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yesMike MurphyNone
July 29, 2020
We're about two hours into the hearing, and Jeff Bezos has had almost nothing to do. While Facebook, Apple and Google's CEOs have had to endure being drilled from members of both parties, Amazon's CEO has primarily sat with his Webex feed turned off, being asked only one question so far.
It's indicative of how the hearing has been going for all four companies. Although there's definitely a possible antitrust argument for each of the companies at the hearing, some are coming off stronger than others.
Rep. Jerry Nadler grilled Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg on whether he saw Instagram as a competitive threat before the company acquired it. In the world of sharing photos (which is, pretty much all you can do on Instagram), Zuckerberg said that it was. Nadler reminded him that buying a company to quash competition under FTC regulations is illegal.
Nadler: If you bought Instagram to neutralize a threat, why shouldn't we unwind the acquisition?
Zuckerberg, more or less: Remember Path? That was a cool app! Totally could've beaten Instagram.
— Protocol (@protocol) July 29, 2020
Rep. David Cicilline brought up a recent report by The Markup that showed, more often than not, that Google's top search results were Google's own products. CEO Sundar Pichai was also hounded about the lyrics the company allegedly lifted from the lyrics-archive website Genius for its own search results.
Rep. Hank Johnson took Apple CEO Tim Cook to task over the monopoly it has over what apps can be installed on the 100 million iPhone devices in the U.S., and the cut Apple takes from their developers.
Amazon so far has only had to answer one question, about its search feed. It's yet to have to answer for the fact that its AWS cloud services power so much of the web, nor that it has had reportedly investing in companies only to launch competing products itself, or that it's changed its search algorithms to boost its own products.
In every case, these companies have built ecosystems that are tough to break out of. More people use social media through Facebook properties than any other service in the world. Google is far and away the largest provider of search, video, and email services, and along with Facebook, effectively control the digital advertising market. If you want to work with Apple, you have to play by its rules, and pray it doesn't alter the deal any further. Amazon is well on the way to becoming the internet's "everything store," while owning some of the most important digital infrastructure online.
But some of these ecosystems are more exclusive than others. If you don't want to use Apple products, there are excellent alternatives for all of its products made by other companies — just be wary of the social stigma of green text bubbles. If you don't want to sell to or buy from Amazon, there's Walmart, Target and, to a degree, Shopify. For AWS, there's other major cloud providers (though a few of them are also on this hearing). For Google, your options are more limited — there's no search engine quite as dominant as Google, nor a video platform as broad as YouTube. But there are some other options — products like Firefox instead of Chrome, Bing (it's not bad!) or DuckDuckGo instead of Google Search, and even products like Helm if you don't want any tech company of any kind reading your email. For Facebook, you can try calling your friends or just texting them photos, but you won't have nearly the same reach as you would on Facebook or Instagram.
And then there's Twitter, which Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner seemed to have confused for Facebook. The microblogging site recently suspended Donald Trump Jr. for sharing a highly controversial video about COVID-19. Zuckerberg informed him that he was in fact thinking of Twitter, and not the company he runs. Twitter CEO Jack is probably enjoying not having to dial into this hearing with a bit of meditation.
Correction: This post was updated July 30 to correct Jerry Nadler's name.
Mike Murphy
Mike Murphy ( @mcwm) is the director of special projects at Protocol, focusing on the industries being rapidly upended by technology and the companies disrupting incumbents. Previously, Mike was the technology editor at Quartz, where he frequently wrote on robotics, artificial intelligence, and consumer electronics.
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.
People
Google's union has big goals — and big roadblocks
Absence of dues, retaliation fears and small numbers could pose problems for the union's dream of collective bargaining, but Googlers are undeterred.
Recruiting union members beyond the early adopters has had its challenges.
Photo: David Paul Morris/Getty Images
January 22, 2021
Anna Kramer is a reporter at Protocol (@ anna_c_kramer), where she helps write and produce Source Code, Protocol's daily newsletter. Prior to joining the team, she covered tech and small business for the San Francisco Chronicle and privacy for Bloomberg Law. She is a recent graduate of Brown University, where she studied International Relations and Arabic and wrote her senior thesis about surveillance tools and technological development in the Middle East.
January 22, 2021
When the Alphabet Workers Union launched with more than 200 Googlers at the beginning of the year, it saw a quick flood of new sign-ups, nearly quadrupling membership over a few weeks. But even with the more than 710 members it now represents, the union still stands for just a tiny fraction of Google's more than 200,000 North American employees and contractors. The broader Alphabet workforce could prove difficult to win over, which is a hurdle that could stand in the way of the group's long-term ambitions for substantive culture change and even collective bargaining.
The initial boom of interest from Googlers was thrilling for Alex Peterson, a software engineer and union spokesperson. "It's really reinvigorating what it means to actually be a community of Googlers, which is something that's been eroding over the past four or five years, or even longer."
<p>But since those initial weeks, Peterson acknowledges that recruiting members beyond the early adopters has had its challenges. One of the biggest barriers, according to Peterson, is the union's dues structure. As Googlers' pay goes up, they become more hesitant to commit 1% of their salaries to dues: The more people are paid, the bigger that figure becomes. People with children and high Bay Area rents also have a more difficult time factoring the union dues into their budgets, Peterson said, though he remains impressed that hundreds of people are willing to pay dues anyway. "There's definitely going to be an ongoing conversation about whether or how to restructure the dues system with that in mind," he said. </p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="1">
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</div></p><p>Retaliation is another big fear preventing some from joining, though the union has strict security rules in place to protect anonymity for those who want it. When the union first launched, many of its founding members hoped that publicly putting their names behind the union would encourage people to join who were afraid of retaliation earlier in the process. But that fear hasn't gone entirely away. "We've gotten emails from people just asking how anonymous they can be," Peterson said.</p><p>Some union members never reveal their name to anyone but their captain — the person in charge of their particular unit of workers in a particular location — and they can use anonymous names in the AWU Slack group. Everyone is required to use a private email address, and they avoid using Google products in their work because, while they trust Google's privacy policies to protect them in theory, they worry that a rogue Google member could try to violate those policies to out members. The official member list is closely guarded by a few people on the union executive team. </p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="2">
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</div></p><p>The absence of a collective bargaining unit has also been a common deterrent for those hesitating to sign up, Peterson said. Traditionally, union members pay dues in part because of the promise of higher wages and better benefits negotiated through a formal bargaining process. Because AWU includes various groups of Google workers and company contractors, it isn't <a href="https://www.protocol.com/google-union-awu" target="_blank">legally eligible</a> to go through the formal collective bargaining process. </p><p>And yet, while the AWU can't form its own collective bargaining unit, there are other ways to enable some members to engage in collective bargaining, Peterson explained. Because workers in the union are organized by both their location and their role, the AWU hopes that it will be able to use its partnership with the Communication Workers of America, which helped organize AWU, to form smaller collective bargaining groups within the union. For example, a group of engineers in the Seattle office, or researchers in San Francisco, could form their own unit with the expertise and assistance of the AWU and their CWA union partners (Google warehouse workers in Pittsburgh did this <a href="https://slate.com/technology/2019/09/google-contractors-vote-to-unionize-in-pittsburgh.html" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">independently</a> in 2019). </p><p>"A really small group like this can end up having really big influence if they are strategic about what they're trying to accomplish," said Beth Allen, the spokesperson for CWA. "There is sort of big power for big change, and then there is influence and making a real difference for individual workers. Making a real difference for individual workers happens from day one." According to Allen, organizing and getting to know the new members is more than enough of a heavy lift for the organizers, and signals great early progress.</p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="3">
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</div></p><p>The AWU won't be the first union working with CWA to pursue a structure like this, Allen said. She cited the Committee for Better Banks, which pushes for industry change, as one example. Some workers within that committee later formed a collective bargaining unit to address their specific problems, a model AWU workers could emulate. "That's definitely a possibility if there is a particular work group where there's a large number of members and the kinds of problems they're facing would have a collective bargaining agreement as the best way to address that," she said. </p><p>The CWA has been working to organize tech and gaming workers since early 2020, when it launched a campaign called <a href="https://www.code-cwa.org/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">CODE-CWA</a>. "We've seen activism throughout the industry in workers organizing, and have been approached by workers in the industry," said Wes McEnany, one of CODE-CWA's organizers. "CWA is trying to meet the moment. We're not creating the moment."</p><p>As part of that effort, CODE-CWA hosts regular trainings with tech workers, advising them on ways to talk to their colleagues about organizing. "It's not just winning the vote. It's building democracy in the workplace, and that's a process," McEnany said.</p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="4">
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</div></p><p>Since the AWU went public, McEnany said his team has been bombarded with inquiries from other tech workers interested in forming similarly-structured unions at their own companies. "They look at the two-tiered workforce, where there are more vendors and contractors in the industry than full-time employees. It's not hard to look around and see there are serious inequities happening here," McEnany said, noting that he believes the online content moderation space is particularly ripe for organizing.</p><p>McEnany and his growing team at CWA are hoping to convince some of these workers that minority unions can still have an impact, even if they lack collective bargaining power. "We think there's no reason to not bring this model back," he said. "This is not just solidifying protest culture, but taking a more robust organizing approach to it."</p><p>Peterson, for one, isn't worried that AWU is still relatively small compared to Alphabet. Many of the founding members envision a union that's united by community values, not just labor protections, and they know they need to prove themselves to the broader Googler community before that can happen.</p><p>He hopes that beginning in February, the various committees and groups will start to solidify and begin discussions about their first campaigns and goals, including setting a formal recruitment goal and plan. He's also hoping that some workers will be able to return to the office in the summer, which should ease some of the recruitment difficulties and also help union members get a better sense of how their colleagues feel about the work. </p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="5">
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</div></p><p>"Among those of us who have already joined, we're extremely motivated by not just workplace conditions and our ability to change policies and things like that, but also the consumer advocacy side," Peterson said. "We have to prove ourselves in a certain sense with our workplace victories to demonstrate what we have to offer to those who might be less tuned in to the consequences of some of Google's product decisions."</p><p><em>Issie Lapowsky contributed additional reporting. </em><br></p>
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Anna Kramer is a reporter at Protocol (@ anna_c_kramer), where she helps write and produce Source Code, Protocol's daily newsletter. Prior to joining the team, she covered tech and small business for the San Francisco Chronicle and privacy for Bloomberg Law. She is a recent graduate of Brown University, where she studied International Relations and Arabic and wrote her senior thesis about surveillance tools and technological development in the Middle East.
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.
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.
Politics
This is the future of the FTC
President Joe Biden has named Becca Slaughter acting chair of the FTC. In conversation with Protocol, she laid out her priorities for the next four years.
FTC commissioner Becca Slaughter may be President Biden's pick for FTC chair.
Photo: David Becker/Getty Images
January 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 20, 2021
Becca Slaughter made a name for herself last year when, as a commissioner for the Federal Trade Commission, she breastfed her newborn baby during video testimony before the Senate, raising awareness about the plight of working parents during the pandemic.
But on Thursday, Slaughter's name began circulating for other reasons: She was just named as President Joe Biden's pick for acting chair of the FTC, an appointment that puts Slaughter at the head of antitrust investigations into tech giants, including Facebook.
<p>Just days before Biden announced his pick, Slaughter took some time to speak at <a href="https://youtu.be/UFksDi3ygyU" target="_blank">a Protocol event</a> about the FTC's Facebook case, how antitrust enforcement can be "anti-racist" and what she hopes to see the FTC prioritize these next four years. Now that she's in charge, those priorities matter more than ever.</p><p><em>This interview has been lightly edited.</em></p><p><strong>It's indisputable that in the last few weeks since the Capitol riot, we've seen tech giants from Facebook to Amazon taking more action on dangerous speech on their platforms than ever before. Everyone's talking about regulation, but obviously any government regulation having to do with speech is a really dicey area. What do you anticipate the Biden administration's approach will be to this, and what are the appropriate legislative and regulatory remedies here? </strong></p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="1">
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</div></p><p>I can't speak to the president's plans, but I do think what we're seeing is, on the one hand, eminently appropriate action being taken by the companies to stop violence. I am concerned as a citizen that that actually came too late, and it might have been much better taken much earlier. But at the same time, we're seeing really important questions surface about the fact that those decisions are lying in the hands of private companies with enormous market power. The decisions can be correct, while at the same time, we can take a step back and say: What does this tell us about the state of our markets that these really important conversations and decisions are governed entirely by individual companies with enormous market share?</p><p><strong>What are some ways the FTC, in particular, can respond to that?</strong></p><p>Within our mandate is antitrust law. One thing I've found really interesting is a lot of the voices that are decrying the actions of the platforms to remove some of this dangerous content are the same ones who resist government antitrust intervention. I think we have to be mindful of the fact that we have laws in place, and we need to be vigorously enforcing those laws that address outsized market share. The FTC has at least one big lawsuit pending on this topic. Colorado Attorney General <a href="https://www.protocol.com/Politics/google-phil-weiser-attorney-general" target="_self">Phil Weiser</a> is leading another one. We will continue to do investigations and bring cases that address misuse of market power under our antitrust laws.</p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="2">
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</div></p><p><strong><strong>Y</strong>ou mentioned the FTC case against Facebook. When you brought that suit, and a number of states brought a similar suit, Facebook <a href="https://www.protocol.com/facebook-antitrust-zuckerberg" target="_self">responded</a> by saying the FTC is looking at all of these past mergers and setting a standard where no company that had a merger settled in the past can be sure it will be permanent. What is your response to that criticism from Facebook?</strong></p><p>I don't find it particularly persuasive. That we've brought one lawsuit that seeks to address two, among many, mergers that happened as part of an ongoing course of conduct does not suggest all mergers in all industries for all companies are forever in legal uncertainty. That is beyond a stretch. </p><p>What we have to do, as enforcers, and what we do in this case, is look at the particular facts at issue and the particular conduct at issue. And it is the case under the law that when the FTC or the Department of Justice review mergers in advance, we don't clear mergers. We don't approve mergers in advance. What we have an opportunity to do is to say: At this moment, are we going to take effort to block the merger? And in fact, in the occasions where we do the investigations and decline to take effort, we don't say we will never take action. We say: Right now, we're not going to take action, but that does not mean if we later understand this conduct to have been illegal we are precluded from bringing a suit. </p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="3">
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</div></p><p>So that should be a disincentive to companies to enter into conduct, whether it's mergers or other conduct, that's illegal. That's what we want to disincentivize, and the threat of future lawsuits is an important part of that incentive structure. </p><p><strong>Beyond the Facebook suit, what do you think the priority of this FTC ought to be, and are there any big mistakes over the last four years that need to be corrected?</strong></p><p>Well, I can tell you what my priorities are. First, I think we do need to be thinking, like everyone across the government is right now, about pandemic response. COVID touches on a lot of areas of the FTC's mandate. There are some obvious ones, like work we've done to stop scams and phony cures, but some that are less obvious, including thinking about the effects of market concentration on, for example, supply chain resiliency. I think we need to be thinking about how all of our lives have moved digitally and the implications that has for privacy and data issues. </p><p>The second thing I would say is a huge priority for me has been making sure that our enforcement efforts continue and sharpen in our long, arduous and very large national task of being anti-racist. So I want us to be, in our enforcement efforts on marginalized communities, focusing on cases where harm disproportionately falls on people of color, whether that is as workers or as consumers. </p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="4">
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</div></p><p>The third, generally, is I think we need to focus on being really strategic with the resources that we have. That means bringing cases that have big effects and can create deterrence across markets, rather than counting how many cases we bring or how many dollars we get. I want us to think very carefully about how each federal dollar we spend can best effectuate deterrence so we don't have to spend more federal dollars bringing the same sort of cases. </p><p>To the extent that I think there are things we could have done better over the last four years, there are a number of cases where I had dissented, because I thought that our resolutions, while they were good enforcement resolutions, didn't go far enough on that deterrence front. I'm concerned that we're going to end up back at the table with the same companies with the same problems if we are not bringing cases and really fighting for the outcome that will best protect consumers from having the same problems again. </p><p><strong>I want to go back to what you said about the anti-racism work. Can you give us an example of that?</strong></p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="5">
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</div></p><p>We brought a really important case under the Equal Credit Opportunity Act last year involving auto financing for violations of fair lending rules and discriminatory behavior on financing. That's one kind of case. This is something we're very comfortable talking about in the consumer protection sphere. We are less comfortable talking about it as a general matter in the antitrust space. But for me, antitrust enforcement is fundamentally about market structure and making sure markets are fair. And one thing we know statistically is that our markets are currently structured in a way that is unfair and unequal for communities of color. So when we make decisions to do enforcement in certain places or not do enforcement in certain places, those decisions are never neutral. They will either help make our society less unequal or they will reinforce existing inequality. </p><p>So the first step for us, from my perspective, is just opening our eyes and understanding the effects of those decisions better. When we choose to bring a case — let's say, for example, a hospital enforcement case, because health care is an area where we know there are huge disparities in access and outcomes across races — we [should bring] cases that improve access, improve quality of care and reduce costs, particularly when the populations being served are communities of color. That's a big thing that we can do, and we already do, to help make our markets more anti-racist. </p><p>I would rather that we be honest and transparent about the effect our actions have and think about those decisions seriously, because we don't have the resources or the capacity to enforce all the violations of the law in all the markets. When we set priorities, for me, the priority has to include helping historically disadvantaged and marginalized communities where we need to equalize our society more effectively.</p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="6">
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</div></p><p><strong>Where do you see the role of the FTC when it comes to mitigating algorithmic bias?</strong></p><p><strong></strong>I think we do need a multi-stakeholder process. I think the FTC is one of the interested stakeholders that should be involved. I also think we need to be critically examining the toolbox we have and thinking creatively about how we can use all the tools in it to address this issue. This is something I spoke about and wrote about a year ago. For me, algorithmic bias is an economic justice issue. We see disparate outcomes coming out of algorithmic decision-making that disproportionately affect and harm Black and brown communities and affect their ability to participate equally in society. That's something we need to address, and we need to think about whether it fits under our unfairness framework, whether we might have rule-making authority that could apply to it or whether we use statutes like the Equal Credit Opportunity Act or the Fair Credit Reporting Act. But I think it's one of those things where really good, creative thinking needs to be applied. </p><p>The issue is new, and it is hard. But one thing I remind myself all the time: My older daughter, who is in Zoom school downstairs in my house right now and hates it, she was in kindergarten last year, and her teacher would say to her all the time, "Kindergarteners can do hard things." And I say to myself: "OK, well if kindergarteners can do hard things, the FTC can do hard things. Government can do hard things, and we have to start trying to tackle the big problems."<em></em></p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="7">
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</div></p><p><em><strong>Update: </strong>This article was updated Jan. 21, 2021, to include that Slaughter was named acting chair.</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.
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