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August 13, 2020
The long-simmering spat between Fortnite maker Epic Games and Apple boiled over on Thursday, leaving Fortnite kicked out of the App Store and Apple with a new lawsuit on its hands. Google then also removed Fortnite from its Google Play Store, but it can still be downloaded directly from Epic. And once again, Epic had a ready-to-go lawsuit that it filed against Google.
The clash started when Fortnite announced the "Fortnite Mega Drop." Advertised as a way for players to save money when purchasing V-Bucks in the game, it gave users the option to buy through Apple's payment processing system for the full price, or buy directly from Epic for a savings of up to 20%. Developers are banned from processing their own payments when users buy digital goods, although apps selling physical products like shoes are allowed. Epic's inability to process its own payments or build a competing gaming store has long irked its CEO Tim Sweeney, who has called the 30% cut Apple takes as "absolutely abhorrent."
The "Mega Drop" release was an obvious and knowing violation of App Store rules and a clear taunt to Apple to see if it would enforce them. And Apple did.
Apple pulled Fortnite from the App Store just a few hours later. "Today, Epic Games took the unfortunate step of violating the App Store guidelines that are applied equally to every developer and designed to keep the store safe for our users. As a result their Fortnite app has been removed from the store," Apple said in a statement. "Epic enabled a feature in its app which was not reviewed or approved by Apple, and they did so with the express intent of violating the App Store guidelines regarding in-app payments that apply to every developer who sells digital goods or services."
Epic clearly knew that was coming, and so that wasn't the end of it. Instead, Epic turned around and filed legal action against Apple, asking for injunctive relief and an end to what it calls anti-competitive actions in "two distinct, multi-billion dollar markets: (i) the iOS App Distribution Market, and (ii) the iOS In-App Payment Processing Market." It's not seeking any monetary damages.
"Apple's removal of Fortnite is yet another example of Apple flexing its enormous power in order to impose unreasonable restraints and unlawfully maintain its 100% monopoly over the iOS In-app Payment Processing Market," Epic said in the lawsuit.
The capstone on the whole thing came when Epic hosted a party inside Fortnite, called the "Nineteen Eighty-Fortnite," which brought players into the game for a short, virtually shot-for-shot remake of Apple's famous "1984" ad, only this time with Fortnite characters fighting back against the evil Apple empire.
"Epic Games has defied the App Store Monopoly," the scrolling text at the end of the short video said. "In retaliation, Apple is blocking Fortnite from a billion devices. Join the fight to stop 2020 from becoming '1984.'" Epic asked the same of the courts in its lawsuit: "Epic respectfully requests this Court to enjoin Apple from continuing to impose its anti-competitive restrictions on the iOS ecosystem and ensure 2020 is not like '1984.'"
While it's response to Google didn't have a coordinated video campaign (or at least one that we've seen yet), Epic's lawsuit does call out Google's original motto of "Don't Be Evil." Google didn't comment on the lawsuit, but said it looked forward to working with Epic and bring Fortnite back to the Play Store.
"Twenty-two years later, Google has relegated its motto to nearly an afterthought, and is using its size to do evil upon competitors, innovators, customers, and users in a slew of markets it has grown to monopolize," Epic said in its complaint.
Update: This story was updated at 5 p.m. PT to reflect Google kicking Fortnite off the Play Store, again at 6:45 p.m. PT to reflect Epic's lawsuit against Google, and at 8:15 p.m. PT to add a response from Google.
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Biz Carson
Biz Carson ( @bizcarson) is a San Francisco-based reporter at Protocol, covering Silicon Valley with a focus on startups and venture capital. Previously, she reported for Forbes and was co-editor of Forbes Next Billion-Dollar Startups list. Before that, she worked for Business Insider, Gigaom, and Wired and started her career as a newspaper designer for Gannett.
People
Making the economy work for Black entrepreneurs
Funding for Black-owned startups needs to grow. That's just the start.
"There is no quick fix to close the racial wealth and opportunity gaps, but there are many ways companies can help," said Mastercard's Michael Froman.
Photo: DigitalVision/Getty Images
February 26, 2021
Michael Froman serves as vice chairman and president, Strategic Growth for Mastercard. He and his team drive inclusive growth efforts and partner across public and private sectors to address major societal and economic issues. From 2013 to 2017, Mike served as the U.S. trade representative, President Barack Obama’s principal adviser and negotiator on international trade and investment issues. He is a distinguished fellow of the Council on Foreign Relations and a member of the board of directors of The Walt Disney Company.
February 26, 2021
Michael Froman is the vice chairman and president of Strategic Growth for Mastercard.
When Tanya Van Court's daughter shared her 9th birthday wish list — a bike and an investment account — Tanya had a moment of inspiration. She wondered whether helping more kids get excited about saving for goals and learning simple financial principles could help them build a pathway to financial security. With a goal of reaching every kid in America, she founded Goalsetter, a savings and financial literacy app for kids. Last month, Tanya brought in backers including NBA stars Kevin Durant and Chris Paul, raising $3.9 million in seed funding.
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Reaching this milestone is a testament to Tanya's perseverance and resilience as she, like many other Black women founders, struggle to find institutional investors. Our financial system is simply not set up to help Black entrepreneurs launch a business. Most new businesses are initially funded from savings and home equity, but the persistent racial wealth gap in our country places Black would-be entrepreneurs at a dramatic disadvantage since many don't have those assets available. On top of that, of the approximately $625 billion in venture capital invested since 2015, only around $15 billion went to Black and Latinx founders; that's just 2.4% of funding. For Black women founders specifically, the numbers plunge to 0.27% of funding over the past <a href="https://www.projectdiane.com/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">two years</a>.
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This is not an issue that will resolve itself; we need to be deliberate about opening doors and bringing down barriers, not just to solve for one Black or minority-owned business at a time, but to rebuild a system that gives everyone a chance. Capitalism has lifted millions of people out of poverty and improved their quality of life, but it has also left many behind. As we now rebuild our national economy, we need to ensure future growth is inclusive, and that small businesses — the backbone of our economy — recover in a way that lifts up promising Black-owned startups at every point in their journey.
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There is no quick fix to close the racial wealth and opportunity gaps, but there are many ways companies can help. Here are four insights we've learned from years of working with startups and community organizations.
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<strong>Invest in the network.</strong> Startups like Oakland-based <a href="https://www.mycnote.com/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">CNote</a> are working to channel capital to underserved micro and small businesses through a vast network of Black-owned banks, minority credit unions and community development financial institutions that have direct access to many local communities. However, these market innovators are hampered by complex governance requirements that Fortune 200 companies have to put in place before they will do business. We need to make it easier for new players like CNote to pass procurement hurdles and get into the pipeline so they can grow. By helping them on the back end, it opens them up to partnering with large corporates from all across the country.
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<strong>Open up access to markets.</strong> For those Black-owned businesses that do secure a first round of funding, their growth trajectory often slows when it comes to entering new markets. A startup's ability to scale increases exponentially when larger companies with trusted relationships not only make introductions to its partners but also offer the startup's services as part of a proposed solution to customers. This is an approach that has helped <a href="https://mocafi.com/about/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">MoCaFi</a>, a New York-based, Black-owned startup that offers banking services to lower- and moderate-income communities, to start working with local city leaders in new markets. This work can be mutually beneficial for corporations: The ability to deliver effective support to underserved communities increases when the right partners with the right solutions are brought to the table.
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<strong>Digitizing access to capital.</strong> Black entrepreneurs are being denied or given smaller bank loans nearly <a href="https://www.federalreserve.gov/publications/2017-september-availability-of-credit-to-small-businesses.htm" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">twice the rate of</a> their white peers — 54% compared to 30%, respectively. Microfinance institutions and CDFIs have stepped in to fill this void, supporting applications for those previously denied loans. However, the demand exceeds the resources and tools available, and getting funds to those who need it urgently can be challenging. New digital tools can be transformative in this situation if we could accelerate access for these organizations. Many rely on slow paper-based processes, but through the digitization of both applications and distribution of loans, CDFIs like the <a href="https://crfusa.com/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Community Reinvestment Fund</a> and micro-finance institutions like <a href="https://www.grameenamerica.org/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Grameen America</a> have been able to process requests faster, more securely and for more businesses, throughout the pandemic.
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<strong>Going all in. </strong>Finally, one of the most important lessons we've learned is that the programs and partnerships used to tackle these issues can't be just for a moment in time or a single intervention. For maximum impact, companies need to be all in with the full breadth of their assets — funding, product pilots, supplier practices, consulting services, data insights — as this is how to drive a catalytic impact and create a more sustainable, inclusive digital economy.
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As more businesses, CEOs, corporate treasurers and venture capitalists join in this effort, we can collectively help bridge that wealth and opportunity gap. Startups can't scale up if they aren't given that first chance.
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As we are reminded during this Black History Month, the problems of racial economic disparity have existed for too long, and although the challenge seems daunting, we are confident that with perseverance we can successfully build a more just and equitable economy. Our early progress matters, and we should make every effort to build on the first steps by coming together across sectors and organizations so that amazing ideas like Tanya's are embraced from the outset.
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Michael Froman serves as vice chairman and president, Strategic Growth for Mastercard. He and his team drive inclusive growth efforts and partner across public and private sectors to address major societal and economic issues. From 2013 to 2017, Mike served as the U.S. trade representative, President Barack Obama’s principal adviser and negotiator on international trade and investment issues. He is a distinguished fellow of the Council on Foreign Relations and a member of the board of directors of The Walt Disney Company.
Sponsored Content
Building better relationships in the age of all-remote work
How Stripe, Xero and ModSquad work with external partners and customers in Slack channels to build stronger, lasting relationships.
Image: Original by Damian Zaleski
February 21, 2021
February 8, 2021
Every business leader knows you can learn the most about your customers and partners by meeting them face-to-face. But in the wake of Covid-19, the kinds of conversations that were taking place over coffee, meals and in company halls are now relegated to video conferences—which can be less effective for nurturing relationships—and email.
Email inboxes, with hard-to-search threads and siloed messages, not only slow down communication but are also an easy target for scammers. Earlier this year, Google reported more than 18 million daily malware and phishing emails related to Covid-19 scams in just one week and more than 240 million daily spam messages.
<p>To keep the lines of communication wide open in this new reality, organizations are adopting new cloud solutions at a rate CIOs expected to see years from now. In fact, 79% of CIOs agree that the pandemic will force their organizations to digitally transform faster than planned, according to <a href="https://slack.com/blog/transformation/people-partners-systems-slack" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">J.P. Morgan</a>. </p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="1">
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</div></p><p>But executive leaders know it takes more than just adopting a communication platform or software bundle to build relationships remotely. You have to find the <em>right</em> solution that meets both your internal and external collaboration needs. That's why competitive businesses today are turning to Slack, the <a href="https://slack.com/features/channels" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">channel-based messaging platform, </a>to close communication gaps with partners and customers in the age of remote work. Companies can securely collaborate with external parties using <a href="https://slack.com/help/articles/360017938993-What-is-a-channel" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Slack channels</a>, a single place to share files and messages, in the same <a href="https://slack.com/resources/using-slack/setting-up-a-shared-channel" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Slack workspace</a> through <a href="http://slack.com/connect" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Slack Connect</a>.</p><p>With Slack Connect, organizations can build stronger customer and partner relationships through real-time communication. And unlike email—which leaves users open to the risk of spam and phishing—companies and external parties receive communications only from <a href="https://slackhq.com/introducing-new-layers-of-enterprise-grade-security" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">verified members in Slack channels</a>. Plus, Slack workspace administrators can maintain control over data and monitor external access. </p><p>Here's a closer look at how teams at Stripe, Xero and ModSquad are using Slack Connect to engage customers, prospects and partners in real-time and close deals faster. </p><h4>Stripe: Expediting sales deals while building lasting relationships with customers</h4><p><a href="https://stripe.com/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Stripe</a> is an online payment provider with a mission to support e-commerce. The Stripe sales team works with early-stage startups all the way through global Fortune 500 companies, and uses Slack Connect to engage with customers, keep communication organized and teams in sync, and jump on sales opportunities.</p><p>Jeanne DeWitt Grosser, head of Americas revenue and growth at Stripe, says communicating with prospective customers in Slack has been instrumental in maintaining engagement and closing deals.</p><p class="pull-quote">"Historically, the gold standard of a deep relationship in sales was getting the person on text," says DeWitt Grosser. "Now the gold standard is getting them into a Slack channel."</p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="2">
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</div></p><p>Usually at the beginning of a sale, DeWitt Grosser explains, reps used to double down on communication using the "law of 2x." Essentially, you start with a meeting and then follow up a week later. But this strategy no longer makes the cut: A lot could change in a week, and Slack is more in line with the tempo of the digital workplace. </p><p>"In Slack channels, the dialogue with the prospect happens in real time, as opposed to the next time you align your schedules," DeWitt Grosser says. "This kind of personal, persistent connection grows customer loyalty and retention."</p><p>Often sales reps have to communicate with a variety of departments to seal the deal. Instead of emailing them separately and creating silos, Stripe's account executives and solution architects set up a Slack channel with key customer stakeholders, like developers, the head of payments and a finance representative. </p><p>"When you need to move quickly, email is not the right format: It's more formal and responses take longer," says James Dyett, Stripe's head of global product sales and payments optimizations. "Slack has super powers. It's a much better experience." </p><h4>Xero: Working with external partners like they're on the same team</h4><p>If the pandemic has taught us one thing, it's that relationships matter. Whether it's launching a marketing campaign with a partner or hiring contractors to complete a specific project, we can't—and shouldn't—try to do everything ourselves. <br><br>When it comes to nurturing partnerships in the midst of the pandemic, <a href="https://www.xero.com/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Xero</a>, a cloud-based accounting software company, affirms that working in Slack Connect has been a game changer. Justine Wallendorf, New Zealand partner marketing manager at Xero, says Slack Connect helped her team launch a joint online marketing campaign with partners, <a href="https://www.figured.com/en-us/figured-xero" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Figured</a> and <a href="http://paysauce" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Paysauce</a>. </p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="3">
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</div></p><p>The three companies were offering a complete software solution for farmers looking to manage their business digitally. By coming together in one Slack channel, #xero-partners, the sales and marketing teams across all three businesses could connect and ensure alignment on: </p><ul class="ee-ul"><li>Immediate universal access to all campaign details</li><li>Consistent messaging across sales enablement deliverables, such as one pagers and slide decks</li><li>Quick feedback and turnaround times for deliverables</li><li>Clear leadership signoffs</li></ul><p class="pull-quote">"Working in Slack Connect guaranteed that everyone was beating the same drum and speaking the same language, positioning our partnership as best as possible in the market," Wallendorf says.</p><h4>ModSquad: Winning customer loyalty with exceptional customer support</h4><p>With so much uncertainty in the world, efficient and reliable customer support is akin to a safe harbor in a storm. That's why Slack customer, <a href="https://modsquad.com/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">ModSquad</a> has its support teams troubleshoot customer issues in real time with Slack Connect.</p><p>As a customer experience outsourcer, ModSquad knows good customer service. Each day, ModSquad's global crew of experts—the Mods—help their customers engage with their audiences online through customer support, content moderation, community management and social media. </p><p>ModSquad works with its clients in Slack Connect to set up service level agreements and incorporate support dashboards. With the <a href="https://slack.com/apps/A0108APQFQC-geckoboard" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Geckoboard Slack integration</a>, ModSquad monitors clients' incoming calls and chats—without ever leaving Slack. Whenever the team sees an uptick in activity or service impacting issues, they can quickly alert clients and internal teams for quick resolution. The team also relies on a <a href="https://slack.com/apps/A9WFQ3M0B-zendesk" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Zendesk Slack integration</a> to track service desk tickets, troubleshoot and resolve issues.</p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="4">
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</div></p><p>According to Steve Henry, senior vice president, client services at ModSquad, Slack channels also help build a culture of transparent communication and trust with clients.</p><p>"Establishing trust with our clients is very important, and Slack provides a crucial component for all of our efforts" Henry says. "With Slack, we can provide world-class support solutions and improvements for our clients, driving efficiencies while growing their business in the process."</p><h4>In an all-remote world, Slack Connect builds strong partnerships</h4><p>Slack Connect is available for <a href="https://slack.com/pricing/paid-vs-free" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">all paid plans</a>. If you're already a customer but new to Slack Connect, feel free to <a href="http://slack.com/contact" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">reach out</a> or learn more on <a href="https://slack.com/resources/using-slack/setting-up-a-shared-channel" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">how to get started</a>. And if you want to see how others are using Slack Connect to work with external partners, check out a few of our recent <a href="https://slack.com/blog/collections/slack-connect-shared-channels-shared-success" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">customer stories</a>. </p>
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People
Citizen’s plan to keep people safe (and beat COVID-19) with an app
Citizen CEO Andrew Frame talks privacy, safety, coronavirus and the future of the neighborhood watch.
Citizen added COVID-19 tracking to its app over the summer — but its bigger plans got derailed.
Photo: Citizen
February 24, 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.
February 24, 2021
Citizen is an app built on the idea that transparency is a good thing. It's the place users — more than 7 million of them, in 28 cities with many more to come soon — can find out when there's a crime, a protest or an incident of any kind nearby. (Just yesterday, it alerted me, along with 17,900 residents of Washington, D.C., that it was about to get very windy. It did indeed get windy.) Users can stream or upload video of what's going on, locals can chat about the latest incidents and everyone's a little safer at the end of the day knowing what's happening in their city.
At least, that's how CEO Andrew Frame sees it. Critics of Citizen say the app is creating hordes of voyeurs, incentivizing people to run into dangerous situations just to grab a video, and encouraging racial profiling and other problematic behaviors all under the guise of whatever "safety" means. They say the app promotes paranoia, alerting users to things that they don't actually need to know about. (That the app was originally called "Vigilante" doesn't help its case.)
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</div></p><p>Above all, Citizen raises questions: When does safety trump privacy? What are people willing to give up or risk in order to keep themselves and their loved ones safe? What does "safety" even mean in an increasingly digital world?</p><p>Frame joined the <a href="https://www.podpage.com/sourcecode/" target="_blank">Source Code podcast</a> to discuss all that and more. He talked about the app's history, what it means to promote safety above all else, how his company tried — and failed — to fight COVID-19 long before other tech companies got involved and what it means to be a good Citizen citizen.</p><div class="rm-embed embed-media"><iframe frameborder="no" height="200px" scrolling="no" seamless="" src="https://player.simplecast.com/1cb18adc-4514-4097-b9a5-3c9a5c2e5408?dark=true" width="100%"></iframe></div><p><em>The following excerpts from our conversation have been lightly edited for length and clarity.</em><br></p><p><strong>Citizen has had sort of a windy history, so maybe go all the way back to the beginning of the product and the company. What was the thing you were trying to build when you started out building it?</strong></p><p>I wanted to build something that was consumer [facing], because that's where my passion lies. And I feel like that's the only thing I'm sort of good at. It had to be mobile first, network-effect driven, with a very noble mission so that once the network effect activates, hopefully, it becomes the gift that keeps on giving. </p><p>As soon as I identified wanting to build a safety product, the question was, how do you get to market with a product that keeps people safe? There was a moment where I was sitting outside, and I was just thinking about, what is the Trojan horse to build a safety system? And it just dawned on me: I think all of us remember playing with police scanners, and listening to police. It's this incredible data stream that is filled with people in need of help. And it was just this closed system that had open access for listening. When a fire hits a building, nobody knows except the fire department. Why don't the 1,000 people inside of the building know that their building is on fire? The information is right there, transmitted right through the walls of that building. </p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="2">
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</div></p><p>And so it just instantly hit me: Let's open this system, create a trusted shared safety system where police and civilians and everybody has access to the same information. There are so many great byproducts of creating this open, shared system, one of which is you get the people out of the burning building. You get the kidnapped kid back because you got the whole neighborhood engaged. You eliminate police brutality, because now you've built what I call "conditional transparency." It's not a radical transparency. It's a conditional transparency, meaning the transparency hits once a kid is missing. It doesn't mean there's overhead planes surveilling, there's no surveillance state in this. It's simply transparency when it is urgently needed. And that was kind of the genesis of this thing.</p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="3">
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</div></p><p><strong>I'm getting ahead of myself here, but you kind of already got into what over the years has been complicated in how people think about Citizen. The reason to not tell the people in the building that there's a fire is that you don't want to cause a panic, right? And the reason to not tell people in the neighborhood is that you don't want them running toward the fire, because some people will run toward a fire.</strong> </p><p><strong>All the pushback I've ever seen about Citizen has basically been about that fundamental question. Is it productive to have all of this information given to everyone all the time? At some point, do you just have to decide that, on balance, you believe it is?</strong></p><p>You know, there would be no innovation if people were just fixated on worst-case scenarios. On any product, we can think about worst-case scenarios. And of course, there are valid reasons. But it's not going to stop you from building something great. </p><p>Just take Uber, right? I was taught not to hitchhike, that'd be a very dangerous thing. And if we were all in a room thinking about what happens when you just allow people to hitchhike with their neighbors, and build it as a global platform? People would say, "Oh, my gosh, that's the worst idea of all time."</p><p><strong>A lot of people did say that about Uber!</strong> </p><p>Yeah. So you know, it's just so easy to just fixate on the worst-case scenario. This is no longer an idea. This is something that is prevalent across 28 cities, we have ZIP codes, where 60[%], 70[%], 80% of the entire ZIP code are active Citizen users. We don't have those stories. Believe me, I was also terrified of this. At the beginning, it gave me and the team a huge amount of anxiety, because we also thought about the worst-case scenario. But we also thought about the best-case scenario, which is why we built this and why we're scaling. And it far exceeds the unfounded fear of some of these worst-case scenarios.</p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="4">
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</div></p><p><strong>I feel like COVID has become kind of a bigger part of Citizen than I would have expected. Rewinding to the early days of the pandemic, was it obvious to you that Citizen needed to be part of this, needed to help be the solution here?</strong></p><p>At first, everybody in the company wanted to pitch COVID ideas. It wasn't until we realized just the architectural model of contact tracing — a very simple idea of just enabling Bluetooth and allowing everybody's Bluetooth radio to say hello to each other as you come in close physical contact — that it was like, OK, wait a sec, we already have distribution. We had 30% of New York City on the app back in March. </p><p>We just went, "Oh, my goodness, we have the safety platform, all we have to do is ask these 30% of New Yorkers to turn on Bluetooth." Suddenly, we have the largest and most dense contact-tracing system in any big city in the world, in ground zero, which was New York at the time. </p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="5">
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</div></p><p>Unfortunately, we never got the approval to launch it. </p><p><strong>What happened?</strong> </p><p>It's a complicated story. Apple and Google had their own plans. We came forward with this architecture, and we needed help. We needed allies. We needed Apple, we needed Google, we needed the government. </p><p>We created a product that integrated at-home testing and contact tracing. Because we knew those were the two tactics on how to manage this here in the U.S. Our ask was basically, a) obviously we need to get it in the App Store; b) we wanted the government to pay for all that at-home testing for the U.S. Labcorp was working on their at-home test kit. And basically, you could just ship a test kit to anybody that asks for it within 24 hours, saliva sample, they send it back, and the result is delivered in the app. So it'll say, "You're negative for COVID." </p><p>Keep in mind, this is back in March that we had this. We built prototypes and everything inside the company, we were taking tests and getting the results in the app. Now, if you are positive, it would automatically inform all of the people that your Bluetooth recently saw that "you have had a potential exposure to COVID." Those people would then be offered a free test that would show up the next day. You can imagine if we partnered with Amazon on the logistics side, where Amazon is trucking these. It's like OK, tech, come together and let's go, like, what can we do about COVID? There was zero government support. None whatsoever. We needed them to pay for the tests. It'd be great if Amazon did the logistics. But we called it the "testing-tracing flywheel." And this is, again, back in March, people had never even heard of contact tracing.</p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="6">
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</div></p><p>We didn't get the support. We didn't get the alliances, we were on our own on this one. And the government, there was a Contact Tracing Task Force, we were selected as the app to provide contact tracing to America, before [the task force] was suddenly just disbanded and dissolved and just went away one day.</p><p><strong>My question was going to be, wouldn't this be a useful time to do things like partner with local governments, but you're saying you did, and then it fell apart?</strong></p><p>Well, there was no official partnership. But we were told that this was by far the best system for America. And there were just a bunch of meetings that didn't really go anywhere. And then suddenly, you know, they put a bunch of great technology entrepreneurs on the task force, who we knew! We knew all these people, and it was great. Sometimes government needs entrepreneurs to step up and solve problems. And in this case, it seemed like something was going to happen, but then it was just instantly disbanded with no plan. </p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="7">
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</div></p><p><strong>Looking back now with almost a year of hindsight, was there anything else you could have done? Should you have just pushed through and said, "We'll figure something else out, screw all the rest of you?"</strong></p><p>No, we couldn't, we didn't have approval from the app stores. Right now, innovation is no longer open. You have to go through the app stores, and they will decide if your innovation can reach the world. This is not how it was, pre-mobile. With the internet, you can build anything you want. And you have an open, uncensored, unfiltered internet. And with app stores, you don't. You must get through the process.</p><p><strong>This is actually sort of a perfect example of the kind of tension we were talking about earlier. You have an obvious societal good. No one is going to argue that curbing the spread of COVID-19 is not a good thing. We're all on the same page about that. But then, and this is what I think we spent maybe six months too long debating, you have all of the privacy implications of that. What does it mean that there's now a system that knows that not only do I have COVID, but who gave it to me and where they got it from? Were those the kinds of debates that you were having, even back in March? Was that the holdup?</strong></p><p>That actually annoyed me, because I just don't think that COVID was this mass privacy thing. All of the data was protected, nobody would know. But most likely, just through the social interaction, like people, every person that has COVID has told me. It's not like, "Oh, my gosh, this person has COVID. Nobody can know." </p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="8">
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</div></p><p>And we didn't expose the name. We did expose the location. There was a big fight even with the app stores, because we thought that the location was super relevant. Why? Because it protects more people. If you went to a superspreader dinner, it should say, here's the time and place you got COVID. We can say Friday night, 8 p.m., here's the location. We're not going to tell you who, but you're like, "Oh, that was the birthday party." What's the next step? Tell everybody at the birthday party that there was an exposure there, because not everybody has the contact tracer. </p><p>This was about beating COVID. I just think that there was this red herring around privacy that stopped everything. Privacy became the fundamental discussion, when it's like, OK, we won on the privacy side, but how are we doing as a nation now? Printing trillions of dollars, small businesses all going out of business. What mattered more: this privacy thing that seems to be extremely unfounded and a red herring, or beating COVID?</p><p><strong>That's the big existential question around all of this, right? And it goes back to what you were saying before about best- and worst-case scenarios. There's just always going to be a tension between privacy and safety, right? Even as we talk about things like encryption, there's always going to be that tension. And at some point, all you can do is pick a side and be clear about which side you've picked.</strong></p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="9">
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</div></p><p>Yeah. I mean, you've got to use judgment. And this is really where mission comes in. What is this privacy preservation that we're even talking about? I mean, the amount of tracking going on by Big Tech is thousands of times more privacy-invading than the COVID thing we were talking about. </p><p>The fact that we just got so sucked up talking about privacy preservation being the only issue, when in the meantime, COVID is spreading rapidly and just destroying families and small businesses and American restaurants that'll never come back. I think that the focus was on the wrong area.</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.
Transforming 2021
Blockchain, QR codes and your phone: the race to build vaccine passports
Digital verification systems could give people the freedom to work and travel. Here's how they could actually happen.
One day, you might not need to carry that physical passport around, either.
Photo: CommonPass
February 23, 2021
Mike Murphy ( @mcwm) is the director of special projects at Protocol, focusing on the industries being rapidly upended by technology and the companies disrupting incumbents. Previously, Mike was the technology editor at Quartz, where he frequently wrote on robotics, artificial intelligence, and consumer electronics.
February 23, 2021
There will come a time, hopefully in the near future, when you'll feel comfortable getting on a plane again. You might even stop at the lounge at the airport, head to the regional office when you land and maybe even see a concert that evening. This seemingly distant reality will depend upon vaccine rollouts continuing on schedule, an open-sourced digital verification system and, amazingly, the blockchain.
Several countries around the world have begun to prepare for what comes after vaccinations. Swaths of the population will be vaccinated before others, but that hasn't stopped industries decimated by the pandemic from pioneering ways to get some people back to work and play. One of the most promising efforts is the idea of a "vaccine passport," which would allow individuals to show proof that they've been vaccinated against COVID-19 in a way that could be verified by businesses to allow them to travel, work or relax in public without a great fear of spreading the virus.
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</div></p><p>But building a system that everyone agrees with — and can access — is no small task. There are several companies working on competing projects to verify vaccinations. But beyond that, there are more than a few hurdles that could prevent vaccine passports from succeeding, from antiquated medical records systems to interoperability issues and privacy concerns. Here's how they could actually succeed. </p><h3>Competing projects, similar standards</h3><p>Pretty much since the first blockchain white paper, people have been looking for perfect examples of where a distributed, immutable ledger could be valuable. There's obviously the push to use it for currencies, and companies have tried to use it for things like tracking <a href="https://www.protocol.com/ibm-blockchain-supply-produce-coffee" target="_self">food production</a> and <a href="https://www.govtech.com/products/Blockchain-Voting-Debate-Heats-Up-After-Historic-Election.html" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">voting</a>, but there are few use cases that have truly taken off, at least so far. "We've been working on this since 2014; we never thought that health care would be the kind of the use case that we take this mainstream," Jamie Smith, the senior director of business development at Evernym, a company focused on using the blockchain as a basis for verifying identities, told Protocol. </p><p>Smith said Evernym had been discussing its concepts with automakers, retailers, telcos, governments, loyalty companies and banks prior to the pandemic. One of those companies was IAG, the airline group that owns British Airways, which had been interested in the idea of contactless travel based on a single identity credential that follows you from the airport check-in to your gate. With the pandemic, that morphed into thinking about ways to verify that passengers have had negative COVID tests, and eventually, that they've received a vaccine. "From our perspective, it was a really easy lift to see," Smith said. "We're doing contactless travel, and we just added verifiable credentials for test results."</p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="2">
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</div></p><p>It's a similar genesis for IBM's Digital Health Pass initiative, which leader Eric Piscini said started about two years ago as a way to store people's entire health records in a safe, accessible platform. It also relies on the blockchain for its immutable record of proof, and both Evernym and IBM are part of an open-standards group called the Good Health Pass Collaborative, which aims to bring private credentialed vaccine records to business and people around the world. Companies are working on their own implementations of the standards, but Evernym's Smith said the data is meant to be portable from one passport to another. </p><p>Most of the companies working on passports say their systems are private by design, especially given that they're mainly working off the same open standards. In most cases, the health information only ever remains on a user's phone, but where it asks to verify that the user's information meets a system's standards — such as whether this person has had two COVID vaccines and should be allowed into an office — that information is recorded on a blockchain. "You can, using blockchain technologies, verify that someone has been tested recently, without having access to the underlying data," Piscini said. "I don't know any other technology where you can do that."</p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="3">
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</div></p><p>Similarly, the nonprofit Commons Project's CommonPass, backed by the likes of Oracle, Microsoft and Salesforce, started out as a project to bring an analog to Apple Health for Android. JP Pollak, a senior researcher at Cornell and founder of the Commons Project, first launched CommonHealth to bring the sort of data and insights that Apple Health offers to iPhone owners to Android users. Last summer, the group started building an app that could take health data and privately share it with others — in that case, it was to help truckers stuck at the borders in <a href="https://www.newtimes.co.rw/opinions/digital-technology-re-opening-africa" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">East African countries</a> who couldn't easily prove they'd taken COVID tests. This morphed into vaccine credentialing, with the group now working to pull together the various data streams needed to get a project like this off the ground. </p><p>"Health care institutions, EMR vendors, retail pharmacies, state vaccine registries, all issuing people a digital verifiable credential of their vaccination record that they could then use in the app of their choice, to be able to get access to various kinds of services," Pollak said. CommonPass is also working with the Mayo Clinic, as well as Epic Systems and Cerner, two of the largest EMR vendors. </p><h3>Something for everyone </h3><p>With so many competing efforts to become the world's digital vaccine passport, it might seem that the country is heading for some sort of VHS versus Betamax format war for proving everyone has had COVID vaccines. But given that so many of the efforts are using the same standards, and in many cases, looking to embed their tech in someone else's app rather than their own, the race might be less about the best tech winning, and more about various approaches working in different situations. </p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="4">
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</div></p><p>"The intent is not to be the only company; we don't want to be the proprietary platform that everybody has to use because they have no choice," IBM's Piscini said. "That's not who we are right now: That's the IBM from 30 years ago, not the IBM of today."</p><p>For IBM, though, the selling point is that the company already works with so many other massive companies. Why look elsewhere for a vaccine passport solution if your airline booking system is already powered by IBM? "We believe our network is going to be more valuable than any other because of our scale and our ability to integrate the platform with CRM systems, building systems or stadium systems — we can do that every day," Piscini said.</p><p class="shortcode-media shortcode-media-rebelmouse-image">
<img type="lazy-image" data-runner-src="https://assets.rebelmouse.io/eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJpbWFnZSI6Imh0dHBzOi8vYXNzZXRzLnJibC5tcy8yNTY2NTc3NS9vcmlnaW4uanBnIiwiZXhwaXJlc19hdCI6MTYyMTM1MjYyM30._ykxxCyx3_wDbZrYgCcmK0QT2Ue1tZFdP5pf60kOmPU/img.jpg?width=980" id="c81c9" class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="3967636652192acfdaad341861263bc8" data-rm-shortcode-name="rebelmouse-image">
<small class="image-media media-caption" placeholder="Add Photo Caption...">IATA's digital passport app.</small><small class="image-media media-photo-credit" placeholder="Add Photo Credit...">Photo: IATA</small></p><p>For other companies, it's about securing new partnerships with major players in the hopes of finding that scale. Evernym, for example, is working with International Air Transport Association, the airline industry's trade association, on an air travel-specific app called Travel Pass. IATA is working with airlines and local governments to ensure it has the latest requirements to feed the app's rules engine. "It will say, 'Hey, you're flying JFK to Heathrow, you need a PCR test 48 hours in advance before you can land,'" Evernym's Smith said. "And of course, those policy changes are changing every day." Qatar, Emirates and Etihad Airways are all <a href="https://simpleflying.com/qatar-iata-travel-pass-launch/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">expected</a> to start trialing the app in the next few weeks.<br></p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="5">
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</div></p><p>In other instances, the technology will live inside other companies' existing apps; why make someone download yet another app and add another hurdle to compliance? Instead, the experience will be rather like adding a loyalty account or TSA PreCheck number when booking a flight. Airlines and other venues restricting access will require uploading negative test results or vaccine records using one of these services. "You're going to be using the United or the Delta app, and they'll be using our solution or somebody else's, but you will do it via their app," IATA's Travel Pass lead, Alan Murray Hayden, told Protocol.</p><p>The World Health Organization is also working on its own offering, and recently convened the <a href="https://www.who.int/groups/smart-vaccination-certificate-working-group" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Smart Vaccination Certificate Working Group</a>. It's built upon the WHO's nearly century-old notion of the "yellow card" vaccination record, which first was used to document that travelers had been inoculated against diseases such as cholera and yellow fever. Evernym Chief Trust Officer Drummond Reed is part of the working group; he said there should be more to share in the coming months. </p><h3>What could go wrong?</h3><p>It's entirely possible that as more people start to get vaccinated, vaccine passports start to become the norm. You walk to work — still masked, of course — scan a QR code reader in the lobby, and are let in. You go out for lunch, and your loyalty card app has a discount for in-store shoppers verifying they're vaccinated. Your concert ticket is also tied to health pass information that you shared earlier in the day with Ticketmaster. But there are more than a few hurdles ahead of the companies rushing to turn these concepts into realities. </p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="6">
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</div></p><p>First off, there's the … reality … of the real world that any digital system has to contend with. For anyone without access to the internet, digital vaccine credentials will prove difficult to acquire, though all the companies Protocol spoke with said they would offer a paper-based QR code for people who don't have smartphones. But there's also the issue of having to corral so many different stakeholders into one system, especially when some health care providers are still reliant on antiquated database systems or <a href="https://www.protocol.com/manuals/health-care-revolution/electronic-health-records-after-coronavirus" target="_self">even paper records</a>. "The amount of inefficiency in the system is tremendous," IBM's Piscini said. </p><p>But in the U.S. at least, all vaccinators are required to report COVID-19 vaccines to their state. Piscini said that even for people who just received a paper copy of their vaccine records, systems like IBM's can likely link up to the state's immunization registry and allow people to import records to a vaccine passport.</p><p class="shortcode-media shortcode-media-rebelmouse-image">
<img type="lazy-image" data-runner-src="https://assets.rebelmouse.io/eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJpbWFnZSI6Imh0dHBzOi8vYXNzZXRzLnJibC5tcy8yNTY2NTc4My9vcmlnaW4ucG5nIiwiZXhwaXJlc19hdCI6MTYzNzg3MTM2M30.RZtqR7F_FuXK1S24V6jVaqUZ0xOSG-gCwj00xU3fxcM/img.png?width=980" id="b0bd3" class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="11d8002d92c0cd6ef39b12fc7b8dccf8" data-rm-shortcode-name="rebelmouse-image">
<small class="image-media media-caption" placeholder="Add Photo Caption...">How CommonPass's app shows your records. </small><small class="image-media media-photo-credit" placeholder="Add Photo Credit...">Image: CommonPass</small></p><p>And states are willing to help out, Pollak said, adding that CommonPass has started working with Hawaii to roll out its offering for would-be tourists. "We're seeing a lot of state governments stepping up and doing a really good job with this," Pollak said. "It would be surprising if there wasn't a coordinated federal effort very soon." That being said, while <a href="https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/north/iceland-covid-passports-canada-1.5904828" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">many countries around</a> the world are committing to working on vaccine passports, getting a straight answer out of the U.S. government on what it's doing has proven difficult. The State Department, which maintains America's traditional, analogue passports, referred me to Homeland Security, which referred me to the White House. The acting director and chief of staff of the White House's Office of Science and Technology Policy, Kei Koizumi, told Protocol that "OSTP can't discuss projects we are working on before they are publicly announced."</p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="7">
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</div></p><p>But even with systems in place at a federal level, there's still a fair amount of education that needs to happen before people will trust systems like these. "There's a substantial gap in understanding and knowledge of how these systems work, and people's views, in terms of who should get access to which data," Pollak said. </p><p>"We assume there's a Facebook Borg in the sky, monitoring every interaction," Smith said. "The emergence of verifiable credentials breaks down that mental model, where actually it becomes more like decentralized bits of paper that I can carry around, and no one's to know that I've been sharing this information."</p><p>"Our belief is that if you do the right thing, from a platform point of view, protecting your privacy, and giving you control and access to the platform to everybody who wants to use it," Piscini said. "I think those are very basic things that allow the core of the platform that we build to generate adoption by the individuals."</p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="8">
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</div></p><p>Even with a system that works, there may still be holdouts to this potential new normal. "Some people are saying, 'I will never get vaccinated,'" Piscini said, "and I don't know if the airlines are going to say, 'Well, maybe you will never fly again.'"</p>
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Mike Murphy ( @mcwm) is the director of special projects at Protocol, focusing on the industries being rapidly upended by technology and the companies disrupting incumbents. Previously, Mike was the technology editor at Quartz, where he frequently wrote on robotics, artificial intelligence, and consumer electronics.
Power
Libby is stuck between libraries and publishers in the e-book war
Readers love the Libby app, but its newfound popularity is costing librarians more than they can afford.
Librarians depend on Libby, but they also worry that its newfound popularity could seriously strain their budgets.
Photo: Alfons Morales/Unsplash
February 11, 2021
Anna Kramer is a reporter at Protocol (@ anna_c_kramer), where she helps write and produce Source Code, Protocol's daily newsletter. Prior to joining the team, she covered tech and small business for the San Francisco Chronicle and privacy for Bloomberg Law. She is a recent graduate of Brown University, where she studied International Relations and Arabic and wrote her senior thesis about surveillance tools and technological development in the Middle East.
February 11, 2021
On the surface, there couldn't be a more wholesome story than the meteoric rise of the Libby app. A user-friendly reading app becomes popular during the pandemic, making books cool again for young readers, multiplying e-book circulation and saving public libraries from sudden obsolescence.
But the Libby story is also a parable for how the best-intentioned people can build a beloved technological tool and accidentally create a financial crisis for those who need the tech most. Public librarians depend on Libby, but they also worry that its newfound popularity could seriously strain their budgets.
<p>Before 2017, e-books were still pretty niche, and checking out library e-books was torture. In 2016, just over <a href="https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2016/09/01/book-reading-2016/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">a quarter of Americans had read an e-book</a> within the previous year, according to a Pew Research Center survey. Not many people even knew their libraries offered digital books. Overdrive — the digital marketplace for publishers and libraries, and the creator of Libby — was (and still is) clunky, slow and unintuitive. Overdrive <a href="https://company.overdrive.com/2017/01/10/libraries-surpass-196-million-checkouts-overdrive-2016/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">hit just under 200 million checkouts </a>in 2016; in 2020, that number more than doubled, surpassing 430 million. </p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="1">
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</div></p><p>Few noticed when the cute, friendly virtual library app <a href="https://www.cleveland.com/business/2017/06/overdrives_app_libby_puts_a_li_1.html" target="_blank">launched</a> in 2017. Libraries are never very good at selling themselves, and neither is Overdrive. But the app's seamless, user-friendly experience was so exceptional that it spoke for itself. Libby became a cult favorite for book lovers and dedicated librarygoers, and almost every public library in the country, already dependent on Overdrive for their growing digital collections, loved that they could make reading online a little bit easier. It was the public library's best-kept secret.</p><p>And then in March 2020, when libraries closed their doors and books sat gathering dust, the Libby app became so much more than a cute reading tool. People turned to digital books and were delighted to discover they were so much simpler than remembered. You could access the web app anywhere on any computer, and everything synced to a phone app as well. You could download library books to Kindle. You never needed a password. You could use more than one library card. Libby downloads increased three times their usual amount beginning in late March. E-book checkout growth and new users on Overdrive both increased more than 50%. </p><p>Libby had helped to save libraries.</p><p>It had also accelerated a funding crisis. Public library budgets have never been luxe, and book acquisition budgets in particular have always been tight. Though it may seem counterintuitive to readers, e-books cost far more than physical books for libraries, meaning that increased demand for digital editions put libraries in a financial bind. </p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="2">
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</div></p><p>Because e-books are not regulated under the same laws that govern physical books, publishers can price them however they choose. Rather than emulate the physical model, where libraries pay a fixed cost for a certain number of books, they instead offer digital editions through a license that usually includes a limit on the number of times a book can be checked out, the length of time a library holds an edition, or both. Just like with movies, music and software, book publishers have moved from an ownership model to a subscription model for their digital products (none of the major publishing houses responded to multiple requests for comment for this story). Librarians sometimes pay hundreds of dollars to circulate one copy of an e-book for a two-year period, a number that could theoretically add up to thousands for one book over decades, <a href="http://www.ala.org/news/sites/ala.org.news/files/content/mediapresscenter/CompetitionDigitalMarkets.pdf" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">according to a 2019 American Library Association report to Congress</a>.</p><p>The librarians I spoke with celebrate Libby. They love that more people are reading digital books. But they can't help but quietly curse the technological problem that brought them here. </p><p>"It is definitely problematic," said Michelle Jeske, the city librarian for the Denver Public Library and president of the Public Library Association, a division of the American Library Association. "You're buying it in print, you're buying it in e-book, and in audio e-book, CD, and in Spanish. With either a steady or decreasing collection development budget, it's a serious problem."</p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="3">
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</div></p><p>Despite Overdrive's dominance, the company has escaped criticism for the funding crisis. Overdrive makes good money on the digital book-lending business; it's the largest marketplace for publishers to sell to public libraries in the U.S., is expanding rapidly in other major publishing powerhouse countries like Germany and China, and offers a popular school reading app called Sora. More than 23,000 new schools and libraries joined Overdrive in 2020 alone. </p><p>"It's important for us to have the same values and standards that the libraries do, protecting privacy and confidentiality, making information accessible in as broad a ways as possible," said David Burleigh, the communications director for Overdrive. Overdrive also became a Certified B Corporation the same year it launched the Libby app, and it now leverages that status to avoid getting mucked up in the financial fight.</p><p>The ALA lobbying arm has been pushing Congress to consider regulating digital media to address this problem, and it's no secret to anyone who reads Publishers Weekly that tensions between librarians and publishers have spilled over into public animosity. "Publishing is a tough tough world, and it sometimes has felt like librarians and publishers have been pitted against each other. They need to make money, and we need to be able to serve our public. There has got to be some place in the middle," Jeske said.</p><p>Publishers justify the increased cost of e-books because they say the new technology has reduced friction too much, hurting their sales. They have argued that Libby and libraries have made it too easy for people to read books without buying them. Macmillan, one of the big five publishers, <a href="https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/digital/content-and-e-books/article/77777-librarians-question-tor-s-e-book-embargo.html" target="_blank">placed an eight-week embargo</a> on library sales of new e-book releases in late 2019 for just that reason, though it <a href="https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/libraries/article/82715-macmillan-abandons-library-e-book-embargo.html" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">reversed its position</a> in March 2020 because of the pandemic. "In today's digital world there is no such friction in the market. As the development of apps and extensions continues, and as libraries extend their reach statewide as well as nationally, it is becoming ever easier to borrow rather than buy," wrote John Sargent, Macmillan's then-CEO, <a href="https://d1x9nywezhk0w2.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/29160131/A-Letter-from-John-Sargent-.pdf" target="_blank">in an open letter to librarians justifying the embargo</a>.</p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="4">
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</div></p><p>And though librarians like Jeske and Eileen Ybarra, the e-book coordinator for the largest digital collection in the country at the LA Public Library, vehemently disagree — they believe it's still too hard for people to access digital books — they say that in one respect, the publishers are absolutely correct: Overdrive wants to make the e-reading experience as frictionless as possible.</p><p>"That's the idea. It's to make it as easy as possible for people to read as much as they like," Burleigh said. "Ease," "accessibility" and "efficiency" are his keywords: He repeats them over and over again in every conversation about his company's app.</p><p>Overdrive doesn't believe that frictionless library lending hurts publishers. In fact, Burleigh said, it actually can help.</p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="5">
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</div></p><p>While Burleigh wouldn't directly answer questions about Overdrive's role in reducing the friction — it would be awkward for business if he did, given that Overdrive mostly makes money through a cut of what publishers sell on its platform — he pointed to research that shows that increased library lending actually helps book sales. (<a href="https://www.panoramaproject.org/research" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Overdrive funds Panorama,</a> the independent group that conducted the research.)</p><p>"Libraries are part of the ecosystem. They're not competing necessarily with booksellers," Burleigh said, adding that the research shows that when people read more, it creates a channel of discovery for lesser-known books.</p><p>Burleigh said that Overdrive advocates for a wide range of funding models and the best deals for libraries, but he also hesitated to describe an "ideal" solution for e-book pricing that would satisfy everyone. "It's a good question. I don't know that I have the answer. Publishers have different strategies. Libraries have different strategies." </p><p>While Jeske wouldn't say exactly how much she believes e-books should cost, she thinks the problem could be helped if Congress considered legislation to take the rules that apply to physical books and expand them to digital ones.</p><p>"It would be nice if the prices were analogous a lot closer to physical copies. It would be nice if they didn't expire. That creates a situation where we are potentially spending a lot of money on one title.That just does not happen with physical books," Ybarra said. </p><p>No one wants to blame the technology itself. While they might be worried about their budgets, at the end of the day librarians just want people to read more, and Libby is helping them do that. "We only see it as a positive," Jeske said. "It has introduced the library to folks who weren't using it before."</p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="6">
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Anna Kramer is a reporter at Protocol (@ anna_c_kramer), where she helps write and produce Source Code, Protocol's daily newsletter. Prior to joining the team, she covered tech and small business for the San Francisco Chronicle and privacy for Bloomberg Law. She is a recent graduate of Brown University, where she studied International Relations and Arabic and wrote her senior thesis about surveillance tools and technological development in the Middle East.
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