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The world’s most polluting companies are increasingly being targeted by lawsuits challenging their inaction on climate change and attempts to spread misinformation, according to a new report.Research by the London School of Economics Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment found a surge in legal cases against the fossil fuel industry over the past year – especially outside the US – and growing action in other corporate sectors.People have been filing legal challenges on climate change grounds since the mid-1980s, but it is a strategy that has recently come into its own. The number of climate change-related litigation lawsuits around the world has more than doubled since 2015 and roughly one quarter of the 2,002 recorded cases to date were filed in the past two years alone.Most of those lawsuits are challenging state inaction, many inspired by the landmark 2019 ruling that ordered the Dutch government to cut its emissions.But the fossil fuel industry is increasingly within the sights of campaigners. At least 13 cases have been filed against the largest Europe-based polluters and at least two in Australia against gas company Santos. Exxon, Eni and Sasol are all also involved in challenges to government decisions about oil and gas exploration and licensing in Guyana and South Africa.The food and agriculture, transport, plastics and finance sectors are increasingly targets as well, the report finds.Many of these cases attempt to tackle greenwashing, while litigants are increasingly drawing connections “between ongoing public debates about the contribution that individuals’ consumer and lifestyle choices can make to reducing emissions and widespread concern that industry misinformation and inaction may prevent such choices from making a real difference”.Climate litigation has not seen any success in the UK yet, with all judicial reviews of government policy so far failing in court. The latest case, which challenges the government’s net zero strategy, was heard in June and a decision is expected over the next few months.But around the world it has proved an effective strategy for boosting climate action. Climate litigation was identified in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s latest report as one of several important new avenues through which climate policy is being shaped around the world.As well as forcing countries such as Germany to redraw their emission strategies, legal challenges have had tangible impacts in the private sector. South Korean export credit agency Kexim, for example, recently announced it would delay its final decision on whether to finance a gas project off the shore of Australia two weeks after traditional owners filed a case challenging it. It cited “environmental and legal risks” as the reason.Report authors Joana Setzer, assistant professorial research fellow at the Grantham Research Institute, and Catherine Higham, a policy analyst and coordinator of its Climate Change Laws of the World project, expect a continued rise in litigation challenging commitments that over-rely on greenhouse gas removal or “negative emissions” technologies, as well as cases explicitly linking climate and biodiversity.And they predict other high-emitting sectors such as steel and cement, textiles, shipping and aviation will be the next corporate targets.Their research also suggests companies should brace for claims focusing on personal responsibility (such as the duties of company directors to manage climate risks) and international lawsuits on loss and damage.However, the report is a reminder that not all lawsuits seek to advance action on the climate crisis. Energy companies have made numerous attempts to sue governments over policies that might harm their projects under the energy charter treaty – a treaty that is itself now the subject of a climate-related lawsuit brought by a group of young people. And the US supreme court is imminently expected to rule on a group of cases that could have serious implications for the country’s ability to respond to the climate emergency. | Climate Change |
NOAA via AP, File FILE – This satellite image provided by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration shows Hurricane Sam, center right, in the Atlantic Ocean, Monday, Sept. 27, 2021. Federal meteorologists say the Atlantic should expect another extra busy hurricane season in 2022, driven in part by persisting La Nina conditions. If La Niña conditions develop in the Pacific for the third year in a row, as the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) predicts, cool ocean temperatures along the equator will once again crank up Earth’s air conditioner. And once again, climate change will overpower it and deliver yet another hot year. Years ago, that forecast might have been more of a toss-up. It’s still possible — but less likely — that global temperatures dip a little before La Niña conditions switch back to normal. The cycle between La Niña, neutral (or normal), and El Niño conditions — where warm water dominates the equatorial Pacific — has historically alternated warming and cooling influences on global weather. But as greenhouse gas emissions trap more heat in our atmosphere, La Niña’s cooling effects are increasingly muted. Global warming is winning. While the equatorial Pacific may seem far away, the change in ocean temperatures associated with La Niña affects weather conditions across the globe. In the U. S., higher temperatures from the Southwest to the Mid-Atlantic are expected when La Niña is at play, along with lower temperatures in the Upper Midwest and Northern Plains. As the entire planet trends warmer, though, that could translate to extreme departures from the norm in hot spots, and not much difference in cold ones. Of course, even as warming climate trends continue, weather is erratic. Cold winter days and snow aren’t going away. In fact, snowfall could increase, partly because of winter weather patterns that La Niña influences, partly because a warming atmosphere holds more moisture, which in winter falls back down as snow — especially in the Midwest and Great Lakes. So, La Niña and climate change can team up to boost the odds of snow days across the Northern United States. That alignment can do the same for rain. In moist climates — the Pacific Northwest, along with the Missouri, Mississippi and Tennessee Valleys, and the Great Lakes — our warmer, wetter atmosphere already generates higher hourly rainfall rates, amplifying the risk of flash flooding. The influence of La Niña can mean more rain in all of those regions, so the danger is even greater. In other places, the effects of climate change and La Niña align in the opposite way: Both tend to produce drier conditions in the Southwest. The severe drought currently depleting water supplies and escalating wildfire risks will likely continue; and even when La Niña gives way to a warming Pacific, the growing influence of climate change will probably keep trending toward a hotter, drier American West. There are no guarantees, though. Conditions in the Pacific can boost the chances of regional weather patterns developing, but they don’t always materialize. This year’s unusually quiet Atlantic hurricane season is a great example. La Niña generally causes weaker winds over the Atlantic Basin, making it easier for hurricanes to form, but 2022 hasn’t produced many, so far. At this point, it is hard to say whether a warming climate makes tropical cyclones more common, but the ones that form are more likely to grow stronger and faster, fueled by warm ocean temperatures in the Western Atlantic and Caribbean. Their capacity to push higher storm surges on top of rising seas makes hurricanes increasingly dangerous and costly, so even in a quiet year the threat of a disaster still looms. The current cycle will eventually flip. La Niña will fade back to a neutral state, warmer El Niño conditions will emerge, and some of the impacts of climate change exaggerated by recent patterns might instead be tempered — but overall, it’s not making the difference it used to. Last year, La Niña pushed global average temperatures down by about 0.02 degrees Celsius (0.04 degrees Fahrenheit) and will likely prevent 2022 from setting a heat record. Even so, these have been the warmest La Niña years ever, with global temperature comparable to what we saw from the warming influence of the 2009-2010 El Niño. This is not a surprise. As long as the blanket of greenhouse gasses wrapped around our planet keeps getting thicker and the temperature beneath it keeps rising, climate change will only exert a more and more dominant influence over our weather. Lauren Casey is a meteorologist for the Climate Matters program at Climate Central. Casey specializes in communicating the connections between climate change and extreme weather. Prior to joining Climate Central, Casey worked as a broadcast meteorologist for more than 15 years. | Climate Change |
Mali Cooper parked across both southbound lanes of the Sydney Harbour Tunnel and locked themselves to the steering wheel during peak-hour traffic as part of disruptive climate protests. A Blockade Australia protester who brought Sydney’s peak-hour traffic to a standstill has had all charges against them dropped after the court found they suffered from "climate anxiety".Mali Cooper was arrested after they parked across both southbound lanes of the Sydney Harbour Tunnel in June as part of a major demonstration held by the activist group in the CBD.The 22-year-old locked themselves to the steering wheel of the car, leaving hundreds of vehicles stranded during their morning commute.The Lismore-born climate activist was charged with entering the tunnel to disrupt traffic and obstructing vehicles as a pedestrian under new laws introduced to deter protesters.Magistrate Jeff Linden on Tuesday dismissed all charges against Cooper in Lismore Local Court without conviction on mental health grounds and ordered them to see a psychologist for six months.Stream the news you want, when you want with Flash. 25+ news channels in 1 place. New to Flash? Try 1 month free. Offer ends 31 October, 2022 >Under the new laws introduced in NSW Cooper was looking at a $22,000 fine or a two-year jail sentence for their protest which was part of a major demonstration by climate group Blockade Australia.According to several reports Cooper’s lawyer Mark Davis argued his client had suffered from the trauma of seeing record floods decimate their hometown of Lismore."We are very relieved that the court calmly considered all of the facts in this case, including the psychological impact of climate change upon young people like Mali," their lawyer Mark Davis said in a statement."Seeing (their) hometown of Lismore destroyed twice in the months preceding (their) action induced a trauma in (them) that was a decisive factor in today's decision."Following the decision, Cooper said they had been deeply affected by the recent flooding in their hometown but indicated they may participate in further climate demonstrations if action was not taken by the government."I have watched the town I love be decimated by a climate disaster. I have witnessed community step up and take care of each other in place of our Government,” they said in a statement from Blockade Australia."If we stand together and resist through direct action, we have the best chance of turning this destruction around.”Cooper filmed the protest from inside their car, with the video showing furious motorists knocking on the window and screaming at them.“I stand in solidarity with First Nations people all over this continent who have been fighting for the right to protect their country everywhere,” they said.“There are some really angry people who are screaming and threatening me and banging on doors. The police are on their way and I’m not sure how long this is going to happen.“I’m a bit overwhelmed but I stand for all of us, I stand for all of our life’s support systems, I stand for this country that has held me, has supported me to grow.”NSW Police Minister Paul Toole at the time of the protest said the climate activists would face the “full force of the law” following the chaotic scenes witnessed across the city."What really they are are is nothing short of economic vandals and this kind of action and behaviours will not be tolerated in the state," Mr Toole told Sky News Australia."And let's be very clear, these (people) are not placard holders, they are nothing short of professional pests."They don’t care about people’s daily lives, they don’t care about people trying to make a daily living and this kind of behaviour will not be tolerated."Mr Toole was contacted by SkyNews.com.au for a comment. | Climate Change |
Aerial view of the Diablo Canyon, the only operational nuclear plant left in California, viewed in these aerial photos taken on December 1, 2021, near Avila Beach, California. Set on 1,000 acres of scenic coastal property just north and west of Avila Beach, the controversial power plant operated by Pacific Gas & Electric (PG&E) was commisioned in 1985.George Rose | Getty Images News | Getty ImagesCalifornia lawmakers are circulating draft legislation that would keep the state's last operating nuclear plant, Diablo Canyon, open beyond its planned 2025 closure date, although there are still significant logistical and political challenges ahead before that could happen.The plan to close Diablo Canyon has been underway since 2016. But as the dire symptoms of climate change -- heat and drought -- have been bearing down hard on the state, and delays have slowed the construction of wind and solar energy sources, lawmakers and representatives for local utility PG&E are reconsidering.The Diablo Canyon power plant currently supplies 8.6% of the state's electricity and 17% of the state's zero-carbon electricity supply. The two operating reactors are scheduled to be retired November 2, 2024, and August 26, 2025. But California is will probably not be able to ramp up its wind and solar renewable energy sources fast enough to meet that capacity."Two things changed since last year," David Victor, professor of innovation and public policy at the School of Global Policy and Strategy at UC San Diego, told CNBC. "One is the grid operators have focused even more on reliability and the challenges in maintaining grid reliability. An unreliable grid is not only bad for the economy but also very bad for politicians."California Governor Gavin Newsom also indicated some willingness for keeping the nuclear power plant open, and that helped catalyze these latest moves."The other thing that changed, which is probably even more important, is it the governor signaled his interest in a possible extension with an offhand comment to the Los Angeles Times. That was a few months ago and touched off theory of analysis and lobbying," Victor said. "That has culminated in today's proposal." Draft legislation in California legislatureA copy of the draft legislation was circulated to lawmakers on Thursday, according to Gov. Newsom's office, and was shared with CNBC on Monday.The draft legislation says that the California energy grid is going to struggle to keep up with demand."The impacts of climate change are occurring sooner and with greater intensity and frequency than anticipated, causing unprecedented stress on California's energy system," the draft legislation reads. "These impacts are simultaneously driving higher demand as more intense and frequent heat waves hit California and the Western region and reducing supply as drought conditions impact hydropower production and fires threaten electrical infrastructure."It then cites the difficulty of ramping up renewable energy sources in time to make the transition."Because of supply chain disruptions, the impact of tariff disputes, and other delays in installation of new clean energy generation and storage systems, including solar and wind projects with battery storage, there is substantial risk that insufficient new clean energy supplies will be online in time to ensure electricity system reliability when the Diablo Canyon powerplant is scheduled to be decommissioned," the legislation draft reads.If California does not extend operations of Diablo Canyon, then the state will end up depending on sources of energy that release greenhouse gasses, which cause climate change to accelerate, the draft legislation argues.The proposal would keep unit 1 open until October 31, 2029, and unit 2 until October 31, 2030. After five years, the state would assess whether the units should stay open for another five years, with a final expiration set for October 31, 2035, according to a memo about the legislation shared by the governor's office with CNBC on Monday.Newsom's office pointed out that it has been working to make it faster to bring renewable sources of energy online."In June, the state took action to streamline permitting for clean energy projects to bring more renewable energy generation and storage online," the governor's office said in a written statement provided to CNBC.PALM SPRINGS, CA - MARCH 27: Giant wind turbines are powered by strong winds in front of solar panels on March 27, 2013 in Palm Springs, California. According to reports, California continues to lead the nation in green technology and has the lowest greenhouse gas emissions per capita, even with a growing economy and population. (Photo by Kevork Djansezian/Getty Images)Kevork Djansezian | Getty Images News | Getty ImagesNot easy to reverse courseVictor is in favor of extending Diablo Canyon's life. But he also knows that a lot of effort went into the shutdown plan."And they are going to feel betrayed. So the politics of this could be very nasty. And the utility is stuck right in the middle — with big risks," Victor told CNBC.While conversations in the California legislature are a critical step for initiating the processes to keep Diablo Canyon open, there are a lot of logistical procedures and staffing needs which would need to be addressed to keep the plant open."It's hard to assess the odds that the plant will be extended, especially for the full 10 years. A year ago I put the odds at about 5 percent or so. Now I put the odds at about 25 percent to 35 percent," Victor told CNBC."The new proposal, along with federal incentives, will help a lot. But people seem to forget that there's a whole lot of machinery that needs to happen to keep a plant open. An extension needs to be filed with a Nuclear Regulatory Commission. Crucially, workers are needed and until now pretty much all the workers were focused on getting different jobs and the utility was helping them find those jobs," Victor said."You can imagine solving all these problems individually but doing it all at once on a tight schedule will be challenging," he said.If Diablo were to get try to get its operating license extended, the state of California would loan the utility operating the plant, PG&E, as much as $1.4 billion to help with the costs associated with relicensing, according to the memo from the governor's office. Also, PG&E could apply to get federal money from the U.S. Department of Energy's $6 billion program passed as part of Bipartisan Infrastructure Law which was intended to preserve the existing U.S. fleet of nuclear power reactors. "The proposed language provides a pathway for relicensing at the U.S Nuclear Regulatory Commission so that PG&E may apply for this funding," the memo from the governor's office says.On July 28, PG&E announced its second quarter financials. And in the discussion of the utility company's financial results, the CEO, Patricia K. Poppe, addressed Diablo Canyon's future."Earlier this year, Governor Newsom reached out to ask us to evaluate keeping Diablo Canyon open beyond its scheduled retirement in 2024 and 2025 to support the capacity and reliability of the state's electric supply system," Poppe said. "We're exploring the possibility of keeping this plant open for California's benefit. It is not an easy option and it will require much coordination between the state, multiple regulatory bodies and PG&E as well as many others impacted by the outcome of this decision."Poppe said that if Diablo Canyon is to be extended, PG&E needs to know soon because there are a slew of steps it has to take to be able to keep the plant online."We've got a real sense of urgency in order to transition from being in a decommissioning posture to a life extension posture. So the most important thing to us right now is that we get certainty on the decision-making. We have to secure casks. We have to order fuel. There are some very near-term items," Poppe said. "The actions that we would need to take if, in fact, we change the posture of the plant."Reversing course would be a challenge, but Poppe also noted a change in the state's feelings about nuclear energy. "We like the fact that that plant's value is being recognized by the state. There seems to be kind of a shift in the attitude about the role that nuclear can play in a GHG-free economy," Poppe said.She said PG&E would try to get access to federal funds. "We do think that the DOE funding is a possibility and certainly the state has expressed interest in maximizing that and making sure that Diablo Canyon gets included in the DOE's program to extend the life of nuclear," Poppe said. "Again nationally, I think there's been a real shift in attitude about the value of these baseload nuclear facilities. And so, given that, we're just going to continue to work through the financials, and that will be second to making sure that the plant is ready and safe and able to operate for the state."But the clock is ticking. Legislation has to be passed by the end of August, and then signed into law in September, Poppe said. | Climate Change |
While plenty of houses cook with gas, heat water with propane or even warm up with a wood stove, 26% of them use only electricity for all their energy needs. That milestone comes amid a push by some advocates to remove those other fuels from homes as a way to address climate change and save some money as fossil fuels become more expensive.As of 2020, better than 32 million houses used only electricity for their energy needs, the Energy Information Administration reported in July. That percentage is likely to increase. There are both climate and financial reasons to electrify your home. We'll discuss them below.Electrifying your home falls outside the realm of easy energy and money-saving hacks. If you're looking for some low-hanging, money-saving fruit, find out how much unplugging some appliances and turning off your lights can save you. Make sure you know when energy is most expensive and brush up on some other energy-saving tips.Why is electrification important?The big reason here is climate change. The planet is getting hotter because of emissions like carbon dioxide that come from burning fossil fuels. In the US (which has the highest per capita carbon emissions), over 75% of carbon dioxide emissions came from transportation, electricity generation and industry, the Environmental Protection Agency reports. While many of those problems and their solutions require corporate or government action, about 6% of US carbon dioxide emissions came from residential buildings in 2020. That means homeowners (and renters, by lobbying their landlords) can do something about carbon emissions on their own: They can electrify their homes. Electrification means replacing furnaces, water heaters, stoves or other appliances that burn fossil fuels like natural gas and propane with electric alternatives. One recent study found that greenhouse gases from the gas stoves in the US was equal to those of half a million cars.While electricity can come from dirtier sources like coal, the power that flows to your house is certainly getting cleaner. While burning fossil fuels still accounts for 60% of electricity generation in the US, renewable sources now make up 20% and continue to increase their share. Wind and solar power accounted for most of the new energy added to the grid in 2021. As more clean sources are added in the future, your induction stovetop or heat pump will be even more environmentally friendly than the gas alternative.As more renewable and carbon-free energy is added to the grid, the electricity you use at home becomes greener. Steve Proehl/Getty Images It's a way to do right by the environment "that doesn't require sacrifice from the consumer," said Sam Calisch, head of special projects for Rewiring America, a nonprofit advocating for electrification of homes and vehicles. Achieving electrification in 25% of American homes is a good start and an important step in solving the challenge of climate change, though progress toward major climate goals like the Paris Climate Agreement is still behind schedule. Home electrification may be a bit better than the recently announced 26%, though. The data behind that number was collected in 2020, before gas prices jumped with inflation and Russia's war against Ukraine."It's a snapshot that's already becoming outdated," Calisch said.Does electrification benefit homeowners?Swapping gas appliances (or cars) for electric ones can pay off in the long run. Shifting from forced air heating and cooling to a heat pump can save you thousands of dollars in energy costs over the lifetime of your system, according to the EPA. Energy costs are more than 6% household income for 25% of American households, according to research from the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy. That research used data from before the COVID-19 pandemic and recent inflation.Similarly, an electric vehicle can travel the same distance as a car with an internal combustion engine for a fraction of the cost. As of this writing, the average cost for a gallon of gasoline is $4.21, according to AAA. At a similar price, annual fuel costs for gas powered vehicles are about three times the charging costs of a similar electric vehicle. While electric vehicles cost more upfront, lower fuel and maintenance costs mean, over the lifetime of the vehicle, you should save. The same is generally true for home appliances. A heat pump may cost more upfront, but it saves money compared to a furnace (and can replace an air conditioner to boot). Replacing a natural gas furnace, a heat pump can save about $100 annually on average, the Carbon Switch reports. Switching from other sources of heating like a propane furnace ($855) or a natural gas boiler ($199) will save you even more.An electric stove can replace a gas one (and looks so easy to clean). gerenme/Getty Images Residential electricity increased about 7% from May 2021 to May 2022, according to the EIA. Natural gas prices for residential use increased about 11% from April 2021 to April 2022. Natural gas prices are generally more variable than electricity prices.Swapping out gas appliances from your home can also be a good thing for your health. Gas stoves can release carbon monoxide, formaldehyde and other pollutants into your home, according to the California Air Resources Board.When electric vehicles replace internal combustion engines, they avoid the tailpipe emissions that can harm human health. The EPA found that "pollutants emitted from motor vehicles can cause lung and heart problems and premature death."How the experts say to electrify your homeIt's probably not feasible to run out and electrify your home tomorrow (unless you have a bunch of money you need to spend).But, preparing for the eventuality can make you more likely to follow through when the time comes. You're less likely to get an electric water heater if you need to do research, find a qualified installer and wait for a new outlet to be put in. The prospect of three weeks of cold showers in the winter might be enough to make someone choose a natural gas water heater, Calisch said. Installing a new gas water heater locks in demand for natural gas for another 15 years or so. Replacing appliances before they die will give you the time to make sure the transition is as painless as possible and help you get fossil fuels out of your home, Calisch said."All the pieces of infrastructure hiding in our basements and laundry rooms are really important," Calisch said.Electric appliances have the potential to save you money, improve your life at home and help the planet. They're within reach with a bit of investment. | Climate Change |
Elizabeth Mrema, Executive Secretary, UN Convention on Biological Diversity, speaks to guests during the annual Reuters IMPACT summit in London, Britain October 4, 2022. REUTERS/Maja SmiejkowskaLONDON, Oct 4 (Reuters) - Next month's U.N. climate summit must do more to include the developing world, financial and industry leaders told the Reuters IMPACT conference this week, as global warming reaches a critical juncture for the poorest nations.The gulf between the Global South and the developed world, in terms of climate effects and mitigation, is coming sharply into focus ahead of the COP27 meeting in Egypt."Africa's contribution to all the carbon out there, is about 3% ... but the ten countries most affected by climate change are in Africa," Sudanese-British billionaire businessman Mo Ibrahim said at the conference. "Without power, there is no education, no schools, no jobs, no healthcare; you cannot have human life."Register now for FREE unlimited access to Reuters.comDeveloping countries are increasing demands for wealthier, carbon-emitting nations to pay for climate-induced disasters like floods and fires.Egypt, an oil and gas producer considered highly vulnerable to climate change, has positioned itself as a champion for African interests as it prepares to host the COP27 summit in Sharm el-Sheikh.African ministers who met in Cairo last month called for a sharp expansion of climate financing for their continent while pushing back against an abrupt move away from fossil fuels."There's been a broken dialogue at COP," said Julien Perez, Vice President of Strategy and Policy at the Oil & Gas Climate Initiative. "Europe and the U.S. talk to each other, but they leave out the developing world."Andrew Steer, the chief executive of Jeff Bezos' environmental fund, told the conference the Amazon billionaire's Bezos Earth Fund was seeking to build a coalition with African and European countries around the U.N. climate summit to add heft to land restoration efforts in Africa.The fund is championing a cause to begin reversing deforestation and land degradation on 100 million hectares in Africa by 2030, said Steer. The so-called AFR100 initiative is led by some African Union countries."African farmers are suffering appallingly from climate change," Steer said. Restoration's goal would be reducing carbon in the atmosphere and "better incomes for farmers, better food security, more resilient soils.""Rich countries are going to have to play a bigger role on creating resilience on helping poor countries and poor citizens to adapt."Elizabeth Mrema, executive secretary of the U.N. Convention on Biological Diversity, said there were still too many outstanding commitments from COP26 in Glasgow last year and gatherings prior to that which had not been followed through."There is no use adding new commitments if they’re not there yet," Mrema said. "This is the time to connect the dots ... no action is not an option."-----To view a livestream of Reuters Impact, please click here: https://www.reuters.com/business/reuters-impact/reuters-impact-global-virtual-broadcast-2022-09-29/Register now for FREE unlimited access to Reuters.comWriting by Jane Wardell
Editing by Mark PotterOur Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles. | Climate Change |
People of colour are four times more likely to live in areas at high risk from heatwaves in the UK as the climate heats up, according to experts.Researchers at the University of Manchester and Friends of the Earth found one in three people from minority ethnic groups lived in areas most exposed to extreme heat, compared with just one in 12 white people.Overall, almost 6 million people were found to live in neighbourhoods at risk from high temperatures, with black and brown people disproportionately represented. The average proportion of people of colour in high-risk neighbourhoods was 28%, compared with a national average of 9.5%.The top five local authorities with the most “at risk” neighbourhoods were Birmingham, Newham, Tower Hamlets, Hackney and Nottingham – all among the UK’s most ethnically diverse areas.Speaking as the temperature crept past 40C in the hottest day yet recorded in the UK, Mike Childs, head of science, policy and research at Friends of the Earth, said: “Extreme heatwaves will be more frequent and severe as the planet warms. While the UK and Europe are suffering with 40C heat, parts of India and Pakistan faced temperatures of around 50C earlier this year.“Our research … shows that the poorest people and people of colour are disproportionately impacted by extreme weather in England. This is true across the UK and internationally. The communities on the frontlines of the climate crisis also have the lowest carbon footprints – they have contributed the least but are being hardest hit by rising global temperatures.”A team led by Sarah Lindley, professor of geography at Manchester’s school of environment, education and development, identified which neighbourhoods in the UK were the most socially vulnerable to high temperatures, and compared them with the areas set to see increased temperatures in a range of global warming scenarios.They found 3,001 high-risk neighbourhoods that would be exposed to very hot weather – 27.5C or above for five days or more – with 1.5C of warming, and would be exposed to dangerously hot weather – 30C or above – with 3C of warming.Friends of the Earth also found that those who were living in areas that were most at risk were contributing least to the problem, having lower carbon footprints than average.Awareness of the disproportionate impact of climate change must feed into policy, Childs said. “Environmental justice must be at the centre of governments’ climate strategies,” he said. “Unless carbon emissions are cut drastically, we will face even more health-threatening heatwaves in the UK and large parts of the planet could become unliveable.“Action is urgently needed to adapt frontline neighbourhoods to cope with extreme weather, with more green spaces and trees for shelter, home insulation to keep homes warm in winter and cool in summer, and air-conditioned community centres for people to get some respite from the heat.”Sign up to First Edition, our free daily newsletter – every weekday morning at 7am BSTCriteria used by the researchers to identify high-risk areas included: types of housing, taking into account the added difficulty of cooling high rises and mobile homes; environmental factors such as the number of trees and green spaces; demographics, with the very old and very young more susceptible to heat stress; and even crime rates, since people in high crime areas are less comfortable leaving windows open at night.Separate research by the BBC supported the findings. Cross-referencing satellite heat map data with deprivation statistics, the broadcaster found people in deprived areas were more than twice as likely to live in places which are significantly hotter than neighbouring places. | Climate Change |
FARNBOROUGH, England — Airplanes are a minor contributor to global greenhouse-gas emissions, but their share is sure to grow as more people travel in coming years — and that has the aviation industry facing the prospect of tighter environmental regulations and higher costs.The industry has embraced a goal of reaching net-zero greenhouse-gas emissions by 2050. Experts who track the issue are skeptical.Until the COVID-19 pandemic caused travel to slump, airlines were on a steady course of burning more fuel, year after year. Today’s aircraft engines are the most efficient ever, but improvements in reducing fuel burn are agonizingly slow — about 1% a year on average.At Monday’s opening of a huge aviation industry show near London, discussion about climate change replaced much of the usual buzz over big airplane orders.The weather was fitting. The Farnborough International Airshow opened as U.K. authorities issued the first extreme heat warning in England’s history. Two nearby airports closed their runways, one reporting that heat caused the surface to buckle.As airlines confront climate change, the stakes could hardly be higher.Jim Harris, who leads the aerospace practice at consultant Bain & Co., says that with airlines recovering from the jolt of the pandemic, hitting net-zero by 2050 is now the industry’s biggest challenge.“There is no obvious solution, there is no one technology, there is no one set of actions that are going to get the industry there,” Harris says. “The amount of change required, and the timeline, are big issues.”Aviation releases only one-sixth the amount of carbon dioxide produced by cars and trucks, according to World Resources Institute, a nonprofit research group based in Washington. However, aviation is used by far fewer people per day.Jet fuel use by the four biggest U.S. airlines – American, United, Delta and Southwest — rose 15% in the five years leading up to 2019, the last year before air travel dropped, even as they updated their fleets with more efficient planes.Airbus and Boeing, the world’s two biggest aircraft makers, both addressed sustainability during Monday’s opening day at Farnborough, although they approached the issue in different ways.Europe’s Airbus and seven airline groups announced a venture in West Texas to explore removing carbon dioxide from the air and injecting it deep underground, while Boeing officials said sustainable aviation fuel, or SAF, will be the best tool — but not the only one — to reduce emissions.Last September, airline leaders and President Joe Biden touted an agreement to cut aircraft emissions 20% by 2030 by producing 3 billion gallons of SAF by then and replacing all conventional jet fuel by 2050. Climate experts praised the idea but said the voluntary targets are overly optimistic. Current SAF production is around 5 million gallons per year.Sustainable fuel is biofuel made from cooking oil, animal fats, municipal waste or other feedstocks. Its chief advantage is that it can be blended with conventional fuel to power jet engines. It has been used many times on test flights and even regular flights with passengers on board.Among SAF’s drawbacks are the high cost — about three times more than conventional jet fuel. As airlines seek to buy and use more of it, the price will rise further. Advocates are lobbying for tax breaks and other incentives to boost production.Policymakers see SAF as a bridge fuel — a way to reduce emissions until more dramatic breakthroughs, such as electric- or hydrogen-powered planes, are ready. Those technologies might not be widely available for airline-size planes for two or three decades.Several companies are designing and starting to build electric-powered planes, but most are small aircraft that take off and land vertically, like helicopters, and they are about the same size — with room for only a few passengers.Electric-powered planes big enough to carry around 200 passengers — a medium-size jet by airline standards — would require much bigger batteries for longer flights. The batteries would weigh about 40 times more than jet fuel to produce the same amount of power, making electric airliners impractical without huge leaps in battery technology.Hydrogen, on the other hand, “is a very light fuel,” says Dan Rutherford, who leads the study of decarbonizing cars and planes for an environmental group, the International Council on Clean Transportation. “But you need a lot of volume to store it, and the fuel tanks themselves are heavy.”Despite that, Rutherford remains “cautiously optimistic” about hydrogen. His group believes that by 2035, there could be hydrogen-powered planes capable of flying about 2,100 miles (3,380 kilometers). Others, however, see obstacles including the need for massive and expensive new infrastructure at airports to store hydrogen that has been chilled into liquid form.Airlines face the risk of increasingly tough emissions regulations.The U.N. aviation organization reached an agreement — voluntary until 2026, then mandatory — in which airlines can offset their emissions by investing in projects to reduce greenhouse gases in other ways. However, some major countries didn’t sign it, and environmentalists say the scheme won’t reduce emissions.Even some in the airline industry, such as United Airlines CEO Scott Kirby, have mocked carbon offsets, which companies can get for things like paying to plant trees.The European Union has its own plan to slash emissions 55% by 2030 and reach net zero by 2050 while bringing aviation under the goals of the 2015 Paris agreement on climate change. It is trying to finalize an emissions-trading system and impose higher taxes on fossil fuels including jet fuel. The rules would apply only to flights within Europe.“The taxation policies that are already in place, particularly in Europe, are going to drive the cost of operations for airlines way up,” says Harris, the Bain consultant. “Ultimately, fares rise whether it be paying more for sustainable aviation fuel or it’s taxes on fossil fuels.”Airlines also face the risk of flight shaming — that more consumers could decide to travel by train or electric vehicle instead of by plane if those produce lower emissions. That does not seem to be inhibiting many travelers this summer, however, as pent-up travel demand has led to full planes.Whether changes in fuel and planes can cut emissions fast enough to hit the industry 2050 target — and whether airlines act on their own or under pressure from regulators — remains to be seen. But it won’t be easy.“We’re not on a path to deliver those goals,” Delta Air Lines CEO Ed Bastian says. “We need the energy producers to invest in sustainable product for us, (which) is going to require government to come in.”Rutherford, the transportation expert, notes that net zero “is a really challenging target.”“If we aren’t clearly on a trajectory of down emissions and massive uptake of clean fuels by 2030 and 2035, we are not going to hit net zero in 2050,” he says.Koenig reported from Dallas. Frank Jordans in Berlin contributed to this report. | Climate Change |
Julian Aguon hopes his new book helps spread understanding — through the lens of grief and loss — of the injustices in America’s territories.“The colonies should be brought front and center in the conversation about what needs to change in this country,” said Aguon, a human rights lawyer in Guam and author of “No Country for Eight-Spot Butterflies.”Aguon’s book is a memoir-manifesto that publishes Tuesday. It’s a collection of essays, poems, commencement speeches and eulogies — among other writings — about resistance, resilience and collective power in the midst of the climate crisis.In the first chapter, he writes: “How obscene is it that communities with the smallest carbon footprint—like low-lying islands and atolls in the middle of the Pacific Ocean—are paying the steepest price for a crisis we had almost no hand in creating?”Pacific islands are on the front lines of climate change, despite accounting for a small amount of global greenhouse gas emissions. They’ve seen the impact of climate change in part by the increasing severity of typhoons.A satellite view of Guam in the North Pacific.Gallo Images / Getty ImagesSea levels in the region are rising at two to three times the rate of the global average, threatening the islands' existence. And if global temperatures increase by 2 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels, 90% of coral reefs in the region could endure substantial degradation, which would have a number of consequences: It could negatively impact water quality, cancer drug research and the economy in the Pacific and beyond.Aguon began writing his book at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic as a way to process his grief, which is a central theme. Suicide rates on the island of Guam were on the rise. This included young people, for whom he wrote the book as a love letter.“I was writing out of an immediate place of grief, having death so close,” he said. “Having been flanked by death from every side at that time, the only way to really think about that, the natural thing that happens is you start processing and revisiting all of your own loved ones who have left you.”The essays are told against the backdrop of climate change, which he called a “threat multiplier” and said is also a story of loss, with species vanishing from the face of the Earth as one of the irreversible effects of a warming planet.Aguon wrote in the third chapter of his book about how a medicine his Auntie Frances makes with plants found on the island has been more effective in alleviating his bronchitis than any other Western medicine.That chapter also detailed how U.S. militarization of Guam — to which thousands of Indigenous residents are opposed — jeopardizes the island’s primary source of drinking water and entails the destruction of more than 1,000 acres of native limestone forest. It’s home to several endangered species, including the eight-spot butterfly, native to Guam and the neighboring island of Saipan. “It’s bitterly ironic that so many of these [bulldozers] bear the name ‘Caterpillar’ when the very thing they are destroying is that precious creature’s preciously singular habitat. To be sure, such forests house the host plants for the endemic Mariana eight-spot butterfly,” he wrote. “But then again maybe a country that routinely prefers power over strength, and living over letting live, is no country for eight-spot butterflies.”Aguon was named a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for commentary for an essay he wrote in The Atlantic in 2021 titled “To Hell With Drowning,” in which he argued that there’s a greater need for stories than facts in the fight against climate change.“Something about the sheer scale of the problem makes people feel like they can do little to nothing to combat it. So if we shift the way we talk about climate change, we can actually move people’s hearts,” he said. “We don’t need yet another IPCC report to tell us things that we already know. We have enough facts. What we don’t have enough of are stories from the front lines of the climate crisis.”“No Country for Eight-Spot Butterflies” was first published in 2021 under the title “The Properties of Perpetual Light,” but it was re-released this year with an introduction by author Arundhati Roy and an updated afterword about how Aguon’s life has changed since the book was published.He said he was reminded while writing the book that grief and broken hearts serve as a bridge, particularly at a time when there is so much loss.“We’re living in a world that’s changing so rapidly, from accelerating totalitarianism around the world to a destabilizing climate. It’s just like, we are living in this mode of almost incalculable loss,” he said. “What do we do? 'Where do we go from here?' is the question I was trying to answer in the book.” | Climate Change |
Steam rises from the cooling towers of the coal power plant of RWE, one of Europe's biggest electricity and gas companies in Niederaussem, Germany, March 3, 2016. REUTERS/Wolfgang RattayRegister now for FREE unlimited access to Reuters.comBRUSSELS, June 22 (Reuters) - The $2.4 trillion set to be invested in energy this year includes record spending on renewables but falls short of plugging a supply gap and tackling climate change, the International Energy Agency (IEA) said on Wednesday.Rising 8% from the previous year when the pandemic was more severe, the investment includes big increases in the power sector and efforts to bolster energy efficiency, the Paris-based watchdog said in its annual report on investment."A massive surge in investment to accelerate clean energy transitions is the only lasting solution," said IEA Executive Director Fatih Birol.Register now for FREE unlimited access to Reuters.com"This kind of investment is rising, but we need a much faster increase to ease the pressure on consumers from high fossil fuel prices, make our energy systems more secure, and get the world on track to reach our climate goals."The advances are focused in the developed world, however, with poorer countries excluding China still investing no more in renewables than in 2015, when leaders inked the Paris Agreement to cap the rise in temperatures to as close as possible to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial times.Investment in coal - one of the most polluting fossil fuels - was up by 10% last year, the IEA warned, with China continuing to bring new coal-fired powered plants online.Still, clean energy investment worldwide has risen 12% since 2020 after an increase of just 2% annually in the previous five years.Investment in other fossil fuels falls short of climate goals, the IEA said, and still cannot meet rising demand if energy systems are not retooled towards cleaner technology."Today's oil and gas spending is caught between two visions of the future: it is too high for a pathway aligned with limiting global warming to 1.5 °C but not enough to satisfy rising demand in a scenario where governments stick with today's policy settings and fail to deliver on their climate pledges," it said.Register now for FREE unlimited access to Reuters.comReporting by Noah Browning
Editing by Mark PotterOur Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles. | Climate Change |
A Gambian woman (R) holds her identity card in her mouth while exiting a polling station during heavy rains that forced the extension of voting hours for presidential elections, September 22, 2006. Voters in the tiny West African nation of Gambia went to the polls on Friday in a presidential election widely expected to extend the iron-fisted rule of incumbent Yahya Jammeh for a third elected term. REUTERS/Finbarr O'Reilly (GAMBIA)Register now for FREE unlimited access to Reuters.comBANJUL, Aug 3 (Reuters) - The Gambia recorded its heaviest rainfall in more than 30 years last weekend, causing widespread flooding and at least two deaths, the government said on Wednesday, blaming climate change for the extreme weather.Torrential rain started on Saturday morning and continued for more than 20 hours in parts of the West African country, said the Department of Water Resources.The highest rainfall measured over that period was 276 mm (10.87 inches) at Banjul International Airport, compared with a previous record of 175.4 mm in July 1998, it said.Register now for FREE unlimited access to Reuters.com"It is the worst flooding I have ever seen in the Gambia," said Sanna Dahaba, executive director of the National Disaster Management Agency. "This is attributed to climate change, there's no doubt about that."Two children died and an estimated 13,000 households were affected by the floods, he said, as heavy rain continued on and off throughout the country.Gambia is highly vulnerable to the effects of climate change, including floods, drought, sea level rise and heatwaves, according to the World Bank. Its capital Banjul is situated on a peninsula where the Gambia River flows into the Atlantic Ocean.Aerial photos and videos shared on social media showed vast areas of flooding with roads submerged and water nearly up to roof-level of some buildings.The Gambia Red Cross said its volunteers were working around the clock to distribute supplies and help families relocate to emergency shelters.Register now for FREE unlimited access to Reuters.comReporting by Pap Saine; Additional reporting and writing by Nellie Peyton; Editing by Sofia Christensen and David HolmesOur Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles. | Climate Change |
Climate change means anyone who lives where the countryside touches urban environments should prepare a bag of essentials so they are ready for a wildfire, an Australian fire expert has told Sky News.Professor Ed Galea, University of Greenwich's founding director of the Fire Safety Engineering Group (FSEG) and originally from Melbourne, says people living where wildfires are increasingly likely should prepare a "go-bag".
It comes after two rows of terraced houses in Wennington, on the edge of the London conurbation, were destroyed by a fire that swept across neighbouring grassland rendered tinder dry by the recent heatwave.Major fire incidents were also declared on Tuesday in London, Norfolk, Suffolk, Lincolnshire, Leicestershire and South Yorkshire amid the 40C heat.UK weather - live updates: Bookies are tipping more 'extreme heat' next month Prof Galea told Sky's Kay Burley: "We have to accept the fact that the climate is changing - we are getting into drier summers, less rain... It increases the risk of wildfires.
"We have to adapt to that and we need to build not just the physical resilience of... the emergency services, but the population needs to adapt to this and change behaviours. More on Heatwave UK heatwave: Charred remains of homes and cars after fires on UK's hottest ever day - as public is warned 'danger isn't over' Hottest day on record: How did the UK cope? How much will it cost to keep your fan on while you sleep tonight? "If you're living in an area where - we call them WUI, wild-land urban interface - there is a risk of wildfire, things you can do is prepare a 'go-bag'... where you've got your valuables, your medication, the important things you need, so that in the event of emergency you just grab the bag and go."In many countries around the world that are wildfire-prone, this is the advice that we give people. We are beginning to see the need for that here in the UK."He said what happened in Wennington was a perfect example of the wild-land urban interface because you had properties and countryside "right up against it".Prof Galea's homeland Australia has seen numerous examples of heat-caused wildfires driving people from their homes. Image: The scene after a blaze in the village of Wennington, east London What should you take?Australia's regional governments have put together an extensive series of web-based materials to help householders prepare for the risk of wildfires, including checklists of what to take.Among the items recommended to pack are:Cash, ATM cards, credit cardsMedications, toiletries and sanitary suppliesSpecial requirements for infants, elderly, injured, disabledMobile phone and chargerImportant documents (passport, birth certificate, marriage certificate, insurance policy), valuables and photosChange of clothes for everyoneThe detailed advice from Australian authorities comes after particularly fierce wildfires in 2019 and 2020 left up to 80% of the Australian population impacted by the blazes, according to the country's Climate Council, with 3,000 homes destroyed and dozens killed.Advice is given to people who live not just in the Australian bush, but also specifically next to grassland and meadows.Read more: French firefighters battle huge forest blaze and pilot dies in crash in Portugal as wildfires rage across EuropeWhy a 40C day in the UK is deadlier than a 40C day in other countries Image: A car drives near a fire in Rainham, east London Where else did grassland fires occur?Sadiq Khan said the London Fire Brigade (LFB) had in excess of 2,600 calls on Tuesday - seven times the usual number - with one of them being a grassland fire that destroyed and damaged houses in Dagenham.In South Yorkshire, a serious blaze occurred when a row of houses was consumed by flames in Barnsley and Doncaster Council said a major blaze in Clayton spread to three residential properties.Meanwhile, firefighters in Norfolk were called to a blaze that started in a field in the village of Ashmanhaugh and spread to two homes. Please use Chrome browser for a more accessible video player Fires destroy homes and cars in London 'No management of the fire field'Mr Galea, talking about what local people had said about the fire in Wennington, told Sky News there appeared to be "no management of the fire field and what the residents should be doing".He added: "One of the first things that the fire service and the police should be doing when they arrive at these places is to ensure safety of life - evacuate the people, move them out of the way, and then start tackling the fire."I'm not quite sure how that was handled. I'm not quite sure when the fire service actually arrived and how far the fire had advanced, but I would have thought all those houses... you could see the way the fire was advancing, you could see the way the smoke was moving, all those houses were under threat and they should all have been evacuated. Image: A view of gorse bush fire, during a heatwave near Zennor, Cornwall "From what some of the residents have said, they were not told where to go, they were not told to evacuate."This is one of the lessons to be learnt when you are dealing with wildfires, you need to be looking after people, number one."LFB's Assistant Commissioner Jonathan Smith admitted that climate change was something that was increasingly having to be included in their strategic planning in the future as he told Sky News: "[Tuesday] was an unprecedented challenge for the London Fire Brigade... a number of large scale incidents... including the incident in Wennington... another incident in Upminster and 13 others spread right across London... and in addition a number of low-level grassland and woodland fires."Our firefighters, officers and control staff have worked incredibly hard over the last 24 hours. We've had 16 firefighters injured, including two of whom were hospitalised. I'm pleased to say they've now been released. It was a huge effort by the emergency services yesterday." | Climate Change |
MOMBASA, Kenya (AP) — African officials outlined their priorities for the upcoming U.N. climate summit, including a push to make heavily polluting rich nations compensate poor countries for the environmental damage done to them.
The continent will also focus on how countries can adapt to global warming and how the continent can best halt further climate-related disasters. Africa has seen debilitating droughts in the east and Horn of Africa and deadly cyclones in the south.
Other key areas for discussion include moving from high-carbon energy sources like oil and gas to renewables, and “carbon credit” schemes, where foreign governments and companies pay for tree planting in exchange for producing greenhouse gases.
The U.N. climate conference, known as COP27, will be held in Egypt in November.
How much funding Africa gets is the biggest factor for how prepared it will be for a hotter future, said Harsen Nyambe, the director of sustainable environment at the African Union Commission.
READ MORE: Climate change caused by wealthy nations creates harm for poorer, study says
“We recall the $100 billion that was promised has never been fulfilled and current assessments show that even that amount is not enough,” Nyambe said, referring to a 12-year-old pledge by rich nations to provide climate funding for poorer nations.
“Africa must be given adequate time to transition and transform its energy infrastructure. We cannot transform abruptly. We need resources, capacity, technology transfer and finance to power our development,” he added.
A commitment made in the previous international summit in Glasgow to spend half of climate funds on helping developing nations adapt to the effects of a warming world by having infrastructure and agriculture that’s resilient to more volatile weather systems, must be followed through, said Jean-Paul Adam, director of climate change for the U.N.’s Economic Commission for Africa.
He added the continent only received about 7.5 percent of its promised $70 billion in climate funding between 2014 and 2018.
Africa needs around $3 trillion to fulfill its self-determined emissions targets, known as nationally determined contributions, that each country is required to submit as part of the 2015 Paris agreement on climate, according to U.N. and Africa Development Bank estimates.
More meetings between the continent’s climate leaders are set to follow ahead of COP27. | Climate Change |
CANBERRA, Australia (AP) — Australia’s foreign minister on Tuesday urged Pacific island neighbors to unite on their shared challenges of U.S.-China strategic competition, climate change and COVID-19.Foreign Minister Penny Wong addressed reporters in the Fijian capital Suva ahead of a leaders’ summit of the Pacific Islands Forum.She said Pacific leaders have talked with her about the challenges of climate change and COVID-19 — “which have fallen harder on this region than on many other parts of the world and, of course, strategic competition,” Wong said.“All the nations are seeking to navigate those challenges. And we do it best when we can do it together,” she added.Australia and New Zealand are the wealthiest forum nations and share a concern over a security pact signed this year between China and the Solomon Islands.The Micronesian state of Kiribati has reportedly split from the 18-nation body in a major blow to regional unity.Wong said the “door remains open” to Kiribati returning.Both the Solomon Islands and Kiribati recently changed their diplomatic recognition from Taiwan to Beijing. Kiribati’s withdrawal from the forum is being interpreted as a deepening of China’s influence in the region.New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, who arrived Monday in Fiji, described Kiribati’s withdrawal as “disappointing.”Australian Defense Minister Richard Marles said in a speech in Washington, D.C., that Australia and the Unites States will need to do more to counter a growing number of threats in the Indo-Pacific region.He said China’s rise had complicated issues across the Pacific and that Australia and the United States would have to work more closely together in coming years.“We can’t afford to stand still, because in the years ahead the U.S.-Australia alliance will not only have to operate in a much more strategic environment in the Indo-Pacific, it will need to contribute to a more effective balance of military power aimed at avoiding a catastrophic failure of deterrence,” Marles said.Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, who will travel to Fiji on Wednesday, said his government was committed to spend at least 2% of Australia’s gross domestic production on defense.“National security and our security in the Indo-Pacific is about more than just defense spending. And tomorrow I’ll be traveling to the Pacific Islands Forum, where our neighbors in the Pacific understand that climate change is a national security issue,” Albanese said in Sydney.“Indeed, they regard — just as the United States does — as it being at the center of national security and I look forward to the discussions that I’ll have with the leaders in the Pacific,” Albanese added.Albanese’s government was elected in May with a promise to reduce Australia’s greenhouse gas emissions by 43% below 2005 levels by 2030.The previous government only committed to reducing emissions by 26% to 28% by the end of the decade.Due to the pandemic, the Suva summit will be Pacific leaders’ first opportunity for face-to-face meetings since 2019 when the forum met in Tuvalu.In May, China fell short on a bold plan to have 10 Pacific nations endorse a sweeping new agreement covering everything from security to fisheries as some in the region expressed deep concerns. But there were plenty of smaller wins for China’s Foreign Minister Wang Yi during his island-hopping tour of the region.Wang was in Fiji on May 30 to co-host a key meeting with the foreign ministers from the 10 island nations. At an unusual news conference afterward, Wang and Bainimarama spoke for about 30 minutes and then abruptly left the stage as reporters tried to shout out questions. That left many details of what transpired at the meeting unanswered. It was clear the nations hadn’t endorsed China’s plan. But Wang managed to sign smaller bilateral agreements with the Pacific nations during his tour. | Climate Change |
Nation Updated on Aug 16, 2022 1:45 PM EDT — Published on Aug 16, 2022 1:02 PM EDT SALT LAKE CITY (AP) — U.S. officials announced Tuesday that two U.S. states reliant on water from the Colorado River will face more water cuts as they endure extreme drought.
The move affecting Arizona and Nevada came as officials predict levels at Lake Mead, the largest U.S. reservoir, will plummet even further than they have. The cuts will place officials in those states under extraordinary pressure to plan for a hotter, drier future and a growing population. Mexico will also face cuts.
Lake Mead is currently less than a quarter full and the seven states overall that depend on its water missed a federal deadline to announce proposals on plans cut additional water next year.
WACTH: Unrelenting drought leaves millions who rely on Colorado River facing an uncertain future
The Colorado River provides water to 40 million people across seven states in the American West as well as Mexico and helps feed an agricultural industry valued at $15 billion a year. Cities and farms across the region are anxiously awaiting official hydrology projections — estimates of future water levels in the river — that will determine the extent and scope of cuts to their water supply.
Water officials in Arizona, California, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming had expected federal officials to project Lake Mead — located on the Nevada-Arizona border and the largest manmade reservoir in the U.S. — to shrink to dangerously low levels that could disrupt water delivery and hydropower production and cut the amount of water allocated to Arizona and Nevada, as well as Mexico.
And that’s not all: Officials from the states are also scrambling to meet a deadline imposed by the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation to slash their water use by at least 15 percent in order to keep water levels at the river’s storage reservoirs from dropping even more.
Together, the projections and the deadline for cuts are presenting Western states with unprecedented challenges and confronting them with difficult decisions about how to plan for a drier future.
While the Bureau of Reclamation is “very focused on just getting through this to next year,” any cutbacks will likely need to be in place far longer, said University of Oxford hydrologist Kevin Wheeler.
“What contribution the science makes is, it’s pretty clear that that these reductions just have to have to stay in place until the drought has ended or we realize they actually have to get worse and the cuts have to get deeper,” he said.
The cuts announced Tuesday are based on a plan the seven states as well as Mexico signed in 2019 to help maintain reservoir levels. Under that plan, the amount of water allocated to states depends on the water levels at Lake Mead. Last year, the lake fell low enough for the federal government to declare a first-ever water shortage in the region, triggering mandatory cuts for Arizona and Nevada as well as Mexico in 2022.
Officials expected hydrologists will project the lake to fall further, triggering additional cuts to Nevada, Arizona and Mexico next year. States with higher priority water rights are not expected to see cuts.
Reservoir levels have been falling for years — and faster than experts predicted — due to 22 years of drought worsened by climate change and overuse of the river. Scorching temperatures and less melting snow in the spring have reduced the amount of water flowing from the Rocky Mountains, where the river originates before it snakes 1,450 miles (2,334 kilometers) southwest and into the Gulf of California.
WATCH: Megadrought causes perilously low water levels at Lake Mead
Already, extraordinary steps have been taken this year to keep water in Lake Powell, the other large Colorado River reservoir, which sits upstream of Lake Mead and straddles the Arizona-Utah border. Water from the lake runs through Glen Canyon Dam, which produces enough electricity to power between 1 million and 1.5 million homes each year.
After water levels at Lake Powell reached levels low enough to threaten hydropower production, federal officials said they would hold back an additional 480,000 acre-feet (more than 156 billion gallons or 592 million cubic meters) of water to ensure the dam could still produce energy. That water would normally course to Lake Mead.
Naishadham reported from Washington. The Associated Press receives support from the Walton Family Foundation for coverage of water and environmental policy. The AP is solely responsible for all content. For all of AP’s environmental coverage, visit https://apnews.com/hub/climate-and-environment Left: An aerial view of Lake Powell is seen, where water levels have declined dramatically to lows not seen since it was filled in the 1960s as growing demand for water and climate change shrink the Colorado River and create challenges for business owners and recreation in Page, Arizona, U.S., April 20, 2022. Caitlin Ochs/Reuters | Climate Change |
The fate of nearly all marine species could be at risk of extinction by the end of the century if greenhouse gases continue to be emitted at current rates, scientists are warning in a new study.Researchers evaluated threats faced by nearly 25,000 marine species and found that almost 90% will be at high or critical risk of extinction by 2100 under a high emissions or "business as usual" scenario, according to a study published Monday in Nature Climate Change. The species included animals, plants, chromists, protozoans and bacteria that inhabit the upper 100 meters of oceans -- the vast majority of which are not expected to survive in their current habitat across an average of 85% of their geographical distribution, the paper states.The species are expected to die off as climate change drives changes to the ecosystem and further biodiversity loss in the oceans, according to the study.A Shortfin Mako Shark swims in open water in Baja California, Mexico, April 14, 2015.Universal Images Group via Getty Images, FILEIn addition, about 10% of the ocean has areas of combined high climate risk, endemism -- a state of a species being found in just a few defined locations -- and an extinction threat to species, the authors wrote. Many ecosystems that house high biodiversity were included in those areas, the scientists said.The findings are "quite startling and very sobering" and an indication of what could happen if the extraction of fossil fuels continue at the current rate without paying any mind to mitigation, Daniel Boyce, an ecologist at the Bedford Institute of Oceanography in Nova Scotia and author of the study, told ABC News."I'd like to think that that's an implausible scenario," Boyce said. "But nonetheless, it is the worst case scenario. And when we evaluated that scenario, we found that there was a very grim picture for the climate risk for marine species."A ray swims in the Indian Ocean offshore of Mogadishu, Somalia, May 27, 2022.Anadolu Agency via Getty Images, FILEThreats are greatest for higher trophic species, especially those that are harvested for food, including pufferfish, tunas and sharks, and in low-income countries with a high dependence on fisheries, suggesting a widespread ecosystem restructuring for those species, Boyce said."There was a really striking pattern where the risk was systematically higher for nations that have a lower socioeconomic status, lower income nations that tend to be more dependent on fisheries and tend to have a lower food security, and overall nutritional status," he said.Shortfin mako sharks, rays and mammals were also listed in the study as some of animals most vulnerable to ecosystem changes.Mitigating climate change could reduce for the risks for nearly all species examined as well as enhance stability in ecosystems and benefit food-insecure populations in low-income countries, the authors said.A shortfin mako shark swims in the Pacific Ocean in California, Aug. 21, 2006.VWPics via AP Images, FILEIt's "easy to forget" how much humans and the rest of the planet rely on oceans of a "multitude of services," such as food and oxygen, Boyce said.The findings could be used to prioritize the conservation of vulnerable ecosystems and include the effort to consider the susceptibility and adaptivity of species in climate management strategies, the authors concluded."It should provide a strong motivation for us to do everything that we can to mitigate our emissions and focus on avoiding that worst-case scenario," Boyce said. | Climate Change |
Antarctica's Thwaites Glacier, the widest on Earth, is in trouble.The glacier extends out into the Southern Ocean and is losing about 50 billion tons of ice per year, with that loss doubling over the last 30 years. In 2019, NASA scientists discovered a huge cavity beneath the glacier, about two-thirds the size of Manhattan, which could speed up the glacier's demise. This week, researchers mapped the ocean floor in front of Thwaites, showing the glacier had rapidly retreated in the past -- and suggesting a small kick might accelerate its retreat once more. This is worrying. If Thwaites melts, sea levels would rise about 25 inches. Its demise could also destabilize the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, which locks away around 10 feet of sea level rise. That kind of melting would be catastrophic. With every new study, we learn more about Thwaites's vulnerability. And with every new study we see Thwaites back in the news cycle, largely thanks to its powerful and alarming nickname: "The Doomsday Glacier."But that nickname, though it has generated mountains of press exploring the fate of Thwaites, might actually do more harm than good. It's a moniker glaciologists and scientists shy away from using -- so why is it so pervasive in the mainstream press? Should we keep using it? And why does it matter? Doom and GloomOn May 9, 2017, Rolling Stone published a deeply-researched and brilliantly-written piece about Thwaites by climate writer Jeff Goodell. It had a simple, powerful headline: "The Doomsday Glacier." It's perfect for the story. But the nickname stuck.Today, publications repeat the line ad nauseum whenever a significant new study about Thwaites is published. Some stories suggest Thwaites is known as the Doomsday glacier in "scientific circles" because its disintegration could lead to catastrophic sea level rise of more than 3 to 10 feet. That's not quite the case. We don't know for sure how Thwaites' disintegration would change sea levels in the short-term. The glacier itself locks up about 25 inches of sea level rise, but most stories use the 3 to 10 feet range. This is actually referring to the entire West Antarctic Ice Sheet being lost. And though extensive research shows Thwaites is in trouble, it's not the scientists or glaciologists or polar experts that are throwing around the nickname. I spoke to a number of experts associated with glaciology and polar research who all highlighted the fate of Thwaites is increasingly concerning. However, most had mixed feelings about the doomsday moniker, with many averse to using the title at all."I discourage the use of the term 'Doomsday Glacier' to refer to Thwaites Glacier," said Ted Scambos, a glaciologist at the University of Colorado, Boulder and member of the Thwaites Glacier Collaboration. Scambos suggested "wild card glacier" or "riskiest glacier" might be used in its place. One of the chief reasons scientists feel uneasy about the phrase is that it suggests we're already doomed. "We are not," said Eric Rignot, an Earth scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. The doom and gloom narrative feeds into a sense that we've already past the point of no return, that Thwaites is already lost which can, more broadly, lead to inaction. The moniker gives us the wrong idea. "It's kind of too alarmist," noted Helen Fricker, a glaciologist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography. Rignot said we could still slow down the retreat of Thwaites if we take proper action on climate but "time is running out." That's a little less severe than doomsday, of course. Another reason "doomsday" might not be a great moniker is because it obscures the larger problem facing the Earth's frozen areas -- the "cryosphere." Human-induced climate change and the burning of fossil fuels has caused glacial retreat across the planet."On the one hand, it is a wake up call, aka take these things seriously," said Rignot. "On the other hand, it summarizes the situation as if there was only one bad glacier out there." Rignot explains there are glaciers across the world -- in East Antarctica and Greenland, for instance -- which lock up far more water. If those were to disintegrate and disappear, sea level rise could be an order of magnitude greater than what we might see with Thwaites. The study this week in Nature Geoscience, led by glaciologist Robert Larter at the British Antarctic Survey, shows how precarious the situation is and how much faster than expected Thwaites might retreat. But even Larter shies away from using the word "Doomsday."That's not to say Thwaites isn't important. "Thwaites is obviously not the only glacier that matters, but it is objectively the most concerning glacier on Earth in terms of its potential to generate large amounts of sea level rise in the future," said Andrew Mackintosh, a glaciologist at Monash University.So should we keep using "Doomsday Glacier"? The Vanderford Glacier, in East Antarctica, is poorly studied. Jackson Ryan/CNET You Can't Always Get What You WantIn September 2021, coronavirus cases were surging in South Africa. Scientists began detecting a variant of the virus dubbed C.1.2, with a number of mutations, which quickly found its way to the press via preprint studies. Though the new variant accounted for just 5% of new cases, some publications jumped on the news, describing the variant as "worse than Delta," and calling it the Doomsday variant. Doomsday, it seems, can be brought about by many different sources.The coronavirus scenario is an interesting comparison. By the time the doomsday headlines began circulating, the World Health Organization was already suggesting that C.1.2 was not a variant of concern. That meant it was easy to drop the alarmist name. For Thwaites, things are a little different. Scientists are concerned about its future. Things are getting worse. Doomsday, in this instance, helps bring attention to the plight of the glacier and may aid in understanding how problematic things have become. And perhaps it's already too late to change course and rename it. Even the first line of Thwaites Glacier's Wikipedia page says it's also known as the Doomsday Glacier. "There is no getting ahead of the label," said Scambos. "On the plus side, the public is now aware of the area because of the power of the nickname," said Scambos. So, though scientists might not feel all that great about it, we might just be stuck with it. We just can't let that hide the fact there are many glaciers under threat and the threat is us: If we don't wean ourselves off fossil fuels, we'll continue to increase carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and bring about Thwaites demise.And the real doomsday won't be the loss of Thwaites. It will be when we disturb areas like East Antarctica, which locks away meters of sea level. If that sheet was lost it would dramatically change the face of the Earth. Fricker says that's not a future that will come to pass any time soon but if we begin to see dramatic changes in that ice sheet, then that's when we're in real trouble."That's doomsday," she said. | Climate Change |
“While this decision risks damaging our nation’s ability to keep our air clean and combat climate change, I will not relent in using my lawful authorities to protect public health and tackle the climate crisis. . . .Today’s decision sides with special interests that have waged a long-term campaign to strip away our right to breathe clean air. We cannot and will not ignore the danger to public health and existential threat the climate crisis poses. The science confirms what we all see with our own eyes — the wildfires, droughts, extreme heat, and intense storms are endangering our lives and livelihoods. I will take action.”WEST VIRGINIA GOVERNOR JIM JUSTICE”This ruling in favor of West Virginia will stop unelected bureaucrats in Washington, D.C., from being able to unilaterally decarbonize our economy just because they feel like it. Instead, members of Congress who have been duly elected to represent the will of the people across all of America will be allowed to have a rightful say when it comes to balancing our desire for a clean environment with our need for energy and the security it provides us.”STEPHANE DUJARRIC, SPOKESPERSON FOR UN SECRETARY-GENERAL“This is a setback in our fight against climate change, when we are already far off-track in meeting the goals of the Paris Agreement. The Secretary-General has said repeatedly that the G20 must lead the way in dramatically stepping up climate action. Decisions like the one today in the US or any other major emitting economy make it harder to meet the goals of the Paris Agreement, for a healthy, livable planet, especially as we need to accelerate the phase out of coal and the transition to renewable energies.”MASSACHUSETTS ATTORNEY GENERAL MAURA HEALEY“We are deeply disappointed in the Supreme Court’s misguided decision giving in to the coal industry and its scheme to prevent regulation of harmful greenhouse gas emissions ... Today’s decision marks a step backward in our collective effort to combat the climate crisis.”SENATE MINORITY LEADER MITCH MCCONNELL, KENTUCKY REPUBLICAN“The Supreme Court gave power back to the people. In siding with the state of West Virginia, the Court has undone illegal regulations issued by the EPA without any clear congressional authorization and confirmed that only the people’s representatives in Congress — not unelected, unaccountable bureaucrats — may write our nation’s laws ... The ruling also pushes back against the overbearing administrative state, which Democrats have expanded dramatically in recent years. The Constitution states clearly that the lawmaking process lies with the people and their elected representatives, not with opaque federal agencies. I am glad the Supreme Court affirmed this fact and hope other overeager bureaucrats take notice.”SENATE MAJORITY LEADER CHUCK SCHUMER, DEMOCRAT OF NEW YORK“Just like last week’s dangerously misguided and abhorrent decisions on gun safety and abortion, the extremist MAGA Court’s ruling today in West Virginia v. EPA will cause more needless deaths – in this instance because of more pollution that will exacerbate the climate crisis and make our air and water less clean and safe.”WEST VIRGINIA ATTORNEY GENERAL PATRICK MORRISEY“Huge victory against federal overreach and the excesses of the administrative state. This is a HUGE win for West Virginia, our energy jobs and those who care about maintaining separation of powers in our nation.”SENATOR EDWARD J. MARKEY, DEMOCRAT OF MASSACHUSETTS“Just like last week’s dangerously misguided and abhorrent decisions on gun safety and abortion, the extremist MAGA Court’s ruling today in West Virginia v. EPA will cause more needless deaths – in this instance because of more pollution that will exacerbate the climate crisis and make our air and water less clean and safe.”BRADLEY CAMPBELL, PRESIDENT OF THE CONSERVATION LAW FOUNDATION“By arbitrarily limiting EPA’s explicit and broad authority under the Clean Air Act to require the use of less polluting systems, the Court has consigned millions of Americans to more illness, shorter lives, and greater poverty in an overheated climate, while giving itself nearly unlimited authority to invalidate protections and safeguards intended by Congress.”KESHIA SEXTON, MOTHERS OUT FRONT“The Court has sided with polluters over the health of people and the planet. We will not let this stand. We are mothers, sisters, aunts, grandmothers — all working together because of our shared concern for the health of all children. As active members in our communities, we are going to work extra hard to make sure this decision does not stand in the way of progress on clean air and climate,.JANET DOMENITZ, EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR OF MASSPIRG“This decision limiting the EPA’s authority undermines the nation’s commitment to addressing climate change. Like any powerful law, the Clean Air Act requires enforcement. Without that, the federal government is left with just blind hope that polluters will do what they’re supposed to. Congress should immediately amend the Clean Air Act to give the EPA full authority to do what needs to be done to address climate change.”BEN HELLERSTEIN, STATE DIRECTOR OF ENVIRONMENT MASSACHUSETTS“Bay Staters count on the EPA to protect our air and environment. Now that the Court has put a stable climate even further from reach, lawmakers in Massachusetts must seek out other ways to reduce emissions and secure a clean and healthy future.”David Abel can be reached at [email protected]. Follow him on Twitter @davabel. | Climate Change |
This story originally appeared on Yale Environment 360 and is part of the Climate Desk collaboration.The Covid pandemic has rightly received most of the blame for global supply chain upheavals in the past two years. But the less publicized impact of climate change on supply chains poses a far more serious threat and is already being felt, scholars and experts say.The pandemic is “a temporary problem,” while climate change is “long-term dire,” said Austin Becker, a maritime infrastructure resilience scholar at the University of Rhode Island. “Climate change is a slow-moving crisis that is going to last a very, very long time, and it’s going to require some fundamental changes,” said Becker. “Every coastal community, every coastal transportation network is going to face some risks from this, and we’re not going to have nearly enough resources to make all the investments that are required.”Of all of climate change’s threats to supply chains, sea level rise lurks as potentially the biggest. But even now, years before sea level rise begins inundating ports and other coastal infrastructure, supply chain disruptions caused by hurricanes, floods, wildfires, and other forms of increasingly extreme weather are jolting the global economy. A sampling of these disruptions from just last year suggests the variety and magnitude of climate change’s threats:The Texas freeze last February caused the worst involuntary energy blackout in US history. That forced three major semiconductor plants to close, exacerbating a global pandemic-triggered semiconductor shortage and further slowing production of microchip-dependent cars. The outages also forced railroad closures, severing heavily used supply chain links between Texas and the Pacific Northwest for three days.Heavy rainfall and snowmelt last February caused some banks of the Rhine River, Europe’s most important commercial waterway, to begin to burst, triggering a halt in river shipping for several days. Then, in April, water levels on the Rhine, which was facing a long-term drought, dropped so low that cargo ships were forced to load no more than half their usual capacity to avoid running aground. In recent years, manufacturers relying on the Rhine “have increasingly faced shipping capacity reductions that disrupted both inbound raw material and outbound product delivery flows” as a result of drought, according to a May 2021 report by Everstream Analytics, which tracks supply chain trends.Flooding in central China in late July disrupted supply chains for commodities such as coal, pigs, and peanuts and forced the closure of a Nissan automobile plant. SAIC Motor, the country’s largest automaker, announced that these disruptions caused what Reuters called a “short-term impact on logistics” at its giant plant in Zhengzhou, capable of producing 600,000 cars a year.Hurricane Ida, the fifth-costliest hurricane in US history, struck the Gulf of Mexico coast in late August, damaging vital industrial installations that generate an array of products, including plastics and pharmaceuticals, and forcing a diversion of trucks, already in short supply across the country, for use in relief aid.Fires in British Columbia from late June through early October triggered by an unprecedented heat wave comprised the third-worst wildfire season in the province’s history and closed a transportation choke point at Fraser Canyon that idled thousands of rail cars and stranded their contents. Then, in November, an atmospheric river, delivering what officials called “once-in-a-century” rainfall, caused severe flooding in the province. The floods severed crucial railroad and highway links to Canada’s largest port and forced a regional oil pipeline to close. The loss of the rail network forced provincial lumber companies to scale back production, causing price increases and shortages of lumber, paper pulp, and other wood products in the United States.In December, a typhoon caused what TechWireAsia called “arguably the worst flooding in history in various parts” of Malaysia, and severely damaged Klang, Southeast Asia’s second-largest port. That created a break in the semiconductor supply chain, since semiconductors from Taiwan, by far the world’s largest manufacturer of advanced microchips, are routinely shipped to Klang for packaging at Malaysian factories before being transported to US companies and consumers. The packaging breakdown contributed to global semiconductor shortages and caused some US automobile manufacturers to suspend operations.“The Malaysia node in the global supply chain that hardly anyone was aware of turned out to be critical,” Christopher Mims, a Wall Street Journal technology columnist and author of Arriving Today: From Factory to Front Door—Why Everything Has Changed About How and What We Buy, said in an interview. “It illustrates how a bottleneck anywhere in the supply chain can interfere with the availability of critical goods.”Photograph: BRANDEN EASTWOOD/Getty ImagesScientists say that such climate-related disruptions are bound to intensify in coming years as the world warms. In addition, ports, rail lines, highways, and other transportation and supply infrastructure will be threatened by increases in sea level of an estimated 2 to 6 feet—and perhaps more—by 2100. Around 90 percent of the world’s freight moves by ship, and, according to Becker, inundations eventually will threaten most of the world’s 2,738 coastal ports, whose wharves generally lie just a few feet to 15 feet above sea level. But to most port managers, the threat still feels remote. The rate of future sea level rise is so uncertain and solutions so elusive that only a few port managers have taken action to counter the threat, and only a fraction have tried to assess it.As the ripple effects of what are likely to be ever increasing and intensifying climate-related disruptions spread through the global economy, price increases and shortages of all kinds of goods—from agricultural commodities to cutting-edge electronics—are probable consequences, Mims said. The leap in the cost of shipping a container across the Pacific Ocean as a result of the pandemic—from $2,000 to $15,000 or $20,000—may suggest what’s in store.A 2020 paper in Maritime Policy and Management even asserted that if current climate science is correct, “global supply chains will be massively disrupted, beyond what can be adapted to while maintaining current systems.” The paper argues that supply chain managers should accept the inevitability of economic upheaval by the end of this century and embrace practices that support rebuilding afterwards.To be sure, not all experts believe supply chains are highly vulnerable to climate change. “I don’t lie awake at night thinking about what will happen to supply chains because of climate,” said Yossi Sheffi, director of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Center for Transportation and Logistics and the author of numerous books about supply chains. “I think supply chain disruption is usually local and limited in time, and supply chains are so redundant that there are many ways to get around problems.”Supply chains are, in essence, strings of potential bottlenecks. Each stopping point is a node in a tree-like system that conveys raw materials from the system’s farthest tendrils to sub-assemblers along its roots to manufacturers, who are the system’s trunk. Products like smartphones possess hundreds of components whose raw materials are transported from all over the world; the cumulative mileage traveled by all those parts would “probably reach to the moon,” Mims said. These supply chains are so complicated and opaque that smartphone manufacturers don’t even know the identity of all their suppliers—getting all of them to adapt to climate change would mark a colossal achievement. Yet each node is a point of vulnerability whose breakdown could send damaging ripples up and down the chain and beyond it.Seaports are particularly vulnerable. Port authorities have three ways to cope with sea level rise, and all are inadequate, experts say. They can retreat to inland locations with river links to oceans, but available sites with requisite conditions are few and expensive. They can build costly sea dikes around the ports, but even if the dikes are strong enough to resist the rising ocean, they must continually be raised to keep up with sea level rise, and they only buy time until eventually being overtopped. They also divert floodwater to nearby coastal areas unprotected by the dikes.Finally, port officials can raise by at least a couple of meters all port infrastructure so that the port can continue to function as sea level rise proceeds. But the rate of the rise is so uncertain that choosing a cost-effective height for the increase is problematic, Becker said. And raising wharves and other port infrastructure would still leave ports’ vital ground transportation links—railroads and highways—and, for that matter, the residents of adjoining cities, unprotected.In a 2016 paper in Global Environmental Change, Becker and four colleagues concluded that raising 221 of the world’s most active seaports by 2 meters (6.5 feet) would require 436 million cubic meters of construction materials, an amount large enough to create global shortages of some commodities. The estimated amount of cement—49 million metric tons—alone would cost $60 billion in 2022 dollars. Another study that Becker coauthored in 2017 found that elevating the infrastructure of the 100 biggest US seaports by 2 meters would cost $57 billion to $78 billion in 2012 dollars (equivalent to $69 billion to $103 billion in current dollars), and would require “704 million cubic meters of dredged fill … four times more than all material dredged by the Army Corps of Engineers in 2012.”“We’re a rich country,” Becker said, “and we’re not going to have nearly enough resources to make all the required investments. So among ports there’s going to be winners and losers. I don’t know that we’re well equipped for that.”The long-term nature of sea level rise, combined with the deficiencies and expense of the proposed solutions, have largely prevented seaport managers from addressing the threat. A 2020 study in the Journal of Waterway, Port, Coastal, and Ocean Engineering that Becker coauthored found that of 85 US maritime infrastructure engineers who responded to a survey, only 29 percent said their organizations had a policy or planning document for sea level rise, let alone had acted on one. In addition, the federal government offers no guidance on incorporating sea level projections into port design. “This leaves engineers to make subjective decisions based on inconsistent guidance and information,” the study said, and “leads to engineers and their clients disregarding [sea level change] more frequently.”In response to the threat of increasing supply chain disruption, manufacturers are considering enlarging their inventories or developing “dual supply chains”—supply chains that deliver the same goods via two different routes, so that if one breaks down, the other will prevent shortages. But both solutions would increase production costs, and would contradict the still-predominant “just in time” manufacturing approach, which relies on robust supply chains to eliminate the need for companies to keep extensive parts inventories in stock. American companies could shorten their supply chains, shifting production facilities back to the US or a nearby country, but in many cases they would be removing their factories from the constellation of suppliers that grew up around them in countries such as China and Vietnam.On top of all this, there’s a built-in inertia in supply chain management. “[Long-term] strategy and logistics are opposite things,” Dale Rogers, a business professor at Arizona State University, said in an interview. “Logisticians are always trying to execute the strategy but not necessarily develop it. They’re trying to figure out how to make something happen now, and climate change is a long-term problem.”More Great WIRED Stories📩 The latest on tech, science, and more: Get our newsletters!Jacques Vallée still doesn’t know what UFOs areWhat will it take to make genetic databases more diverse?TikTok was designed for warHow Google's new tech reads your body languageThe quiet way advertisers track your browsing👁️ Explore AI like never before with our new database🏃🏽♀️ Want the best tools to get healthy? Check out our Gear team’s picks for the best fitness trackers, running gear (including shoes and socks), and best headphones | Climate Change |
Mexico, or large parts of it, is running out of water.An extreme drought has seen taps run dry across the country, with nearly two-thirds of all municipalities facing a water shortage that is forcing people in some places to line up for hours for government water deliveries.The lack of water has grown so extreme that irate residents block highways and kidnap municipal workers to demand more supply.The numbers underlining the crisis are startling: In July, eight of Mexico’s 32 states were experiencing extreme to moderate drought, resulting in 1,546 of the country’s 2,463 municipalities confronting water shortages, according to the National Water Commission.By mid-July, about 48% of Mexico’s territory was suffering drought, according to the commission, compared with about 28% of the country’s territory during the same period last year.While tying a single drought to human-caused climate change requires analysis, scientists have no doubt that global warming can alter rainfall patterns around the world and is increasing the likelihood of droughts.Across the border in recent years, most of the western half of the United States has been in drought, with conditions ranging from moderate to severe. For the region, this period is now the driest two decades in 1,200 years.The crisis is particularly acute in Monterrey, Mexico’s second-largest city and one of its most important economic hubs, where the entire metropolitan area of about 5 million people is affected by drought, according to officials. Some neighborhoods in Monterrey have been without water for 75 days, leading many schools to close before the scheduled summer break.The situation in the city has gotten so dire, a visiting journalist could not find any drinking water for sale at several stores, including a Walmart.Buckets, too, are scarce at local stores — or being sold at astronomically high prices — as Monterrey’s residents scrape together containers to collect water supplied by government trucks sent to the driest neighborhoods. Some residents clean out trash cans to ferry water home, children struggling to help carry what can amount to 450 pounds of water.While Monterrey’s poorest neighborhoods are the hardest hit, the crisis is affecting everyone, including the wealthy.“Here you have to chase the water,” said Claudia Muñiz, 38, whose household is often without running water for up to a week. “In a moment of desperation, people explode,” she said about the violence that has flared as people fight over what water there is.Monterrey is in northern Mexico, the most parched region of the country, which has seen its population grow in recent years as the economy boomed. But the area’s typically arid weather is struggling to support the population as climate change reduces what little rainfall the region has.Monterrey’s residents can now walk across the floor of the reservoir that was created by the Cerro Prieto dam and that was once one of the city’s largest sources of water. The reservoir also used to be a major tourist attraction that the local government marketed for its lively waterfront restaurants and its fishing, boating and water-skiing.Now Cerro Prieto is mostly popular because of the coins buried at the bottom of the reservoir that bakes under the sun. Residents swipe metal detectors across exposed rock and scrub, filling pouches with peso coins once tossed in by visitors as they made a wish.Along with the Cerro Prieto reservoir, a seven-year drought — interrupted only by strong rains in 2018, according to a local official — has also dried up water along two other dams that provide most of Monterrey’s water supply. One dam reached 15% of its capacity this year, while the other reached 42%. The rest of the city’s water comes from aquifers, many of which are also running low.The amount of rain in July in parts of the state of Nuevo León, which borders Texas and whose capital is Monterrey, was just 10% of the monthly average recorded since 1960, according to Juan Ignacio Barragán Villarreal, the general director of the city’s water agency.“In March it did not rain a single drop in the entire state,’’ he said, adding that it was the first rain-free March since the government started keeping records in 1960.Today, the government distributes a total of 9 million liters of water daily to 400 neighborhoods. Every day “pipas,” large trucks filled with water and pipes for distribution, fan out across Monterrey and its suburbs to tend to the needs of the driest neighborhoods, often illegal settlements that are home to the poorest residents.Alejandro Casas, a water truck driver, has been working for the government for five years and said that when he started, he supported the city’s firefighters and was called perhaps once or twice a month to deliver water to a fire scene. His workdays were often spent staring at his phone.But since Monterrey’s water shortage became so acute that taps started running dry in January, he now works every day, making up to 10 daily trips to various neighborhoods to supply about 200 families with water with each trip.By the time Casas arrives, a long queue snakes through neighborhood streets with people waiting their turn. Some families carry containers that can hold 200 liters, or 53 gallons, and wait in the sun throughout the afternoon before finally receiving water at midnight.The water he delivers can be all the family gets for up to a week.No one polices the lines so fights break out, as residents from other communities try to sneak in instead of waiting for trucks to reach their neighborhood days later. Residents are allowed to take home as much water as their containers can hold.In May, Casas’ truck was stormed by several young men who got into the passenger seat and threatened him as he was delivering water to the San Ángel neighborhood.“They spoke to me with a very threatening tone,” Casas said, explaining that they demanded he drive the truck to their neighborhood to distribute water. “They told me that if we don’t go to where they wanted, they were going to kidnap us.”Casas headed to the other neighborhood, filled residents’ buckets and was set free.Edgar Ruiz, another government water truck driver, has also seen the crisis worsen. Starting in January he has delivered water from the wells the government controls and has watched nervously each week as their levels plunge.“In January I distributed two or three pipes,” he said, referring to individual water tanks that can carry up to 15,000 liters. “Now I distribute 10, and they have hired many more people” to drive water trucks. Neighboring states have also sent drivers and trucks to help out.He now fears doing his job. Residents used to be grateful when they saw his water truck entering their neighborhood; now they are irate the government has not been able to fix the water shortage.“They stoned a water truck,” he said.María De Los Ángeles, 45, was born and raised in Ciénega de Flores, a town near Monterrey. She says the water crisis is straining her family and her business.“I have never experienced a crisis like this before,” De Los Ángeles said. “The water only comes through our taps every four or five days.”The crisis, she said, is pushing her into bankruptcy — a garden nursery she owns is her family’s only source of livelihood and needs more water than can be provided by the occasional water that flows through her home’s taps.“I have to buy a water tank every week that costs me 1,200 pesos,” equal to $60, from a private supplier, she said. That consumes about half of her weekly income of $120.“We can’t handle it anymore,” De Los Ángeles said.Small-business owners like De Los Ángeles are frustrated that they are left to fend for themselves while Monterrey’s big industries are largely able to operate normally. Factories are able to draw 50 million cubic meters of water per year because of federal concessions that give them special access to the city’s aquifers.The government is struggling to respond to the crisis.To try to mitigate future shortages, the state is investing about $97 million to build a plant to treat wastewater and plans to buy water from a desalination plant under construction in a neighboring state.The government has spent about $82 million to rent more trucks to distribute water, pay additional drivers and dig more wells, according to Barragán, the general director of the water agency.The governor of Nuevo León state, Samuel García, recently urged the world to act together to tackle climate change because it was beyond the capacity of any single government to confront.“The climate crisis has caught up to us,” García wrote on Twitter.“Today we have to take care of the environment, it is life or death.”c.2022 The New York Times Company | Climate Change |
South Korea’s telecommunication regulator, the Korea Communications Commission (KCC), said Friday that it plans to levy fines on Google and Apple, which could total up to $50.5 million, for violating the country’s in-app payment law.
According to the KCC statement, the two Big Tech giants abused market dominance to force local app developers to use their in-app payment methods rather than competitors’ payment systems and unfairly delayed app reviews to enforce the specific billing system.
The commission informed Google and Apple of the implementation of corrective measures to promote fair competition in the app store marketplace. The watchdog also mentioned in the statement that Apple discriminatorily charged commissions to domestic app developers in South Korea.
The KCC will finalize the fines for Google and Apple, up to 47.6 billion won ($35.4 million) and 20.5 billion won, respectively, after collecting opinions from Google and Apple.
The Korean watchdog launched its investigation into the case of three app stores — Google, Apple and One Store, a local app store — in August 2022 over potential violations of the country’s in-app payment rule that South Korea passed in 2021.
In 2021, South Korea enacted a new telecommunication law that allows app developers to use third-party payment options for in-app purchases and bans app store operators from forcing them to use their own systems. Apple and Google agreed to abide by these rules. However, Apple asked developers targeting the South Korean App Store to submit a separate binary for using third-party purchasing systems in 2022.
Earlier this year, South Korea’s Fair Trade Commission (KFTC) fined Alphabet’s Google 42.1 billion won (nearly $32 million) for blocking developers from releasing mobile video games on a Korean competitor platform called One Store.
TechCrunch has reached out to Google and Apple for a comment, and we’ll update the story if we hear back. | Tech Giants |
(Bloomberg) -- Amazon.com Inc.’s cloud unit, determined to take on Microsoft and Google in the burgeoning market for generative artificial intelligence, has unveiled a range of new AI products, including a service that helps health care providers summarize doctor visits and software that let companies create their own chatbots.
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Amazon Web Services’ new HealthScribe summarizing tool has already attracted the interest of 3M Health Information Systems Inc., Babylon Health and ScribeEMR, said Swami Sivasubramanian, vice president of database, analytics and machine learning, who announced the new products on Wednesday in New York. AWS is working with partners to get the technology into clinicians’ hands rather than selling its own product directly to hospitals or doctors, he said in an interview.
Companies are rushing to integrate generative AI into their businesses and automate a range of tasks currently handled by people. Microsoft Corp. and Alphabet Inc.’s Google are both using the technology to revamp web search and add AI capabilities to a host of products. AWS, seen in some quarters as lagging behind its two smaller cloud rivals in generative AI, is trying to sell clients on its services and persuade them to run their own custom-built AI apps on AWS.
The health care sector is already a significant battleground for generative AI. Microsoft, which acquired health AI company Nuance last year, is already using the technology underpinning ChatGPT to sell transcribing and summarizing services to doctors and nurses. Google is working on Med-PaLM, an AI model that researchers say has the potential to revolutionize health care by letting physicians retrieve medical knowledge in real time to support their clinical decisions. HealthScribe is available as a preview in the eastern US region, Amazon said.
AWS also announced it will be adding more business-intelligence tools to its QuickSight product, which competes with Microsoft’s PowerBI and Salesforce Inc.’s Tableau. Apart from easing the preparation of data dashboards, the new features will let customers use plain language to tell the software to create a slideshow or data story from particular graphs or dashboards, Sivasubramanian said.
Customers who want to create chatbots or customer service agents can select one of several large language models used to train the AI algorithms. Amazon is also adding two large language models from the AI company Cohere to its Bedrock product, as well as the latest ones from Stability AI and Anthropic. AWS said customers such as Ryanair Holdings Plc and Bridgewater Associates are using Bedrock. The chatbot tools, called Agents for Bedrock, are available as a preview.
AWS also made available a service that lets customers tap into the latest Nvidia Corp. chip for training AI models, the H100, a further attempt to lure more clients to run their AI apps in AWS’s data centers rather than with Microsoft or Google.
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💬 Social-media startup Truth Social has branded itself as the anti-Twitter and the exclusive home of former President Donald Trump. Its prospects, the firm’s financial backers have disclosed in public filings, depend on monetizing Trump supporters’ rage over alleged “Big Tech” censorship of the political right. As it turns out, it’s hard to build a social network to take on Big Tech without the help of Big Tech. The Trump venture’s pugnacious political approach has hobbled the company’s development from its inception, a Reuters examination of the origins of the secretive enterprise has found. Trump Media & Technology Group (TMTG) has struggled to develop its social media platform since its February 2021 founding because its managers have sought to avoid potential corporate partners and employees perceived as politically liberal in a Silicon Valley-based industry that skews left, said three people with knowledge of its operations. The feeling is mutual: Many engineers and tech firms won’t consider working with a Trump company, according to two of those people, two additional sources with knowledge of the venture and a May 16 filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission by the investment company that plans to merge with TMTG, Digital World Acquisition Corp, or DWAC. The mutual aversion has severely restricted the pool of talent and corporate partners available to help TMTG build a competitive social network on an ambitious timeline. The reluctance of potential staffers and partners to work with TMTG is as practical as it is political: The firms fear an association with Trump will cost them customers, and tech workers worry it could hurt their careers, the people interviewed by Reuters said. The company risks facing the same challenge in seeking advertising from major companies, who want to avoid alienating the half or more of their customers in a politically polarized America who dislike Trump, according to two advertising experts. This account of the company’s early challenges is based on interviews with 16 people with knowledge of its operations, all of whom spoke on condition of anonymity, and public filings by DWAC. The company also faces serious challenges on the legal and financial fronts. DWAC disclosed on Monday that a federal grand jury convened by the Department of Justice (DOJ) in New York has issued subpoenas to all of its directors. The DOJ investigation dovetails with a probe by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) that the investment company first disclosed in December. Word of the SEC inquiry came weeks after Democratic Senator Elizabeth Warren, of Massachusetts, asked the SEC to examine possible securities violations related to allegedly undisclosed private merger talks between TMTG and DWAC last year, before DWAC went public. The SEC declined to comment on its investigation Monday; the DOJ did not immediately respond to a request. DWAC said in an SEC filing Monday that the investigations could delay the proposed merger, which would also stymie a major cash infusion planned for Trump’s social media company. TMTG said in a statement Monday that it would cooperate with SEC “oversight,” without mentioning the Justice Department probe, and said that it remained “focused on reclaiming the American people’s right to free expression” and improving the Truth Social app. Reuters reporter Helen Coster discusses the struggles of Donald Trump’s Truth Social to build a competitive platform to take on the ‘Big Tech’ industry the former president has attacked. The company’s avoidance of Big Tech firms contributed to major problems with the February launch of its app on the Apple Store, relegating hundreds of thousands of users to a waiting list that wasn’t cleared until April. A person familiar with TMTG’s technical operations said the botched launch was caused by problems with servers, the remote computers that provide the storage and data-processing power to run websites. The servers, the person said, had been provided by two smaller cloud providers with political credentials that suited TMTG: Rumble, a Canadian video-sharing platform that caters to conservatives but is brand new to the server business; and RightForge, an infrastructure firm that markets itself as a free-speech champion. The firms were chosen to replace cloud-computing industry leader Amazon Web Services (AWS), which was used early in the project but quickly ditched for political considerations, the person said. AWS was particularly problematic because the cloud-computing unit of tech titan Amazon.com Inc. angered many on the political right last year by terminating services to Parler, the social network popular among conservatives, citing its failure to police posts inciting violence. In the May 16 filing, DWAC named Amazon among the Big Tech firms TMTG was “founded to fight,” because they “collude to limit debate in America and silence voices that contradict their woke ideology.” The list also included Twitter, Facebook, Netflix and Google, among “others” DWAC left unnamed. An AWS spokesperson declined to comment. Parler did not respond to an inquiry. An investor relations company representing TMTG issued a short statement in response to detailed questions from Reuters sent to representatives of Trump, TMTG and DWAC. The statement, from Shannon Devine, a managing partner at MZ Group, said the Reuters inquiry contained “false and defamatory statements.” “It also includes misleading assertions and omits material facts,” wrote Devine, who said the statement was on behalf of TMTG’s legal department. Devine did not specify what information was false or misleading and did not respond to a follow-up request for comment. TMTG has also been hampered by a leadership team with little tech-industry experience and little interest in learning the operational details of software development, according to two people familiar with company operations. Two people central to the company’s founding, Wes Moss and Andy Litinsky, are both former castmates on “The Apprentice,” the reality TV show that featured Trump before his presidency. Moss is also a managing partner at a wealth management firm in Atlanta. Litinsky previously worked at Trump’s TV production company and hosted a conservative radio show. He also ran a short-lived start-up, ConnectPal, a social-media site that charged subscribers to access users’ profiles before Litinsky dissolved the business in 2018, according to a regulatory filing. Two people familiar with company operations said Moss and Litinsky essentially ran TMTG in its early days, before it hired CEO Devin Nunes, a former Republican U.S. congressman and dairy farmer. Nunes started in January, the month before the rocky app launch. He did not respond to a request for comment. TMTG has not disclosed executive job titles for Moss and Litinsky. The May 16 filing identifies Moss as a director, but Reuters could not determine his current management role or level of involvement with the company. Moss did not respond to a request for comment. Litinsky left the company “months ago,” according to a person familiar with the venture, without specifying his exact date or reason for departing. The exit of Litinsky, who now works as a media and technology consultant, has not been previously reported. TMTG technology team members tried soon after the company’s launch to get Moss and Litinsky to commit to software-development best practices, such as identifying and prioritizing key user features, according to a person familiar with company operations. The two men called such suggestions a waste of time, the person said. When tech employees pressed Moss and Litinsky for the company vision, they said TMTG should replicate Twitter, the person said, except without content-moderation policies that irk some conservatives. Such an imitative approach would reflect a fundamental misunderstanding of what’s required for tech-industry survival, said Aaron Ginn, co-founder of the Lincoln Network, an influential group of tech-industry conservatives. Like all startups, he said, TMTG must innovate to compete in the fierce battle for users’ attention. “The question is whether or not the product has a unique invention,” Ginn said. TMTG, he said, needs to generate differentiated content that users “can’t get on Twitter.” TMTG’s business model has looked shaky in light of recent news. Billionaire Elon Musk, who has a deal to buy Twitter, in May vowed to rescind that platform’s ban on Trump. Later, the May 16 DWAC filing disclosed that the platform’s “exclusive” deal with Trump isn’t so exclusive: It allows him to post political commentary “on any social media site at any time,” deepening doubts about his commitment to the enterprise. A Twitter spokesperson declined to comment for this report. TMTG’s fortunes are inextricably tied to Trump. He is billed by the company as the chief traffic driver. As chairman, he will control either 47% or 58% of the company’s voting power, depending on how preferred stock is handled once it merges with DWAC, the special purpose acquisition company. The merger requires approval from the Securities and Exchange Commission and is likely months away from closing. 🕸️ ‘Comically low’ app downloads Some early dysfunction is expected in startups, but unlike most new firms, TMTG did not have the luxury of learning on a small stage. Under the unceasing spotlight on Trump, the company had to build a platform to accommodate a large audience and uneven spikes in traffic from its first day, without the reliable tools most Silicon Valley developers depend on. Platforms such as AWS server systems, for instance, have become so ubiquitous that many developers aren’t trained to work on anything else. That dynamic exacerbated already difficult recruiting and development processes, according to a person familiar with TMTG’s technical operations. The tech team has started to get more traction recently. In late April, Truth Social finally cleared its waiting list for Apple device users and topped the charts for App Store downloads for about a week. In mid-May, the company released a version of Truth Social for web browsers. One venture capitalist calls the 2.8 million downloads of the Truth Social app as of June 1 “comically low” for a high-profile enterprise associated with a former U.S. president. The company, however, has yet to launch an app in Google’s Play Store for Android phones, which comprise about 40% of the U.S. smartphone market. And its user base remains a tiny fraction of its ambitious growth targets. TMTG told investors in November that the site would reach 56 million users by 2024 and 81 million by 2026. For comparison, the 2026 target would be about 35% of the number of daily users on Twitter today. As of June 1, the Truth Social app had been downloaded 2.8 million times, according to data analytics firm Sensor Tower. One venture capitalist called that figure “comically low” for a high-profile venture backed by a former U.S. president. Gene Munster, a managing partner at Minneapolis-based technology investment firm Loup, said he would have expected more like 25 million downloads given the heavy attention the project has drawn. “Is it that the platform wasn’t working right? Is it that they aren’t getting their message out?” he asked. “I’m shocked … that’s low.” ⭐ Cast of characters The team seeking to monetize Trump’s social-media magnetism has been a revolving cast from politics, tech, reality TV and other industries. The firm has had three different technology chiefs in its first year. The idea for Truth Social started with the duo from the “Apprentice,” the show that forced contestants to compete in business challenges for a job in Trump’s real-estate empire. In January 2021, Moss and Litinsky pitched Trump on a social network that could restore his unfiltered access to the American people, according to a person familiar with the company’s founding. Twitter and Facebook had just banned Trump after concluding he had incited or glorified violence during the U.S. Capitol riot earlier that month. Trump greenlit the idea, and by June a small team set to work on it, according to a person familiar with company operations. Fellow “Apprentice” alum Nicholas Warnock, a California insurance salesman, was one early team member. Warnock previously spent more than a decade at a digital book company. He was sued in 2019 by his former business partner, who alleged Warnock had “absconded” with money, court filings show. A California judge last year ordered Warnock to pay more than $310,000, a decision Warnock has appealed. Warnock did not respond to requests for comment. Reuters could not determine his specific role or current employment status at TMTG. Another early team member was Will Russell, a former deputy travel director in Trump’s White House. The chief financial officer was Phillip Juhan, who previously held the CFO role at bankrupt fitness chain operator Town Sports International, according to the May DWAC filing. Chief Technology Officer Jay Dalke, an Atlanta tech-industry veteran, was among the few early hires with significant tech-industry experience. Truth Social last summer started recruiting tech talent. Executives sought to find ideologically aligned staffers, in at least one case scanning candidates’ social media and listening to their appearances on podcasts, according to a person familiar with company operations. But the company struggled to woo skilled tech workers, regardless of their politics, according to three people with knowledge of the recruiting efforts. Those with the company’s preferred conservative politics, or at least a commitment to its stated free-speech mission, were in short supply, they said. And tech workers with liberal or moderate politics usually wanted nothing to do with the Trump company. One person approached by TMTG told Reuters it was an easy offer to refuse. Beyond a distaste for Trump’s politics, this person cited concerns about the former president’s history of business failures – the DWAC filing lists six Trump entities that have filed for bankruptcy – and about TMTG’s financing arrangements. At least two people who never worked for TMTG were listed in a November 2021 investor presentation as members of its tech team, according to two people with knowledge of the matter. An earlier presentation, in March 2021, named John Horton, a startup founder who served in the administration of Republican President George W. Bush, as one of Trump Media Group’s “key personnel,” responsible for technology, security and payment processing. Horton told Reuters he has had no involvement with Truth Social. Some staffers who did sign up have hidden their work at TMTG, avoiding any mention of their new jobs on their social media bios, according to a Reuters review of workers’ bios. Some feared career repercussions, according to a person familiar with company operations. The identities of two key TMTG executives – Chief Product Officer Billy Boozer, and the company’s second of three chief technology officers, Josh Adams – were not publicly known until Reuters exclusively reported in April that they had resigned after a brief and tumultuous tenure. Boozer and Adams did not respond to requests for comment. 🥱 Sleepless nights The development team worked at a WeWork co-working space in Atlanta. The TMTG staff was small and heavily reliant on outside contractors, according to two sources familiar with company operations. Reuters could not determine the size of the whole operation, but TMTG had about 40 full-time employees as of March 31, according to the May 16 regulatory filing from DWAC. The startup had as much difficulty finding vendors as it did recruiting staffers, according to the filing and three people with knowledge of company operations. Several potential partners, the filing said, were unwilling to partner with TMTG because of the company’s “connection with President Trump.” Two sources with knowledge of TMTG’s operations said several companies backed out of agreements after reconsidering the potential for backlash from clients or customers. Some prospective partners feared becoming targets for hackers, according to another person with knowledge of company operations. Fueling those fears, an early, unpublished version of the app was breached in October by hackers who created parody accounts, including a false “donaldjtrump” account with a photograph of a defecating pig. Fastly, a content-delivery network provider, told Reuters it rejected a request to provide services for Truth Social. The company, which provides a system allowing for fast and reliable web access, said someone signed up online with a personal email address in September and “ultimately tried to configure service with a truthsocial domain on our system.” The company said it shut the account down for violating its terms of service but declined to comment on the specific violation. As TMTG publicly blasted Big Tech, it sought out ideologically aligned firms such as Rumble. TMTG announced on Dec. 14 that it had entered into a “wide-ranging technology and cloud services” agreement with the Canadian firm, which would include video and streaming for Truth Social. Rumble had already been working with TMTG for months in a role that was described internally as a key strategic partnership but not clearly defined to staffers, according to two people with knowledge of TMTG operations. TMTG’s connections to Rumble were both political and personal. Rumble CEO Chris Pavlovski was a friend of Moss, according to a person familiar with the venture. Rumble was backed by major investors on the political right, including PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel. Trump Media CEO Nunes had a presence on the platform, and a lawyer who had previously worked under Nunes on a Congressional intelligence committee became Rumble’s top attorney in November. Thiel did not respond to a request for comment. TMTG wanted to use Rumble as a cloud provider, but Rumble couldn’t immediately take on the job because it was still developing its cloud-services offering, according to a person familiar with TMTG’s technical operations. That forced TMTG to temporarily use AWS, despite the concerns about hiring a major Big Tech player. By October, TMTG had dropped AWS and added RightForge, the company that bills itself as a free-speech proponent, to be the main server provider while Rumble ramped up its cloud offering. By then, the work on Truth Social was so far behind schedule that its tech team had to work brutally long hours to get it done, according to a person familiar with TMTG’s technical operations. The firm’s original chief technology officer, Jay Dalke, quit that same month, to be replaced by Adams. Adams and chief product officer Boozer would lead the scramble to meet the company launch deadline of President’s Day, Feb. 21. Both were Southern tech entrepreneurs and conservatives with a passion for Truth Social’s free-speech mission, according to two people familiar with TMTG operations. “None of these guys slept for weeks and weeks and weeks,” one of those people said of Adams’ technology team. Adams and Boozer beat the deadline by one day, but the app lacked key features, such as direct messaging, and most users trying to download it were shunted to the waiting list. Server problems caused the chaos, according to a source familiar with the app’s technical operations. Rumble had only gotten its cloud service operational shortly before the app launch, and some of its technology failed when the site went live, the person said. Deploying Rumble’s servers alongside the RightForge cloud infrastructure also created problems in getting the two systems to work together running the same app, the source said. Rumble CEO Pavlovski did not answer detailed questions from Reuters on its work with TMTG. A Rumble spokesperson denied in a statement that the company’s servers experienced technical issues when the TMTG app launched. The statement said Rumble cloud services “were ready” in 2021, without specifying the date. In a June 17 filing from CF Acquisition Corp. VI, the blank-check firm taking Rumble public, Rumble said that its “initial cloud service offerings revolve around a small number of customer relationships,” including its work with TMTG, and that its “infrastructure services offerings are still currently in early development.” A company spokesperson for RightForge did not respond to a request for comment. Adams and Boozer resigned shortly after the app’s troubled debut. Replacing Adams was another Southern tech entrepreneur, William “B.J.” Lawson, a medical doctor who previously launched a health tech startup and twice ran unsuccessfully for Congress in North Carolina. 👋 Weak grip on Trump Big money is riding on Truth Social. TMTG stands to receive $293 million in cash from DWAC and has raised about $1 billion in additional committed financing from investors in a private investment in public equity (PIPE) arrangement. The money from both deals won’t be available until the DWAC merger closes. The site, meanwhile, isn’t expected to generate revenue until 2023, according to the May 16 DWAC filing, which noted the company had a net loss of $60 million in 2021. Despite Trump’s financial interest in Truth Social, the former president did not post on the platform for more than two months after its troubled Apple app launch, raising questions about his commitment to the company. Earlier, in October, as TMTG raced to produce a product, Trump was holding discussions about a financial arrangement to join Gettr, a rival conservative social media network run by Trump’s former spokesman, Jason Miller. DWAC said in a May regulatory filing that it learned of the Gettr flirtation from a podcast featuring Miller. The former president has posted regularly on Truth Social since the beginning of May, sometimes multiple times a day. But the May 16 DWAC filing made clear how little control TMTG has over Trump’s social media activities. Trump is obligated to give Truth Social a six-hour exclusive on any post – except the posts that matter most to TMTG’s business. Trump is free to post “political messaging, political fundraising or get-out-the vote efforts” on any site, at any time, the filing said. The agreement presents a “huge problem” for the company, said Munster, the venture capitalist. “It’s a problem because Trump is going to go where the audience is,” he said. The company’s only defense against promiscuous posting by the former president, he said, is that Trump may benefit financially if Truth Social succeeds. But the “political messaging” clause is a signal of Trump’s lack of commitment to TMTG, Munster said. Truth Social has quickly grown its user base by tapping hardcore Trump fans angry over his de-platforming, but it will struggle to take over the conservative conversation from established platforms, said Ethan Zuckerman, an associate professor of public policy and communications at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. “Truth Social really would love to be in a place where, if you cared what the right in America was thinking, you had to be on Truth Social,” he said. “That hasn’t happened yet.” The firm’s revenue challenge mirrors those it faces throughout its operations: The pool of advertisers for a Trump company will be as limited as the pool of workers and corporate partners. The site is likely to get ads from the likes of MyPillow, a regular Fox News advertiser run by prominent Trump supporter Mike Lindell, who told Reuters he would “absolutely” advertise on Truth Social. It could also attract companies catering specifically to conservatives, such as gun manufacturers, said Allen Adamson, an ad industry veteran who is co-founder of Metaforce, a marketing consulting firm. “But those are not the big advertisers. The big advertisers are the beer and the chips and the diaper companies,” who risk driving away customers by affiliating with a Trump company, he said. “They have to be relevant in red and blue.” TMTG chief Nunes has privately expressed concern about that dynamic, worrying the company’s revenue will quickly hit a ceiling without such blue-chip advertisers, according to a person with knowledge of the matter. The May 16 filing noted that surveys have shown only 30% of respondents – and only 60% of Republicans – would consider using a Trump-affiliated social media platform. “In order to be successful,” the filing noted, “TMTG will need millions of those people to register and regularly use TMTG’s platform.” Trump’s Truth By Helen Coster and Julia Love Photo editing: Corinne Perkins Video production: Lucy Ha and Emma Jehle Art direction: John Emerson Edited by: Kenneth Li, Jason Szep and Brian Thevenot Follow Reuters Investigates | Tech Giants |
The logos of Facebook and Giphy.Aytac Unal | Anadolu Agency via Getty ImagesMeta, the owner of Facebook, admitted defeat Tuesday after U.K. competition regulators issued a final verdict ordering the company to sell its animated image making unit Giphy.Citing the risk of a substantial lessening of competition in the social media and display advertising market, the Competition and Markets Authority said Tuesday that Meta must "sell GIPHY, in its entirety, to a suitable buyer." It is not yet clear which company will step in to buy Giphy.In a statement, a Meta spokesperson said the company was "disappointed by the CMA's decision but accept today's ruling as the final word on the matter.""We will work closely with the CMA on divesting GIPHY," the Meta spokesperson told CNBC. "We are grateful to the GIPHY team during this uncertain time for their business, and wish them every success. We will continue to evaluate opportunities - including through acquisition - to bring innovation and choice to more people in the UK and around the world."In November, the CMA ordered Meta to divest Giphy after finding the combination of the two companies raised competition concerns. Meta tried to appeal the decision. However, in June, a court largely ruled against the company's appeal, kicking the final decision over the fate of the deal back to the CMA. After a three-month review, a CMA panel ruled the deal would enable Meta to further increase its market power.Meta's $400 million acquisition of Giphy was hardly one of the social media giant's biggest. It had spent far greater sums on earlier deals, including the $1 billion acquisition of photo sharing app Instagram and the $19 billion buyout of encrypted messaging platform WhatsApp.GIFs 'cringe'In an August court filing, Giphy tried to downplay the significance of Meta's takeover of the company with an unorthodox argument — its core product offering was going out of fashion, so there'd be no other company willing to buy it.GIFs "have fallen out of fashion as a content form, with younger users in particular describing gifs as 'for boomers' and 'cringe,'" the company said in the filing. Giphy has seen a decline in the number of GIF uploads in the past two years, it added.But the CMA took issues with the takeover — specifically with impact it would have on the U.K. display advertising market. Meta controls nearly half of the U.K.'s £7 billion ($7.9 billion) display advertising market."Before the merger, Giphy was offering innovative advertising services in the US and was considering expanding to other countries, including the UK," the regulator said. Such services would have allowed brands like Dunkin' Donuts and Pepsi to promote their brands through GIFs, it added.The CMA also cited the prospect of Giphy relinquishing its own ambitions in digital advertising in its decision to block the deal. Giphy had plans to launch its own ads but these were quashed by Meta after the takeover was completed in 2020, according to the regulator. The watchdog said this effectively "removed Giphy as a potential challenger in the UK display advertising market."The CMA said it found Meta's purchase of Giphy would have restricted rival social media firms' access to the platform's GIFs, driving users to Meta's own services. It added that the move may result in Meta changing its terms of service to curb competition — for example, by requiring customers of Giphy, like China's TikTok, to provide more data from their U.K. users to secure continued access its GIFs.Landmark moveIt is the first time a global regulator has unwound a completed deal by a Big Tech company. The CMA is seeking to become a greater force in the battle among global regulators to rein in Big Tech companies.Alongside the European Commission, the EU's executive arm, it has several ongoing high-profile investigations into the likes of Meta, Google and Apple, and wants powers from the government to levy bigger fines against tech giants over breaches of competition law. | Tech Giants |
- Amazon, Alphabet, Apple, Microsoft, Meta and ByteDance have now six months to comply with stricter market rules.
- Microsoft and Apple challenged the commission's view that Bing and iMessage are services that have to follow the new rules.
- The European Union has stepped up its oversight of Big Tech players in recent years, often criticized for being anti-American.
BRUSSELS — U.S. tech giants are facing stricter rules in Europe with more regulation announced this week, but one senior European Union official told CNBC the aim is to avoid forced breakups of large businesses.
The European Commission, the executive arm of the EU, named six "gatekeepers" on Wednesday — these are companies that have an annual turnover above 7.5 billion euros ($8 billion) or 45 million monthly active users inside the bloc. They are Amazon, Alphabet, Apple, Microsoft, Meta and ByteDance, who now have six months to comply with stricter market rules — such as not being able to prevent users from un-installing any pre-installed software or apps, or treating their own services more favorably.
"If these companies do not comply, and I hope that they will all comply, then we will have the ability to have [a] fine [of] up to 10% of the global revenue," Thierry Breton, the EU's commissioner for the Internal Market, told CNBC Wednesday.
The fine could be increased to 20% if the company in question continues to not comply with the rules.
"And if they continue, yes, we have tools, including to break up these companies, but I will never want to use it. And I can tell you the discussion that we have with all these companies are professional and I believe are going in the right decision," Breton said.
Microsoft and Apple challenged the commission's view that their services, Bing and iMessage, have to follow the new rules, known collectively as the EU's Digital Markets Act. The commission started an investigation looking at these companies' arguments and will decide within five months whether they are valid.
The European Union has stepped up its oversight of Big Tech players in recent years, and has been often criticized for being anti-American given that most of these companies are U.S.-based.
"I enjoy to be able to offer to successful companies, European or non-European, to have the ability to enter into our digital market, which is, by the way, bigger than the one in the United States. So it's very attractive, we are happy that big non-European compan[ies] could benefit from it," Breton said, who spoke exclusively with CNBC.
On top of the Digital Markets Act, the EU also introduced the Digital Services Act, which is focused on making platforms legally accountable for the content they carry. Failure to comply with the latter could also lead to hefty fines and temporary bans in the European market.
Some of the largest tech firms have undergone stress tests in the run-up to the implementation of the new law. For example, the stress test of the X social media platform, formerly known as Twitter, revealed that work still needs to be done to tackle illegal content and disinformation.
Amazon Marketplace, Apple AppStore, Instagram, TikTok and GoogleSearch are among the 19 platforms that fall under the tougher rules. More companies could be added to this list, including the likes of Netflix, PornHub and Airbnb. | Tech Giants |
It’s one of the worst-kept secrets in the tech industry that a large group of Apple employees are working on a car project, known internally as Project Titan. But there’s a difference between working on a project and actually shipping out a finished product, and the CEO of Volkswagen is the latest voice to publicly cast doubt over the prospects of an Apple Car making it to market. Reuters reports that Herbert Diess said yesterday: “I’m not sure if Apple will actually bring cars to the market in the end. It would be a big effort.” Diess, who was speaking at Berlin’s hub.berlin tech conference, added that he was sure that Apple wants to enter the car market on the software side, but that’s not quite the same thing. Diess certainly has a point. The car industry has a high cost of entry and it will be difficult for Apple to make an actual car without the assistance of an existing car manufacturer. The tech giant is notoriously difficult to work with and asking an auto maker to help with the creation of an Apple Car is a bit like asking turkeys to vote for Christmas. It’s also important to note, however, that Diess is by no means a disinterested observer in all this. In 2021 he insisted that VW is not afraid of the competition an Apple Car would pose, but Tesla’s success means the automotive industry is well aware of tech’s disruptive potential. Telling the world that the Apple Car will not change the industry is one way of trying to make sure it doesn’t, by dampening enthusiasm and persuading Apple shareholders that this would not be a productive avenue for development. And here’s one final tidbit which illustrates both how long the Apple Car has been running and the peculiar love-hate relationship the company has had with car manufacturers. Back in the day, Volkswagen itself reportedly held talks with Apple about jointly developing a vehicle, but negotiations came to nothing. In those days both companies had different CEOs; VW was headed by Martin Winterkorn, and Apple by a guy you may have heard of by the name of Steve Jobs. Because this happened in 2007. Perhaps in another 15 years the Apple Car will finally be a reality. Or perhaps we will have finally stopped talking about it. But right now, both seem like remote prospects. Note: When you purchase something after clicking links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. Read our affiliate link policy for more details. David has loved the iPhone since covering the original 2007 launch; later his obsession expanded to include iPad and Apple Watch. He offers advice to owners (and prospective owners) of these devices. | Tech Giants |
Social-media companies can no longer shirk responsibility for profit-driven algorithms that boost terrorist content. This week I — with some help from the US Supreme Court — sought to bring a wrecking ball to the archaic wall of protective legislation enabling them.
On Oct. 13, 2015, two Hamas supporters boarded the No. 78 bus in Jerusalem and massacred passengers. The killings were inspired by Facebook pages and social media the terrorists were active on. They followed materials that radicalized groups posted using Facebook’s platform.
There was everything for the wannabe jihadist: clerics and terror chieftains calling to kill Jews, glorification of past terror acts and anatomical diagrams showing the most lethally effective areas to shoot or stab.
It was not isolated. In fall 2015, terrorists and lone wolves incited to violence killed and wounded scores of Israelis in random, social-media-inspired stabbing, shooting, bludgeoning and car-ramming attacks. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu labeled the wave of terror the “Facebook Intifada.”
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg didn’t commit the acts, but the Facebook parent firm’s universe aided and abetted these crimes, and it did so protected by an impregnable wall of absolute immunity created by 26 words of an obsolete codicil of legislative doublespeak written in 1996: Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act.
Section 230’s wording — “No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider” — was intended to nurture the nascent companies by sheltering them from bad-faith lawsuits based on content.
Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), one of 230’s authors, said it was intended “to give up-and-coming tech firms a sword and a shield, and to foster free speech and innovation online.” He noted “social media — as a result of Section 230 — has been a huge megaphone for people who want to challenge those in power.”
Yet the way it has allowed terror to metastasize on the Internet isn’t about power, free speech or innovation.
Silicon Valley’s tech monopolies are not in the morality business; they’re driven by profits and ad-revenue-generated quarterly earnings. Provocative material — even the live-streaming of a catastrophic terror event — produces millions of clicks, likes, shares and dollars.
It is not just Facebook. Twitter, Instagram and especially YouTube became go-to terror platforms for propaganda videos — barbaric films showing beheadings and immolations — used to recruit terrorists and raise money. Operational orders for strikes, such as the ISIS November 2015 Paris attacks that killed 130 people, were disseminated online.
I represent the family of Nohemi Gonzalez, a 23-year-old American exchange student murdered in the Paris terror. We believe Google, YouTube’s parent company, became ISIS’s propaganda and operational arm.
Shurat HaDin, the human-rights organization I created in Israel to fight for terror victims’ rights, started battling Section 230 before the Facebook Intifada. We gathered petitions, filed lawsuits and repeatedly had our cases thrown out of federal and state courts because of the 1996 legislation. It blocked our path to get anyone to show moral backbone or take responsibility for a lethal problem. Section 230 shields the tech giants from criminal and civil liability over the content they disseminate. This interpretation has left behind heavy collateral damage.
Our efforts for justice for Nohemi Gonzalez were repeatedly stymied, but in October 2022, the US Supreme Court agreed to hear Gonzalez v. Google. The court found possible merit in the glaring reality that changes to Section 230 are needed.
Since Shurat HaDin added the social-media giants to the list of terrorists and their supporters — Iran, North Korea, Hamas, Hezbollah and the banks that finance them, to name a few — countless innocents have been murdered by extremists who have posted manifestos, living wills, heinous plans and have even live-streamed murders. Across the world, from Pittsburgh to Christchurch, social-media-empowered bloodshed can no longer be ignored.
This week the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in Gonzalez v. Google, one of two terror-related cases before the justices challenging Section 230. The tech giants have circled their wagons defending their legislative armor. Meta warned changing Section 230 “would incentivize online services to remove important, provocative, and controversial content on issues of public concern, frustrating what Congress intended to be a vibrant marketplace of diverse perspectives.”
There is nothing vibrant about terrorists using legislative protection as a lethal weapon. We need to reexamine these 26 words that helped kill Nohemi Gonzalez.
Justice and common-sense decency must once and for all prevail.
Nitsana Darshan-Leitner is an Israeli civil-rights lawyer and the president of Shurat HaDin Law Center. | Tech Giants |
A federal judge has rejected Apple's and Amazon's motions to wholly dismiss a consumer antitrust lawsuit, one that accuses the tech giants of colluding to eliminate all but the highest-price Apple products in Amazon's online store.
Writing in Seattle (PDF), Judge John C. Coughenour noted that Apple and Amazon do not dispute the existence of their agreement, which was publicly touted by the companies in November 2018. Nor do they argue that it had an "effect on interstate commerce," as required by a lawsuit making a complaint under the Sherman Act. The issues pushed in the defendants' motion for dismissal is whether the Global Tenets Agreement (GTA) signed by the companies has an impact on "a relevant market" and whether it "imposes an unreasonable restraint of trade."
Coughenour dismissed one aspect of the plaintiff's lawsuit. He disagreed with Apple's and Amazon's positioning of themselves as competing to sell Apple products "at a horizontal level." Instead, they are, under their GTA, "vertically situated" as a manufacturer and distributor. But, given the "complex nature of the business relationships between the parties," Coughenour wrote, and the fact that the plaintiffs agree that not all resellers of Apple products were removed from Amazon's marketplace, a "per se" finding of antitrust violation could not be sustained.
But the case can go forward, Coughenour wrote. What the specific market is for Apple products on Amazon, and the GTA's impact on it, that "is a question reserved for a jury." The judge cites F.T.C v. Whole Foods Mkt. (the latter of which is owned by Amazon) in dismissing Apple's claims that the plaintiffs have not defined a specific enough market for iPhones and iPads, which can be bought in many places. "The fact that a customer might buy a stick of gum at a supermarket or at a convenience store does not mean there is no definable groceries market," a DC federal court wrote in 2008.
The original complaint, filed by Seattle law firm Hagens Berman on behalf of Pennsylvania resident Steven Floyd and a wider class, suggests that Apple and Amazon's agreement, originally framed as a way of removing counterfeit or low-quality Apple products from the store, denies customers competitive pricing on iPhones and iPads. The suit claimed that the agreement essentially killed the market for refurbished Apple goods on Amazon while giving Amazon a discount of up to 10 percent on its own sales of Apple goods. The suit notably claimed that there were more than 600 vendors of Apple goods on Amazon in early 2018 but only seven by mid-2019.
Hagens Berman has seen Apple in court many times before. The firm has sued Apple over scratched iPad nano cases, e-book price-fixing, App Store developer rules, and iOS touchscreen patents, the last of which involved Apple's accusing Hagens Berman of relying on an undisclosed attorney for help with their suit.
We've reached out to Hagens Berman, Apple, and Amazon for comment and will update the post if we hear back. | Tech Giants |
BRUSSELS, July 11 (Reuters) - Amazon (AMZN.O) is challenging its inclusion in a group of companies subject to tough European Union online content rules, in a move that may prompt other tech giants to follow suit.
The challenge at the Luxembourg-based General Court, Europe's second highest, is the first by a Big Tech company and came two weeks after German online retailer Zalando (ZALG.DE) sued the European Commission over the same issue.
Under the Digital Services Act (DSA), which came into force last year, 19 platforms and search engines were labelled as very large online platforms as they have more than 45 million users.
A VLOP designation requires companies to do more to tackle illegal online content, undertake risk management, conduct external and independent auditing and share data with authorities and researchers.
Amazon said it is not the largest retailer in any of the EU countries where it operates and bigger rivals in these countries have not been designated as VLOPs and asked the General Court to annul its designation.
"Amazon doesn't fit this description of a 'Very Large Online Platform’ under the DSA and therefore should not be designated as such," an Amazon spokesperson said on Tuesday.
"If the VLOP designation were to be applied to Amazon and not to other large retailers across the EU, Amazon would be unfairly singled out and forced to meet onerous administrative obligations that don't benefit EU consumers."
The EU executive said it took note of Amazon's challenge and would defend its position in court.
"The scope of the DSA is very clear and is defined to cover all platforms that expose their users to content, including the sale of products or services, which can be illegal," a Commission spokesperson said.
"For marketplaces as for social networks, very wide user reach increases the risks and the platforms’ responsibilities to address them," they added.
Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles. | Tech Giants |
Chinese regulators have increased scrutiny on the domestic game sector over the past year and a half. But new batches of game approvals and positive steps on improving gaming addiction among kids under 18 years old, could be positive signs that the crackdown is easing.Xing Yun | Costfoto | Barcroft Media | Getty ImagesBeijing is showing signs that its intense crackdown on the domestic video games sector could be easing which may be bullish for Chinese tech giants including Tencent and NetEase.On Tuesday, research firm CNG alongside the China Game Industry Group Committee, which is affiliated with the gaming publishing regulator, published a report in which they praised the progress on reducing gaming addiction among people under the age of 18.related investing newsRegulators have been concerned for some time about gaming addiction among minors. Last year, China's National Press and Publication Administration brought in rules that restricted kids under 18 years old from playing online games for more than 3 hours per week.The CNG report holds weight because it has been published in conjunction with a key gaming industry body with links to the regulator. The report said more than 70% of minors play games for less than 3 hours a week, and the problem of minors' game addiction has "achieved a step toward resolution," according to a CNBC translation.The positive report could signal a more bullish outlook toward the Chinese gaming sector."China's strict regulatory approach over the past year has been a result of a lack of enforcement and compliance across key areas," Daniel Ahmad, senior analyst at Niko Partners, told CNBC. "With game companies now fully compliant, we are seeing a more positive outlook start to develop."The CNG report also singles out major Chinese gaming companies including Tencent and NetEase for their positive moves enforcing the protection of minors.For example, both Tencent and NetEase use facial recognition to see whether the person playing the game is an adult.Another positive sign came last week when the regulators approved a batch of 70 new games for release. In China, video games need approval to be published and monetized. Among the approvals was a game titled Metal Slug: Awakening from Tencent, marking the company's first commercial game license in a year and a half, according to Reuters.Last year, China froze game approvals in the summer and only began green lighting games in April this year. But titles from Tencent, China's largest gaming firm, have been absent from the lists until now.Tencent management last week told analysts on its third-quarter earnings call that the company expects game licenses to be approved relatively quickly in the future, adding to further signs of regulatory scrutiny on the sector easing.Martin Lau, president of Tencent, said the company is seeing "positive signals across the path of macro and regulatory normalization." | Tech Giants |
India’s central bank has halted its plans for a high-profile project intended to rival the nation’s dominant payment system, Unified Payments Interface. The project had attracted significant interest from a variety of major conglomerates, tech giants, and financial institutions, including Amazon, Reliance, Facebook, Tata Group, Google, HDFC, and ICICI.
The Reserve Bank of India had initially invited bids in 2021 for licenses to operate new retail payment and settlement systems across India. The project was called New Umbrella Entity, or NUE.
However, according to RBI Deputy Governor T Rabi Sankar, the project’s potential participants failed to propose “any innovative or infrastructural solutions.” Sankar emphasized the central bank’s interest in exploring ideas that go beyond incremental improvements or substitutes for existing technologies.
UPI, which now processes over 8 billion transactions a month, was inching closer to the 1 billion milestone in 2021. The central bank sought to mitigate concentration risk as UPI’s importance in the economy continued to grow, aiming to develop an alternative protocol that would alleviate strain on the existing system.
PhonePe and Google Pay were commanding the most market share in UPI in 2021 — not much has changed — and many industry participants saw NUE as a way to be early and aggressive with a new payments system.
In an earlier proposal, RBI sought NUEs to be interoperable with each other.
“Thus, NUEs do not have any proprietary access. However, NUEs can customize the networks to their business model and distribution capabilities. If a conglomerate is strong in e-commerce, the NUE could customize to the specific needs of that use-case. UPI has market share caps/calibrated growth for new players (eg. WhatsApp). NUEs would not have such restrictions and might help with accelerated network effects for private players. Thus, NUEs customized design and self-governance could provide stronger capabilities. Unlike UPI’s generic payment network, NUEs will have customized networks based on use-cases,” Bernstein wrote in a report in 2021. | Tech Giants |
(Bloomberg) -- Google’s dominance in online search has triggered a regulatory crackdown by South Africa’s antitrust body.
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The watchdog determined that Alphabet Inc.-owned Google’s search dominance “distorts platform competition” in favor of large market players. It recommended several remedies focused on improving visibility for smaller South African companies in search results to address this.
“Google has an influence on platform competition because it is where most online journeys start,” said Competition Commission Chairman James Hodge in a media briefing on Monday. “Google does give prominence to paid results, which means that the largest platforms with the biggest marketing budgets can dominate the Google search page.”
The findings are the result of a broad investigation into Google and other tech platforms operating in South Africa over competition concerns that launched in 2021. The probe also looked at businesses including Naspers Ltd.’s Takealot, Uber Eats and Apple Inc.’s App Store.
Google said South Africans look to its platform for relevant and high quality search results that they can trust. “This creates choice and generates millions of free visits to South African sites and businesses across the web every day,” said Google spokesperson Siyavuya Madikane, adding that the company was reviewing the watchdog’s final report.
The commission also said that local online firm Takealot, owned by internet group Naspers, should split its marketplace and retail businesses, among other recommendations for the companies examined in the inquiry. The Cape Town-based company launched in 2011 and has become the largest online retailer in South Africa, reporting $827 million in revenue in 2022.
A Takealot spokesperson said the company acknowledged the report and was “considering its findings.”
Africa’s most developed economy joins a number of other large jurisdictions such as the US, Europe and India, in looking at the dominance of Google in search and ad-tech functions.
The watchdog determined that Google must introduce a unit that appears in search results to give more prominence to smaller South African platforms relevant to the search query. It must also make it easier for consumers to identity and support local platforms by adding a flag identifier and search filter for South African companies.
The company must also provide 180 million rand ($10.2 million) in advertising credits and free training for small platforms to use Google’s paid search functions to help with customer acquisition. It must spend 150 million rand to support the performance of small and medium-sized enterprises and black-owned firms in organic results to offset what the watchdog described as the “competitive disadvantages faced on Google search.”
It follows a similar probe of South Africa’s mobile operators, which resulted in the competition commissioner telling dominant wireless carriers such as MTN Group Ltd. and Vodacom Group Ltd. to lower their prices in late 2019.
(Updates with Google’s comments in 5th paragraph, and Takealot business split)
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Google's antitrust headaches compound with another trial, this one targeting its Play Store
Google on Monday will try to protect a lucrative piece of its internet empire at the same time it’s still entangled in the biggest U.S. antitrust trial in a quarter century
SAN FRANCISCO -- Google on Monday will try to protect a lucrative piece of its internet empire at the same time it’s still entangled in the biggest U.S. antitrust trial in a quarter century.
The latest threat will unfold in a San Francisco federal court, where a 10-person jury will decide whether Google's digital payment processing system in the Play Store that distributes apps for phones running on its Android software has been illegally driving up prices for consumers and developers.
The trial before U.S. District Judge James Donato is scheduled to last until just before Christmas and include testimony from longtime Google executive Sundar Pichai, who is now CEO of the company's parent, Alphabet Inc.
Pichai recently took the witness stand in Washington D.C. during an antitrust trial pitting Google's long-running dominance of internet search against the U.S. Justice Department's attempt to undercut it on the grounds the the company has been abusing its power to stifle competition and innovation.
The case targeting Google's Play Store is being brought by Epic Games, the maker of the popular Fortnite video game, which lost in a similar 2021 trial focused on many of the same issues in Apple's iPhone app store.
Although a federal judge sided with Apple on most fronts in that trial, the outcome opened one potential crack in the digital fortress that the company has built around the iPhone.
The judge and an appeals court both determined Apple should allow apps to provide links to other payment options, a change that could undermine the 15% to 30% commissions that both Apple and Google collect on digital purchases made within a mobile app. Apple is appealing that part of the ruling to the U.S. Supreme Court, where Epic is also challenging most elements of the case that it lost.
Epic is now taking aim at Google's commission system, even though Android software is already set up to allow other stores, such as Samsung's installed on its phones, distribute apps that work on the operating system. Even so, Epic maintains that Google still maintains a stranglehold on the Android app ecosystem and the payment system attached to it — and has paid hundreds of millions of dollars to stifle competition.
Much like Apple did in its trial, Google defends its commissions as a way to be compensated for all money that it invests into its Play Store and asserts that the controls over it are a way to protect the security of the tens of millions of people in the U.S. who download apps for phones powered by Android.
Google initially was going to have to defend itself against multiple foes in the trial, but in September it settled allegations that had been brought against the Play Store by state attorneys general and just last week resolved a case being pursued by Match Group, the owner of Tinder and other online dating services.
The Match settlement prompted Google to switch from its original request for a jury trial to a proceeding to be decided by the judge, but Donato rebuffed the bid.
Match is receiving $40 million and adopting Google's “user choice billing" system in its settlement. The terms of the resolution with the state attorneys general is expected to be revealed during Google's trial with Epic.
Epic CEO Tim Sweeney skewered the “user choice billing” option as a sham in a social media post vowing to fight Google in court. Sweeney also is expected to take the witness stand during the trial.
Wilson White, Google's vice president of government affairs and public policy, accused Epic of trying to get “something for nothing” in a blog post. After pointing out that Epic already lost the crux of its case against Apple, White blasted the game maker for “trying their luck with Android by bringing a case that has even less merit.” | Tech Giants |
This article originally appeared in Bitcoin Magazine's "Censorship Resistant Issue." To get a copy, visit our store.Online censorship is becoming increasingly normalized as growing restrictions, deplatforming and its other manifestations have become so pervasive that many have simply come to accept it. This “new normal” for free speech is as insidious as it has been gradual, as we are increasingly being trained to accept unconstitutional limitations on what we can express on the websites that dominate online socialization. Like so much of our lives, social interaction has moved online at a rapid pace in the last decade, meaning that restrictions imposed upon online speech have a disproportionate effect on speech in general. The argument that is often deployed to dismiss concerns regarding online censorship is the claim that the dominant social media companies are private, not public, entities. However, in reality, the Big Tech firms that dominate our online lives, particularly Google and Facebook, were either created with some involvement of the U.S. national security state or have become major U.S. government and/or military contractors over the past two decades.(i,ii,iii,iv,v) When it comes to censoring and deplatforming individuals for claims that run counter to U.S. government narratives, it should be clear that Google-owned YouTube, and other tech platforms owned by contractors to the U.S. military and intelligence communities, have a major conflict of interest in their stifling of speech. The line between “private” Silicon Valley and the public sector has become increasingly blurred and it is now a matter of record that these companies have illegally passed information onto intelligence services, like the National Security Agency (NSA), for blatantly unconstitutional surveillance programs aimed at American civilians.(vi) All indications point to the military-industrial complex having expanded into the military-technology-industrial complex. These days, one need only look at important government commissions — such as the National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence (NSCAI), headed by former Google/Alphabet CEO Eric Schmidt — to see how this de facto public-private partnership between Silicon Valley and the national security state functions, and its outsized role in setting important tech-related policies for both the private and public sectors. For example, that commission, largely comprised of representatives of the military, intelligence community and the scions of Big Tech, has helped set policy on “countering disinformation” online. More specifically, it has recommended weaponizing Artificial Intelligence (AI) for the express purpose of identifying online accounts to deplatform and speech to censor, framing this recommendation as essential to U.S. national security as it relates to “information warfare.”(vii,viii) There are already several companies competing to market an AI-powered censorship engine to the national security state as well as the private sector. One of these companies is Primer AI, a “machine intelligence” company that “builds software machines that read and write in English, Russian, and Chinese to automatically unearth trends and patterns across large volumes of data.” The company publicly states that their work “supports the mission of the intelligence community and broader DOD by automating reading and research tasks to enhance the speed and quality of decision-making.” Their current roster of clients includes the U.S. military, U.S. intelligence, major American companies like Walmart and private “philanthropic” organizations like the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.(ix) Primer’s founder, Sean Gourley, who previously created AI programs for the military to track insurgents in post-invasion Iraq, asserted in an April 2020 blog post that “computational warfare and disinformation campaigns will, in 2020, become a more serious threat than physical war, and we will have to rethink the weapons we deploy to fight them.”(x) In that same post, Gourley argued for the creation of a “Manhattan Project for truth” that would create a publicly available Wikipedia-style database built off of “knowledge bases [that] already exist inside many countries’ intelligence agencies for national security purposes.” Gourley wrote that “this effort would be ultimately about building and enhancing our collective intelligence and establishing a baseline for what’s true or not.” He concludes his blog post by stating that “in 2020, we will begin to weaponize truth.” Since that year, Primer has been under contract with the U.S. military to “develop the first-ever machine learning platform to automatically identify and assess suspected disinformation.”(xi) That the term “suspected disinformation” was used is no accident, as many instances of online censorship involve merely assertions, as opposed to confirmations, that censored speech is part of a nation state-connected or “bad actor”-connected organized disinformation campaign. While those campaigns do exist, legitimate and constitutionally protected speech that deviates from the “official” or government-sanctioned narrative are frequently censored under these metrics, often with little to no ability to meaningfully appeal the censor’s decision. In other cases, posts “suspected” of being disinformation or that are flagged as such (sometimes erroneously) by social media algorithms, are removed or hidden from public view without the poster’s knowledge. In addition, “suspected disinformation” can be used to justify the censorship of speech that is inconvenient for particular governments, corporations and groups, as there is no need to have evidence or present a coherent case that said content is disinformation — one must only cast suspicion upon it in order to have it censored. Further complicating this issue is the fact that some claims initially labeled “disinformation” later become accepted fact or recognized as legitimate speech. This has happened on more than one occasion during the COVID-19 crisis, where content creators had their accounts deleted or their content censored just for broaching issues like the lab-leak hypothesis as well as questions over mask and vaccine efficacy, among many other issues.(xii, xiii) A year or two later, much of this supposed “disinformation” was subsequently admitted to include legitimate avenues of journalistic inquiry and the initial, blanket censorship on these topics was done at the behest of public and private actors alike due to their inconvenience to what had once been the prevailing narrative.(xiv, xv) Primer is only one of several companies seeking to create a world where “truth” is defined by the U.S. national security state, with that rigid definition then being enforced by Big Tech companies with no room for debate. Brian Raymond, a former official for the CIA and the National Security Council who now serves as Primer’s vice president, openly wrote about this in November 2020 for Foreign Policy. In that article, he stated:“Companies like Facebook, Twitter, and Google are increasingly working with U.S. defense agencies to educate future software engineers, cybersecurity experts, and scientists. Eventually, once public-private trust is fully restored, the U.S. government and Silicon Valley can forge a united front in order to effectively take on fake news.” (xvi)Particularly troubling is the fact that Raymond’s chief example of “fake news” at the time was the New York Post’s reporting on the Hunter Biden laptop emails, which — well over a year after the fact — has now been confirmed as authentic.(xvii) Having the government, and more specifically the national security state, which has conducted a litany of confirmed disinformation and propaganda campaigns over the years, define truth and reality is hardly consistent with its professed goal of protecting “democracy.”(xviii) Instead, it protects the interests of the national security state itself, whose own interests are tightly interwoven with those of the country’s increasingly entrenched (and enriched) oligarchy. Not only do we have the national security state in a de facto public-private partnership with Big Tech to censor online information — Now, with the recent launch of the Biden administration’s war on domestic terror, we have the same national security state framing “suspected disinformation” and “conspiracy theories” as national security threats. The policy documents that outline this new war note that a major “pillar” of the government’s entire strategy is to eliminate online material that they claim promotes “domestic terrorist” ideologies, including those that “connect and intersect with conspiracy theories and other forms of disinformation and misinformation.” The proliferation of “dangerous” information “on Internet-based communications platforms such as social media, file-upload sites and end-to-end encrypted platforms”, it argues, “[…] can combine and amplify threats to public safety.” The “front lines” of this war are “overwhelmingly private-sector online platforms.” The problem with this framing is that the Biden administration’s definition of “domestic terrorist” used in these same documents is incredibly broad. For example, it labels opposition to corporate globalization, capitalism and government overreach as “terrorist” ideologies. This means that online content discussing “anti-government” and/or “anti-authority” ideas, which may simply be criticisms of government policy or the national power structure, could soon be treated in the same way as online Al Qaeda or ISIS propaganda. In addition, intelligence agencies in both the U.K. and U.S. have moved to treat critical reporting of COVID-19 vaccines and mandates as “extremist” propaganda, despite the fact that a significant percentage of Americans have chosen not to get the vaccine and/or oppose vaccine mandates. In what appears to be the apparent fulfilment of Primer AI executives’ pleas, the Biden administration also underscores the need to “increase digital literacy” among the American public, while censoring “harmful content” disseminated by “domestic terrorists” as well as by “hostile foreign powers seeking to undermine American democracy.” The latter is a clear reference to the claim that critical reporting of U.S. government policy, particularly its military and intelligence activities abroad, was the product of “Russian disinformation,” a now-discredited claim that was used to heavily censor independent media. Regarding “increasing digital literacy,” the policy documents make it clear that this refers to a new “digital literacy” education curriculum that is currently being developed by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), the U.S.’ domestically-focused intelligence agency, for a domestic audience. This “digital literacy” initiative would have previously violated U.S. law, until the Obama administration worked with Congress to repeal the Smith-Mundt Act, which lifted the World War II-era ban on the U.S. government directing propaganda at domestic audiences. The Biden administration’s war on domestic terror policy also makes it clear that the censorship, as described above, is part of a “broader priority” of the administration, which it defines as follows:“[…] enhancing faith in government and addressing the extreme polarization, fueled by a crisis of disinformation and misinformation often channeled through social media platforms, which can tear Americans apart and lead some to violence.”In other words, fostering trust in government while simultaneously censoring “polarizing” voices who distrust or criticize the government is a key policy goal behind the Biden administration’s new domestic-terror strategy. In addition, this statement implies that Americans not agreeing with each other is problematic and frames that disagreement as a driver of violence, as opposed to a normal occurrence in a supposed democracy that has constitutional protections for freedom of speech. From this framing, it is implied that such violence can only be stopped if all Americans trust the government and agree with its narratives and “truths.” Framing deviations from these narratives as national security threats, as is done in this policy document, invites the labeling of non-conforming speech as “violence” or as “inciting violence” through the fomentation of disagreement. As a result, those who post non-conforming speech online may soon find themselves being labeled as “terrorists” by the state. If we are to accept the “new normal” of online censorship, these efforts to prohibit debate and legitimate criticisms of government policy in the name of “national security” will continue unimpeded. In short order, the First Amendment will be redefined so that it only protects government-sanctioned speech, not the freedom of speech, as was intended. While such measures are often framed as necessary to “protect” democracy, the elimination and imminent criminalization of legitimate speech is the true threat to democracy, one that should deeply disturb all Americans. If the national security state controls and enforces the only permissible narratives and the only permitted version of the “truth,” they will then also control human perception, and — as a consequence — human behavior. Such control has long been a goal of some within the U.S.’ military and intelligence communities, but it is anathema to the values and desires of the vast majority of Americans. If there is no meaningful pushback against the increasing fusion of the national security state and Big Tech, Americans are guaranteed to lose much more than just the freedom of speech, as controlling speech is just the first step towards controlling all behavior. Americans would do well to remember the warning of Benjamin Franklin as the U.S. government moves to criminalize free speech under the guise of protecting national security; “Those who would give up essential liberty, to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.”Endnotes:i Webb, Whitney. “The Military Origins of Facebook.” Unlimited Hangout, 12 Apr. 2021, unlimitedhangout.com/2021/04/investigative-reports/the-military-origins-of-facebook/.ii Ahmed, Nafeez. “How the CIA Made Google.” Medium, INSURGE intelligence, 22 Jan. 2015, medium.com/insurge-intelligence/how-the-cia-made-google-e836451a959e.iii Feiner, Lauren. “Google’s Cloud Division Lands Deal with the Department of Defense.” CNBC, 20 May 2020, www.cnbc.com/2020/05/20/googles-cloud-division-lands-deal-with-the-department-of-defense.html.iv Novet, Jordan. “Microsoft Wins U.S. Army Contract for Augmented Reality Headsets, Worth up to $21.9 Billion over 10 Years.” CNBC, 31 Mar. 2021, www.cnbc.com/2021/03/31/microsoft-wins-contract-to-make-modified-hololens-for-us-army.html.v Shane, Scott, and Daisuke Wakabayashi. ““The Business of War”: Google Employees Protest Work for the Pentagon.” The New York Times, 4 Apr. 2018, www.nytimes.com/2018/04/04/technology/google-letter-ceo-pentagon-project.html.vi “Commissioners.” NSCAI, www.nscai.gov/commissioners/.vii Interim Report and Third Quarter Recommendations. 2020.viii PrimerAI Homepage.” PrimerAI, primer.ai/.ix “To Fight Disinformation, We Need to Weaponise the Truth.” PrimerAI, 20 Apr. 2020, primer.ai/blog/to-fight-disinformation-we-need-to-weaponise-the-truth/.x AI, Primer. “SOCOM and US Air Force Enlist Primer to Combat Disinformation.” www.prnewswire.com, 1 Oct. 2020, www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/socom-and-us-air-force-enlist-primer-to-combat-disinformation-301143716.html/. xi Forget Counterterrorism, the United States Needs a Counter-Disinformation Strategy.” PrimerAI, 16 Nov. 2020, primer.ai/blog/forget-counterterrorism-the-united-states-needs-a-counter-disinformation/.xii Golding, Bruce. “Washington Post Joins New York Times in Finally Admitting Emails from Hunter Biden Laptop Are Real.” New York Post, 30 Mar. 2022, nypost.com/2022/03/30/washington-post-admits-hunter-biden-laptop-is-real/. xiii Greenwald, Glenn. “The CIA’s Murderous Practices, Disinformation Campaigns, and Interference in Other Countries Still Shape the World Order and U.S. Politics.” The Intercept, 21 May 2020, theintercept.com/2020/05/21/the-cias-murderous-practices-disinformation-campaigns-and-interference-in-other-countries-still-shapes-the-world-order-and-u-s-politics/. xiv Ferreira, Roberto Garcia. “The Cia and Jacobo Arbenz: History of a Disinformation Campaign .” Journal of Third World Studies, vol. 25, no. 2, 2008, pp. 59–81, www.jstor.org/stable/45194479, 10.2307/45194479.f. xv National Strategy for Countering Domestic Terrorism, June 2021. https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/National-Strategy-for-Countering-Domestic-Terrorism.pdf. xvi Webb, Whitney. “US - UK Intel Agencies Declare Cyber War on Independent Media.” Unlimitedhangout.com, 11 Nov. 2020, unlimitedhangout.com/2020/11/reports/us-uk-intel-agencies-declare-cyber-war-on-independent-media/. xvii Webb, Whitney. “Lifting of US Propaganda Ban Gives New Meaning to Old Song.” MintPress News, 12 Feb. 2018, www.mintpressnews.com/planting-stories-in-the-press-lifting-of-us-propaganda-ban-gives-new-meaning-to-old-song/237493/. xviii National Strategy for Countering Domestic Terrorism, June 2021. https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/National-Strategy-for-Countering-Domestic-Terrorism.pdf/. | Tech Giants |
Meta to start blocking news content for up to 5% of Canadian Facebook, Instagram users
Social media giant steps up opposition to Bill C-18
Meta will soon block some Canadian users of Facebook and Instagram from accessing or posting news content on either platform.
The move, which the social media giant announced in a blog post on Thursday, comes in reaction to the looming passage into law of Bill C-18, the Online News Act.
Facebook has said it will be forced to block news content from its platforms in Canada if the bill becomes law, something that could happen as soon as this month as the bill is currently being considered in the Senate.
Among other stipulations, the bill would require tech giants to pay Canadian media companies for linking to or otherwise repurposing their content online.
"As we prepare to comply with the legislation, we are announcing today that we will begin tests on both platforms that will limit some users and publishers from viewing or sharing some news content in Canada," Meta said.
- Are you a Facebook or Instagram user? Do you use those platforms to share the news? We want to speak to you as part of a story. Email us at [email protected].
Between one and five per cent of the 24 million Canadians who use Facebook or Instagram will be included in the test, which is set to start soon.
Different content may be blocked for different users on different platforms, said Rachel Curran, the head of public policy for Meta Canada.
"It won't be a uniform experience, necessarily," she said. "Some news links won't be shareable on Facebook, but it might not be that experience on Instagram. It will be a different experience on different surfaces."
"Throughout the testing period, which will run for several weeks, a small percentage of people in Canada who are enrolled in testing will be notified if they attempt to share news content."
The test means that a user would not see links to articles or videos from news publishers anywhere in their feed. A user would also be blocked from sharing such content to other people.
News publishers will be able to post news links and content, but some of it will not be viewable in Canada.
Users who will be included in the test will be selected randomly, and will only be made aware that they're included if they attempt to share news, at which point they will see a notification that they are unable to.
The number of news publishers who will have their content included in the test will not be public and is also randomized, but could include international publishers that operate in Canada. The publishers will be notified if they have been included in the test, Meta says.
News industry decries move
Paul Deegan, the head of News Media Canada, called Meta's move a "kick in the shins" to Canadians at a time when the value and need for credible information has never been greater.
"Meta's decision to 'unfriend' Canada by denying access to trusted sources of news for some of their users, as wildfires burn and when public safety is at stake is irresponsible and tone deaf," Deegan told CBC News in an email.
"This hard-nose lobbying tactic is more evidence of the power imbalance that exists between dominant platforms and publishers, which is why parliamentarians need to pass the Online News Act before their summer recess."
Meta's move comes on the heels of a similar move by Google earlier this year, when it blocked news results for more than a million Canadians, also in opposition to the bill.
Meta says Bill C-18 is "fundamentally flawed legislation that ignores the realities of how our platforms work, the preferences of the people who use them, and the value we provide news publishers."
Curran told senators pondering the bill in a committee last month that the company objects to being asked to compensate news publishers for their content, when by their calculation they have given news publishers more than 1.9 million clicks in Canada in the past year, "and free marketing worth more than $230 million in estimated value."
"We will be forced to compensate news publishers for material that they post to drive traffic and drive clicks back to their page and websites where they can then monetize those views and eyeballs either through a paywall or they can place ads against the views that show up on their web page," she said. "We are being asked to compensate them for an activity that actually benefits them from a monetary perspective."
Government calls move 'disappointing'
Heritage Minister Pablo Rodriguez called Meta's move "disappointing" and said Canadians will not be intimidated by these tactics.
Legacy media and broadcasters have praised the bill, which promises to "enhance fairness" in the digital news marketplace and help bring in more money for shrinking newsrooms. Tech giants including Meta and Google have been blamed in the past for disrupting and dominating the advertising industry, eclipsing smaller, traditional players.
Meta, which is based in Menlo Park, Calif., has taken similar steps in the past. In 2021, it briefly blocked news from its platform in Australia after the country passed legislation that would compel tech companies to pay publishers for using their news stories. It later struck deals with Australian publishers.
Meta also reached a deal with U.K. publishers that year, after similar discussions.
Accountable Tech, a U.S.-based advocacy group pushing for more regulation of technology companies in that country, says the news blackouts in various countries show the lengths that big tech companies will go to in order to sway governments and maintain their profits.
"What we witnessed unfold in Australia, and now in Canada, is Big Tech's willingness to cripple democracy by withholding news content to a population — chosen at random — as a bargaining chip to stop legislation," the group's executive director Nicole Gill said.
"It's clear that Meta has no interest in acting in good faith or improving the lives of its users and the communities they operate in. There is simply no reason for the U.S. to delay any action on reining them in."
With files from The Associated Press | Tech Giants |
Chatbots’ ‘Alarming’ Output Prompts U.S. Senator To Query Tech Giants On Safety
Colorado Senator Michael Bennet wants information on how chatbot makers are handling safety for kids.
(Bloomberg) -- As Microsoft Corp., OpenAI, Google and other technology companies accelerate the release of chatbots and other artificial intelligence-based tools to the public, a US Senator is demanding answers about how they intend to protect kids from harm.
Michael Bennet, a Democrat from Colorado, wrote to the chief executive officers of OpenAI, Microsoft, Alphabet Inc.’s Google, Facebook parent Meta Platforms Inc. and Snapchat owner Snap Inc. — all of which are building and distributing AI technology that lets users ask questions, get advice and generate text in various forms. Calling some of the output of these software programs “alarming,” Bennet asked the CEOs to respond to questions about how the companies assess, mitigate and audit their AI services and the models behind them by April 28, focusing mainly on how they are keeping young users safe.
Chatbots, once relegated to barely useful customer-service web applications, have become an increasingly competitive area since OpenAI’s ChatGPT went viral in November. Microsoft is building OpenAI’s technology into its Bing internet search engine; Google is offering a test version of a chatbot-based search called Bard; and Snap has its own ChatGPT-powered bot called My AI. Bennet detailed several examples of the programs offering inappropriate responses, including a report that showed Snap’s program providing disturbing advice to researchers posing as children.
“Few recent technologies have captured the public’s attention like generative AI. The technology is a testament to American innovation, and we should welcome its potential benefits to our economy and society,” Bennet wrote in the letter, according to a copy provided by the senator’s office. “But the race to deploy generative AI cannot come at the expense of our children. Responsible deployment requires clear policies and frameworks to promote safety, anticipate risk, and mitigate harm.”
He also asked the companies to tell him about data collection and retention policies related to content put into chatbots by younger users, and how many staff each company has working on AI safety, particularly those focused on younger users.
More stories like this are available on bloomberg.com
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- JPMorgan Chase is developing a ChatGPT-like software service that leans on a disruptive form of artificial intelligence to select investments for customers, CNBC has learned.
- The company applied to trademark a product called IndexGPT earlier this month, according to a filing from the New York-based bank.
- "It's an A.I. program to select financial securities," said trademark lawyer Josh Gerben. "This sounds to me like they're trying to put my financial advisor out of business."
JPMorgan Chase is developing a ChatGPT-like software service that leans on a disruptive form of artificial intelligence to select investments for customers, CNBC has learned.
The company applied to trademark a product called IndexGPT this month, according to a filing from the New York-based bank.
related investing news
IndexGPT will tap "cloud computing software using artificial intelligence" for "analyzing and selecting securities tailored to customer needs," according to the filing.
The viral success of OpenAI's ChatGPT technology last year has forced entire industries to grapple with the arrival of artificial intelligence. ChatGPT, which uses massive language models to create human-sounding responses to questions, has ignited an arms race among tech giants and chipmakers over what is seen as the next foundational innovation.
The technology has a range of possible uses in finance. Banks including Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley have already begun testing it for internal use. That includes ways to help Goldman engineers create code or answer Morgan Stanley financial advisors' queries.
But JPMorgan may be the first financial incumbent aiming to release a GPT-like product directly to its customers, according to Washington D.C.-based trademark attorney Josh Gerben.
"This is a real indication they might have a potential product to launch in the near future," Gerben said.
"Companies like JPMorgan don't just file trademarks for the fun of it," he said. The filing includes "a sworn statement from a corporate officer essentially saying, 'Yes, we plan on using this trademark.'"
JPMorgan must launch IndexGPT within about three years of approval to secure the trademark, according to the lawyer. Trademarks typically take nearly a year to be approved, thanks to backlogs at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, he said.
The applications are typically vaguely written to give companies the broadest possible protections, Gerben said.
But JPMorgan's filing does specify that IndexGPT uses the same flavor of A.I. popularized by ChatGPT; the bank plans to use A.I. powered by "Generative Pre-trained Transformer (GPT) models."
"It's an A.I. program to select financial securities," Gerben said. "This sounds to me like they're trying to put my financial advisor out of business."
JPMorgan declined to comment for this article.
Financial advisors have long feared the arrival of technology good enough to displace their role in markets. Those fears have largely yet to materialize.
Wealth management firms, including Morgan Stanley and Bank of America's Merrill, offer simple roboadvisor services, but that hasn't stopped their human advisors from gathering billions of dollars more in assets.
Earlier this week, executives at JPMorgan touted their progress in applying A.I. across operations at the company's annual investor conference.
The bank, which employs 1,500 data scientists and machine-learning engineers, is testing "a number of use cases" for GPT technology, said global tech chief Lori Beer.
"We couldn't discuss A.I. without mentioning GPT and large language models," Beer said. "We've recognized the power and opportunity of these tools and are committed to exploring all the ways they can deliver value for the firm." | Tech Giants |
Canada's Parliament passed legislation that will force Facebook to share more profits with news publishers, a move that led parent company Meta to ban the sharing of news on its platforms.
Canada's legislative body passed C-18, also known as the Online News Act, on Thursday. The law would force Big Tech companies to negotiate compensation deals with news organizations so that they must pay them for all content published on their platforms. Facebook quickly responded to its passage by announcing that it would no longer share news on its platform in Canada.
“We have repeatedly shared that in order to comply with Bill C-18, passed today in Parliament, content from news outlets, including news publishers and broadcasters, will no longer be available to people accessing our platforms in Canada,” Meta wrote in a blog post.
Canada's leadership appeared unfazed by the gesture. “Facebook knows very well that they have no obligations under the act right now," Heritage Minister Pablo Rodriguez wrote in an email to the National Post. "Following Royal Assent of Bill C-18, the Government will engage in a regulatory and implementation process. If the Government can’t stand up for Canadians against tech giants, who will?”
Google confirmed that it is also in negotiations with the Canadian government and that it intended to seek a resolution that did not end with ending news service in Canada.
Facebook has threatened to pull news in past tussles with governments.
Congress is considering a similar bill in the Journalism Competition and Preservation Act. The bill was pushed through the Senate Judiciary Committee last term but failed to pass due to disagreements about amendments. Meta made similar threats over the JCPA. The bill was recently passed by committee and is waiting to be considered by the Senate. It is expected to run into resistance in the House, as Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) emphasized that the bill would be "dead on the floor."
The company banned sharing and viewing news stories in Australia after the country passed a law requiring the Big Tech giant to pay news outlets for their content. The ban was reversed within days after international pressure. | Tech Giants |
The regulator was concerned with Amazon's dual role as both a marketplace and a competitor to merchants selling on its platform.Nathan Stirk | Getty ImagesAmazon on Tuesday agreed to make some significant changes to its business in Europe as part of a settlement of antitrust investigations that could have resulted in a hefty fine for the e-commerce titan.The European Commission, the EU's executive arm, announced Tuesday that Amazon had made a series of commitments to address allegations that the company was using independent sellers' data to its advantage.The regulator had expressed concerns with Amazon's dual role as both a marketplace and a competitor to merchants selling on its platform. Amazon, for its part, says it is an enabler of small businesses in the region.In November 2020, the Commission issued Amazon a statement of objections over its "systematic" use of non-public business data from independent sellers to benefit its own retail business.It also opened a second investigation into claims that criteria set by Amazon for selecting featured merchants in its "buy box" tool and enabling sellers to offer products to users of its Prime membership program gave preferential treatment to Amazon's retail business or sellers using its own delivery services.On Tuesday, the Commission said that Amazon had made assurances that it would change some of those practices. One of the commitments was to stop using non-public data on independent sellers for its retail business or for selling branded goods and private label products.The company also agreed to display a second buy box when there is a second offer that is different from the first on price or delivery, and to let Prime sellers choose any carrier for their logistics or delivery services.The changes apply only to the European Economic Area. In Italy, Amazon has agreed separate legal remedies with the country's competition regulator relating to the buy box and Prime. Amazon will have until June 2023 to implement the changes, which will remain in place for five to seven years."Today's decision sets the rules that Amazon will need to play by in the future instead of Amazon determining these rules for all players on its platform," Margrethe Vestager, the EU's competition chief, said in a speech Tuesday."With these new rules, competing independent retailers, carriers and European customers will have more opportunities and choice."If the company had been found guilty, it could have faced a fine worth up to 10% of its global annual revenues. For Amazon, a company that made $469.81 billion of revenue in 2021, that could have meant a record $47 billion penalty.However, the EU may still fine Amazon 10% of its total annual turnover if it breaches the commitments, or a periodic penalty of 5% per day of daily turnover for each day of non-compliance.Amazon said in a statement that it was "pleased that we have addressed the European Commission's concerns and resolved these matters.""While we continue to disagree with several of the preliminary conclusions the European Commission made, we have engaged constructively to ensure that we can continue to serve customers across Europe and support the 225,000 European small and medium sized businesses selling through our stores," an Amazon spokesperson told CNBC via email.The development marks a subtle victory for the EU, which is pursuing seismic changes to American tech giants' business models with its Digital Markets Act. The legislation, which entered into force last month, aims to prevent so-called "gatekeeper" firms from abusing their market position to harm smaller rivals.It is already causing significant changes for some of these companies. Apple, for example, is reportedly working on changes that would allow users to "sideload" apps from the web, bypassing the App Store, to bring its business into compliance with the DMA. | Tech Giants |
A woman walks by a sign outside of Apple headquarters in Cupertino, Calif.Tony Avelar | Bloomberg | Getty ImagesMany of the biggest technology companies are laying off staff as fears of a recession rises. But the job cuts come after a few years of rapid expansion.On Wednesday, Microsoft announced it will eliminate 10,000 employees, reducing its workforce by 5%, and Amazon began conducting a new round of layoffs that will eventually slash 18,000 jobs. On Friday, Google announced plans to cut 12,000 positions, a move many employees had feared was coming. Facebook parent Meta kicked off the trend among tech giants last November, cutting 11,000 jobs.While each company is slightly different, most companies going through layoffs are blaming macroeconomic conditions and the possibility of a future recession as the reason for their belt-tightening.But an underappreciated factor is how rapidly tech companies ramped up hiring over the last two years.In 2020, widespread Covid lockdowns made internet applications more important to people, supercharging business for many tech companies. As sales and profit continued to rise in 2021, they continued to add huge numbers of employees in the hopes that the success they were seeing would become a new baseline. It didn't work out that way. Growth is slowing, and companies are now having to readjust.Apple is a major exception: It did not appreciably increase its rate of hiring over the last two years, and also has not announced any layoffs.A review of SEC filings shows how rapidly the other biggest tech companies grew during the pandemic.Microsoft had 221,000 full time employees at the end of June 2022, the most recent official figure that's available. That was a 40,000 employee jump from the same time in 2021, a 22% percent increase in staff. The year before that, Microsoft added 18,000 employees, an 11% increase.In a note about Microsoft layoffs, Wedbush analyst Dan Ives said that the tech sector had to spend money during the pandemic to keep up with elevated demand."Redmond needed to aggressively hire along with the rest of the tech sector and spend money like 1980's Rock Stars to keep pace with eye-popping demand," Ives wrote in a Wednesday note.Amazon is more complicated than Microsoft because it has a huge hourly workforce for its warehouses, as well as the corporate office employees seen in most tech companies.Still, Amazon grew voraciously in 2021, adding 310,000 jobs. That followed an even bigger expansion in 2020, when it grew over 38% and added half a million employees.Overall, Amazon reported 1.6 million employees as of the end of December 2021, of which about 300,000 have corporate jobs.An Amazon executive said that its Covid-era expansion was one reason for cutbacks on Wednesday in a memo to employees."During Covid, our first priority was scaling to meet the needs of our customers while ensuring the safety of our employees. I'm incredibly proud of this team's work during this period," Amazon retail chief Doug Herrington said in a memo obtained by CNBC. "Although other companies might have balked at the short-term economics, we prioritized investing for customers and employees during these unprecedented times."Meta (formerly Facebook) has increased headcount by thousands of employees each year since going public in 2012, according to SEC filings.In 2020, Meta added over 13,000 employees, a 30% increase, and the biggest year of hiring in the company's history. In 2021, it added another 13,000 workers. By total worker numbers, it was the two biggest years of expansion in Facebook's short history.Alphabet, the parent company of Google, was the last among the big companies to make a major cutback but announced 12,000 job cuts on Friday. Prior to that, it had cut 240 positions at Verily, its health sciences division, and laid off 40 at Intrinsic, a robotics division.In 2021, Alphabet added over 21,000 employees, or a 15% increase during the year to a total of 156,500 workers. In 2020, it added over 16,000 employees, or a nearly 14% increase.That growth predates the pandemic, however, as Alphabet has increased headcount at least 10% every year since 2013, and added over 20% new employees in 2018 and 2019 as well.Apple grew much more slowly during the pandemic. In fact, Apple's hiring over the past few years has followed the same general trend since 2016.As of September 2022, Apple had 164,000 employees, which includes both corporate employees as well as retail staff for its stores. But that was only a rise of 6.5% from the same period in 2021, amounting to real growth of 10,000 employees. Apple also hired judiciously in 2020, adding less than 7,000 employees in the year before September 2021.Correction: A previous version of this story misspelled Doug Herrington's name. | Tech Giants |
Google Charged By EU With Abusing Its Ad Tech Dominance
Online advertising is Alphabet’s most lucrative business, generating 80% of total revenue last year, adding up to about $225 billion.
(Bloomberg) -- Google was accused of abusing its dominance over advertising technology to crush competition, as the European Union took aim at the US firm’s most-lucrative business.
The Alphabet Inc. unit had had favored its own ad exchange program over its rivals and bolstered the company’s central role in the ad tech supply chain as well as Google’s ability to charge a high fee for its service, Margrethe Vestager, the EU’s competition commissioner, said Wednesday at a press conference.
While she said Google may be forced to divest part its ad sales services should the commission decide that the company acted illegally, market reaction to the announcement was muted. European investigations take years to conclude and the previously eye-catching fines that ran into the billions have had little impact on the company’s share price. The US previously sued Google over the same issue and the UK has an open investigation. The US previously sued Google over the same issue and the UK has an open investigation.
Google shares were little changed, down 0.2% in premarket trading.
“Google is present at almost all levels of the so-called ad tech supply chain,” Vestager said. “Our preliminary concern is that Google may have used its market position to favor its own intermediation services.”
Crucially, the European Commission said that a potential order for Google to implement behavioral remedies may not be sufficient in correcting the abusive conduct, opening the door for a potential order against Google to break up its ad tech business from its core services.
“Google remains committed to creating value for our publisher and advertiser partners in this highly competitive sector,” Dan Taylor, vice president of global ads at Google, said in a statement. “The commission’s investigation focuses on a narrow aspect of our advertising business and is not new. We disagree with the EC’s view and we will respond accordingly.”
The EU case is a direct attack on the black-box of online advertising where Google automatically calculates and offers ad space and prices to advertisers and publishers as a user clicks on a web page. Online advertising is Alphabet’s most lucrative business, generating 80% of total revenue last year, adding up to about $225 billion.
The new charge sheet follows three earlier EU cases against Google, in which the company has racked up more than €8 billion ($8.6 billion) since 2017 for abuses of dominance on its mobile operating system, its search business, and its display advertising operations. Google has continued to defend its innocence.
So-called statements of objections are a formal step laying out the European Commission’s concerns over a particular behavior that it deems to be harmful to the market. On Wednesday, the EU’s antitrust arm appealed to Google to come forward with solutions.
Read More: Google’s Cash Cow Finally Gets Scrutiny: Alex Webb
While antitrust charge sheets can pave the way for fines as much as 10% of a firms’ global sales, they seldom approach that level, meaning the impact on earnings of Silicon Valley firms is often muted.
Instead, regulators across Europe have pivoted toward insisting on tough remedies — including changes to the business model of companies — that can be far more onerous. They’ve also approved a slew of new rules to try to act before it’s too late to stop the most powerful companies turning markets into competition dead-zones.
Google has long held a key position in which it’s able to collect data allowing advertisers to target ads, as well as sell ad space and provide the technology that allows for advertisers to find publishers to sell their space.
The EU first opened a probe into Google’s ad tech practices in 2021. The commission’s investigation has been examining how the company may have obstructed rivals’ access to user-data for online advertising as well as how it may have ringfenced data for its own use.
The UK’s competition authority has also been investigating Google’s ad tech practices. Litigation against the firm’s behavior is also ongoing in the U.S as part of three different suits filed by the US Department of Justice and a group of states, a separate one from a different group of states and one by advertisers and publishers. Those cases could well result in an order for Google to separate its ad tech arm from its core business.
(Updates with market reaction from the third paragraph)
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An AirPower wireless charger is displayed along with other products during an Apple launch event in Cupertino, California, U.S. September 12, 2017. REUTERS/Stephen Lam/File PhotoBRUSSELS, Oct 4 (Reuters) - The European Parliament approved new rules on Tuesday that will introduce in the European Union a single charging port for mobile phones, tablets and cameras by 2024, a world first that is expected to affect iPhone maker Apple more than its rivals.The vote confirms an earlier agreement among EU institutions and will make USB-C connectors used by Android-based devices the EU standard, forcing Apple (AAPL.O) to change its charging port for iPhones and other devices. read more Among big providers of electronic devices to European customers, Apple is expected to be among the most affected, but analysts also expect a possible positive impact because it could encourage shoppers to buy the company's latest gadgets instead of ones without USB-C.Register now for FREE unlimited access to Reuters.comThe deal also covers e-readers, ear buds and other technologies, meaning it may also have an impact on Samsung (005930.KS), Huawei [RIC:RIC:HWT.UL] and other device makers, analysts said.Apple, Samsung and Huawei were not immediately available for comments.Apple has in the past warned that the proposal would hurt innovation and create a mountain of electronics waste.EU lawmakers supported the reform with a large majority, with 602 votes in favour and only 13 against.The change had been discussed for years and was prompted by complaints from iPhone and Android users about having to switch to different chargers for their devices.The European Commission has estimated that the single charger would save about 250 million euros ($247.3 million) for consumers.Half the chargers sold with mobile phones in 2018 had a USB micro-B connector, while 29% had a USB-C connector and 21% a Lightning connector, which is used by Apple, a 2019 Commission study showed.($1 = 1.0106 euros)Register now for FREE unlimited access to Reuters.comReporting by Francesco Guarascio; Editing by Andrew Heavens and Catherine EvansOur Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles. | Tech Giants |
- A jury will decide if Google Play has been illegally driving up prices for consumers and developers.
- Epic Games, the maker of the popular "Fortnite" video game, brought the case against Google.
- Google recently resolved a case being pursued by the owner of Tinder and other online dating services.
Google on Monday will try to protect a lucrative piece of its internet empire at the same time it's still entangled in the biggest U.S. antitrust trial in a quarter century.
The latest threat will unfold in a San Francisco federal court, where a 10-person jury will decide whether Google's digital payment processing system in the Play Store, which distributes apps for phones running on its Android software, has been illegally driving up prices for consumers and developers.
The trial before U.S. District Judge James Donato is scheduled to last until just before Christmas and include testimony from longtime Google executive Sundar Pichai, who is now CEO of the company's parent, Alphabet Inc.
Pichai recently took the witness stand in Washington D.C., during an antitrust trial pitting Google's long-running dominance of internet search against the U.S. Justice Department's attempt to undercut it on the grounds that the company has been abusing its power to stifle competition and innovation.
The case targeting Google's Play Store is being brought by Epic Games, the maker of the popular "Fortnite" video game, which largely lost in a similar 2021 trial focused on many of the same issues in Apple's iPhone app store.
Although a federal judge sided with Apple on most fronts in that trial, the outcome opened one potential crack in the digital fortress that the company has built around the iPhone.
The judge and an appeals court both determined Apple should allow apps to provide links to other payment options, a change that could undermine the 15% to 30% commissions that both Apple and Google collect on digital purchases made within a mobile app. Apple is appealing that part of the ruling to the U.S. Supreme Court, where Epic is also challenging most elements of the case that it lost.
Epic is now taking aim at Google's commission system, even though Android software is already set up to allow other stores, such as Samsung's installed on its phones, to distribute apps that work on the operating system. Even so, Epic maintains that Google still maintains a stranglehold on the Android app ecosystem and the payment system attached to it — and has paid hundreds of millions of dollars to stifle competition.
Much like Apple did in its trial, Google defends its commissions as a way to be compensated for all money that it invests into its Play Store and asserts that the controls over it are a way to protect the security of the tens of millions of people in the U.S. who download apps for phones powered by Android.
Google initially was going to have to defend itself against multiple foes in the trial, but in September it settled allegations that had been brought against the Play Store by state attorneys general and just last week resolved a case being pursued by Match Group, the owner of Tinder and other online dating services.
The Match settlement prompted Google to switch from its original request for a jury trial to a proceeding to be decided by the judge, but Donato rebuffed the bid.
Match is receiving $40 million and adopting Google's "user choice billing" system in its settlement. The terms of the resolution with the state attorneys general is expected to be revealed during Google's trial with Epic.
—Tim Sweeney (@TimSweeneyEpic) October 31, 2023
Wilson White, Google's vice president of government affairs and public policy, accused Epic of trying to get "something for nothing" in a blog post. After pointing out that Epic already lost the crux of its case against Apple, White blasted the game maker for "trying their luck with Android by bringing a case that has even less merit." | Tech Giants |
Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta Platforms, appears on CNBC's "Mad Money" with Jim Cramer on June 22, 2022.CNBCMeta Platforms CEO Mark Zuckerberg told CNBC's Jim Cramer on Wednesday that the metaverse could be a considerable part of the social-network operator's business in the second half of the decade."We hope to basically get to around a billion people in the metaverse doing hundreds of dollars of commerce, each buying digital goods, digital content, different things to express themselves, so whether that's clothing for their avatar or different digital goods for their virtual home or things to decorate their virtual conference room, utilities to be able to be more productive in virtual and augmented reality and across the metaverse overall," he said.Investors have cut the company's market capitalization in half this year as growth has slowed and the number of its daily active users declined sequentially for the first time between the last two quarters. Zuckerberg has been increasingly directing the company toward what he views as the next generation of content, a virtual world where people can buy and sell digital clothes and other goods for avatars who can communicate with one another. The company's ticker symbol changed from FB, a relic of its history as a pure social media provider, to META earlier this month.But the company's investment in augmented reality and virtual reality dates back to 2014, when it paid $2 billion for headset maker Oculus VR. Shipments of headsets have failed to outnumber shipments of PCs or smartphones. Zuckerberg expressed optimism about the performance of its current-generation Meta Quest 2, which starts at $299."Quest 2 has been a hit," Zuckerberg told the "Mad Money" host. "I've been really happy with how that's gone. It has exceeded my expectations. But I still think it's going to take a while for it to get to the scale of several hundreds of millions or even billions of people in the metaverse, just because things take some time to get there. So that's the north star. I think we will get there. But, you know. the other services that we run are at a somewhat larger scale already today."Experiences in the metaverse can be more immersive than text, photos or videos, which are pervasive on Meta's Facebook and Instagram, and so it will be a big theme for Meta over the next decade, Zuckerberg said.Zuckerberg met with Cramer in the metaverse. The Facebook co-founder said such experiences can foster a sense of being together, even if people are physically on the other side of the country. He said it's possible to make eye contact, which isn't guaranteed on video calls, and use spatial audio that allow for quiet side conversations.The technology "basically adds up to making it deliver this realistic sense of presence," he said.Bringing that to customers over the next several years will require Meta to release a stack of hardware, software and experiences."We are at this point, you know, a company that can afford to make some big long-term research investments, and this is a big focus," he said.Meta Platforms had 3.64 billion monthly active people across its family of applications in the first quarter, up 6% year over year.He expects the economy around the metaverse to be massive, he said.Sign up now for the CNBC Investing Club to follow Jim Cramer's every move in the market.DisclaimerQuestions for Cramer? Call Cramer: 1-800-743-CNBCWant to take a deep dive into Cramer's world? Hit him up! Mad Money Twitter - Jim Cramer Twitter - Facebook - InstagramQuestions, comments, suggestions for the "Mad Money" website? [email protected] | Tech Giants |
Jan. 12, 2023Updated: Jan. 12, 2023 10:21 a.m. The logo for Alphabet appears on a screen at the Nasdaq MarketSite in New York. Google’s parent company is conducting layoffs at its Verily and Intrinsic divisions.Richard Drew, STF / Associated Press Google parent Alphabet has cut hundreds of jobs across its Verily Life Sciences and Intrinsic divisions, as layoffs expand to hit another tech giant. South San Francisco-based Verily will reduce its more than 1,600-person workforce by 15%, or about 240 people, CEO Stephen Gillett wrote in a memo that was shared publicly Wednesday. The health care tech company will scrap some programs such as its Verily Value Suite software. “Our path forward is driven by the need to make deliberate choices about where we can have the greatest impact in precision health and to put ourselves on a faster path to sustained commercial success. It’s about accelerating the things that are working best and that customers need the most,” Gillett wrote. Robotics division Intrinsic, based in Mountain View, is laying off 40 employees. “This decision was made in light of shifts in prioritization and our longer-term strategic direction. It will ensure Intrinsic can continue to allocate resources to our highest priority initiatives,” a spokesperson said. The company works on artificial intelligence software for manufacturing robots. The layoffs are far less than some of Alphabet’s fellow tech giants. Meta cut 11,000 workers and Amazon’s layoffs swelled to 18,000 people, the biggest in tech during the pandemic. Salesforce, San Francisco’s largest private employer, is cutting around 8,000 jobs, including 752 jobs in the city. Experts say that while the tech layoffs show a downturn in the sector, the Bay Area continues to have low unemployment rates and overall positive job growth. There are no signs of a recession yet. Verily operated a coronavirus testing program through contracts worth $55 million across 28 California counties in 2020, but San Francisco and Alameda County severed ties after only seven months over privacy and equity concerns. Alphabet had 186,779 employees at the end of September 2022, after hiring a record 12,700 in the third quarter. The company has slowed hiring since then. Its Google division has not announced any layoffs, but multiple reports have said the company plans tougher performance reviews which could lead to staff departures. Roland Li is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: [email protected] Twitter: @rolandlisf | Tech Giants |
The "next big thing" in personal technology may not be an immersive augmented reality headset or a phone that folds in half. It could just be finding new ways to get more out of the phones we're already using. That message rang clear throughout 2022, as companies like Apple, Samsung and Google introduced new ways to make our phones more practical, reliable and private. This year's offerings lacked the wow factor that defined the smartphone's first decade, instead including upgrades that could make our phones last longer and feel more useful. Among the changes: lengthier Android software support for Samsung devices, free new privacy features for fledgling Pixel phone owners, and better safety features for the iPhone. These subtle but noteworthy changes say a lot about the state of the smartphone industry. Mobile devices have matured to the point that annual hardware improvements don't feel as monumental as they once did. As it becomes more difficult to impress consumers with new technologies, tech giants increasingly keep existing users hooked by making phones feel more essential in everyday life. That's as important as ever in 2022 as inflation has dampened the appetite for new smartphones, making it even more challenging to drive upgrades. Your phone as a safety netIt's difficult to define precisely how smartphones evolved in 2022, because there isn't one common dominant theme as there has been in years past. It wasn't, for instance, the year smartphones got ultrawide camera lenses, or fast charging capabilities. "Smartphones over the last five, six or so years -- it was all about how many cameras, how big the cameras were, screen size, battery improvements," said Aaron West, a senior analyst covering the smartphone industry at Omdia. "And now it's kind of plateaued a bit." But a couple of shared themes become evident once you dig below the surface.The first is peace of mind, and that phrase means something a little different for each new major smartphone we saw in 2022. For the iPhone 14, it's the ability to automatically detect car crashes and connect to emergency services via satellite when cell networks aren't available. Google's Pixel phones have supported accident detection for years, but it's a first for Apple. It's also one of the few features that separates the iPhone 14 from the iPhone 13. Emergency SOS via satellite. Apple unveiled the upcoming feature on Sept. 7. Screenshot by CNET For Samsung, it's knowing that your Galaxy S22 or Galaxy A53 5G won't feel outdated anytime soon, since it'll get up to four generations of Android version updates. That even outlasts Google, which provides only three years of major Android OS support for its Pixel phones. Both companies provide five years of security updates, but Samsung's extended support means you'll get new systemwide features for another year. For Google's Pixel 7 and 7 Pro, that means having the option to browse the web more privately with a free, built-in VPN. You'd otherwise have to pay $10 per month as part of the premium tier of the Google One subscription service to get that feature. It's another example of how Google is using exclusive software perks to distinguish its new Pixel devices from other Android competitors.The problem, however, is that features like these don't always coerce people into buying a new phone. "Security is an emotional enhancement," Josh Lowitz of Consumer Intelligence Research Partners said in reference to the iPhone 14's new safety features. "But it doesn't change your day-to-day living."How your phone is becoming more importantGoogle wants you to store your driver's license in Google Wallet. Google Tech giants also tried to make phones feel like a more essential part of our daily lives in 2022. Most notably, Apple, Samsung and Google each made improvements to their digital wallets. Mobile payments have existed on phones for years, but these companies ramped up efforts to store government IDs and other essentials on phones in 2022. The goal is to make it so you can leave your house with almost nothing but your phone as it gradually replaces your physical wallet. The announcements came as mobile wallet adoption is increasing. In September 2022, 32% of smartphone owners across regions including France, Germany, Italy, Spain and the US reported using a mobile wallet in the past month, according to Jack Hamlin, a global consumer insight director at data and consulting company Kantar. That's a 3% increase versus the previous year. Phone makers also expanded their ambitions to cement the phone as the center of the other digital services and devices we use -- another means of making them more critical. It isn't a new trend, but the products we saw in 2022 underscored the idea that your phone isn't just a phone, it's the gateway to the other apps and gadgets in our lives. Google, for example, released its first consumer smartwatch, called the Pixel Watch, in October. It's perhaps the search giant's biggest gambit in years to lure shoppers into its Pixel landscape, replicating Apple's strategy.The Google Pixel Watch and the Pixel 7 Pro. Andrew Lanxon/CNET "One of the things that is keeping people locked into Apple's ecosystem is once you buy an Apple Watch, it's really hard to leave," Techsponential analyst Avi Greengart previously said to CNET's Imad Khan regarding the Pixel Watch's launch.That's just one of the most prominent examples of how tech companies are broadening their respective ecosystems. Apple expanded services like Apple Fitness Plus and Apple TV Plus in 2022 by bringing its workout subscription app to iPhones and announcing plans to air Major League Soccer matches on its streaming TV platform. Building up an ecosystem is more important than ever for tech companies now that it's become more challenging to sell new phones. Not only does it keep current users locked into their current phone of choice, but it also gives companies another way to monetize those devotees. iPhone owners can become Apple Watch or AirPods customers. They may even subscribe to Apple Fitness Plus, too. Galaxy S22 owners might opt for Samsung's Galaxy Watch 5 rather than a Fitbit tracker or the Pixel Watch. It's harder than ever to convince people to buy new phonesThere's no way to sugarcoat it: Smartphone sales looked bleak this year. In the third quarter of 2022, the global smartphone industry suffered its fifth consecutive decline, according to the International Data Corporation. The second quarter of 2022 wasn't any better; Canalys reports that shipments fell 9% year-over-year. Both company's reports cite as contributing factors economic challenges and weakened demand. At the same time, people are holding on to their phones longer. In the 12 months that ended with the September 2022 quarter, 29% of buyers had their previous phone for three years or more, according to Consumer Intelligence Research Partners. That's an increase from the same quarter one year ago, when that number was 23%. The average age of devices turned in through trade-ins also crossed three-and-a-half years for the first time, according to Assurant, an insurance provider that also helps companies develop trade-in programs. With that in mind, you can also begin to understand why annual phone releases aren't as exciting as they used to be. Phone makers aren't just catering to shoppers who upgraded their phone last year or the year prior; they're targeting legacy phone owners."It's all well and good comparing an iPhone 13 to an iPhone 14 and saying there's very little development," said Hamlin. "But with consumers holding on to their devices for four years now, that's a consumer moving from an iPhone 10 to an iPhone 14." The phones in Apple's iPhone 14 lineup are the company's first to have car crash detection and emergency SOS via satellite. But the regular iPhone 14 (pictured) otherwise has a lot in common with the iPhone 13. James Martin/CNET Perhaps the biggest lesson from 2022 is that the phone as we know it likely won't change for the foreseeable future. Yes, phones will continue to get faster processors and more-advanced cameras. But the current iteration of the phone that exists today is the one that many people will be using for a long time, despite the industry's efforts to accelerate the adoption of foldable phones.That's why tech companies may have to work harder to keep consumers intrigued, especially as new features become less visible than the flashy hardware leaps found in previous phone generations."Phones now are the right size," said West. "The cameras are as good as they're going to get. The batteries are pretty much as good as the size allows. So what else can we do with them?" | Tech Giants |
- Microsoft on Tuesday announced a new artificial intelligence subscription service for Microsoft 365: The company will charge users an additional $30 per month for the use of generative AI with tools like Teams, Excel and Word.
- Adding on the generative AI subscription should reportedly cost enterprise users an additional 50% or more per month.
- The updates come as the race to offer consumer-driven generative AI tools heats up among tech giants like Microsoft, Google, IBM and more.
Microsoft shares rose more than 5% on Tuesday after the company announced a new artificial intelligence subscription service for Microsoft 365: The company will charge users an additional $30 per month for the use of generative AI with tools like Teams, Excel and Word.
Adding on the subscription to Copilot, a generative AI assistant that works across Microsoft 365 programs, should reportedly cost enterprise users an additional 50% or more per month. Copilot's capabilities reportedly include summarizing meetings, analyzing spreadsheet data and designing presentations, but the tool is in currently in early testing stages and is not yet available to the public.
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The updates come as the race to offer consumer-driven generative AI tools heats up among tech giants like Microsoft, Google, IBM and more.
The company also announced a significant update to Bing Chat, its AI chatbot, on Tuesday: visual search. Users can now take or upload a photo to Bing Chat and ask for more information on it through the desktop or Bing apps.
This is breaking news; please check back for updates | Tech Giants |
Microsoft’s new AI-powered Copilot summarized my meeting instantly yesterday (the meeting was with Microsoft to discuss Copilot, of course) before listing out the questions I’d asked just seconds before. I’ve watched Microsoft demo the future of work for years with concepts about virtual assistants, but Copilot is the closest thing I’ve ever seen to them coming true.
“In our minds this is the new way of computing, the new way of working with technology, and the most adaptive technology we’ve seen,” says Jon Friedman, corporate vice president of design and research at Microsoft, in an interview with The Verge.
I was speaking to Friedman in a Teams call when he activated Copilot midway through our meeting to perform its AI-powered magic. Microsoft has a flashy marketing video that shows off Copilot’s potential, but seeing Friedman demonstrate this in real time across Office apps and in Teams left me convinced it will forever change how we interact with software, create documents, and ultimately, how we work.
Copilot appears in Office apps as a useful AI chatbot on the sidebar, but it’s much more than just that. You could be in the middle of a Word document, and it will gently appear when you highlight an entire paragraph — much like how Word has UI prompts that highlight your spelling mistakes. You can use it to rewrite your paragraphs with 10 suggestions of new text to flick through and freely edit, or you can have Copilot generate entire documents for you.
Copilot can even teach you Office features
This adaptability is what sets it apart from Microsoft just shoving ChatGPT into a sidebar in Office. Copilot doesn’t just offer up a chatbot interface — you can use it to command Office apps like Excel and PowerPoint. If you’re looking at a slide deck and wish every title were orange instead of blue, just ask Copilot instead of having to dig into PowerPoint features.
In Excel, you can have Copilot generate a PivotTable, create a graph, or just help you understand the rows and columns of data in front of you. “One of the ways we’re starting with Copilot is helping analyze and understand data,” says Friedman. “You can ask Copilot what it makes of the data, you can get graphs from Copilot based on trends it sees in the data, and you can insert those trends into a spreadsheet.” Excel even has a “show me” feature for Copilot that will let this AI teach you how it just completed a command so you can improve your Office knowledge.
It feels like Microsoft is slowly building on the vision it had for its Cortana assistant or even Clippy decades before. “I love that our heritage is full of products that try to adapt to people,” says Friedman. “Copilot shares some similarities with some things we’ve done in the past, but it’s far more capable, it’s humble, and it’s there to serve things up for you that help you save time.”
Microsoft has customized this Copilot system for every Office app, so there are different ways to command it. Friedman demonstrated to me how Copilot can help you write emails in Outlook, offering up short or long message drafts with options to change the tone. It even works in the mobile version of Outlook, which got me thinking about the ways this could speed up work on the go.
“Outlook mobile is the first place where we’re doing a big push,” explains Friedman. Outlook can summarize all your emails on the go, generate drafts, and generally make it easier to triage your inbox. But imagine creating entire Word documents from your phone without having to type on a tiny on-screen keyboard. “We’ll have more to talk about mobile in the coming months,” says Friedman. But you can imagine where things will go.
As impressive as Copilot is, we’ve seen the myriad ways that large language models can fail, including inserting racial or gender bias into text and simply making things up. Those traits are alarming enough in a search engine, but when you’re talking about Excel (which arguably powers the world’s economy) or your email inbox, it’s a whole different level of ethics, privacy, and data concerns.
“It gets things right a lot of the time but not all of the time,” admits Friedman. “In the user experience we do things like put in affordances to not send something until you’ve read it, or to encourage you to try again, edit, and discard.”
Microsoft also has a number of warnings inside Copilot that appear as you use it. In PowerPoint, you’ll see a message that says, “Content is generated by AI and might contain inaccuracies for sensitive material. Be sure to verify information.” Elsewhere, there are prompts that say, “AI-generated content may be incorrect.” Microsoft is trying to design the system in a way that reminds you that you’re in charge.
“We give you tools to report it when it’s wrong. We create prompt suggestions to help you write good prompts. Everything we’re doing in the user experience is to make it conversational and give you agency,” says Friedman.
We’ve seen what happens when it goes wrong in Microsoft’s Bing search engine. The AI-powered chatbot has hallucinated on multiple occasions, and Microsoft has had to put limits in place to control its outbursts. In one conversation with The Verge, Bing even claimed it spied on Microsoft’s employees through webcams on their laptops and manipulated them.
“Everything we’re learning from Bing in preview is helping us mitigate those risks,” says Friedman. “We’re applying all that learning and thinking to Copilot as well.” Microsoft is also starting off small with its Copilot rollout. It will initially be available to just 20 businesses before Microsoft opens it up to more when it’s ready. Microsoft is also starting with enterprise customers first before rolling it out to consumers.
“We feel pretty good about what we have as a starting point, but we don’t yet know if it’s performing the way we want it to and helping really empower people to accomplish their jobs,” says Friedman. “We’ll quickly iterate, we’ve been building fast, very fast. But we pause and we learn a lot and we’ll update really fast. Our plan is to move as fast as we possibly can to scale to more of enterprise in a thoughtful and responsible way and make sure the experience is awesome.”
Is Microsoft moving too fast, though? Google announced its own AI features for Gmail and Docs earlier this week, and the AI race has many experts worried that tech giants aren’t properly considering the impact of these new tools.
“In our mind we’re being thoughtfully quick.”
“In our mind we’re being thoughtfully quick,” says Friedman. “We’re being thoughtful in that we’re rolling it out to 20 customers and working side by side with them.” Despite reports of Microsoft laying off its ethics and society team that taught employees how to make AI tools responsibly, Friedman says Microsoft is growing the people working on these concerns. “In terms of our investment in ethics and AI, we’ve grown more and more ethics and AI experts in all of the product teams working on this stuff,” says Friedman. “We have to scale way bigger, so we’ve been investing more heavily and it continues to grow year over year.”
Microsoft knows Copilot isn’t perfect and that it’s going to take some time to get there. Although it impressed me during the Teams meeting recap, it could have easily confused my voice for someone else’s if I’d been using a bad microphone, or Outlook could pull out the wrong summary in an email thread. There are big challenges ahead, but Microsoft is hoping the work it does on making it easy to edit responses, correct sources, and issue feedback will ultimately improve the system.
“We know AI gets things wrong, we know it hallucinates and we know it does it confidently,” admits Friedman. “We continue to work on making it better at doing that less, but also that the user experience really empowers people and puts them in the driver’s seat.”
For all the challenges, the future of the Copilot system won’t just be text-based generation, either. Microsoft has a clear vision to use Copilot to generate images, video, and more once large language models can handle these features well.
Microsoft has already integrated OpenAI’s DALL-E model into its Designer app, which allows people to generate images based on text. Designer will also help PowerPoint select the best imagery for AI-generated slides. “We’re going to bake Designer further into Copilot so you can change things within Designer,” says Friedman. “The Designer stuff you’ve seen today is just scratching the surface. I fully suspect we’re going to use Copilot to do amazing multimedia things.”
So where else could we see Copilot appear? I asked Friedman about Windows integration. “We’re looking at all sorts of places and ways to expand [Copilot] out. I believe this is the next major wave of computing and it will change the way we work with all devices in the coming years,” says Friedman.
Microsoft also has a multiplayer Copilot experience
The future will also include a multiplayer experience for Copilot, too. Loop components, one of the biggest changes to Office documents in decades, are available in Teams and Outlook. Loop components, the branding for Microsoft’s Fluid work, are blocks of collaborative text or content that can live independently and be copied, pasted, and shared freely.
Now, imagine copying a Loop component of text into an email and having multiple people edit it and interact with the Copilot. “In the component while we’re editing, the conversation is a clickable history of the content being generated that you can go back and forth through,” says Friedman. “What’s so cool about it is that it feels like a totally new mental model with how to work with a Copilot with a group of people.”
All of these Copilot features for Office and Microsoft 365 feel like they will forever change how we work and communicate, especially as these large language models evolve in the years ahead. Microsoft’s push to integrate this AI deep into its products could have a lasting effect on the job market.
“Every time there’s a new tech advancement there are both opportunities and things we have to consider,” says Friedman. “We believe infusing this AI is going to create new job opportunities long term, and increase job satisfaction short term. We expect it’s going to change the nature of a lot of jobs and create new jobs that didn’t exist before. That’s why empowering people and building this common design system is so important to us.” | Tech Giants |
Register now for FREE unlimited access to Reuters.comLONDON, June 28 (Reuters) - Investors managing more than $350 billion of assets have demanded that Microsoft (MSFT.O) publish more transparent tax and financial information, as tech giants face growing scrutiny globally over their tax affairs.A shareholder resolution on tax transparency had been filed to Microsoft ahead of its annual investor meeting this year, said the organiser of the action, Britain-based proxy advisers Pensions & Investment Research Consultants (PIRC).Investors including Nordea, AkademikerPension and Greater Manchester Pension Fund had backed the resolution, PIRC said.Register now for FREE unlimited access to Reuters.comThe resolution calls on the company to publish financial and tax information on a country-by-country basis outside its home market of the United States so investors can assess whether it is paying fair taxes and identify any risks posed by tax reforms.A Microsoft logo is seen on an office building in New York City, U.S. on July 28, 2015. REUTERS/Mike SegarIt also calls on Microsoft to produce a tax transparency report in line with the tax standard of the Global Reporting Initiative, a standards organisation.A similar resolution has also been filed to tech giant Cisco (CSCO.O), PIRC said.Investors voted on a tax transparency resolution at Amazon's investor meeting in May, but it and other investor-led resolutions failed to get sufficient support to pass. read more Microsoft and Cisco were not immediately available for comment.Register now for FREE unlimited access to Reuters.comReporting by Iain Withers; Editing by Bradley PerrettOur Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles. | Tech Giants |
Google Judge Told Android Contracts Block Upstart Search App
Alphabet Inc.’s Google stymied the development of an upstart search app by invoking its exclusive revenue-sharing deals with Samsung Electronics Co., Verizon Communications Inc., AT&T Inc. and T-Mobile Inc., the founder of a tech startup told a judge.
(Bloomberg) -- Alphabet Inc.’s Google stymied the development of an upstart search app by invoking its exclusive revenue-sharing deals with Samsung Electronics Co., Verizon Communications Inc., AT&T Inc. and T-Mobile Inc., the founder of a tech startup told a judge.
“Time and again, the Google contract was the primary blocker for us distributing app search,” Alex Austin, founder of Branch Metrics, testified Wednesday during the US Justice Department’s antitrust trial in Washington against the tech giant.
The government claims Google uses such contracts with tech rivals, smartphone makers and wireless providers to illegally maintain its monopoly in online search, by making it the preselected option, or default, on PCs and mobile phones. Google denies the allegation and says users choose its search engine because it is the best one.
Founded in 2013, Branch Metrics raised $650 million from New Enterprise Associates Inc., Samsung Next Fund and other venture capital investors to build a search engine for mobile apps, the founder said. The company’s product would have directed users to information within apps already installed on their phone, Austin said. It was designed to help users discover new apps, he said.
Read More: Apple, Google Agreed to ‘Defend’ Search Deal From Regulators
After investing in 2015, Samsung sought to integrate the Branch product into its phones starting in 2019 with the S10 device, Austin said. But the phone maker restricted some of the functionality because of concerns about the Google contract, he said. The product was only allowed to search 25 apps and hid results from any apps not already installed on the phone, he said.
Austin said Samsung told him that Google’s revenue-share agreements required it be the only “web search engine” on a device. But in 2020, Google began to renegotiate those agreements, requiring that it be the “only connected search and internet search” on a device, he said.
After that, Branch was forced to revamp its product to focus only on searching apps already installed on a device, Austin said.
Under questioning by Google’s lawyers Thursday, Austin acknowledged that Samsung wrote in February 2021 that the smartphone manufacturer wanted to prioritize building out its own product, S-Finder, instead of working with Branch.
After that email, Austin said, Branch employees flew to Korea to speak in person about why Samsung pulled back.
The employees called to report back that “it’s Google and you never have any hope of getting past that,” Austin said. Samsung was “not going to document in any email exchange that it’s Google.”
Branch also had discussions with Apple Inc. about incorporating its product into the iPhone, but they ultimately didn’t move forward, Austin said.
Raising Concerns
Google executive Anna Kartasheva said she brought concerns internally in June 2020 about Samsung’s implementation of the Branch product. AT&T initially raised the issue, asking Google whether the Branch product would violate the revenue-share agreement, she said.
“We have allowed it everywhere, even on devices covered by search rev share deals because Samsung pointed to gaps in what Google Search was able to do with this type of search,” Kartasheva wrote in an email to Google’s search team. “We believe this goes beyond the scope of what we originally allowed Samsung (and US carriers) and have started pushing back on them.”
Kartasheva, who is involved in strategy for Android systems, testified that she was not the person who would decide whether the Branch product violated the terms of Google’s contracts, and was seeking more information from the search team about their views.
“Nobody started pushing back on Samsung,” she said. “None of us were decision makers.”
Read More: What’s at Stake in Google Trial on Antitrust Charges
Kartasheva took screenshots of the product that she shared in the email to other Google employees under the statement: “Situation: Samsung’s partnership with Branch expands the search experience via deep linking, violating their contracts.”
During her testimony before US District Judge Amit Mehta, who will decide the case, Kartasheva said she was sharing her opinion, but was never told what the ultimate decision was on Branch’s product or AT&T’s request.
Following her testimony, the Justice Department read aloud from a deposition by an AT&T executive, Jeff Ezell, about a potential partnership with Branch.
“Google indicated they felt it was inconsistent with the” revenue-share agreement, Ezell said in his deposition. “We decided it wasn’t worth it.”
After that, Ezell said, AT&T ended its discussions with Branch.
Google also read from Ezell’s deposition. “We weren’t really sure if that was a user experience they would want,” he said of Branch’s product.
The antitrust trial is in its third week and is expected to last into November.
The case is US v. Google, 20-cv-3010, US District Court, District of Columbia.
(Updates with additional testimony beginning in eighth paragraph.)
More stories like this are available on bloomberg.com
©2023 Bloomberg L.P. | Tech Giants |
A US iPhone throttling compensation claim was settled back in 2020, when Apple agreed to pay up to $500M for intentionally slowing older iPhones with degraded batteries to prevent them shutting down. Now a UK claim has been filed, seeking a total of $750M ($910M) damages for British owners of affected iPhones.
The complaint has been filed by Justin Gumann, a retired market researcher who has since turned consumer advocate … Background
The controversy dates back to 2016, when a significant number of iPhone 6s models were affected by random shutdowns.
Apple subsequently determined that these were due to degraded batteries being unable to meet peak power requirements, so decided to quietly fix the issue by detecting this battery degradation and throttling performance to match the available power. It did this in an iOS update, which was applied to other iPhone models too.
The company chose not to disclose this action, but it was subsequently discovered by Geekbench founder John Poole in 2017 – following which Apple went public on the throttling, explaining its reasons. It later offered a subsidised battery replacement service for affected phones.
In 2018, the company added a Battery Health feature which allowed users to check the capacity of their battery, and to disable the throttling if desired.
Apple was hit with dozens of class action lawsuits over the issue, and the biggest of these was settled in 2020, when Apple agreed to pay a total of $500M in damages to US owners of effected models.
UK iPhone throttling compensation claim
The Guardian reports that a similar complaint has now been filed in the UK. Apple is facing a multimillion-pound legal claim that could reimburse millions of iPhone owners over a secret decision to slow down older phones in 2017 […]
Justin Gutmann, a consumer rights campaigner, has launched a claim against Apple over the decision at the Competition Appeals Tribunal. If he wins, the company could be forced to pay damages of more than £750m, spread out between the approximately 25 million people who bought one of the affected phones. The claim relates to the iPhone 6, 6 Plus, 6S, 6S Plus, SE, 7, 7 Plus, 8, 8 Plus and iPhone X models […]
“Instead of doing the honourable and legal thing by their customers and offering a free replacement, repair service or compensation, Apple instead misled people by concealing a tool in software updates that slowed their devices by up to 58%,” Gutmann said.
“I’m launching this case so that millions of iPhone users across the UK will receive redress for the harm suffered by Apple’s actions. There are two key differences between the US class action lawsuit and the UK complaint. First, the UK case is not actually a lawsuit, but rather a complaint to a competition regulator. It is up to the regulator to make a decision, and either party could then challenge this.
Second, if compensation is awarded, there will be no lawyer’s cut to deduct. Even so, the total sum being claimed would only see owners awarded £30 ($36), so no one should start planning M2 MacBook Air purchases with the proceeds.
If the decision goes against Apple, details will then be provided on how to make a claim. Generally this involves providing proof that you owned an affected model during the relevant dates.
Apple said that its motives were to make older iPhones last as long as possible. “We have never – and would never – do anything to intentionally shorten the life of any Apple product, or degrade the user experience to drive customer upgrades,” Apple said in a statement on Thursday. “Our goal has always been to create products that our customers love, and making iPhones last as long as possible is an important part of that.” iPhones now include a report in the settings menu, under “battery health”, that discloses whether the throttling is in effect. 9to5Mac’s Take
With everything now known, it seems pretty clear that Apple’s actions were well-intentioned, performance throttling being preferable to random shutdowns. Where the company ran into trouble was failing to disclose the decision.
Given the US precedent, it seems likely that the tribunal will award compensation, though it may not agree with the amount claimed. Should this indeed be the case, Apple will likely accept that decision without challenge.
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Workers at an Apple store in Towson, Maryland, voted on Saturday to join a union, making their store the first of the tech giant's stores in the United States to do so. Retail workers voted 65-33 to join the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers, despite Apple opposing the effort. EU TO REQUIRE SINGLE CHARGER FOR ALL SMARTPHONES IN CHANGE TARGETING APPLE "I applaud the courage displayed by CORE members at the Apple store in Towson for achieving this historic victory,” said Robert Martinez Jr., the international president of the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers. “I ask Apple CEO Tim Cook to respect the election results and fast-track a first contract for the dedicated IAM CORE Apple employees in Towson. This victory shows the growing demand for unions at Apple stores and different industries across our nation.” The vote still needs to be certified by the National Labor Relations Board for it to become finalized. Workers had sent a letter to Apple CEO Tim Cook last month about their intent to organize, calling themselves the Coalition of Organized Retail Employees, or CORE for short. "This is something we do not to go against or create conflict with our management. Rather, we have come together as a union because of a deep love of our role as workers within the company," they wrote. "The decision to form a union is about us as workers gaining access to rights that we do not currently have." The Maryland store is not the only location to seek unionization. A vote to unionize workers at an Apple store in Atlanta was withdrawn in May after the Communications Workers of America claimed Apple had violated labor laws and made a fair election impossible, according to CNBC. CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER The Towson retail workers join a growing wave of organizers who have worked to establish unions at companies including Amazon, Starbucks, and Google parent company Alphabet. In April, workers at an Amazon warehouse on Staten Island became the first to vote in favor of unionizing. The Washington Examiner reached out to Apple for comment. | Tech Giants |
Microsoft joins plea for government regulation of AI tools like ChatGPT
Microsoft President Brad Smith went to the other Washington this week to ask government officials to put guardrails up around artificial intelligence.
At the D.C. event, Smith made the case for regulating the technology behind tools like ChatGPT.
“I think we need to think about two things here in the United States,” Smith said. “First is to enable innovation to go forward with guardrails that both provide the assurance that the American public wants and deserves, but frankly, shows the world that there is a path where we can innovate quickly and responsibly.”
Microsoft is positioned to seize a huge opportunity in generative AI as a major investor and partner with OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT. Microsoft has integrated the technology into its Bing search engine, thrusting the company ahead of longtime search engine king Google in the AI arms race. The Redmond, Wash. software giant is also integrating AI into its enterprise tools like Office 365.
As part of the event in D.C. Thursday, Microsoft released a “blueprint for governing AI” that it hopes regulators will adopt. The recommendations include adapting existing law to new technologies, requiring companies that build AI systems for critical infrastructure to add “safety brakes,” and promoting transparency in the development of AI.
Smith also called for an executive order saying the federal government will only procure AI technology from companies that meet those standards. He said his most pressing concern is deepfake media — videos, images, audio, etc. — that look deceptively real, but are generated by AI.
“Our goal is to ensure that AI serves humanity, and is controlled by humans, with an approach to policy and law and regulation,” Smith said.
Though it might seem unusual for a tech company to invite regulation of itself, this is not a new strategy for Smith or Microsoft. The company has set itself aside from other tech giants in recent years by calling for regulation of social media, facial recognition, and other technologies. It is worth noting that in many cases, those regulations wouldn’t target core parts of Microsoft’s business.
There is another reason tech companies might invite government oversight: it creates a level playing field with competitors. Throughout tech’s history – but particularly in the contest to bring AI technology to market first – companies have shirked responsibility with an old adage: "If we don’t build it, someone else will." Government rules can change that equation.
Despite the growing chorus of the tech companies calling for federal regulation of AI, it’s unlikely to come from the current, divided government. It's more likely that a patchwork of state and international regulations will create a de facto standard, similar to what's happened with privacy regulations across Washington state, California, and Europe.
“Pace matters,” Smith said at the event Thursday. “If you go too slow, the U.S. will fall behind.” | Tech Giants |
Microsoft is overhauling its artificial intelligence ethics policies and will no longer let companies use its technology to do things such as infer emotion, gender or age using facial recognition technology, the company has said.As part of its new “responsible AI standard”, Microsoft says it intends to keep “people and their goals at the centre of system design decisions”. The high-level principles will lead to real changes in practice, the company says, with some features being tweaked and others withdrawn from sale.Microsoft’s Azure Face service, for instance, is a facial recognition tool that is used by companies such as Uber as part of their identity verification processes. Now, any company that wants to use the service’s facial recognition features will need to actively apply for use, including those that have already built it into their products, to prove they are matching Microsoft’s AI ethics standards and that the features benefit the end user and society.Even those companies that are granted access will no longer be able to use some of the more controversial features of Azure Face, Microsoft says, and the company will be retiring facial analysis technology that purports to infer emotional states and attributes such as gender or age.“We collaborated with internal and external researchers to understand the limitations and potential benefits of this technology and navigate the tradeoffs,” said Sarah Bird, a product manager at Microsoft. “In the case of emotion classification specifically, these efforts raised important questions about privacy, the lack of consensus on a definition of ‘emotions’, and the inability to generalise the linkage between facial expression and emotional state across use cases.”Sign up to First Edition, our free daily newsletter – every weekday morning at 7am BSTMicrosoft is not scrapping emotion recognition entirely – the company will still use it internally, for accessibility tools such as Seeing AI, which attempt to verbally describe the world for users with vision problems.Similarly, the company has restricted use of its custom neural voice technology, which allows the creation of synthetic voices that sound nearly identical to the original source. “It is … easy to imagine how it could be used to inappropriately impersonate speakers and deceive listeners,” said Natasha Crampton, the company’s chief responsible AI officer.Earlier this year Microsoft began watermarking its synthetic voices, incorporating minor, inaudible fluctuations in the output that meant the company could tell when a recording was made using its technology. “With the advancement of the neural TTS technology, which makes synthetic speech indistinguishable from human voices, comes a risk of harmful deepfakes,” said Microsoft’s Qinying Liao. | Tech Giants |
Illustration shows NavIC (Navigation with Indian Constellation), Apple, Xiaomi, Samsung, Mediatek and Qualcomm logos are seen near Satellite model placed on the map in this illustration taken, September 25, 2022. REUTERS/Dado Ruvic/IllustrationRegister now for FREE unlimited access to Reuters.comNEW DELHI, Sept 26 (Reuters) - The Indian government is pushing smartphone makers to enable support for its NavIC navigation system in new devices sold in the country from next year, a move that has spooked the industry due to additional costs and tight time frame.Below are the details of NavIC's inception, why India wants smartphone makers to adopt it and how the system compares to other global or regional navigation systems.WHAT IS NavIC?Register now for FREE unlimited access to Reuters.comNavIC, or Navigation with Indian Constellation, is an independent stand-alone navigation satellite system developed by the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO).NavIC was originally approved in 2006 at a cost of $174 million. It was expected to be completed by late 2011, but only became operational in 2018.NavIC consists of eight satellites and covers the whole of India's landmass and up to 1,500 km (930 miles) from its boundaries.Currently, NavIC's use is limited. It is being used in public vehicle tracking in India, for providing emergency warning alerts to fishermen venturing into the deep sea where there is no terrestrial network connectivity, and for tracking and providing information related to natural disasters.Enabling it in smartphones is the next step India is pushing for.HOW DOES NavIC COMPARE?The main difference is the serviceable area covered by these systems. GPS caters to users across the globe and its satellites circle the earth twice a day, while NavIC is currently for use in India and adjacent areas.Like GPS, there are three more navigation systems that have global coverage - Galileo from the European Union, Russia-owned GLONASS and China's Beidou. QZSS, operated by Japan, is another regional navigation system coveringAsia-Oceania region, with a focus on Japan.India's 2021 satellite navigation draft policy stated the government will work towards "expanding the coverage from regional to global" to ensure availability of NavIC signal in any part of the world.NavIC is "as good as GPS of the United States in terms of position accuracy," the Indian government said in August.WHY IS INDIA PROMOTING NavIC?India says NavIC is conceived with the aim of removing dependence on foreign satellite systems for navigation service requirements, particularly for "strategic sectors."Relying on systems like GPS and GLONASS may not always be reliable, India says, as those are operated by the defence agencies of respective nations and it is possible that civilian services can be degraded or denied."NavIC is an indigenous positioning system that is under Indian control. There is no risk of the service being withdrawn or denied in a given situation," the government said in 2021.India also wants to encourage its ministries to use NavIC applications to promote local industry engaged in developing indigenous NavIC-based solutions.Register now for FREE unlimited access to Reuters.comReporting by Munsif Vengattil and Aditya Kalra in New Delhi; Editing by Mike Collett-White and Raju GopalakrishnanOur Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles. | Tech Giants |
On Thursday, September 15th, Uber confirmed reports of an organization-wide cybersecurity breach. This is an evolving situation, but we will bring you here the latest information and commentary as we get it.“What makes this breach appear so significant is that this does not appear to be a breach of a single system. The attackers seem to have moved laterally between systems for a complete organization takeover” Mackenzie Jackson – Security Advocate at GitGuardianUpdate 9/20/22: Uber confirmed in a security update that the named attacker "Tea Pot" was affiliated with the Lapsus$ hacking group, famous for breaching NVIDIA, Samsung, and Microsoft earlier this year. According to their early investigations, it is likely that the attacker targeted an external contractor whose credentials were bought on the dark web.What happenedHere’s what we know so far, pending investigation and confirmation from Uber’s security teams.The attack started with a social engineering campaign on Uber employees, which yielded access to a VPN, in turn granting access to Uber's internal network *.corp.uber.com.Once on the network, the attacker found some PowerShell scripts, one of which contained hardcoded credentials for a domain admin account for Thycotic, Uber’s Privileged Access Management (PAM) solution.Using admin access, the attacker was able to log in and take over multiple services and internal tools used at Uber: AWS, GCP, Google Drive, Slack workspace, SentinelOne, HackerOne admin console, Uber’s internal employee dashboards, and a few code repositories.Screenshot from a private message with the hacker on TelegramThe critical vulnerability that granted the attacker such high levels of access was hardcoded credentials in a PowerShell script. These credentials gave admin access to a Privileged Access Management (PAM) system: Thycotic. This tool carries huge amounts of privilege, making it a single point of failure; it stores both end-user credentials for employee access to internal services and third-party apps as well as DevOps secrets used in the context of software development. This is a worst-case scenario. The PAM system controls access to multiple systems, and having admin access means you can give yourself or extract secrets to all connected systems. This has appeared to give the attacker complete access to all of Uber's internal systems.This isn't the first time we've seen an Uber data breach: in 2014 hackers gained access to an AWS S3 bucket after developers leaked secrets to a public git repository. Two years later, a similar incident happened when attackers exploited poor password hygiene by some developers to gain access to private repositories which contained multiple access credentials. Now we appear to have the final episode in the trilogy, and it appears to be the most serious situation yet. “There have been three reported breaches involving Uber in 2014, 2016, and now 2022. It appears that all three incidents critically involve hardcoded credentials (secrets) inside code and scripts” Mackenzie Jackson – Security Advocate at GitGuardianHow bad is it?Critically, Uber’s Privileged Access Management (PAM) platform was compromised through the exposure of its admin credentials. Privileged access management (PAM) is the combination of tools and technology used to secure, control, and monitor employee access to an organization's critical information and resources. With that in mind, the attacker may have gained access to nearly all the internal systems of Uber. Let’s go through the ones we know of based on preliminary information and evidence to understand the severity of this incident. “We very often find credentials and secrets for specific systems that have leaked, but finding admin credentials to an access management system is like finding a master key to every room and alarm system, in every building, in every country that an organization owns.” Mackenzie Jackson – Security Advocate at GitGuardianThycotic – Severity = CriticalThe attacker gained admin access to the Thycotic PAM system. PAM systems can be a single full-featured software console or a collection of multiple tools; in the case of Thycotic, it is a single tool with many features. It can control access to different services and also has a secrets manager where credentials and passwords are stored. It appears the hacker was able to access secrets inside the secure storage, granting the worst possible scenario for Uber.AWS instance – Severity = CriticalThe AWS instance controls the cloud infrastructure of Uber's applications. Depending on configuration, privileges, and architecture, the attacker can potentially shut down services, abuse computing resources, access sensitive user data, delete or ransom data, change user access, and many more things.VMware vSphere – Severity = CriticalVMware vSphere is a cloud computing virtualization platform. This is a critical platform as it interfaces with both cloud computing and on-premise servers which can give attack access to controlled on-premise servers as well as many administrative functions that would help an attacker move deeper into systems.SentinelOne – Severity = HighSentinelOne is an XDR (eXtended Detection and Response) platform. Simply put, this platform connects to your mission-critical systems and lets you know if there are security issues. Any attacker that can obtain privileged access to this system can obfuscate their activity and prolong their attacks. XDRs can bake in "backdoors" for Incident Response (IR) teams, such as allowing IR teams to "shell into" employee machines and potentially widening the attacker's access.Slack workspace – Severity = MediumThe internal messaging system of Slack can be used to great effect as an attacker to launch phishing campaigns. As the attacker has the instant trust of other users, they can send malicious links, try and get admins to elevate their privilege, and access sensitive information. As the attacker has made themselves known, this is likely a smaller threat.GSuite Admin – Severity = MediumGSuite is a tool used by many companies to manage their users, store data, and many other administrative tasks. With admin access, the attacker can create and delete accounts, but would also likely have access to employee data and other sensitive company data. HackerOne – Severity = MediumHackerOne is the platform used to pay and communicate with security researchers that find vulnerabilities within systems for rewards. Given the level of detail bounty hunters usually provide, anyone with access to the HackerOne tenant has detailed how-tos on how to exploit (likely unpatched) vulnerabilities in other areas of their IT systems. This means persistence is highly likely.Uber Hack 2022 - HackerOne message posted by the attackerAlthough we can't be sure at this point, the immediate disclosure of the breach by the attacker himself both to security researchers on the HackerOne platform and Uber personnel on their Slack workspace tend to indicate that he might not be financially motivated.From what we have seen, the attacker likely has access to many more systems and services belonging to Uber, but these are the ones we know about. Given the blast radius of this breach, we believe it will be extremely difficult and costly for Uber to sift through all their systems and access logs to ensure the attacker has not achieved persistence. Thanks for signing up to the Blog! Oops! Something went wrong while submitting the form. | Tech Giants |
Grand Street Commons, a project in Seattle supported by the Amazon Housing Equity FundAmazonAmazon said Thursday that it's giving minority-led organizations $23 million to build and preserve more than 568 affordable homes in Seattle, a step to ease the local housing crisis.Amazon Housing Equity Fund, which emphasizes aiding households that earn 30% to 80% of an area's median income, will support the investment. Launched in 2021, the fund has provided $1.2 billion for over 8,000 affordable homes across the Puget Sound region in Washington state, the Arlington, Virginia region and Nashville, Tennessee.Amazon is working with three housing partners -- the Mount Baker Housing Authority (MBHA), El Centro de la Raza, and Gardner Global -- and focuses on neighborhoods with large populations of people of color."We are committed to helping address the housing crisis in the Puget Sound region, which is disproportionally affecting communities of color," said Catherine Buell, director of the Amazon Housing Equity Fund. "In supporting these projects, we are focusing on equity by not only increasing access to affordable housing but also being intentional about whom we select as development partners."The Puget Sound region in Washington State hosts offices for tech firms like Microsoft, Google and Amazon. Microsoft, headquartered in Redmond, Washington, has also provided housing funds in the area.Seattleites have blamed Amazon for increasing the cost of home ownership. The housing price in Bellevue has soared, even surpassing Manhattan, after Amazon expanded its towers into the Seattle suburb, according to data from Redfin cited by Bloomberg."When our city's businesses and private partners step up, like Amazon is doing through this significant investment, we can accelerate progress addressing difficult challenges like housing affordability," Seattle Mayor Bruce Harrell said in a news release announcing the investment. | Tech Giants |
Reporters Without Borders (RSF) and a group of Russian independent media organizations have called on big tech companies to establish a working group to prevent Russia's online information shutdown.
Since the start of the war in Ukraine, Russia has blocked or forced the closure of nearly all independent media outlets and blocked major platforms — such as Facebook and Instagram — for violating rules on coverage of the country’s invasion.
“We do not want to live in a new Cold War era. There is an urgent need to reconnect Russian citizens with pluralistic information, and with the rest of the world,” the joint statement said.
“It is the essence of the internet to provide this function,” continues the statement addressed to the heads of global tech giants including Apple CEO Tim Cook, Twitter CEO Elon Musk and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg.
The journalists said they feared the Kremlin might block two platforms that are still working in Russia — Telegram and YouTube — “as soon as this autumn, making more than 140 million people hostages of the state’s propaganda apparatus.”
Telegram and Google-owned YouTube have been vital platforms for dissenting Russian journalists and bloggers amid the Kremlin's widening censorship.
“The major services you are in charge of have become the main actors of this mission: social networks, search engines, and app marketplaces are the gateways to an open informational world,” the statement said.
Russia has continued to see a precipitous decline in press freedom in the past year, according to RSF's annual rankings published last month.
Russia placed 164th out of the 180 countries surveyed in the ranking amid what RSF called a “final purge” of the media landscape enabled by the war in Ukraine. | Tech Giants |
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OTTAWA — Facebook and Instagram’s parent company says it will stop making news content available on its platforms if the proposed federal Online News Act passes in its current form.
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Meta spokesperson Lisa Laventure says the company made the decision because the act will require it to pay publishers for links or content it doesn’t post.
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Laventure says paying for these posts is neither sustainable nor workable for Meta.
Tech giants like Meta and Google have fought against the proposed law known as Bill C-18, which would require digital giants such as Google to negotiate deals that would compensate Canadian media companies for linking to or repurposing their content online.
Large Canadian media companies and the federal Liberal government argue the bill would level the playing field for news outlets that compete with tech giants for advertising dollars.
Facebook blocked access to news in Australia after a similar law was discussed in 2021, but quickly backtracked after the government made changes to an arbitration mechanism in the bill.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published March 11, 2023.
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‘Limited regard for democracy’: MPs admonish Google reps summoned over news-blocking
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Sen. Peter Harder: Passage of the Online News Act is urgent and essential for good journalism | Tech Giants |
Google continued to ramp up federal lobbying spending before DOJ filed second antitrust lawsuit
The Department of Justice filed a lawsuit against Google’s parent company Alphabet last Tuesday, alleging the tech giant abused its dominance in the digital advertising sector and violated federal antitrust law.
This is the second federal antitrust lawsuit the Justice Department has filed against Google since 2020. In the last two years, Google’s parent company ramped up annual lobbying expenditures by nearly 50% — spending more than $13 million on federal lobbying in 2022 alone.
Tuesday’s complaint alleges Google monopolizes digital advertising technology tools — informally known as “ad tech” — that act as matchmakers between billions of advertisers and website publishers each day through automated auctions. According to the court filing, Google maintains its dominance in the digital advertising space by systematically acquiring rivals, forcing publishers and advertisers to adopt its tools and manipulating the auction process to thwart competition.
“Competition in the ad tech space is broken,” the lawsuit alleges, since Google now controls nearly all the major technological tools involved in the advertisement bidding process.
This behavior, which has led the Justice Department to dub Google an “illegal monopoly,” has allegedly forced key and potential competitors to abandon the ad tech industry by artificially inflating entry barriers to the market. Google rakes in 35 cents of each advertising dollar that goes through its ad tech tools.
Joined by eight plaintiff states, the Justice Department is seeking “equitable relief on behalf of the American public” as well as triple the amount of damages to make up for what federal government agencies lost due to overpaying for online advertising.
Google was the top earner of digital advertising revenue in 2022, generating over $168 billion. The majority of that revenue came from search ads, which was also addressed in a previous lawsuit the department brought against Google in 2020.
During former President Donald Trump’s administration, the Justice Department and 11 states sued Google, alleging the company “unlawfully maintained monopolies in search and search advertising.”
The 2020 suit focused on Google’s practice of making deals that give “preferential treatment for its search engine on devices, web browsers, and other search access points, creating a continuous and self-reinforcing cycle of monopolization.” This preferential treatment allegedly includes pre-installation of Google products and making them the devices’ default search engine or undeletable. That case will go to trial later this year.
Late last year, the European Union upheld an antitrust ruling of its own, fining the company more than $4 billion for requiring phone manufacturers to pre-install Google Search and Chrome to obtain a license to its app store, Google Play. This marked the third time the EU has levied antitrust fines against the company.
Since the Justice Department’s 2020 antitrust lawsuit against Google, Alphabet has been spending more on lobbying each year. That year, it spent about $9 million. In 2021, Alphabet ramped up its lobbying by 34%, spending nearly $12 million.
Last year, the company spent over $13 million, the most Alphabet spent since 2018, when Alphabet spent a record $22 million on lobbying. Alphabet, alongside fellow tech giants Meta, parent company of Facebook, and Amazon.com, upped its lobbying efforts that year to contest scrutiny from lawmakers, who were considering new antitrust and privacy regulations.
In 2018, Alphabet’s lobbyists focused on legislation in the House and Senate that would have provided a federal framework for self-driving cars. Waymo, a subsidiary of Alphabet, began testing driverless cars on public roads that same year.
Google did not respond to a request for comment.
Subhed: Alphabet lobbyists take on antitrust bills in Washington
Antitrust bills have been a key focus of Alphabet’s lobbying campaign as the company ramped up its operations in D.C.
One issue that Alphabet lobbyists focused on was the Open App Markets Act; introduced in the U.S. Senate with a companion bill in the House, the bill would have prohibited companies like Google and Apple from forcing app developers to use their app store or payment system for purchases. Google publicly denounced the bill last year.
“This bill could destroy many consumer benefits that current payment systems provide,” Google Vice President of Government Affairs and Public Policy Mark Isakowitz told Reuters when the Senate Judiciary Committee voted 20-2 to advance the bill out of committee in February 2022. The act and its companion bill in the House were mentioned in 10 of Alphabet’s lobbying reports in 2022.
The bill failed to reach the Senate floor before the conclusion of the 117th U.S. Congress following a lobbying blitz by Alphabet and other tech giants including Apple, Amazon and Meta. The bill is yet to be reintroduced in the 118th Congress.
Alphabet’s lobbyists tackled three other failed pieces of antitrust legislation last year.
The American Innovation and Choice Online Act, which aimed to prevent Big Tech companies from prioritizing their own products over their rivals, was advanced by a Senate committee last January, but did not come to the floor for a vote before the end of the term. The Competition and Antitrust Law Enforcement Reform Act of 2021 shared the same fate.
The State Antitrust Enforcement Venue Act of 2021 unanimously passed in the Senate, but wasn’t voted on in the House before Congress adjourned.
Alphabet affiliates also spend millions of dollars each election in campaign contributions, largely to Democratic candidates. During the 2020 election cycle, PACs and individuals from Alphabet donated over $28 million in political contributions, with President Joe Biden’s campaign, the Democratic National Committee and Democratic super PAC Senate Majority PAC, making up the top three recipients. About half as much was spent in the 2022 midterm election, with the DNC and Senate Majority PAC topping the list again.
Despite spending big on political influence, Alphabet announced on Jan. 20 that the company would be laying off 12,000 employees — about 6% of its workforce — making it one of many tech companies that recently announced mass job cuts. In his memo to staff, CEO Sundar Pichai said the cuts were company-wide and reflect the outcome of a “rigorous review” of the company’s staff and priorities.
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Will Android and Apple ever play nice? Photo: Florence Ion / GizmodoThis week, alongside a massive unveiling of brand new foldable devices and accessories from Samsung, Google put out its own ad campaign in an attempt to rally the troops against Apple’s tyrannical reign on messaging. Google’s #getthemessage campaign hopes to stoke the flames of millions of bothered Android fans so that Apple might be encouraged to support RCS messaging, the cross-platform standard recently adopted by Google Messages.OffEnglishThe Get The Message website reads like a Bible class handout from my old Christian school. It has all the talking points Google wants me to use to remind people that it’s Apple’s fault that I, as an Android user, don’t have access to the full resolution and capabilities afforded by Apple Messages. Google brings up that, sometimes, group messages get broken because they include a mixture of Apple and Android-using folks, often leading to “social frustration.” It even links to past coverage pointing to evidence that children and teens dread carrying around Android devices for fear of being denoted an uncool Green Bubble. I immediately knew what Google was going for when I saw the ad campaign go live. I remember covering Google Senior Vice President Hiroshi Lockheimer’s first tweet storm about the inefficacies of Apple’s proprietary messaging standard. And then the second time, months after when he called on Apple to make it easier on everyone. But the latest #getthemessage campaign seems a little all over the place. I’m struggling to understand precisely the demographic that is supposed to go after Apple to make things play nice. Is it Android olds like me who are crotchety and have complained about the lack of parity in messaging since the early days on the platform? Or is it Gen Z-ers on TikTok who have no problem taking in the weirdest Riverdale storylines and running with whatever horror shitshow the CW is allowing to show over there? (I hear it’s very good.) Why is Madelaine Petsch, who plays Cheryl on Riverdale, part of this ad campaign? Is she supposed to inspire the youngins to help drive the point home? Furthermore, why is Vanessa Hudgens part of this ad campaign, when her last relevant IMDB entry is The Princess Switch, a Netflix-exclusive Christmas movie with nothing on my Lifetime favorites? I have absolutely no emotional connection to these people as an Android user. Not to mention, you can tell they’re reading off a script from their screens. I don’t believe these famous-ish people know what my life is like wielding an Android phone and hanging out in Apple land. What’s the problem with iMessage?There’s indeed fragmentation in text messaging among the major mobile platforms. Apple Messages app runs on the iMessage service to send texts between iPhones and other iOS-enabled devices. It supports end-to-end encryption, better support for group chats, and high-resolution images and videos. But when an Apple user texts an Android device with the default texting application, the message is sent out as an old-school SMS or MMS message, often deprecating the experience of the text on the Android user’s side.Google adopted RCS, or Rich Communication Services, to try to fix this dichotomy, and it’s already in use in other markets. RCS enables encrypted messaging, high-quality media sharing, and other modern features like bigger character limits and read receipts. If you have access to RCS on Android Messages and are chatting with another Android user, you already have access to some of these features. That’s what life could be like with your iPhone-using pal. Google has attempted to bridge the gap between iOS and Android messengers despite the repeated pleas for Apple to do the work. Emoji reactions, which used to be limited to iPhone users, became available earlier this year after the company added support for them on Android. The fragmentation will persist unless Apple wants to get on board with RCS. But Apple is committed to keeping its walled garden coifed and gated up, because it helps sell its hardware, where it makes the bulk of its cash. The iOS 16 Beta already has iPhone-only abilities to edit and delete delivered iMessages. That sort of feature is possible precisely because of the tightly-knit nature of the iOS platform. Anyway, I wouldn’t be surprised if this campaign fizzles out because Android users have already moved on. Meta’s Messenger and WhatsApp have a stronger hold on the market, and many other messaging apps work with your phone number. Even I’ve moved on from Android Messages and find most of my daily correspondence happening exclusively inside Instagram DMs. | Tech Giants |
Earlier this week, the European Commission announced the first list of gatekeeper companies and services for the European Union (EU). That’s how we know Apple doesn’t have to open iMessage to RCS anytime soon. And iOS 17 will bring sideloading to iPhone, at least in Europe. The EU wants its Digital Markets Act (DMA) law to improve services from tech giants in the region, and reduce the power of big tech companies while protecting customers. But those customers are about to be confused.
While iMessage isn’t a gatekeeper service, per the DMA rules, Meta’s WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger chat apps are. That means Meta has six months to open up its popular chat apps to rival platforms, and I don’t expect that process to be user-friendly or fun.
When discussing the EU’s influence on iMessage and the potential RCS support, I explained that I don’t suffer from a blue vs. green bubble problem. We have iPhones and Androids in my family and my group of friends, yet we’ve never had any issues communicating via chat apps.
If anything, a regulator like the EU forcing Apple to support RCS might bring only usability issues. And I don’t want to be the designated tech guy who has to fix unforeseen software issues that many of my family members are bound to face.
WhatsApp and Facebook Messengers are gatekeepers
The same argument applies to WhatsApp and Messenger. These two big chat apps are gatekeepers now. Meta has six months to make them work with rival platforms, which is probably something Meta doesn’t want to do. And to be frank, interoperability is a feature I don’t want from these apps.
Meta might have to find ways to add WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger support to third-party chat apps. Think iMessage, RCS, Signal, and who knows what else. This can’t be easy, especially for WhatsApp, which is end-to-end encrypted. WhatsApp is one of the apps I use most to talk to people, including iPhone owners.
But the DMA is clear, interoperability of messenger apps is a must once these services make the list:
The DMA includes an interoperability obligation for gatekeepers providing messenger services concerning basic functionalities.
The good news is that Meta only has to make its chat apps work with third-party apps if those third-party apps require it. So, I wouldn’t expect Apple to ask Meta to have WhatsApp support iMessage chats. But what if Google decides it wants Meta’s chat apps to support RCS?
How interoperability should work
If third-party instant messaging app vendors decide to request interoperability support from Meta, this is what would follow:
Some basic functionalities have to be made available for interoperability within six months from the designation of the gatekeeper, (e.g. text messages between two individual users), more complex ones will be introduced gradually and have to be made available after two years (e.g. group text messages) or four years (e.g. audio and video calls between two individual users or groups of end users) from the moment of designation.
This calendar would apply to RCS support in iMessage if and when Apple’s chat app becomes a gatekeeper. And if the service stops being a gatekeeper after a while, it must mean it can throw away those interoperability features.
At the very best, a competing WhatsApp service would get support for simple two-way chats within six months. That’s if Meta can even find a way to incorporate it without breaking encryption. Let’s remember that Meta did make Messenger and Instagram chats work together, but it did not combine them with WhatsApp. Again, the latter is end-to-end encrypted.
Thankfully, the DMA does protect strong encryption, so Meta has a good way out for WhatsApp:
The DMA provisions on the interoperability obligation also ensure that the levels of service integrity, security and encryption offered by the gatekeeper shall and will not be reduced.
But wait, it gets worse.
In the end, it’s up to the user
It’s not just WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger rivals that get to choose whether to ask for interoperability. It’s also customers who get to choose:
It is important to stress that non-gatekeeper service providers of messenger services are not obliged to implement interoperability, meaning they are free to choose either to benefit from such interoperability obligation that falls upon the gatekeeper, or to keep their service separate from the gatekeeper.
In addition, end users will equally have the choice to use or refuse such an option, where their provider has decided to interoperate with a gatekeeper.
I know I won’t want to take advantage of WhatsApp or Facebook Messenger interoperability once Meta rolls out any kind of support for third-party chat apps.
In other words, complying with the DMA sounds like a nightmare for gatekeepers, especially for chat app developers. As for Meta, it’ll have to spend money on potentially making WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger work with other chat apps in Europe for end users who probably don’t really care about interoperability in the first place. | Tech Giants |
Canada Announces New Work Permit For 10,000 H-1B Visa Holders From U.S.
Technology companies depend on the visa to hire tens of thousands of employees each year from countries like India and China.
Canada has announced a new open work-permit stream to allow 10,000 H-1B visa holders in the U.S. to come and work in the country, a move that could benefit thousands of Indian tech professionals.
Canada is hoping to become a world leader in a variety of emerging technologies and it hopes to attract professionals affected by massive layoffs by U.S. tech giants.
The H-1B visa is a non-immigrant visa that allows U.S. companies to employ foreign workers in specialty occupations that require theoretical or technical expertise.
Technology companies depend on it to hire tens of thousands of employees each year from countries like India and China.
By July 16, the Canadian government will create an open work-permit stream to allow 10,000 American H-1B visa holders to come and work in Canada, Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Minister Sean Fraser said on Tuesday.
In its news release, the ministry said the programme will also provide for study or work permits for their family members.
“We’re enthusiastic about the ambitious goals we have set in immigration because they aren’t just about numbers—they are strategic. With Canada’s first-ever immigration Tech Talent Strategy, we’re targeting newcomers that can help enshrine Canada as a world leader in a variety of emerging technologies," Fraser said.
Approved applicants for the new programme will receive an open work permit of up to three years in duration, which means they will be able to work for almost any employer anywhere in Canada. Their spouses and dependants will also be eligible to apply for a temporary resident visa, with a work or study permit, as needed, the release said.
Tech companies went on a hiring binge during the pandemic but have since started laying people off in large numbers. That's left a lot of H-1B visa holders scrambling to find new jobs before they're forced to leave the U.S., the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation reported.
Thousands of highly skilled foreign-born workers, including Indians, in the US, have lost their jobs due to the series of recent layoffs at companies like Google, Microsoft and Amazon. According to U.S. media reports, nearly 200,000 IT workers have been laid off since November last year.
Industry insiders say that between 30 to 40% of them are Indian IT professionals, a significant number of whom are on H-1B and L1 visas.
Every year, the U.S. government issues 65,000 H-1B visas. The visas last for three years and can be renewed for another three years.
Of the H-1B petitions approved in FY 2022, 72.6% were for beneficiaries whose country of birth was India, according to the US Citizenship and Immigration Services.
In the previous fiscal year, about 74.1% of Indians received H-1B visas of the total approved in FY 2021. | Tech Giants |
Most of 2023 has been defined by the big tech stocks driving bullish sentiment and overcoming 2022’s bear market. That said, since about halfway through the summer, the bull market has been on pause with the prospect of interest rates remaining high for longer than expected, among other macro factors, putting a dampener on proceedings.
Still, going by the past week’s performance, there are signs the bulls’ charge is about to resume in earnest. In fact, with Q3 earnings season about to commence, Goldman Sachs’ portfolio strategist Cormac Conners points out that going by past events, the coming period might be a bountiful one, especially for the tech leaders.
“History suggests that the upcoming 3Q results may catalyze a momentum reversal in the largest tech stocks,” Conners recently wrote. “Since 4Q16, the mega caps in aggregate have beaten consensus sales growth expectations 81% of the time and have outperformed in two-thirds of earnings seasons, typically by 3pp.”
With this in mind, we decided to get the lowdown on two mega-cap tech names the Goldman analysts believe are primed to use the coming earnings season as a catalyst for further gains. Moreover, according to the TipRanks database, both are currently rated as Strong Buys by the analyst consensus. Here are the details.
Nvidia Corporation (NVDA)
We’ll start with Nvidia, a major player in the semiconductor chip industry. The company has found a solid base of support in strong customer demand for its high-end GPU chips, which have become essential to the rapid growth of AI technology.
The explosive growth of AI since the end of last year has clearly been good for Nvidia. Since 2020, the company has been an important supplier of GPU chips for OpenAI, whose ChatGPT sparked off the current AI revolution. OpenAI has already indicated that it will need some 10,000 chips heading into next year, just to maintain ChatGPT’s performance capabilities. Nvidia’s exposure to this, and to other facets of AI, has fueled a surge in its top and bottom lines over the past several quarters, and Nvidia has become one of just 5 publicly traded companies valued at more than $1 trillion.
A quick look back at Nvidia’s last earnings report will show the magnitude of the company’s recent growth. Nvidia reported a company record of $13.5 billion in quarterly revenue for fiscal 2Q24, its last release. This was up 101% year-over-year, and beat the forecast by over $2.4 billion. The bottom line of $2.70 per adj. share, was 61 cents per share ahead of the estimates – and was up a whopping 429% compared to the prior year quarter.
Looking ahead, the Street expects further gains when Nvidia reports its fiscal Q3 results next month. The outlook for revenue is $15.87 billion, and for non-GAAP EPS is $3.35.
For Goldman’s Toshiya Hari, the near- to mid-term looks good for the company. Nvidia should benefit, in his view, from continued strong customer demand, fueled by data center and AI applications. The 5-star analyst writes, “Looking ahead, we see the combination of a strong/broadening demand profile in Data Center and an improving supply backdrop supporting sustained revenue growth through CY2024. Importantly, although we recognize emerging competition from the large cloud service providers (i.e. captive/internal solutions) as well as other merchant semiconductor suppliers, we expect Nvidia to maintain its status as the accelerated computing industry standard for the foreseeable future given its competitive moat and the urgency with which customers are developing/deploying increasingly complex AI models.”
This stock is off the peak value it hit at the end of August, but it is still up by 219% year-to-date and Hari thinks there are still solid gains ahead to look forward to. He gives NVDA shares a Buy rating, with a $605 price target to imply 32% upside potential for the next 12 months. (To watch Hari’s track record, click here)
The tech giants never lack for Wall Street attention, and Nvidia has 39 recent analyst reviews on record – with a lopsided 38 to 1 breakdown favoring Buys over Holds, for a Strong Buy consensus rating. The shares have a trading price of $457.62, and their $647.04 average price target is more bullish than Hari’s, suggesting a 41% gain for the year ahead. (See NVDA stock forecast)
Amazon (AMZN)
Next up is Amazon, one of the world’s instantly recognizable brand names. Amazon boasts a proven record as a ‘tech survivor,’ having gotten its start in the late ‘90s – and then surviving the dot.com bubble that winnowed the early field of tech companies. Today, Amazon leads the global e-commerce market, and with its $1.3 trillion market cap is another of the 5 largest firms in the public stock markets. This impressive edifice stands on the company’s online retail operations, which last year moved approximately $690 billion in gross merchandise volume.
While online retail gets the headlines, Amazon has its hands in multiple pots. The company is constantly developing new products to take advantage of newly opened niches – look at the way Amazon Web Services quickly became a major player in cloud computing. Amazon also has multiple AI-based products under development, with prominent projects including a chatbot, an image building platform, and a software code development tool. The company is also integrating AI into the existing AWS, which in the last reported quarter, 2Q23, generated over $22 billion in revenue.
Amazon shares have retreated some ~12% from their September peak although the stock is still up 49% for the year-to-date, an overall gain based on solid performance.
We saw those performance metrics in the company’s 2Q23 results. Amazon’s top line came to $134.4 billion, beating the forecast by $3 billion and growing 11% y/y. We’ve already noted the y/y growth in AWS, which helped to power the overall revenue total; the company’s North American retail was also up year-over-year, by 11%, to reach $82.5 billion. Amazon’s Q2 EPS figure of 65 cents was 31 cents better than expected – but that figure benefited from a $200 million gain due to non-operating expenses from the company’s equity holdings in Rivian Automotive, where the comparable figure in the previous year quarter was a $3.9 billion loss.
When we look towards Amazon’s upcoming Q3 results, we see that Wall Street is expecting an EPS of 58 cents, supported by revenues of $141.5 billion.
5-star analyst Eric Sheridan covers this stock for Goldman, and in his view, the company’s strong AWS performance will remain in the driver’s seat, while Amazon as a whole does well on the long term: “We remain convinced that AWS remains on track to return to a more normalized growth/margin structure in 2024 and that the segment is well positioned (contrary to current investor perception) against the rising computing shifts towards AI. Looking over a multi-year timeframe, we reiterate our view that Amazon will compound a mix of solid revenue trajectory with expanding margins as they deliver yield/returns on multiple year investment cycles.”
Sheridan’s stance supports his Buy rating, and his $180 price target implies a strong 41% upside potential on the one-year horizon. (To watch Sheridan’s track record, click here)
Overall, Amazon has picked up 41 recent analyst reviews, and these include 40 Buys against a single Hold to give the stock a Strong Buy consensus rating. AMZN boasts an average price target of $176.02, suggesting an increase of 37.5% from the current $127.96 share price. (See Amazon stock forecast)
To find good ideas for stocks trading at attractive valuations, visit TipRanks’ Best Stocks to Buy, a newly launched tool that unites all of TipRanks’ equity insights.
Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this article are solely those of the featured analysts. The content is intended to be used for informational purposes only. It is very important to do your own analysis before making any investment. | Tech Giants |
Apple and Google are hoping with their powers combined they can truly hinder just how effective stalking with Bluetooth trackers has become. The two tech giants have agreed on a set of standards for AirTag-like products that would enable automatic alerts on both iOS and Android devices, though the proposed device specs likely won’t eliminate the threat of device-enabled stalking altogether.
On Tuesday, the companies announced they were proposing industry-wide specifications to curtail misuse of Bluetooth trackers. Essentially, these proposed universal settings would make Bluetooth devices detectable by both Apple iOS devices as well as Google Android. Since their release in 2021, Apple has updated its AirTag software to chirp when it’s tracking an item through the Find My app. iPhones are also supposed to notify users if it detects an unknown AirTag on their person. Up until now, Apple has forced Android users to download a separate app that will alert users when an unknown AirTag device is detected near them.
The companies’ release mentioned that other tracker makers including Samsung, Tile, Chipolo, eufy Security, and Pebblebee “have expressed support” for the draft standards, though each would have to follow through on building these capabilities into any new tracker models. According to oft-cited Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo, Apple sold close to 55 million AirTag units by the middle of 2022. Tile, the second biggest tracker maker under Apple, told Wirecutter earlier this year the company has sold more than 50 million trackers so far, though some will have inevitably failed or run out of juice in that time.
Though some of the most popular trackers have beeping capability, there are millions of old trackers currently in use that can’t receive any hardware updates, and some will likely never receive any new software upgrades.
Beyond those big few tracking manufacturers, there are a few other, smaller companies also engaged in making AirTag-like trackers. For example, there’s Nutale which sells small, cheap Bluetooth trackers. According to Apple, the standards development organization Internet Engineering Task Force has agreed to enforce these standards. That group has been responsible for proposing hypertext protocol standards (know that HTTP in front of web addresses?) among other major functions of the internet. Still, it’s not exactly government regulation, and there’s nothing forcing a company from developing a device that doesn’t apply to those standards.
According to the draft specifications released by the tech giants, any device that has a location-enabled state needs to have a low-energy Bluetooth signal recognizable by both iOS and Android devices. This constant signal would hide the device’s identity, but allow for “non-owner unencrypted connections to the accessory.”
In addition, devices need to transition from a “near-owner” mode to a “separated” mode if the device is no longer near an owner’s device after 30 minutes. This mode will also allow users to look up the serial number of a device, which could be used by police to find stalkers.
The draft specs mention that the devices should be able to play a sound around a user when their device detects an unknown tracker. However, users have found simple ways to disable the speakers on AirTags, eliminating one of the major ways Apple tries to alert users of unwanted devices.
Some anti-stalking advocates have praised the move. In Apple’s release Erica Olsen, the senior director of the advocacy group National Network to End Domestic violence, called the standards “a significant step forward.” Still, the Center said in a tweet the companies still need to implement and adopt these protocols.
Some Bluetooth tracker companies already have their stated means of cracking down on tracking, such as Tile’s promise to fine convicted stalkers $1 million. That is, if those stalkers use Tile’s own feature that makes their trackers undetectable to apps and devices that scan for them. This flies directly in the face of Apple and Google’s proposed standards, which would require all devices to include at least one open Bluetooth connection detectable by outside apps and devices.
Gizmodo reached out to Tile for comment, but we did not immediately hear back.
Companies like Apple and Tile have already been through it with allegations of allowing a new form of cyber-enhanced stalking. At the same time, Apple has routinely said that its trackers are for other, more mundane purposes. In the release, Apple’s vice president of Sensing and Connectivity Ron Huang said the Cupertino company simply wants to “give users the peace of mind knowing where to find their most important items.”
Companies are not the only ones pushing AirTags for roles they weren’t necessarily meant for. The New York City Police Department announced it was giving out hundreds of AirTags explicitly for tracking users’ stolen vehicles. Most police departments try to warn users about how bad actors could use trackers like AirTags to stalk people, but of course, those police departments don’t have New York’s first “mayor of swagger” Eric Adams, who’s routinely obsessed with obsolete and questionable technological solutions, pulling the strings. Adams even joked that he uses an AirTag to keep track of his own child.
These standards will take time and quite a lot of cooperation to see done, and done effectively. While it’s a good first step, there’s still the threat of Bluetooth trackers being used nefariously. Sure, there’s tons of examples of regular users finding a use for trackers in creative ways, but when reports show that AirTags have been used to track murder victims, there’s a growing impetus for Apple to make these changes. | Tech Giants |
Just a few years ago, a crackdown in the US to curb the might of America's tech giants seemed at hand.
Bosses from Apple, Amazon, Google and Facebook had been hauled before Congress and President Joe Biden was putting in place a slew of officials known for their tough-on-tech views.
But efforts by Congress to write new rules tackling issues such as privacy and disinformation are all but dead, and in the courts tech firms have won a series of high-profile victories in cases challenging their responsibility for content on their platforms and their right to buy up other firms.
On Tuesday, the next legal battle will begin - a high-stakes trial that pits the government against Google.
The company is accused of unfairly cementing its position as the world's go-to search engine by paying billions of dollars to phone-makers like Apple and web browsers like Mozilla to be installed as the default option.
Prosecutors contend the deals gave Google - which handles some 90% of global search queries - such a data advantage that it blocked rivals from emerging and violated US competition laws.
The suit, filed in the waning days of the Trump administration in 2020, is seen as a landmark case - the most serious challenge to the way the tech industry operates in decades and a key test of whether the US government can prevail in its fight to rein in the industry.
Sundar Pichai, chief executive of Google's parent company, Alphabet, is expected to testify over the 10-week trial, as are executives from Apple.
"It's the anti-trust monopolisation trial of a generation," says Bill Baer, visiting fellow at the Brookings Institution and a former government attorney working on competition issues, known as anti-trust in the US.
Some analysts say the government has a strong case,
They noted similarities with the 1998 suit against Microsoft, which the courts later found maintained its monopoly over operating systems through illegal, anti-competitive tactics, like pre-installing Internet Explorer.
If the government wins this case, it could mean Google is no longer automatically installed as a search engine - and perhaps other, more significant changes.
Analysts say that could open up the opportunity for rivals, like Microsoft's Bing or ChatGPT to gain users - and data - a critical change would leave consumers with more viable choices.
But a government victory is no sure thing.
Google has maintained that it provides a superior product - and nothing but its stronger offering has prevented rivals from working out their own agreements.
Matt Schruers, president of the tech lobby the Computer & Communications Industry Association, says Google can persuasively liken its deals to negotiations between food-makers and supermarkets over where products are placed in stores, agreements that have been examined by US courts and deemed legal.
Mr Schruers says he expects it will also be difficult for the government to prove that consumers have been hurt - the traditional standard by which illegal monopoly power has been judged in the US.
"US anti-trust law does not protect competitors from their competition. It protects the competitive process in order to protect consumers," he says. "Here it seems like the government is picking winners and losers... and courts have traditionally rejected that view."
In other recent US court tangles with tech firms, such as the effort to block Microsoft's acquisition of videogame-maker Activision Blizzard, the government has gone down in defeat.
That has led to blistering criticism from some quarters, including some Republicans who have accused the Biden administration of squandering money on cases it is sure to lose.
"Are you losing on purpose?" Republican Congressman Kevin Kiley asked the head of the Federal Trade Commission, which handled the Microsoft-Activision case at a hearing in July. Fellow Republican Jim Jordan called the agency's approach "intimidation followed by inaction".
FTC chair Lina Khan and Jonathan Kanter, who heads anti-trust for the Department of Justice, which is handling the Google case, have defended their records, pointing in part to wins in other industries.
But they have also acknowledged that a tougher competition approach will mean losses in some cases.
Rebecca Haw Allensworth, a law professor at Vanderbilt University, says she thinks regulators can claim progress even in cases they have lost.
"I think it's too early to say that they're losing the fight," she says. "They're winning some battles and losing some battles but the war is not over."
Later this month, the FTC is widely expected to file a lawsuit against Amazon. Cases concerning Google's ad business and Facebook's purchase of Instagram are also on deck in the coming months. Google recently settled a lawsuit brought by US states over its app store.
Regardless of how this wave of lawsuits is resolved, the tech giants are being slowed by such battles, says Viktor Mayer-Schönberger, professor of internet governance at Oxford University.
But he warns that the US is fighting "the last war" as developments in artificial intelligence put the big platforms on the back foot. Nor does he see signs that such suits will address questions - like control over data - that are likely to play big roles determining the major players of tomorrow.
"It doesn't mean we shouldn't do it," he says, referring to anti-monopoly cases. "[But] we should not hope that this will solve the problems of platform power."
Anti-monopoly campaigner Stacy Mitchell, co-executive director of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, says courts have been slow to change, despite mounting public concern about big business and criticism of how they have judged competition disputes. But she sees the tide turning.
"I've been studying anti-trust issues for more than 15 years and I can't overstate how much things have changed," she says.
"I actually think we're going to win this," she says. But she admits: "I can't tell you how long it's going to take." | Tech Giants |
We can all agree that leaving the house is a marvelous thing. But what if your city stroll was enhanced by encounters with historical figures who walked those streets when they were cobblestoned? Or if it featured sightings of extinct or even imaginary species? John Hanke not only wants to see things like that happen, he has made it happen by sending millions of people on outdoor quests to capture imaginary cartoon characters.As the CEO and founder of Niantic Labs, Hanke launched Pokémon Go in 2016, and he remains obsessed with a vision of a physical world enhanced by digital objects, the concept now called augmented reality. He has been pursuing this vision since at least 2010, when he founded Niantic as an internal startup at Google, then spun it out and launched Go. The game, in which players wander the streets with phones held to their faces trying to capture Weedles, Squirtles, and Nidorinas, was both a cultural phenomenon and a financial success, reaping over a billion dollars in revenue. Like Wendy sewing Peter Pan’s shadow to his foot, Hanke has been gradually binding the ephemeral to the real, providing a substrate for the merger of pixels and atoms that he sees as the future.But now people are babbling and swooning about this thing called a … metaverse. Companies like Facebook—well, mainly Facebook—are pitching a more immersive vision where people don hardware rigs that block out their senses and replace the input with digital artifacts, essentially discarding reality for alternate worlds created by the lords of Silicon Valley. “Our overarching goal … is to help bring the metaverse to life,” Mark Zuckerberg told his workforce in June.Hanke hates this idea. He’s read all the science fiction books and seen all the films that first imagined the metaverse—all great fun, and all wrong. He believes that his vision, unlike virtual reality, will make the real world better without encouraging people to totally check out of it. This past summer, he felt compelled to explain why in a self-described manifesto whose title says it all: “The Metaverse Is a Dystopian Nightmare. Let’s Build a Better Reality.” (Facebook’s response: Change its name to Meta so it could focus on constructing Hanke’s nightmare.)Niantic is hard at work too. It has developed Lightship, a software platform for augmented reality apps like Pokémon Go, for both internal projects and the creations of others. Early developers include Historic Royal Palaces, Coachella, and Led Zeppelin. The next goal is to map the entire physical world to better integrate it with digital objects. “Think of it as kind of a GPS but without the satellites and with a higher degree of accuracy,” wrote Hanke. (The secret: Players of Pokémon Go and other Niantic apps can scan real-world “wayspots” with their phones during gameplay.) Those tuned to the proper “reality channel” will experience their location’s alter ego, which may blast them to the past, rocket them to a possible future, or anything in between.All of this will eventually happen just centimeters from your retina. This fall, Niantic also announced the finalization of its open source blueprint, cocreated with the chip giant Qualcomm, for augmented reality glasses that’ll let people mingle what they see naturally with a kaleidoscope of make-believe things. This puts it in competition with Facebook, Snap, Apple, Microsoft, and other firms striving to put their realities on eyeglass frames.For better or for verse—whether it’s Hanke’s vision or Zuckerberg’s—what we see in the future is going to be more than meets the eye.Hanke and I spoke twice about augmented reality, and why the metaverse is destined to suck. Respecting Covid-19, we conducted both interviews in the mini-metaverse of Zoom. During the first, he showed his zeal for perambulation, walking the streets of Truckee, California. As we chatted he held his phone to his face as if searching for a Pikachu. The second was a Zoom session where he remained static, though at one point he ducked down to pat an amazingly lifelike dog. It might have even been his real dog.WIRED: Why do you call the metaverse dystopian?John Hanke: It takes us away from what fundamentally makes us happy as human beings. We’re biologically evolved to be present in our bodies and to be out in the world. The tech world that we’ve been living in, as exacerbated by Covid, is not healthy. We’ve picked up bad habits—kids spending all day playing Roblox or whatever. And we’re extrapolating that, saying, “Hey, this is great. Let’s do this times 10.” That scares the daylights out of me.Whereas you want people to actually experience daylight, albeit with a phone in their hands. I really got into this idea of using digital tech to reinvigorate the idea of a public square, to bring people off the couch and out into an environment they can enjoy. There’s a lot of research that supports the positive psychological impact of walking through a park, walking through a forest—just walking. But now we live in a world where we have all this anxiety, amplified by Covid. There’s a lot of unhappiness. There’s a lot of anger. Some of it comes from not doing what our bodies want us to do—to be active and mobile. In our early experiments, we got a lot of feedback from people who were kind of couch potatoes that the game was causing them to walk more. They were saying, “Wow, this is amazing, I feel so much better. I’m physically better, but mentally I’m way more better. I broke out of my depression or met new people in the community.” We said, “Wow, like, this is good we can do in the world.”According to your manifesto, your mission is also to warn about the hype and danger of the full-on metaverse, which has gone from a science fiction concoction to the latest tech buzzword. We’re at a fork in the road. The future that I am describing is the one that’s going to win. It’s one where computing stays with us, disappearing into the background and supporting what we’re doing. It is ubiquitous computing, which goes back to the early work at Xerox PARC. I feel like that vision of the future has gotten somehow lost temporarily as people have become fascinated with these online 3D worlds.Remind us what ubiquitous computing is? It’s where computing becomes smaller and less obvious and more embedded on your person or in the environment, so that it’s helping you without you feeling it’s intermediating your experience.What do you make of Facebook Horizon Workrooms, the company’s virtual reality version of Zoom? It seems like the opposite of your vision, where people interact via avatars in a totally digital environment. Immersion in a 3D world might be an entertainment experience, in the same way that you would maybe watch a movie with all the bells and whistles on your home theater system. But that’s not where you’ll spend the majority of your life. I don’t need to make a conference room look like a cartoon Tahiti. That doesn’t make it better for me.In some cases, you want to make artificial objects persistent, bound to geographic locations available to everyone on your system who’s tuned to a given channel. I live near Astor Place in New York City, so if I had that system, I might be able to see a reenactment of the “Shakespeare Riot” that took place there in the 1800s. And someone I’m walking with, or maybe a whole crowd of people, would be looking at that same historical reenactment, even though, if we took the glasses off, it would be the same old street corner. Is that what you’re talking about? Yeah, exactly. That’s a great poetic example. A less poetic one would be King Kong climbing up the Empire State Building, or the Ghostbusters vortex on top of that apartment building on Central Park West. You would be able to create that persistent reality. Everybody will be able to see it, and it’s kind of locked in place. With a reality channel, when you use all these tools, you can create with it too.AR by Eceertrey; Portrait by Gabriela HasbunIn your essay, you talk about how you might be walking around and the buildings might take on pastel hues and the people you see would be in costumes. To me that’s a weird thing and maybe even a scary thing. That doesn’t necessarily put you in touch with your world—it distorts the world. If I asked you to imagine a Greek city, what do you imagine?I’m thinking of buildings like the Parthenon. Like Greece in my history book. All those buildings were painted with crazy, psychedelically bright colors—yellows, greens, and reds. We think of them now as these whitewashed buildings. We’ve always adorned our environment, our architecture, with embellishments. These reality channels can make the world more interesting in certain ways, just using bits instead of atoms. Instead of paint, it’s digital paint. It can be very localized, or maybe it’s something that is mapped across the entire world.So kids doing a high school prom wouldn’t need to decorate the gym. They could give a theme that people would see if they wore the glasses, right? Sure, absolutely.It’s scary to imagine if an augmented layer of reality gets hacked. People can mess with your vision. I guess that can happen with anything. But I’m worried more about my smart home devices like my Nest getting hacked than I am about someone hacking what I’m wearing outside.It seems to me that this is still tweaking what our senses provide us in a way that denies our reality. That seems unhealthy in the same way as the metaverse you’re complaining about. Imagine a kid who loves Harry Potter—Niantic has licensed the Potter universe. You might make a kid’s whole neighborhood into the Hogwarts world, and they would never turn it off. Parents always say to kids, “You’re living in a dream world.” Well, this technology would literally let them live in a dream world. I don’t know, when you were a kid, didn’t you ever fantasize that there was more to the world than what you were actually seeing?That’s right. But I had to have my imagination work at it. When you go to Disneyland, people re-create that stuff …But then you leave Disneyland. Why spend billions on concrete when you can create it digitally? OK, there’s a range. If you’re talking about dialing the reality channel all the way up, from translucent to opaque, where you are replacing everything in the world with something synthetic, then I’d agree with you. But I’m talking about embellishing things selectively, like planting flowers in boxes along the street. That could make the world more interesting in small doses. I don’t think that’s bad. If it gets your kid to want to go for a walk in the park with you instead of playing computer games, that’s a trade I’ll take. Because you’ll see the redwoods, and you’ll breathe fresh air, and he’ll get the exercise. And if he finds a Pokémon hiding behind a fern, OK, I’m good with that.But it’s more than Pokémon. You’re pitching a persistent technology that’s used for all sorts of nongaming activities. Yes, that’s what we mean by “the real metaverse”—the common substrate for all of these transformations. Many of those would be for entertainment—giant robots, Pac-Man, Pokémon. But it could be purely utilitarian. It could be oriented toward shopping or any number of practical applications. What’s different from the VR metaverse is that with ours you have this common structure that is the real world. The bits get tied to the atoms. And so you have these things that add information to the place that you’re in or give you useful functionality. It could put a virtual button hanging in the air that lets you buy a bus ticket or check in for your flight, or arrows painted on the sidewalk that lead you to the subway, or information about the product that you’re looking at, telling you whether it was ethically sourced. That’s the potential that matters. AR is the place where the real metaverse is going to happen.More Great WIRED Stories📩 The latest on tech, science, and more: Get our newsletters!Is Becky Chambers the ultimate hope for science fiction?Growing crops under solar panels? There's a bright ideaThese steaming-hot gifts are perfect for coffee loversHow Dune's VFX team made sandworms from scratchHow to fix Facebook, according to Facebook employees👁️ Explore AI like never before with our new database🎧 Things not sounding right? Check out our favorite wireless headphones, soundbars, and Bluetooth speakers | Tech Giants |
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The Federal Trade Commission sued Meta in federal court Wednesday in an attempt to block the company’s acquisition of virtual reality app creator Within, the latest effort by the FTC to restrict the tech giant’s growing influence by targeting its practice of buying up competitors. A sign with Meta's name and logo is displayed in front of Facebook headquarters on October 28, 2021 ... [+] in Menlo Park, California. Getty Images Key Facts The FTC filed a complaint in federal court in California asking for an injunction that would block Meta from completing its acquisition of Within, a virtual reality company best known for its fitness app Supernatural. Meta and Within announced they were entering into a $400 million acquisition deal in October, as Meta seeks to expand its virtual reality offerings and concentrate on the “metaverse” beyond its suite of apps like Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp. The FTC argued Meta would have a monopoly in the market for VR fitness apps if it’s allowed to buy Within, which could have “multiple harmful outcomes, including less innovation, lower quality, higher prices, less incentive to attract and keep employees, and less consumer choice.” Meta and CEO Mark Zuckerberg are trying to control the entire VR ecosystem and the company is buying up competitors rather than trying to compete with them, the FTC alleges, saying if Meta acquires Within, the company will “no longer have any incentive” to improve its products, since it won’t have any rivals to compete with “on the merits.” That violates federal antitrust laws by eliminating the need to compete in the marketplace, the FTC argued. Meta and Within Unlimited have not yet responded to requests for comment. What To Watch For
Meta’s second quarter earnings will be released later on Wednesday, and the company and Zuckerberg could address the FTC’s new legal challenge during its earnings call. Analysts predict the tech giant could report its first decline in revenue this quarter and a significant drop in daily users, amid a downturn in digital ad spending and increased competition from TikTok.
Crucial Quote
“Instead of competing on the merits, Meta is trying to buy its way to the top,” FTC Bureau of Competition Deputy Director John Newman said in a statement Wednesday.
Key Background
The FTC’s lawsuit comes after the Information previously reported in December that the agency had opened a probe into Meta’s Within deal just after Thanksgiving. Though Within isn’t the first VR company that Meta has tried to acquire, it is the biggest deal it's made so far in that market, and the Information notes that previous deals were small enough to evade governmental scrutiny. The FTC, whose chair Lina Khan has been heavily critical of Meta and other tech giants’ power, has already sued Meta (then known as Facebook) in federal court for broader antitrust violations, arguing the company has engaged in “anticompetitive conduct and unfair methods of competition,” including by acquiring Instagram and WhatsApp. A federal judge initially dismissed the FTC’s challenge, finding the agency’s lawsuit was “legally insufficient” and “light on specific factual allegations.” The FTC then re-filed its complaint with more evidence, however, and the court has allowed the case to move forward, which could potentially result in Meta having to be broken up and WhatsApp and Instagram becoming separate companies again if the FTC succeeds. Meta has consistently denied any anticompetitive behavior and maintained its acquisitions are lawful. Further Reading
Meta (Facebook) is buying Within, creators of the ‘Supernatural’ VR fitness app (TechCrunch)
FTC Slows Meta Platforms’ Metaverse Strategy By Extending Antitrust Probe of VR Deal (The Information)
Judge Refuses To Throw Out Facebook Antitrust Lawsuit (Forbes) | Tech Giants |
More than 40 European rivals to Google’s shopping service urged EU antitrust regulators on Monday to use newly adopted tech rules to ensure the Alphabet unit complies with a 2017 EU order to allow more competition on its search page.The European Commission fined Google 2.4 billion euros ($2.33 billion) five years ago and told the firm to stop favouring its shopping service.The company subsequently said it would treat its own shopping service the same as competitors when they bid in an auction for adverts in the shopping box that appears at the top of a search page.But in a letter to EU antitrust chief Margrethe Vestager, the 43 companies – which include British firm Kelkoo, France’s LeGuide Group, Sweden’s PriceRunner and Germany’s idealo – said the proposal was legally insufficient and had not led to them benefitting from the advert auctions.“The Commission needs to re-open space on general search results pages for the most relevant providers, by removing Google’s Shopping Units that allow no competition but lead to higher prices and less choice for consumers and an unfair transfer of profit margins from merchants and competing CSSs to Google,” the companies said in the letter seen by Reuters.CSSs refer to Comparison Shopping Services.They said Google’s mechanism breaches the Digital Markets Act (DMA), Vestager’s new rules aimed at reining in the power of tech giants, which will apply in May next year.“Google’s prominent embedding of Shopping Units is a prima facie infringement of the DMA’s ban on self-preferencing,” they said.“Considering the unambiguous new legal framework, it is now time to walk the talk.The most paramount case at the heart of the calls for the DMA needs to be brought to an effective end,” the companies, from 20 European countries, said.($1 = 1.0289 euros)Get real time update about this post categories directly on your device, subscribe now. | Tech Giants |
Call it the Godzilla Problem. Apple is so big and influential that any move it makes will have enormous consequences for someone, somewhere. If Godzilla takes a walk, he leaves enormous footprints (and, let’s be honest, a bunch of crushed stuff) behind him. And like any large corporation (or nuclear Kaiju), Apple knows when it’s time to tread lightly and when it’s time to throw its weight around. Any choice it makes–especially where the iPhone is concerned–can move markets, make or break suppliers, and distort the trajectory of the tech industry. When Apple announced the iPhone, it broke the control that wireless carriers had over our phones. Apple would bring the iPhone to the company that agreed to keep its paws off the phone’s Apple-built interface, AT&T (then Cingular) agreed, and the rest is history. Now Apple’s up to it again. Apple is such a behemoth that its move to eSIM only will influence other phone makers to eventually do the same.Apple eSIMs for some With the iPhone 14 models, Apple is using its weight to drive the adoption of a new technology: eSIMs. For years, all cellphones included a tiny smart card called a SIM that contained the “identity” of those devices so that they could connect to the cellular network. As time went on, it became superfluous–that information could just as easily be stored on devices and even transferred from device to device. And so someone invented the eSIM, which did just that, and SIM cards were destined for doom. (Like with so many new technologies, Apple wasn’t the first to market with a phone that supported eSIM. Samsung seems to win that distinction.) But the world changes slowly, and it’s so much easier just to keep doing business as usual. So although eSIMs have become more popular, the SIM card is still required in numerous countries. Carriers are apparently worried that eliminating the need for a physical card will make it easier for customers to switch networks. But mostly, I think they fear change. And don’t want to do the extra work to change if they don’t have to. Do you hear those footsteps? Godzilla is coming. Buy an iPhone 14 in the U.S. and you’ll find this handy little note inside the box.Foundry Apple forces change All iPhone 14s sold in the United States don’t come with a SIM card slot. It’s just not there. And this is going to have a powerful effect on wireless carriers all over the world. Here in the U.S., it will spur the adoption of eSIMs. iPhone users have been able to use an eSIM since the new models that were introduced in 2018, but 100 percent of upgraders to the iPhone 14 will have to make the switch. (Apple has been pushing users in this direction for a while, with recent phones shipping without any SIM card installed. Users could add one themselves, of course, but it’s so easy to just give in.) Of course, Americans travel as well, and given the iPhone’s large market share, that will increase demand for eSIMs. Carriers in other countries that enjoy selling SIM cards to tourists will need to get comfortable with eSIMs if they haven’t already. The ball will keep rolling. eSIMs will continue on their path to inevitability. Apple benefits… eventually In the long run, it’s clear that Apple is going to want to stop building SIM slots into any iPhone models. In the short run, however, it just can’t do that–so it’s making two different versions of its phones, for the U.S. and for the rest of the world. (That’s not new–Apple has been making large iPhones with two SIM slots for the Chinese market for a while, believe it or not.) Unlike this U.S. iPhone 14 Pro Max, the SIM tray is located under the volume buttons in non-U.S. version of the phone.Foundry In the long run, eliminating the slot will be good for Apple because it eliminates another potential point of water and dust ingress, a fiddly little metal SIM slot, and the space on the inside of the iPhone case dedicated to reading the SIM card. Unfortunately, in the short term, there’s almost no benefit to Apple. The company can’t do two completely different designs of the internals of the iPhone, one for the U.S. and one for everyone else. That’s why, when iFixIt tore apart the iPhone 14 Pro, it found a little plastic spacer where the SIM socket was supposed to be. Until the SIM card is defeated everywhere, it will still complicate iPhone design. But now that Apple has begun to push, the defeat of the SIM card is inevitable. The people of the city can’t fight Godzilla–they just need to get out of his way. Where next, monster? This year we’ve seen Apple’s influence take hold in a few other interesting areas. Certainly, the announcement of Emergency SOS via Satellite has changed the game in terms of satellite data services for consumer cellular devices. Elon Musk and T-Mobile went so far as to pre-empt Apple’s announcement with a press conference of their own, announcing that SpaceX’s Starlink service would eventually work with T-Mobile’s wireless network to fill in carrier gaps. Considering that Apple has reportedly bought 85 percent of the capacity of the satellite network of its partner, Globalstar, there is undoubtedly going to be a run on satellite capacity–and a lot of new data satellites are going to need to be launched. (Apple’s satellite connectivity is coming via a Qualcomm 5G modem chip, but while its competitors can buy the chip, they will need to find somewhere to buy limited satellite data resources in the meantime.) As the operator of two of the most popular computing platforms in the world, Apple throwing its lot in with the new WebAuthn standard–which Apple calls Passkeys–pretty much makes widespread adoption of that standard a fait accompli, especially given that Google and Microsoft are onboard. Likewise, the new Matter standard for smart-home devices gave Apple and some of its big competitors to declare peace and ensure that the new standard will make it across the finish line. So what’s next in terms of world-changing moves for Apple? Unfortunately, Godzilla doesn’t answer his voicemails. iPhone 14 Pro iPhone 14 Pro Max iPhone 14 iPhone 14 Plus | Tech Giants |
IBM and SAP have joined a slew of other tech giants cutting thousands of jobs in response to the slowing global economic outlook and waning demand for some digital services.IBM announced the cuts, some 3,900 positions, or 1.5% of its global workforce, on Wednesday. SAP, Europe’s largest software company, will lay off 2.5% of its global workforce of 112,000, or around 2,800 employees, according to an earnings report published Thursday.SAP CEO Christian Klein said that the "targeted" cuts will allow the company to invest in the areas “where it really matters for SAP to be competitive in the future" – particularly its cloud business – while dealing with pressures from a slowing global economy. 'I was too ambitious':Spotify CEO announces layoffs among 6% of employees as tech job cuts continueGDP report:Economy grew solidly in 4th quarter but recession fears remain. Here's what to know.Last week, Klein suggested that the firm would avoid having to lay off workers, as it is “in a very strong position,” in an interview with CNBC.IBM, SAP moves come as 2022 earnings releasedThe layoffs come the same day both companies announced their fourth quarter 2022 earnings results."Our solid fourth-quarter performance capped a year in which we grew revenue above our mid-single digit model. Clients in all geographies increasingly embraced our hybrid cloud and AI solutions as technology remains a differentiating force in today's business environment," Arvind Krishna, IBM chairman and CEO wrote in a statement. "Looking ahead to 2023, we expect full-year revenue growth consistent with our mid-single digit model."IBM's fourth quarter highlights included:Revenue of $16.7 billion, flat.Software revenue up 3%Consulting revenue up 0.5%Infrastructure revenue up 2%Full-year highlights also showed revenue of $60.5 billion, up 6%, the company wrote in its release.Klein wrote Wednesday that SAP ended 2022 "with continued strong cloud momentum and a return to operating profit growth in the fourth quarter, marking an important inflection point.""Heading into 2023, this gives us great confidence in delivering on our promise of accelerating topline and double-digit non-IFRS operating profit growth," Klein continued. SAP's year-end earnings showed cloud revenue was up 33% in FY 2022. The company also announced it was exploring a sale of its stake in U.S.-based software company Qualtrics.Layoffs join Google, Amazon, Spotify, Microsoft and moreMonday, Spotify announced it would cut 6% of its workforce.Last week, Amazon began laying off thousands of employees. On Jan. 4, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy announced the company planned to cut more than 18,000 employees "between the reductions we made in November and the ones we’re sharing today."New layoff notifications for about 8,000 employees began last week – just months after an initial round of 10,000 job cuts.Also last week, Microsoft announced 10,000 job cuts, or nearly 5% of its workforce. And Facebook parent Meta announced 11,000 job cuts, or 13% of its workforce, in November.NYSE stock (IBM)IBM's New York Stock Exchange stock dipped more than 4% in early trading Thursday.NYSE stock (SAP)SAP's New York Stock Exchange stock dipped more than 1.5% in early trading Thursday.Camille Fine is a trending visual producer on USA TODAY's NOW team. What's everyone talking about?Sign up for our trending newsletter to get the latest news of the day | Tech Giants |
- Some of the world's largest internet companies may have strong balance sheets, but their employees haven't been able to avoid layoffs.
- From Microsoft to SAP, tech companies around the world have laid off thousands of employees since the start of the year.
- Tech companies that have laid off people have cited a slowdown in growth and that they are hedging against economic uncertainties.
From the U.S. to Europe and Asia, global tech giants from Microsoft and Google, to Amazon, SAP and more have laid off thousands of employees since the start of the year.
That's despite most of these companies being profitable.
"Headcount reduction is a result of over hiring during the pandemic and a slower growth outlook than originally forecasted," according to a report by financial services company Jefferies.
With interest rates and inflation remaining elevated, consumers are pulling back spending amid uncertainty in the global economy.
As a result, companies "need to reduce headcount in order to regain operating efficiency with a headcount that matches current demand trends," the analysts at Jefferies said.
With interest rates rising, capital has become more expensive and companies started reining in their headcount costs.
"Particularly for startups, the surge in employment was partly fueled by cheap capital," wrote a Bank of America Global Research report.
Here are some of the more prominent global tech firms that have axed staff despite earning big money.
Microsoft posted a net profit of $16.4 billion for the quarter ended Dec. 31, down 8% from a year ago. Its cloud business drove results, with Microsoft Cloud revenue at $27.1 billion, up 22% year-over-year.
The firm also delivered "record results" in fiscal year 2022 ended Jun. 30 despite a "dynamic environment," CEO Satya Nadella said in the tech giant's annual report.
"We reported $198 billion in revenue and $83 billion in operating income. And the Microsoft Cloud surpassed $100 billion in annualized revenue for the first time," he said in the fiscal year 2022 report.
Despite that, Microsoft announced in January that it's laying off 10,000 workers as the firm braces for slower revenue growth.
The company missed on earnings and revenue in the fourth quarter, but managed to eke out a 1% year-on-year revenue growth for the quarter ended December.
CFO Ruth Porat said during the earnings call that Alphabet added 3,455 people during the quarter, most of them technical roles.
She also told CNBC's Deirdre Bosa the company is meaningfully slowing the pace of hiring in a bid to deliver profitable growth in the longer run.
"Over the past two years we've seen periods of dramatic growth. To match and fuel that growth, we hired for a different economic reality than the one we face today," said CEO Sundar Pichai, in a memo to staff.
That's despite posting an impressive revenue in the fourth quarter of 2022 — beating analysts' estimates.
Though net revenue was up 9% at $149.2 billion in the quarter, operating income in the same quarter slipped to $2.7 billion, compared to $3.5 billion a year ago.
Overall, 2022 was Amazon's slowest year of growth since it was publicly listed in 1997. The e-commerce giant said it's bracing for recessionary pressures and a decline in consumer spending.
Germany's SAP said it met guidance across the board for full year 2022, with cloud revenue increasing 24% from a year ago. The enterprise software company also returned to positive operating profit growth of 2%.
However, SAP announced in January that it's cutting up to 3,000 jobs, as the leadership seeks to steer the company toward double-digit profit growth in 2023.
Singapore-based tech giant Sea Group reported net income of $422.8 million in the fourth quarter of 2022 — the company's first quarterly profit since it started in 2019.
Days later, the Indonesian unit of Sea's e-commerce arm Shopee conducted a fresh round of layoffs, affecting less than 500 full-time and contractual employees, according to media reports.
Last year, the company reportedly already cut more than 7,000 jobs — or about 10% of its workforce.
Other tech firms in Asia have not been spared either.
Dell posted a record revenue of $102.3 billion in fiscal year 2023 ended Feb. 3, up 1% from the year before. Operating income for the year was up 24% at $5.77 billion.
In February, the PC-maker announced plans to lay off 5% of its workforce — or some 6,650 workers.
The headcount reduction was conducted in an effort to "stay ahead of downturn impacts," co-COO Jeff Clarke said in a memo to employees.
While fiscal year 2023 revenue improved, Dell's operating income dipped 26% to $1.18 billion in the fourth quarter of fiscal year 2023 as demand for PCs and laptops slowed globally.
But the iPhone-maker is also seen tightening its belt.
The iPhone maker missed expectations for revenue, profit, and sales for several lines of business in the first quarter of fiscal year 2023 which ended Dec. 31 last year.
CEO Tim Cook blamed it on a strong dollar, production disruptions in China, and macro headwinds.
This is not exhaustive list. | Tech Giants |
(Bloomberg) -- Apple Inc. is on the verge of becoming the first company to ever achieve a market value of $3 trillion, the latest sign of big tech’s seemingly unstoppable dominance on Wall Street.
Most Read from Bloomberg
The iPhone maker was on the cusp of making history Friday, rising to $192 in premarket trading, bringing its gain for the year above 46% as of Thursday close. Its year-to-date rally has added more than $900 billion to the company’s size.
Apple’s possible milestone underscores the dominance of tech megacaps in the broader stock market this year. The group has eclipsed traditional growth stocks and led some to question the viability of the rally that caught many strategists off guard, as it faces potentially more Federal Reserve interest-rate hikes.
Read more: Nasdaq 100 Adds $5 Trillion in Record Start to Year: Tech Watch
Big tech’s strength in 2023 has lifted the Nasdaq 100 Index 37%. Excitement over artificial intelligence has fueled much of the gain, though investors have also gravitated toward the kind of quality factors that Apple has in spades, including a strong balance sheet, durable revenue streams, and a robust competitive position.
“The reason Apple has outperformed for more than a decade isn’t because investors are being foolhardy, but because it is executing on a business strategy that works, its earnings plan is working, and its lock on the consumer is only getting stronger,” said Jonathan Curtis, director of portfolio management for Franklin Equity Group.
He is not surprised that Apple would be the first to reach the milestone.
“The balance sheet is phenomenal, it pays a dividend it can continue to grow, it has an active repurchasing program, and a consumer staples-esque platform business, all powered by a device people look at four hours a day,” Curtis said.
In a sign in Wall Street’s ongoing optimism about the stock, Citi on Thursday began coverage of Apple with a buy rating, writing that its ability to continue expanding margins was underappreciated. It sees additional upside of about 30% for the stock, a target that would take Apple close to a $4 trillion valuation.
The Trillion-Dollar Club
Apple first became the world’s most valuable stock in 2011, when its market cap was under $340 billion and it comprised about 3.3% of the S&P 500. Since then, it has rarely forfeit that title. It first reached $1 trillion in value in mid-2018, and it achieved a $2 trillion valuation in August 2020, making it the first US company to surpass that level, though Saudi Aramco was the first $2 trillion company overall.
The iPhone maker briefly rose above the $3 trillion level in early 2022, although it failed to close above it, and that peak marked the start of a downtrend that has now been fully erased.
Companies of this size are few and far between, and in the US the club is populated only by other megacap technology and internet stocks, including Alphabet Inc., Amazon.com Inc., and chipmaker Nvidia Corp., which became the first trillion-dollar chipmaker earlier this year. Microsoft Corp is the only other US stock with a valuation above $2 trillion.
While Apple is not the biggest gainer of the year — Nvidia, Meta Platforms Inc., and Tesla Inc. have more than doubled — its size gives it a massive influence over markets, accounting for 7.6% of the weight of the S&P 500 Index.
Still, the milestone doesn’t mean smooth sailing for Apple from here. The stock trades at nearly 30 times forward earnings, and while this is down from a 2020 peak above 35, it remains well above its 10-year average multiple of 17.9.
Read more: Apple $3 Trillion Valuation Isn’t About the Headset: Tech Daily
Despite Citi’s new bull call, analysts have been pulling back on the stock amid the year’s rally. Fewer than 70% of the firms tracked by Bloomberg recommend buying the stock, the lowest such ratio among the trillion-dollar stocks. Furthermore, its consensus rating — a proxy for its ratio of buy, hold, and sell ratings — is near its lowest since November 2020. A recent downgrade from UBS was the latest example of weaker sentiment.
Furthermore, Apple is slightly above the average price target, suggesting analysts aren’t anticipating much in the way of additional gains from current levels.
--With assistance from Kit Rees and Thyagaraju Adinarayan.
(Updates trading and adds additional context.)
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©2023 Bloomberg L.P. | Tech Giants |
Microsoft Sees AI Shaking Up Search While Google Calms Investors
Google and Microsoft whose quarterly earnings each got a boost from their established search and cloud-computing businesses, used their time with investors to emphasize what’s next: artificial intelligence.
(Bloomberg) -- Alphabet Inc.’s Google and Microsoft Corp., whose quarterly earnings each got a boost from their established search and cloud-computing businesses, used their time with investors to emphasize what’s next: artificial intelligence.
In their respective earnings calls on Tuesday, the tech giants, which are becoming rivals in the competition for the future of search, offered up starkly different assessments of just how much disruption is in store for the market. Google executives encouraged investors to trust in the company’s long track record as the world’s leading search engine, and framed AI as just another shift in its constantly evolving business. Microsoft suggested that something much more dramatic is underway.
Investors seemed to like Microsoft’s thesis better, sending its shares up as much as 9.7% in extended trading, while Alphabet increased less than 2%.
Until recently, Google was viewed as all but invincible in the market for online search, which it dominates worldwide. That changed with the debut of OpenAI’s wildly popular chatbot, ChatGPT. Microsoft has begun weaving OpenAI’s technology into its Bing search engine, and the partnership has ratcheted up pressure on Google to reinvent its core search business to allow for more of the conversational exchanges that generative AI makes possible.
Speaking to analysts, Alphabet Chief Executive Officer Sundar Pichai stressed that Google is investing heavily in AI, yet he downplayed what the technology would mean for the search advertising business, which remains the company’s lifeblood. He expressed optimism that users will continue to value online advertising even if their searches yield a summary composed by a large language model, rather than the familiar list of links that Google has long delivered.
“Throughout the years, we have gone through many, many shifts in search,” Pichai said. “And as we have evolved search, I think we’ve always had a strong, grounded approach in terms of how we evolve ads as well.”
Yet Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella suggested his company is a formidable challenger. He said app installations have quadrupled since the launch of the AI-powered Bing in February. He added that Bing took share in the US market in the quarter, without offering specific metrics.
Read more: Microsoft Profit, Sales Top Estimates on Strong Cloud Demand
“We look forward to continuing this journey in what is a generational shift in the largest software category — search,” Nadella said on the company’s earnings call.
Billions of dollars in revenue could be up for grabs with even relatively small changes in market share. But in the past quarter, at least, Google’s search business appeared to be weathering the heightened competitive threats and a broader downturn in the digital advertising market. The company’s revenue from search and related businesses rose to almost $40.4 billion in the period ended March 31, besting analysts’ estimates.
As Google moves to incorporate generative AI into search, Pichai said the company would draw on its institutional knowledge. “We’ll be guided by data and years of experience about what people want and our high standards for quality,” Pichai said. “And we’ll test and iterate as we go because we know that billions of people trust Google to provide the right information.”
Yet the company has ample reason to be worried, said Max Willens, an analyst at Insider Intelligence.
“Google’s core business is facing the most serious challenges it has encountered in quite some time,” Willens wrote in a note.
Read more: Alphabet Shares Rise on Revenue Beat as Ad Sales Recover
Google’s partnerships with manufacturers of Android phones present another opportunity for Microsoft to gain ground. Yet there, too, Pichai suggested that Google’s long track record will win the day.
“When we work with our partners, we work hard to create a win-win experience,” Pichai said. “And ultimately, partners end up choosing us because that’s what their users want.”
More stories like this are available on bloomberg.com
©2023 Bloomberg L.P. | Tech Giants |
Apple and Amazon Results Pose Tech Rally’s Toughest Hurdle Yet
Results from Apple Inc. and Amazon.com Inc. after Thursday’s close represent the next big hurdle for the market’s tech-fueled rally, and it may be the hardest to clear.
(Bloomberg) -- Results from Apple Inc. and Amazon.com Inc. after Thursday’s close represent the next big hurdle for the market’s tech-fueled rally, and it may be the hardest to clear.
Both stocks have been critical to the S&P 500’s advance this year, attracting investors with their relatively durable revenue streams and market dominance. But whether they can fuel further gains is in question, given they trade at lofty multiples, face headwinds in their core businesses, and have limited direct exposure to artificial intelligence — a key driver behind this year’s jump.
“At these valuations, multiples either need to come down, or earnings need to rebound in a very robust way, which might be difficult since a lot of AI excitement has been priced in,” said Irene Tunkel, chief US equity strategist at BCA Research. “But that remains a buzzword more than something that is moving the needle in terms of growth.”
Rate sensitive tech stocks suffered a blow on Wednesday after Treasury yields soared in the wake of Fitch’s downgrade of US sovereign debt. A tech-fueled rally has added more than $6 trillion in value to the S&P 500 index this year, but the sector has struggled to advance after coming within 5% of the Nasdaq 100’s all-time high last month, despite better-than-expected reports from Alphabet Inc. and Meta Platforms Inc.
Apple, whose 48% gain in 2023 has made it the only company valued at more than $3 trillion, will be especially critical if the rally is to get back on track. The stock accounts for nearly 8% of the S&P 500 Index, giving it enormous sway over the benchmark.
The iPhone maker is expected to report a 1.7% drop in revenue in its fiscal third quarter, which would be its third consecutive year-over-year contraction. It is also facing a risk from a weak smartphone market in China, one of its biggest markets, while a tepid revenue forecast from Qualcomm Inc. on Wednesday underlined weak demand for mobile devices. However, Apple trades at nearly 30 times estimated earnings, above its long-term average and at a premium to the market overall.
“Apple seems like a stable story, rather than one that will sprint ahead in growth, and I don’t know what it can do to jazz investors further given the run its had,” said David Klink, senior equity analyst at Huntington Private Bank. “It looks expensive, and presumably everyone who wants to own it already does, so you really have to wonder what it could do to get a pop.”
After rising 53% in 2023, Amazon trades at about 40 times estimated earnings. While this is below its long-term average, a key driver of the company’s profitability comes from its Amazon Web Services cloud business. In a potential warning sign, Microsoft Corp. last week warned of a continued slowdown in its cloud-computing business.
“The results from Microsoft were decent, but even decent results won’t be well received with Amazon,” said Klink. “It is still the market leader in cloud, and if it also shows things slowing, then investors probably got ahead of themselves.”
Tech Chart of the Day
The CBOE’s Nasdaq-100 volatility index gained 12.5% on Wednesday, its biggest one-day percentage gain in nearly a year. The spike in volatility came as the Nasdaq 100 sank 2.2% in a broad decline.
Top Tech Stories
- Qualcomm Inc., the largest maker of smartphone processors, fell as much as 8.2% in late trading after giving a tepid sales forecast for the current quarter, indicating that demand for mobile devices remains weak.
- PayPal Holdings Inc. shares slumped after the payments giant said a key measure of profits shrank in the second quarter as the company had to set aside more money to cover souring loans it has made to merchants.
- Altice USA has replaced Yossi Benchetrit as its head of procurement as an investigation linked to suspected fraud at its European counterpart Altice Europe NV widens.
- Lions Gate Entertainment Corp. is close to a deal to buy the EOne film and TV studio from toymaker Hasbro Inc. for a little under $400 million, according to people familiar with the matter.
- Tesla Inc. is offering shopping vouchers worth 3,000 yuan ($420) to new customers in Shanghai, in conjunction with a local government incentive program aimed at boosting consumption and the flagging economy.
- Investors continued to pile into some Korean stocks seen as related to superconductors amid claims about a breakthrough in the technology, even as the exchange warned of speculative bets and unfair trades.
Earnings Due Thursday
- Premarket
- Entegris
- Trimble
- Black Knight
- Cognex
- Arrow Electronics
- Wix.com
- Belden
- Itron
- ACI Worldwide
- SolarWinds
- CommScope
- BCE
- Tegna
- Expedia
- Postmarket
- Apple
- Amazon
- Booking
- Airbnb
- Fortinet
- Microchip
- Motorola Solutions
- Atlassian
- Cloudflare
- GoPro
- Epam Systems
- GoDaddy
- Open Text
- Dropbox
- Dolby Labs
- Universal Display
- Qualys
- Appian
- Synaptics
- Cable One
- Yelp
- Block
--With assistance from Subrat Patnaik and Paul Jarvis.
More stories like this are available on bloomberg.com
©2023 Bloomberg L.P. | Tech Giants |
Facebook parent company Meta on Monday launched Sphere, an AI information verifier that Wikipedia utilizes to validate the strength of the claims in their web entries, TechCrunch reported.The tech news outlet provided a demo showing how the software works on Wikipedia. In the video, Sphere scans citations and then displays a failed or passed attempt at information verification. Facebook has fared poorly with the undeterred false information on the platform. In June, the company began to crack down on fake reviews on the platform. Meta also has plans to scrap CrowdTangle, the tool it uses to monitor misinformation on its platforms, after the midterm elections in November. It's still unclear whether Meta is using Sphere on its own platforms, according to TechCrunch. In addition to Facebook, it also owns Instagram, Messenger and WhatsApp, among others.Meta did not immediately respond to a request for comment. | Tech Giants |
The long-awaited follow-up to ChatGPT has gone live, boasting of “human-level performance” in university-standard exams.
OpenAI said GPT-4, the next generation of its artificial intelligence-powered chatbot, marked a “milestone” in the development of deep learning, which imitates how humans gain knowledge.
“We’ve spent 6 months iteratively aligning GPT-4 using lessons from our adversarial testing program as well as ChatGPT, resulting in our best-ever results (though far from perfect) on factuality, steerability, and refusing to go outside of guardrails,” the San Francisco-based company said in a blog post on Tuesday.
OpenAI, which is backed by Microsoft, said the new version of its AI-powered chatbot is a “multimodal” model that can generate content from both images and text prompts.
In an online demonstration, OpenAI President Greg Brockman showed GPT-4 creating a real website based on a hand-drawn mock-up.
OpenAI said the update is able to pass the bar exam for prospective lawyers with a score in the top 10 percent of applicants, compared with the bottom 10 percent of test-takers previously.
The chatbot can also beat 90 percent of humans who take the evidence-based reading and writing section of the Scholastic Assessment Test and the verbal section of the Graduate Record Examination used for admission to postgraduate education, OpenAI said.
GPT-4 is also much less likely to produce inaccurate, offensive, insulting answers than ChatGPT, the company said.
“We spent six months making GPT-4 safer and more aligned. GPT-4 is 82 percent less likely to respond to requests for disallowed content and 40 percent more likely to produce factual responses,” OpenAI said.
OpenAI, however, said GPT-4 is still “not fully reliable” and can still produce unexpected answers known as “hallucinations” and reasoning errors.
OpenAI’s launch of ChatGPT in November took the tech world by storm, prompting existential questions about the future of sectors ranging from education to journalism and healthcare.
Tech giants including Google, Microsoft, Huawei, Alibaba, and Baidu are racing to roll out their own versions of the technology amid heated competition to dominate the burgeoning AI sector. | Tech Giants |
Earnings reports from the biggest technology companies show that the group is navigating the tough economic environment better than smaller rivals, fueling a rebound in stock prices and encouraging investors about the outlook for the second half.Results from companies including Amazon.com Inc., Alphabet Inc. and Microsoft Corp. have lifted the Nasdaq 100 Index by 11% in July, adding about $1.5 trillion to its market value and putting it on a pace for its biggest monthly advance since November 2020. Facebook owner Meta Platforms Inc. has been the notable exception.“The leading companies have been putting up some of the better numbers this season, and their position as secular growth leaders still seems intact,” said Mitch Rubin, chief investment officer at RiverPark Funds. “It has been an incredibly painful road, in terms of sticking it out and owning these names, but I think this quarter marks an important inflection point.”Here’s a look at the megacap results that came out this week:Apple Inc.The iPhone maker’s results beat expectations, in what was seen as a relief given concerns over supply chain issues and falling consumer spending. The stock gained 2.8% before the opening bell. It has risen 15% in July, as of its Thursday close, representing its biggest monthly gain since August 2020.Apple is showing signs of supply chain improvements in China, which bodes well for the coming period, which are seasonally its biggest quarters, Bloomberg Intelligence analyst Anurag Rana said.MicrosoftThe initial reaction to Microsoft’s report was decidedly mixed, after both sales and earnings came in below expectations, hurt by foreign-exchange headwinds, an issue it had warned about in early June. However, the stock saw a dramatic turnaround after it gave a robust forecast for the fiscal year, with revenue and operating income seen increasing at a double-digit pace.That Microsoft, which has a market value above $2 trillion, can steadily deliver such sizable growth is a key reason why investors continue to gravitate toward the stock.“We’re still looking for growth, but the number of choices we have for that is rapidly narrowing,” said Patrick Burton, a portfolio manager at Winslow Capital Management, which oversees about $26 billion. “In this uncertain environment, we’re narrowing our focus to the names that can meet expectations or guide in line. That means names like Microsoft, Alphabet or Amazon.”AlphabetThe Google parent reported revenue that was roughly in line with expectations, easing concerns about the market for online advertising. Those concerns had risen after a disastrous report from Snap Inc., although Alphabet’s Search business pointed to resilience even in a weaker backdrop.“Search is doing much better than other forms of digital ads, so it didn’t see the weakness that Meta or Snap saw,” said Winslow’s Burton. The stock is attractive at about 17 times estimated earnings, he said. That’s below its 10-year average and the Nasdaq 100’s multiple of 21 times.“I think you’ll see both growth and value investors moving into Alphabet,” he said.Alphabet Rises With Search a Bright Spot of Results: Street WrapShares have risen 4.8% this month, putting it on track for its first positive month since March, as well as its biggest monthly gain since October.Amazon.comThe e-commerce company delivered a blowout report and gave a strong sales forecast, easing concerns about the impact that inflation is having on consumer spending. The stock is up 12% in premarket trading, setting up a strong finish to what is already on track to be its best month since April 2020.Meta Platforms Inc.The Facebook parent has struggled throughout 2022, and this week’s results did little to change that narrative. The company reported its first drop in revenue ever and forecast a further fall in sales in the current period.Meta’s outlook did not look as dire as that of Snap, but it is also not proving to be as resilient as Alphabet’s Search business as the economic backdrop weakens.Tech Chart of the DayShares of Meta sank 5.2% Thursday, putting it into negative territory for July. Should it end the month lower, that would make for its fourth straight monthly decline, its longest such streak since 2018. In addition, the losses pushed the company out of the country’s list of the 10 largest companies by market value. Meta is down almost 60% from its peak in September; the market value lost by the company since then would represent the sixth-biggest company in the US, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.Top Tech StoriesGlobal smartphone shipments fell to their lowest quarterly number in two years after consumer confidence was sapped by inflation and recession fears.Intel Corp. Chief Executive Officer Pat Gelsinger slashed sales and profit forecasts for the rest of the year, conceding that the struggling chipmaker needs more time to make its products competitive while assuring investors that the current quarter will be the nadir.Xiaomi Corp. is facing difficulties getting regulatory approval for its electric vehicle project in China, an unexpected hurdle for the smartphone giant's $10 billion carmaking endeavor.Elon Musk said in Twitter posts that inflation might be trending down, noting that more Tesla Inc. commodity prices are trending down than up.Roku Inc. slumped 25% in late trading after saying advertisers are pulling back on spending due to economic concerns, adding to jitters about the slowing growth of marketing budgets.Hollywood movies will start playing in China again this year, with one of the most anticipated new films, "Avatar: The Way of Water," among those likely to get released there, Imax Corp. Chief Executive Officer Rich Gelfond told investors Thursday.Hosiden Corp., a major assembler of Nintendo Co.'s Switch console, withdrew its fiscal year sales forecast, citing difficulties procuring electronic components.Krafton Inc. plunged its most in more than five months after India ordered Google to remove its blockbuster Battlegrounds Mobile game from app stores, spurring concerns about whether foreign firms can compete in the growing market.©2022 Bloomberg L.P. | Tech Giants |
European lawmakers are looking to introduce a law that would require electronic devices to use a common charger. EU lawmakers have proposed USB Type-C as the common standard.gelmold | iStock | Getty ImagesEuropean lawmakers on Tuesday approved a new law that would require electronic devices to use a common charger.The European Parliament approved the rule which, if passed, will mean all mobile phones, tablets and cameras sold in the European Union must be equipped with a USB Type-C charging port by the end of 2024.That would affect companies like Apple and others that currently don't use USB Type-C. Apple's iPhone uses its proprietary Lightening charger. In theory, Apple would need to include the common charging type if it were to sell its iPhones in the EU.Apple's newer iPads and MacBooks are already equipped with USB-C ports.Apple was not immediately available for comment when contacted by CNBC.The charging rules, which have been more than 10 years in the making, are currently going through the EU legislative process so have not yet come into effect. The European Commission, the EU's executive arm, agreed on the legislation in June. Now the European Parliament has given it the green light. It is now up to the European Council, which is made up of representatives of governments of EU countries, to give it a final approval before it becomes law.EU lawmakers argue the rules will reduce wastage as consumers do not need to buy a new charger every time they purchase a device. The EU said that this will reduce production and the disposal of new chargers.If the law is passed, in theory, consumers would be able to use a Samsung USB Type-C charger to charge their compatible iPhone."This future-proof law allows for the development of innovative charging solutions in the future, and it will benefit everyone - from frustrated consumers to our vulnerable environment," Alex Agius Saliba, a member of European Parliament, said in a press release. | Tech Giants |
The Justice Department and eight other states filed a historic antitrust lawsuit Tuesday targeting Google over what they allege is the Big Tech giant's monopoly over the online advertising market.The lawsuit, filed in the Eastern District of Virginia, aims to have Google's dominance in the online ad marketplace broken up by having a court compel the company to divest its Google Ad Manager suite. They also seek an order from the court enjoining Google from further engaging in any of the anticompetitive practices outlined in their lawsuit."Having inserted itself into all aspects of the digital advertising marketplace, Google has used anticompetitive, exclusionary, and unlawful means to eliminate or severely diminish any threat to its dominance over digital advertising technologies," according to the lawsuit. "The United States and Plaintiff States bring this action for violations of the Sherman Act to halt Google's anticompetitive scheme, unwind Google's monopolistic grip on the market, and restore competition to digital advertising."A view of the main lobby of building BV200, during a tour of Google's new Bay View Campus in Mountain View, Calif., May 16, 2022.Peter Dasilva/Reuters, FILEDOJ is joined in the lawsuit by California, Colorado, Connecticut, New Jersey, New York, Rhode Island, Tennessee and Virginia."Competition in the ad tech space is broken, for reasons that were neither accidental nor inevitable," the DOJ wrote in the lawsuit. "One industry behemoth, Google, has corrupted legitimate competition in the ad tech industry by engaging in a systematic campaign to seize control of the wide swath of high-tech tools used by publishers, advertisers, and brokers, to facilitate digital advertising."Google is set to take in more than 26% of all digital advertising revenue this year, according to an analysis from data firm Insider Intelligence. In total, tech giants Google, Amazon and Facebook-parent Meta will take in about 64% of the $200 billion in digital ad revenue generated this year, the study found.Google rebuked the lawsuit's claims in a statement to ABC News."Today’s lawsuit from the DOJ attempts to pick winners and losers in the highly competitive advertising technology sector. It largely duplicates an unfounded lawsuit by the Texas Attorney General, much of which was recently dismissed by a federal court," a spokesperson said."DOJ is doubling down on a flawed argument that would slow innovation, raise advertising fees, and make it harder for thousands of small businesses and publishers to grow," the spokesperson added.A view of the Google logo on a temporary house during CES 2023, an annual consumer electronics trade show, in Las Vegas, Jan. 6, 2023.Steve Marcus/Reuters, FILEGoogle exploits a conflict of interest, the lawsuit alleges, since the company controls the technology used to both offer and purchase advertising space, as well as the largest ad exchange on which marketers are matched with publishers.Further, the lawsuit accuses Google of using its market power to punish companies that purchase digital ads elsewhere and charge heightened fees for clients that buy ads on its platforms.In turn, such "anticompetitive behavior" has forced potential competitors out of the digital advertising business and sidelined businesses that remain, the lawsuit said."Google has thwarted meaningful competition and deterred innovation in the digital advertising industry," the lawsuit said. | Tech Giants |
May 2 (Reuters) - A pioneer of artificial intelligence said he quit Google (GOOGL.O) to speak freely about the technology's dangers, after realising that computers could become smarter than people far sooner than he and other experts had expected.
"I left so that I could talk about the dangers of AI without considering how this impacts Google," Geoffrey Hinton wrote on Twitter.
In an interview with the New York Times, Hinton said he was worried about AI's capacity to create convincing false images and texts, creating a world where people will "not be able to know what is true anymore".
"It is hard to see how you can prevent the bad actors from using it for bad things," he said.
The technology could quickly displace workers, and become a greater danger as it learns new behaviours.
“The idea that this stuff could actually get smarter than people — a few people believed that,” he told the New York Times. “But most people thought it was way off. And I thought it was way off. I thought it was 30 to 50 years or even longer away. Obviously, I no longer think that."
In his tweet, Hinton said Google itself had "acted very responsibly" and denied that he had quit so that he could criticise his former employer.
Google, part of Alphabet Inc., did not immediately reply to a request for comment from Reuters. The Times quoted Google’s chief scientist, Jeff Dean, as saying in a statement: “We remain committed to a responsible approach to A.I. We’re continually learning to understand emerging risks while also innovating boldly.”
Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles. | Tech Giants |
A Microsoft logo is seen on an office building in New York City, U.S. on July 28, 2015. REUTERS/Mike SegarRegister now for FREE unlimited access to Reuters.comLONDON, June 28 (Reuters) - Investors managing more than $350 billion of assets have demanded that Microsoft (MSFT.O) publish more transparent tax and financial information, as tech giants face growing scrutiny globally over their tax affairs.A shareholder resolution on tax transparency had been filed to Microsoft ahead of its annual investor meeting this year, said the organiser of the action, Britain-based proxy advisers Pensions & Investment Research Consultants (PIRC).Investors including Nordea, AkademikerPension and Greater Manchester Pension Fund had backed the resolution, PIRC said.Register now for FREE unlimited access to Reuters.comThe resolution calls on the company to publish financial and tax information on a country-by-country basis outside its home market of the United States so investors can assess whether it is paying fair taxes and identify any risks posed by tax reforms.It also calls on Microsoft to produce a tax transparency report in line with the tax standard of the Global Reporting Initiative, a standards organisation.A similar resolution has also been filed to tech giant Cisco (CSCO.O), PIRC said.Investors voted on a tax transparency resolution at Amazon's investor meeting in May, but it and other investor-led resolutions failed to get sufficient support to pass. read more Microsoft and Cisco were not immediately available for comment.Register now for FREE unlimited access to Reuters.comReporting by Iain Withers; Editing by Bradley PerrettOur Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles. | Tech Giants |
Internet safety watchdog says tech giants should automatically scan for child exploitation material on their services.Australia’s Internet safety watchdog has accused tech giants Apple and Microsoft of turning a blind eye to the sexual exploitation of children.
Australia’s eSafety Commissioner said in a report on Thursday that the tech giants were “not doing enough” to tackle the problem as they do not proactively search for child exploitation material on their services despite the availability of software that scans for known images and videos of abuse.
Commissioner Julie Inman Grant said the “very concerning” findings came after her office issued legal notices requiring Apple, Meta, WhatsApp, Microsoft, Skype, Snap and Omegle to provide information about their policies for preventing child exploitation on their services.
“This report shows us that some companies are making an effort to tackle the scourge of online child sexual exploitation material, while others are doing very little,” Grant said.
“But we’re talking about illegal content that depicts the sexual abuse of children – and it is unacceptable that tech giants with long-term knowledge of extensive child sexual exploitation, access to existing technical tools and significant resources are not doing everything they can to stamp this out on their platforms.”
The report also highlighted disparities in how fast tech companies responded – with the average time ranging from Snap’s four minutes to Microsoft’s two days – and policy loopholes that allowed Meta services users suspended for sharing child abuse material to set up new accounts on other platforms.
Apple and Microsoft did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Last week, Apple announced it had scrapped plans to automatically scan iCloud accounts for child exploitation material after blowback from privacy advocates who warned the feature could open the door to more invasive surveillance.
In August, the New York Times reported that a man who took a picture of his son’s groin for the doctor was subjected to a police investigation after Google’s scanning software flagged the image as abuse.
Despite police clearing the man of any wrongdoing, Google refused to reinstate his account. | Tech Giants |
Facebook and Instagram could soon be news-free for our neighbors to the north. Meta has once again said it would rather scrap news links on its platforms in Canada than comply with pending legislation.
Canada’s Online News Act, a bill officially called C-18, would force online platforms to pay publishers for their content. In other words: the legislation would make sites like Facebook and Google pay news outlets like Gizmodo a fee for content linked or shared on their platforms. Tech corporations could end up having to pay hundreds of millions of dollars annually to news publishers, under the act. The legislation has passed through House of Commons and is currently being considered in the Senate’s Committee on Transport and Communications. For obvious reasons, tech companies aren’t on board with the potential policy.
Google and Meta alike have been doing their best to protest the bill through lobbying, public statements, and other measures. Google, for instance, began restricting news links in search results for a small percentage of Canadian users in February, during a test that lasted for five weeks. Previously, Meta assured Canadian lawmakers that, if C-18 were to pass, Facebook and Instagram in the country would no longer support news links.
Now, the company has doubled down on that stance in a lengthy public statement from Nick Clegg, Meta’s president of global affairs and former U.K. politician, published Monday.
“The Online News Act is based on a fundamentally flawed premise. Meta does not benefit unfairly from people sharing links to news content on our platform. The reverse is true,” the exec wrote in the blog post. “Ultimately, this legislation puts Meta in an invidious position. In order to comply, we have to either operate in a flawed and unfair regulatory environment, or we have to end the availability of news content in Canada. With a heavy heart we choose the latter. As the Minister of Canadian Heritage has said, this is a business decision,” Clegg added.
The statement outlined Meta’s reasoning behind its stance—reiterating many of the arguments the company has made before. Namely, that news sites need Facebook and Instagram, not the other way around. Clegg repeated claims that just a tiny proportion (about 3%) of Facebook Feed content is made up of news links. Conversely Meta says it has generated “more than $230 million” in “free marketing” for news publishers.
According to Meta, Clegg’s statement was initially supposed to be delivered as part of a Canadian Senate committee hearing on Monday. However, after the hearing’s name was changed to “Tech Giants’ Current and Ongoing Use of Intimidation and Subversion Tactics to Evade Regulation in Canada and Across the World,” Clegg backed out and Meta opted to send other representatives in his place. Kevin Chan, the company’s global policy director, and Rachel Curran, Meta’s public policy head for Canada, spoke before the Senate committee instead.
During the meeting, Curran told legislators that Meta is already working on a content blocking strategy for news links in Canada. Contrary to the chaos the company sowed in Australia in 2021, Curran claimed, this time news removal would be careful and transparent, according to a report from the CBC. “It is absolutely our intention to not make the same errors in Canada that we made in Australia,” the Meta exec said.
Canada is not the first country to float forcing social media platforms and other sites to pay news publishers for hosting their content. Previously, Australian lawmakers were considering a similar bill. In response, Meta blocked news on its platforms countrywide. The move didn’t just end up impacting publishers, it also tanked emergency alert networks—removing things like hospital and fire service pages. Though Curran called that result an “error” during Monday’s meeting, a 2022 report from the Wall Street Journal determined the havoc may have been an intentional move to sway negotiations.
Regardless of whether or not it was deliberate, the Australian news block test had the desired outcome for Meta and its peers. Australia passed a much watered down version of its legislation. If Meta and Google keep forging ahead in Canada, chances are they’ll be able to strong-arm their way to reduced regulations there too. | Tech Giants |
Politico reports: Governments and businesses have spent two decades rushing to the cloud — trusting some of their most sensitive data to tech giants that promised near-limitless storage, powerful software and the knowhow to keep it safe.
Now the White House worries that the cloud is becoming a huge security vulnerability.
So it's embarking on the nation's first comprehensive plan to regulate the security practices of cloud providers like Amazon, Microsoft, Google and Oracle, whose servers provide data storage and computing power for customers ranging from mom-and-pop businesses to the Pentagon and CIA.... Among other steps, the Biden administration recently said it will require cloud providers to verify the identity of their users to prevent foreign hackers from renting space on U.S. cloud servers (implementing an idea first introduced in a Trump administration executive order). And last week the administration warned in its national cybersecurity strategy that more cloud regulations are coming — saying it plans to identify and close regulatory gaps over the industry....
So far, cloud providers have haven't done enough to prevent criminal and nation-state hackers from abusing their services to stage attacks within the U.S., officials argued, pointing in particular to the 2020 SolarWinds espionage campaign, in which Russian spooks avoided detection in part by renting servers from Amazon and GoDaddy. For months, they used those to slip unnoticed into at least nine federal agencies and 100 companies. That risk is only growing, said Rob Knake, the deputy national cyber director for strategy and budget. Foreign hackers have become more adept at "spinning up and rapidly spinning down" new servers, he said — in effect, moving so quickly from one rented service to the next that new leads dry up for U.S. law enforcement faster than it can trace them down.
On top of that, U.S. officials express significant frustration that cloud providers often up-charge customers to add security protections — both taking advantage of the need for such measures and leaving a security hole when companies decide not to spend the extra money. That practice complicated the federal investigations into the SolarWinds attack, because the agencies that fell victim to the Russian hacking campaign had not paid extra for Microsoft's enhanced data-logging features.... Part of what makes that difficult is that neither the government nor companies using cloud providers fully know what security protections cloud providers have in place. In a study last month on the U.S. financial sector's use of cloud services, the Treasury Department found that cloud companies provided "insufficient transparency to support due diligence and monitoring" and U.S. banks could not "fully understand the risks associated with cloud services."
Now the White House worries that the cloud is becoming a huge security vulnerability.
So it's embarking on the nation's first comprehensive plan to regulate the security practices of cloud providers like Amazon, Microsoft, Google and Oracle, whose servers provide data storage and computing power for customers ranging from mom-and-pop businesses to the Pentagon and CIA.... Among other steps, the Biden administration recently said it will require cloud providers to verify the identity of their users to prevent foreign hackers from renting space on U.S. cloud servers (implementing an idea first introduced in a Trump administration executive order). And last week the administration warned in its national cybersecurity strategy that more cloud regulations are coming — saying it plans to identify and close regulatory gaps over the industry....
So far, cloud providers have haven't done enough to prevent criminal and nation-state hackers from abusing their services to stage attacks within the U.S., officials argued, pointing in particular to the 2020 SolarWinds espionage campaign, in which Russian spooks avoided detection in part by renting servers from Amazon and GoDaddy. For months, they used those to slip unnoticed into at least nine federal agencies and 100 companies. That risk is only growing, said Rob Knake, the deputy national cyber director for strategy and budget. Foreign hackers have become more adept at "spinning up and rapidly spinning down" new servers, he said — in effect, moving so quickly from one rented service to the next that new leads dry up for U.S. law enforcement faster than it can trace them down.
On top of that, U.S. officials express significant frustration that cloud providers often up-charge customers to add security protections — both taking advantage of the need for such measures and leaving a security hole when companies decide not to spend the extra money. That practice complicated the federal investigations into the SolarWinds attack, because the agencies that fell victim to the Russian hacking campaign had not paid extra for Microsoft's enhanced data-logging features.... Part of what makes that difficult is that neither the government nor companies using cloud providers fully know what security protections cloud providers have in place. In a study last month on the U.S. financial sector's use of cloud services, the Treasury Department found that cloud companies provided "insufficient transparency to support due diligence and monitoring" and U.S. banks could not "fully understand the risks associated with cloud services." | Tech Giants |
Microsoft, Google, and Salesforce have all announced layoffs this year.
Companies indicated they’re reversing course after previously over-hiring.
All told, some 55,300 employees from more than a 154 tech companies have been affected this year. Loading
Something is loading. Thanks for signing up! Access your favorite topics in a personalized feed while you’re on the go. Barely three weeks into the new year, tens of thousands of Big Tech employees are staring down the barrel of unemployment. Microsoft said with plans to lay off 18,000 this year.
All told, more than 55,300 employees from more than a 154 tech companies have been affected by layoffs in 2023, according to Layoffs.fyi, a layoff tracking site.
To justify the job losses, CEOs like Google’s Sundar Pichai and Salesforce’s Marc Benioff have repeated the refrain of a slowing economy, framing the layoffs as a necessary backtrack after the over-hiring of two years ago.
Pichai message earlier this month to Salesforce staff that “we hired too many people leading into this economic downturn we’re now facing, and I take responsibility for that.”
2023’s cuts were foreshadowed at the end of last year, as some giants began slashing numbers.
Twitter’s massive layoffs followed its own theme, with Elon Musk marking his takeover of the platform in October with cuts to thousands of employees.
Others like Meta, Coinbase, and Robinhood announcing in November that it plans to let go of more than 11,000 employees.
The domino-style wave of layoffs across the industry has also presented more calculated effort by companies looking to cut costs not just by reducing headcount, but also by putting pressure on bonuses and wages.
Insider previously reported that Microsoft, for instance, is Snap is taking longer for its yearly assessment of its own compensation.
The layoffs foreshadow more cuts and potential pay reductions in store for workers this year. After all, it’s only January.
Read Insider’s coverage of the latest wave of tech layoffs:
Google is laying off around 12,000 workers as tech giants continue to slash jobs. Read CEO Sundar Pichai’s email to staff.
Microsoft employees are bracing for more layoffs
Pay in tech is dropping fast as firms like Microsoft, Snap and more use layoffs and a looming recession to wrest power from workers
Microsoft’s major layoffs prove that no tech giant is safe from the market downturn
Microsoft held an invite-only Sting concert for execs in Davos the day before the company announced layoffs of 10,000 employees
Read the emails Amazon’s HR and retail bosses sent to employees as its largest layoff in company history starts
An average 1,600 tech workers have been laid off every day of 2023 so far
Salesforce says it’s cutting about 10% of its employees and closing some offices Source link Continue Reading | Tech Giants |
Google Play Trial To Test Alphabet’s App Marketplace Power
Alphabet Inc. is facing off with Epic Games Inc. at a trial this week in an antitrust fight targeting the technology giant’s control over its money-spinning Google Play app store.
(Bloomberg) -- Alphabet Inc. is facing off with Epic Games Inc. at a trial this week in an antitrust fight targeting the technology giant’s control over its money-spinning Google Play app store.
The showdown in San Francisco federal court threatens billions of dollars in revenue generated by Alphabet’s app marketplace. In a lawsuit filed three years ago, Epic claims Google has monopolized the Android app distribution market for more than a decade by striking side deals to pay off rivals and uses its “vast resources to snuff out all competition.” If Alphabet loses, it could be forced to open the door for payment and app distribution methods outside its own app store.
Epic, maker of the popular game, largely lost a similar challenge two years ago to Apple Inc. over its app store. Epic Chief Executive Officer and billionaire Tim Sweeney, who says he went to court to stick up for app developers, is now asking the US Supreme Court to review the Apple dispute. Epic is the only stakeholder still suing Alphabet after the Mountain View, California-based company recently reached settlements with consumers, state attorneys general and Match Group Inc., all of whom had targeted Google Play in complaints.
Here’s what you need to know as the Google Play trial gets underway:
Epic’s Claims
Epic isn’t seeking monetary damages, but wants an order that would upend Google Play policies covering Android app distribution and payment methods. That “would make good on Google’s broken promise: an open, competitive Android ecosystem for all users and industry participants,” Epic said in its complaint. Policies that force developers and users to exclusively use Google Play while blocking third-party payment options violate antitrust law and hurt device makers, app developers and distributors, payment processing companies, and consumers, according to Epic.
Epic claims Google struck unlawful revenue-sharing and licensing agreements with electronic device makers so Google Play would be pre-installed and distinctly displayed on phones and tablets. It also negotiated agreements with device makers that thwart them from allowing third-party app stores or apps on their own, Epic said in its complaint.
Alphabet’s Defense
Alphabet has said that offering developers certain incentives to launch their apps on Google Play is how the store competes with Apple’s App Store, in addition to the Samsung Galaxy Store and Amazon Appstore, PCs and gaming consoles.
The company’s lawyers are expected to argue that Google Play policies are legal and that the security features and other benefits the store offers outweigh any harms caused to developers and users. Alphabet also claims the game maker breached its contract and acted in bad faith when it tried to set up its own app store in 2020 as an end-run around the Google Play billing system.
Two-Part Trial
A jury will decide whether Google Play’s policies violate federal antitrust statutes. If jurors find Google is breaking the law, the trial will move to a second phase in which US District Judge James Donato will decide how to fix any antitrust violations.
The trial is scheduled to run until early December and is expected to feature testimony from Sweeney and Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai. Last week, Pichai testified in Washington federal court in the Justice Department’s landmark competition case over Google’s search dominance.
The case is In Re Google Play Store Antitrust Litigation, 21-md-02981, US District Court, Northern District of California (San Francisco).
©2023 Bloomberg L.P. | Tech Giants |
The Twitter app is seen on a smartphone in this illustration taken July 13, 2021. REUTERS/Dado Ruvic/IllustrationRegister now for FREE unlimited access to Reuters.comJune 20 (Reuters) - The Japanese government is set to levy fines against 48 tech companies including Twitter Inc. (TWTR.N), Facebook- owner Meta Platforms Inc (META.O) and Alphabet Inc's Google (GOOGL.O) for failing to register their headquarters in the country, the Nikkei newspaper reported on Monday.Register now for FREE unlimited access to Reuters.comReporting by Akanksha Khushi in Bengaluru; Editing by Rashmi AichOur Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles. | Tech Giants |
At a glance, the tech giants don’t seem to have a lot in common. Google delivers information quickly. Meta connects you to friends and family. Amazon is a store. Apple makes phones and computers. Microsoft is all about business software.
But under the hood, they are united by advertising, referred to as the “dark beating heart of the internet” by the author Tim Hwang in his book Subprime Attention Crisis. About 80 percent of Google’s revenue comes from the ads it places next to search-engine results, on sites across the internet, and before YouTube videos. Meta makes considerably more than 90 percent of its billions in revenue from advertising. Amazon has the third biggest share of the U.S. ad market, thanks to what it charges independent retailers for placement on its site. And although few people think of Microsoft as a company that benefits from digital ads, it, too, makes billions from them every year.
Even Apple, which foregrounds user privacy as one of its selling points, is in on the ad game. Advertising makes up close to $4 billion of its annual revenue, according to the research company Insider Intelligence. All told, outside of China, the online-ad industry was worth about $500 billion last year, according to data from Omdia, and Google, Meta, Amazon, and Apple are believed to have taken some $340 billion of that. Companies that traditionally opposed advertising are looking for their way in too: After resisting ads since its inception, Netflix introduced an ad-supported version of its streaming service last year, as did Disney+.
As so much of the internet is changing—social media feels less relevant than ever; generative AI threatens to disrupt everything—advertising remains its inescapable business model. That’s a problem, because digital ads are terrible. Users hate them, they’re easily exploited in fraud schemes, and they encourage controversial business practices such as tracking. They also might not work very well: Studies suggest that most users ignore them, and roughly a third of display-ad clicks are believed to be accidental.
But the ad-supported internet is about to get worse. Many publishers are already motivated to generate as much content as possible, for as low a price as possible, for the largest audience possible. (That’s why they push out so many formulaic posts at mass volume, trying to eke out marginal ad profits from endless How old is this actor? Who is her wife? What is her net worth? articles.) Now we can add to this derivative fluff a flood of articles that were written by programs. In the ChatGPT era, we face a future of low-quality content automatically churned out, itself “read” only by other algorithms as they train themselves up and by bots generating fraudulent ad clicks—a “gray goo” internet created by algorithms, for algorithms, and shunned by everyone with a pulse. Ads already make the internet less usable; the effect will only be magnified as we’re forced to wade through the sludge.
It’s a problem for which we urgently need a solution. The internet as we know it relies on ads, but no one feels like they’re getting a good deal out of them. The web is crucial infrastructure, but its financial foundations are alarmingly shaky.
You’re no doubt familiar with article pages whose loading is dragged to a standstill as multiple clashing ads load, videos autoplay, and hard-to-dismiss pop-ups occasionally lead to accidental clicks. Very few of us deliberately look at, let alone click, online ads. Far fewer than 1 percent of people who see a given ad next to content will click it, on average, and about 40 percent of internet users in the U.S. employ an ad blocker. The result is an online arms race, with ever more determined ad networks fighting to get their inventory in front of the public’s unwilling eyeballs.
For the tech giants, one solution to this is to better match advertisers with users through improved targeting. This is usually presented as a win-win-win situation: We get advertisements we’re more likely to appreciate, brands get a better result from their campaign, and both the website we visit and the ad network get more money. But the reality is very different. Targeting isn’t about making the user’s ad experience better; it’s about showing the highest-value advertisements to the users who match the advertiser’s criteria. In effect, this means that when you visit a site, it looks for the identifying information it has about you, and determines which detail has the highest value.
For example, a site might identify that you’re browsing from the U.S., that you’re currently logged in to your Facebook account, and that you’re a regular reader of a premium newspaper that we’ll call The Economics Times Journal. That last bit of identifying information is worth much more than the other two: On average, readers of this publication have significantly higher salaries than the U.S. population at large.
This means that you might get an ad for a more premium product, even on a garbage clickbait site, than someone who reached it with just the first two tags attached to them. But this presents a problem for the publication itself: Its homepage now becomes the most expensive place on the internet for advertisers to reach its own readers. Why pay to advertise there if you can reach users more cheaply when they browse elsewhere?
The result of this system is a conflict of interest between the Big Tech companies that run the ad networks and their clients, fueled by relentless tracking of users across the internet, with perhaps dozens of different trackers on any site that seeks to make money from advertising.
So-called artificial-intelligence search, powered by large language models such as GPT-4, will likely make that conflict even more intense, as Bing and Google allow AI assistants to present information from across the web on their own sites, giving users even less reason to click through to publishers.
At present, if someone searches for information that is on a publisher’s site, the search engine makes some money by showing ads next to the search results, but then the publisher has a chance to make some money once the user actually visits their site. If AIs just scrape and rephrase the key information, making the visit unnecessary, only the search site gets the benefit. This is a legal gray zone—information cannot be copyrighted, but particular phrasing of it can—and is set to lead to new showdowns between tech and content, once again over who gets the ad dollars.
The AI monkey wrench is being thrown into the machinery right as regulators are taking a hard look at the digital-ad industry. Google is facing an existential antitrust lawsuit against its advertising business, led by the Department of Justice and joined by a coalition of 17 states.
Most previous lawsuits have been easily batted aside by Big Tech. Because of the companies’ scale, even multibillion-dollar fines, themselves very rare, are little more than the cost of doing business. This time, in a move not seen against a tech giant since the efforts targeting Microsoft in the 1990s, the DOJ is seeking to break up Google’s ad-tech business.
The very existence of such a suit may change the calculus of tech’s business model. This is especially true when European regulators are starting to make more aggressive use of the bloc’s stricter data regulators; the EU is, after all, more populous than the U.S. and is one of the world’s largest markets. Meta was fined $414 million by the Irish Data Protection Commission earlier this year for violating privacy law.
There are signs that Big Tech is adjusting its model. Last year, Elon Musk paid $44 billion for Twitter, a company that made 90 percent of its revenue from advertising. This is a model that Musk has repeatedly and openly criticized (Tesla famously does not advertise, although that may soon change), and he quickly sought to replace it with a subscription model, Twitter Blue, priced at $8 a month. A key part of Musk’s proposition for those $8-a-month users was that Twitter would halve the number of advertisements they saw. (Internal documents showed that the economics of this made absolutely no sense: The top 1 percent of Twitter users were, they revealed, worth $40 a month in ad revenue. Twitter is now valued at a third of what Musk paid for it.)
Elsewhere, Mark Zuckerberg has staked the future of his company (and even its name) on the metaverse, an immersive world in which proponents hoped for new ways not just to display ads, but to sell and trade virtual goods and even digital real estate. It hasn’t quite panned out. Amazon made a huge bet on Alexa as a new ecosystem with which users might interact, but it failed to generate revenue. The crypto boom became as inflated as it did in part because venture capitalists believed it could revolutionize how businesses make money online; it crashed and burned.
At some point, something new will come—it always does. But new business models, let alone technological breakthroughs, rarely appear on demand. They also almost never benefit the incumbents of the previous cutting age of tech. The Kodaks of the world had too much to lose from the dissolution of their large-but-declining print business to pivot to digital in time, and so they diminished.
The tech companies most hooked on the ad industry are left to hope that this time is different. Advertising was the engine that propelled them to global prominence and unbelievable wealth. Now they’re left wondering what to do as they feel the engine sputtering. Do they restart it, or do they accept that they’re destined to spend their future in a state of stagnation?
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Chipmaker Nvidia has rocketed into the constellation of Big Tech's brightest stars while riding the artificial intelligence wave that's fueling red-hot demand for its technology.
The latest evidence of Nvidia's ascendance emerged with the release of the company's quarterly earnings report Wednesday. The results covering the May-July period exceeded Nvidia's projections for astronomical sales growth propelled by the company's specialized chips — key components that help power different forms of artificial intelligence such as Open AI's popular ChatGPT and Google's Bard chatbots.
"The entire tech sector and overall market was waiting for Nvidia with this being the purest and best barometer for AI demand," Wedbush analysts said in a report. "The results/guidance were a "drop the mic" moment in our opinion that will have a ripple impact for the tech space for the rest of the year."
Nvidia's revenue for its second fiscal quarter doubled from the same period last year to $13.51 billion, culminating in a profit of $6.2 billion, or $2.48 per share, more than nine times what the company made a year ago. Both figures were well above the projections from analysts polled by FactSet Research.
Nvidia shares rose 33 points in after-hours trading, or nearly 7%, to $504 a share. The company's stock is up 222% so far this year.
Major beneficiaries
And the momentum is still building. The Santa Clara, California, company predicted its revenue for its August-October quarter will total $16 billion, nearly tripling its sales from the same time last year. Analysts had been anticipating $12.6 billion in revenue for the period, according to FactSet.
"We view these results and guidance as a historical moment for the tech sector speaking the tidal wave of AI spending now on the horizon over the coming years," said Wedbush analysts. "Software, digital media, Big Tech, and of course chips will be the major beneficiaries of this spending with Microsoft in our opinion along with Nvidia the best pure play AI names."
Nvidia's stock price surged 8% in extended trading after the numbers came out. The shares already have more than tripled so far this year, a run-up that has boosted Nvidia's market value to $1.2 trillion — a threshold that thrust the company into the tech industry's elite. If the stock rises similarly during Thursday's regular trading session, it will mark yet another record high for Nvidia's shares and boost the company's market value by another $90 billion or so.
Other stalwarts that are currently or have been recently valued at $1 trillion or above are Apple, Microsoft, Amazon and Google's corporate parent Alphabet.
Now, those tech giants as well as a long line of other firms are snapping up Nvidia chips as the company wades deeper into AI — a movement that's enabling cars to drive themselves, and automating the creation of stories, art and music.
Nvidia has carved out an early lead in the hardware and software needed in the AI-focused shift, partly because its co-founder and CEO Jensen Huang began to nudge the company into what was then seen as a still half-baked technology more than a decade ago. While others were still debating the merits of AI, Huang was already looking at ways that Nvidia chipsets known as graphics processing units might be tweaked for AI-related applications to expand beyond their early inroads in video gaming.
By 2018, Huang was convinced that AI would trigger a tectonic shift in technology similar to Apple's 2007 introduction of the iPhone igniting a mobile computing revolution. That conclusion led Huang into what resulted in what he calls a "bet the company moment." At the time Huang doubled down on AI, Nvidia's market value stood at about $120 billion.
"I think it's safe to say it was worth it to bet the company" on AI, Huang, 60, said during a presentation earlier this month.
Huang's foresight gave Nvidia a head start in designing software to complement its chips tailored for AI applications, creating "a moat" that other major chipmakers such as Intel and AMD are having trouble getting around during a period of intense demand that is expected to continue into next year, said Bernstein analyst Stacy Rasgon. Nvidia is increasingly pitching a Lego-like combination of GPUs, memory chips and more conventional processing chips enclosed in a big package. In a demonstration earlier this month, Huang showed one such room-sized structure, joking about how it might look if delivered to a doorstep by Amazon.
"Everybody else is trying to catch them now that they see the opportunity is there." Rasgon said.
Huang's vision has prompted Wedbush Securities analyst Dan Ives to hail him as "the Godfather of AI," and established him as one of the world's wealthiest people with an estimated fortune of $42 billion.
While Ives still sees plenty of upside in Nvidia's future growth and stock price, other market observers believe investors are getting carried away.
"This level of hype is dangerous as it could lead investors to assume that these stocks are a silver bullet to build long-term wealth — and they are not, at least not on their own," warned Nigel Green, CEO of deVere Group.
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Presidential candidates are facing pressure from a new bipartisan group to refuse donations from Big Tech companies in the 2024 election. The “No Big Tech Money” pledge launched on Tuesday and is pushing to separate Big Tech from politics, saying these companies have “amassed too much power over our democracy, our economy, and our lives.”
The pledge specifically targets Microsoft, Amazon, Meta, Apple, and Google’s parent company Alphabet Inc., and if a political candidate signs the pledge, they are agreeing to accept no more than $200 from any Big Tech company listed. Once a candidate signs, it applies to all current and future campaigns, regardless of if a candidate switches the office they are running for.
The No Big Tech Money pledge has not received any signers at the time of writing, according to the spokesperson, having just launched today, but he said: “Efforts are now underway to ask candidates for President, Senate, and House to sign the pledge.”
By signing the pledge, candidates are showing they “are willing to stand with people, not Big Tech,” and shows their acknowledgment of the role Big Tech is playing within the U.S. democracy, the group’s site says.
Emily Southard, the founder of the No Fossil Fuel Money pledge in 2019, is now the executive director for the No Big Tech Money Project and was motivated to found it after the success of her former group, a spokesperson for the group said in an email. The fossil fuel pledge reportedly brought in thousands of candidates’ signatures, most of whom were Democrats, the spokesperson said, but noted the Big Tech pledge differs in one major way, it has “true cross-party appeal.”
The group is working alongside both conservative and progressive groups to reel in candidates’ support for its mission. “The pledge was started because Big Tech companies like Facebook and Google have amassed too much power and control, have hurt small businesses, and have too much influence in Washington,” the spokesperson said. “Specifically, Big Tech companies have spent hundreds of millions of dollars in political donations and on lobbying to kill legislation that would rein them in and promote competition,” he added.
Tech companies have drastically increased their political spending in recent years, reaching roughly $106.2 million in 2020, more than doubling the $47.1 million donated in 2018 and nearly three times the $37.7 million spent in 2016, according to the nonprofit, OpenSecrets. It noted that Alphabet spent more than $11.2 million in contributions last year, while Amazon spent $21.8 million, and Meta spent $19.1 million.
However, the pledge does not include some companies that have long been top contributors in political elections, including Netflix, which was ranked as number one for the highest monetary contribution of $7.8 million.
“The pledge is a way for politicians to say enough is enough and to signal to voters that they’ll put our democracy, our small businesses, and our families over Big Tech’s corrupting influence,” Southard told The Washington Post. | Tech Giants |
Microsoft is reportedly working on its own AI chips that can be used to train large language models and avoid a costly reliance on Nvidia. The Information reports that Microsoft has been developing the chips in secret since 2019, and some Microsoft and OpenAI employees already have access to them to test how well they perform for the latest large language models like GPT-4.
Nvidia is the key supplier of AI server chips right now, with companies racing to buy up these chips and estimates suggesting OpenAI will need more than 30,000 of Nvidia’s A100 GPUs for the commercialization of ChatGPT. Nvidia’s latest H100 GPUs are selling for more than $40,000 on eBay, illustrating the demand for high-end chips that can help deploy AI software.
While Nvidia races to build as many as possible to meet demand, Microsoft is reportedly looking in-house and hoping it can save money on its AI push. Microsoft has reportedly accelerated its work on codename Athena, a project to build its own AI chips. While it’s not clear if Microsoft will ever make these chips available to its Azure cloud customers, the software maker is reportedly planning to make its AI chips available more broadly inside Microsoft and OpenAI as early as next year. Microsoft also reportedly has a road map for the chips that includes multiple future generations.
Microsoft’s own AI chips aren’t said to be direct replacements for Nvidia’s, but the in-house efforts could cut costs significantly as Microsoft continues its push to roll out AI-powered features in Bing, Office apps, GitHub, and elsewhere.
Microsoft has also been working on its own ARM-based chips for several years. Bloomberg reported in late 2020 that Microsoft was looking at designing its own ARM-based processors for servers and possibly even a future Surface device. We haven’t seen those ARM chips emerge yet, but Microsoft has worked with AMD and Qualcomm for custom chips for its Surface Laptop and Surface Pro X devices.
If Microsoft is working on its own AI chips, it would be the latest in a line of tech giants. Amazon, Google, and Meta also have their own in-house chips for AI, but many companies are still relying on Nvidia chips to power the latest large language models. | Tech Giants |
Apple logo is seen in this illustration taken March 1, 2022. REUTERS/Dado Ruvic/Illustration/File PhotoRegister now for FREE unlimited access to Reuters.comJune 24 (Reuters) - Apple Inc (AAPL.O)accepts the outcome of a vote by Maryland store workers to become its first U.S. employees to join a union and is ready to bargain with them, a person familiar with the matter told Reuters on Friday.Apple is one of several major American companies whose workforces have moved to unionize, with workers at some Starbucks Corp (SBUX.O) and Amazon Inc (AMZN.O) locations also voting to join a union in recent months.Nearly two-thirds of the employees at the Apple store in Towson, Maryland who organized as the Coalition of Organized Retail Employees (CORE), voted to join a union last week. The store is the first of Apple's roughly 270 U.S. outlets to do so.Register now for FREE unlimited access to Reuters.comThe successful vote came after another planned vote in Georgia was called off earlier this year.Apple intends to participate in the bargaining process in "good faith," the person familiar with the matter said.The Maryland employees voted to join the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers (IAM).In a statement, David Sullivan, the union's eastern territory vice president, said the members "look forward to bargaining with Apple and obtaining a strong first contract that makes positive changes for Apple workers and the customers they are proud to serve."Companies have responded to employee efforts to organize in different ways.Amazon challenged the outcome of a plan to unionize at a warehouse in New York City, while Microsoft Corp's (MSFT.O)President Brad Smith said in a blog post earlier this month that his company will not resist efforts by employees to organize.Apple employees at a store in Georgia earlier this year had plans to vote on unionization but canceled the vote, with union officers later filing a complaint alleging Apple intimidated its employees. Employees at two other Apple stores in New York are also considering unionization.Register now for FREE unlimited access to Reuters.comReporting by Stephen Nellis in San Francisco; editing by Jonathan Oatis and Deepa BabingtonOur Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles. | Tech Giants |
A price to pay? — Customers claim that Google Play artificially inflated app prices. Next summer, courts will decide whether Google is guilty of “misleading” millions of Google Play users by warning them against using any other app stores or services to download apps.
A judge this week granted class-action status to antitrust litigation that now covers 21 million Google Play customers in 12 states—Alabama, Georgia, Hawaii, Illinois, Kansas, Maine, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Wisconsin, and Wyoming—and five US territories, including American Samoa, Guam, Northern Mariana Islands, Puerto Rico, and the US Virgin Islands. The lawsuit claims that Google’s misleading warnings led millions of customers nationwide to pay “artificially inflated” prices for apps they could have downloaded cheaper elsewhere.
Last year, dozens of state attorneys general sued Google on these same antitrust grounds. Those state enforcers alleged that Google made it impossible for other app stores to compete, and the company had a monopoly on Android apps. The legal teams for the customers suing are now joining forces with the states suing; if the customers win, Google owner Alphabet Inc. could be on the hook for an estimated $4.7 billion in damages from the class-action suit alone.
Initially, Google had opposed the class-action designation, claiming in part that each of the individual plaintiffs suing couldn’t demonstrate actual harm, potentially allowing uninjured parties to join the class action. This week, US District Judge James Donato disagreed with Google in his order granting class-action status.
“In effect, Google demands that each class member individually prove an injury before certification may be granted,” Donato wrote in his order. “The law provides otherwise. It is true that a class may not be certified when it would be so overinclusive that substantial numbers of uninjured people would populate it. Google has not shown this is a concern here.” Plaintiffs argued that the designation was appropriate because Google Play’s allegedly “monopolistic” business practices “affected all of the prices set by the developers and paid by consumers to Google.”
On Monday, a Google spokesperson told Reuters, "We're evaluating the ruling, and after that, we'll assess our options." A Google spokesperson declined further comment to Ars. Lawyers representing the customers suing didn’t immediately respond to Ars’ request for comment.
The trial deciding the class-action litigation is set to start in June 2023.
Experts clash over Google Play price models
To help the judge decide if the lawsuit is best settled with individual plaintiffs or as a class action, both sides provided expert testimony. This testimony largely focused on whether Google Play app store customers actually paid higher prices across the board.
Google disagreed with so much of the opinion of the plaintiffs' expert, Hal J. Singer, that the company asked Donato to exclude his testimony. Google argued in part that Singer used methods to calculate prices in the Google Play store that Google’s expert, Michelle M. Burtis, had “never seen before.”
According to Google, another alleged flaw in Singer's analysis was that Singer failed to account for real-world data impacting how developers make decisions to raise or lower prices based on app store fees. Burtis claimed that Singer’s analysis predicted that all developers would have lowered prices if Google Play lowered its fees, but Burtis’ analysis of how developers actually responded when fees were lowered showed that “only a tiny fraction of developers whose service fees Google reduced then reduced prices.”
Ultimately, Donato denied Google’s motion to exclude Singer’s testimony, writing in his order that Google’s argument against Singer’s methodology “is the stuff of cross-examination and not exclusion.” Further, Donato said, “it is not necessarily ‘surprising’ for expert opinions to be based on methods that are new and not been the subject of peer review.”
Neither Burtis nor Singer responded to Ars’ requests for comment. | Tech Giants |
Alibaba Splits Into Six, Plans New IPOs In Historic Overhaul
Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. plans to split its $220 billion business into six main units encompassing e-commerce, media and the cloud.
(Bloomberg) -- Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. plans to split its $220 billion empire into six units that will individually raise funds and explore initial public offerings, the biggest overhaul of China’s online commerce leader since its inception more than two decades ago.
The move frees up the Chinese company’s main divisions from e-commerce and media to the cloud to operate with far more autonomy, laying the foundation for future spinoffs and market debuts. Its shares climbed 8% in pre-market trading in New York.
The shift to a holding company structure is rare for major Chinese tech firms and could present a template for Alibaba’s peers. Decentralizing the company’s business lines and decision-making power addresses one of Beijing’s primary goals during its sweeping crackdown on the technology sector.
The government had criticized the influence of online platforms, particularly those of Alibaba and WeChat operator Tencent Holdings Ltd. That will likely mean the restructuring would draw support from government regulators who have been concerned that concentrated power in tech suppressed innovation. Alibaba and Tencent invested in hundreds of startups over the years, often helping to craft strategy as they grew.
“It is one step in the direction with China’s policy to reduce the monopolistic nature of the tech giants,” said Marvin Chen, an analyst with Bloomberg Intelligence. “While China tech spinoffs are not uncommon, the move looks to be more encompassing, including core businesses, that may serve as a blueprint for the industry going forward.”
Alibaba’s announcement Tuesday coincided with the return of its billionaire co-founder Jack Ma to China after more than a year abroad.
It marks a departure from the internet company’s traditional preference for keeping most of its operations under one roof, running everything from supermarkets to datacenters under the main Alibaba umbrella. It’s also a strong signal that Alibaba is ready to tap investors and public markets, after the Xi Jinping administration’s clampdown on internet spheres wiped out more than $500 billion of its value.
Group Chief Executive Officer Daniel Zhang will head up the cloud intelligence division, a nod to the growing role that AI will play in the e-commerce leader’s portfolio in the long run. He will continue to run the parent company.
International commerce chief Jiang Fan will head up the global digital business unit, while longtime executive Trudy Dai takes up the main Taobao Tmall online shopping division. Its other divisions include local services such as meal delivery, the Cainiao logistics group and digital media and entertainment.
“At 24 years of age, Alibaba is welcoming a new opportunity for growth,” Zhang said in a statement. “The market is the best litmus test, and each business group and company can pursue independent fundraising and IPOs when they are ready.”
Alibaba has had previous success with spinoffs. It hived off Alipay in 2010, an unpopular move at the time that nonetheless lead to the creation of Ant Group Co. The fintech affiliate controlled by Ma was on the verge of pulling off the world’s largest IPO before Beijing pulled the plug, and has said it would consider a second run at the market.
Despite the creation of a half-dozen business lines, Alibaba on Tuesday reaffirmed the cost-cutting it had pledged to shore up the bottom line. That was a conservative shift for a tech conglomerate that once spent aggressively to dominate swaths of the economy, reflecting the dissipation of growth since Xi’s crackdown ensued in 2020.
Beijing has cracked down on the country’s tech giants over the last two years, forcing fundamental changes in the business models of companies including Alibaba. The e-commerce pioneer is also navigating increasingly tough competition from arch-rival JD.com Inc. as well as up-and-comers such as PDD Holdings Inc. and ByteDance Ltd.
“The innovative plan to split up its businesses, we assume has had some kind of blessing from the authorities,” said Gary Dugan, chief executive officer at the Global CIO Office. “In which case it will be seen as an elegant solution for unlocking the value inside the business.”
More stories like this are available on bloomberg.com
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The host of measures could amount to the biggest shift in US policy on shipping technology to China since the 1990s and could set Chinese chip makers back by years.The Biden administration on Friday published a sweeping set of export controls, including a measure to cut China off from certain semiconductor chips made anywhere in the world with US tools, vastly expanding its reach in its bid to slow Beijing’s technological and military advances.
The series of measures could amount to the biggest shift in US policy towards shipping technology to China since the 1990s. If effective, they could set China’s chip manufacturing industry back years by forcing American and foreign companies that use US technology to cut off support for some of China’s leading factories and chip designers.
“This will set the Chinese back years,” said Jim Lewis, a technology and cybersecurity expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), a Washington DC-based think-tank, who said the policies harken back to the tough regulations of the height of the Cold War.
“China isn’t going to give up on chipmaking … but this will really slow them [down].”
The rules, some of which go into effect immediately, build on restrictions sent in letters earlier this year to top toolmakers KLA Corp, Lam Research Corp and Applied Materials Inc, effectively requiring them to halt shipments of equipment to wholly Chinese-owned factories producing advanced logic chips.
In a briefing with reporters on Thursday previewing the rules, senior government officials said many of the measures sought to prevent foreign firms from selling advanced chips to China or supplying Chinese firms with tools to make their own advanced chips. They conceded, however, that they have not yet secured any promises that allied nations will implement similar measures and that discussions with those nations are continuing.
“We recognise that the unilateral controls we’re putting into place will lose effectiveness over time if other countries don’t join us,” one official said. “And we risk harming US technology leadership if foreign competitors are not subject to similar controls.”
Potential impact ‘quite stunning’
The expansion of US powers to control exports to China of chips made with US tools is based on a broadening of the so-called foreign direct product rule. It was previously expanded to give the US government authority to control exports of chips made overseas to Chinese telecoms giant Huawei Technologies Co Ltd and later to stop the flow of semiconductors to Russia after its invasion of Ukraine.
On Friday, the Biden administration applied the expanded restrictions to China’s IFLYTEK, Dahua Technology, and Megvii Technology, companies added to the entity list in 2019 over allegations they aided Beijing in the suppression of its Uighur minority group.
The rules can hit the data centres of some of the Chinese tech giants [File: Florence Lo/Illustration/Reuters]
The rules published on Friday also block shipments of a broad array of chips for use in Chinese supercomputing systems. The rules define a supercomputer as any system with more than 100 petaflops of computing power within a floor space of 6,400sq feet (595sq metres), a definition that two industry sources said could also hit some commercial data centres at Chinese tech giants.
US Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer welcomed the announcement, arguing the rules would “protect our country’s innovations from China’s predatory actions”.
Eric Sayers, a defence policy expert at the American Enterprise Institute, said the move reflects a new bid by the Biden administration to contain China’s advances instead of simply seeking to level the playing field.
“The scope of the rule and potential impacts are quite stunning but the devil will, of course, be in the details of implementation,” he added.
The Semiconductor Industry Association, which represents chipmakers, said it was studying the regulations and urged the US to “implement the rules in a targeted way – and in collaboration with international partners – to help level the playing field”.
Ratcheting up tensions
Earlier on Friday, the US added China’s top memory chipmaker YMTC and 30 other Chinese entities to a list of companies that US officials cannot inspect, ratcheting up tensions with Beijing and taking aim at a firm that has long troubled the Biden administration.
The “unverified list” is a potential precursor to tougher economic blacklists, but companies that comply with US inspection rules can come off the list. On Friday, US officials removed nine such firms, including a unit of China’s Wuxi Biologics, which makes ingredients for AstraZeneca Plc’s COVID-19 vaccine.
The new regulations will also severely restrict the export of US equipment to Chinese memory chip makers and formalise letters sent to Nvidia Corp and Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD) restricting shipments to China of chips used in supercomputing systems that nations around the world rely on to develop nuclear weapons and other military technologies.
Reuters was the first to report key details of the new restrictions on memory chip makers, including a reprieve for foreign companies operating in China and the moves to broaden restrictions on shipments to China of technologies from KLA, Lam, Applied Materials, Nvidia and AMD. | Tech Giants |
(Bloomberg) -- Nvidia Corp. reached a record high Thursday after the chipmaker at the forefront of an industrywide artificial intelligence race delivered a third-straight revenue forecast that surpassed Wall Street’s estimates.
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The shares rose 1.9% to $480.01 in New York after Nvidia said sales will be about $16 billion in the three months ending in October. Analysts had estimated just $12.5 billion, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. Nvidia’s results last quarter also blew past projections, and it approved an additional $25 billion in stock buybacks.
The outlook underscores Nvidia’s role as the key beneficiary of the AI computing boom. Faced with skyrocketing demand for chatbots and other tools, data center operators are stocking up on the company’s processors, which are adept at handling the heavy workloads required by artificial intelligence. That’s helped Nvidia quickly pull out of an global chip slump and accelerate sales growth to its fastest rate in years.
“A new computing era has begun,” Chief Executive Officer Jensen Huang said in a statement. Companies around the world are shifting to more powerful computing that can handle ChatGPT-style generative AI, he said.
The stock had climbed as much as 6.7% earlier in Thursday’s session, before paring gains as part of a broader pullback. That added to a more than threefold increase for the stock this year. The shares closed at $471.16 in New York on Wednesday before Nvidia released its quarterly report.
In the fiscal second quarter, which ended July 30, revenue doubled to $13.5 billion, the company said. Profit was $2.70 a share, minus certain items. Analysts had predicted sales of about $11 billion and profit of $2.07.
Nvidia became the first-ever semiconductor company to rack up a $1 trillion market valuation after another blowout quarter in May. It has emerged as the main supplier of infrastructure needed to support the growing use of AI systems. But investors have been waiting for more evidence that the second quarter was the beginning of a long-term expansion and not a one-time spike. What they got Wednesday was even more bullish than hoped.
Underscoring Nvidia’s dramatic growth, this quarter’s revenue target is 28% above Wall Street projections and nearly as high as the company’s total annual sales in 2021.
In another milestone, Nvidia’s quarterly sales overtook those of Intel Corp. for the first time. Though Nvidia has had a higher valuation than Intel since 2020, posting more revenue than the chip pioneer shows just how pervasive its products have become.
Nvidia was co-founded in 1993 by Huang, who still runs the company. He’s successfully parlayed a business making graphics chips for video games into dominance of the market for so-called accelerators — chips that help train AI software by bombarding it with data. Nvidia’s rapid introduction of ever-more powerful processors — along with accompanying software — has left would-be rivals trailing far behind. Customers such as Microsoft Corp. and Alphabet Inc.’s. Google, meanwhile, are lining up to take as many chips as Nvidia can supply.
What Bloomberg Intelligence Says:
“A significant 2Q beat and raise, a repeat of 1Q’s performance, suggests sustained demand strength in Nvidia’s Data Center (DC) business, while guidance 29% above consensus for 3Q implies the company may get its hands on better-than-expected supply. Gross-margin upside (112 bps above consensus) is likely to continue as the DC contribution rises.”
— Kunjan Sobhani, BI technology industry analyst
Click here to read the research.
Like many of its peers, Nvidia doesn’t operate its own chip production and relies on outsourced manufacturing provided by Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. and Samsung Electronics Co. That arrangement frees it from the huge expenditure and risks of investing in manufacturing. But it also gives it less ability to adjust supply quickly.
There were concerns that supply constraints could hamper Nvidia’s sales in the current quarter, but its forecast suggests that operations are running smoothly. Chief Financial Officer Colette Kress said the company is happy with the progress it’s making in getting more components.
“We expect supply to increase each quarter through next year,” she told analysts on a conference call.
Nvidia’s division that supplies chips to data centers — once a sideline business — has become its biggest moneymaker. The unit had sales of $10.3 billion last quarter, versus an estimate of $7.98 billion. Gaming revenue was $2.49 billion, compared with an average analyst prediction of $2.38 billion. Automotive-related chips brought in $253 million.
The personal computer market, previously Nvidia’s largest source of revenue, had slumped in the past year. But it has returned to being a growth driver. Demand for laptop components is particularly strong, the Santa Clara, California-based company said.
Read More: Nvidia CEO Dispels Fears About Running Out of Chips in AI Boom
AI has been the hottest topic for tech investors this year, and every major company has talked up its capabilities in that area. But Nvidia is one of the few making serious money from the trend, which has accelerated since the public debut of OpenAI’s ChatGPT in November. That tool helped show the potential of generative AI to a broader audience.
Nvidia’s stock run-up of more than 200% this year has eclipsed the gains of all others in the closely watched Philadelphia Stock Exchange Semiconductor Index.
The company’s gains are all the more remarkable because it can’t sell its full lineup to the largest chip market, China. The US government requires Nvidia to obtain licenses to supply Chinese customers with its best-performing AI-related chips.
The announcement of that rule last year put a dent in shipments to the Asian nation and forced Nvidia to rework one of its key products. The company depowered one of its graphics processor units, or GPUs, to make sure it didn’t trigger the China restriction. But the Biden administration is considering new regulations that could limit sales of that component as well, Bloomberg has reported.
Nvidia’s CFO Kress addressed that possibility Wednesday on the call.
“Given the strength of demand for our products worldwide, we do not anticipate that additional export restrictions on our data center GPUs, if adopted, would have an immediate material impact to our financial results,” she said.
Nvidia also has become more important as a tech industry bellwether. The chipmaker’s forecasts provide a window into the plans of some of the world’s most valuable companies — and indicate how much those businesses are willing to spend to overhaul computer systems to accommodate AI.
(Updates shares in second paragraph.)
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Microsoft's Bing AI chat can already be helpful for finding answers, but now it can help you produce fanciful pictures. The company has introduced a Bing Image Creator preview that adds OpenAI's DALL-E AI image generation to both Bing search and a sidebar in the Edge browser. You just have to ask the chatbot to create an image with either a direct description or a follow-up to a previous query. If you're wondering how to revamp your living room, you can ask Bing to draw some ideas based on your criteria.
Yes, Microsoft is aware of the potential for things to go awry. The company says it's applying "additional protections" beyond OpenAI's own. It will block you from creating potentially "harmful" images, the firm says. Microsoft also explicitly clarifies that images are AI-generated, including through watermarks.
Image Creator is available to a selection of Bing desktop and mobile users in preview and through a dedicated site. Edge users have access as well If you're part of the test group, you'll have to toggle the Creative mode to give the generator a try. Microsoft plans to bring the creative tool to Balanced and Precise mode users in the future, though, and plans to fine-tune the system's behavior in multi-step chats. While the technology only supports English, more languages are in the works.
More forms of AI are finding their way into Bing. The company is rolling out AI-based Knowledge Cards that now offer "dynamic" quick-glance info like charts and timelines. Stories, meanwhile, provide images and short videos linked to searched topics.
The DALL-E tool comes just as Adobe has unveiled plans to put generative AI in Photoshop, After Effects and Premiere Pro, while NVIDIA is launching a customizable cloud AI service that includes image creation. While Microsoft clearly isn't competing directly with Adobe or NVIDIA, it's joining a wave of tech giants that see AI image production as a valuable tool. Bing Image Creator might also provide a competitive edge over Google, which only just widened access to its Bard AI chat following a limited test. | Tech Giants |
Tomorrow marks 15 years since the first iPhone went on sale. When Steve Jobs introduced the original iPhone he wryly hyped it as three revolutionary products: An iPod, a phone and an internet communicator. The first iPhone only came in one size and the only decision you had was whether to get one with 4GB of storage or 8GB. As far as carriers, only AT&T supported Apple's first phone.At the time, the idea of carrying an iPhone instead of a flip phone and an iPod was enough to convince some people to buy one. For others like me, the iPhone's main appeal was the touch screen, which seemed unreal and futuristic. "From the very beginning, one of the unique things about [the] iPhone was that we wanted to fuse together software, services and hardware to create a simple, powerful kind of magical experience," said Bob Borchers, Apple's vice president for product marketing. "And with the original iPhone, it was that interaction of multi touch and pinch to zoom, where you started to see that come together."Fifteen years later, Apple sells eight different models of iPhone, five of which have launched in the past 10 months. There is at least one version that works with pretty much every major phone carrier in the world. The iPhone is available in an array of colors, finishes, sizes and storage options that now top out at 1TB. And while the screen is where most of the magic happens, it's no longer the main appeal of the iPhone. Now playing: Watch this: Here's which iPhone you should buy in 2022 8:19 Over the past decade and a half, what defines the iPhone has shifted away from just design and hardware specs. Instead, the iPhone and iOS have become a gateway into Apple services and features like iMessage, FaceTime, Siri, Apple Music, Apple Pay, top-of-the-line cameras and apps like Uber, TikTok, Twitter and WhatsApp. For better or worse, the iPhone has become home to our photos, music, conversations, ideas, games, identity, work, social media, shopping, keys and money.In 2022, the iPhone continues to extend beyond its svelte metal-and-glass chassis into the world around us. It's the backbone for products like the Apple Watch and AirPods, and will likely play a role in future Apple products like rumored AR glasses.It also serves as the foundation for Apple's digital services, which have become an increasingly important factor to differentiate the iPhone from competing mobile devices. These services have evolved rapidly in recent years along with the iPhone.Find My, which started as a tool in 2010 for locating a lost iPhone, has grown into a network for finding Apple devices and pretty much anything you can attach one of Apple's tiny AirTag trackers to. Some products, like VanMoof's S3 bike, even have built-in Find My support, eliminating the need to add an AirTag entirely. As of 2021, Apple's Find My network had hundreds of millions of devices, most of which were iPhones.Just weeks ago at WWDC, Apple's annual software developers conference, the company announced iOS 16 with expansions to its nearly decade-old Wallet app and Apple Pay service. Essentially, Apple wants to make your physical wallet obsolete. There's also a new feature called Apple Pay Later that lets you split the cost of an Apple Pay purchase into four equal payments spread over six weeks, with zero interest and no fees. It's done entirely through your iPhone.The 2022 iPhone SE is nearly identical to the 2020 version but gets more durable glass, 5G and the A15 Bionic chip that debuted in the iPhone 13. Kevin Heinz/CNET In fact, you need an iPhone to access or use most of these services. Keep in mind that, for years, the iPhone's premium price made it inaccessible to many, and that's still true of Apple's top-of-the-line iPhone Pro models. The recently upgraded iPhone SE gives Apple the opportunity to expand the iPhone's reach even further. It's the purest example of what defines an iPhone in 2022. The SE blends the body of an iPhone 8 with the glass and processor from the iPhone 13. At $429, it's currently the most affordable way to get people into Apple experiences.I spoke with Borchers ahead of the iPhone SE launch in March about the phone and why Apple added an A15 Bionic chip to it."It's actually a really easy decision to put as much capability as we can in today, in order to invest in and create opportunities for those future experiences. It's something that distinguishes us from others," said Borchers.No other phone maker takes this approach. It would be like Samsung using the body of its Galaxy S8 and putting the Galaxy S22's processing power inside. The upcoming Pixel 6A will be the first budget Android phone that uses the same processor, Google's Tensor chip, as the flagship Pixel 6 and 6 Pro. Of course, Google isn't putting it into the body of Pixel 2 and instead is introducing a new design.It makes sense that Apple's cheapest phone has the same processor as its most expensive: It's all about giving people access to Apple experiences. For example, if you buy an iPhone SE, you can use the Live Text feature in iOS 15 to grab text with your camera or copy it from a photo. And while the 2016 and 2020 versions of the iPhone SE sold well, it seems the 2022 version isn't breaking any sales records yet. Apple doesn't disclose a specific model breakdown of how many iPhones it sells, but analyst Ming-Chi Kuo lowered his shipping estimates for the iPhone SE (2022) by 10 million. The lower demand could be an effect of rising inflation and the fact that the 2022 and 2020 versions of the iPhone SE look identical. Shanghai lockdown doesn't affect the iPhone SE production. However, the new iPhone SE demand is lower than expected (the delivery status "in stock" as one of the proofs), and I cut my shipment estimation in 2022 to 15-20M (vs. 25-30M previously).— 郭明錤 (Ming-Chi Kuo) (@mingchikuo) March 28, 2022 The SE showcases how iOS and Apple Silicon become the bedrock for everything you do on your iPhone. Obviously, not every model in Apple's iPhone lineup is equal. More expensive phones like the iPhone 13 Pro come with a contemporary design, high refresh-rate screens, larger camera sensors and tools like the U1 ultra wideband chip and lidar.These extra perks mean you can use your iPhone in more ways. For example, if you've got the right car, you can unlock it and start it with your iPhone. Borscher describes moments like these as "automagic," meaning it just works. The same way a pair of AirPods can switch from your iPhone to your Mac for watching a video, or the way you can unlock your Mac using your Apple Watch.Apple first introduced AirPods in 2017 with the release of the iPhone 7 and 7 Plus, which lacked a physical headphone jack. Sarah Tew/CNET Of course, such growth has consequences. Antitrust concerns over the app store and mobile payments, debates about screen time, Apple's contentious dealings with the FBI, criticism that all these services are part of a strategy to lock people into Apple's ecosystem and more recently, privacy questions over AirTags are just some of the concerns that have grown alongside the iPhone's meteoric success. There are even questions as to whether Apple can launch another product line that is even half as successful as the iPhone. My CNET colleague and Apple reporter Ian Sherr points out that products like the Apple Watch and AirPods are lucrative largely because of their connection to the iPhone.Over 15 years, the iPhone has become ubiquitous and helped Apple become a nearly $3 trillion company. The next iteration of the phone, likely called the iPhone 14, is expected to launch this September. It will no doubt run on iOS 16 and have the newest version of Apple's A series processor and will continue to support the Apple experience. As for the long-term, my colleague Lisa Eadicicco thinks the most important part of future iPhones will be how it works with everything around it. iPhone 13 and iPhone 13 Mini: Check out the redesigned camera module and smaller notch See all photos | Tech Giants |
Curious what display Apple has put in its iPhones over the years or the specs your current iPhone display has? Follow along for a look at the complete iPhone display list for the size, resolution, pixels per inch (ppi), brightness, and more that’s found on the screen of every iPhone model. iPhone has seen quite the evolution over the years when it comes to displays. While Apple initially resisted using larger screens on its smartphones that were more difficult to use one-handed, it followed Samsung and gave everyone what they asked for, larger and larger displays.
And with the iPhone 14 lineup, we’re expecting to see the largest smartphone screens from Apple yet: Exclusive: iPhone 14 coming in four models without ‘mini’ version, Pro models with taller screen, satellite features advancing
iPhone 14 news: Here’s everything we know so far Along with this guide on iPhone displays, we’ve got detailed articles on iPhone battery capacity and memory: iPhone battery mAh list: How much capacity does each iPhone model have?
iPhone RAM list: Here’s how much memory each iPhone model has Before checking out the specs below, do you know the display size of the original iPhone? 😁
Ok, here’s the full iPhone display list…
iPhone display list: Size, resolution, ppi, brightness
Note: An Apple News bug may cause the information below to display incorrectly. Read on 9to5Mac.com for all the details. iPhone 13 Pro Max display?
6.7-inch – 2778 x 1284 resolution – 458 ppi – 1,000-1,200 nits – Super Retina XDR OLED with ProMotion iPhone 13 Pro display?
6.1-inch – 2532 x 1170 resolution – 460 ppi – 1,000-1,200 nits – Super Retina XDR OLED with ProMotion iPhone 13 display?
6.1-inch – 2532 x 1170 resolution – 460 ppi – 800-1,200 nits – Super Retina XDR OLED iPhone 13 mini display?
5.4-inch – 2340 x 1080 resolution – 476 ppi – 800-1,200 nits – Super Retina XDR OLED iPhone SE 3rd gen display?
4.7-inch – 1334 x 750 resolution – 326 ppi – 625 nits – Retina HD LED-backlit LCD iPhone 12 Pro Max display?
6.7-inch – 2778 x 1284 resolution – 458 ppi – 800-1,200 nits – Super Retina XDR OLED iPhone 12 Pro display?
6.1-inch – 2532 x 1170 resolution – 460 ppi – 800-1,200 nits – Super Retina XDR OLED iPhone 12 display?
6.1-inch – 2532 x 1170 resolution – 460 ppi – 625-1,200 nits – Super Retina XDR OLED iPhone 12 mini display?
5.4-inch – 2340 x 1080 resolution – 476 ppi – 625-1,200 nits – Super Retina XDR OLED iPhone SE 2nd gen display?
4.7-inch – 1334 x 750 resolution – 326 ppi – 625 nits – Retina HD LED-backlit LCD iPhone 11 Pro Max display?
6.5-inch – 2688 x 1242 resolution – 458 ppi – 800-1,200 nits – Super Retina HD OLED iPhone 11 Pro display?
5.8-inch – 2436 x 1125 resolution – 458 ppi – 800-1,200 nits – Super Retina HD OLED iPhone 11 display?
6.1-inch – 1792 x 828 resolution – 326 ppi – 625 nits – Liquid Retina HD LED-backlit LCD iPhone XR display?
6.1-inch – 1792 x 828 resolution – 326 ppi – 625 nits – Liquid Retina HD LED-backlit LCD iPhone XS Max display?
6.5-inch – 2688 x 1242 resolution – 458 ppi – 625 nits – Super Retina HD OLED iPhone XS display?
5.8-inch – 2436 x 1125 resolution – 458 ppi – 625 nits – Super Retina HD OLED iPhone X display?
5.8-inch – 2436 x 1125 resolution – 458 ppi – 625 nits – Super Retina HD OLED iPhone 8 Plus display?
5.5-inch – 1920 x 1080 resolution – 401 ppi – 625 nits – Retina HD LED-backlit LCD iPhone 8 display?
4.7-inch – 1334 x 750 resolution – 326 ppi – 625 nits – Retina HD LED-backlit LCD iPhone 7 Plus display?
5.5-inch – 1920 x 1080 resolution – 401 ppi – 625 nits – Retina HD LED-backlit LCD iPhone 7 display?
4.7-inch – 1334 x 750 resolution – 326 ppi – 625 nits – Retina HD LED-backlit LCD iPhone SE display?
4-inch – 1136 x 640 resolution – 326 ppi – 500 nits – Retina HD LED-backlit LCD iPhone 6S Plus display?
5.5-inch – 1920 x 1080 resolution – 401 ppi – 500 nits – Retina HD LED-backlit LCD iPhone 6S display?
4.7-inch – 1334 x 750 resolution – 326 ppi – 500 nits – Retina HD LED-backlit LCD iPhone 6 Plus display?
5.5-inch – 1920 x 1080 resolution – 401 ppi – 500 nits – Retina HD LED-backlit LCD iPhone 6 display?
4.7-inch – 1334 x 750 resolution – 326 ppi – 500 nits – Retina HD LED-backlit LCD iPhone 5S display?
4-inch – 1136 x 640 resolution – 326 ppi – 500 nits – Retina HD LED-backlit LCD iPhone 5C display?
4-inch – 1136 x 640 resolution – 326 ppi – 500 nits – Retina HD LED-backlit LCD iPhone 5 display?
4-inch – 1136 x 640 resolution – 326 ppi – 500 nits – Retina HD LED-backlit LCD iPhone 4S display?
3.5-inch – 960 x 640 resolution – 326 ppi – Retina HD LED-backlit LCD iPhone 4 display?
3.5-inch – 960 x 640 resolution – 326 ppi – Retina HD LED-backlit LCD iPhone 3GS display?
3.5-inch – 480 x 320 resolution – 163 ppi – LCD iPhone 3G display?
3.5-inch – 480 x 320 resolution – 163 ppi – LCD Original iPhone display?
3.5-inch – 480 x 320 resolution – 163 ppi – LCD Expected iPhone 14 Pro and Pro Max designs
What iPhone display most surprised you? Or did you find something interesting about how Apple has used displays in iPhone over the years? Share your thoughts in the comments!
Thanks for reading our iPhone display list!
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Check out 9to5Mac on YouTube for more Apple news: About the Author Michael Potuck @michaelpotuck Michael is an editor for 9to5Mac. Since joining in 2016 he has written more than 3,000 articles including breaking news, reviews, and detailed comparisons and tutorials. Michael Potuck's favorite gear | Tech Giants |
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