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Javier E

Opinion | It's Time to Break Up Facebook - The New York Times - 1 views

www.nytimes.com/...ughes-facebook-zuckerberg.html

facebook monopoly social media antitrust politics policy

shared by Javier E on 09 Dec 20 - No Cached
  • For many people today, it’s hard to imagine government doing much of anything right, let alone breaking up a company like Facebook. This isn’t by coincidence.
  • Starting in the 1970s, a small but dedicated group of economists, lawyers and policymakers sowed the seeds of our cynicism. Over the next 40 years, they financed a network of think tanks, journals, social clubs, academic centers and media outlets to teach an emerging generation that private interests should take precedence over public ones
  • Their gospel was simple: “Free” markets are dynamic and productive, while government is bureaucratic and ineffective. By the mid-1980s, they had largely managed to relegate energetic antitrust enforcement to the history books.
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  • This shift, combined with business-friendly tax and regulatory policy, ushered in a period of mergers and acquisitions that created megacorporations
  • In the past 20 years, more than 75 percent of American industries, from airlines to pharmaceuticals, have experienced increased concentration, and the average size of public companies has tripled. The results are a decline in entrepreneurship, stalled productivity growth, and higher prices and fewer choices for consumers.
  • Because Facebook so dominates social networking, it faces no market-based accountability. This means that every time Facebook messes up, we repeat an exhausting pattern: first outrage, then disappointment and, finally, resignation.
  • Over a decade later, Facebook has earned the prize of domination. It is worth half a trillion dollars and commands, by my estimate, more than 80 percent of the world’s social networking revenue. It is a powerful monopoly, eclipsing all of its rivals and erasing competition from the social networking category.
  • Facebook’s monopoly is also visible in its usage statistics. About 70 percent of American adults use social media, and a vast majority are on Facebook products
  • Over two-thirds use the core site, a third use Instagram, and a fifth use WhatsApp.
  • As a result of all this, would-be competitors can’t raise the money to take on Facebook. Investors realize that if a company gets traction, Facebook will copy its innovations, shut it down or acquire it for a relatively modest sum
  • Facebook’s dominance is not an accident of history. The company’s strategy was to beat every competitor in plain view, and regulators and the government tacitly — and at times explicitly — approved
  • The F.T.C.’s biggest mistake was to allow Facebook to acquire Instagram and WhatsApp. In 2012, the newer platforms were nipping at Facebook’s heels because they had been built for the smartphone, where Facebook was still struggling to gain traction. Mark responded by buying them, and the F.T.C. approved.
  • Neither Instagram nor WhatsApp had any meaningful revenue, but both were incredibly popular. The Instagram acquisition guaranteed Facebook would preserve its dominance in photo networking, and WhatsApp gave it a new entry into mobile real-time messaging.
  • When it hasn’t acquired its way to dominance, Facebook has used its monopoly position to shut out competing companies or has copied their technology.
  • In 2014, the rules favored curiosity-inducing “clickbait” headlines. In 2016, they enabled the spread of fringe political views and fake news, which made it easier for Russian actors to manipulate the American electorate.
  • As markets become more concentrated, the number of new start-up businesses declines. This holds true in other high-tech areas dominated by single companies, like search (controlled by Google) and e-commerce (taken over by Amazon)
  • I don’t blame Mark for his quest for domination. He has demonstrated nothing more nefarious than the virtuous hustle of a talented entrepreneur
  • It’s on our government to ensure that we never lose the magic of the invisible hand. How did we allow this to happen
  • a narrow reliance on whether or not consumers have experienced price gouging fails to take into account the full cost of market domination
  • It doesn’t recognize that we also want markets to be competitive to encourage innovation and to hold power in check. And it is out of step with the history of antitrust law. Two of the last major antitrust suits, against AT&T and IBM in the 1980s, were grounded in the argument that they had used their size to stifle innovation and crush competition.
  • It is a disservice to the laws and their intent to retain such a laserlike focus on price effects as the measure of all that antitrust was meant to do.”
  • Facebook is the perfect case on which to reverse course, precisely because Facebook makes its money from targeted advertising, meaning users do not pay to use the service. But it is not actually free, and it certainly isn’t harmless.
  • We pay for Facebook with our data and our attention, and by either measure it doesn’t come cheap.
  • The choice is mine, but it doesn’t feel like a choice. Facebook seeps into every corner of our lives to capture as much of our attention and data as possible and, without any alternative, we make the trade.
  • The vibrant marketplace that once drove Facebook and other social media companies to compete to come up with better products has virtually disappeared. This means there’s less chance of start-ups developing healthier, less exploitative social media platforms. It also means less accountability on issues like privacy.
  • The most problematic aspect of Facebook’s power is Mark’s unilateral control over speech. There is no precedent for his ability to monitor, organize and even censor the conversations of two billion people.
  • Facebook engineers write algorithms that select which users’ comments or experiences end up displayed in the News Feeds of friends and family. These rules are proprietary and so complex that many Facebook employees themselves don’t understand them.
  • What started out as lighthearted entertainment has become the primary way that people of all ages communicate online.
  • In January 2018, Mark announced that the algorithms would favor non-news content shared by friends and news from “trustworthy” sources, which his engineers interpreted — to the confusion of many — as a boost for anything in the category of “politics, crime, tragedy.”
  • As if Facebook’s opaque algorithms weren’t enough, last year we learned that Facebook executives had permanently deleted their own messages from the platform, erasing them from the inboxes of recipients; the justification was corporate security concerns.
  • No one at Facebook headquarters is choosing what single news story everyone in America wakes up to, of course. But they do decide whether it will be an article from a reputable outlet or a clip from “The Daily Show,” a photo from a friend’s wedding or an incendiary call to kill others.
  • Mark knows that this is too much power and is pursuing a twofold strategy to mitigate it. He is pivoting Facebook’s focus toward encouraging more private, encrypted messaging that Facebook’s employees can’t see, let alone control
  • Second, he is hoping for friendly oversight from regulators and other industry executives.
  • In an op-ed essay in The Washington Post in March, he wrote, “Lawmakers often tell me we have too much power over speech, and I agree.” And he went even further than before, calling for more government regulation — not just on speech, but also on privacy and interoperability, the ability of consumers to seamlessly leave one network and transfer their profiles, friend connections, photos and other data to another.
  • I don’t think these proposals were made in bad faith. But I do think they’re an attempt to head off the argument that regulators need to go further and break up the company. Facebook isn’t afraid of a few more rules. It’s afraid of an antitrust case and of the kind of accountability that real government oversight would bring.
  • We don’t expect calcified rules or voluntary commissions to work to regulate drug companies, health care companies, car manufacturers or credit card providers. Agencies oversee these industries to ensure that the private market works for the public good. In these cases, we all understand that government isn’t an external force meddling in an organic market; it’s what makes a dynamic and fair market possible in the first place. This should be just as true for social networking as it is for air travel or pharmaceuticals.
  • Just breaking up Facebook is not enough. We need a new agency, empowered by Congress to regulate tech companies. Its first mandate should be to protect privacy.
  • First, Facebook should be separated into multiple companies. The F.T.C., in conjunction with the Justice Department, should enforce antitrust laws by undoing the Instagram and WhatsApp acquisitions and banning future acquisitions for several years.
  • How would a breakup work? Facebook would have a brief period to spin off the Instagram and WhatsApp businesses, and the three would become distinct companies, most likely publicly traded.
  • Facebook is indeed more valuable when there are more people on it: There are more connections for a user to make and more content to be shared. But the cost of entering the social network business is not that high. And unlike with pipes and electricity, there is no good argument that the country benefits from having only one dominant social networking company.
  • others worry that the breakup of Facebook or other American tech companies could be a national security problem. Because advancements in artificial intelligence require immense amounts of data and computing power, only large companies like Facebook, Google and Amazon can afford these investments, they say. If American companies become smaller, the Chinese will outpace us.
  • The American government needs to do two things: break up Facebook’s monopoly and regulate the company to make it more accountable to the American people.
  • But the biggest winners would be the American people. Imagine a competitive market in which they could choose among one network that offered higher privacy standards, another that cost a fee to join but had little advertising and another that would allow users to customize and tweak their feeds as they saw fit
  • The cost of breaking up Facebook would be next to zero for the government, and lots of people stand to gain economically. A ban on short-term acquisitions would ensure that competitors, and the investors who take a bet on them, would have the space to flourish. Digital advertisers would suddenly have multiple companies vying for their dollars.
  • The Europeans have made headway on privacy with the General Data Protection Regulation, a law that guarantees users a minimal level of protection. A landmark privacy bill in the United States should specify exactly what control Americans have over their digital information, require clearer disclosure to users and provide enough flexibility to the agency to exercise effective oversight over time
  • The agency should also be charged with guaranteeing basic interoperability across platforms.
  • Finally, the agency should create guidelines for acceptable speech on social media
  • We will have to create similar standards that tech companies can use. These standards should of course be subject to the review of the courts, just as any other limits on speech are. But there is no constitutional right to harass others or live-stream violence.
  • These are difficult challenges. I worry that government regulators will not be able to keep up with the pace of digital innovation
  • I worry that more competition in social networking might lead to a conservative Facebook and a liberal one, or that newer social networks might be less secure if government regulation is weak
  • Professor Wu has written that this “policeman at the elbow” led IBM to steer clear “of anything close to anticompetitive conduct, for fear of adding to the case against it.”
  • Finally, an aggressive case against Facebook would persuade other behemoths like Google and Amazon to think twice about stifling competition in their own sectors, out of fear that they could be next.
  • The alternative is bleak. If we do not take action, Facebook’s monopoly will become even more entrenched. With much of the world’s personal communications in hand, it can mine that data for patterns and trends, giving it an advantage over competitors for decades to come.
  • This movement of public servants, scholars and activists deserves our support. Mark Zuckerberg cannot fix Facebook, but our government can.
Javier E

How 'Stealth' Consolidation Is Undermining Competition - WSJ - 0 views

www.wsj.com/...mining-competition-11560954936

consolidation competition economy oligopoly

shared by Javier E on 20 Jun 19 - No Cached
  • Big tech and big mergers get the headlines, but the real monopoly problem is beneath the surface. In numerous industries and regions, competition has declined and corporate concentration risen through acquisitions often too small to draw the scrutiny of antitrust watchdogs.
  • The number of enforcement cases brought by the Justice Department’s antitrust division against alleged anticompetitive agreements and monopolistic behavior has plummeted in the past decade
  • he FTC, while continuing to challenge mergers resulting in just two to four competitors, has since the mid-2000s been less likely to challenge mergers that result in five to eight competitors.
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  • Until 2001, deals worth more than $15 million had to be reported to the antitrust authorities. That year, the threshold was raised and indexed to economic growth, and is now $90 million.
  • For transactions involving few tangible assets such as in technology and pharmaceutical startups, the threshold is $360 million.
  • after the 2001 changes, the number of merger notifications dropped 70% and the number of mergers that didn’t require notification jumped nearly 50%
  • 22% of markets for physicians are highly concentrated (according to federal guidelines), and they got that way mostly via acquisitions too small to be reported.
  • between 1997 and 2017 more than 4,000 acquisitions of kidney dialysis centers were proposed. About half were above the reporting threshold, and in 265 cases, the FTC required divestitures to resolve competition concerns
  • Among the half below the threshold, the FTC required just three divestitures. Two companies controlled about 31% of facilities in 1997. By 2016, two companies, DaVita Inc. and Fresenius Medical Care , controlled 77% of facilities
  • his preliminary results suggest the numbers of nurses per technician decline and patients per hemodialysis machine rise at facilities acquired in mergers below the reporting threshold. That, he said, could be evidence of reduced quality of care, though he acknowledged it could also reflect increased efficiency.
  • Before the change, around a third of merger investigations involved deals worth less than $50 million. After the change, the number of such deals investigated fell to close to zero.
  • pharmaceutical companies often halt development of competing drugs at startups they acquire, especially when the acquisition is just small enough to escape antitrust reporting requirements.
Javier E

The Antitrust Case Against Facebook, Google and Amazon - WSJ - 0 views

www.wsj.com/...le-amazon-and-apple-1516121561

antitrust tech fb amazon apple microsoft network monopoly

shared by Javier E on 17 Jan 18 - No Cached
  • A growing number of critics think these tech giants need to be broken up or regulated as Standard Oil and AT&T once were.
  • antitrust regulators have a narrow test: Does their size leave consumers worse off?
  • By that standard, there isn’t a clear case for going after big tech—at least for now. They are driving down prices and rolling out new and often improved products and services every week.
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  • That may not be true in the future: If market dominance means fewer competitors and less innovation, consumers will be worse off than if those companies had been restrained. “The impact on innovation can be the most important competitive effect” in an antitrust case
  • Yet Google’s monopoly means some features and prices that competitors offered never made it in front of customers. Yelp Inc., which in 2004 began aggregating detailed information and user reviews of local services, such as restaurants and stores, claims Google altered its search results to hurt Yelp and help its own competing service. While Yelp survived, it has retreated from Europe, and several similar local search services have faded.
  • In a 2005 paper, Mr. Scherer found that Standard Oil was indeed a prolific generator of patents in its early years, but that slowed once it achieved dominance.
  • Standard Oil and AT&T used trusts, regulations and patents to keep out or co-opt competitors. They were respected but unloved.
  • By contrast, Google and Facebook give away their main product, while Amazon undercuts traditional retailers so aggressively it may be holding down inflation. None enjoys a government-sanctioned monopoly; all invest prodigiously in new products.
  • All are among the public’s most loved brands, according to polls by Morning Consult.
  • Yet there are also important parallels. The monopolies of old and of today were built on proprietary technology and physical networks that drove down costs while locking in customers, erecting formidable barriers to entry.
  • . If they’re imposing a cost, it may not be what customers pay but the products they never see.
  • When the federal government sued to break up Standard Oil, the Supreme Court acknowledged business acumen was important to the company’s early success, but concluded that was eventually supplanted by a single-minded determination to drive others out of the market.
  • Amazon hasn’t yet reached the same market share as Google or Facebook but its position is arguably even more impregnable because it enjoys both physical and technological barriers to entry. Its roughly 75 fulfillment centers and state-of-the art logistics (including robots) put it closer, in time and space, to customers than any other online retailer.
  • “Just like people joined Facebook because everyone else was on Facebook, the biggest competitive advantage AT&T had was that it was interconnected,”
  • Early in the 20th century, AT&T began buying up local competitors and refusing to connect independent exchanges to its long-distance lines, arousing antitrust complaints. By the 1920s, it was allowed to become a monopoly in exchange for universal service in the communities it served. By 1939, the company carried more than 90% of calls.
  • After AT&T was broken up into separate local and long-distance companies in 1982, telecommunication innovation blossomed, spreading to digital switching, fiber optics, cellphones—and the internet.
  • “There should be hundreds of Yelps. There’s not. No one is pitching investors to build a service that relies on discovery through Facebook or Google to grow, because venture capitalists think it’s a poor bet.”
  • At that same hearing Jeffrey Katz, then the chief executive of Nextag, responded, “That is like saying move to Panama if you don’t like the tax rate in America. It’s a fake choice because no one has Google’s scope or capabilities and consumers won’t, don’t, and in fact can’t jump.”
  • In 2013 the U.S. Federal Trade Commission concluded that even if Google had hurt competitors, it was to serve consumers better, and declined to bring a case. Since then, comparison sites such as Nextag have largely faded.
  • The different outcomes hinge in part on different approaches. European regulators are more likely to see a shrinking pool of competitors as inherently bad for both competition and consumers. American regulators are more open to the possibility that it could be natural and benign.
  • Internet platforms have high fixed and minimal operating costs, which favors consolidation into a few deep-pocketed competitors. And the more customers a platform has, the more useful it is to each individual customer—the “network effect.”
  • But a platform that confers monopoly in one market can be leveraged to dominate another. Facebook’s existing user base enabled it to become the world’s largest photo-sharing site through its purchase of Instagram in 2012 and the largest instant-messaging provider through its purchase of WhatsApp in 2014. It is also muscling into virtual reality through its acquisition of Oculus VR in 2014 and anonymous polling with its purchase of TBH last year.
  • Once a company like Google or Facebook has critical mass, “the venture capital looks elsewhere,” says Roger McNamee of Elevation Partners, a technology-focused private-equity firm. “There’s no point taking on someone with a three or four years head start.”
  • when Google launched its own comparison business, Google Shopping, those sites found themselves dropping deeper into Google’s search results. They accused Google of changing its algorithm to favor its own results. The company responded that its algorithm was designed to give customers the results they want.
  • As the dominant platform for third-party online sales, Amazon also has access to data it can use to decide what products to sell itself. In 2016 Capitol Forum, a news service that investigates anticompetitive behavior, reported that when a shopper views an Amazon private-label clothing brand, the accompanying list of items labeled “Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought,” is also dominated by Amazon’s private-label brands. This, it says, restricts competing sellers’ access to a prime marketing space
  • In the face of such accusations, the probability of regulatory action—for now—looks low, largely because U.S. regulators have a relatively high bar to clear: Do consumers suffer?
  • “We think consumer welfare is the right standard,” Bruce Hoffman, the FTC’s acting director of the bureau of competition, recently told a panel on antitrust law and innovation. “We have tried other standards. They were dismal failures.”
  • What would remedies look like? Since Big Tech owes its network effects to data, one often-proposed fix is to give users ownership of their own data: the “social graph” of connections on Facebook, or their search history on Google and Amazon. They could then take it to a competitor.
  • A more drastic remedy would be to block acquisitions of companies that might one day be a competing platform. British regulators let Facebook buy Instagram in part because Instagram didn’t sell ads, which they argued made them different businesses. In fact, Facebook used Instagram to engage users longer and thus sell more ads
  • Ben Thompson, wrote in his technology newsletter Stratechery. Building a network is “extremely difficult, but, once built, nearly impregnable. The only possible antidote is another network that draws away the one scarce resource: attention.” Thus, maintaining competition on the internet requires keeping “social networks in separate competitive companies.”
  • How sound are these premises? Google’s and Facebook’s access to that data and network effects might seem like an impregnable barrier, but the same appeared to be true of America Online’s membership, Yahoo ’s search engine and Apple’s iTunes store, note two economists, David Evans and Richard Schmalensee, in a recent paper. All saw their dominance recede in the face of disruptive competition.
  • It’s possible Microsoft might have become the dominant company in search and mobile without the scrutiny the federal antitrust case brought. Throughout history, entrepreneurs have often needed the government’s help to dislodge a monopolist—and may one day need it again.
Javier E

Washington Monthly | How to Fix Facebook-Before It Fixes Us - 0 views

washingtonmonthly.com/...ix-facebook-before-it-fixes-us

fb google propaganda social media disinformation monopoly regulation crisis politics

shared by Javier E on 28 Feb 18 - No Cached
  • Smartphones changed the advertising game completely. It took only a few years for billions of people to have an all-purpose content delivery system easily accessible sixteen hours or more a day. This turned media into a battle to hold users’ attention as long as possible.
  • And it left Facebook and Google with a prohibitive advantage over traditional media: with their vast reservoirs of real-time data on two billion individuals, they could personalize the content seen by every user. That made it much easier to monopolize user attention on smartphones and made the platforms uniquely attractive to advertisers. Why pay a newspaper in the hopes of catching the attention of a certain portion of its audience, when you can pay Facebook to reach exactly those people and no one else?
  • Wikipedia defines an algorithm as “a set of rules that precisely defines a sequence of operations.” Algorithms appear value neutral, but the platforms’ algorithms are actually designed with a specific value in mind: maximum share of attention, which optimizes profits.
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  • They do this by sucking up and analyzing your data, using it to predict what will cause you to react most strongly, and then giving you more of that.
  • Algorithms that maximize attention give an advantage to negative messages. People tend to react more to inputs that land low on the brainstem. Fear and anger produce a lot more engagement and sharing than joy
  • The result is that the algorithms favor sensational content over substance.
  • for mass media, this was constrained by one-size-fits-all content and by the limitations of delivery platforms. Not so for internet platforms on smartphones. They have created billions of individual channels, each of which can be pushed further into negativity and extremism without the risk of alienating other audience members
  • On Facebook, it’s your news feed, while on Google it’s your individually customized search results. The result is that everyone sees a different version of the internet tailored to create the illusion that everyone else agrees with them.
  • It took Brexit for me to begin to see the danger of this dynamic. I’m no expert on British politics, but it seemed likely that Facebook might have had a big impact on the vote because one side’s message was perfect for the algorithms and the other’s wasn’t. The “Leave” campaign made an absurd promise—there would be savings from leaving the European Union that would fund a big improvement in the National Health System—while also exploiting xenophobia by casting Brexit as the best way to protect English culture and jobs from immigrants. It was too-good-to-be-true nonsense mixed with fearmongering.
  • Facebook was a much cheaper and more effective platform for Leave in terms of cost per user reached. And filter bubbles would ensure that people on the Leave side would rarely have their questionable beliefs challenged. Facebook’s model may have had the power to reshape an entire continent.
  • Tristan Harris, formerly the design ethicist at Google. Tristan had just appeared on 60 Minutes to discuss the public health threat from social networks like Facebook. An expert in persuasive technology, he described the techniques that tech platforms use to create addiction and the ways they exploit that addiction to increase profits. He called it “brain hacking.”
  • The most important tool used by Facebook and Google to hold user attention is filter bubbles. The use of algorithms to give consumers “what they want” leads to an unending stream of posts that confirm each user’s existing beliefs
  • Continuous reinforcement of existing beliefs tends to entrench those beliefs more deeply, while also making them more extreme and resistant to contrary facts
  • No one stopped them from siphoning off the profits of content creators. No one stopped them from gathering data on every aspect of every user’s internet life. No one stopped them from amassing market share not seen since the days of Standard Oil.
  • Facebook takes the concept one step further with its “groups” feature, which encourages like-minded users to congregate around shared interests or beliefs. While this ostensibly provides a benefit to users, the larger benefit goes to advertisers, who can target audiences even more effectively.
  • We theorized that the Russians had identified a set of users susceptible to its message, used Facebook’s advertising tools to identify users with similar profiles, and used ads to persuade those people to join groups dedicated to controversial issues. Facebook’s algorithms would have favored Trump’s crude message and the anti-Clinton conspiracy theories that thrilled his supporters, with the likely consequence that Trump and his backers paid less than Clinton for Facebook advertising per person reached.
  • The ads were less important, though, than what came next: once users were in groups, the Russians could have used fake American troll accounts and computerized “bots” to share incendiary messages and organize events.
  • Trolls and bots impersonating Americans would have created the illusion of greater support for radical ideas than actually existed.
  • Real users “like” posts shared by trolls and bots and share them on their own news feeds, so that small investments in advertising and memes posted to Facebook groups would reach tens of millions of people.
  • A similar strategy prevailed on other platforms, including Twitter. Both techniques, bots and trolls, take time and money to develop—but the payoff would have been huge.
  • 2016 was just the beginning. Without immediate and aggressive action from Washington, bad actors of all kinds would be able to use Facebook and other platforms to manipulate the American electorate in future elections.
  • Renee DiResta, an expert in how conspiracy theories spread on the internet. Renee described how bad actors plant a rumor on sites like 4chan and Reddit, leverage the disenchanted people on those sites to create buzz, build phony news sites with “press” versions of the rumor, push the story onto Twitter to attract the real media, then blow up the story for the masses on Facebook.
  • It was sophisticated hacker technique, but not expensive. We hypothesized that the Russians were able to manipulate tens of millions of American voters for a sum less than it would take to buy an F-35 fighter jet.
  • Algorithms can be beautiful in mathematical terms, but they are only as good as the people who create them. In the case of Facebook and Google, the algorithms have flaws that are increasingly obvious and dangerous.
  • Thanks to the U.S. government’s laissez-faire approach to regulation, the internet platforms were able to pursue business strategies that would not have been allowed in prior decades. No one stopped them from using free products to centralize the internet and then replace its core functions.
  • To the contrary: the platforms help people self-segregate into like-minded filter bubbles, reducing the risk of exposure to challenging ideas.
  • No one stopped them from running massive social and psychological experiments on their users. No one demanded that they police their platforms. It has been a sweet deal.
  • Facebook and Google are now so large that traditional tools of regulation may no longer be effective.
  • The largest antitrust fine in EU history bounced off Google like a spitball off a battleship.
  • It reads like the plot of a sci-fi novel: a technology celebrated for bringing people together is exploited by a hostile power to drive people apart, undermine democracy, and create misery. This is precisely what happened in the United States during the 2016 election.
  • We had constructed a modern Maginot Line—half the world’s defense spending and cyber-hardened financial centers, all built to ward off attacks from abroad—never imagining that an enemy could infect the minds of our citizens through inventions of our own making, at minimal cost
  • Not only was the attack an overwhelming success, but it was also a persistent one, as the political party that benefited refuses to acknowledge reality. The attacks continue every day, posing an existential threat to our democratic processes and independence.
  • Facebook, Google, Twitter, and other platforms were manipulated by the Russians to shift outcomes in Brexit and the U.S. presidential election, and unless major changes are made, they will be manipulated again. Next time, there is no telling who the manipulators will be.
  • Unfortunately, there is no regulatory silver bullet. The scope of the problem requires a multi-pronged approach.
  • Polls suggest that about a third of Americans believe that Russian interference is fake news, despite unanimous agreement to the contrary by the country’s intelligence agencies. Helping those people accept the truth is a priority. I recommend that Facebook, Google, Twitter, and others be required to contact each person touched by Russian content with a personal message that says, “You, and we, were manipulated by the Russians. This really happened, and here is the evidence.” The message would include every Russian message the user received.
  • This idea, which originated with my colleague Tristan Harris, is based on experience with cults. When you want to deprogram a cult member, it is really important that the call to action come from another member of the cult, ideally the leader.
  • decentralization had a cost: no one had an incentive to make internet tools easy to use. Frustrated by those tools, users embraced easy-to-use alternatives from Facebook and Google. This allowed the platforms to centralize the internet, inserting themselves between users and content, effectively imposing a tax on both sides. This is a great business model for Facebook and Google—and convenient in the short term for customers—but we are drowning in evidence that there are costs that society may not be able to afford.
  • Second, the chief executive officers of Facebook, Google, Twitter, and others—not just their lawyers—must testify before congressional committees in open session
  • This is important not just for the public, but also for another crucial constituency: the employees who keep the tech giants running. While many of the folks who run Silicon Valley are extreme libertarians, the people who work there tend to be idealists. They want to believe what they’re doing is good. Forcing tech CEOs like Mark Zuckerberg to justify the unjustifiable, in public—without the shield of spokespeople or PR spin—would go a long way to puncturing their carefully preserved cults of personality in the eyes of their employees.
  • We also need regulatory fixes. Here are a few ideas.
  • First, it’s essential to ban digital bots that impersonate humans. They distort the “public square” in a way that was never possible in history, no matter how many anonymous leaflets you printed.
  • At a minimum, the law could require explicit labeling of all bots, the ability for users to block them, and liability on the part of platform vendors for the harm bots cause.
  • Second, the platforms should not be allowed to make any acquisitions until they have addressed the damage caused to date, taken steps to prevent harm in the future, and demonstrated that such acquisitions will not result in diminished competition.
  • An underappreciated aspect of the platforms’ growth is their pattern of gobbling up smaller firms—in Facebook’s case, that includes Instagram and WhatsApp; in Google’s, it includes YouTube, Google Maps, AdSense, and many others—and using them to extend their monopoly power.
  • This is important, because the internet has lost something very valuable. The early internet was designed to be decentralized. It treated all content and all content owners equally. That equality had value in society, as it kept the playing field level and encouraged new entrants.
  • There’s no doubt that the platforms have the technological capacity to reach out to every affected person. No matter the cost, platform companies must absorb it as the price for their carelessness in allowing the manipulation.
  • Third, the platforms must be transparent about who is behind political and issues-based communication.
  • Transparency with respect to those who sponsor political advertising of all kinds is a step toward rebuilding trust in our political institutions.
  • Fourth, the platforms must be more transparent about their algorithms. Users deserve to know why they see what they see in their news feeds and search results. If Facebook and Google had to be up-front about the reason you’re seeing conspiracy theories—namely, that it’s good for business—they would be far less likely to stick to that tactic
  • Allowing third parties to audit the algorithms would go even further toward maintaining transparency. Facebook and Google make millions of editorial choices every hour and must accept responsibility for the consequences of those choices. Consumers should also be able to see what attributes are causing advertisers to target them.
  • Fifth, the platforms should be required to have a more equitable contractual relationship with users. Facebook, Google, and others have asserted unprecedented rights with respect to end-user license agreements (EULAs), the contracts that specify the relationship between platform and user.
  • All software platforms should be required to offer a legitimate opt-out, one that enables users to stick with the prior version if they do not like the new EULA.
  • “Forking” platforms between old and new versions would have several benefits: increased consumer choice, greater transparency on the EULA, and more care in the rollout of new functionality, among others. It would limit the risk that platforms would run massive social experiments on millions—or billions—of users without appropriate prior notification. Maintaining more than one version of their services would be expensive for Facebook, Google, and the rest, but in software that has always been one of the costs of success. Why should this generation get a pass?
  • Sixth, we need a limit on the commercial exploitation of consumer data by internet platforms. Customers understand that their “free” use of platforms like Facebook and Google gives the platforms license to exploit personal data. The problem is that platforms are using that data in ways consumers do not understand, and might not accept if they did.
  • Not only do the platforms use your data on their own sites, but they also lease it to third parties to use all over the internet. And they will use that data forever, unless someone tells them to stop.
  • There should be a statute of limitations on the use of consumer data by a platform and its customers. Perhaps that limit should be ninety days, perhaps a year. But at some point, users must have the right to renegotiate the terms of how their data is used.
  • Seventh, consumers, not the platforms, should own their own data. In the case of Facebook, this includes posts, friends, and events—in short, the entire social graph. Users created this data, so they should have the right to export it to other social networks.
  • It would be analogous to the regulation of the AT&T monopoly’s long-distance business, which led to lower prices and better service for consumers.
  • Eighth, and finally, we should consider that the time has come to revive the country’s traditional approach to monopoly. Since the Reagan era, antitrust law has operated under the principle that monopoly is not a problem so long as it doesn’t result in higher prices for consumers.
  • Under that framework, Facebook and Google have been allowed to dominate several industries—not just search and social media but also email, video, photos, and digital ad sales, among others—increasing their monopolies by buying potential rivals like YouTube and Instagram.
  • While superficially appealing, this approach ignores costs that don’t show up in a price tag. Addiction to Facebook, YouTube, and other platforms has a cost. Election manipulation has a cost. Reduced innovation and shrinkage of the entrepreneurial economy has a cost. All of these costs are evident today. We can quantify them well enough to appreciate that the costs to consumers of concentration on the internet are unacceptably high.
carolinehayter

Teachers Say Laws Banning Critical Race Theory Are Putting A Chill On Their Lessons : NPR - 0 views

www.npr.org/...are-leading-to-self-censorship

politics us Culture policy history gop

shared by carolinehayter on 30 May 21 - No Cached
  • As Republican lawmakers across the country advance state bills that would limit how public school teachers can discuss race in their classrooms, educators say the efforts are already having a chilling effect on their lessons.
  • In recent weeks, Republican legislatures in roughly half a dozen states have either adopted or advanced bills purporting to take aim at the teaching of critical race theory, an academic approach that examines how race and racism function in law and society.
  • Conservatives have made the teaching of critical race theory a rallying cry in the culture wars, calling it divisive and unpatriotic for forcing students to consider the influence of racism in situations where they might not see it otherwise.
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • educators say the newly adopted and proposed laws are already forcing teachers to second-guess whether they can lead students in conversations about race and structural racism that many feel are critical at a time the nation is navigating an important reckoning on those issues.
  • In Texas, a bill that has passed both chambers of the Republican-controlled Legislature would impose restrictions similar to Oklahoma's, including banning public universities from requiring students to take diversity training. It would also require teachers who discuss ugly episodes in history, or controversial current events, to explore "contending perspectives without giving deference to any one perspective."
  • "What if they say the wrong thing?" Lewis said. "What if somebody in their class during the critical thinking brings up the word oppression or systemic racism? Are they in danger? Is their job in danger?"
  • "We need to do it, because our students desire it," she said. "But how do we do that without opening Oklahoma City public schools up to a lawsuit?"
  • Lewis acknowledged that in a conservative state such as Oklahoma, there are many parents – especially white ones – who support the idea of shielding their children from uncomfortable conversations about race. But she said that's why they're so important.
  • Texas teachers already feel that pressure, including one of her colleagues who during the pandemic gave students a virtual lesson on race and prejudice in U.S. society.
  • "Then he wrote an email to the administration complaining that the teacher was accusing his child of being a racist when they were having a conversation about implicit bias and what implicit bias is and how it affects us," Dougherty said.
  • She said she knows teachers who are already self-censoring. They're "afraid to speak out on issues because they feel there are going to be repercussions from their districts," she said.
  • "Does the state of Texas want me to stand up and spend class time saying, well, let's look at all sides of this topic?" Kleiman said. "I don't think that's what the state of Texas wants. But that's what this bill does." Facebook Twitter Flipboard Email
carolinehayter

The U.S. Has Banned Seafood From A Chinese Company Over Suspicions Of Forced Labor : NPR - 0 views

www.npr.org/...over-suspicions-of-forced-labo

politics us policy economics

shared by carolinehayter on 30 May 21 - No Cached
  • U.S. Customs and Border Protection has imposed a new import ban on seafood from a fleet of Chinese fishing vessels, after a year-long investigation uncovered what U.S. officials called signs of forced labor within the fleet's operations.
  • The agency said it identified at least 11 indicators of forced labor across the company's fleet, "including physical violence, withholding of wages, and abusive working and living conditions." The allegations include abuses against many Indonesian workers.
  • According to CBP officials, this is the first U.S. ban on imports from an entire fishing fleet, as opposed to individual vessels targeted in the past.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • "Companies that exploit their workers have no place doing business in the United States," said Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas in a statement. "Products made from forced labor not only exploit workers, but hurt American businesses and expose consumers to unethical purchases."
  • Earlier this week, U.S. Trade Representative Katherine Tai also called attention to the issue of forced labor on fishing vessels, submitting a proposal to the World Trade Organization to curb subsidies to fishing activities that involve the use of forced labor and requiring that member countries recognize the problem.
  • The Trump administration, during its last week in office, implemented a ban on the import of cotton and tomato products from China's Xinjiang region. The sweeping prohibition followed allegations that products were being produced by Uighur Muslims working under involuntary conditions and forced labor.
  • In September, in a similar effort, the U.S. prohibited the import of certain Chinese-made hair products, apparel and computer parts over concerns of forced labor — again in the Xinjiang region.
  • "DHS will continue to aggressively investigate the use of forced labor by distant water fishing vessels, and by a wide range of other industries," said Secretary Mayorkas in a news briefing. "Producers and U.S. importers alike should understand that there will be consequences for entities that attempt to exploit workers to sell goods in the United States." Facebook Twitter Flipboard Email
mariedhorne

Law-Firm Clients Demand More Black Attorneys - WSJ - 0 views

www.wsj.com/...re-black-attorneys-11604313000

BLM protest

shared by mariedhorne on 02 Nov 20 - No Cached
  • Companies including Microsoft Corp. MSFT -1.10% , U.S. Bancorp, Uber Technologies Inc. UBER -1.91% and Intel Corp. INTC 0.39% are asking the law firms they hire to detail how many diverse lawyers they employ and whether those lawyers are assigned meaningful work.
  • When his Chicago-based company set out this spring to buy for-profit online educator Walden University in a $1.5 billion acquisition, Mr. Patterson recruited experienced Black law partners in the three specialty areas he needed: mergers and acquisitions, finance and regulatory law.
  • About 2% of partners at U.S. law firms and less than 5% of attorneys in the lower ranks are Black, figures that have barely budged for decades, according to the National Association for Law Placement, or NALP.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • “You’ll see the same associate staffed on all the great cases and think, ‘Why am I not getting those same opportunities?’ ” said Duvol Thompson, a partner at Holland & Knight LLP. He recently helped compile a survey of 60 Black male lawyers that concluded: “The consistent challenge is attempting to rise through the ranks based on knowledge, experience and ability rather than being minimized, diminished or judged based on the color of our skin.”
  • “What gets done is what gets rewarded,” said Shannon Klinger, chief legal officer of pharmaceutical company Novartis AG , which withholds 15% of legal fees if diversity benchmarks aren’t met.
  • In any given year, a handful of the nation’s largest law firms have no Black partners. Elite law firm Cravath, Swaine & Moore LLP, which has 500 lawyers, has had one Black partner in its centurylong history.
  • Attrition rates for minority associates were 22%, compared with 17% for white associates, according to a study this year by the NALP Foundation, an industry research group, and legal recruiting firm Major, Lindsey & Africa.
  • “For a profession that’s supposed to be all about equality, opportunity and justice,” he said, “we should be first, not last.”
Javier E

Opinion | What Years of Emails and Texts Reveal About Your Friendly Tech Companies - Th... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ok-congressional-hearings.html

tech predator oligopoly monopoly policy

shared by Javier E on 04 Aug 20 - No Cached
  • he picture that emerges from these documents is not one of steady entrepreneurial brilliance. Rather, at points where they might have been vulnerable to hotter, newer start-ups, Big Tech companies have managed to avoid the rigors of competition. Their two main tools — buying their way out of the problem and a willingness to lose money — are both made possible by sky-high Wall Street valuations, which go only higher with acquisitions of competitors, fueling a cycle of enrichment and consolidation of power
  • As Mr. Zuckerberg bluntly boasted in an email, because of its immense wealth Facebook “can likely always just buy any competitive start-ups.”
  • The greater scandal here may be that the federal government has let these companies get away with this
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • the government in the 2010s allowed more than 500 start-up acquisitions to go unchallenged. This hands-off approach effectively gave tech executives a green light to consolidate the industry.
  • It may be profitable and savvy to eliminate rivals to maintain a monopoly, but it remains illegal in this country under the Sherman Antitrust Act and Standard Oil v. United States. Unless we re-establish that legal fact, Big Tech will continue to fight dirty and keep on winning.
Javier E

Will Elon Musk-owned Twitter end up as a "deal from hell"? | The Economist - 0 views

www.economist.com/...ter-end-up-as-a-deal-from-hell

musk deal twitter economist

shared by Javier E on 13 Oct 22 - No Cached
  • mergers and acquisitions that end happily do so for a variety of reasons. It’s the unhappy ones that are alike. This is particularly true of m&a deals done at the top of the business cycle, when hubris runs amok, lofty valuations make acquirers sloppy with their money and the most radical ideas are made to sound plausible. In this category sits Elon Musk’s shotgun wedding to Twitter
  • Mr Musk’s latest attempt to justify it is to describe it as a step towards a Chinese-style “everything app”. It is just as likely to go down in history as a top-of-the-market “deal from hell”.
  • the stock phrases that sum up such debacles—wrong target, wrong time, wrong price tag—already seem applicable to his pursuit of Twitter, and may explain why he has spent so long trying to wriggle out of the deal
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • the first hints of hell come from hubris. The self-styled “Technoking” has every reason for self-belief. Tesla is the world’s most valuable carmaker. SpaceX is literally rocket science in action. Yet for executives like him it’s a fine line from that to overconfidence. Sony’s Morita Akio crossed it. So did AOL’s Steve Case and RBS’s Fred Goodwin
  • The corollary of hubris is sloppy financing, another attribute of top-of-the-market megaflops. This is particularly true at the tail end of bull markets
  • as with many M&A deals, deteriorating markets can turn a flawed acquisition into a disaster. That possibility must haunt Mr Musk. The digital-advertising market on which Twitter depends has crumbled. Tesla’s own shares, the source of most of his wealth, have lost a third of their value since he made the bid (don’t cry for him, he is still worth $220bn). The deal financing includes $13bn of high-risk debt and spreads on this kind of instrument have soared
  • the repercussions are likely to be troubling. Either banks are stuck with hard-to-sell debt and suffer hefty losses or, in the unlikely event that they abandon the deal, a superhero of 21st-century capitalism faces a $44bn day of reckoning
  • Finally there is strategy. In Mr Bruner’s analysis, the worst M&A deals are done when the target is in an industry far beyond the acquirer’s “domain knowledge”. That is surely true of Mr Musk and Twitter
  • it also has a hellish side. It could pit the world’s most powerful businessman against tech regulators. It could stir up trouble geopolitically (imagine a reinstated Donald Trump weighing in, as Mr Musk has done, on Russia and Ukraine). And it could enrage China, thwarting Tesla’s prospects there. Another deal for the history books, no doubt
Javier E

Amazon Prime Day Is Dystopian - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...619265

Amazon power influence prime policy history

shared by Javier E on 19 Sep 22 - No Cached
  • hen Prime was introduced, in 2005, Amazon was relatively small, and still known mostly for books. As the company’s former director of ordering, Vijay Ravindran, told Recode’s Jason Del Rey in 2019, Prime “was brilliant. It made Amazon the default.”
  • It created incentives for users to be loyal to Amazon, so they could recoup the cost of membership, then $79 for unlimited two-day shipping. It also enabled Amazon to better track the products they buy and, when video streaming was added as a perk in 2011, the shows they watch, in order to make more things that the data indicated people would want to buy and watch, and to surface the things they were most likely to buy and watch at the very top of the page.
  • And most important, Prime habituated consumers to a degree of convenience, speed, and selection that, while unheard-of just years before, was made standard virtually overnight.
  • ...26 more annotations...
  • “It is genius for the current consumer culture,” Christine Whelan, a clinical professor of consumer science at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, told me. “It encourages and then meets the need for the thing, so we then continue on the hedonic treadmill: Buy the latest thing we want and then have it delivered immediately and then buy the next latest thing.”
  • With traditional retail, “there’s the friction of having to go to the store, there’s the friction of will the store have it, there’s the friction of carrying it,” Whelan said. “There’s the friction of having to admit to another human being that you’re buying it. And when you remove the friction, you also remove a lot of individual self-control. The more you are in the ecosystem and the easier it is to make a purchase, the easier it is to say yes to your desire rather than no.”
  • “It used to be that being a consumer was all about choice,”
  • But now, “two-thirds of people start their product searches on Amazon.
  • Prime discourages comparison shopping—looking around is pointless when everything you need is right here—even as Amazon’s sheer breadth of products makes shoppers feel as if they have agency.
  • “Consumerism has become a key way that people have misidentified freedom,”
  • what Amazon represents is a corporate infrastructure that is increasingly directed at getting as many consumers as possible locked into a consumerist process—an Amazon consumer for life.”
  • Amazon offers steep discounts to college students and new parents, two groups that are highly likely to change their buying behavior. It keeps adding more discounts and goodies to the Prime bundle, making subscribing ever more appealing. And, in an especially sinister move, it makes quitting Prime maddeningly difficult.
  • As subscription numbers grew through the 2010s, the revenue from them helped Amazon pump more money into building fulfillment centers (to get products to people even faster), acquiring new businesses (to control even more of the global economy), and adding more perks to the bundle (to encourage more people to sign up)
  • In 2019, Amazon shaved a full day off its delivery time, making one-day shipping the default, and also making Prime an even more tantalizing proposition: Why hop in the car for anything at all when you could get it delivered tomorrow, for free?
  • the United States now has more Prime memberships than households. In 2020,
  • Amazon’s revenue from subscriptions alone—mostly Prime—was $25.2 billion, which is a 31 percent increase from the previous year
  • Thanks in large part to the revenue from Prime subscriptions and from the things subscribers buy, Amazon’s value has multiplied roughly 97 times, to $1.76 trillion, since the service was introduced. Amazon is the second-largest private employer in the United States, after Walmart, and it is responsible for roughly 40 percent of all e-commerce in the United States.
  • It controls hundreds of millions of square feet across the country and is opening more fulfillment centers all the time. It has acquired dozens of other companies, most recently the film studio MGM for $8.5 billion. Its cloud-computing operation, Amazon Web Services, is the largest of its kind and provides the plumbing for a vast swath of the internet, to a profit of $13.5 billion last year.
  • Amazon has entered some 40 million American homes in the form of the Alexa smart speaker, and some 150 million American pockets in the form of the Amazon app
  • “Amazon is a beast we’ve never seen before,” Alimahomed-Wilson told me. “Amazon powers our Zoom calls. It contracts with ICE. It’s in our neighborhoods. This is a very different thing than just being a large retailer, like Walmart or the Ford Motor Company.”
  • I find it useful to compare Big Tech to climate change, another force that is altering the destiny of everyone on Earth, forever. Both present themselves to us all the time in small ways—a creepy ad here, an uncommonly warm November there—but are so big, so abstract, so everywhere that they’re impossible for any one person to really understand
  • Both are the result of a decades-long, very human addiction to consumption and convenience that has been made grotesque and extreme by the incentives and mechanisms of the internet, market consolidation, and economic stratification
  • Both have primarily been advanced by a small handful of very big companies that are invested in making their machinations unseeable to the naked eye.
  • Speed and convenience aren’t actually free; they never are. Free shipping isn’t free either. It just obscures the real price.
  • Next-day shipping comes with tremendous costs: for labor and logistics and transportation and storage; for the people who pack your stuff into those smiling boxes and for the people who deliver them; for the planes and trucks and vans that carry them; for the warehouses that store them; for the software ensuring that everything really does get to your door on time, for air-conditioning and gas and cardboard and steel. Amazon—Prime in particular—has done a superlative job of making all those costs, all those moving parts, all those externalities invisible to the consumer.
  • The pandemic drove up demand for Amazon, and for labor: Last year, company profits shot up 70 percent, Bezos’s personal wealth grew by $70 billion, and 1,400 people a day joined the company’s workforce.
  • Amazon is so big that every sector of our economy has bent to respond to the new way of consuming that it invented. Prime isn’t just bad for Amazon’s workers—it’s bad for Target’s, and Walmart’s. It’s bad for the people behind the counter at your neighborhood hardware store and bookstore, if your neighborhood still has a hardware store and a bookstore. Amazon has accustomed shoppers to a pace and manner of buying that depends on a miracle of precision logistics even when it’s managed by one of the biggest companies on Earth. For the smaller guys, it’s downright impossible.
  • “Every decision we make is based upon the fact that Amazon can get these books cheaper and faster. The prevailing expectation is you can get anything online shipped for”— he scrunched his fingers into air quotes—“‘free,’ in one or two days. And there’s really only one company that can do that. They do that because they’re willing to push and exploit their workers.”
  • Just as abstaining from flying for moral reasons won’t stop sea-level rise, one person canceling Prime won’t do much of anything to a multinational corporation’s bottom line. “It’s statistically insignificant to Amazon. They’ll never feel it,” Caine told me. But, he said, “the small businesses in your neighborhood will absolutely feel the addition of a new customer. Individual choices do make a big difference to them.”
  • Whelan teaches a class at UW called Consuming Happiness, and she is fond of giving her students the adage that you can buy happiness—“if you spend your money in keeping with your values: spending prosocially, on experiences. Tons of research shows us this.”
Javier E

Dispute Within Art Critics Group Over Diversity Reveals a Widening Rift - The New York ... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...-aica-rift-diversity-jobs.html

art criticism diversity history crisis culture economics analysis outlook

shared by Javier E on 11 Feb 23 - No Cached
  • The need for change in museums was pointed out in the 2022 Burns Halperin Report, published by Artnet News in December, that analyzed more than a decade of data from over 30 cultural institutions. It found that just 11 percent of acquisitions at U.S. museums were by female artists and only 2.2 percent were by Black American artists
  • Julia Halperin, one of the study’s organizers, who recently left her position as Artnet’s executive editor, said that the industry has an asymmetric approach to diversity. “The pool of artists is diversifying somewhat, but the pool of staff critics has not,” she said.
  • the matter of diversity in criticism is compounded by the fact that opportunities for all critics have been diminished.
  • ...12 more annotations...
  • While most editors recognize the importance of criticism in helping readers decipher contemporary art, and the multibillion-dollar industry it has created, venues for such writing are shrinking. Over the years, newspapers including The Philadelphia Inquirer and The Miami Herald have trimmed critics’ jobs.
  • In December, the Penske Media Corporation announced that it had acquired Artforum, a contemporary art journal, and was bringing the title under the same ownership as its two competitors, ARTnews and Art in America. Its sister publication, Bookforum, was not acquired and ceased operations. Through the pandemic, other outlets have shuttered, including popular blogs run by SFMOMA and the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis as well as smaller magazines called Astra and Elephant.
  • (National newspapers with art critics on staff include The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Boston Globe and The Washington Post. )
  • David Velasco, editor in chief of Artforum, said in an interview that he hoped the magazine’s acquisition would improve the publication’s financial picture. The magazine runs nearly 700 reviews a year, Velasco said; about half of those run online and pay $50 for roughly 250 words. “Nobody I know who knows about art does it for the money,” Velasco said, “but I would love to arrive at a point where people could.”
  • Noah Dillon, who was on the AICA-USA board until he resigned last year, has been reluctant to recommend that anyone follow his path to become a critic. Not that they could. The graduate program in art writing that he attended at the School of Visual Arts in Manhattan also closed during the pandemic.
  • “It’s crazy that the ideal job nowadays is producing catalog essays for galleries, which are basically just sales pitches,” Dillon said in a phone interview. “Critical thinking about art is not valued financially.”
  • Large galleries — including Gagosian, Hauser & Wirth, and Pace Gallery — now produce their own publications with interviews and articles sometimes written by the same freelance critics who simultaneously moonlight as curators and marketers. Within its membership, AICA-USA has a number of writers who belong to all three categories.
  • According to Lilly Wei, a longtime AICA-USA board member who recently resigned, the group explored different ways of protecting writers in the industry. There were unrealized plans of turning the organization into a union; others hoped to create a permanent emergency fund to keep financially struggling critics afloat. She said the organization has instead canceled initiatives, including an awards program for the best exhibitions across the country.
  • “It just came down to not having enough money,” said Terence Trouillot, a senior editor at Frieze, a contemporary art magazine . He spent nearly three years on the AICA-USA board, resigning in 2022. He said that initiatives to re-energize the group “were just moving too slowly.”
  • The organization has yearly dues of $115 and provides free access to many museums. But some members complained that the fee was too expensive for young critics, yet not enough to support significant programming.
  • Efforts to revive AICA-USA are continuing. In January, Jasmine Amussen joined the organization’s board to help rethink the meaning of criticism for a younger generation.
  • Amussen, 33, is the editor of Burnaway, which focuses on criticism in the American South and often features young Black artists. (The magazine started in 2008 in response to layoffs at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution’s culture section and now runs as a nonprofit with four full-time employees and a budget that mostly consists of grants.)
James Flanagan

1.6 Billion Rounds Of Ammo For Homeland Security? It's Time For A National Conversation... - 1 views

www.forbes.com/...me-for-a-national-conversation

shared by James Flanagan on 12 Mar 13 - No Cached
  • the Department of Homeland Security has issued an open purchase order for 1.6 billion rounds of ammunition. 
  • some of this purchase order is for hollow-point rounds, forbidden by international law for use in war, along with a frightening amount specialized for snipers
  • DHS now is showing off its acquisition of heavily armored personnel carriers, repatriated from the Iraqi and Afghani theaters of operation. 
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • at the height of the Iraq War the Army was expending less than 6 million rounds a month.  Therefore 1.6 billion rounds would be enough to sustain a hot war for 20+ years.  In America.
  •   It is utterly inconceivable that Department of Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano is planning a coup d’etat against President Obama, and the Congress, to install herself as Supreme Ruler of the United States of America.
  • There, however, are real signs that the Department bureaucrats are running amok.
  • Why, indeed, should the federal government not be deploying armored personnel carriers and stockpiling enough ammo for a 20-year war in the homeland?  Because it’s wrong in every way.
  •  President Obama has an opportunity, now, to live up to some of his rhetoric by helping the federal government set a noble example in a matter very close to his heart (and that of his Progressive base), one not inimical to the Bill of Rights: gun contro
  • The federal government can (for a nice change) begin practicing what it preaches by controlling itself.
Javier E

In Yahoo, Another Example of the Buyback Mirage - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ple-of-the-buyback-mirage.html

stock market repurchase shareholder company EPS valuation

shared by Javier E on 26 Mar 16 - No Cached
  • It is one of the great investment conundrums of our time: Why do so many stockholders cheer when a company announces that it’s buying back shares?
  • Stated simply, repurchase programs can be hazardous to a company’s long-term financial health and often signal a management that has run out of better ways to invest in the business.
  • given the enormous popularity of buybacks nowadays, those that are harmful probably outnumber the beneficial.
  • ...14 more annotations...
  • Consider Yahoo. The company bought back shares worth $6.6 billion from 2008 to 2014, according to Robert L. Colby, a retired investment professional and developer of Corequity, an equity valuation service used by institutional investors. These purchases helped increase Yahoo’s earnings per share about 16 percent annually, on average.
  • a company’s overall profit growth is unaffected by share buybacks. And comparing increases in earnings per share with real profit growth reveals the impact that buybacks have on that particular measure. Call it the buyback mirage.
  • Those who run companies like buybacks because they make their earnings look better on a per-share basis. When fewer shares are outstanding, each one technically earns more.
  • But Mr. Colby pointed out that buybacks provide only a one-time benefit, while smart investments in a company’s operations can generate years of gains.
  • Given these figures, Mr. Colby reckoned that Yahoo, if it had invested that same amount of money in its operations, would have had to generate only a 3.2 percent after-tax return to produce overall net profit growth of 16 percent annually over those years.
  • But a good bit of that performance was the buyback mirage. Growth in Yahoo’s overall net profits came in at about 11 percent annually
  • Mr. Colby said his research “confirms my suspicion that while buybacks are not universally bad, they are being practiced far more broadly and without as much analysis as there should be.”
  • Perhaps the crucial flaw in buybacks is that they reward sellers of a company’s stock over its long-term holders. That’s because a company announcing a repurchase program usually sees its stock price pop in the short term. But passive investors, such as index funds, and other long-term holders gain little from the programs.
  • Another hazard: companies that spend billions to repurchase stock without substantially shrinking the number of shares outstanding. That’s because in these circumstances, prized corporate cash is used to buy back shares that offset stock grants bestowed on company executives in rich compensation plans.
  • And there are plenty of companies whose buybacks have simply left them with less money to invest in more promising opportunities. Advertisement Continue reading the main story “By throwing away money on buybacks, companies are giving up on the ability to grow in the future,”
  • proposals ask the companies to adopt a policy of excluding the effect of stock buybacks from any performance metrics they use to determine executive pay packages.
  • At 3M, for example, research and development expenditures plus strategic acquisitions have totaled $22 billion over the last five years, Mr. Kanzer said. In the meantime, the company’s buyback program has cost $21 billion.
  • “You really have to ask why a company’s board decides to return a big chunk of capital instead of replacing managers with ones who can figure out how to develop the operations,”
  • “If the board doesn’t think it’s worth investing in the company’s future,” Mr. Lutin added, “how can a shareholder justify continuing to hold the stock, or voting for directors who’ve given up?”
Conner Armstrong

Russia's Capital Outflows at Whopping $63 Billion in 2013 - Emerging Europe Real Time -... - 0 views

blogs.wsj.com/...at-whopping-63-billion-in-2013

russia economic capital billion

shared by Conner Armstrong on 17 Jan 14 - No Cached
  • Russia’s central bank forecast that net capital outflows would shrink in line with the country’s current account surplus. But the bank now says a net sum of $63 billion flowed out of the country last year, even as the surplus—money from trade, money transactions and investment revenues—more than halved.
  • Analysts say it was because state oil firm OAO Rosneft’s acquisition of TNK-BP for some $60 billion boosted the number, although it’s not clear what part of the complex deal was counted as outflows.
  • The Economy Ministry has forecast that net capital outflows will fall this year to $30 billion.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • Meanwhile, the current account surplus fell to $33 billion in 2013 from $72 billion.
  • Demand for foreign currencies plays a role as Russians travel abroad more and more each year, said Mr. Pantyushin. Higher payments for corporate loans obtained abroad also contributed to the capital flight.
Javier E

The Influence of Fiorina at Lucent, in Hindsight - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...na-at-lucent-in-hindsight.html

election 2016 GOP candidate

shared by Javier E on 22 Sep 15 - No Cached
  • her celebrated tenure at Lucent has been clouded by what happened two years after she left in 1999. The once-highflying business worth more than $250 billion at its peak nearly collapsed in the face of an accounting scandal and the telecommunications bust. The company laid off 50,000 employees in 2001 alone. Today the company, after merging with Alcatel of France, is worth only about $10 billion.
  • Lucent, like some its rivals, artificially burnished its financial performance through vendor financing — lending money to customers so they could buy its products. In 2004, the company settled charges brought by the Securities and Exchange Commission that accused it of perpetrating a $1.1 billion accounting fraud.
  • “It’s unlikely she would have been considered for the HP job once it became clear that Lucent’s success had more to do with loose credit terms and creative accounting than any reinvention of the company as the Second Coming of Cisco,”
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  • While Mrs. Fiorina wasn’t responsible for the accounting fraud — she was never accused of being involved in any financial shenanigans — she did work with, and helped support, some of the employees who came under legal scrutiny for acts that took place after she left. One of those executives was Nina Aversano, a senior executive at Lucent who played a role in the company’s aggressive sales and accounting tactics. Mrs. Fiorina, somewhat famously inside of Lucent, literally kissed the feet of Ms. Aversano on stage in front of hundreds of employees after a particularly good quarter.
  • Scott Woolley of Fortune magazine wrote a deeply reported story in 2010 during Ms. Fiorina’s unsuccessful Senate campaign in California that detailed a questionable deal she championed. Mr. Woolley focused on a vendor-financed transaction with a small company, PathNet, a sale that was valued at as much as $2.1 billion, though PathNet had only $1.6 million in annual revenue. It later filed for bankruptcy.
  • Ms. Endlich Heffernan’s book connects Mrs. Fiorina to two other failures while she was at Lucent. In one, Mrs. Fiorina was assigned to run Lucent’s consumer products business. Perhaps that division was always destined for failure — it included Lucent’s handset business just as the world was pivoting to mobile communications. But Mrs. Fiorina orchestrated a joint venture with the Dutch electronics giant Philips Electronics that turned out to be a mess, one that she later told The Wall Street Journal was the biggest mistake of her career.
  • Then there was Lucent’s 1999 acquisition of Ascend Communications for more than $22 billion. That deal may go down in history as one of the worst. Again, however, Mrs. Fiorina wasn’t in charge at Lucent. Was she consulted on the transaction? Yes. But she didn’t try to object to it.
  • Donald Trump was right when he said during the debate last week: “You know, if you look at what happened at Lucent under her tenure, it was not a good picture.”
Javier E

The Possibilities of Online Learning - Room for Debate - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ssibilities-of-online-learning

online courses education K-12

shared by Javier E on 06 Apr 11 - No Cached
  • Information access represents the tiniest fraction of what it means to be educated. As long as education is viewed as the acquisition of information, most often transmitted by a teacher or pulled from the Web, then efforts to drive down costs, cut programs, layoff teachers and privatize schools seem viable.
  • My colleagues and I have demonstrated that online environments focused on collaboration and action, rather than reading and test-taking, can be more social, creative, substantial and personally meaningful than traditional classes. Learning is no longer bound by artificial schedules, random teacher assignments or age segregation. Students feel more connected than in “school” where talking is the No. 1 infraction and teacher access is severely curtailed. When work is public, peers learn from it and support reciprocal growth. Everyone is a teacher and learner all of the time. The quality of work benefits from the extra time, collaboration and expertise.
  • Done well, online learning could supplement classroom instruction, offer experiences otherwise impossible, support 24/7 learning and break down barriers of geography, wealth or culture.
Javier E

Ta-Nehisi Coates defines a new race beat - Columbia Journalism Review - 0 views

www.cjr.org/...ehisi_coates_defines_a_new.php

history culture race racism American idea exceptionalism journalism slavery freedom empathy white privilege

shared by Javier E on 25 Mar 15 - No Cached
  • “The Case for Reparations,” Coates’ 16,000-word cover story for The Atlantic, where he is a national correspondent. Published online in May, it was a close look at housing discrimination, such as redlining, that was really about the need for America to take a brutally honest look in the mirror and acknowledge its deep racial divisions.
  • The story broke a single-day traffic record for a magazine story on The Atlantic’s website, and in its wake, Politico named him to its list of 50 thinkers changing American politics
  • Coates believes that if there is an answer to contemporary racism, it lies in confronting the pas
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  • When an event becomes news, there is often an implication that it is an exception—that the world is mostly working as it should and this event is newsworthy because it’s an aberration. If the race-related stories we see most often in the media are about personal bigotry, then our conception of racism is limited to the bigoted remarks or actions—racism becomes little more than uttering the n-word.
  • he came to see black respectability—the idea that, to succeed, African-Americans must stoically prevail against the odds and be “twice as good” as white people to get the same rights—as deeply immoral.
  • For Coates, true equality means “black people in this country have the right to be as mediocre as white people,” he says. “Not that individual black people will be as excellent, or more excellent, than other white people.”
  • he cites research that in 1860 slaves were the largest asset in the US economy. “It is almost impossible to think of democracy, as it was formed in America, without the enslavement of African-Americans,” he says. “Not that these things were bumps in the road along the way, but that they were the road.”
  • Another term for that road is “white supremacy.” This refers not so much to hate groups, but, as Coates defines it, a system of policies and beliefs that aims to keep African-Americans as “a peon class.”
  • To be “white” in this sense does not refer merely to skin color but to the degree that someone qualifies as “normal,” and thus worthy of the same rights as all Americans
  • The pool where all these ideas eventually arrive is a question: “How big-hearted can democracy be?” he says. “How many people can it actually include and sustain itself? That is the question I’m asking over and over again.”
  • it is a question of empathy. Are humans capable of forming a society where everyone can flourish?
  • there was the coverage of Michael Brown (or Jordan Davis, or Renisha McBride, or Eric Garner): unarmed African-Americans killed by police or others under controversial circumstances. In each case, the storyline was that these horrific encounters were caused either by genuine provocation, or by race-fueled fear or hatred. Either way, they were stories of personal failings.
  • we miss the real question of why there is a systemic, historical difference in the way police treat blacks versus whites.
  • To him, it’s an open question whether or not America will ever be capable of fostering true equality. “How big-hearted can democracy be? It points to a very ugly answer: maybe not that big-hearted at all. That in fact America is not exceptional. That it’s just like every other country. That it passes its democracy and it passes all these allegedly big-hearted programs [the New Deal, the G.I. Bill] but still excludes other people,
  • a lack of historical perspective in the media’s approach to race. “Journalism privileges what’s happening now over the long reasons for things happening,” he says. “And for African-Americans, that has a particular effect.”
  • Even the very existence of racism is questioned: A recent study published by the Association of Psychological Science has shown that whites think they are discriminated against due to race as much if not more than blacks.
  • “So when you’re talking about something like institutional racism and prejudice, how do you talk about that as an objective reality?”
  • Coates’ strength is in connecting contemporary problems to historical scholarship. “I think if I bring anything to the table it’s the ability to synthesize all of that into something that people find emotionally moving,” he says. The irony of the reparations piece, as unoriginal as it may have been to scholars, is that it was news to many people.
  • Reporting on race requires simultaneously understanding multiple, contradictory worlds, with contradictory narratives. Widespread black poverty exists; so do a black middle class and a black president
  • Progress is key to the myth of American Exceptionalism, and the notion that America is built on slavery and on freedom are discordant ideas that threaten any simple storyline. Coates, together with others who join him, is trying to claim the frontier of a new narrative.
  • reading Coates is like building a worldview, piece by piece, on an area of contemporary life that’s otherwise difficult to grasp.
  • “To come and tell someone may not be as effective in convincing them as allowing them to learn on their own. If you believe you come to a conclusion on your own, you’re more likely to agree.”
  • It’s brave to bare yourself intellectually on the Web, and to acknowledge mistakes, especially when the capital that public intellectuals appear to have is their ability to be “right.”
  • Coates is equally demanding of his followers. Online he is blunt, and willing to call people out. He cares enough to be rigorous
  • despite being a master of online engagement, Coates insists he does not write for others, an idea he explained in a recent post: “I have long believed that the best part of writing is not the communication of knowledge to other people, but the acquisition and synthesizing of knowledge for oneself. The best thing I can say about the reparations piece is that I now understand.”
  • He is no soothsayer, telling people what to think from on high, but rather is refreshingly open about what he doesn’t know, inviting readers to learn with him. Coates is not merely an ivory-tower pontificator or a shiny Web 2.0 brand. He is a public intellectual for the digital age.
  • In a 2010 post about antebellum America, Coates mentioned feminist and abolitionist Angelina Grimke. “Suffice to say that much like Abe Lincoln, and Ulysses Grant, Angelina Grimke was a Walker,” he wrote. “What was the Walker reference?” Rosemartian asked in the comments section. “Just someone who spends their life evolving, or, walking,” Coates replied. “Grant and Lincoln fit in there for me. Malcolm X was another Walker. Walkers tend to be sometimes—even often—wrong. But they are rarely bigots, in the sense of nakedly clinging to ignorance.”
Javier E

Drones Beaming Web Access Are in the Stars for Facebook - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...in-the-stars-for-facebook.html

facebook advertising connection drone

shared by Javier E on 27 Mar 15 - No Cached
  • in a high-stakes competition for domination of the Internet, in which Google wields high-altitude balloons and high-speed fiber networks and Amazon has experimental delivery drones and colossal data centers, Facebook is under pressure to show that it, too, can pursue projects that are more speculative than product.
  • “The Amazons, Googles and Facebooks are exploring completely new things that will change the way we live,
  • Facebook’s drone team, which came to the company through the acquisition last year of the drone maker Ascenta, say they believe their solar-powered craft can eventually be aloft up to three months at a time, beaming high-speed data from 60,000 to 90,000 feet to some of the world’s remotest regions via laser. Test flights are to begin this summer, though full commercial deployment may take years
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  • “We want to serve every person in the world” with high-speed Internet signals, said Yael Maguire, head of Facebook’s Connectivity Lab. The dream — assuming regulators around the planet go along with it — is a fleet as big as 1,000 drones connecting people to the Internet. And where it is too remote even for the drones, satellites would do the trick.
  • Facebook’s effort in artificial intelligence is called deep learning, for the number of levels at which it critically analyzes information. By figuring out context, Facebook better knows why people anywhere are looking at something, and what else it can do to keep them engaged.
  • For the long term, Mr. Zuckerberg hopes Facebook’s A.I. will translate languages on the fly, know strangers you might meet and, of course, bring you the highest-value ads
  • Because, in the end, it’s still about getting you to look at more ads.“The fundamental thing about advertising is people paying to get a message in front of you,” Mr. Schroepfer said. “That won’t go away in my life, though the form may change.”
katyshannon

The Rationale Behind Verizon's Interest in Yahoo's Web Business - Bloomberg Business - 0 views

www.bloomberg.com/...terest-in-yahoo-s-web-business

verizon interest rationale yahoo web business bloomberg economic

shared by katyshannon on 10 Dec 15 - No Cached
  • Verizon Communications Inc. wants to attract teens and millennials who are more used to watching videos on their mobile phones than on a TV in a living room. Yahoo! Inc., which is spinning out its main Web business, has been investing heavily in online-video content.
  • So it’s probably not a coincidence that executives at the largest U.S. wireless carrier were chattier than usual this week when asked the question: Would Verizon be interested in buying Yahoo’s Internet assets?
  • Chief Executive Officer Lowell McAdam and Chief Financial Officer Fran Shammo, using similar language, both said within the past two days that Verizon would look at a Yahoo deal "if it made sense," instead of declining to comment. 
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  • Both Yahoo and Verizon have staked their future on mobile Internet and video growth. On paper, a deal would make sense. New York-based Verizon has already shown a willingness to buy Internet properties with its $4.4 billion acquisition of AOL in June. Yahoo’s Web business, which could fetch a price of $3 billion to $3.5 billion, based on analysts’ estimates, will be spun out as part of Yahoo’s tax-saving move to return the value of its $31 billion stake in Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. to shareholders.
  • Yahoo’s board has said that it’s not putting the company up for sale, and that the move is the best way to deal with the Alibaba holdings.
  • "Yahoo would help check several boxes in what Verizon is looking to build at the moment with a cross-platform ad strategy and new video offerings," said Jan Dawson, an analyst at Jackdaw Research LLC.
  • Yahoo’s mail, finance, sports and video sites attract more than 1 billion users, a prized asset that would add to AOL’s 2 million users. That kind of Web traffic, along with exclusive content, is just what Verizon, with more than 105 million wireless subscribers, needs to lure and retain a new smartphone-addicted generation.
  • A Yahoo deal would also give Verizon a new source of revenue, through online advertising, especially from Yahoo’s video-ad unit Brightroll. Verizon has introduced an ad-supported mobile-video service called go90 (named for tilting small screens 90 degrees to watch videos). By seeking users and marketers, Verizon is essentially bulking up to compete with the likes of Facebook Inc. and Google, which are starting to move into the Internet space as a way to drive more users to their online properties.
  • "Verizon is vying to get a larger share of advertisers’ wallets and adding Yahoo would help strengthen AOL as the No. 3 player," said Brian Wieser, an analyst at Pivotal Research Group. "Yahoo has a lot of users in a well defined environment. That is very valuable to advertisers."
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