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September 20, 2020
This week: Shakeel Hashim on Apple One, Snowflake and Unity; Janko Roettgers on Facebook's big (and small) plans for AR and VR; and Ashkhen Kazaryan and Emily Birnbaum on what's been happening with TikTok, Oracle, China and the White House.
For more on the topics in this episode:
David Pierce
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.
People
Beeper built the universal messaging app the world needed
It's an app for all your social apps. And part of an entirely new way to think about chat.
Beeper is an app for all your messaging apps, including the hard-to-access ones.
Image: Beeper
January 22, 2021
David Pierce ( @pierce) is Protocol's editor at large. Prior to joining Protocol, he was a columnist at The Wall Street Journal, a senior writer with Wired, and deputy editor at The Verge. He owns all the phones.
January 22, 2021
Eric Migicovsky likes to tinker. And the former CEO of Pebble — he's now a partner at Y Combinator — knows a thing or two about messaging. "You remember on the Pebble," he asked me, "how we had this microphone, and on Android you could reply to all kinds of messages?" Migicovsky liked that feature, and he especially liked that it didn't care which app you used. Android-using Pebble wearers could speak their replies to texts, Messenger chats, almost any notification that popped up.
That kind of universal, non-siloed approach to messaging appealed to Migicovsky, and it didn't really exist anywhere else. "Remember Trillian from back in the day?" he asked, somewhat wistfully. "Or Adium?" They were the gold-standard of universal messaging apps; users could log in to their AIM, MSN, GChat and Yahoo accounts, and chat with everyone in one place.
<p>Migicovsky has spent the last two years building a modern equivalent. It's called Beeper, and it pulls 15 different messaging services — including WhatsApp, Slack, Instagram and iMessage — into a single app. The app launched this week, and will cost $10 a month for anyone who wants to use it. Migicovsky said roughly 40 people have been using the app for the last few months, and that he's come to rely on it completely. "Beeper went down for me a couple of weeks ago, and I had to fix it," he said. "And for the hours I was fixing it, I had to open up Slack, Telegram, Signal, everything. It was like going back to the Stone Ages." </p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="1">
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</div></p><p>To explain how Beeper works, and why Migicovsky thinks it's valuable, you have to understand the protocols. In the early days of online messaging (otherwise known as The Adium Era), many messaging services were based on a protocol called Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol, or XMPP. When it was designed, XMPP intended to make all kinds of communication on the internet, from text to video to file transfers, into decentralized systems. For a while, it worked: From AIM to Google Talk to the early days of Facebook Chat, some of the biggest messaging services used XMPP. </p><p>A few years later, Google and Facebook — and soon others — decided to stop supporting XMPP. Some argued XMPP was too complicated a protocol and simply didn't work; others said they could develop features more quickly by keeping everything in-house. "Today, group conversations, sharing your day with stickers or emojis and messaging across multiple devices have become second nature to many of us," Google product manager Mayur Kamat <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20150704141805if_/https://plus.google.com/+MayurKamat/posts/ETBvtp9VYav" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">wrote in 2015</a> announcing the switch from Google Talk (which supported XMPP) to Hangouts (which didn't). Whatever the reason, messaging apps soon became walled gardens, with everything run — and stored — in one place.</p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="2">
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</div></p><p>In the last few years, though, a group of developers has been building a new protocol, one they hope can offer all the openness and decentralization of XMPP but with all the modern features people need now: encryption, voice and video, integrations with other apps and the like. It's called Matrix. "Matrix is our effort to right the balance" after decades of great tech being turned into walled gardens, said Matthew Hodgson, Matrix's technical co-founder. "If you were going to build the holy grail of messaging," the team asked themselves several years ago — a service where anyone can participate, where everything is encrypted, where nothing is locked off from the ecosystem — "what would it look like?" Some of this tech has been built in the past, but always inside a single company or service. They wanted to build it and give it to the internet.</p><p>Ultimately, Hodgson said, Matrix is more than a messaging protocol. "It's a real-time database for any kind of information," he said, from financial tickers to drone flights to VR streams. "Matrix just gives you the building blocks to synchronize it between different deployments." Messaging just happens to be something with which Hodgson and his team have plenty of experience. Not to mention, it's kind of a killer app. Matrix-based messaging can support a whole ecosystem of apps, the way email protocols do. It's all end-to-end encrypted, and it's resilient by virtue of not being housed in a single data center. </p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="3">
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</div></p><p>"When Slack goes down for six hours," Hodgson said, "or Signal goes down for 24 hours, people realize, 'hang on, all my eggs are in one basket.'" There are already decentralized, harder-to-kill apps like Slack or Signal running on Matrix, where there's less security risk or possibility of downtime. He added: "The narrative is swinging in our direction." Millions of users use Matrix messaging tools already, he said, including the entire French government, which uses a Slack-like tool called Element that is built by the Matrix team.</p><p class="shortcode-media shortcode-media-rebelmouse-image">
<img type="lazy-image" data-runner-src="https://assets.rebelmouse.io/eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJpbWFnZSI6Imh0dHBzOi8vYXNzZXRzLnJibC5tcy8yNTUxMjQ3Mi9vcmlnaW4ucG5nIiwiZXhwaXJlc19hdCI6MTY3MDIzNzU0NX0.NPrsWaIEy9RUG90_cIsyZMFW7foaGyiuP_vHdD2T-Ok/img.png?width=980" id="ce4ab" class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="37ea800dd363bb5c0c588b2727990131" data-rm-shortcode-name="rebelmouse-image" alt="Beeper chats">
<small class="image-media media-caption" placeholder="Add Photo Caption...">Beeper tries to wrangle lots of messaging apps into one. Eventually, that might not be necessary.</small><small class="image-media media-photo-credit" placeholder="Add Photo Credit...">Image: Beeper</small></p><p>Matrix is key to Beeper, but in a slightly different way. Migicovsky isn't trying to build a brand-new chat service to compete with WhatsApp; he's trying to wrangle all the services people use into a system that feels more open. So he's taking advantage of a Matrix feature called Bridges, which pulls other apps into the Matrix ecosystem. Sometimes this is easy: Migicovsky said IRC and Telegram have great APIs, making it easy to send and read messages from other apps. Most others are a bit hackier, though Migicovsky said it's rarely impossible: "If you can open something in a browser, we can get to it."<br></p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="4">
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</div></p><p>One of Beeper's most enticing integrations is with iMessage, which would mean users could access their iMessages on Android or Windows through the Beeper app. This one is stupendously hacky. If a Beeper user has a Mac that's always on and connected to the internet, it's easy; Beeper just connects to the same relay that delivers messages to all your Apple devices, and sends them to Beeper. But if you don't have a Mac that fits the description, there's only one way in. "We wrote an app for jailbroken iPhones that acts as a relay," Migicovsky said. "There's a database on the iPhone called sms.db. And so we just read and write to that." </p><p>But wait, it gets hackier! There's no way to get everyone to jailbreak their iPhones, so Migicovsky found a workaround. "I buy used old cracked-screen iPhones for cheap," he said. "I jailbreak them, and send them to people with the app installed. And they just set it up and leave it somewhere connected to Wi-Fi." There's a box full of semi-busted iPhones, all the way back to the iPhone 4, on his desk right now. The plan works, though it doesn't exactly scale. "We tried a lot of different things," Migicovsky said. "It might not be like this forever." </p><p>There's one part of this setup that Migicovsky actually quite likes. "You control the phone," he said. All the code is open source, and Beeper encrypts all messages; only users have their passwords to access them. But if you really don't want Beeper getting your texts anymore, just unplug that jailbroken iPhone, and you're done.</p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="5">
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</div></p><p>Migicovsky has lots of ideas for how to improve Beeper as a product, and messaging in general. "No one has really innovated in chat in the last 10 years," he said, before allowing that maybe Slack and Discord get a little credit. But that's it. He's not sure what better looks like, though. He's intrigued by new ways to sort and organize messages, even how threads could look. "I'm really just excited about having this ... not a blank canvas, a malleable canvas," he said.</p><p>The list of places people message seems to get longer every day, and Migicovsky wants Beeper to support them all. "I want to build LinkedIn and Snapchat, and I'm not dating but a lot of people want Tinder messages on this," he said. He's not trying to replace those apps entirely, though. "Discord's amazing," he said, by way of example. "It has cool animations, you have the audio chat that's really good, it's got this social element." For Discord things, people should use Discord. But texting with friends or sharing photos shouldn't be a Discord thing. Or an Instagram thing, or a WhatsApp thing, or a Signal thing, or a Slack thing. It definitely shouldn't be all of those, separately.</p>"It would be wonderful if we didn't have to build what we built," Migicovsky said. "And you could just look me up, like in a phone book or something, and say, 'I want to talk to Eric.'" In the long run, Matrix might help make that possible — already, it appears some of Twitter's decentralization work through Project Bluesky is <a href="https://twitter.com/bluesky/status/1352302821140549632" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">being done on Matrix</a>, and Hodgson said he's had conversations with a number of big players in the tech world about build a more open and interoperable messaging ecosystem. For now, the best anyone can do is put everything in one place. It's hacky, but it's progress.
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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.
The Capitol riots scrambled FCC Republicans’ Section 230 plans. What now?
The FCC's top tech agitators have been almost silent about Big Tech's Trump bans.
The commissioners will gingerly walk a line of condemning the tech platforms without seeming like they are condoning the rhetoric that led to Trump's suspensions or the takedown of Parler.
Photo: Jonathan Newton-Pool/Getty Images
January 22, 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.
January 22, 2021
Brendan Carr, one of the Federal Communications Commission's two Republicans, spent the better part of 2020 blasting Big Tech platforms for allegedly censoring conservative speech, appearing on Fox News and right-wing podcasts to claim that social media companies exhibited bias against President Trump and the GOP more broadly.
But in the weeks since Twitter, Facebook and YouTube suspended former President Trump and removed large swaths of his supporters in the wake of the violent riot on Capitol Hill, Carr has remained largely silent about the deplatforming, except to condemn the violence. "Political violence is completely unacceptable," Carr told reporters days after the riot. "It's clear to me President Trump bears responsibility."
<p>The Jan. 6 riot, which the former president incited and which led to his indefinite suspension from social media, has scrambled the debate around content moderation within the FCC and left Carr, as well as the newly-confirmed Republican FCC Commissioner Nathan Simington, in a bind as they carve out what Carr calls a "<a href="https://www.newsweek.com/conservative-path-forward-big-tech-opinion-1520375" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">conservative path forward on Big Tech</a>." Simington in particular had helped push forward Trump's agenda on Section 230 from his perch at the National Telecommunications and Information Administration before being confirmed at the FCC. Now, former FCC officials say he and Carr will have to gingerly walk a line of condemning the tech platforms without seeming like they are condoning the rhetoric that led to Trump's suspensions or the takedown of Parler, the social networking site that was used in part to organize the violence.</p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="1">
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</div></p><p>"The reality is, these commissioners recognize that these events are a game-changer in the way people are talking about Section 230 and internet gatekeepers writ large," said one former FCC official. The official said the commissioners are staying mum for now because they are "cognizant of the fact that the conversation is so associated with that horrible attack." Capitalizing on it, the official said, would "[distract] from the core issue." </p><p>Last weekend, Simington was set to speak at a meetup in Las Vegas where right-wing speakers, including some on the party's fringe, discussed topics including "woke tech" and political censorship, but he <a href="https://www.protocol.com/conservatives-vegas-woke-tech" target="_self">backed out</a> at the last minute. "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," he told Protocol. </p><p>Simington's spokesperson declined to comment for this story. </p><p>Experts who watch the FCC said it's unlikely that Simington or Carr will back off completely from talking about Section 230. "I don't think that this is going to go away," said Zach Graves, head of policy at the Lincoln Network, a right-leaning tech group. But he said they might strike a more conciliatory tone, particularly now that the Democrats will be in control. "What might happen is while [Republicans] are out of power, they might be more sophisticated in the kinds of policy recommendations they push for on tech," Graves said. </p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="2">
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</div></p><p>In one of his final acts as FCC chair, Republican Ajit Pai <a href="https://www.protocol.com/ajit-pai-distancing-trump" target="_self">chose not to move forward</a> with a rule-making on Section 230, which was laid out in Trump's social media executive order. </p><p>Carr, meanwhile, said that he believes it is within the FCC's jurisdiction to review the law, and he told reporters earlier this month that he plans to "continue to advocate for Section 230 reform." "It's clear we're having failures in different directions," Carr said.<br></p><p>Conservatives in recent weeks have particularly homed in on Amazon Web Services' decision to cut off service for Parler, a massive display of power for the cloud company that typically functions more as neutral infrastructure than a platform with content moderation policies. The former FCC official predicted that will be the next turn in the conversation about internet freedom within the FCC. "I think [Simington and Carr] will be careful in the way they engage with that, trying to make sure they're not seen as defending Parler, but really talking about the future of internet freedom," the official said.</p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="3">
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</div></p><p>Another former FCC official told Protocol that they believe what AWS did to Parler "will become part of the net neutrality debate. I think conservatives are going to [say], 'OK, great, want to talk about net neutrality and free speech on the internet? Let's talk about cloud and web-hosting.'"</p><p>Democrats on the Commission, meanwhile, have made it clear that they do not believe the FCC should play a role in dictating the future of platform speech issues, including Section 230. FCC Commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel, who Biden chose to serve as acting chair Thursday, <a href="https://www.protocol.com/jessica-rosenworcel-fcc-interview" target="_self">told Protocol</a> last year that it is "not a provision where Congress specifically asked us to enact rules, nor has the FCC had a history of acting in this area." </p><p>Mignon Clyburn, who worked with Carr during her tenure as an FCC commissioner in 2018 and remains close to the agency, said the events on Capitol Hill illustrated that social media platforms have "been used to weaponize hate" and "spread mis- and disinformation." But she doesn't think the FCC has the ability to take on Section 230.</p><p>"Does [Section 230] need a refresh?" Clyburn said. "Does it need modification? I think that it would be a prudent and worthy exercise to answer those questions — and that job, respectfully, is Congress'." </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.
Politics
Facebook’s Oversight Board won’t save it from the Trump ban backlash
The Board's decision on whether to reinstate Trump could set a new precedent for Facebook. But does the average user care what the Board has to say?
A person holds a sign during a Free Speech Rally against tech companies, on Jan. 20 in California.
Photo: Valerie Macon/Getty Images
January 21, 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 21, 2021
Two weeks after Facebook suspended former President Donald Trump's account indefinitely, Facebook answered a chorus of calls and referred the case to its newly created Oversight Board for review. Now, the board has 90 days to make a call as to whether Trump stays or goes permanently. The board's decision — and more specifically, how and why it arrives at that decision — could have consequences not only for other global leaders on Facebook, but for the future of the Board itself.
Facebook created its Oversight Board for such a time as this — a time when it would face a controversial content moderation decision and might need a gut check. Or a fall guy. There could be no decision more controversial than the one Facebook made on Jan. 7, when it decided to muzzle one of the most powerful people in the world with weeks remaining in his presidency. It stands to reason, then, that Facebook would tap in its newly anointed refs on the Oversight Board both to earnestly review the call and to put a little distance between Facebook and the decision.
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</div></p><p>It also stands to reason that the Oversight Board would oblige. It was designed to be Facebook's Supreme Court analog, taking up cases that can set new, important precedents for Facebook and issuing decisions on those cases. Like the actual Supreme Court, what matters now is not just what decision the board reaches regarding Trump's account, but how narrowly or broadly it rules. A broad decision that takes into account not just what Trump said on Facebook, but the offline consequences of his words, could mean tougher treatment of all global leaders with a record of <a href="https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/daveyalba/facebook-philippines-dutertes-drug-war" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">exploiting Facebook to achieve violent ends</a>. A narrow one could risk creating a global double standard, <a href="https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/story/2021-01-15/facebook-social-media-bans-trump-capitol-riot" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">affirming fears</a> that Facebook is more concerned with violence on its own home turf than in other countries. </p><p>"I actually think this will be the Oversight Board's Marbury v Madison moment," Stanford Law professor Nate Persily <a href="https://twitter.com/persily/status/1352308920031666177?s=20" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">wrote</a> on Twitter. "Meaning, even if they uphold the decision to suspend, the way they handle the case, decide on their jurisdiction, and consider the breadth of the issue presented will be important going forward."</p><p>But a broader question hangs over this entire experiment, and it is very much an experiment: Does the average Facebook user actually care what the Board has to say?</p><p>It's true that the Board's decisions will matter to Facebook, which means they will matter to its billions of users. The decisions it makes will be binding, according to bylaws agreed upon by Facebook, and will likely have domino effects on other content decisions down the line. But if there's a public relations aspect to all of this — that is, if Facebook is hoping to unload the burden of Trump's banishment and redirect some of the public backlash toward a third party — that effort seems doomed to fail. </p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="2">
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</div></p><p>Unlike the actual Supreme Court, the average American may very well have no idea that the Oversight Board exists. Even if they do, how many of them will take the time to understand the <a href="https://www.protocol.com/facebook-oversight-board-rules-of-the-internet" target="_self">tedious process</a> Facebook underwent to ensure the board is both bipartisan and independent? To the average Trump voter incensed about Facebook's decision to suspend Trump and so many other decisions before that, what is the Oversight Board, really, but an offshoot of the all-powerful tech giant they've believed to be shilling for Democrats all along?</p><p>That's what makes this moment so dicey for the Oversight Board. It's taking on one of its most consequential cases before it's even issued a single other decision. "On the one hand, it divests a huge amount of power from [Facebook] to give the Board authority over this. On the other hand, maybe the Board is too nascent to take on such an enormous question," Kate Klonick, an assistant professor at St. John's Law School, who has studied the Oversight Board extensively, <a href="https://twitter.com/Klonick/status/1352305708423929858?s=20" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">tweeted</a> Thursday. "The Board can establish its seriousness and jurisdiction/power over [Facebook]. That could be good for the Board, but it also means that it's very risky for establishing legitimacy [...] Not sending it also would have also been a damning message — that the Board's authority was limited and that [Facebook] didn't really intend to give it any hard questions."</p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="3">
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</div></p><p>Now, just months after it came into existence, the Board already <a href="https://twitter.com/hijakamran/status/1352306226923790341?s=20" target="_blank">faces</a> an existential question: to err on the side of public safety or public perception. "Whatever they say will piss off 50-ish percent of Americans. Purely as game theory, I think they're best off reinstating. That shows independence [and] reassures American conservatives, who broadly pose a bigger threat to the Facebook Oversight Board than American liberals," <a href="https://twitter.com/daphnehk/status/1352304994695798784?s=20" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">tweeted</a> Daphne Keller, who directs the program on platform regulation at Stanford's Cyber Policy Center. </p><p>Keller later <a href="https://twitter.com/daphnehk/status/1352306626947022853?s=20" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">added</a> that ruling based on those incentives "would be a dereliction of duty, in terms of what they are actually supposed to do."</p><p>But of course, those incentives do exist. The Board may be new, but the choice it's now facing is not. It's a choice between public safety and self-preservation — a choice that will determine the future of dictators and strongmen around the world and, as we've recently seen, have very real implications for the people they govern. It's a choice Facebook has made again and again throughout its history — a choice it's now asking the board to make instead.</p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="4">
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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.
People
The future of the cell phone, according to the man who invented it
Martin Cooper on 5G, AI, and why sometimes in tech it's helpful to have an enemy.
Martin Cooper with his original DynaTAC cell phone.
Photo: Ted Soqui/Getty Images
January 21, 2021
David Pierce ( @pierce) is Protocol's editor at large. Prior to joining Protocol, he was a columnist at The Wall Street Journal, a senior writer with Wired, and deputy editor at The Verge. He owns all the phones.
January 21, 2021
Martin Cooper helped invent one of the most consequential and successful products in history: the cell phone. And almost five decades after he made the first public cell phone call, on a 2-pound brick of a device called the DynaTAC, he's written a book about his career called "Cutting the Cord: The Cell Phone Has Transformed Humanity." In it he tells the story of the cell phone's invention, and looks at how it has changed the world and will continue to do so.
Cooper came on the Source Code Podcast to talk about his time at Motorola, the process of designing the first-ever cell phone, whether today's tech giants are monopolies and why he's bullish on the future of AI.
<div class="rm-embed embed-media"><iframe frameborder="no" height="200px" scrolling="no" seamless="" src="https://player.simplecast.com/21947943-bc81-43d9-9eb3-f18341a6c8b6?dark=true" width="100%"></iframe></div><p><em>The following excerpts from our conversation have been edited for length and clarity.</em><br></p><p><strong>I want to get to the phones, but before we do I want to talk about pagers, because I have this deep obsession with pagers. I think pagers are a much better example of the direct predecessor to the cell phone than landlines. Even though you couldn't make phone calls, it seems like spiritually, pagers were cell phones before they were cell phones. You made pagers, and they were huge. And I guess my big question is, why didn't pagers get their due? We kind of skip over them, but it feels like they were a big thing.</strong></p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="1">
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</div></p><p>Well they were, at the time we did it. In the U.S. there were, at the peak, over 50 million pagers. And the principle is freedom. Our biggest customers were people like doctors, who were trapped next to their patients because they have to be available. And the pager set them free! They could go play a game of golf and know that they could get a beep and be at the hospital at 10 minutes. So the concept of freedom, I don't want to beat it to death, is really the essence of what portability is. </p><p>And since you brought the subject up, one of the battles that I'm engaged in today has to do with education and the need for broadband for education. And the solution that the FCC is proposing is wired broadband. Cable! We're going through the same thing all over again. And I am trying to persuade them that if you want to solve the digital divide in education, it's going to have to be with wireless broadband.</p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="2">
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</div></p><p><strong>I agree. And one of the other things you're involved in right now is 5G stuff, right? I spend all of my time talking to people in tech who are, let's say, overzealous about the potential of 5G. Everybody has spent five years telling me that 5G is going to change everything, that it's the panacea of technology, and I'm not sure that I see it. Tell me what you think about 5G: Is it as big of a change in how all of this stuff works as some people like to make it out to be?</strong></p><p>Not really. I think you put your finger on it: 5G is an incremental change. It introduces a couple of new capabilities to what existed in 4G. One of them is the use of millimeter-wave where there is a much bigger bandwidth, but a big handicap is the fact that the millimeter waves don't travel very far. There are other things that are done that reduce latency. </p><p>So it turns out that those two characteristics — very high speeds and low latency — are very useful in things like running a robot. If you've got a factory and you want to run robots, you're going to need those kinds of things. Unfortunately, for people like you and me, 5G does essentially nothing. You have to understand, I think 5G is a wonderful thing, and we have to keep progressing. But I don't appreciate being deluded. And the carriers have done that: They talk about having remote operations and autonomous cars and things of that nature. And guess who's paying for the 5G? It's you and me.</p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="3">
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</div></p><p><strong>OK, let's go back and talk about the DynaTAC stuff. My favorite scene in the book was when you're at a restaurant in Chicago, and a bunch of people have brought you prototypes of this cell phone. And nobody has any idea what a cell phone is supposed to look like. What's that day like?</strong></p><p>Well, you have to start at the beginning of that, because two weeks previously, I approached Rudy Krolopp. Now, Rudy didn't work for me. He ran the Industrial Design Group for this division. But he was a visionary. I told him where we were going to build a cell phone, and he said, "What's a cell phone?" And I described what a portable phone was like, and he reassigned all the people in his group to come up with their concept of what this portable phone might look like. And so I felt I had to reward them in some way. And that's why I invited them to dinner. </p><p>Each of these guys got up and presented what his vision was, of what a portable phone would look like. And they all ended up being a vision of what actually happened. There was a slide phone, there was a flip phone, and there was what they call a capsule phone. These guys were just remarkable. </p><p>We ended up picking what we called the shoe phone — for obvious reasons — because it was simple.</p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="4">
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</div></p><p><strong>You say you picked the shoe phone because it was simple, but it doesn't seem like it would necessarily be obvious that it was simple, because again, nobody had ever done this before. Most of the parts that were required didn't really exist yet. What's your criteria for thinking, "this is the one we can do?"</strong></p><p>It was mechanically simple. It was just the box. Anytime you put hinges and sliders, things of that nature, they're going to break. We actually ended up all agreeing that this was the way to go. And I wanted to make sure that I appreciated the efforts of these other guys. So even though I picked this one, we selected this as a group. Everybody agreed that this is the way to go. </p><p><strong>I guess it makes sense to say, "We have to invent 1,000 things just to make this work. Why invent 1,001 that we don't have to?"</strong></p><p>That's exactly right. [Pulls an original DynaTAC model out.] Calling this "simple" … the insides of this phone are incredibly complex, much more so than a modern phone. A modern phone has a million times the power of this box that we're looking at now. But the complexity, the number of parts — there are like 10 times more parts in the old phone, and they were all hand-soldered together. It's close to a miracle that we got one to work. And they actually got two to work!</p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="5">
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</div></p><p><strong>The timing of all this is interesting to me, because you're in the middle of this fight against AT&T. It seems like there was something about that fight, and that moment, that made this whole project go. And I was wondering, if Motorola had been super successful, doing fine, under no real threat from AT&T and the FCC, does a project like this happen? Or does it take this kind of existential threat to push something like the phone forward?</strong></p><p>How could I ever have persuaded my management to start investing? They ended up pretty much betting the company, between 1969 when the Bell System announced their desire to continue their monopoly on cellular, and 1983 when we actually have service. This battle that we engaged in lasted 13 to 14 years, and the company spent $100 million of 1970 dollars. So how would I ever have persuaded them, if we didn't have an enemy? If we didn't have to bet our whole company against them, because they would have put us out of business?</p><p><strong>You really don't think you could have pulled it off by yourself? You had a lot of power and trust and autonomy at Motorola.</strong></p><p>We would have come up with a phone, but getting the FCC to move really took a huge amount of effort. The Bell System had 200 lobbyists calling on the FCC alone. They had two guys assigned to each of the nine commissioners. At that time, our total lobbyists force in Washington was three guys, who called on the FCC, the Congress and all the government agencies. So it really took that kind of challenge to make this thing happen. </p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="6">
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</div></p><p><strong>So let's talk about monopolies. You've truly been in the center of fighting against one, and now we're having these same arguments again, about Google and Amazon and Apple and Facebook. What do you make about the antitrust fight happening right now? Does it rhyme with history to you, as you see all this stuff happening?</strong></p><p>It's a different problem. But it's still a problem.</p><p>There's no question in my mind that some of the practices that Google and Amazon exercise are anti-competitive. And so we've got to do something about it. But there's a difference between that and a regulated monopoly where the government decides what the price is going to be and the monopoly just makes all the decisions, and they have no competitive pressures. That's what Bell Systems did. </p><p>The whole process was different. Bell Labs — which by the way, was an extraordinary organization — had all the funding that they wanted, because they had a monopoly supporting them. And they would invent something, and they would think, "Oh, this is interesting, let's make a product." And they would turn the product over to Western Electric, which was part of the monopoly, and they would make them all and then they would turn that over to the operating companies. And the operating companies would come to you and say, "David, this is what you want, right?" </p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="7">
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</div></p><p>That's exactly backwards from what we do today. Marketers today look at what people need and want, what problems they solve and they work backwards through that process. The research guys work on, hopefully, what are going to solve human problems.</p><p><strong>But then on the flip side, then come questions about how power works differently. And especially as we get to privacy and data collection and all this stuff. Bell Systems <em>felt</em> like a monopoly: You could just look at it and be like, "this is clearly a monopoly." It feels messier now, but maybe not any less consequential.</strong> </p><p>I think the real problem is not Google and Facebook and Amazon. It's the people that think they're getting something for nothing. They're not getting anything free, they're giving up their information, which has value, and they're getting less value in return. When people start realizing that and that they have alternatives, the problem is going to get solved. So once again, it sounds like I'm being overly optimistic. And it may be that the government has to intervene in the process, but the real solution there is education.</p><p><strong>Speaking of the privacy and society side of all of this, when you were in the early days of the cell phone, were you thinking about "what does it mean for society when everyone has a phone like this?" You wrote the book that you imagined that when everybody was born, they'd be given a phone number. And were you guys asking this sort of philosophical question?</strong> </p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="8">
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</div></p><p>No.</p><p>You know, it's one thing to be a visionary. And I really think that we were visionaries. We stuck our necks out on that thing. But when people asked me what I was thinking of when we made the first public call, it was, "I hope this thing works." </p><p><strong>Before I let you go, I want to talk about AI. Because I think that's another place we have a lot of optimists and a lot of pessimists, and the way you seem to think about where artificial intelligence and humanity meet is about as optimistic a take as I think I've heard. So convince me that the future of AI is mostly good news.</strong></p><p><strong></strong>When I look at a product, I define the usefulness of a product, or at least the interface, as bad, good and optimum. A bad interface is one where you need an instruction manual to work something. If you have a device or a service that is intuitive — you look at it, and you could figure out what to do without looking at an instruction manual — that's pretty good technology. The optimum technology is invisible. It's there, it works for you, it solves your problem. You don't even have to think about it. Well, if you're going to do that, something has to be behind the scenes, making decisions for you. And that's artificial intelligence.<br></p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="9">
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</div></p><p>There are people that are very optimistic about how quickly that's going to happen. And it turns out that there are some things that the brain does that we haven't even figured out how to copy. It doesn't compute very well, it doesn't remember very well. But other things? It can abstract in ways that machines cannot. And so I think it's going to be a slow process, where the machines are little by little going to take over more and more of the routine things in our lives, are going to make us more efficient. </p><p>Society is much more resilient than people think. People are more resilient. People keep saying, "Oh, no, we are going down the tubes, because the kids aren't talking to each other anymore." Yes, I do see lots of cases where kids sit around the table all looking at their cell phones, but most of them are texting each other. And it takes time for society to embrace and understand new things. </p><p>These things are all new, it's going to take a generation for us to accommodate them. But human minds are very flexible. The brain is amazing. It's going to be many generations before artificial intelligences take over. And when they do take over, we won't even notice it.</p>
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David Pierce ( @pierce) is Protocol's editor at large. Prior to joining Protocol, he was a columnist at The Wall Street Journal, a senior writer with Wired, and deputy editor at The Verge. He owns all the phones.
Big Tech gets a win from Biden’s sweeping immigration actions
Tim Cook and Sundar Pichai praised President Biden's immigration actions, which read like a tech industry wishlist.
Newly-inaugurated President Joe Biden signed two immigration-related executive orders on Wednesday.
Photo: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
January 21, 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.
January 20, 2021
Immediately after being sworn in as president Wednesday, Joe Biden signed two pro-immigration executive orders and delivered an immigration bill to Congress that reads like a tech industry wishlist. The move drew enthusiastic praise from tech leaders, including Apple CEO Tim Cook and Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai.
President Biden nullified several of former-President Trump's most hawkish immigration policies. His executive orders reversed the so-called "Muslim ban" and instructed the attorney general and the secretary of Homeland Security to preserve the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, program, which the Trump administration had sought to end. He also sent an expansive immigration reform bill to Congress that would provide a pathway to citizenship for undocumented individuals and make it easier for foreign U.S. graduates with STEM degrees to stay in the United States, among other provisions.
<p>Biden's Day One moves suggest that immigration reform will be one of the key areas for allyship between Silicon Valley and the Biden administration over the next several years. The industry is sorely in need of common ground as Democrats pledge to use their power over Congress and the White House to crack down on Big Tech. </p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="1">
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</div></p><p>"We welcome President Biden's commitment to pursuing comprehensive immigration reform that reflects the American values of justice, fairness and dignity," said Cook in a statement to Protocol. "This effort will strengthen American communities and the pathways to opportunity this country has long fostered." </p><p>Cook, who is the chair of Business Roundtable's immigration committee, said he looked forward to working with Democrats and Republicans on a "permanent solution for Dreamers that includes a path to citizenship."</p><p>"We applaud @POTUS's quick action on COVID relief, the Paris Climate Accord, and immigration reform," Pichai <a href="https://twitter.com/sundarpichai/status/1352021111479832576?s=21" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">tweeted</a> Wednesday. "Google has supported action on these important issues & we look forward to working with the new administration to help the US recover from the pandemic + grow our economy."</p><p>An Uber spokesperson also affirmed the company's support for President Biden's actions. "At Uber, we have long supported positive immigration reform and an effective system that upholds core American values," the spokesperson said. "Uber will continue to support Dreamers, and we welcome the new Administration's effort to reform our nation's immigration system."</p><p>The tech industry, which relies heavily on foreign workers, has spent the last four years <a href="https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2017/08/31/tech-industry-prepares-new-trump-fight-over-daca-dreamer-protection-program/622897001/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">battling with the Trump administration</a> over efforts to shut down vital talent pipelines from countries including India, China and Iran. Over the last four years, tech giants have filed <a href="https://abcnews.go.com/Business/dreamers-embody-apples-innovation-strategy-apple-ceo-tim/story?id=66030999" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">amicus briefs</a> in high-profile <a href="https://www.vox.com/2020/1/16/21069827/twitter-microsoft-linkedin-public-charge-trump-immigration-tech-companies" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">court cases</a> and lobbied in favor of opening up U.S. borders to high-skilled workers. Despite protestations from Silicon Valley leaders, the Trump administration continually added uncertainty to the H-1B visa application process, resulting in significant backlogs. </p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="2">
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</div></p><p>Biden's immigration bill would put money towards clearing visa backlogs, eliminate visa caps on certain countries and make it easier for people on temporary work visas to get green cards. Perhaps most significantly, it would immediately give the 11 million undocumented immigrants in the U.S. a pathway to become citizens. </p><p>The executive orders on DACA and the Muslim ban will immediately appease immigration advocates, including those inside the tech industry, but the toughest battle still lies ahead: rallying support in Congress for immigration reform, which has failed for years. Still, there may be some in the Republican party who are willing to work with the Biden administration on key pillars of the proposal. On Wednesday, Sen. Lindsey Graham, who was a leading player in immigration talks during the Obama years and a top Trump ally, told CBS he is open to creating a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants.</p><p>"What we are really looking for is making sure there is congressional action and there is a legislative solution," said Karolina Filipiak, senior director of government affairs at the Information Technology Industry Council, a tech trade group. "We don't want to be in the same position four years from now or eight years from now [with] a new administration that could rescind the program." </p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="3">
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</div></p><p>Companies including Facebook and Google are hoping to work with lawmakers in Congress to create bipartisan support for reform, particularly as they face regulatory headwinds of their own. </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.
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January 22, 2021 11:32 EST
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