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Annus Horribilis – 2017 Tipping Point for Tech Determinism

Thursday, November 2nd, 2017

Annus Horriblis may be the kindest way to describe how tech platforms have fared in 2017.

Google, and to a lesser extent Facebook and Twitter, have – for want of a better description – taken a pounding from the press in key areas of privacy, corporate governance, taxation, abuse of dominant position and stifling innovation.

Let’s break this down a little, because judging by reams of negative coverage, it would seem the dopamine of bleary eyed tech fatalism has run dry.

There are accusations of stifling free speech by removing the social media app Gab from Google Play app store, or thwarting the inter-operability of Google Docs with longtime rival Opera browser. Pouring cold water on the profits of content creators by demonetising videos (while claiming to protect advertisers from having their ads shown alongside unsavory or propaganda content). Such is the power of Google’s platform that another rival browser Vivaldi, found itself kicked off of Adwords; there were the threats to blacklist publishers from AdExchange and DoubleClick for violating Google’s ban on hate speech simply for discussing remedies to it!

Google, and to a lesser extent Facebook and Twitter have taken a pounding from the press in key areas of privacy, corporate governance, taxation, abuse of dominant position and stifling innovation.

Start-ups have long since been fodder for the ‘too-big-to-fail’ tech platforms; many being acquired and with that the tech, innovation and any threat absorbed into the larger company. However, there are some that will push back.  Jagiellonian University for example, who are backing Jarosław Duda; an author of ANS video compression , whose work contributed to an open source compression technique. Sadly, for Duda, Google attempted to patent the video compression application of ANS coding – receiving heavy criticism from Polish media along the way.

Google has been panned for the broadside against innovation (closing out new tech from their distribution channel, Google Play), buying start-ups to thwart competition, patent trolling or for throwing the baby out with the bathwater with regards to hate speech (disenfranchising legitimate YouTubers using the veil of censorship).

DON’T BE CRITICAL

In August, Barry C Lynn, a senior fellow at the New America Foundation, Open Markets, think tank in Washington, D.C, wrote a blog post. In the post he commended the European Commission for fining Google “€2.42 billion for abusing dominance as a search engine by giving illegal advantage to its own comparison shopping service”.  Unfortunately, Lynn’s project received most of its funding from Google. Shortly after the post the project was canned, allegedly for criticizing Google. Merely a coincidence, perhaps? Perhaps Not! It certainly piled opprobrium from commentators on Google nevertheless.

SEARCHING FOR EDITORIAL STANDARDS

In October both Google and Facebook promoted a link to a fake 4Chan story that claimed to have the name of the Las Vegas shooter. Google presented the story as “breaking news” while Facebook’s system presented it in their “Top Stories” section.

At best each was poor corporate governance, at worst defamation. Google spread misinformation and promoted material that incorrectly identified the shooter as Geary Danley – long before Police identified the murder as Stephen Paddock.

Naturally both platforms blamed their algorithm, promised to improve “quality”, employ extra “human quality raters” and apologised. All well and good, unless you are Geary Danley.

ANTI-TRUST & TAX EVASION

There were European Commission fines of €2.42 for favouring Google Shopping in search listings over competitor sites. The EC said that Google had, “abused its market dominance as a search engine by giving an illegal advantage to another Google product.”

The EC said that Google had abused its market dominance

There was also a hefty bill for ‘funnelling’ cash from India to Ireland to evade paying taxes. In the case, “Google has been ordered to pay business taxes on 14,570m rupees ($224m) of profit to the Indian government after losing a six-year legal battle.”

However, last year Alphabet – Google’s parent company – reported global revenues of $21.5B in 2016. These are eye-watering sums, which make the fines for tax avoidance and anti-trust pale into insignificance.

This year hacking and data leaks were never far from the headlines; (Equifax, Yahoo – again and T-Mobile), the EU finally acted in relation to Facebook owned WhatsApp’s storing personal data (including that of non-users of services in 2016).  The company is facing censor from a data protection taskforce. The Article 29 Data Protection Working Party are acting in relation to WhatsApp sharing user data with parent company Facebook, despite previous instruction by European watchdogs and regulators not to do so.

Separately, the Spanish Data Protection Agency ruled that Facebook had used unauthorised user data for advertising practices, and had therefore broken local privacy laws. These fines were a symbolic rather than significant €1.2m ($1.5m) charge.

The fine for unauthorised profiling is not the first this year. In May, French authorities levied the maximum permitted fine for data breaches when fining Facebook €150,000 ($179,300).

BUT FACEBOOK IS RELIGION

Facebook hasn’t fared much better in the PR stakes and have even gone as far as to claim their handling of the Russian ad funded scandal – rumoured to have influenced the 2016 US election – as being equal in measure to the work of UNICEF!

Facebook asked, “Shouldn’t you stop foreigners from meddling in US social issues?”

Then said, “Organizations such as UNICEF, Oxfam or religious organizations depend on the ability to communicate — and advertise — their views in a wide range of countries.”

Technology has never been neutral. Technology always favours some over others. Christian Katzenbach

So, if it’s good enough for UNICEF, it’s good enough for Facebook!

Then again; “technology has never been neutral,” Christian Katzenbach, head of internet policy and governance at the Humboldt Institute for Internet & Society, a think tank in Berlin told Politico magazine. “Technology always favours some over others.”

While tech and algorithms can go awry, the underlying control is human led. Never forget that Google or Facebook are human led and did not hatch from an egg, no matter how many times Silicon Valley says “incubator” and “start-up”.

NOT TO FORGET TWITTER

If Google has been drinking the Kool-Aid, Facebook has been embroiled in the Russia/Trump election saga, while Twitter has escaped quite the same level of regulatory scrutiny, but not without issue.

Hate Speech, dissemination of terror material, and Trump himself have brought the platform under the microscope.

Hate speech [and] instances of trolling are to be treated and investigated in the same light as threats made offline.

Hate speech received focus in the likes of UK where instances of trolling are to be treated and investigated in the same light as threats made offline.

There were reports that Twitter was slowest to remove material relating to terrorism, and then there were renewed self-regulation commitments to act to suppress such material faster. The commitment came in cohort with Google and Facebook. The US and UK governments want to know which Russian backed accounts have taken out adverts in support of election candidates or in the Brexit referendum. In one response Twitter has simply removed and blocked Russia Today (RT) and Sputnik from having any ability to advertise on the platform.

AND FINALLY… THERE’S TRUMP

President Trump has been reported for bullying (his vitriol towards newscasters or individuals given as a reason), and then there is the fact that President Trump commands a huge following and engagement factor on Twitter.

He is reported to be worth $2bn in revenue to the company. Why would Twitter ban Trump?!

He is reported to be worth $2bn in revenue to the company. Why would Twitter ban Trump?!

The past twelve months have signaled a departure in some quarters from acceptance of tech determinism in mainstream comment.  Post-Trump the narrative has shifted from “too big to fail” to “no smoke without fire”.

Where better to show just how bad 2017 has been for the big tech platforms than a few Google trend searches for ‘Google Fined’, ‘Trump Russia Facebook’, ‘Fake News’ or ‘Hate Speech’, to gain some empirical (albeit shrouded) insight.

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Mindgolia or Minegolia?

Tuesday, September 19th, 2017

Three Questions to David Porter, CEO of eCampusOntario

eCampusOntario is a not for profit, owned by the 45 universities and colleges that make up the higher education sector in Ontario, Canada. It is government funded. It provides a learning directory to distance education and online education for learners, and resources and services for instructors – in total 16 000 courses and over 700 programs. Netopia talked to its CEO David Porter, who started by relaying this prescient anecdote:

“I was on a government-funded ICT research mission to Mongolia, which has an economy that relies heavily on raw materials. My host Dr. Enkhbat Dangaasuren, a former Green Party member of parliament, asked our team the rhetorical question of where the country wants to go: Are we Mindgolia or Minegolia? It was a wonderful question to guide our work.”

Will machines replace humans?

No, not in the purest sense. There will be lots of low skill, repetitive tasks that robots and automated systems will replace, but high-level knowledge and getting those machines into practice and monitoring the outcome of that work will still be human activity.

There will be lots of low skill, repetitive tasks that robots and automated systems will replace

Downstream for sure we know that artificial intelligence will increasingly be important in the kind of decision-making and application processes where lots of data can facilitate decisions. Surgery relies on both data and doctors, medicine uses lots of data right now to make informed decisions, evidence-based.

Can online learning replace schools?

I think online learning has the potential to deal with the knowledge portions of schools, and the flexibility of online education means students can build their schedules to fit their life situation.

Online learning has the potential to deal with the knowledge portions of schools

But it cannot fully replicate the social component of learning that comes when learners are together. At least not until online systems are better at those social situations where interaction happens, this part remains somewhat problematic. Having a Facebook-friend is not the same as having a real friend.

Also, many students want to leave high school and go away to college and explore. They like to pick colleges away from home in order to have the opportunity to interact with a more diverse group, face-to-face. I’m not sure how to replicate that online.

Can skills be defined? If we overly define them, do we invite automation?

Good point. The skills, needs and requirements necessary to be effective in the workplace will be more about social capability in future. Lifelong learning is a permanently in beta condition,

Lifelong learning is a permanently in beta condition

so that we have to accept how to deal with new knowledge and skills in an ongoing manner. We learn throughout life. I like the idea that was presented on stage today about a life-long learning account. This does not only support life-long learning but proactively promotes it. More and more people need to understand and deal with this reality.

The discussion on lifelong learning in the EU had a sense of newness about it today, but in other parts of the world people have been thinking about how to facilitate lifelong learning for a longer time, I believe.

Updated with the name Dr. Enkhbat Dangaasuren

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Springtime for the Hive Mind

Friday, September 8th, 2017

3 Questions to Epi Ludvik Nikaj, founder of Crowdsourcing Week-conference

The first promise of the internet was democratisation – new voices would be heard and a plethora of expressions would flourish. Today, the internet looks more like monocultures inside walled gardens, managed by mammoth companies harvesting user data. Very far from the original idea. Can new methods in crowdsourcing and distributed technology bring back the first promise? Netopia talked to crowdsourcing evangelist Epi Ludvik Nikaj to get the latest.

What is new in crowdsourcing?

Without any doubt Crowdsourcing is going mainstream and today we see it being utilized across almost every industry and government sector. The power of AI (Artificial Intelligence) will help accelerate this process by enabling HI (Human Intelligence) as a collective super brain to solve the world’s biggest problems and challenges. Today we see much more sophisticated user cases of crowdsourcing from co-creation to prize challenges. We are at the cross roads of second wave of this digital transformation and the key enabler for every individual is empowerment through blockchain technology. Think about past 25 years of internet of information and next 25 years as internet of value. And this value internet is much more exciting and empowering than the past era of internet.

What is the role of venture capital?

VC’s as platforms. This is the future not just for VC’s but for companies including governments. We see more and more type of financing being syndicated through platforms such as www.angel.co and www.gust.com for VC’s. We see platforms like https://e-estonia.com. We see platforms like https://ideas.lego.com. What this tells us that software is eating the old world and with this we are going to see acceleration and efficiency.

If governments used to rule the world, and now it’s the tech giants of Silicon Valley who rule the digital world, who will rule in the future? 

The Crowd is the World’s Newest Super Power. These were the words of a good friend of mine Joe Schmidt of Freedom United at our last CSW Summit in DC. I let the time tell, but certainly we will have a very different governance because at the heart of economic governance we have a disruption taking place as we speak and this type of disruption is too BIG to ignore it. Crowd Currencies and Initial Coin Offerings [new crypto currencies introduced – editor’s note] are gaining momentum.

 

Read more:

http://crowdsourcingweek.com/14-parts-of-the-crowd-economy-landscape/

 

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Television Post Territoriality

Tuesday, August 8th, 2017

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Digital Single Market: The Loser Consumer

Thursday, July 6th, 2017

3 Questions to Felipe Florez Duncan, co-author of The impact of cross-border access to audiovisual content on EU consumers.

The convenience of accessing film and TV programmes throughout a digitally connected Europe belies the complex and finely balanced content production industry underpinning it. Consumers value ease of access for sure, but they also value a wide choice of quality content from both international and local producers. Felipe Florez Duncan is the co-author of a recent report titled The impact of cross-border access to audiovisual content on EU consumers, which examines this trade-off in detail.  Netopia had the opportunity to ask Felipe Florez Duncan three questions.

Per Strömbäck: You have done research on the potential impact of the European Commission’s proposals on cross-border access to content – which are your main findings?

Felipe Florez Duncan: Rather than focusing on any particular measure proposed by the Commission, our research takes a broad view of the spirit of the debate. That is, the erosion of exclusive territorial licencing within Europe. As such, we abstract from the specific tools the Commission might employ which currently include the on-going pay-TV movies competition case; the recently adopted portability regulation; proposals to extend the ‘country of origin’ copyright principle to online transmissions; and the proposed geo-blocking regulation (though the most recent draft of this excludes audio-visual services).

Instead, we consider a scenario in which any audio-visual service available in Europe can be accessed by all European consumers, regardless of the Member State in which they live. This allows us to clearly examine the effect of territoriality on both industry and consumers. We find that any erosion of the established territorial licencing regime for audio-visual works will reduce the quality, quantity, and range of audio-visual productions on offer, leading to reduced welfare for European consumers.

In the short-run, consumers are expected to take advantage of the new cross-border audio-visual services available to them. There are several possible motivations for this, including cultural or linguistic preferences; price savings; quality enhancements; diversity of works available; and/or differences in timing. In response to this consumer switching, local broadcasters will reduce the price they are willing to pay when buying content from producers, to account for the de facto loss of territorial exclusivity.

We anticipate a fall of around €8.2bn in annual revenues

This has a knock-on effect on producers, who’s established funding mechanisms—such as output deals, co-production agreements or pre-sale agreements—are weakened by the resulting uncertainty around future revenues. We anticipate a fall of around €8.2bn in annual revenues, putting up to 48% of TV and up to 37% of film output at risk of not being made. This loss of content would translate into a €9.3bn reduction in consumer welfare per year.

Furthermore, over the long-run we anticipate industry would respond with a variety of measures to minimise these significant revenue losses. This could include moving towards exclusive pan-European licences; raising prices in lower-income countries to minimise cross-border revenue leakage; imposing distribution restrictions such as excluding OTT platforms; or enforcing dubbing in foreign language territories.

While these responses will reduce content loss it will also have a redistributive effect, as localised content restrictions worsen the services on offer to certain European consumers. Overall, we expect a long-run content loss of around 35%, which combined with local distribution restrictions would mean a fall of around €4.5bn in consumer welfare each year.

Importantly, as the debate has evolved, the Commission has not opposed rights holders having the freedom to licence content on a territory-by-territory basis. What the Commission objects to is absolute territorial licensing—such as the passive cross-border sales restrictions that are the focus of the pay-TV movies case.

However, when shopping online for digitally distributed audio-visual works, the active vs. passive marketing distinction is largely meaningless. Consumers already rely on passive sales tools such as social media and web-search to find the best outlets for their desired content, including from pirate or ‘grey-market’ providers. In the absence of enforceable passive sales restrictions we foresee this becoming even easier, as intermediary services spring up to help consumers find content from anywhere across Europe. As such, the freedom to license on a territorial basis may not mean much in a world where more and more content is consumed online, over-the-top.

PS: According to your research, who would be the winners if the current policy proposals on content in the Digital Single Market would come into effect?

FFD: Whereas much of the debate has focused on the short-run—asking which consumers might gain from consuming across borders—our report was careful to consider the long-run, drawing out the ‘dynamic’ effects as industry adapts to the new legal and regulatory landscape.

With this in mind, we foresee the real winners being large, multi-national platforms

With this in mind, we foresee the real winners being large, multi-national platforms as the Commission’s Digital Single Market proposals accelerate a convergence towards pan-European content licensing. These parties, which have sufficient scale and scope to both purchase and exploit the de facto pan-European broadcast rights, will be handed a significant advantage over smaller, localised operators.

However, as well as harming local broadcasters, we expect to see a knock-on detrimental effect on producers, advertisers and consumers as the market becomes more homogenised and less tailored to local markets and cultures.

PS: And who would be the losers?

FFD: Our findings are clear: the big losers will be Europe’s audio-visual consumers, who face reduced choice and quality as content producers’ European revenues decline. In the long-run, this harm is compounded further by reduced access for certain groups of European consumers in smaller and/or lower income countries, as producer licencing practices adapt to the changing incentives they face.

Overall, it is a question of priorities. Do consumers and policymakers favour a “single”, homogenised European market for digital audio-visual content at the cost of reduced output, adverse licencing incentives and redistributive welfare effects; or do they prefer exclusive territorial licencing, allowing producers to continue financing high-quality, localised works which they can make widely available at prices local consumers can afford.

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Digital Myth: The Internet Will Save News

Wednesday, July 5th, 2017

The perfect storm that hit the news.

‘I’m level 186 on Candy Crush.’ The room laughed at my joke, added at the end of a question I asked from the floor at a talked entitled ‘Can Google Save the News Industry’. The speaker, Google News executive Madhav Chinnappa, had made several references to the popular game so I picked up on that to soften my question. Google wants to present itself as a friend of the news industry, a business partner, but if you look at the evidence it will have to try much harder. Let’s assume that the free press is important and that it needs money to live, that should not be too controversial: the Panama Papers leak is but one example, revealing large-scale tax evasion by policy-makers, sports stars, business leaders and others. Transparency does not come on its own, but free journalism can make it happen, in this case when combined with internet-era phenomena such as terabyte databases and online leaks. It appears the lessons from WikiLeaks have been taken to heart: there needs to be an editorial layer. Snowden used Glenn Greenwald and several established news organisations, and hundreds of editorial teams have worked on the Panama Papers. Internet cannot replace journalism, but it can make it better. However, it seems it can also hurt it.

‘The news media let the genie out of the bottle; now they’re trying to put it back inside’.

‘The news media let the genie out of the bottle; now they’re trying to put it back inside’. This is how a friend of mine captured the news media’s current digital predicament. While snappy, is it really true? For sure, traditional news media is in dire straits – subscription revenues dropping, ad sales moving to digital competitors, cutbacks mean fewer pages in your daily and fewer reporters in the newsroom. The news organisations are trying to fight back with no lack of innovation, ‘native’ advertising formats, dieting clubs, tailored events and so forth. Some hope for patrons to save quality journalism: Amazon founder Jeff Bezos now owns the Washington Post; Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes last year acquired The New Republic. No small irony that these publicist icons are now in the hands of Silicon Valley billionaires. How did the news media end up here?

When the Web was young and ‘information wants to be free’ was still a credo that a lot of people believed in, daily newspapers had two main sources of income: sales (subscriptions and newsstands) and advertising. A rule of thumb was that sales paid for the print and distribution, while adverts paid for the content. By this logic, it looked like a great idea to publish all the content for free online, never mind the distribution and its zero sum game of cost and revenue. With free access, more readers would come and thus more advertising revenue. No shortage of new media experts sang this gospel and many publications joined the chorus. The sacrifice was severing the direct tie of the delivery to the content: no print paper hitting the doormat early in the morning; no financial exchange taking place at the newsstands on the way home from work. (I realise it was a gradual process, such things as these don’t happen overnight – in fact you can still subscribe to a daily, twenty years into this process.) This was the first part of the perfect storm.

The next part of the news business to be challenged was the advertising. Relying mainly on a single source of revenue obviously makes a business vulnerable. With the freenomics of the Web, advertising became the #1 business model not only for news media, but for pretty much all the internet services. Without the competitive advantage of paper delivery, newspapers saw themselves compete for the limited ad budgets with native digital business which could offer better deals in many cases. Concepts such as ‘buying traffic’ and ‘eCPM’ arrived. While the news media may have still had better quality content to offer, it was dethroned as the main advertising channel for many categories. Classified ads went to online services like Craigslist.com and Subito.it etc., typically broken down by country, but just as typically with one dominant player for classifieds per market, because with the law of the networks, why would you need more than one? Job ads went online, car ads, insurance ads … the list goes on. Not only specialized niche online services, but also general services like search and later video, social media and who-knows-what competed for the ad revenue. The other half of the news business revenue began to crumble.

Relying mainly on a single source of revenue obviously makes a business vulnerable.

With sales and ad revenue diminishing, the news media was left with its quality content, but that too was challenged by native digital competitors. The Huffington Post is only one example of online publications that have been accused of lifting content from traditional news media. More spectacular was the case in Spain last December, where a new law required Google News (and similar services) to pay fees to the copyright owner when showing snippets of news stories from other publications. If there was ever a need to demonstrate how dependent the news services have become on Google as a source of traffic, if the case had to be made that the power balance is skewed heavily in favour of the global big data companies, if an example was needed to illustrate the different logics of the valued pluralism in traditional media and the monoculture of cloud services, hardly any could be more convincing than what followed suit: Google News simply shut down its service in Spain, the news publications found themselves losing up to 25% of visits to their web pages and with no option but to waive their rights under the new law.

Three digital strikes brought the news media to its knees: first the loss of sales, second the loss of ad revenue and third the lost integrity of the content. Did the news business do it to itself? Probably to some extent, at least in the first step – to publish content for free online – looks ill-advised in retrospect. But the rest was outside the influence of the news organisations – it was the result of the actions of other parties.

Another blow came with smartphones and the mobile web, which allowed readers to access online content from anywhere and not only the desktop. That is of course good news in many ways, giving flexibility to users, new opportunities for businesses, new offers and new forms of culture. The news media has indeed embraced mobile in many ways; for a while it even looked like apps would save its revenues. But it also meant that another exclusive domain for the traditional newspapers – the commute. Instead of reading a paid-for newspaper on the metro or bus, commuters access the same content for free on their smartphones.

The news media has an added dimension of difficulty, freedom of expression being the foundation of its existence. While it is true that unauthorized distribution of the expressions of others has nothing to do with freedom of speech, that copyright is the other foundation of free speech, that not all data that travels in digital networks can be regarded as expressions – the ethos of news is to never go anywhere that even remotely smells of any restriction of freedom of expression. An honourable position, but in this case perhaps contributing to the difficulties.

It is safe to make the case for the importance of independent media in modern democracies. The public’s access to information, the scrutiny of power, the formation of public opinion are all central tasks of independent media. Without knocking the new sources of information that have arrived with the digital media, it is difficult to imagine democratic elections without independent media. Consider, for example, the media’s position in authoritarian regimes: it is no coincidence that the dictators of Belarus or North Korea win more than 90% of votes in elections, and that the media is loyal to the regime.

The public’s access to information, the scrutiny of power, are all central tasks of independent media.

But democracy is not the only irrefutable value of the independent media. Many of the challenges that new digital media struggle with – editorial responsibility, threats, hate speech or cyber-bullying, user comment, lack of fact verification and thus the dissemination of myths – have all been addressed by the traditional media. In addition, solutions have been developed over the years in the form of press ethics: simple things like responsible editors; signed articles; verifying facts with an independent source; giving each side of a story an opportunity to comment; rules on revealing the identities of crime suspects; protection of sources; and some system for dealing with abuse of the rules of press ethics. This continuously evolving setup has developed over at least two centuries, with the purpose of fair reporting and the formation of free public opinion. It takes time to learn; reporters go to journalism school and work with more experienced editors to understand the system. It is the topic of continuous debate within the journalists’ trade. All in all, it is a fundamental contribution to modern democracies and gives important clues as to how to deal with those same problems in the online public sphere, which suffers from a lack of fair reporting and often breeds myths and filter bubbles. That is the dark side of democratized digital media, but the exact same problem is why traditional media have worked it out in the form of media ethics. It would be well advised to put some of that insight to use in online media before it’s too late.

In this chapter, I have painted a dark picture of the situation for news media online. Is there no hope? Of course there is. The news media is still around, both in traditional distribution forms and new ones. The arrival of Silicon Valley patrons as media owners is surely not the first time in history where industrialists or vested interests have bought or started news businesses. And some of them may have the best intentions, in which case the resources can help journalism. New business and funding models have seen the light and will continue to grow. And for sure there is a case to be made for the benefits of democratized media. It’s also true that while young people use traditional media less, they’re better informed than previous generations – the bloggers, social media and streamers can do a good job spreading the news, but it can’t dig like investigative journalists can. Let’s appreciate the values of traditional media and protect them. There should be room enough for the bloggers, the patrons and the classic media. The threat is the loss of skilled reporters as news organisations cut back, the loss of revenue for independent quality media and the monolithic big data companies that concentrate power and revenue to a very small number of people. That last bit is not only for the news media to worry about.

So what was the question I asked Google’s Chinnappa? ‘Does Google share the data harvested from partners using its news services back with them so they can develop better services and offers?’ Chinnappa dodged the question and talked about privacy rights (I took that as a ‘No’), but the moderator had a good follow-up, asking if news were more important than other content, to which Chinnappa replied: ‘Everything is important.’ That says it all. If everything is important then nothing is important. If everything has the same value, my cheesy holiday videos are as important as the Panama leak. Data is data and nothing is more important than the other. No wonder conspiracy theories, filter bubbles, hate speech, organised disinformation and piracy flourish online. That is not democratized distribution; it is an illusion of democratized distribution. The absence of priorities does not make everything equal; the opposite is true: to have democracy, equality and freedom, there must be rights. There must be priorities. Some things must be more important.

Can the internet skyscrapers save the news industry? No, but they could stop help killing it by sharing their ad revenue, distributing other people’s content (even in snippets) against their will, letting news partners own their data, respecting intellectual property rights across various services, being transparent about the priorities for its search results and applying established press ethics on their online publishing channels.

Digital Myths is a series of posts published from the book 21 Digital Myths, Reality Distortion Antidote where Netopia editor Per Strömbäck takes a closer look at some of the concepts that have shaped the way we think, talk and make decisions about digital technology and the internet.

 

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Fake News as Propaganda

Monday, June 26th, 2017

3 Questions to Martin Hoffmann

– Fake-news! It’s a defamation against journalists, extolled President of the European Federation of Journalists, Mogens Blicher Bjerregård at the recent ECPMF conference in Leipzig, Germany.

The idea that fake news is not only pernicious by nature but also misleading and damaging to the role of journalists was underlined by several speakers. Fake news defame the impartiality of journalists and peddles rhetoric deemed anti-democratic on account of its non-existent veracity.
Martin Hoffmann is the author of a new report titled Concept of the Enemy II – ‘lying press’ and journalistic self-assertion which looks into the trend of violence against journalists in an environment of fake-news and unsubstantiated stories being spread in German. Netopia had the opportunity to ask Martin Hoffman three questions.

What are the findings of your report and how do you see fake news leading to claims of Lügenpresse?

We researched the connection between lying press allegations and the increased number of attacks of attacks on journalists from 2015 on. At the end of 2014 some populist movements had arisen, in Saxony, called Pegida, and from 2015 we observed an increasing number of attacks on journalists in Germany.

Firstly, we tried to verify how many attacks happened before Pegida and then 2015, -16 and -17 compared. What we observed a huge increase from 2014 to 2015, where we went from four attacks (defined as physically attacked via beating including spitting) on journalists and then in 2015 43 reports of violence often at the Pegida rallies or other populist movement like Alternative for Germany (AFD) and other gatherings throughout Germany.

 …leaders of these populist movements have from the outset claimed that journalists are “Lügenpresse”, and flagged this point via speeches, posts on social media and raised overall distrust of the media.

We observed that there is a connection because the leaders of these populist movements have from the outset claimed that journalists are “Lügenpresse”, and flagged this point via speeches, posts on social media and raised overall distrust of the media.

Many populist movements take social media posts that amplify their narrative, for instance something negative relating to refugees are presented with spurious examples like “Refugees Receive an Iphone” which are designed to bolster their agenda. They frame the conditions of what they term “Lügenpresse” and then they share the content and claim it to be mainstream media and in cohort with the government. The frame is such that they claim journalists have lost impartiality from government and are acting as a propaganda machine.

Which platforms are the worst for amplifying this phenomenon? 

The platforms weren’t part of our main research, but the main channels for them were Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and some alternative media such as magazines, or info-sheets that then take on the form of authoritative and authentic media. The reach of this kind of social media facilitated the rise of the fake news, which were self-perpetuating creating an echo-chamber or filter-bubble effect. What we know is that the fake news often lacked sources, but used statements to confirm their position.

Who should do something about this, and how?

In the first place, everyone, by challenging the posts, or tweets with an objective answer. The other side, where there is responsibility are the big strong enterprises such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and alike that have a responsibility and currently admonish themselves of responsibilities that old-media have. Thirdly, I am not convinced by the German proposal to have publishers remove posts within a week because it pushes the big enterprises to delete posts that might not actually be fake or hate speech. I think it needs further thought because the German proposition could become a chilling effect in countries where well researched media is suppressed. I think some legislation can be useful, but the German approach needs more thought. The problem we have is that commercial enterprise is risk averse, and they would rather not spend their earnings on moderation, so in the end perhaps a form of self-regulation with some strong penalties for non-compliance on a case by case basis set against the rule of law. I am a fan of self-regulation, because hate speech and fake news is not erased well enough and with a law at European level could provide an incentive for this to happen.

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The Winner Takes All: Recipe for Disaster

Thursday, June 22nd, 2017

3 Questions to Jonathan Taplin, author of Move Fast and Break Things

In the third decade of the commercial internet, concentration of power and money is greater than ever. Will this process stop or reverse? Or are we heading for a future of even stronger corporate dominance? Netopia talked to Jonathan Taplin, author of Move Fast and Break Things – a book which takes a closer look at the ideology and business of Silicon Valley’s internet skyscrapers.

Per Strömbäck: Is the “do first, ask later”-ideology the key to Silicon Valley’s success? Could it have been some other way?

Jonathan Taplin: There is a famous line from Ayn Rand’s novel, “The Fountainhead” which most tech entrepreneurs can quote by heart. The architect hero is the novel is questioned as to how he can build his radical structure. He replies, “Who will stop me.” Once libertarians like Peter Thiel, Larry Page and Jeff Bezos realized that an unregulated internet, with no privacy, no taxes and no copyright could be built, then the victory would go to the swift. The modern internet was going to be a winner takes all economy, with a single dominant player in search advertising, social media and ecommerce. A service like YouTube or Facebook could have never been built if they asked permission from copyright holders to post their material. And of course the politicians provided the “safe harbor” protection for these services that made it impossible for musicians, journalists or filmmakers to control their property. Until we get some laws around privacy and get rid of safe harbor, the creative community will be at the mercy of the Internet monopolies.

PS: How did this become the dominant modus operandus for tech? Is it the personalities of the entrepreneurs? The only way to success? An ideology? Or what?

JT: It is partially the libertarian ideology which creates a “don’t ask permission culture”. Obviously the leaders of the companies believe that they are the smartest people in the country which leads to a kind of techno-determinism. They are on a mission to disrupt all current institutions and businesses, and we (the public) just have to go along with it. Politicians are too intimidated by their money and perceived genius to push back. Of course the fact that the Internet has been an unregulated space for a quarter century makes that possible.

PS: Will the tech giants of today be around in 20-30 years? Who can challenge them?

JT: My guess is that Google, Amazon and Facebook will dominate their sectors for the next 30 years. And because they have the most money to dominate the Artificial Intelligence business, there influence will spread to many other sectors like transportation and healthcare. The amount of destruction they have wrought on the creative economy will look like child’s play next to the destruction they are about to unleash on the service economy. When 4 Million truck drivers in the US are put out of work by self-driving trucks, Google will not be hiring them to write code. They think that is society’s responsibility, not theirs.

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Saving Culture: For The Public Good

Thursday, June 22nd, 2017

Book Review: Jonathan Taplin Move fast and Break Things: A music manager’s strategy to fight the monopoly power of Google & Move Fast and Break Things: How Facebook  Google  and Co

Jonathan Taplin is one of those guys who, judged by the width of their accomplishment, seem to have more than one life at their disposal. Taplin has been a tour manager for Bob Dylan and The Band and a film producer for Martin Scorsese. He served as an investment advisor to the Bass Brothers in their successful attempt to save Walt Disney Studios and as a consultant for Merrill Lynch. Now, at the age of 70, he has felt the urge to write a book in which he develops a defense strategy for the industries and artists for whom he has been working since the 1970s. The enemy against which he is fighting has appeared on stage rather recently. The book’s title says it all: Move Fast and Break Things: How Facebook, Google, and Amazon Have Cornered Culture and What It Means for All Of Us.

Google vs American Newspapers

Taplin’s concern can easily be summarized in two sets of figures. On the one hand: Newspaper Advertising Revenues from 1950 until today. As the Newspaper Association of America’s statistics show, revenues have been rising more or less steadily until the year late 1980s – this was when advertising on commercial TV-stations began to eat up newspapers’ advertising revenues. After a short period of recovery, revenues reached an all-time-high in 2000. From that point onwards, numbers have been rapidly sinking, to a level below that of the 1950s. A similar story can be told about revenues in the music industry and the movie business. A second set of numbers gives a clue about who might have taken all the money: Google’s annual revenues climbed steadily from 0,4 billion dollars in 2002 to almost 90 billion in 2016.

The old days lasted exactly until the introduction of Napster in 2000

There a real persons’ fates behind these numbers. Taplin tells the story of Levon Helm, drummer of The Band. In the old days, groups like The Band could count on financial rewards long after they had stopped publishing new music. The old days lasted exactly until the introduction of Napster in 2000 – which set the start for the ‘free’ as in ‘free beer’-approach in the consumption of cultural products. Soon thereafter, The Band members went from a decent royalty income of around $100,000 per year to almost nothing. Levon, by then seriously ill, had to start organizing concerts in early 2000 to cover his medical bills.

Don’t be evil!

One question which arises is: How can it be demonstrated that the Google’s annual revenues and the Newspaper Association of America’s statistics really relate to each other as cause and effect – and not just happen to correlate with each other as a matter of chance? One hint which Taplin provides is this one:

“Try a little experiment. Go on your Google search engine and type “watch [insert the name of your favorite movie here] free online.” What will come up are direct links to all the major pirate sites.”

Google (and other Internet intermediaries) are actively making a business out of providing access to illegal content. This, according to Taplin, does not happen by chance, but fits well into the framework of libertarian thinking to which the founders of Google, Amazon and other big players have committed themselves. Following Taplin through this part of the story almost reads like a conspiracy theory.

Without the financial and intellectual help of well-funded think tanks and advocacy groups […] none of the Internet empires would exist at its current scale.

Without the financial and intellectual help of well-funded think tanks and advocacy groups such as “Americans for Prosperity” which are devoted to anarchic and libertarian political thinking, Taplin claims, “none of the Internet empires would exist at its current scale.” A particularly infamous role in the network play the Koch brothers, who own a natural resources conglomerate with revenues of more than $100 billion per year. The Kochs are among the main supporters of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC). According to Taplin, ALEC is the principal climate-change opposition group at the state level. The initiative has also focused on opposing insurance coverage for birth control in the US; advocated laws allowing citizens the right to self-defense if they feel their property is under attack; and has given its voice to initiatives prohibiting cities from building public broadband networks. Both Google and Facebook have been members of the ALEC from 2013 onwards for some time.

Instead of “don’t be evil” (the slogan with which Google has successfully managed to be perceived as a company acting in the public’s interest), the real philosophy which seems to drive most of the managers and owners of the major US-companies (which happen to operate in the field of digital services) is an open opposition to law and government. (Tapin excludes Apple’s Steve Jobs and Tim Cook as well as Mark Zuckerberg to some extent from this general accusation.)

Monopoly power

Although fascinating, all this is not more as a side story. What stands as a general fact is that Internet intermediaries such as Google and Facebook do make a business out of giving access to music, movies and books. They do it in such a way those actors that are involved in creating and curating that very content can be easily hurt and probably actually are hurt. This must not happen necessarily in illegal ways. Google and Facebook, as Taplin points out, are de facto monopolies. Facebook strives for a monopoly over access to consumers and citizens. Once established, such a monopoly can be quite profitable: Facebook could charge publishers (who then have no other means to sell their products) for access to its 1.6 billion users! Monopoly power is also useful when it comes to manipulate public opinion. In order to fight against Anti-Piracy regulations, Google more than once relied upon the reach of the Google landing page in order to successfully start and support public campaigns.

Fighting back!

Here are some of the counter-measures Taplin proposes:

>> Antitrust-legislation should be equipped with a further-reaching rationale. Instead of only addressing issues of consumer protection, antitrust-legislation should be equipped with the mandate to fight for the public good. Taplin does not bother himself with the question if this is possible within the given constitutional frameworks. Rather, he gives compelling reasons why antitrust should be equipped in such way. It’s for preserving the arts! In a nutshell: Along with the Internet revolution, we are witnessing an inflation of content. This is because for Google and Facebook, it doesn’t make a difference whether a New York Times article or a porn site is delivered to the user. “The New York Times spends millions of dollars on its content and expects to receive premium ad rates based on the quality ‘environment’ those ads will be featured in”, writes Taplin. “But programmatic advertising [on Google or Facebook] destroys that whole value proposition.”

>> Public benefits can be gained from the fact that services provided by Internet Intermediaries are in the hands of just a few big players. (I reach more friends when all of them are on Facebook, and it’s easier for me to organize my dates when emails, calendar and other functions all have seamlessly merged into one and the same family of Google-Apps.) Therefore, regulation should not aim to destroy these monopolies, but rather treat these as “public utilities” or “public infrastructures”. This would imply that like Google & Co. should be run on the basis of licenses provided for by the state. As part of such an agreement, Taplin suggests, Google could be required to license every patent it owns for a nominal fee to any American company that asks for it. (“It would have to license its search algorithms, Android patents, self-driving car patents, smart-thermostat patents, advertising-exchange patents, Google Maps patents, Google Now patents, virtual-reality patents, and thousands of others.”)

>> Concerning copyright protection, Internet intermediaries must shoulder greater responsibility for fighting illegal content on their sites. Taplin: “An amendment to the law needs to be written, stating that once a takedown notice has been filed, it is the responsibility of the website to keep the content down” (“take down, stay down”). Concerning fair use, an institution such as “the Library of Congress should issue a set of guidelines […].When a YouTube user uploads a clip (asserting fair use) of a piece of work that Content ID identifies as being blocked by the copyright holder, the clip would be sent to a human screener employed by YouTube for evaluation […].If the clip does not meet the Library of Congress guidelines, it would stay blocked.”

These are rather concrete proposals, worth being discussed. The floor is open!

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The End of Roaming Means… Geo-blocking

Thursday, June 15th, 2017

Today, June 15th, 2017 is the end of roaming in the European Digital Single Market. A big step for the European Union, but telecom operators are not thrilled to see a big source of revenue go away. No longer will the European telephone subscribers have to pay extra for calls to other member states. At least in theory.

The telecoms have in part pre-empsaysted this policy: this writer has used a European subscription for years, paying extra for a flat rate in Europe. But perhaps the EU telephone subscribers are not as concerned about roaming as European policymakers and telecom lobbyists (or this writer for that matter) may think. A telecoms analyst tells New York Times cell phone roaming is an issue “for the few, not for the many”.

Telecoms have come up with innovative interpretations to circumvent the end of roaming. One is to simply exclude data-roaming from subscriptions, another is to increase subscription fees across the board, yet another is to decrease the monthly amount of data included in the subscription plan. While changes to the terms normally allows subscribers to change or cancel subscriptions, it appears that few have exercised that right.

The Commissioner for the Digital Single Market, Vice President Andrus Ansip, says no company should use this as an excuse to raise prices and that “the rules are strict and will be strictly applied.”. But it appears the EU telecoms watchdog BEREC is of a different opinion. National regulators are “not in the business of regulating retail prices,” said its chairman last week.

Ironically, the end of roaming may mean more revenue for telecoms, stricter terms for subscribers, higher prices on cross-border data and, in practice, geo-blocking. Who said policy-making was easy?


Image Caption:
Berlaymont Architects: André and Jean Polak, Jean Gilson, Lucien De Vestel; Renovation: Berlaymont 2000

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