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October 16, 2020
Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz, Qualcomm co-founder Irwin Jacobs and Twilio CEO Jeff Lawson are joining the ranks of tech leaders throwing their support behind Proposition 15, a California ballot initiative that would raise as much as $12 billion for local schools and communities by hiking some commercial property taxes.
Until recently, Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, were lonely voices in this fight, flooding the Yes on 15 campaign with more than $10 million in support. Despite activists' concerted efforts to get more of Silicon Valley's business leaders to support the measure, even the industry's most socially conscious CEOs were staying silent.
That is, until this week, when Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff announced he was backing the measure with $400,000 in funding. "We're supporting CA Prop 15 [...] because it's an important step in addressing the resource deficits that both our public schools & local governments face," Benioff tweeted.
That announcement broke the dam, leading to a wave of new contributions from the tech sector. According to newly filed contribution records to the Yes on 15 campaign, Moskovitz and his wife, Cari Tuna, donated $250,000 to the measure. Lawson and his wife Erica gave $100,000. Jacobs and his wife Joan contributed $250,000. And the Silicon Valley Community Foundation, which has raised gobs of money in the past from tech billionaires including WhatsApp co-founders Jan Koum and Brian Acton, shelled out $100,000. Moskovitz, Jacobs and Lawson are also all prominent Democratic donors.
"Support for Proposition 15 keeps rolling in because this crisis has further exposed the structural inequities baked into our current system, and tech and business leaders recognize that Proposition 15 will result in an equitable reinvestment in our schools, local communities, and small businesses," Gina Dalma, executive vice president at the Silicon Valley Community Foundation, said in a statement.
Proposition 15 will carve large commercial landowners out of California's Proposition 13, which allows property owners to pay taxes on the price of their property when it was purchased, not its current market value. Prop 13 has allowed commercial landowners in California to skirt the higher taxes that younger companies, many of them in the tech sector, currently pay. Proposition 15 would change that, and it has been endorsed by California Sen. Kamala Harris, a flurry of education and labor groups, and most mayors in the state. The opposition, meanwhile, includes a slew of business groups including the California Chamber of Commerce, as well as agricultural organizations, who argue that even though farmland is exempt from the measure, Proposition 15 would lead to tax hikes on "fixtures and improvements" to farmland.
Since Proposition 15 was introduced, a nonprofit group called TechEquity has also been actively seeking out tech sector endorsements for the measure. Catherine Bracy, executive director of TechEquity, was encouraged by the new show of support. "It's very heartening to see tech step up to support what is the most critically important policy to help California recover from the recession," Bracy told Protocol. "We hope this is an indicator that tech leaders realize the importance of addressing structural issues to bring about a twenty-first century economy that works for everyone."
Issie Lapowsky
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
'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.
Why Biden needs a National Technology Council
The U.S. government needs a more tightly coordinated approach to technology, argues Jonathan Spalter.
A coordinated effort to approach tech could help the White House navigate the future more easily.
Photo: Gage Skidmore/Flickr
January 15, 2021
Jonathan Spalter is the president and CEO of USTelecom – The Broadband Association.
January 15, 2021
The White House has a National Security Council and a National Economic Council. President-elect Joe Biden should move quickly to establish a National Technology Council.
Consumers are looking to the government to set a coherent and consistent 21st century digital policy that works for them. Millions of Americans still await public investments that will help connect their remote communities to broadband, while millions more — including many families with school-age children — still struggle to afford access.
<p>America's leadership in many new technologies is vital, but not a given: The enormous benefits of 5G, AI, cloud and quantum computing lay ahead, but other nations are threatening U.S. dominance. Meanwhile, our largest digital platforms are facing criticism over misinformation, algorithmic bias and concerns about anticompetitive market dominance, while foreign enemies are invading our government at the highest levels through sophisticated cyber warfare.</p><p>From all sides, the status quo leaves too many opportunities untapped and vulnerabilities exposed. This has significant implications for our nation, from jobs and modern health care to national security and global competition. Without greater coordination and leadership from the top, a fast-proliferating warren of competing federal agencies — all with a rightful claim of technology's importance to their work — has no hope of uniting to help our digital economy "build back better."</p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="1">
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</div></p><p>The National Security Council was created by President Harry Truman in the aftermath of World War II. The National Economic Council was established by President Bill Clinton a mere five days after he first took the oath of office. Both serve essentially the same purpose: They exist to pull together the disparate efforts of a vast federal apparatus and ensure every oar is not just in the water, but pulling vigorously in the same direction on complex, interrelated issues that have far-reaching implications for the nation.</p><p>We need this more tightly-coordinated approach in the technology arena. From smart transportation to remote education and health care to the nation's defense, commerce and trade, every agency rightly views technology as central to their work. Equally true: Every American has a rightful claim to a coordinated, ambitious and effective effort from their government.</p><p>We don't have that today in the multi-headed, overlapping and often competing technology policy coordination processes, legacy functions like the Office of Science and Technology Policy and a host of more recently created 'C-level' offices (CTO, CIO, CISO, etc.) at work in the White House today.</p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="2">
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</div></p><p>To offer one example, there are currently 20 federal initiatives relating to 5G network security alone — each with its own set of objectives, its own circle of leaders and partners and its own set of tasks and requests for information and collaboration from industry. </p><p>Rather than a growing multiverse of agencies scrambling for the soccer ball, we need a coordinated effort to better ensure the U.S. government's technology leadership can turn on a dime, whether in response to imminent cyber threats, marshaling federal resources to close the digital divide or creating more incentives for private sector innovation and investment.</p><p>We need one referee supported by a more streamlined and diverse team that can see the entire field and ensure the best ideas get the time, space and fair attention they require at the highest levels of the White House.</p><p>We've done it before. It's been more than two decades since the White House launched an all-out coordination effort on a hugely important technology issue: standing up the Y2K Task Force. Its role was to prevent a global meltdown of digital systems that threatened to imperil everything from air travel and nuclear reactors to credit card expiration dates and social security payments.</p><p>From the public's point of view, the turning of the digital calendar to a new millennium was a "non-event." To those of us who did the work — from coordination to coding — it was millions of hours of effort. Every designated representative was at the White House weekly coordinating U.S. preparedness.</p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="3">
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</div></p><p>It was a Herculean effort. It was also "one and done." In the 20 years since, technology has grown exponentially more central to virtually every part of our nation's success. A permanent National Technology Council would offer President-elect Biden — and all who follow him into the Oval Office — a central and more cohesive coordinating mechanism with the stature to steer the massive ship that is the U.S. government according to a shared vision, common objectives and aggressive but achievable goals.</p><p>We have serious issues before our country. Technology innovation and network evolution are central to our path forward: from our health and wellbeing as a society and a democracy to our delivery away from this pandemic, and for sustaining growth, creating jobs and leading on the global stage.</p><p>The presidential transition offers a precedential moment. With a clear mandate to close the digital divide and in the aftermath of a massive, state-sponsored act of cyber warfare, President-elect Biden should seize the moment. President Truman famously declared: "The buck stops here." President-elect Biden should act now to definitively answer the question left to linger far too long over the nation's technology policy: "The buck stops where?"</p>
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Jonathan Spalter is the president and CEO of USTelecom – The Broadband Association.
Election 2020
Google says it’s fighting election lies, but its ads fund them
A new report finds that more than 1,600 brands, from Disney to Procter & Gamble, have advertisements running on sites that push pro-Trump conspiracy theories. The majority of those ads are served by Google.
Google is the most dominant player in programmatic advertising, but it has a spotty record enforcing rules for publishers.
Photo: Alex Tai/Getty Images
January 14, 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 14, 2021
Shortly after November's presidential election, a story appeared on the website of far-right personality Charlie Kirk, claiming that 10,000 dead people had returned mail-in ballots in Michigan. But after publishing, a correction appeared at the top of the story, completely debunking the misleading headline, which remains, months later, unchanged.
"We are not aware of a single confirmed case showing that a ballot was actually cast on behalf of a deceased individual," the correction, which quoted Michigan election officials, read.
<p>The note was a clear bait-and-switch on a story that boldly pushed a false conspiracy theory about the election. But just as striking as the editor's note is what sits at the top of this story, and every story on Kirk's site: a Google ad.</p><p>Since the 2016 election, endless attention has been paid to the way election misinformation can spread through targeted ads on social media platforms like Facebook and YouTube. But an equally insidious and less-discussed problem is how programmatic advertising, a field dominated by Google, has become the lifeblood of misinformation sites. With or without social platforms, these ads allow misinformation sites to exist and even thrive all on their own by providing a source of revenue, and companies like Google have a shoddy record of policing them. </p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="1">
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</div></p><p>In a new <a href="https://www.newsguardtech.com/special-report-advertising-on-election-misinformation/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">report</a> released Thursday by the news rating company NewsGuard, researchers found ads for more than 1,600 mainstream brands, from Disney to Procter & Gamble, running on <a href="https://www.newsguardtech.com/election-misinformation-tracker/" target="_blank">160 sites</a> (including Kirk's) that have openly pushed election conspiracies. Google was responsible for ads on a whopping 80 percent of those sites. Another ad exchange, The Trade Desk, was running ads on roughly half.</p><p>Among the examples NewsGuard lists: ads for Harvard University appearing on One America News Network's website, ads for AARP appearing on sites like The Gateway Pundit and ZeroHedge, and Walmart ads appearing on NOQ Report, a site that recently argued Satan uses Democrats to do his bidding, including stealing the election.</p><p>In some cases, the ads create discordant messaging between publisher and advertiser. While reporting this story, Protocol found ads for Planned Parenthood on Kirk's site, despite Kirk's frequent <a href="https://twitter.com/charliekirk11/status/1263209491581018114?s=20" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">calls</a> for Planned Parenthood to be defunded. Thanks to these ads, Planned Parenthood is effectively funding Kirk.</p><p class="shortcode-media shortcode-media-rebelmouse-image">
<img type="lazy-image" data-runner-src="https://assets.rebelmouse.io/eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJpbWFnZSI6Imh0dHBzOi8vYXNzZXRzLnJibC5tcy8yNTQ1MDA1Mi9vcmlnaW4ucG5nIiwiZXhwaXJlc19hdCI6MTYzNTY4MDEwOH0.qplQOYcTtVCBgeOXCbDihtGMd6uAjeg-XL39oaEr8Bw/img.png?width=980" id="f1e64" class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="42c21c19889922502d0fba8fec366b71" data-rm-shortcode-name="rebelmouse-image">
<small class="image-media media-caption" placeholder="Add Photo Caption...">A Planned Parenthood fundraising ad appears on a story containing election misinformation at the top of Charlie Kirk's website.</small><small class="image-media media-photo-credit" placeholder="Add Photo Credit...">Screenshot: Protocol</small></p><p><br></p><p>Google has <a href="https://support.google.com/adsense/answer/9335564?hl=en&visit_id=637461598271119369-2898334728&rd=1" target="_blank">policies</a> forbidding publishers who post demonstrably false election misinformation and other types of content from placing Google ads on their websites. "Claims that voter fraud was widespread or that the election was stolen are all prohibited by our policies. When we find content that violates our policies we remove its ability to monetize," a Google spokesperson said.</p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="2">
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</div></p><p>The company demonetizes individual stories first, reserving site-wide demonetization for egregious, persistent offenders (The company recently demonetized a far-right militia site following the Capitol riot). In 2019, the company removed ads from 21 million individual pages, the Google spokesperson said. The problem: Google serves billions of ads every day. </p><p>It's not that the company is unaware it's serving ads on the sites NewsGuard noted in its report. In August, a group of philanthropists <a href="https://www.protocol.com/google-ads-charities-disinformation-sites" target="_self">wrote</a> to Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai after reports showed that ads for groups like the Red Cross and Save the Children were appearing alongside COVID-19 misinformation on TheGatewayPundit and elsewhere. The philanthropists urged Google to institute a new model that "does not put [advertisers] into unwanted and damaging associations that undermine their good works and values." </p><p>Since then, the company has taken action on individual Gateway Pundit articles, but five months later, Google has yet to fully demonetize the site despite repeated violations, enabling it to continue growing and spreading misinformation. </p><p>The power programmatic advertising has in sustaining these sites is particularly relevant now as social media giants begin to more forcefully crack down on accounts, including the president's, that regularly post dangerous conspiracy theories or incitements to violence. For many of these companies, last week's riot in the U.S. Capitol was a wake-up call, showing them the disastrous real-world consequences of allowing people to believe lies about the election being stolen. But chasing the accounts that peddle those lies off of Facebook, Twitter and YouTube is only part of the solution. As long as the people behind those accounts have a way to make money on their falsehoods, why would they ever stop?</p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="3">
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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.
Big Tech is cutting off political contributions. Here are the biggest losers.
Election objectors like McCarthy, Nunes, Jordan and Stefanik all took tech PAC money last year. But they're not the only ones losing out.
Some of tech's biggest critics in Congress have taken money from tech PACs. Now, they're getting cut off.
Photo: Darren Halstead/Unsplash
January 13, 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 13, 2021
One day after Twitter banned President Trump and Google and Apple kicked the far-right social network Parler out of their app stores, New York Rep. Elise Stefanik dashed off a tweet: "If you think the American people will quietly accept #BigTechTyranny, You. Are. Wrong."
One detail Stefanik left out: She took $30,000 from corporate PACs linked to Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Amazon and Intel in the last year alone, according to campaign finance records. During her tenure in Congress, she's raised nearly twice that much from those companies. And now, she's getting cut off.
<p>Stefanik and the 146 other Republicans who voted against certifying election results last week — including fellow tech critics House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy and Reps. Devin Nunes and Jim Jordan — are among the many members of Congress who will soon lose financial backing from top tech PACs that are either scaling back or completely <a href="https://www.protocol.com/bulletins/tech-companies-pausing-campaign-contributions" target="_self">halting their corporate PACs' campaign contributions</a>, following last week's siege on the Capitol.</p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="1">
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</div></p><p>For all of their efforts to secure the election, tech giants ended up contributing an awful lot to members of Congress who tried to overturn the election anyway. Of the more than $7 million that Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Amazon and Intel's PACs spent in the 2020 election cycle, Protocol found that around $700,000 of it went to members who voted to contest the results. That includes $35,000 that went to McCarthy, $14,000 that went to Jordan and $10,000 that went to Nunes, all of whom have lashed out at tech companies over alleged censorship. Now, those same companies are putting a hold on that spending while they reevaluate. </p><p>And yet, as many have pointed out, some efforts to pull back from political donations may wind up hurting those members who voted to certify the election results more than those who didn't. Facebook, Google and Microsoft have announced that they will be cutting off all PAC contributions for the foreseeable future, a decision that <a href="https://www.protocol.com/silicon-valley-cracks-down-on-congress" target="_blank">earned the companies criticism for punishing both sides of the aisle</a> for a Republican-driven insurrection. </p><p>The numbers bear that out. While Microsoft spent $1.87 million on all PAC donations during the 2020 election cycle, only $167,000 of that went to members who objected to the election results. Google made some $1.86 million in contributions last year, but just $174,000 went to objectors, including McCarthy, Nunes, Stefanik and Jordan. Facebook spent less than either of those companies, with just $523,000 in overall PAC contributions in 2020, but just over $33,000 of that funded objectors. These three companies alone, in other words, could wind up withholding millions of dollars in support from members of Congress who voted to uphold the results, just to avoid singling out the ones who didn't.</p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="2">
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</div></p><p>Amazon, Airbnb and Intel, for their part, have said they will only be stopping contributions to members who objected to certification, leaving the vast majority of their contributions intact for now. </p><p>The companies set different timelines for themselves to reconsider their political giving. Facebook's pause will last "for at least the current quarter." Google said its PAC is on hiatus while "we review and reassess its policies following last week's deeply troubling events." Amazon said it will discuss the decision with affected members and "evaluate their responses as we consider future PAC contributions." </p><p>It's possible that any of these companies could return to business as usual in the second quarter when the memory of the riot isn't quite so fresh. But if they stick to their commitments in the long run, these companies could leave a significant hole in some Congressional coffers.</p><p>Here's a look at where top tech companies spent their money on Capitol Hill before the last election, who stands to lose their support for trying to overturn the results of that election and who's getting caught in the crossfire.</p><p><em>Methodology: This data comes from OpenSecrets. These figures apply only to PAC contributions, not lobbying spending or contributions made by individuals. Twitter and Apple don't have corporate PACs, so they're not reflected here. Airbnb also pledged to withhold contributions to election objectors, but in 2020, the company spent only about $5,000 on these members, so it was excluded from our list. </em></p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="3">
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</div></p><h2>Amazon</h2><p><em><strong>Action taken:</strong> </em>Suspended contributions to any member of Congress who voted to override the election results</p><p><em><strong>Total PAC contributions in 2020 cycle:</strong></em> more than $1.94 million</p><p><strong><em>Total PAC contributions to federal candidates in 2020 cycle:</em> </strong>more than $1.26 million</p><p><em><strong>Total PAC contributions to members who objected to election results in 2020:</strong></em> $238,500</p><p><strong><em>Objectors who raised the most</em>:</strong> </p><blockquote>Kevin McCarthy (R-CA), $10,000<br>Sam Graves (R-MO), $10,000<br>Richard Hudson (R-NC), $10,000<br>Elise Stefanik (R-NY), $10,000<br>Morgan Griffith (R-VA), $10,000</blockquote><h2>Microsoft</h2><p><strong>Action taken: </strong>Will not make any political donations until after it "assesses the implications" of the riot</p><p><em><strong>Total PAC contributions in 2020 cycle:</strong></em> more than $1.87 million</p><p><em><strong>Total PAC contributions to federal candidates in 2020 cycle:</strong></em> more than $820,000</p><p><strong><em>Total PAC contributions to members who objected to election results in 2020:</em> </strong>$167,000</p><p><em><strong>Objectors who raised the most:</strong></em></p><blockquote>Kevin McCarthy (R-CA), $10,000<br>Steve Scalise (R-LA), $10,000</blockquote><p><em><strong>Non-objectors who raised the most:</strong></em></p><blockquote>Chris Coons (D-DE), $10,000<br>Steven Daines (R-MT), $10,000<br>Lindsey Graham (R-SC), $10,000<br>Mitch McConnell (R-KY), $10,000<br>Gary Peters (D-MI), $10,000<br>Ben Sasse (R-NE), $10,000<br>Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH), $10,000<br>Tina Smith (D-MN), $10,000<br>Dan Sullivan (R-AK), $10,000<br>Thom Tillis (R-NC), $10,000<br>Kelly Armstrong (R-ND), $10,000<br>Kevin Brady (R-TX), $10,000<br>James Clyburn (D-SC), $10,000<br>Steny Hoyer (D-MD), $10,000<br>Frank Pallone Jr. (D-NJ), $10,000<br>Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-WA), $10,000<br>Adam Smith (D-WA), $10,000</blockquote><h2>Google<br></h2><p><strong>Action taken: </strong>Froze all political contributions</p><p><em><strong>T</strong><strong>otal PAC contributions in 2020 cycle:</strong></em> more than $1.86 million</p><p><strong><em>Total PAC contributions to federal candidates in 2020 cycle:</em> </strong>$1.05 million</p><p><em><strong>Total PAC contributions to members who objected to election results in 2020:</strong></em> $174,000</p><p><em><strong>Objectors who raised the most:</strong></em></p><blockquote>Kevin McCarthy (R-CA), $10,000<br>Steve Scalise, (R-LA) $10,000<br>Elise Stefanik (R-NY), $10,000<br>Jim Jordan (R-OH), $10,000<br>Jeff Duncan (R-SC), $10,000<br>Steve Chabot (R-OH), $10,000</blockquote><p><em><strong>Non-objectors who raised the most:</strong></em></p><blockquote>Susan Collins (R-ME), $10,000<br>Chris Coons (D-DE), $10,000<br>Joni Ernst (R-IA), $10,000<br>Martha McSally (R-AZ), $10,000<br>Kevin Brady (R-TX), $10,000<br>John Curtis (R-UT), $10,000<br>Rodney Davis (R-IL), $10,000<br>Tom Emmer (R-MN), $10,000<br>Anna Eshoo (D-CA), $10,000<br>Drew Ferguson (R-GA), $10,000<br>Steny Hoyer (D-MD), $10,000<br>Darin LaHood (R-IL), $10,000<br>Zoe Lofgren (D-CA), $10,000<br>Michael McCaul (R-TX), $10,000<br>Patrick McHenry (R-NC), $10,000<br>Frank Pallone Jr. (D-NJ), $10,000<br>Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), $10,000<br>Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-WA), $10,000</blockquote><h2>Intel</h2><p><em><strong>Action taken: </strong></em>Will not contribute to members of Congress who voted against certification of the Electoral College results</p><p><em><strong>Total PAC contributions in 2020 cycle:</strong></em> more than $977,000</p><p><strong><em>Total PAC contributions to federal candidates in 2020 cycle:</em> </strong>more than $560,000</p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="4">
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</div></p><p><em><strong>Total PAC contributions to members who objected to election results in 2020:</strong></em> $100,500</p><p><em><strong>Objectors who raised the most:</strong></em></p><blockquote>Andy Biggs (R-AZ), $10,000<br>Roger Williams (R-TX), $10,000</blockquote><h2>Facebook </h2><p><em><strong>Action taken: </strong></em>Pausing all PAC contributions for at least the current quarter</p><p><em><strong>Total PAC contributions in 2020 cycle:</strong></em> more than $523,000</p><p><em><strong>Total PAC contributions to federal candidates in 2020 cycle:</strong></em> more than $303,000</p><p><strong><em>Total PAC contributions to members who objected to election results in 2020:</em> </strong>$33,500</p><p><em><strong>Objectors who raised the most:</strong></em></p><blockquote>Kevin McCarthy (R-CA), $5,000<br>Steve Scalise (R-LA), $5,000<br>Michael Burgess (R-TX), $5,000</blockquote><p><em><strong>Non-objectors who raised the most:</strong></em></p><blockquote>Zoe Lofgren (D-CA), $10,000<br>Richard E. Neal (D-MA), $10,000<br>Frank Pallone Jr. (D-NJ), $10,000<br>Adam Schiff (D-CA), $10,000</blockquote><p><em>Disclosure: Reporter Issie Lapowsky is married to an Amazon employee.</em></p>
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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.
Protocol | Enterprise
Twilio CEO Jeff Lawson explains how he decided to face off with Parler
Also, why he thinks the $3.2 billion purchase of Segment will help Twilio's customers help their customers and why he's OK with being reliant on AWS.
"I think in a society, words matter, actions matter," Twilio CEO Jeff Lawson said. "That's why companies have things like Terms of Service and acceptable use policies."
Photo: Twilio
January 13, 2021
Tom Krazit ( @tomkrazit) is a senior reporter at Protocol, covering cloud computing and enterprise technology out of the Pacific Northwest. He has written and edited stories about the technology industry for almost two decades for publications such as IDG, CNET, paidContent, and GeekWire. He served as executive editor of Gigaom and Structure, and most recently produced a leading cloud computing newsletter called Mostly Cloudy.
January 13, 2021
Cloud computing companies were one of the few segments of society that enjoyed 2020. But even companies like Twilio, whose stock price tripled over the last 12 months, have had enough of 2021 already.
Last Friday, in the wake of the deadly attack on the Capitol, Twilio sent a letter to the right-wing social media app Parler notifying the company that it was violating Twilio's acceptable use policy for two of its authentication services. Parler decided to turn off Twilio's services rather than moderate calls for violence against elected officials on its app, which became a moot point after AWS cut Parler off from its own computing and storage services Sunday evening.
<p>This was not the way CEO Jeff Lawson wanted to kick off a round of publicity for his new book, "<a href="https://www.amazon.com/Ask-Your-Developer-Software-Developers/dp/0063018292" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Ask Your Developer</a>." But little that has happened this month has gone according to plan, and he is quick to defend his decision from last week.</p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="1">
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</div></p><p>"If you walk into a movie theater and yell 'fire,' or you walk into an ice cream parlor and start yelling racist epithets, don't expect to be a customer of that establishment for very long," he said in an interview with Protocol Tuesday.</p><p>Lawson built Twilio into a $60 billion company based around communications APIs that allow app and web developers to build customer service and support capabilities into their own products. Just as Stripe became a central hub for payment technology for a generation of developers, Twilio enjoys a similar position when it comes to communications technology.</p><p>In his conversation with Protocol, Lawson explained the thinking behind Twilio's decision on Parler, the strategy behind <a href="https://www.protocol.com/newsletters/protocol-enterprise/why-did-twilio-pay-3-billion-for-segment-developers" target="_self">last year's $3.2 billion acquisition of Segment</a> and why developers should be free to choose no code, low code or "yo code" tools when building their apps.</p><p><em>This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.</em></p><p><strong>Given everything that's happened in the last week, I was wondering if you could walk me through your decision to suspend service to Parler?</strong></p><p>I think in a society, words matter, actions matter. And we all have to work together to build a society. That's why companies have things like Terms of Service and acceptable use policies, because they say "What is acceptable?" There's a wide variety of things that are acceptable, but there's also fringe things that aren't.</p><p>This is not new to the online world, but think about the offline world. If you walk into a movie theater and yell "fire," or you walk into an ice cream parlor and start yelling racist epithets, don't expect to be a customer of that establishment for very long. I think what you see is the online world doing the same thing.</p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="2">
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</div></p><p>When people at the fringes of society are doing things like advocating for violence, overthrow[ing] the government, murder and hate, those are things that are largely illegal. And therefore companies like Twilio are saying: That's not how you're allowed to use our products, our platform,</p><p>This is fringe, extremist stuff. And if this were some other religion we'd be having a very different conversation. I just think that because it is happening in America, and it's largely white, it's "why are we shutting it down?" But when it's religious extremism of other varieties? People have a very clear sense: "Oh, yeah, that's wrong. And that shouldn't be allowed."</p><p><strong>What was the motivation behind the Segment deal?</strong></p><p>Our goal is to build the leading customer engagement platform. And customer engagement is essentially the sum of all of the interactions a company has with its customer that makes the customer love the company and want to buy products and want to be a loyal customer and repeat customer. And there's really two parts to building a great customer experience or customer engagement.</p><p>One is knowing your customer, and then, two, engaging with them using communications to say relevant things and to actually be a good communicator. Twilio has long played in the second category of helping companies to communicate with their customers, with text, with voice, [with] video, with chat across many different parts of the customer experience spectrum, whether it's on the ... marketing side, or the sales side, or the customer support side, or while you're using a product.</p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="3">
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</div></p><p>But the first thing you need to do is really understand your customer: understand who they are, what products they're looking for and how they use your product. That's what helps you be really good at engaging with customers. And that's what Segment does.</p><p>If you think about especially B2C companies, the way the story of who you are, what products you're interested in, what your purchase history is, that is all told through data that is on various systems throughout the company. The marketing system knows which emails you clicked on, maybe indicating that you liked those products; the ecommerce system knows which products you bought, historically; the customer support system knows how many times you've interacted with the company and the problems that you've had. The sum of understanding you is the sum of all those data points about you.</p><p>Segment allows companies to take all those bits of data that are siloed, all throughout the company and all those different computer systems, and actually pull them together to build a cohesive picture of, you know, you.</p><p><strong>The way that your customers go about this is they build these customer service products for themselves, using some of your basic plumbing tools. Do you see yourself increasingly competing with companies that sort of just provide that whole experience as a service?</strong></p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="4">
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</div></p><p>Generally speaking, companies need to be able to build parts of their customer experience that their customers value, because that's how you differentiate in the market. If you have the exact same customer experience as all your competitors, you're not going to be very differentiated, especially in the digital era where the perception that customers have so many companies is the digital experience you have.</p><p>Companies who win are companies who are good at building software that differentiates them in the eyes of their customers. Now, you do that by buying some things and building some things. And so a lot of companies will have, you know, SaaS products that they bought, but they need to make those SaaS products do new and interesting things to answer their customers' needs. </p><p>Many of the problems that arise are from companies having bought a whole bunch of SaaS applications that can't talk to each other. They become data silos, and getting the data out of one into the other in order to build a really cohesive experience is tremendously hard. Segment and Twilio allow you to take the investments you've made in a bunch of SaaS products and make them better.</p><p><strong>It appears you're all in on AWS from an infrastructure standpoint, behind your own platform. As you get bigger, have you considered multicloud, or bringing in other providers as you scale?</strong></p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="5">
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</div></p><p>We do have other vendors in the mix at Twilio, although the majority of our infrastructure is with AWS. That doesn't trouble me per se, because if you think about it, what do I want my product teams at Twilio doing? I want them building the things our customers care about.</p><p>Our customers don't really care about where our CPU and storage is. They care about what our products do, and how our products are making our customers' lives better. The more time that we get to spend doing those things that our customers care about and are buying from us, the better.</p><p>That's the great role of infrastructure; infrastructure lets you focus on the things that you do well as your core competency. We are very happy Amazon customers, they provide a great platform. Of course, it helps that I worked there in the very early days of AWS and I know a lot of the people there. But ultimately it's about picking the best tool for the job and then allowing your teams to focus on building the differentiation that your customers care about.</p><p><strong>You mentioned picking the best tool for the job. Increasingly, there are options from Microsoft and Google that are best-in-class tools for a job depending on different needs. But there is obviously some convenience of being all in on AWS, they have a certain way of doing things you understand, so your engineers don't have to learn different tricks. How do you balance that?</strong></p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="6">
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</div></p><p>Developers have the freedom to propose the tool for the job. Now, if it's a new tool we've never used before, there may be an architectural review, there may be a security review, etc. But ultimately, we want developers at Twilio who are building products to be able to essentially pick the right piece of infrastructure that's going to facilitate them building the best product.</p><p>That's one of the points that I make in my book, which is that company policies are useful to protect customers: say, security, and things like that. Of course, you want those things to be taken care of, but you also want to trust your developers to make the right technical decisions for the products they're building.</p><p>In fact, in the areas where we don't use AWS, that's because a developer thought that some other service would be the best tool for the job. And having gone through the appropriate reviews, we let them do that.</p><p><strong>How do low code and no code strategies play into your thinking over the next few years?</strong></p><p>There's three varieties of building tools, if you will: There's low code, no code, and I like to call it "yo code," for the traditional developer approach. There's the right place for each and the right audience for each.</p><p>I think there's builders of many different kinds in the world: There's builders who want to open an IDE and hammer out code, there's builders who want to drag and drop and there's builders who want something in the middle. And we support all those methods of building; we're not religious about saying, in order to build something, you have to write code, you have to love Python, or C or whatever it is.</p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="7">
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</div></p><p>We've got a variety of low code and no code solutions on our platform already. And I think the traction that we're getting with those really speaks to the fact that there's a lot of different ways to build and a lot of different types of builders out there. And ultimately, what we care about is that people are able to innovate at the pace and speed and with the tools that they're most comfortable with.</p><p><strong>Even "yo code" has incorporated a lot of abstractions over time, right? I mean, no one's doing assembly.</strong></p><p>I like to think of it like how we've used Moore's law over the last 40 years. Computers haven't gotten that much faster in terms of how we use them. It's not like your word processor is 10 million times faster than it was in 1990.</p><p>But how we've used Moore's law is to create abstractions that make it easier and easier to build complex, sophisticated software, including the internet itself, right? The fact that you can use Google Docs, which is a word processor, delivered entirely inside the web browser, that's so many layers of abstractions that basically compost the layers below, and make it so that, as a developer or a user, you don't have to care about those details anymore.</p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="8">
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</div></p><p>That frees you to actually build more sophisticated, more agile software that gets updated more frequently. In many ways, as technologists and as [a] society, we've used Moore's law to do that, instead of to make our computers all that much faster for the user.</p>
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Tom Krazit ( @tomkrazit) is a senior reporter at Protocol, covering cloud computing and enterprise technology out of the Pacific Northwest. He has written and edited stories about the technology industry for almost two decades for publications such as IDG, CNET, paidContent, and GeekWire. He served as executive editor of Gigaom and Structure, and most recently produced a leading cloud computing newsletter called Mostly Cloudy.
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