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yesEmily BirnbaumNone
August 14, 2020
The lawsuits from Fortnite maker Epic Games against Apple and Google this week bear all the hallmarks of a PR stunt.
Epic introduced its new payment system with a flourish. And the company was ready with almost 150 pages of legal arguments and an ad campaign to hit back when Apple and Google inevitably removed the app from their stores on Thursday.
But former antitrust regulators and experts say Epic's lawsuits are surprisingly serious, and the $17 billion gaming company actually has a shot at winning.
"This is a really well-put-together lawsuit that they obviously had been planning for quite a while," said Chris Saagers, a professor at Cleveland-Marshall College of Law who has written extensively about antitrust issues around Apple. "They've done their homework."
For one, Epic's cases are backed by multiple superstar attorneys in the antitrust world, including Christine Varney, a former U.S. assistant attorney general within the Justice Department's antitrust division, and Katherine Forrest, who served as the U.S. district judge for the Southern District of New York as well as a deputy in the DOJ antitrust division. (Forrest and Varney now work at Cravath, Swaine & Moore LLP — ironically, the firm that represented IBM, which Apple named as a monopolist when it first launched the App Store.)
Their names alone give the case a boost of credibility, said John Newman, an associate professor of law at the University of Miami and former DOJ antitrust lawyer. "I frankly don't think those types of attorneys take on cases that aren't serious," he said.
The cases also appear to be promising, experts said. Epic is arguing that Apple and Google use their "monopoly" power over their respective app stores to stifle competition and harm rivals, specifically focusing on their policies of taking a 30% cut of all in-app purchases. The argument is reminiscent of landmark tech antitrust case U.S. v. Microsoft, in which Microsoft was found guilty of violating the law.
It's notable that Epic is not seeking any monetary relief. Instead, the company is looking for court orders that would prevent Apple and Google from further engaging in their "anti-competitive conduct" over the app stores.
"Epic is not seeking monetary compensation from this Court for the injuries it has suffered," the company said in its lawsuit against Apple. "Nor is Epic seeking favorable treatment for itself, a single company. Instead, Epic is seeking injunctive relief to allow fair competition in these two key markets that directly affect hundreds of millions of consumers and tens of thousands, if not more, of third-party app developers."
Multiple state attorneys general, Congress and the European Commission are all investigating Apple over its App Store policies, elevating the Apple case's importance and visibility.
But Epic could hit a hurdle with its narrow definition of the markets that Apple and Google monopolize. It's arguing that Apple illegally uses its power over the iOS distribution market and payments system, while Google monopolizes its Android app distribution market. Essentially, Epic is alleging a "single-brand market," which judges typically do not prefer. "Alleging a single-brand market is an uphill battle," said Newman.
There's some precedent for plaintiffs winning cases when they allege single-brand markets, but it will be difficult. The issue is that Apple and Google together dominate the app distribution market in the U.S., making it hard to argue that either has a total monopoly.
The lawyers said it seems like Epic's cases, particularly the case against Apple, have a fair chance of going to trial in Northern California, where they were filed. But that process could take years.
Next, Apple and Google are likely to file motions to dismiss the cases, said Maurice Stucke, a former prosecutor in the Justice Department's antitrust division who now teaches law at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville.
But, Stucke said, the question remains: "Where's our government? Why aren't they bringing these types of cases?"
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Emily Birnbaum
Emily Birnbaum ( @birnbaum_e) is a tech policy reporter with Protocol. Her coverage focuses on the U.S. government's attempts to regulate one of the most powerful industries in the world, with a focus on antitrust, privacy and politics. Previously, she worked as a tech policy reporter with The Hill after spending several months as a breaking news reporter. She is a Bethesda, Maryland native and proud Kenyon College alumna.
People
The future of the cell phone, according to the man who invented it
Martin Cooper comes on the Source Code Podcast.
Martin Cooper with his original DynaTAC cell phone.
Photo: Ted Soqui/Getty Images
January 21, 2021
David Pierce ( @pierce) is Protocol's editor at large. Prior to joining Protocol, he was a columnist at The Wall Street Journal, a senior writer with Wired, and deputy editor at The Verge. He owns all the phones.
January 21, 2021
Martin Cooper helped invent one of the most consequential and successful products in history: the cell phone. And almost five decades after he made the first public cell phone call, on a 2-pound brick of a device called the DynaTAC, he's written a book about his career called "Cutting the Cord: The Cell Phone has Transformed Humanity." In it he tells the story of the cell phone's invention, and looks at how it has changed the world and will continue to do so.
Cooper came on the Source Code Podcast to talk about his time at Motorola, the process of designing the first-ever cell phone, whether today's tech giants are monopolies, and why he's bullish on the future of AI.
<div class="rm-embed embed-media"><iframe frameborder="no" height="200px" scrolling="no" seamless="" src="https://player.simplecast.com/21947943-bc81-43d9-9eb3-f18341a6c8b6?dark=true" width="100%"></iframe></div><p><em>The following excerpts from our conversation have been edited for length and clarity.</em><br></p><p><strong>I want to get to the phones, but before we do I want to talk about pagers, because I have this deep obsession with pagers. I think pagers are a much better example of the direct predecessor to the cell phone than landlines. Even though you couldn't make phone calls, it seems like spiritually, pagers were cell phones before they were cell phones. You made pagers, and they were huge. And I guess my big question is, why didn't pagers get their due? We kind of skip over them, but it feels like they were a big thing.</strong></p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="1">
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</div></p><p>Well they were, at the time we did it. In the U.S. there were at the peak over 50 million pagers. And the principle is freedom. Our biggest customers were people like doctors, who were trapped next to their patients because they have to be available. And the pager set them free! They could go play a game of golf and know that they could get a beep and be at the hospital at 10 minutes. So the concept of freedom, I don't want to beat it to death, is really the essence of what portability is. </p><p>And since you brought the subject up, one of the battles that I'm engaged in today has to do with education and the need for broadband for education. And the solution that the FCC is proposing is wired broadband. Cable! We're going through the same thing all over again. And I am trying to persuade them that if you want to solve the digital divide in education, it's going to have to be with wireless broadband.</p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="2">
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</div></p><p><strong>I agree. And one of the other things you're involved in right now is 5G stuff, right? I spend all of my time talking to people in tech who are, let's say, overzealous about the potential of 5G. Everybody has spent five years telling me that 5G is going to change everything, that it's the panacea of technology, and I'm not sure that I see it. Tell me what you think about 5G: Is it as big of a change in how all of this stuff works as some people like to make it out to be?</strong></p><p>Not really. I think you put your finger on it: 5G is an incremental change. It introduces a couple of new capabilities to what existed in 4G. One of them is the use of millimeter-wave where there is a much bigger bandwidth, but a big handicap is the fact that the millimeter waves don't travel very far. There are other things that are done that reduce latency. </p><p>So it turns out that those two characteristics — very high speeds and low latency — are very useful in things like running a robot. If you've got a factory and you want to run robots, you're going to need those kinds of things. Unfortunately, for people like you and me, 5G does essentially nothing. You have to understand, I think 5G is a wonderful thing, and we have to keep progressing. But I don't appreciate being deluded. And the carriers have done that: They talk about having remote operations and autonomous cars and things of that nature. And guess who's paying for the 5G? It's you and me.</p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="3">
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</div></p><p><strong>OK, let's go back and talk about the DynaTAC stuff. My favorite scene in the book was when you're at a restaurant in Chicago, and a bunch of people have brought you prototypes of this cell phone. And nobody has any idea what a cell phone is supposed to look like. What's that day like?</strong></p><p>Well, you have to start at the beginning of that, because two weeks previously, I approached Rudy Krolopp. Now, Rudy didn't work for me. He ran the Industrial Design Group for this division. But he was a visionary. I told him where we were going to build a cell phone, and he said, "What's a cell phone?" And I described what a portable phone was like, and he reassigned all the people in his group to come up with their concept of what this portable phone might look like. And so I felt I had to reward them in some way. And that's why I invited them to dinner. </p><p>Each of these guys got up and presented what his vision was, of what a portable phone would look like. And they all ended up being a vision of what actually happened. There was a slide phone, there was a flip phone, and there was what they call a capsule phone. These guys were just remarkable. </p><p>We ended up picking what we called the shoe phone — for obvious reasons — because it was simple.</p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="4">
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</div></p><p><strong>You say you picked the shoe phone because it was simple, but it doesn't seem like it would necessarily be obvious that it was simple, because again, nobody had ever done this before. Most of the parts that were required didn't really exist yet. What's your criteria for thinking, "this is the one we can do?"</strong></p><p>It was mechanically simple. It was just the box. Anytime you put hinges and sliders, things of that nature, they're going to break. We actually ended up all agreeing that this was the way to go. And I wanted to make sure that I appreciated the efforts of these other guys. So even though I picked this one, we selected this as a group. Everybody agreed that this is the way to go. </p><p><strong>I guess it makes sense to say, "we have to invent 1,000 things just to make this work. Why invent 1,001 that we don't have to?"</strong></p><p>That's exactly right. [Pulls an original DynaTAC model out.] Calling this "simple" … the insides of this phone are incredibly complex, much more so than a modern phone. A modern phone has a million times the power of this box that we're looking at now. But the complexity, the number of parts — there are like 10 times more parts in the old phone, and they were all hand-soldered together. It's close to a miracle that we got one to work. And they actually got two to work!</p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="5">
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</div></p><p><strong>The timing of all this is interesting to me, because you're in the middle of this fight against AT&T. It seems like there was something about that fight, and that moment, that made this whole project go. And I was wondering, if Motorola had been super successful, doing fine, under no real threat from AT&T and the FCC, does a project like this happen? Or does it take this kind of existential threat to push something like the phone forward?</strong></p><p>How could I ever have persuaded my management to start investing? They ended up pretty much betting the company, between 1969 when the Bell System announced their desire to continue their monopoly on cellular, and 1983 when we actually have service. This battle that we engaged in lasted 13 to 14 years, and the company spent $100 million of 1970 dollars. So how would I ever have persuaded them, if we didn't have an enemy? If we didn't have to bet our whole company against them, because they would have put us out of business?</p><p><strong>You really don't think you could have pulled it off by yourself? You had a lot of power and trust and autonomy at Motorola.</strong></p><p>We would have come up with a phone, but getting the FCC to move really took a huge amount of effort. The Bell System had 200 lobbyists calling on the FCC alone. They had two guys assigned to each of the nine commissioners. At that time, our total lobbyists force in Washington was three guys, who called on the FCC, the Congress, and all the government agencies. So it really took that kind of challenge to make this thing happen. </p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="6">
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</div></p><p><strong>So let's talk about monopolies. You've truly been in the center of fighting against one, and now we're having these same arguments again, about Google and Amazon and Apple and Facebook. What do you make about the antitrust fight happening right now? Does it rhyme with history to you, as you see all this stuff happening?</strong></p><p>It's a different problem. But it's still a problem.</p><p>There's no question in my mind that some of the practices that Google and Amazon exercise are anti-competitive. And so we've got to do something about it. But there's a difference between that and a regulated monopoly where the government decides what the price is going to be and the monopoly just makes all the decisions, and they have no competitive pressures. That's what Bell Systems did. </p><p>The whole process was different. Bell Labs — which by the way, was an extraordinary organization — had all the funding that they wanted, because they had a monopoly supporting them. And they would invent something, and they would think, "Oh, this is interesting, let's make a product." And they would turn the product over to Western Electric, which was part of the monopoly, and they would make them all and then they would turn that over to the operating companies. And the operating companies would come to you and say, "David, this is what you want, right?" </p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="7">
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</div></p><p>That's exactly backwards from what we do today. Marketers today look at what people need and want, what problems they solve, and they work backwards through that process. The research guys work on, hopefully, what are going to solve human problems.</p><p><strong>But then on the flip side, then come questions about how power works differently. And especially as we get to privacy and data collection and all this stuff. Bell Systems <em>felt</em> like a monopoly: You could just look at it and be like, "this is clearly a monopoly." It feels messier now, but maybe not any less consequential.</strong> </p><p>I think the real problem is not Google and Facebook and Amazon. It's the people that think they're getting something for nothing. They're not getting anything free, they're giving up their information, which has value, and they're getting less value in return. When people start realizing that and that they have alternatives, the problem is going to get solved. So once again, it sounds like I'm being overly optimistic. And it may be that the government has to intervene in the process, but the real solution there is education.</p><p><strong>Speaking of the privacy and society side of all of this, when you were in the early days of the cell phone, were you thinking about "what does it mean for society when everyone has a phone like this?" You wrote the book that you imagined that when everybody was born, they'd be given a phone number. And were you guys asking this sort of philosophical question?</strong> </p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="8">
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</div></p><p>No.</p><p>You know, it's one thing to be a visionary. And I really think that we were visionaries. We stuck our necks out on that thing. But when people asked me what I was thinking of when we made the first public call, it was, "I hope this thing works." </p><p><strong>Before I let you go, I want to talk about AI. Because I think that's another place we have a lot of optimists and a lot of pessimists, and the way you seem to think about where artificial intelligence and humanity meet is about as optimistic a take as I think I've heard. So convince me that the future of AI is mostly good news.</strong></p><p><strong></strong>When I look at a product, I define the usefulness of a product, or at least the interface, as bad, good and optimum. A bad interface is one where you need an instruction manual to work something. If you have a device or a service that is intuitive — you look at it, and you could figure out what to do without looking at an instruction manual — that's pretty good technology. The optimum technology is invisible. It's there, it works for you, it solves your problem. You don't even have to think about it. Well, if you're going to do that, something has to be behind the scenes, making decisions for you. And that's artificial intelligence.<br></p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="9">
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</div></p><p>There are people that are very optimistic about how quickly that's going to happen. And it turns out that there are some things that the brain does that we haven't even figured out how to copy. It doesn't compute very well, it doesn't remember very well. But other things? It can abstract in ways that machines cannot. And so I think it's going to be a slow process, where the machines are little by little going to take over more and more of the routine things in our lives, are going to make us more efficient. </p><p>Society is much more resilient than people think. People are more resilient. People keep saying, "Oh, no, we are going down the tubes, because the kids aren't talking to each other anymore." Yes, I do see lots of cases where kids sit around the table all looking at their cell phones, but most of them are texting each other. And it takes time for society to embrace and understand new things. </p><p>These things are all new, it's going to take a generation for us to accommodate them. But human minds are very flexible. The brain is amazing. It's going to be many generations before artificial intelligences take over. And when they do take over, we won't even notice it.</p>
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David Pierce ( @pierce) is Protocol's editor at large. Prior to joining Protocol, he was a columnist at The Wall Street Journal, a senior writer with Wired, and deputy editor at The Verge. He owns all the phones.
Politics
Is this the future of the FTC?
In conversation with Protocol, Commissioner Becca Slaughter, whose name has been floated as a possible FTC chair, laid out her priorities for the next four years.
FTC commissioner Becca Slaughter may be President Biden's pick for FTC chair.
Photo: David Becker/Getty Images
January 20, 2021
Issie Lapowsky (@issielapowsky) is a senior reporter at Protocol, covering the intersection of technology, politics, and national affairs. Previously, she was a senior writer at Wired, where she covered the 2016 election and the Facebook beat in its aftermath. Prior to that, Issie worked as a staff writer for Inc. magazine, writing about small business and entrepreneurship. She has also worked as an on-air contributor for CBS News and taught a graduate-level course at New York University’s Center for Publishing on how tech giants have affected publishing. Email Issie.
January 20, 2021
Becca Slaughter, a commissioner for the Federal Trade Commission, made a name for herself last year when she famously breastfed her newborn baby during video testimony before the Senate, raising awareness about the plight of working parents during the pandemic.
But lately, Slaughter's name has been circulating for other reasons: She's a likely candidate to be President Joe Biden's pick for FTC chair, an appointment that would put Slaughter at the head of antitrust investigations into tech giants, including Facebook.
<p>Biden has yet to formally announce his selection. But this week, Slaughter took some time to speak at <a href="https://youtu.be/UFksDi3ygyU" target="_blank">a Protocol event</a> about the FTC's Facebook case, how antitrust enforcement can be "anti-racist" and what she hopes to see the FTC prioritize these next four years — whether she's in charge or not.</p><p><em>This interview has been lightly edited.</em></p><p><strong>It's indisputable that in the last few weeks since the Capitol riot, we've seen tech giants from Facebook to Amazon taking more action on dangerous speech on their platforms than ever before. Everyone's talking about regulation, but obviously any government regulation having to do with speech is a really dicey area. What do you anticipate the Biden administration's approach will be to this, and what are the appropriate legislative and regulatory remedies here? </strong></p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="1">
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</div></p><p>I can't speak to the president's plans, but I do think what we're seeing is, on the one hand, eminently appropriate action being taken by the companies to stop violence. I am concerned as a citizen that that actually came too late, and it might have been much better taken much earlier. But at the same time, we're seeing really important questions surface about the fact that those decisions are lying in the hands of private companies with enormous market power. The decisions can be correct, while at the same time, we can take a step back and say: What does this tell us about the state of our markets that these really important conversations and decisions are governed entirely by individual companies with enormous market share?</p><p><strong>What are some ways the FTC, in particular, can respond to that?</strong></p><p>Within our mandate is antitrust law. One thing I've found really interesting is a lot of the voices that are decrying the actions of the platforms to remove some of this dangerous content are the same ones who resist government antitrust intervention. I think we have to be mindful of the fact that we have laws in place, and we need to be vigorously enforcing those laws that address outsized market share. The FTC has at least one big lawsuit pending on this topic. Colorado Attorney General <a href="https://www.protocol.com/Politics/google-phil-weiser-attorney-general" target="_self">Phil Weiser</a> is leading another one. We will continue to do investigations and bring cases that address misuse of market power under our antitrust laws.</p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="2">
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</div></p><p><strong><strong>Y</strong>ou mentioned the FTC case against Facebook. When you brought that suit, and a number of states brought a similar suit, Facebook <a href="https://www.protocol.com/facebook-antitrust-zuckerberg" target="_self">responded</a> by saying the FTC is looking at all of these past mergers and setting a standard where no company that had a merger settled in the past can be sure it will be permanent. What is your response to that criticism from Facebook?</strong></p><p>I don't find it particularly persuasive. That we've brought one lawsuit that seeks to address two, among many, mergers that happened as part of an ongoing course of conduct does not suggest all mergers in all industries for all companies are forever in legal uncertainty. That is beyond a stretch. </p><p>What we have to do, as enforcers, and what we do in this case, is look at the particular facts at issue and the particular conduct at issue. And it is the case under the law that when the FTC or the Department of Justice review mergers in advance, we don't clear mergers. We don't approve mergers in advance. What we have an opportunity to do is to say: At this moment, are we going to take effort to block the merger? And in fact, in the occasions where we do the investigations and decline to take effort, we don't say we will never take action. We say: Right now, we're not going to take action, but that does not mean if we later understand this conduct to have been illegal we are precluded from bringing a suit. </p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="3">
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</div></p><p>So that should be a disincentive to companies to enter into conduct, whether it's mergers or other conduct, that's illegal. That's what we want to disincentivize, and the threat of future lawsuits is an important part of that incentive structure. </p><p><strong>Beyond the Facebook suit, what do you think the priority of this FTC ought to be, and are there any big mistakes over the last four years that need to be corrected?</strong></p><p>Well, I can tell you what my priorities are. First, I think we do need to be thinking, like everyone across the government is right now, about pandemic response. COVID touches on a lot of areas of the FTC's mandate. There are some obvious ones, like work we've done to stop scams and phony cures, but some that are less obvious, including thinking about the effects of market concentration on, for example, supply chain resiliency. I think we need to be thinking about how all of our lives have moved digitally and the implications that has for privacy and data issues. </p><p>The second thing I would say is a huge priority for me has been making sure that our enforcement efforts continue and sharpen in our long, arduous and very large national task of being anti-racist. So I want us to be, in our enforcement efforts on marginalized communities, focusing on cases where harm disproportionately falls on people of color, whether that is as workers or as consumers. </p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="4">
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</div></p><p>The third, generally, is I think we need to focus on being really strategic with the resources that we have. That means bringing cases that have big effects and can create deterrence across markets, rather than counting how many cases we bring or how many dollars we get. I want us to think very carefully about how each federal dollar we spend can best effectuate deterrence so we don't have to spend more federal dollars bringing the same sort of cases. </p><p>To the extent that I think there are things we could have done better over the last four years, there are a number of cases where I had dissented, because I thought that our resolutions, while they were good enforcement resolutions, didn't go far enough on that deterrence front. I'm concerned that we're going to end up back at the table with the same companies with the same problems if we are not bringing cases and really fighting for the outcome that will best protect consumers from having the same problems again. </p><p><strong>I want to go back to what you said about the anti-racism work. Can you give us an example of that?</strong></p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="5">
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</div></p><p>We brought a really important case under the Equal Credit Opportunity Act last year involving auto financing for violations of fair lending rules and discriminatory behavior on financing. That's one kind of case. This is something we're very comfortable talking about in the consumer protection sphere. We are less comfortable talking about it as a general matter in the antitrust space. But for me, antitrust enforcement is fundamentally about market structure and making sure markets are fair. And one thing we know statistically is that our markets are currently structured in a way that is unfair and unequal for communities of color. So when we make decisions to do enforcement in certain places or not do enforcement in certain places, those decisions are never neutral. They will either help make our society less unequal or they will reinforce existing inequality. </p><p>So the first step for us, from my perspective, is just opening our eyes and understanding the effects of those decisions better. When we choose to bring a case — let's say, for example, a hospital enforcement case, because health care is an area where we know there are huge disparities in access and outcomes across races — we [should bring] cases that improve access, improve quality of care and reduce costs, particularly when the populations being served are communities of color. That's a big thing that we can do, and we already do, to help make our markets more anti-racist. </p><p>I would rather that we be honest and transparent about the effect our actions have and think about those decisions seriously, because we don't have the resources or the capacity to enforce all the violations of the law in all the markets. When we set priorities, for me, the priority has to include helping historically disadvantaged and marginalized communities where we need to equalize our society more effectively.</p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="6">
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</div></p><p><strong>Where do you see the role of the FTC when it comes to mitigating algorithmic bias?</strong></p><p><strong></strong>I think we do need a multi-stakeholder process. I think the FTC is one of the interested stakeholders that should be involved. I also think we need to be critically examining the toolbox we have and thinking creatively about how we can use all the tools in it to address this issue. This is something I spoke about and wrote about a year ago. For me, algorithmic bias is an economic justice issue. We see disparate outcomes coming out of algorithmic decision-making that disproportionately affect and harm Black and brown communities and affect their ability to participate equally in society. That's something we need to address, and we need to think about whether it fits under our unfairness framework, whether we might have rule-making authority that could apply to it or whether we use statutes like the Equal Credit Opportunity Act or the Fair Credit Reporting Act. But I think it's one of those things where really good, creative thinking needs to be applied. </p><p>The issue is new, and it is hard. But one thing I remind myself all the time: My older daughter, who is in Zoom school downstairs in my house right now and hates it, she was in kindergarten last year, and her teacher would say to her all the time, "Kindergarteners can do hard things." And I say to myself: "OK, well if kindergarteners can do hard things, the FTC can do hard things. Government can do hard things, and we have to start trying to tackle the big problems."</p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="7">
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Issie Lapowsky (@issielapowsky) is a senior reporter at Protocol, covering the intersection of technology, politics, and national affairs. Previously, she was a senior writer at Wired, where she covered the 2016 election and the Facebook beat in its aftermath. Prior to that, Issie worked as a staff writer for Inc. magazine, writing about small business and entrepreneurship. She has also worked as an on-air contributor for CBS News and taught a graduate-level course at New York University’s Center for Publishing on how tech giants have affected publishing. Email Issie.
Politics
What tech policy could look like in Biden’s first 100 days
More antitrust laws and bridging the digital divide should be top of mind for the incoming administration.
A coordinated effort to approach tech could help the White House navigate the future more easily.
Photo: Gage Skidmore/Flickr
January 20, 2021
Penelope Blackwell is a reporting fellow at Protocol covering ed-tech, where she reports on the decisions leading up toward the advances of remote learning. Previously, she interned at The Baltimore Sun covering emerging news and produced content for Carnegie-Knight’s News21 documenting hate and bias incidents in the U.S. She is also a recent graduate of Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism and Morgan State University.
January 19, 2021
Although it is too soon to tell with certainty how President-elect Joe Biden will address the questions surrounding tech policy, it is clear that his inaugural transition on Wednesday will affect the world of tech.
Protocol reporters Issie Lapowsky and Emily Birnbaum, virtually met up with panelists Tuesday to discuss what tech policy and regulation could look like in Biden's first 100 days in office — as well as the next four years.
<p>According to Federal Trade Commissioner Rebecca Kelly Slaughter, more antitrust laws that promote competition and protect consumers from anticompetitive mergers and business practices should be implemented. But she also mentioned that much of the backlash on this issue stems from users who "resist government antitrust intervention."</p><p>"What we are seeing is, on the one hand, imminently appropriate actions being taken by companies to stop violence. And on the other, we're seeing really important questions surface about the fact that those decisions are lying in the hands of private companies with enormous market power," Slaughter said.</p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="1">
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</div></p><p>As the FTC seeks to enforce these laws that address outsized market share, investigations are looming. Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser, who is leading a suit of 38 AGs against Google for anticompetitive conduct, said he thinks the depth of Google's totality needs to be examined.</p><p> "We would like to see the DOJ [Department of Justice] broaden their case against Google. We believe that the breadth of Google's anticompetitive conduct needs to be examined because it hurts consumers by limiting choice and hurts innovation," Weiser said, referring to the <a href="https://www.protocol.com/google-justice-department-lawsuit-antitrust" target="_self"><u>DOJ's antitrust suits</u></a> against the company.</p><p>Antitrust enforcement is the big lesson going into the Biden administration, Weiser said. And bridging the digital divide should also be top of mind, said the Brookings Institution Director for the Center of Technology Innovation Nicol Turner Lee.</p><p>"It's not just about tech for certain functions, it's about tech for all of reality. Not just in terms of getting kids online, but the ability to have an environment where people are being trained on how to build the infrastructure and how to use the technology," Lee said. "With over 100,000 business permanently closed as a result of the pandemic, we are going to be trusting tech to be the new economic driver, which means we need more multi-stakeholder conversations."</p>
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Penelope Blackwell is a reporting fellow at Protocol covering ed-tech, where she reports on the decisions leading up toward the advances of remote learning. Previously, she interned at The Baltimore Sun covering emerging news and produced content for Carnegie-Knight’s News21 documenting hate and bias incidents in the U.S. She is also a recent graduate of Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism and Morgan State University.
Politics
'Woke tech' and 'the new slave power': Conservatives gather for Vegas summit
An agenda for the event, hosted by the Claremont Institute, listed speakers including U.S. CTO Michael Kratsios and Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton.
The so-called "Digital Statecraft Summit" was organized by the Claremont Institute. The speakers include U.S. CTO Michael Kratsios and Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, as well as a who's-who of far-right provocateurs.
Photo: David Vives/Unsplash
January 16, 2021
Emily Birnbaum ( @birnbaum_e) is a tech policy reporter with Protocol. Her coverage focuses on the U.S. government's attempts to regulate one of the most powerful industries in the world, with a focus on antitrust, privacy and politics. Previously, she worked as a tech policy reporter with The Hill after spending several months as a breaking news reporter. She is a Bethesda, Maryland native and proud Kenyon College alumna.
Issie Lapowsky (@issielapowsky) is a senior reporter at Protocol, covering the intersection of technology, politics, and national affairs. Previously, she was a senior writer at Wired, where she covered the 2016 election and the Facebook beat in its aftermath. Prior to that, Issie worked as a staff writer for Inc. magazine, writing about small business and entrepreneurship. She has also worked as an on-air contributor for CBS News and taught a graduate-level course at New York University’s Center for Publishing on how tech giants have affected publishing. Email Issie.
January 16, 2021
Conservative investors, political operatives, right-wing writers and Trump administration officials are quietly meeting in Las Vegas this weekend to discuss topics including China, "woke tech" and "the new slave power," according to four people who were invited to attend or speak at the event as well as a copy of the agenda obtained by Protocol.
The so-called "Digital Statecraft Summit" was organized by the Claremont Institute, a conservative think tank that says its mission is to "restore the principles of the American Founding to their rightful, preeminent authority in our national life." A list of speakers for the event includes a combination of past and current government officials as well as a who's who of far-right provocateurs. One speaker, conservative legal scholar John Eastman, rallied the president's supporters at a White House event before the Capitol Hill riot earlier this month. Some others have been associated with racist ideologies.
<p>Government officials listed on the agenda include United States Chief Technology Officer Michael Kratsios and Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, who is leading a multi-state antitrust lawsuit against Google and is currently <a href="https://www.texastribune.org/2020/11/17/texas-ken-paxton-fbi/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">under federal investigation</a>. A source familiar with Kratsios' planned remarks said he intended to speak about artificial intelligence and China. Also on the agenda: Josh Steinman, the White House National Security Council's recently departed senior director for cyber, who now describes himself as the founder of a "stealth startup" on LinkedIn. </p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="1">
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</div></p><p>Newly confirmed FCC Commissioner Nathan Simington was also listed on the agenda, but he told Protocol he did not end up attending. "Despite initial plans to do so, I did not attend or otherwise participate in the Claremont event this weekend, and I did not prepare or submit remarks," Simington said. </p><p>The event is happening as Las Vegas <a href="https://lasvegassun.com/news/2021/jan/13/las-vegas-hospital-capacity-crisis-covid-19-soar/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">experiences a spike in COVID cases</a>.</p><p>Claremont Institute President Ryan Williams refused to answer Protocol's questions about "the new slave power" panel, what COVID-19 safety protocols are in place during the in-person gathering or the range of speaker backgrounds on the agenda.</p><p>"The Claremont Institute has been a leading voice against political censorship by the Big Tech oligarchs, and we have no interest in commenting on an obvious hatchet job by a publication so clearly beholden to the pieties of Silicon Valley," Williams said in an email to Protocol. "Your questions are riddled with false premises, but we welcome the fire."</p><p>The list of speakers included several people with controversial pedigrees. One speaker, blogger Curtis Yarvin, otherwise known as Mencius Moldbug, has written that there is "no question that biological differences made Africans better slaves than indigenous Americans" because they were less susceptible to tropical diseases. He also once <a href="https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/2007/11/why-i-am-not-white-nationalist/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">wrote</a> in a blog post, "although I am not a white nationalist, I am not exactly allergic to the stuff." Yarvin was listed to speak on the panel about "the new slave power," along with Michael Anton, former deputy national security adviser under President Trump, who recently wrote an essay in Claremont's The American Mind publication suggesting that Democrats were "openly talking about staging a coup." </p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="2">
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</div></p><p>Another speaker on the agenda, Adam Candeub, is the current acting head of the National Telecommunications and Information Administration. Previously, as a lawyer, he <a href="https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2020/05/trumps-commerce-department-just-hired-a-lawyer-with-ties-to-white-nationalists/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">represented</a> white nationalist Jared Taylor in a lawsuit against Twitter. Eastman recently retired from his position as a law professor at Chapman University amid an <a href="https://www.ocregister.com/2021/01/13/controversial-law-professor-john-eastman-retires-from-chapman-university/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">uproar</a> over a speech he gave alleging election fraud at the pro-Trump rally preceding the Capitol attack on Jan. 6.</p><p>One of the final speakers listed on the agenda, Soylent founder Rob Rhinehart, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/28/technology/politics-tech-start-ups-culture-war.html?" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">made waves earlier this summer</a> with a 5,300-word blog post about why he <a href="https://www.robrhinehart.com/why-i-am-voting-for-kanye-west/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">supported hip-hop artist Kanye West</a> for president. "I am so sick of politics. Politics are suddenly everywhere," he wrote, before jumping into a lengthy post about Joe Biden, why the media is "actually evil" and the importance of biofuels. </p><p>One attendee said they had not been given any information on who would be speaking as of midday Friday, hours before the event was set to kick off, and Claremont Institute did not appear to be promoting the event on social media Saturday as the first panels began. "Maybe they're trying to keep it under wraps," the attendee said. </p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="3">
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</div></p><p>The attendee said they understood that the tenor of the weekend would be "very critical of tech, very pro some type of intervention."</p><p>"There's going to be some discrepancy and debate around what intervention looks like," the attendee said.</p><p>The other topics on the agenda include a panel on "restoring law" and a fireside chat titled, "What happened?" The summit takes place 10 days after a violent mob of Trump supporters breached the Capitol Hill complex, resulting in five deaths and forcing a reckoning within the Republican Party over its alignment with Trump and right-wing conspiracy theorists.</p>
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Emily Birnbaum ( @birnbaum_e) is a tech policy reporter with Protocol. Her coverage focuses on the U.S. government's attempts to regulate one of the most powerful industries in the world, with a focus on antitrust, privacy and politics. Previously, she worked as a tech policy reporter with The Hill after spending several months as a breaking news reporter. She is a Bethesda, Maryland native and proud Kenyon College alumna.
The current state-of-the-art quantum computers are a tangle of wires. And that can't be the case in the future.
Photo: IBM Research
January 15, 2021
Dan Garisto is a freelance science journalist who specializes in the physical sciences, with an emphasis on particle physics. He has an undergraduate degree in physics and is based in New York.
January 15, 2021
The iconic image of quantum computing is the "Google chandelier," with its hundreds of intricately arranged copper wires descending like the tendrils of a metallic jellyfish. It's a grand and impressive device, but in that tangle of wires lurks a big problem.
"If you're thinking about the long-term prospects of quantum computing, that image should be just terrifying," Jim Clarke, the director of quantum hardware at Intel, told Protocol.
<p>The problem is scale. When your quantum computer is <a href="https://www.protocol.com/manuals/quantum-computing/noisy-intermediate-scale-nisq" target="_self">based on just a few dozen qubits</a>, it's fine to designate one or more wires to each qubit in order to send and receive signals. But quantum computers are growing, and they will need to reach <a href="https://www.protocol.com/manuals/quantum-computing/next-steps-advances-in-quantum-computing" target="_self">thousands, if not millions, of qubits to truly be useful</a> for <a href="https://www.protocol.com/manuals/quantum-computing/machine-learning-ai-quantum-computing-move-beyond-hype" target="_blank">companies and organizations</a> — at which point, using wires is going to become a literal knotty problem. </p><p>"It's no longer sufficient to just be able to make a qubit device and talk about the properties of a qubit," said David Reilly, a quantum researcher at Microsoft. "It's all about scale. And it's all about the infrastructure that you need to get there."</p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="1">
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</div></p><p>Multiple companies investing in quantum computers are now looking toward this future, and trying to develop better methods of controlling their qubits. These quantum control chips are similar to the silicon wafers produced using CMOS technology, with a few alterations to make them work at ultracold temperatures and with qubits. </p><p>In December, <a href="https://newsroom.intel.com/news/intel-debuts-2nd-gen-horse-ridge-cryogenic-quantum-control-chip/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Intel announced</a> its Horse Ridge 2 control chip, which builds off its predecessor to perform more specific applications, such as manipulating and reading qubits. Research <a href="https://arxiv.org/abs/1912.01299" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">soon to be published</a> in Nature Electronics looks at Microsoft's quantum control chip, which operates at the coldest temperatures yet: a tenth of a degree above absolute zero. But Microsoft and Intel aren't alone; other companies have also been developing quantum control chips. In 2019, Google debuted <a href="https://ai.googleblog.com/2019/02/on-path-to-cryogenic-control-of-quantum.html" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">its own</a>.</p><p>The goal is to help build the <a href="https://www.protocol.com/manuals/quantum-computing/next-steps-advances-in-quantum-computing" target="_self">infrastructure required for a future quantum computer</a> that has actual applications for corporations and research institutes, not just one that can <a href="https://www.protocol.com/manuals/quantum-computing/supremacy-google-debatable-milestone" target="_self">out-speed classical supercomputers in proof-of-principle tests</a>. </p><h3>Going wireless
</h3><p>Quantum computers rely on unsettling properties of the quantum world, such as superposition: the combination of states exemplified famously by Schrödinger's feline, which can be neither dead nor alive, but exists in some superposition of both states. Quantum effects like superposition are fragile, and tend to collapse out in our noisy, warm, macroscopic world. To preserve the qubits' delicate quantum states, they are kept extremely cold, usually below 1 Kelvin (about -457 degrees Fahrenheit)</p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="2">
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</div></p><p>To achieve those temperatures, qubits are kept in dilution fridges, which use liquid helium to keep their contents ultracold. Those devices have limited internal space and limited cooling power, both of which are hampered by a nest of wires. To explain the impetus for better quantum control, Clarke uses an analogy. </p><p>"Imagine that you are in charge of 100 dogs, and you have to take them for a walk," Clarke says. "Do you take them on 100 separate leashes? Or do you have one leash that fans out and do it more efficiently?" </p><p>In classical computers, control chips are small silicon wafers with some input and output pins that connect to billions of transistors. This CMOS technology is well-known, so it's tempting to slap a classical control chip onto a quantum computer, but it's not feasible. There are two main problems: First, quantum control chips have to operate at extremely low temperatures, so circuits must be designed to dissipate far less heat. Second, quantum control chips require alterations to interface with qubits, which are far more finicky than their classical counterparts. </p><p>Solving both problems entails reworking control chips: though hopefully not so much that they can't still be fabricated at scale, with traditional silicon manufacturing techniques.</p><p>Intel claims its Horse Ridge series (named for Horse Ridge, one of the coldest places in Oregon) operates at 4 K — above the temperature of the qubits it can control — and seeks to build on the company's preexisting expertise with semiconductor technology. While Horse Ridge 1 was designed for a wide variety of qubits, the recently unveiled Horse Ridge 2 focuses on expanded applications for spin qubits, Intel's preferred choice in <a href="https://www.protocol.com/manuals/quantum-computing/nobody-agrees-on-how-to-build-quantum-computer" target="_self">the qubit wars</a>. The goal, according to Clarke, is to "customize these low-temperature control chips for different applications." </p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="3">
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</div></p><p>Google's control chip is similar, operating at 3 K, but is designed for yet another type of qubit, called a transmon. The chip has been tested on a few qubits, but not the 53-qubit Sycamore device that <a href="https://www.protocol.com/manuals/quantum-computing/supremacy-google-debatable-milestone" target="_self">made headlines</a> in 2019. <a href="https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?arnumber=8865458" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Research from Google</a> has focused on reducing heat dissipation from the quantum control chip. Where a classical control chip outputs about one watt of heat, Google's dissipates less than two thousandths of a watt. "Getting power down is going to be very important for any of these approaches," Joseph Bardin, an engineering professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and a researcher at Google, wrote in an email to Protocol. </p><p>Microsoft's quantum control chip relies on similar semiconductor technology, but it is designed to work with topological qubits, though it can be adapted for other qubit architectures. (Worth noting: Topological qubits are theoretical, and have not actually been demonstrated.) </p><p>Where it really departs from Intel's and Google's designs is temperature. Microsoft's quantum control chip can dissipate less than a millionth of a watt, allowing it to stay at a chilly 0.1 K, about the same temperature as the qubits themselves.</p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="4">
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</div></p><h3>Is it hot in here?</h3><p>The companies insist on the advantages of their own approaches.</p><p>"What is really unique is that our signals are generated at low temperature," Intel's Clarke said. By putting its classical CPU — which sends signals to the control chip — with the control chip at these temperatures, Intel hopes to avoid the noisiness inherent to signals generated by CPUs at high temperatures. Microsoft's Reilly disputes this claim of uniqueness, and notes that Microsoft has generated its signals at temperatures as low as 1 K. </p><p>For Reilly, running the control chip at 3 or 4 K — as Google and Intel do — is much too hot: Though the difference between 0.1 K and 4 K may sound small, it's also the difference between the quantum world and the classical world. By operating the quantum control chip at the same temperature as the qubits, Reilly hopes to avoid the bottleneck between shuffling information from quantum to classical or vice versa. </p><p>"If their control system is at 4 Kelvin, then you still have this I/O bottleneck," Reilly said. "You still have a bird's nest of cables that run from four Kelvin to the millikelvin stage where the qubits are." One possible solution to that would be to bring the qubits up to 4 K — and there is <a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2170-7" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">some progress</a> in that direction.</p><p>All three companies will be presenting updates at the International Solid-State Circuits Conference, which will be <a href="http://isscc.org/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">held virtually</a> Feb. 13 through Feb. 22.</p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="5">
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</div></p><p>For now, though, no one has remotely enough qubits to necessitate these quantum control chips, let alone determine which of those compromises is preferable. Testing is still done on a few qubits, or devices that model qubit behaviors — not even the full ensemble of dozens of qubits that make up the current cutting-edge of quantum computers.</p><p>At any rate, quantum computing is still in its heady early days, where firsts are being made, and — despite some corporate jousting about progress — demonstrating the possibility of the technology often takes precedence over long-term plans to make it practical. And at this stage, we don't even know what all those roadblocks might be.</p><p>"Wouldn't it be ironic if it turned out that making the qubits turned out to be a little bit of a challenge?" Reilly asked. "And the real roadblocks were in the systems integration and the construction of cryogenic control at scale?"</p>
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Dan Garisto is a freelance science journalist who specializes in the physical sciences, with an emphasis on particle physics. He has an undergraduate degree in physics and is based in New York.
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