Section 230 will be on the chopping block at the next big tech hearing

It looks like we’re in for another big tech CEO hearing.

The Senate Commerce Committee voted Thursday to move forward with subpoenas for Twitter’s Jack Dorsey, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg and Sundar Pichai, the CEO of Alphabet. The unusual decision to subpoena the social media chief executives adds yet another politically volatile event to the schedule in the run-up to the most contentious election in modern U.S. history.

The hearing will focus on Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, the key law that shields online platforms from legal liability for the content their users create.

While the topic might sound dry for the unacquainted, the law is an explosive topic, both politically and in the eyes of the tech industry, which could be left reeling from even what might seem like minor changes to the legal shield.

Committee Chairman Roger Wicker called the decision to hold the hearing “imperative” in order for Americans to “receive a full accounting from the heads of these companies about their content moderation practices.”

Remarkably, the decision to subpoena the CEOs was unanimous, with ranking Democrat Maria Cantwell joining the vote to subpoena the companies after initially opposing the decision.

Cantwell previously called the idea of issuing subpoenas an “extraordinary” step intended to “chill the efforts” of companies to remove misinformation and harassment from their platforms.

Republican members of the Senate Commerce Committee include Wicker, Ted Cruz, John Thune and Rick Scott. Democrats on the committee include Cantwell, Amy Klobuchar, Brian Schatz and Kyrsten Sinema.

The consequences of indecency

What’s going on with Section 230?

Section 230 is generally regarded as the legal infrastructure that made the social internet possible, from Facebook accounts and comments sections to Yelp and Amazon reviews. It’s a short law, but in 2020 an increasingly controversial one, as lawmakers scramble for levers to limit — or at least threaten to limit — the power of big tech companies.

Republicans see dismantling Section 230’s legal protections as a way to punish social media companies for perceived anti-conservative bias — a common refrain on the right that is regularly undermined by the ubiquity of right-leaning content on platforms like Facebook.

Importantly, President Trump and Attorney General William Barr have taken particular interest in attacking Section 230. Earlier this year, Trump lashed out at Twitter for moderating his false claims with an executive order threatening the law. While the order was largely toothless, Trump’s focus on Section 230 set the agenda for the Barr’s Department of Justice and for Republicans in Congress eager to follow his lead. The order also roped the FCC into getting involved.

Trump signs an executive order taking direct aim at social media companies

In June, the Justice Department laid out the groundwork for “a set of concrete reform proposals” that would undermine the law, couching the proposal as an effort to rid platforms of “illicit content” like child abuse. Last month, Barr sent draft legislation to Congress incorporating those proposals.

Democrats have more recently warmed up to the idea of going after Section 230, but for different reasons. While the right mostly complains about political censorship, Democratic lawmakers see changing Section 230 as a way to hold platforms accountable for rampant misinformation and other forms of toxic content that continue to thrive on social platforms.

Legislation taking aim at Section 230

Lindsey Graham’s bill, the EARN IT Act, is probably the best known legislation targeting Section 230 so far. A toned-down version of that bill advanced out of its committee but hasn’t yet faced the full Senate.

In June, Senators John Thune and Brian Schatz, both members of the committee issuing subpoenas, introduced a bipartisan Section 230 bill known as the PACT Act that focused mostly on moderation transparency.

To make matters even more confusing, another Graham-sponsored bill focused on Section 230 emerged earlier this month hours after Trump called on his party to “repeal Section 230 immediately.” That proposal did not have bipartisan sponsorship.

Whatever happens with the next big tech hearing and with all of these Section 230 bills, it’s clear that there’s a bipartisan appetite for doing something to change tech’s critical legal shield, even if the what isn’t yet clear.

What is clear: Tinkering with such a foundational law could have a huge cascade of effects for the internet as we know it and isn’t something to be undertaken lightly — if at all.

Going to war with Twitter, Trump threatens critical social media legal protections

from Amazon – TechCrunch https://techcrunch.com/2020/10/01/section-230-hearing-big-tech/

Kamala Harris brings a view from tech’s epicenter to the presidential race

Joe Biden’s decision to name California Senator Kamala Harris as his running mate in the quest to unseat President Trump means that the next vice president could be not only the first Black and Asian American woman on a presidential ticket in the U.S — historic milestones by any account — but also a Californian who built a career in the tech industry’s front yard.

Born in Oakland, Harris served as San Francisco district attorney and later as the attorney general for California before being elected to the Senate in 2016. And while the newly named vice presidential nominee is likely to bring a deeper understanding of the tech industry to the race, her positions on how a Democratic administration should approach tech’s most powerful companies during an unprecedented moment of scrutiny aren’t exactly crystal clear.

Harris attracted considerable support from Silicon Valley executives in her bid for the Democratic nomination, outpacing other candidates in donations from employees from large tech companies early on. While that support shifted around throughout the race and many donors in tech supported multiple candidates, the industry is likely to be happy with Biden’s selection.

Notably, Harris was elected as California attorney general in 2010 and served two terms, overseeing the tech industry through a large portion of its most explosive growth — a measure that likely proves more meaningful in assessing her stance toward regulating the tech industry than the things she said along the campaign trail.

Still, those were arguably simpler times for Silicon Valley, and ones that predated current hot-button conversations around issues like election interference, misinformation wars and antitrust enforcement.

Playing it safe

As the primary developed and then-rival Elizabeth Warren carved out a posture critical of big tech, Harris seldom waded into thorny issues around regulating the tech industry. During an October debate, Harris avoided a question asking about concerns over second order effects if big tech companies were broken up, instead redirecting to the safer political territory of Trump’s Twitter account. Dodging meatier points about tech accountability, Harris called on Twitter to suspend the president’s account for violating its rules, calling the issue “a matter of safety and corporate accountability.”

Trump's tweets incite violence, threaten witnesses, and obstruct justice. We can't crack down on Facebook but turn a blind eye to Twitter. Big tech companies must be held accountable for how they allow him to abuse their platforms. #DemDebate

— Kamala Harris (@KamalaHarris) October 16, 2019

Earlier this year, in response to a straightforward question asking if companies like Facebook, Google and Amazon should be broken up, Harris again dodged, though signaled that she is concerned in how those companies handle user data.

“I believe that tech companies have got to be regulated in a way that we can ensure the American consumer can be certain that their privacy is not being compromised,” Harris said. Harris also expressed her concerns about user privacy in a 2018 Twitter thread.

“Millions of Americans have no idea how much data Facebook is collecting, from tracking their location and IP address, to following their activities on other websites,” she wrote.

“In the real world, this would be like someone watching what you do, where you go, for how long, and with whom you’re with every day. For most, it would feel like an invasion of privacy.”

A focus on Facebook

In other critiques of tech, Harris has mostly concentrated on Facebook, denouncing its role in spreading Russian disinformation during the 2016 presidential race and expressing worries over how the company handles the data it collects.

When given the chance to press Mark Zuckerberg in person, Harris zeroed in on the company’s handling of the Cambridge Analytica data misuse to its users. More recently, Harris co-authored a letter to Facebook along with Colorado Senator Michael Bennett after the audit’s largely unflattering results were published, pressing the company on election concerns.

Sen. Harris puts Zuckerberg between a rock and a hard place for not disclosing data misuse

“Although the company has shown a recent willingness to rein in disinformation with respect to COVID-19, it has not shown equal resolve to confront voter suppression and learn the lessons of the 2016 election,” the senators wrote. “We share the auditors’ concern that Facebook has failed to use the tools and resources at its disposal to more vigorously combat voter suppression and protect civil rights.”

In another letter to the company, Harris criticized Facebook’s fact-checking policies for climate-related misinformation in light of a New York Times report.

In spite of the harsh talk, Harris seems to be on fairly friendly terms with Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, who congratulated her on the nomination Tuesday. Back in 2013, Harris apparently contributed to the marketing effort around Sandberg’s now-ubiquitous book Lean In, sharing her own story. Harris also spoke at a cyberbullying event hosted at Facebook’s Menlo Park headquarters in 2015 and the two were photographed onstage together.

View this post on Instagram

Today @kamalaharris became the first Black woman to be nominated for Vice President of the United States. This is a huge moment for Black women and girls all over the world – and for all of us. Our nation has a history of great women like Shirley Chisholm who have fought to lead and now, for the first time, we’ll see a Black woman on the ticket for the highest office in the land. In a world where there are still far too few Black women leaders in our companies and government, that really matters – because you can't be what you can't see. Research shows that women running for office face obstacles that men don’t. People are more likely to question their qualifications, criticize their looks, or simply dislike them. For women of color, this gender bias is compounded by racial bias. Black women candidates face double discrimination on the campaign trail, including criticisms of being “too ambitious” or “out for herself.” There’s no denying that Kamala Harris is ambitious – and that’s something we should be celebrating. Today, I am hopeful that many more Black women and girls will be inspired to run for office at every level. It’s only when everyone can compete and get a fair shot that we’ll get a government that truly represents all of us.

A post shared by Sheryl Sandberg (@sherylsandberg) on Aug 11, 2020 at 2:28pm PDT

Antitrust on the back burner?

While we have a handful of public statements from Harris about her views on tech, there’s plenty more that we don’t know. The way she positioned herself in relation to other candidates during the primary might not wholly reflect the kind of priorities she would bring to the vice presidency, and we’ll likely be learning more about those in the coming days.

Right now there are many, many crises on the table for the next administration. If regulating big tech looked like a huge campaign issue back in the pre-pandemic political landscape of 2020, conversations around police brutality and the devastating American failure to contain the coronavirus are now at the fore. Whether issues around antitrust regulation and reining in tech’s power will make it off the back burner remains to be seen, and there are plenty of national five-alarm fires to be put out in the meantime.

While her potential position as the nation’s next vice president doesn’t mean that Harris would be tasked with shaping tech policy or spearheading antitrust efforts, her deep connections to tech’s geographic hub could prove consequential in a Biden presidency and its priorities.

In spite of some question marks around her policy approaches, Harris is a known quantity for the tech industry — one who understands Silicon Valley and who, per her track record, doesn’t look keen to take on the industry’s biggest companies in spite of some recent tough talk. Whatever tech policies emerge out of a Biden/Harris campaign, the fresh vice presidential nominee is connected to tech in a more meaningful way than any other contender for the spot. That alone is something to watch.

Elizabeth Warren, big tech’s sworn foe, drops out of 2020 race

from Amazon – TechCrunch https://techcrunch.com/2020/08/11/kamala-harris-tech-vp-policies/

Secret documents from US antitrust probe reveal big tech’s plot to control or crush the competition

Nearly 500 pages of evidence were made public during the House Judiciary’s marathon hearing this week on potential anti-competitive actions by Amazon, Facebook, Google and Apple. We’ve collected them here with added context and an omnibus, searchable version for anyone who’d rather not juggle four dozen documents.

The emails, chat logs and other communications listed here trickled out online as the hearings went on. Many are internal documents that were never meant to be exposed publicly — for instance, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg telling a colleague that “we can likely always just buy any competitive startups” shortly before acquiring Instagram in 2012.

Congressional investigators wield considerable power in compelling the release of such documents, even against the will of the companies, which would almost certainly never provide such self-incriminating information to journalists. As such, these documents contain all manner of useful information, most of it providing insight into the otherwise opaque thinking of executives as their companies made key decisions about growing their businesses — and hint at strategies traditionally employed by monopolies.

While there isn’t anything that could be called a smoking gun, these are not the only evidence the investigation collected, only those it needed to make public for this hearing. Legislators spoke of other documents and also of interviews and testimony that corroborated their allegations, or contradicted companies’ accounts of events.

While there are too many documents to discuss individually, we’ve noted some interesting exchanges we’ve come across in the files for each company. A combined, searchable mega-file of the internal documents can be found at the bottom of this post. It’s not in any particular order, so it’s best to sift through by looking for key terms, key figures and company names.

Amazon

Image Credits: Screenshot via House Judiciary Committee

The documents contain internal communications about Amazon’s pursuit and eventual purchase of Diapers.com, which also came up in the hearing itself. Aggressive price cutting by the former forced the latter out of business, allowing it to be snapped up and integrated. In one document, we see that Amazon discusses setting up special automatic pricing rules that more aggressively undercut Diapers.com prices compared to other sellers of diapers and toys.

Another document shows that Amazon lost in the neighborhood of $200 million in a single quarter during this period, showing that it was willing to take on losses at a scale that the smaller business couldn’t possibly withstand — a classic monopolistic tactic only possible if you command a giant chunk of a market. Rep. Scanlon (D-PA) pushed Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos on this at about the 2 hour 15 minute mark.

Jeff Bezos, spurred by a TechCrunch post, asks what the plan is for Diapers.com’s next play, Soap.com, and receives a summary of the existing plan, which “undercuts the core diapers business for diapers.com,” and “will slow the adoption of soap.com.” This email shows how Amazon acknowledged that it has positioned itself as “the place to sell globally,” particularly with manufacturers from China who wanted direct access to American consumers. A deck of Diapers.com metrics mentions “predatory pricing” and Amazon as very specific threats to their short- and long-term plans.

Regarding Amazon’s purchase of Ring, which might have emerged as a smart home competitor, this document shows senior management discussing being “willing to pay for market position as it’s hard to catch the leader.” Another email offers more context on Amazon’s thoughts on the acquisition of Ring (at the time referred to as Project Darwin) before it went through. Bezos himself says in this exchange that “we’re buying market position — not technology. And that market position and momentum is very valuable.”

Bezos ‘can’t guarantee’ no anti-competitive activity as Congress catches him flat-footed

Facebook

Image Credits: Screenshot via House Judiciary Committee

In an email exchange from March 2012, the month before Facebook announced it would buy Instagram, Zuckerberg shares a conversation about China’s “strong culture of cloning things quickly.”

In the original conversation, sent to Facebook Product lead Chris Cox and CTO Mike Schroepfer, a high-level Facebook employee describes how they met with the founders of Chinese company RenRen who described how their own company copied apps like Voxer and Pinterest. The author comments that it’s easier for those companies to get products out quickly “since they’re copying other people” and goes on to suggest how a similar strategy could work for Facebook. Forwarding the email to Sheryl Sandberg, Zuckerberg comments “You’ll probably find this interesting and agree.”

Another set of documents captures Mark Zuckerberg’s private courtship of Instagram co-founder Kevin Systrom. Tellingly, a side conversation between Systrom and a former Facebook product VP shows that the Instagram creator was concerned about Zuckerberg going into “destroy mode” if Systrom didn’t agree to sell. There’s also more insight about how Facebook saw the Instagram deal and how the company decided to keep it a separate product.

The Facebook documents also include some conversation about the WhatsApp acquisition, which it nicknames “Project Cobalt,” including the minutes from a board meeting four days before Facebook went public with its acquisition plans. “Ms. Sandberg emphasized that the high concentration of the mobile operating system market — with two providers serving the vast majority of smartphone users around the world — poses a significant strategic threat to [Facebook’s] business…” the minutes state.

In antitrust hearing, Zuckerberg admits Facebook has copied its competition

 

Apple

Image Credits: Screenshot via House Judiciary Committee

Apple’s isn’t as well-known for crushing competitors as the other three companies, but it certainly likes to wring revenues out of its software partners while maintaining a tight grip on both its hardware and software. Many of the documents focus on Apple’s internal strategies responding to criticism on issues like the right-to-repair controversy and developers unhappy with the obsessive level of control Apple exercises over its products.

The Apple documents also detail how the App Store creator gives preferential treatment to some companies on the commissions it takes. In 2016 emails between Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos and Apple SVP Eddy Cue, Apple looks to have struck a special deal over the Amazon Prime Video app for iOS and Apple TV.

An email exchange back in 2011 also details how Apple mulled raising commissions to 40% for the first year for subscription apps. “I think we may be leaving money on the table if we just asked for about 30% of the first year of sub,” Cue wrote. This didn’t come to pass, but the correspondence does provide insight into some questions about setting its own rules that the company didn’t really have an answer to in the hearing.

Apple’s App Store commission structure called into question in antitrust hearing

Google

Image Credits: Screenshot via House Judiciary Committee

In a confidential internal presentation from 2006, Google raises an alarm about the “orthogonal threat” posed by social networks and other websites with “high entertainment value,” like YouTube.

“… The team developed an opinion that these social networking sites will ultimately represent a threat to our search business as people will spend more time on those sites and ultimately may do most searches from the search boxes available there. They aren’t direct competitors, but they may displace us in end-user time tradeoff.”

The presentation goes on to argue that Google should “own the search box on the entertainment sites” and develop its own social networking solution so those sites don’t win out. That same year, Google announced its landmark acquisition of YouTube.

Other email chains from around the same time capture Google’s internal thinking in the run-up to buying YouTube.

“YouTube’s value to us would be a smart team and a platform we could build from (maybe enough to justify an acquisition on its own), but would we really be able to preserve their community once we start reviewing and pulling copyright or inappropriate content? If anything, that’s likely to cast a poor light on Google,” then-Google Director of Product Hunter Walk wrote, in an interesting moment foreshadowing Google’s current content moderation woes.

After floating a $200 million deal for the company and having YouTube turn up its nose, Google eventually went on to buy the now-ubiquitous video sharing platform for $1.65 billion.

Google’s Sundar Pichai grilled over ‘destroying anonymity on the internet’

You can read and search through the documents here:

House Antitrust Subcommitte… by TechCrunch on Scribd

from Amazon – TechCrunch https://techcrunch.com/2020/07/31/house-antitrust-investigation-documents/

How to watch big tech’s CEOs tangle with Congress on antitrust issues and more

Jeff Bezos, Tim Cook, Sundar Pichai and Mark Zuckerberg will defend their companies before the House Antitrust Subcommittee Wednesday in a hearing that will make tech industry history, no matter what happens.

Given that the tech giants are accustomed to answering to no one in particular, collecting four of them on a substantive topic is notable in its own right. Remarkably, Wednesday will mark the first time Amazon’s CEO has faced lawmakers in a public hearing — and they’re bound to have plenty of questions for the take-no-prisoners online retail behemoth.

For Apple and Cook, who prefer to stay above the public-facing political fray, it’s the first time before Congress in years. Facebook and Google have both been called to Congress more recently, but lawmakers have still barely scratched the surface of two companies that have completely reshaped modern life.

If you’re just catching up, read our explainer about why this whole thing is happening at all and what to expect. You can also read the opening statements from Apple, Amazon, Facebook and Google and skip them tomorrow so you can spend more time with your Nespresso or whatever it is we’re all doing to get by these days. The statements provide a good idea of how the companies will play defense against regulators keen to install some safety features before we barrel into a fresh decade of unchecked growth.

There are a lot of unknowns heading into the hearing. Will lawmakers extract any useful revelations or will it be five hours of “let us get back to you on that?” Could tech executives manage to be even more evasive now that they’re appearing remotely via video chat? Will some subcommittee members lead the hearing so far into off-topic territory that we learn nothing about the business practices that scaled an industry of market-owning giants? And most importantly: On a scale of one to supervillain, what kind of vibes will Bezos give off?

We hope to know the answers to all of these questions and more — possibly even a question from a lawmaker or two — as we cover Wednesday’s events closely. If you’re interested in watching it go down yourself, you can tune into the livestream right here (well, up there) on Wednesday July 29 at 12PM ET.

What to expect from tech’s historic antitrust showdown with Congress

from Amazon – TechCrunch https://techcrunch.com/2020/07/28/how-to-watch-tech-hearing-antitrust/

Read how Apple, Amazon, Facebook and Google plan to defend themselves to Congress

With their big day before lawmakers just around the corner, previews of Google (well, Alphabet), Facebook, Amazon and Apple’s opening statements are now available on the House Judiciary Committee’s site. On Wednesday, the CEOs of each company will appear in an unusually executive-packed Congressional hearing focused on antitrust concerns over the business practices.

While the opening statements are just a glimpse of the hearing’s potential topics, they do provide a useful outline for the strategy each company will use to fend off accusations that their businesses have grown on such an enormous scale due to anticompetitive behavior. In recent hearings, tech executives have mostly managed to stick to safe, well-rehearsed lines, so if any moments deviate from these scripts those will likely be the most interesting or useful bits of testimony.

In their opening statements, the chief executives of each company make some similar arguments–for example, all four claim that their companies still face intense competition, especially in global markets. Amazon and Apple also say that their ecosystems have created millions of job for third-party businesses that use their platforms.

But the CEOs also take slightly different approaches to how they present their opening statements. For example, Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s chief executive officer, and Sundar Pichai, the CEO of Alphabet and Google, go into their personal backgrounds in detail. Meanwhile, Apple CEO Tim Cook and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg focus on the fact that their companies are based in the United States: Cook calls Apple an “uniquely American company,” and Zuckerberg says that Facebook is a “proudly American company.”

Though Amazon is the largest online retailer in America, Bezos will argue in his opening statement that it is a small player in the global retail market, with Amazon accounting for “less than 1% of the $25 trillion global retail market and less than 4% of retail in the U.S.” Among domestic competitors, Bezos focuses on Walmart, stating that it is “a company more than twice Amazon’s size,” and also names newer competitors like Shopify and Instacart.

Bezos’ opening statement also dwells on the small- and medium-sized retailers that sell products on Amazon’s platform, estimating that third-party businesses on Amazon have created over 2.2 million new jobs around the world.

Cook says that the “smartphone market is fiercely competitive,” with rivals like Samsung, LG, Huawei and Google, and that all of Apple’s product categories, including the iPhone, do not have a dominant market share in any of the markets where it does business.

Like Bezos, Cook’s statement also argues that Apple’s ecosystem has helped create jobs. He says that the App Store now hosting more than 1.7 million apps, only 60 of which were developed by Apple, and “more than 1.9 million American jobs in all 50 states are attributable to Apple.”

Even though Google Search is the dominant search engine in the U.S., Pichai will claim that is facing down a large roster of rivals, including services that aren’t specifically search engines. For example, he cites Amazon’s Alexa, Twitter, WhatsApp, SnapChat, and Pinterest as alternative sources of information and says most people turn to e-commerce sites like Amazon, eBay and Walmart for information about products.

Google’s ad business is also expected to be in the spotlight during the hearings. Pichai’s opening statement argues that advertisers have “an enormous amount of choice” for platforms, including Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, Comcast and others, that means advertising costs have lowered by 40% over the last decade.

Zuckerberg also argues that Facebook still faces intense competition, especially in other countries. Though Zuckerberg doesn’t reference any specific company or app, he highlights competition from the Chinese tech industry, telling lawmakers that “China is building its own version of the internet focused on on very different ideas, and they are exporiting their vision to other countries.”

While Facebook has been criticized for acquiring companies like Instagram and WhatsApp, Zuckerberg argues that those services improved under his company’s ownership.

The big tech hearing with the House Judiciary’s Antitrust Subcommittee will begin Wednesday at 12PM ET and we’ll be following along over the course of the day so check back for coverage of the most noteworthy moments. For reference, the full opening statements can be found below.

– Apple
– Amazon
– Google
– Facebook

What to expect from tech’s historic antitrust showdown with Congress

from Amazon – TechCrunch https://techcrunch.com/2020/07/28/opening-statements-tech-antitrust-hearing/

What to expect from tech’s historic antitrust showdown with Congress

Chief executives from four of the world’s most powerful companies will defend the vast empires they’ve built in testimony before Congress on Wednesday.

In a hearing held by the House’s Antitrust Subcommittee, Jeff Bezos, Tim Cook, Sundar Pichai and Mark Zuckerberg will all face questions about how their business practices propelled them into the market-dominant giants they are today. Amazon, Apple, Google and Facebook make up four of top six most valuable public companies in existence and are widely regarded as reshaping the consumer world, both within the tech industry and beyond.

The event will begin at 12 PM ET and may run all day, given the breadth of relevant topics and the four very different, deeply influential tech companies that we’ll be hearing from. Here’s what to expect from the big day.

Tech’s top CEOs will face Congress in antitrust hearing now set for Wednesday

What’s the big deal?

There have been quite a few Congressional hearings examining tech companies in recent years, but usually those companies send their lead counsel — not their CEOs.

When a tech CEO appears before Congress it’s a sign that whatever they’re testifying about poses a real enough threat to their business that it’s better to place nice with lawmakers rather than blowing them off.

While Tim Cook, Sundar Pichai and Mark Zuckerberg have all testified before Congress before — Pichai in 2018, Zuckerberg in 2018 and 2019 and Tim Cook way back in 2013 — this will be the first time Jeff Bezos has agreed to come before Congress. Given the amount of concerns lawmakers have expressed over Amazon in recent years, that’s a big deal.

Who’s running the show?

The hearing is being coordinated by the House Judiciary’s Antitrust Subcommittee, a subsection of the broader House committee that focuses on antitrust issues, among other topics. Because it’s in the House, the subcommittee is controlled by Democrats and is helmed by David Cicilline, a prominent and serious critic of big tech companies. It’s worth noting that Val Demings, who is currently being considered as Joe Biden’s running mate, is among the Democratic members.

On the Republican side, Jim Sensenbrenner is the ranking member. The outspoken Trump supporter Matt Gaetz also serves on the subcommittee and we can expect to hear a lot from him for reasons we’ll get into it a little bit.

What is this all about?

The title of the hearing is “Online Platforms and Market Power, Part 6: Examining the Dominance of Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google.” Five previous hearings were also part of the subcommittee’s year-long antitrust investigation into digital markets, touching on issues like data privacy, innovation, the free press and competition. Expect all of those angles to come up at Wednesday’s hearing.

What the hearing is about and what will end up being the focus could be two different things, depending on how well Cicilline is able to rein things in as the subcommittee’s chair. As we mentioned previously, Florida Republican Matt Gaetz has signaled his interest in steering the four tech CEOs to the less substantive but more politically expedient topic of anti-conservative bias in tech.

Earlier this week, Gaetz made a criminal referral to the Justice Department that accused Mark Zuckerberg of lying in his 2018 testimony to Congress when he said Facebook does not have a bias against conservatives. The issue of anti-conservative bias is a favorite among Trump-friendly Republicans, and Gaetz is likely to veer away from very real concerns over anti-competitive behavior among tech companies toward unproven bias claims.

Will they really say anything useful?

House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerry Nadler and Antitrust Subcommittee Chairman David Cicilline stressed the importance that the tech CEOs are “forthcoming” on Wednesday, emphasizing the “central role these corporations play in the lives of the American people.” While it would serve these companies to appear transparent and not evasive, the testimony is likely to be a careful combination of the two.

In past appearances, tech CEOs have been criticized for being tight-lipped, offering only robotic answers and promising to “get back” to members of Congress every other question. We can expect more of this Wednesday, though the tone and efficacy of the hearing will really depending on who’s asking the questions and how well lawmakers coordinate their lines of inquiry.

Where is Twitter? Microsoft?

Last week, House Republicans led by Jim Jordan called on Twitter to appear at tech’s big antitrust hearing, claiming that the day would be “incomplete” without an appearance from Jack Dorsey. Dorsey has made appearances before Congress before, but the new request was rightfully ignored.

While often elevated to the status of peer companies like Facebook and YouTube, Twitter is a relatively small company with an outsized impact on society — and one not suspected of market-shaping practices that could box competitors out. To put it in perspective: Twitter’s market capitalization is $29 billion; Facebook’s is $667 billion.

Compared to Twitter, Microsoft is massive and a more natural fit for the hearing but the company has a much more storied history of government scrutiny. Cicilline himself said that regulatory enforcement against Microsoft two decades ago “made space for an enormous amount of additional innovation and competition.”

Depending on who you ask, U.S. regulatory efforts against Microsoft either presaged an era of regulatory overreach or failed to be little more than a slap on the wrist. Sound familiar?

How do I watch it?

We’ll be watching the hearing and reporting on it, so check back for our coverage and analysis throughout the day. If you’re keen to sit through it yourself, we’ve embedded a YouTube link below that should work when the livestream begins on Wednesday, July 29 at 12 PM ET.

from Amazon – TechCrunch https://techcrunch.com/2020/07/28/tech-hearing-2020-amazon-apple-google-facebook-preview/

California is investigating concerns about COVID-19 safety at Amazon centers

According to a new court filing, multiple California state offices are actively investigating Amazon over worker safety concerns as the coronavirus continues to rage throughout the U.S.

In the filing, reported by Reuters, a San Francisco Superior Court Judge Ethan Schulman writes that California Attorney General Xavier Becerra, California’s Division of Occupational Safety and Health and San Francisco’s Department of Public Health have all opened investigations into the online retail giant’s workplace practices in light of the pandemic. The Attorney General’s office declined to comment when reached by TechCrunch.

An eighth Amazon warehouse employee has died from COVID-19

While Amazon faced frequent criticism for worker well being before the pandemic, the ongoing crisis has made those concerns even more stark. With white-collar workers sent home, the virus has spread quickly through clusters of employees at factory floors and warehouses nationwide where social distancing isn’t enforced. Amazon’s own shipping centers have reported outbreaks, including one in the Pocono Mountains and another in Oregon and by May eight Amazon warehouse workers had died from the virus.

The disclosure of the three California state investigations came out of court case accusing Amazon of failing to adequately protect workers in a San Francisco Amazon Fresh Fulfillment Center. In the lawsuit, filed in March, Amazon Fresh worker Chiyomi Brent accuses the company of taking risks, including sharing the suits they wear into freezers without cleaning them after each use. Brent also filed a complaint with California’s Division of Occupational Safety and Health, which is now looking into Amazon’s distribution center practices.

Bezos details Amazon’s COVID-19 testing plans in shareholder letter

from Amazon – TechCrunch https://techcrunch.com/2020/07/27/california-amazon-probe-attorney-general/

Tech’s top CEOs will face Congress in antitrust hearing now set for Wednesday

A rare public showdown between Congress and the CEOs of tech’s biggest companies is still on track after being postponed last week. The House Judiciary Committee hearing, originally set for Monday, will now take place Wednesday, July 29 at 12 PM Eastern Time. The date was changed in light of the death of the civil rights leader and Georgia Representative John Lewis, who will be honored in a ceremony Monday in the Capitol building.

The hearing, titled “Online Platforms and Market Power, Part 6: Examining the Dominance of Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google,” will see an unusually comprehensive cast of tech’s most powerful leaders face off with lawmakers.

Any hearing that manages to drag a single tech CEO to Washington D.C. — even virtually, in this case — is notable and Wednesday’s hearing will hear testimony from four of them. In the hearing, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Apple’s Tim Cook, Google’s Sundar Pichai, and Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook will all face questions about their company practices and concerns that anticompetitive behavior is impacting some of tech’s key markets for the worse.

The hearing is the latest chapter in the House Judiciary Antitrust Subcommittee’s ongoing antitrust investigation targeting many of tech’s largest, most powerful companies that was first announced last year.

“Since last June, the Subcommittee has been investigating the dominance of a small number of digital platforms and the adequacy of existing antitrust laws and enforcement,” House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerrold Nadler and Antitrust Subcommittee Chairman David Cicilline said in a joint statement.

“Given the central role these corporations play in the lives of the American people, it is critical that their CEOs are forthcoming. As we have said from the start, their testimony is essential for us to complete this investigation.”

We’ll be following the hearing closely on Wednesday. If you stumble onto this page the day of, the link below should provide a reliable stream.

from Amazon – TechCrunch https://techcrunch.com/2020/07/27/tech-hearing-apple-google-amazon-facebook-antitrust-house-judiciary/

Lawsuits allege Microsoft, Amazon and Google violated Illinois facial recognition privacy law

In a set of new lawsuits, two Illinois residents argue that three tech giants violated state laws prohibiting the use of personal biometric data without permission. Illinois residents Steven Vance and Tim Janecyk allege that images of their faces appeared in IBM’s “Diversity in Faces” database without their consent and were used to train facial recognition systems at Amazon, Microsoft and Google’s parent company Alphabet.

While all three companies are based on the West Coast, the suit accuses the tech giants of running afoul of an Illinois law known as the Biometric Information Privacy Act (BIPA). The suit names Vance and Janecyk as plaintiffs but also seeks class action status on behalf of “all other similarly situated individuals” in Illinois. In the lawsuit, the pair of plaintiffs seek $5,000 per violation of the law, an injunction barring the companies from using Illinois residents’ “biometric identifiers” and the destruction of any relevant facial data that’s been stored.

“In its effort to improve its facial recognition technology, Defendant Microsoft violated Illinois’ Biometric Information Privacy Act… by, among other things, unlawfully collecting, obtaining, storing, using, possessing and profiting from the biometric identifiers and information of Plaintiffs Vance and Janecyk and all other similarly situated Illinois residents and citizens (hereinafter, the “Class Members”),” the version of the suit against Microsoft states.

The law cited in the suit, passed more than a decade ago, is designed to protect Illinois residents from having their biometric data harvested or stored without their explicit permission. Lawsuits involving BIPA pop up with some frequency now, as facial recognition becomes both more commonplace and more controversial. In the absence of federal privacy protections in the U.S., the Illinois law poses an interesting hurdle for companies that are used to extracting data from Americans with little oversight.

In January of this year, Facebook paid $550 million to settle a class action lawsuit stemming from BIPA. The suit was filed on behalf of Illinois residents in 2015 and alleged that the social media giant collected facial recognition data from user images without disclosing it to users. At the time, Snapchat, Google, and Shutterfly faced similar suits.

In 2019, a U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals court swatted away Facebook’s claim that facial recognition data did not count as biometric data, stating that “development of face template using facial-recognition technology without consent (as alleged here) invades an individual’s private affairs and concrete interests.”

The IBM dataset the companies trained facial recognition systems on also poses its own controversies. As NBC News reported last year, IBM claimed that its Diversity in Faces dataset was designed “purely for academic research” and not for the company’s own commercial interests. The IBM dataset was apparently culled from more than 100 million Creative Commons-licensed Flickr images, a decision that raised its own ethical questions around the use of facial imagery and if corporations should be allowed leverage images with open licensing for facial recognition applications without the consent of photographers and the people they photograph.

Facebook will pay $550 million to settle class action lawsuit over privacy violations

from Amazon – TechCrunch https://techcrunch.com/2020/07/15/facial-recognition-lawsuit-vance-janecyk-bipa/

Amazon really just renamed a Seattle stadium ‘Climate Pledge Arena’

As perennial front runner for the title of probably-the-most-evil tech company, Amazon has a long way to go to rehabilitate its image as a take-no-prisoners, industry-consolidating wealth machine.

In a bold effort to do so, the company announced today that it would buy the rights to Seattle’s KeyArena, an aging stadium currently under redevelopment in the city. Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos boasts that the stadium will “be the first net zero carbon certified arena in the world.”

“Instead of calling it Amazon Arena, we’re naming it Climate Pledge Arena as a regular reminder of the urgent need for climate action,” Jeff Bezos wrote on Instagram.

View this post on Instagram

I’m excited to announce that Amazon has bought the naming rights to the historic Seattle arena previously known as KeyArena. Instead of calling it Amazon Arena, we’re naming it Climate Pledge Arena as a regular reminder of the urgent need for climate action. It will be the first net zero carbon certified arena in the world, generate zero waste from operations and events, and use reclaimed rainwater in the ice system to create the greenest ice in the NHL. #ClimatePledge

A post shared by Jeff Bezos (@jeffbezos) on Jun 25, 2020 at 11:00am PDT

Other regular reminders for urgent climate action include the company’s own employees walking out to protest its lack of accountability on climate issues, its ongoing courtship with oil and gas companies and the sheer amount of times in a single day we see Amazon delivery vans dropping packages off on the same block.

Addressing its record of climate indifference, Amazon announced a $2 billion investment in sustainable efforts to reduce the company’s massive carbon footprint earlier this week as part of the same climate-friendly PR blitz.

Bezos himself announced in February that he would invest $10 billion of his personal wealth in a fund to address climate change, which is probably the least you can do when you’ve amassed an amount of wealth that’s incomprehensible to any normal person at the expense of workers, the environment and whatever else got in the way.

Jeff Bezos announced a $10 billion fund to fight climate change

from Amazon – TechCrunch https://techcrunch.com/2020/06/25/amazon-climate-pledge-arena/

Powerful House committee demands Jeff Bezos testify after ‘misleading’ statements

Amazon is in hot water with a powerful congressional committee interested in the company’s potentially anticompetitive business practices.

In a bipartisan letter sent Friday to Jeff Bezos, the House Judiciary committee demanded that the Amazon CEO explain discrepancies between his own prior statements and recent reporting from the Wall Street Journal. Specifically, the letter addressed Amazon’s apparent practice of diving into its trove of data on products and third-party sellers to come up with its own Amazon-branded competing products.

As the Journal notes, Amazon “has long asserted, including to Congress, that when it makes and sells its own products, it doesn’t use information it collects from the site’s individual third-party sellers—data those sellers view as proprietary.”

AOC and Elizabeth Warren call for a freeze on big mergers as the coronavirus crisis unfolds

In documents and interviews with many former employees, the Journal found that Amazon does indeed consult that information when making decisions about pricing, product features and the kinds of products with the most potential to make the company money.

In the letter, the House Judiciary Committee accuses Bezos of making “misleading, and possibly criminally false or perjurious” statements to the committee when asked about the practice in the past.

“It is vital to the Committee, as part of its critical work investigating and understanding competition issues in the digital market, that Amazon respond to these and other critical questions concerning competition issues in digital markets,” the committee wrote, adding that it would subpoena the tech CEO if necessary.

While the coronavirus crisis has taken some of the heat off of tech’s mounting regulatory worries in the U.S., the committee’s actions make it clear that plenty of lawmakers are still interested in taking tech companies to task, even with so many aspects of life still up in the air.

View this document on Scribd

from Amazon – TechCrunch https://techcrunch.com/2020/05/01/powerful-house-committee-demands-jeff-bezos-testify-after-misleading-statements-on-how-amazon-develops-its-own-products/

Reports raise video privacy concerns for Amazon-owned Ring

Amazon-owned smart doorbell maker Ring is facing claims that might give some smart home enthusiasts pause. Recent reports from The Intercept and The Information have accused the company of mishandling videos collected by its line of smart home devices, failing to inform users that their videos would be reviewed by humans and failing to protect the sensitive video footage itself with encryption.

In 2016, Ring moved some of its R&D operations to Ukraine as a cost saving move. According to the Intercept’s sources, that team had “unfettered access to a folder on Amazon’s S3 cloud storage service that contained every video created by every Ring camera around the world.” That group was also privy to a database that would allow anyone with access the ability to conduct a simple search to find videos linked to any Ring owner. At this time, the video files were unencrypted due to the “sense that encryption would make the company less valuable” expressed by leadership at the company.

At the same time the Ukraine team was allowed this access, Ring “executives and engineers” in the U.S. were allowed “unfiltered, round-the-clock live feeds from some customer cameras” even if that access was completely unnecessary for their work.

Ring reportedly leaned on its team in Ukraine, known as Ring Labs, to fill in the gaps for its troubled AI efforts. Those employees would comb through videos and manually tag objects in order to train software to one day be able to perform the recognition tasks. The videos included video from outside houses as well as video inside of them.

The company objected to the Intercept’s characterization of the situation, claiming that the training material was culled from public videos via a Ring app called Neighbors, a neighborhood watch app. It’s not clear that participants in the Neighbors app are aware that their videos are being reviewed manually by Ring’s “data operators” in Ukraine.

Ring provided the following statement to TechCrunch:

“We take the privacy and security of our customers’ personal information extremely seriously. In order to improve our service, we view and annotate certain Ring video recordings. These recordings are sourced exclusively from publicly shared Ring videos from the Neighbors app (in accordance with our terms of service), and from a small fraction of Ring users who have provided their explicit written consent to allow us to access and utilize their videos for such purposes. Ring employees do not have access to livestreams from Ring products.

We have strict policies in place for all our team members. We implement systems to restrict and audit access to information. We hold our team members to a high ethical standard and anyone in violation of our policies faces discipline, including termination and potential legal and criminal penalties. In addition, we have zero tolerance for abuse of our systems and if we find bad actors who have engaged in this behavior, we will take swift action against them.”

While it sounds like Ring may not have taken user privacy very seriously in the past, that attitude appears to have shifted upon the company’s acquisition by Amazon last year. The Information describes that scenario in reporting from December:

“After a visit by Amazon representatives to the Ukraine office in May, Amazon moved to restrict access to sensitive customer information, former employees said, requiring a digital key that could only be used from within the Kiev office.

But employees quickly found ways around the restriction. “We had to apply and get access. The Ukraine office wasn’t comfortable with this, so we found a workaround,” a former Kiev employee said. “Workers could then access the system from any computer, at home or anywhere.”

It’s impossible to know if Amazon is running a tight ship with Ring’s sensitive user data now, but it’s yet another reason to consider the privacy risks posed by smart home devices, particularly surveillance ones. Setting up an at-home panopticon might feel more secure, but know you might not be the only one keeping a watchful eye on your home.

Amazon is buying smart doorbell maker Ring

from Amazon – TechCrunch https://techcrunch.com/2019/01/10/amazon-ring-privacy-concerns/