”, the report said.

    The next major reform avenue would be the introduction of a safe harbour scheme, where internet intermediaries would have a legal defence if they comply with a complaint about defamatory material on their platform.

    “This defence has the potential to provide a fast and simple path for complainant to achieve a solution when their reputation has been harmed online – particularly where their primary goal is to have the content modified or removed,” the report said.

    This scheme, which is in place in the UK, would see tech companies giving protection until they are put on notice by a complaint about offending content, with this protection then removed unless they follow the set out process.

    The final option is to introduce immunity for tech companies for user-generated content, similar to the laws in place in the United States. This would apply even after a company is notified of potentially defamatory content.

    This would recognise that these companies are not the creators of content, and “may also be seen as removing a barrier to innovation online”, the defamation working group said.

    But the discussion paper lists a number of downsides of this approach.

    “This wide immunity would be at odds with the approach to traditional secondary publishers such as booksellers, newsagents and librarians,” it said.

    “Granting a broad immunity also fails to recognise that many internet intermediaries have the ability to encourage, but also mitigate, the risk of harm to reputation online.

    “Often their business models, which leverage the network effect to attract users to their platforms for longer periods of time, can lead to heightened risk of harm to reputations, while generating profits for these platforms in doing so. Arguably, this should attract a level of responsibility which this option would fail to deliver.”

    Submissions can be made on the discussion paper until 19 May, with plans to commence the defamation reforms by July this year.

    The post Tech giants may get friendlier defamation laws appeared first on InnovationAus.

    This post was originally published on InnovationAus.

  • Where Has Tibet Gone?

    This post was originally published on TIBET, ACTIVISM AND INFORMATION.

  • Feud 2.0: Google and Microsoft fight heats up

    Google has returned fired at Microsoft after the Redmond-based behemoth singled out the search and advertising giant in calls for more technology and media regulation in the United States. Microsoft’s intervention has reopened fissures between the companies not seen since the company’s 2012 ‘Scroogle’ campaign.

    Following the introduction of Australia’s News Media Bargaining Code, which can force designated platform companies into ‘final offer’ arbitration with news publishers to determine revenue sharing models, Microsoft is now pushing for similar laws in the US as part of potential wider reforms to address big tech dominance.

    Google and Facebook railed against Australia’s latest media laws while Microsoft backed the laws, offering to fill the search void if Google followed through on its threat to leave the Australian market because of the code.

    Abstract
    In the abstract: It’s on like Donkey Kong between the tech giants as regulatory pressure mounts

    On Friday, Microsoft advocated to a US antitrust House Committee for an “Australian approach” to address the “structural imbalance between a technology gatekeeper and the free press”.

    Microsoft president Brad Smith told the committee Australia’s new media laws, while not yet invoked, are “proving effective in driving negotiations” of more than $100 million in deals between Facebook and Google and news media companies.

    But Mr Smith reserved much of his address to lawmakers to highlight Google’s omnipresence in the digital advertising ecosystem and the company’s use of news content, which he argued is having a chilling effect on journalism and democracy.

    Mr Smith outlined Google’s rise and dominance of not only the search business but also the wider market for digital advertising services that have allowed the company, along with Facebook, to capture most of the value from the shift to online advertising.

    But Google, which takes around a third of every dollar spent on digital advertising in the US, is unique, Mr Smith told lawmakers, because “it is the dominant technology firm in virtually every corner of the digital advertising ecosystem”.

    According to Mr Smith, Google’s rise has come at the expense of traditional media, but it is not a case of fair disruption.

    “News organisations have ad inventory to sell, but they can no longer sell directly to those who want to place ads. Instead, for all practical purposes they must use Google’s tools, operate on Google’s ad exchanges, contribute data to Google’s operations, and pay Google money,” Mr Smith said.

    “All this impacts the ability of news organisations to benefit economically even from advertising on their own sites.”

    Australian regulators are currently examining the potential conflicts of interest for Google in the digital advertising ecosystem and a lack of choice for other stakeholders in the local market, through an ACCC inquiry into the supply of digital advertising services.

    US Authorities, too, have locked in on Google, including multiple antitrust cases brought by an overlapping network of state and federal enforcers late last year.

    While the Microsoft President stopped short of saying antitrust committees should pursue Google, he urged the committee to consider what it can do as regulators elsewhere tightened their focus on big tech.

    “We respect [Google’s] sustained creativity, investments, and determination. But as we learned first-hand from Microsoft’s own experience two decades ago, when a company’s success creates side effects that adversely impact a market and our society, the problem should not be ignored. And this typically requires government action.”

    Later on Friday, Google released a statement accusing Microsoft of “reverting to their familiar playbook of attacking rivals and lobbying for regulations that benefit their own interests”.

    Microsoft’s calls for more scrutiny of Google come as the company manages a widespread cyber security attack that exploits vulnerabilities in its popular email software. The timing is not coincidental, according to Google.

    “Microsoft was warned about the vulnerabilities in their system, knew they were being exploited, and are now doing damage control while their customers scramble to pick up the pieces from what has been dubbed the Great Email Robbery,” wrote Google senior vice president of Global Affairs, Kent Walker.

    “So maybe it’s not surprising to see them dusting off the old diversionary Scroogled playbook.”

    In 2012 Microsoft launched a ‘Scroogle’ campaign against the quickly rising competitor, targeting Google’s business models and data collection and processing.

    Mr Walker pointed to Microsoft’s own platform businesses that offer news content, suggesting Microsoft had done relatively little to support journalism.

    The post Feud 2.0: Google and Microsoft fight heats up appeared first on InnovationAus.

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  • Google Employees Demand Whistleblower Protections After Retaliation Against AI Researchers

    The post was originally published as part of The Dissenter newsletter. To subscribe, go here.

    “Is there anyone working on regulation protecting Ethical AI researchers, similar to whistleblower protection?” Timnit Gebru asked on Twitter. “Because with the amount of censorship and intimidation that goes on towards people in specific groups, how does anyone trust any real research in this area can take place?”

    Gebru, a Black woman, was the co-lead of Google’s “Ethical Artificial Intelligence (AI)” team. On December 2, two days after posting this message, Google fired Gebru. It was in response to an ethics research paper that reportedly included criticism of the environmental impact of AI models.

    Now, AI researcher Dr. Margaret Mitchell, who was also involved in leading the “Ethical AI” team, was fired on March 5 after Google locked her “out of her work account for five anxious weeks.” The retaliation came after she shared a document with Google’s public relations department that questioned their stated reasons for terminating Gebru.

    Google Walkout For Real Change (GWRC), a group of Google employees, have seized the moment to demand Congress and state legislatures strengthen whistleblower protections for tech employees like Gebru and Mitchell.

    “The existing legal infrastructure for whistleblowing at corporations developing technologies is wholly insufficient,” GWRC declares. “Researchers and other tech workers need protections, which allow them to call out harmful technology when they see it, and whistleblower protection can be a powerful tool for guarding against the worst abuses of the private entities which create these technologies.”

    As UC Berkeley Center for Law and Technology co-director Sonia Katyal told VentureBeat’s Khari Johnson in December, “What we should be concerned about is a world where all of the most talented researchers like [Gebru] get hired at these places and then effectively muzzled from speaking. And when that happens, whistleblower protections become essential.”

    Johnson noted Katyal is “concerned about a clash between the rights of a business to not disclose information about an algorithm and the civil rights of an individual to live in a world free of discrimination. This will increasingly become a problem, she warned, as government agencies take data or AI service contracts from private companies.”

    There are a number of examples that show a need for whistleblower protection to protect AI researchers, who challenge corporations from within their industries. Like Johnson highlighted, “A fall 2019 study in Nature found that an algorithm used in hospitals may have been involved in the discrimination against millions of Black people in the United States. A more recent story reveals how an algorithm prevented Black people from receiving kidney transplants.”

    “Drs. Mitchell and Gebru also built one of the most diverse teams in Google Research, people who could connect their lived experiences to practices of power, subjection, and domination which get encoded into AI and other data-driven systems,” according to GWRC.

    The group maintains Gebru and Mitchell were “working in the public interest” and spent time critically examining the “benefits and risks of powerful AI systems — especially those whose potential harms outside of the Google workplace were likely to be overlooked or minimized in the name of profit or efficiency.” (Both also complained about workplace conditions to the human resources department.)

    “Google workers have been organizing from within, raising inextricably linked issues of toxic workplace conditions and unethical and harmful tech to leadership and to the public,” GWRC adds. “With the firing of Drs. Mitchell and Gebru, Google has made it clear that they believe they are powerful enough to withstand the public backlash and are not concerned with publicly damaging their employees’ careers and mental health.”

    “They have also shown that they are willing to crack down hard on anyone who would perturb the company’s quest for growth and profit.”

    The group concludes, “Google is not committed to making itself better and has to be held accountable by organized workers with the unwavering support of social movements, civil society, and the research community beyond.”

    In addition to a call for whistleblower protections, GWRC urges academic conferences to “decline sponsorship from organizations, such as Google, engaged in retaliatory actions towards researchers.”

    The Association for Computing Machinery’s Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency (FAccT) conference “suspended” Google’s sponsorship on March 2.

    GWRC encourages “potential recruits to Google” to help “break the tech talent pipeline” and refuse to work at Google as it creates “harmful and unethical technology.”

    “We call on universities, especially those that claim to be human-centered, such as Stanford’s Human Centered AI Institute and MIT’s Schwarzman College of Computing to publicly reject Google funding,” they further suggest.

    Timnit Gebru (Photo: Techcrunch)



    Gebru was previously involved in exposing the “gender and skin-type bias in commercial AI facial recognition systems.” Her work garnered a lot of praise.

    Along with raising concerns about the impact of technology on marginalized communities, Protocol reported that Gebru supported activism at Google and spoke up for employees, who faced retaliation for engaging in protests.

    The same day that Gebru was terminated by Google the corporation was accused by the National Labor Relations Board of spying on employees involved in protest organizing.

    It is hard to fathom how Google’s retaliation against conscientious employees with respect and influence in the world of technology will not prolong a backlash that has already spanned several months.

    Ultimately, if Google cannot tolerate employees on their “Ethical AI” team who raise objections, they should quit using this team as cover for their business. Simply rename the team “AI,” and lean into their corporate culture with the mantra, “Don’t Be Ethical.” 

    The post Google Employees Demand Whistleblower Protections After Retaliation Against AI Researchers appeared first on Shadowproof.

    This post was originally published on Shadowproof.

  • 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.

  • The new Online Safety Bill has been a ‘rush job’

    Civil and digital rights groups say the sweeping new Online Safety Bill is a “rush job”, having been introduced to federal parliament just 10 days after government received nearly 400 submissions on the proposed laws.

    The government unveiled the draft Online Safety Bill in December last year, with consultation running across the summer break up until 14 February.

    The bill extends the eSafety Commissioner’s takedown scheme for Australian adults, allowing them to issue removal notices for content deemed to be rated as R18+ or higher, and to order the sites or apps be blocked if they do not comply.

    Data
    Dark tunnel: The Online Safety Bill has been smashed through parliament

    There are significant concerns about the new powers, particularly their impact on sex workers and activists, the significant power and discretion handed to the commissioner, and on their potential to further undermine encryption.

    Despite the scale and scope of the legislation, the process behind its introduction to parliament and consultations has been a “rush job”, Digital Rights Watch program director Lucie Krahulcova said.

    Submissions on the draft legislation closed on 14 February, with 370 submissions made to government on the bill.

    Despite the volume of submissions, the government introduced the legislation to Parliament just 10 days later on 24 February. It is still yet to release any of the submissions it received as part of that round of consultation.

    It was subsequently referred to a Senate committee for inquiry, with submissions opening on 25 February and closing on 2 March. This left just three working days for stakeholders to make a further submission on the final legislation.

    “The fact that the government is willing to plough on with the bill a mere 10 days after 370 submissions were filed should raise alarm bells. That is not what a democratic consultation process looks like,” Ms Krahulcova told InnovationAus.

    “This does not indicate a meaningful consultation process, nor that community concerns are being taken seriously. It means we need to speak up even more,” Digital Rights Watch tweeted.

    Former federal Greens Senator Scott Ludlam also raised concerns with the timeframe around the bill in a submission to the senate inquiry, saying it appears the government has already made up its mind.

    “As expected, the draft bill provoked hundreds of submissions flagging grave concerns. For some reason the government has ignored this feedback and instead proposes to proceed with an unacceptably compressed timetable, with a largely unamended bill, in the absence of any formal response to red flags many civil society organisations have made,” Mr Ludlam said in the submission.

    “This response indicates that the government had already made up its mind, calling into question the purpose of the exposure draft. It therefore falls to the senate, through this committee, to prevent the foreseeable risks posed by this bill as drafted.”

    In its submission, tech giant Google also pointed out the speedy process of introducing the bill to Parliament.

    “This bill was introduced into the House of Representatives a mere 10 days after the public consultation period on the Exposure Draft of the bill closed,” Google’s Samantha Yorke said in the submission.

    The Online Safety Bill will introduce a “world-first cyber abuse take-down scheme” for Australians, Communications Minister Paul Fletcher said in Parliament last month.

    “This new scheme provides a pathway for those experiencing the most seriously harmful online abuse to have this material removed from the internet,” Mr Fletcher said.

    “The Australian government believes the digital industry must step up and do more to keep their users safe. That belief underpins the provisions of the bill.

    “We all enjoy standards of behaviour and civility in the town square that keeps us safe, and there are appropriate mechanisms and sanctions for those who break these rules,” he said.

    “The Australian government believes that the digital town squares should also be a safe place, and that there should be consequences for those who use the internet to cause others harm. This bill contains a comprehensive set of measures designed in accordance with this belief.”

    The post The new Online Safety Bill has been a ‘rush job’ appeared first on InnovationAus.

    This post was originally published on InnovationAus.

  • Facebook: Everyone happy but nothing is changed

    After some turmoil, Facebook won the war with the Australian government as the necessary changes were made to the legislation that avoids them needing to make changes to their business model.

    Those subtleties are lost in the general press. What counts for the popular media is that they were able to spin some great stories around the fact that Australia stood up to the giants and that brought international attention which boosted the ego of the Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison.

    So everybody is happy and nothing has changed. The digital giants remain as strong as ever.

    As mentioned in previous analyses, the way that the Government has approached its battle with the digital giants has been flawed from the beginning.

    Mark Zuckerberg
    Unmoved: The Media Bargaining Code has changed nothing. Photo Credit Anthony Quintano Flickr

    True, its tough stand had made Google pay media companies well above what these companies would have been able to negotiate individually with Google, but the fundamentals of why these battles are taking place are still unchanged and Facebook is also brought into the negotiation deal.

    However, there is no way that Facebook is going to pay any big money.

    Google was prepared to pay these ‘premiums’ to make sure that its business model would still survive. It is the company’s advertising business model that it was keen to protect and for that reason, it was prepared to pay off the news companies.

    On Facebook all media companies benefit from the distribution of their articles on its platform based on the terms of these publishers.

    So, nothing fundamental has been solved by the Australian government through its media code.

    It is now simply waiting for the next battle and the regulator (ACCC) has also already foreshadowed that it will concentrate on that advertising business model.

    This will be a much tougher battle that Australia will not be able to win on its own. Google will use its full legal power with gigantic financial resources to defend their business.

    It also shows that actions from individual governments are counterproductive. The French, who took a different approach, received only a fraction of the money for its media companies than Google has paid to Australian media, so how will that make the French feel?

    Only united action against global digital moguls will lead to structural changes and I have mentioned some of such structural changes as proposed by the EU here.

    In relation to Facebook: I totally agree with Facebook that the government’s action in relation to the way that Facebook distributes news is out of all proportions and, as a matter of fact, totally wrong.

    All news organisations around the world totally voluntary distribute their news to whoever wants to use it. Facebook is not involved in this at all. Unlike Google, it doesn’t abstract content, it doesn’t create news snippets and it does not distribute links.

    All of this is up to the news companies who are providing their services via Facebook. It is totally up to them if they provide full articles, snippets, links, send users to paywalls and so on.

    It is true that all the information that is was blocked by Facebook can be obtained elsewhere. However, Facebook is such a well-known, integrated platform used by the majority of Australians that it will be the organisations who provide services on the platform and are now blocked who are the ones that suffer from this action.

    Common sense has prevailed, and the government has limited the media code to those digital companies that are actively making money from the content of others.

    Unlike Google, the media code doesn’t really affect their business model, so while they now will have to negotiate with publishers, very few if any will push for payments. There never was a general need for them to negotiate as there was, in fact, nothing to negotiate.

    If the government wanted to stick to its media code, it would also have to force Twitter, LinkedIn and others to the negotiation table as they also would have to pay for the same service that Facebook provides.

    You could even argue that telephone and postal services which are used to distribute news should fall under that code – of course, totally ridiculous.

    It is also in the Government’s own interest that it can continue to use the Facebook platform to distribute its own news. Once again, there are other ways to do that, but the reach of Facebook is unsurpassed and as such, very valuable for the distribution of such information.

    Do I let Facebook off the hook? Totally not. But if we want to get control over the digital media and avoid the damage that they are doing to our society, economy and democracy, we need to be far more strategic and we will globally need to work together on those issues.

    Ultimately the platforms have to be treated as utilities. They should be made available on a neutral basis with any organisation being able to use the platform without going through gatekeepers such as Google and Facebook.

    Paul Budde is a managing director of Paul Budde Consulting, an independent telecommunications research and consultancy organisation. You can follow him on Twitter @PaulBudde. This article was originally published here.

    The post Facebook: Everyone happy but nothing is changed appeared first on InnovationAus.

    This post was originally published on InnovationAus.

  • Facebook and Google deals may leave small publishers out in the cold

    Asia Pacific Report

    The federal government must act urgently to support small Australian news outlets that could be shut out of commercial deals with Facebook and Google under its News Media Bargaining Code, says the union for Australia’s journalists.

    The Media, Entertainment and Arts Alliance (MEAA) said in a statement that it welcomed Facebook’s decision to no longer block news links in Australia following negotiations with the federal government over the code, but added that it was concerned about what this will mean for small media organisations and freelancers.

    MEAA media federal president Marcus Strom said that while the way had now been cleared for the big media companies to strike commercial deals with Facebook and Google, it was unclear to what extent small outlets would benefit.

    “For small publishers that have become reliant on Facebook to distribute their news, it will be a huge relief that the news tap has been turned back on,” Strom said.

    “But they will remain at the mercy of Facebook and Google, which are both seeking to avoid mandatory regulation and will instead choose which media companies they come to agreements with.

    “This will particularly affect small publishers if the Treasurer deems that Google and Facebook have done enough not to be named as respondents to the News Media Mandatory Code.

    “For small publishers who fail to make side deals with the tech giants, they could be locked out, further entrenching the narrow ownership base of the Australian media market.

    A ‘threat to misbehaving companies’
    “We now face the strange possibility that the News Media Mandatory Code could be passed by Parliament and it applies to precisely no one. It will just sit in the Treasurer’s drawer as a threat to misbehaving digital companies, which could later counter threat to turn the tap back off.

    “It shouldn’t be up to Facebook and Google to cherry pick and groom publishers it deems acceptable for side deals. Any code should be mandatory, uniform, predictable, and fair; not at the whim of technology executives”

    Strom said there also remained no guarantees that any money raised for news media from the tech companies would be spent on journalism.

    “Where is the commitment to stable funding to the public broadcasters? Where are the tax incentives to support public interest journalism? And where is the ongoing commitment to support rural, suburban and regional media, along with freelancers?’ he asked.

    “While we support this Bill, MEAA has always maintained that the News Bargaining Code alone has never been a ‘silver bullet’ for small, regional, community and independent outlets.

    “Throughout the long process of developing the code, going back to the original digital platforms inquiry by the ACCC, MEAA has called for a holistic suite of reforms to nurture a vibrant and diverse media ecosystem.

    “Beyond meaningfully addressing the need to ensure digital platforms pay for the news content they carry, there are a range of discrete measures that can be adopted in Australia to maintain the viability of media company operations and, critically, encourage new entrants.

    Reforms called for
    Among the reforms that were called for by the MEAA were:

    • extending the operation of the Public Interest News Gathering programme to become an annual round of funding;
    • the adoption by the federal government of critical measures which have been used overseas, such as directly funding local news, offering taxation rebates and incentives;
    • part-funding editorial positions;
    • and resetting government assistance to ensure funding is available for new media organisations, as well as traditional media companies.

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • Facebook and Google deals may leave small publishers out in the cold

    Small Australian publishers … still at the mercy of Facebook and Google. Image: ABC News screenshot APR

    Asia Pacific Report

    The federal government must act urgently to support small Australian news outlets that could be shut out of commercial deals with Facebook and Google under its News Media Bargaining Code, says the union for Australia’s journalists.

    The Media, Entertainment and Arts Alliance (MEAA) said in a statement that it welcomed Facebook’s decision to no longer block news links in Australia following negotiations with the federal government over the code, but added that it was concerned about what this will mean for small media organisations and freelancers.

    MEAA media federal president Marcus Strom said that while the way had now been cleared for the big media companies to strike commercial deals with Facebook and Google, it was unclear to what extent small outlets would benefit.

    “For small publishers that have become reliant on Facebook to distribute their news, it will be a huge relief that the news tap has been turned back on,” Strom said.

    “But they will remain at the mercy of Facebook and Google, which are both seeking to avoid mandatory regulation and will instead choose which media companies they come to agreements with.

    “This will particularly affect small publishers if the Treasurer deems that Google and Facebook have done enough not to be named as respondents to the News Media Mandatory Code.

    “For small publishers who fail to make side deals with the tech giants, they could be locked out, further entrenching the narrow ownership base of the Australian media market.

    A ‘threat to misbehaving companies’
    “We now face the strange possibility that the News Media Mandatory Code could be passed by Parliament and it applies to precisely no one. It will just sit in the Treasurer’s drawer as a threat to misbehaving digital companies, which could later counter threat to turn the tap back off.

    “It shouldn’t be up to Facebook and Google to cherry pick and groom publishers it deems acceptable for side deals. Any code should be mandatory, uniform, predictable, and fair; not at the whim of technology executives”

    Strom said there also remained no guarantees that any money raised for news media from the tech companies would be spent on journalism.

    “Where is the commitment to stable funding to the public broadcasters? Where are the tax incentives to support public interest journalism? And where is the ongoing commitment to support rural, suburban and regional media, along with freelancers?’ he asked.

    “While we support this Bill, MEAA has always maintained that the News Bargaining Code alone has never been a ‘silver bullet’ for small, regional, community and independent outlets.

    “Throughout the long process of developing the code, going back to the original digital platforms inquiry by the ACCC, MEAA has called for a holistic suite of reforms to nurture a vibrant and diverse media ecosystem.

    “Beyond meaningfully addressing the need to ensure digital platforms pay for the news content they carry, there are a range of discrete measures that can be adopted in Australia to maintain the viability of media company operations and, critically, encourage new entrants.

    Reforms called for
    Among the reforms that were called for by the MEAA were:

    • extending the operation of the Public Interest News Gathering programme to become an annual round of funding;
    • the adoption by the federal government of critical measures which have been used overseas, such as directly funding local news, offering taxation rebates and incentives;
    • part-funding editorial positions;
    • and resetting government assistance to ensure funding is available for new media organisations, as well as traditional media companies.
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    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Govt strikes deal with Facebook on bargaining code

    News content will return to Facebook for Australian users after the federal government agreed to make a series of last minute changes to the media bargaining code in order to appease the tech giant.

    Treasurer Josh Frydenberg announced on Tuesday afternoon that Facebook would soon allow news content back on its platform after the government confirmed it would move a number of amendments to the bargaining code legislation.

    “The government has been advised by Facebook that it intends to restore Australian news pages in the coming days,” Mr Frydenberg said on Tuesday afternoon.

    The bargaining code requires designated companies – likely to be Facebook and Google – to enter into final offer arbitration with Australian media companies to determine revenue sharing deals over the use of news content on their digital platforms.

    It also requires the tech firms to provide advance notice on relevant algorithm changes made by human intervention.

    The big tech firms have railed against the code, with Google threatening to withdraw its search engine from Australia entirely while Facebook said it may block all news content for its Australian users.

    While Google has moved to quickly sign a number of lucrative deals with Australian media companies for the use of its content on its Showcase service, potentially allowing it to avoid designation under the code, Facebook instead followed through with its threat and blocked news content last week.

    After ongoing discussions with Facebook, Mr Frydenberg revealed the government would move a series of last minute amendments as part of a deal which will see the tech company reverse its policy of blocking news content for Australian users.

    The amendments include the introduction of a two-month mediation period before the parties are forced into final offer arbitration, that the government has to consider any commercial deals already negotiated before designating Facebook or Google under the code, and a one month notification period before a designation is made.

    The amendments are set to be introduced in the Senate on Tuesday morning before the bargaining code legislation is brought for a vote on Wednesday, where it is likely to pass easily with bipartisan support.

    In a statement, Facebook Australia managing director William Easton said the amendments address the company’s “core concerns” with the bargaining code.

    “As a result of these changes, we can now work to further our investment in public interest journalism and restore news on Facebook for Australians in the coming days,” Mr Easton said.

    The company said that it retains the ability to decide if news appears on the Facebook platform to ensure it isn’t automatically forced into the arbitration process, signalling that it will move to block news content again if it is designated under the code.

    While the code has now passed into law, it does not truly come into effect until the Treasurer designates one of the tech companies. With Google having recently entered into a number of commercial deals with media companies to use their news content on its Showcase service, the new amendments pave the way for the government to not designate that tech giant.

    The latest amendments also give the government more room to not designate either tech companies if they make deals with media companies outside of the code, and also gives Facebook and Google a month before being designated to strike deals.

    The amendments in the Senate come after the government made a number of “technical” amendments to the legislation in the lower house last week upon request of the tech firms.

    These changes included that the final remuneration amount must be a lump sum, that these deals must be consistent with existing contracts between the two parties and that the advance notification requirement is limited to “circumstances where they are making changes to an algorithm which are likely to have a significant effect on referral traffic to covered news content”.

    The Opposition has said it will support the bargaining code legislation in Parliament despite raising a number of concerns with its implementation, potential unintended consequences and the powers handed to the Treasurer to designate tech companies under the code.

    The post Govt strikes deal with Facebook on bargaining code appeared first on InnovationAus.

    This post was originally published on InnovationAus.

  • RSF condemns Facebook news ban in Australia – block reported to be lifted

    The Australian news blackout by Facebook has been a “deliberate” bid since February 17 to “restrict publishers and people in Australia from sharing or viewing Australian and international news content”. Image: RSF

    Asia Pacific Report

    Reporters Without Borders (RSF) has condemned Facebook for carrying out its threat to block the sharing of its journalistic news content in Australia in retaliation to the federal government’s plan to make platforms pay media outlets.

    The ban impacts on the reliability and pluralism of the information available on this social media platform, said the Paris-based global media watchdog.

    “No posts yet” is the message that the Facebook pages of the Australian media have been showing since February 17, says RSF in a statement.

    This blackout is deliberate. Facebook announced on February 17 that it would “restrict publishers and people in Australia from sharing or viewing Australian and international news content.”

    The decision was taken in reaction to the Australian government’s proposed News Media Bargaining Code, under which platforms such as Facebook and Google would have to pay Australian media outlets for the content they display.

    Facebook’s response, called the “nuclear option” by The Australian daily newspaper, is radical.

    Australian media can no longer share or post content on their Facebook pages, while users in Australia can no longer see or share links to news on the platform, whether Australian or international news.

    Facebook ‘abusing dominant position’
    “    Facebook is abusing its dominant position to defend its economic interests at the expense of online news reliability and pluralism,” said Iris de Villars, the head of RSF’s Tech Desk.

    “Regardless of the proposed law being discussed, these restrictions affect the ability of Australian citizens to access reliable and independent information on this platform.

    “We urge Facebook to reverse this decision, which totally contradicts its pledges to combat disinformation.”

    To implement these restrictions, Facebook has been using machine-learning tools to identify news content publishers but this has had the collateral effect of blocking other kinds of content, including the pages of several NGOs such as RSF, public health bodies, governmental institutions and even entities that handle emergencies.

    Facebook has not as yet responded to RSF’s questions.

    Asia Pacific Report and Pacific Media Watch collaborate with Reporters Without Borders.

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    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • RSF condemns Facebook news ban in Australia – block reported to be lifted

    Asia Pacific Report

    Reporters Without Borders (RSF) has condemned Facebook for carrying out its threat to block the sharing of its journalistic news content in Australia in retaliation to the federal government’s plan to make platforms pay media outlets.

    The ban impacts on the reliability and pluralism of the information available on this social media platform, said the Paris-based global media watchdog.

    “No posts yet” is the message that the Facebook pages of the Australian media have been showing since February 17, says RSF in a statement.

    This blackout is deliberate. Facebook announced on February 17 that it would “restrict publishers and people in Australia from sharing or viewing Australian and international news content.”

    The decision was taken in reaction to the Australian government’s proposed News Media Bargaining Code, under which platforms such as Facebook and Google would have to pay Australian media outlets for the content they display.

    Facebook’s response, called the “nuclear option” by The Australian daily newspaper, is radical.

    Australian media can no longer share or post content on their Facebook pages, while users in Australia can no longer see or share links to news on the platform, whether Australian or international news.

    Facebook ‘abusing dominant position’
    “    Facebook is abusing its dominant position to defend its economic interests at the expense of online news reliability and pluralism,” said Iris de Villars, the head of RSF’s Tech Desk.

    “Regardless of the proposed law being discussed, these restrictions affect the ability of Australian citizens to access reliable and independent information on this platform.

    “We urge Facebook to reverse this decision, which totally contradicts its pledges to combat disinformation.”

    To implement these restrictions, Facebook has been using machine-learning tools to identify news content publishers but this has had the collateral effect of blocking other kinds of content, including the pages of several NGOs such as RSF, public health bodies, governmental institutions and even entities that handle emergencies.

    Facebook has not as yet responded to RSF’s questions.

    Asia Pacific Report and Pacific Media Watch collaborate with Reporters Without Borders.

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • Facebook Unfriends Australia: The Triumph of Epistemic Chaos

    Creepy and ruthless Facebook has again impressed with its steely indifference to civic responsibility, as if a company established by a sociopath could ever be a model of human improvement. On February 18, Mark Zuckerberg’s antisocial company took aim at Australia by blocking those in that country from sharing local and international content.  As the company notice to those trying to share material went: “In response to Australian government legislation, Facebook generally restricts the posting of news links and all post from news Pages in Australia. Globally, the posting and sharing of news links from Australian publications is restricted.”

    As with previous thugs of mercenary trade (the Dutch East India Company and its British equivalent come to mind), Facebook is keen to make the rules it likes, and ignore those of the commonweal.  It is a plundering pioneer in the world of surveillance capitalism, which has led to what Shoshana Zuboff calls an “epistemic coup” with “unprecedented computational concentrations of knowledge and power” gathered by extracting data elitists.  These elitists, in turn, trash such concepts as the rule of law and democracy in the name of profits.

    As she explained in her keynote speech at last year’s EU Parliament’s Science and Technology Options Assessment panel, “These corporations are not publishers, they are not distributors, they are not merely adtech providers; they are indiscriminate, radically indifferent all-you-can-eat extractors of everything forever, all for the sake of prediction that become more lucrative as they approach certainty.”

    Australia’s News Media Bargaining Code is one such proposed imposition on these extractive qualities, though it does little to actually redress the central principles Facebook and Google operate under.  The Code, as it stands, is a compendium of defects sold as politics rather than sound structural change. In it, the Australian government hopes not to restrict surveillance capitalism so much as redirect it.

    According to the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission the Code would “address the fundamental bargaining power imbalance between Australian news media businesses and major digital platforms.”  It’s all a problem of revenue: the fourth estate is dying, having lost its classified advertising base; the Australian government, unenthused by ideas of creating funding schemes or taxing Big Tech, has come to the conclusion that these giants will subsidize and ultimately regenerate old media outlets.  To do so, it proposes making companies reach, through good will negotiations, bargains by which revenue can be distributed.

    While making wild presumptions of what platforms such as Facebook do with the news (referrals, shares and so forth), the government will also require these Silicon Valley hulks to notify media organisations of any change in their search algorithms and abide by an arbitration mechanism.  Disputes on the amount of revenue will then go to an arbitration body.  Such scenes promise to be messy: media moguls hunkering down to discussions with such amoral practitioners as Facebook.

    The blocking of news content on the Facebook platform precipitated a range of consequences, some of them possibly surprising to Zuckerberg and his crew.  The Facebook pages of news organisations were immediately emptied of content.  Australia’s ABC put it like this: “If you search for the Facebook pages of (for example) ABC News, the Sydney Morning Herald, the New York Times, and the BBC, you’ll see a blank feed saying ‘No posts yet.’”

    This was not all.  The draft Code has a definition of news content of some breadth, which purports to be any material that “reports, investigates, or explains issues that are relevant in engaging Australians in public debate”.  When approached for comment on the issue, Facebook confirmed it has pushed its own reading to the limits, citing a lack of clarity.  “As the law does not provide clear guidance on the definition of news content, we have taken a broad definition in order to respect the law as drafted.”  Not that the law has been implemented, but Facebook has been quick on the draw.  Snottily, the company promises to “reverse any Pages that are inadvertently impacted.”

    Government pages were also caught up in the dramatic scrub, including the Australian Bureau of Meteorology, Queensland Health and an assortment of commercial and retail outlets.  The blocking of content on the bureau’s site was considered particularly galling, given cases of flooding in Queensland and fire danger in Western Australia.  “Warnings need to get to as wide an audience as possible as a matter of safety,” tweeted ABC weather presenter Nate Byrne.  “Shocking.”

    Smaller community news outlets, trade unions, homeless charities, and various local controlled health services were also enveloped in the information clean. Indigenous communities have been particularly bruised. According to the National Indigenous Times, “Indigenous health and media groups fear Facebook’s pushback will have a dangerous impact on regional and remote communities during [the] wet season and the COVID-19 epidemic, with concerns communities will not have access to vital updates on flood warnings or the rollout of COVID-19 vaccinations.”

    The National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Legal Services saw the issue of blocking content on its site as a matter of rights, restricting an invaluable means of connecting with the community.  “This is a human rights issue, silencing the voices of Aboriginal & Torres Strait Islander people, our representative peak bodies.”

    In going for the Australian throat, Facebook has resorted to a different approach from that other giant of amoral propensities, Google.  Google has repeatedly threatened to withdraw its search engine from Australia for similar grievances against the draft Code. But the company has been aggressively negotiating and buttering up Australian media outlets for its News Showcase.  The Australian government sees this as a triumph, a strange interpretation given the positively pyrrhic nature of any such outcomes.  Google can well argue to have come out better in the deal, its business model left intact.

    The time has come to reconsider the very operating rationale of such companies in an effort to address their singular monopoly position.  Solutions are not merely to be found in government regulation and antitrust approaches.  The very allegiance shown to such platforms by their captive users will have to change.  The time has come to save the human project from surveillance capitalism.

    The post Facebook Unfriends Australia: The Triumph of Epistemic Chaos first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.