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Hello. I will be Blogging today.
I know there's a lot of pressing stuff going on in the world right now, so if tweets about tech anti-trust are not where you're at rn, please mute! (I'll try to keep everything to this thread, that I am starting now,) https://twitter.com/JuliaAngwin/status/1288470730607296514
I know there's a lot of pressing stuff going on in the world right now, so if tweets about tech anti-trust are not where you're at rn, please mute! (I'll try to keep everything to this thread, that I am starting now,) https://twitter.com/JuliaAngwin/status/1288470730607296514
I found this article summarizing each CEO's planned opening remarks helpful. https://twitter.com/alfredwkng/status/1288473129187246089
. @ali_alkhatib made a bingo card, if you were hoping to play today! https://twitter.com/_alialkhatib/status/1288339408299520000
Before we start, I'm going to allot a moment of silence to the late (and great!) Vine. Sometimes, late at night, I think about emails published by the UK's @CommonsDCMS, who implied that FB played a hand in the app's demise!
See @Hamilbug's 2018 article: https://www.businessinsider.com/facebook-documents-mark-zuckerberg-restricted-vine-data-access-2018-12
See @Hamilbug's 2018 article: https://www.businessinsider.com/facebook-documents-mark-zuckerberg-restricted-vine-data-access-2018-12
We are starting in 20 minutes. Follow my much smarter @themarkup colleagues @adrjeffries @ASankin @AnnieGilbertson @colinlecher @jonkeegan @JuliaAngwin for better commentary.
Here's a link to the hearing, for your viewing pleasure:
Here's a link to the hearing, for your viewing pleasure:
Some stuff to think about as we get started: who's connected to who? @Sludge found that of Facebook's 68 federal lobbyists, "only three have never held jobs in the federal government." https://twitter.com/Sludge/status/1288462168451678208
It's not just lobbyists. Earlier this week, multiple antitrust scholars quit Yale's Thurmond Arnold Project after the director was found to have *paid advisor roles* for both Apple and Amazon.
Check out @bigblackjacobin's article on the subject: https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/ep4mx4/yale-antitrust-scholars-resign-because-director-advises-apple-amazon
Check out @bigblackjacobin's article on the subject: https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/ep4mx4/yale-antitrust-scholars-resign-because-director-advises-apple-amazon
We are delayed from starting due to a 30 minute cleaning break. Me, desperately trying to keep up with all these twists and turns:
We are starting! Rep. Cicilline and Rep. Sensenbrenner both point out how much big tech companies have benefited from Covid19.
Tech stocks have been "relatively unscathed", even as millions in the US are unemployed & on the brink of eviction: https://www.marketwatch.com/story/tech-stocks-have-weathered-the-coronavirus-panic-but-some-analysts-wonder-if-this-resilience-can-last-2020-04-27
Tech stocks have been "relatively unscathed", even as millions in the US are unemployed & on the brink of eviction: https://www.marketwatch.com/story/tech-stocks-have-weathered-the-coronavirus-panic-but-some-analysts-wonder-if-this-resilience-can-last-2020-04-27
Friendly reminder that some of those third-party businesses selling on Amazon have led to drug overdoses and death: https://themarkup.org/banned-bounty/2020/06/18/amazons-enforcement-failures-leave-open-a-back-door
...and not everyone who works for Amazon enjoys the same privileges. The company relies on a massive network of third party contractors to move packages, who usually have "scant perks or benefits," as @ceodonovan and @kenbensinger reported in 2019: https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/carolineodonovan/amazon-next-day-delivery-deaths
Zuckerberg is trying to take a very expansive view of who Facebook's competitors are. In a 2019 FAQ about their antitrust decision against FB, @Kartellamt pushed back against this idea, at least in Germany. See #4: https://www.bundeskartellamt.de/SharedDocs/Publikation/EN/Pressemitteilungen/2019/07_02_2019_Facebook_FAQs.pdf?__blob=publicationFile&v=6
Emails, emails, emails. Microsoft notoriously went down because of threads relying how they wanted to "crush" the competition: https://www.theringer.com/tech/2018/5/18/17362452/microsoft-antitrust-lawsuit-netscape-internet-explorer-20-years
Tim Cook being grilled by Rep. Hank Johnson about the App Store. It's not a marketplace, it's a feature!
Might be worth checking out @dhh's statement on Hey's trouble with the Apple App Store. The email app was rejected because it did not use Apple's payment system, despite other email services like Gmail thriving in the App Store while doing the same. https://m.signalvnoise.com/on-apples-monopoly-power-to-destroy-hey/
A nice article on geofence warrants on @ozm, if, like me, you are not super familiar with the subject: https://onezero.medium.com/googles-geofence-warrants-face-a-major-legal-challenge-ac6da1408fba
The @EU_Commission launched an antitrust inquiry last year related Amazon's ability to analyze third party seller data: https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/IP_19_4291
It's uh, interesting that we're spending so much time talking about shadowbanning conservatives.
Here's an industry that has been struggling with this issue for years, in part thanks to laws passed by Congress: https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/3kjawb/sex-workers-say-theyre-being-pushed-off-social-media-platforms
Here's an industry that has been struggling with this issue for years, in part thanks to laws passed by Congress: https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/3kjawb/sex-workers-say-theyre-being-pushed-off-social-media-platforms
My colleague @colinlecher has written a bit about how the First Amendment doesn't apply to private platforms in the past, for those who need a little help with understanding their constitutional rights: https://www.theverge.com/2019/6/17/18682099/supreme-court-ruling-first-amendment-social-media-public-forum
Counterfeits being used as leverage against third party sellers was mentioned pretty frequently! The @ilsr was the first place I read about this: https://twitter.com/stacyfmitchell/status/1288571917109264385
Is this the first AWS question?!
A little piece of tech antitrust memorabilia could be yours for $6.88
speaking of deadly content, friendly reminder that the United Nations condemned Facebook for its role in the Rohingya genocide way back in 2018 https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/mar/13/myanmar-un-blames-facebook-for-spreading-hatred-of-rohingya
Also like, @ASankin and I found that up until late April, Facebook let you target ads to millions of Facebook and Instagram users interested in "pseudoscience" https://themarkup.org/coronavirus/2020/04/23/want-to-find-a-misinformed-public-facebooks-already-done-it
We're talking about Onavo and the "Facebook Research" app, which required teens to give Facebook root access to their phones for money https://techcrunch.com/2019/01/29/facebook-project-atlas/
