As We're All Living, Working, And Socializing Via The Internet... MIT Tech Review Says It Proves Silicon Valley Innovation Is A Myth

from the say-what-now? dept

I get that people are getting a bit of cabin fever and perhaps that's impacting people's outlook on the world, but a recent piece by David Rotman in the MIT Tech Review is truly bizarre. The title gets you straight to the premise: Covid-19 has blown apart the myth of Silicon Valley innovation. Of course, even the paragraph that explains the thesis seems almost like a modern updating of the famous "what have the Romans ever done for us?" scene from Monty Python's Life of Brian:

Silicon Valley and big tech in general have been lame in responding to the crisis. Sure, they have given us Zoom to keep the fortunate among us working and Netflix to keep us sane; Amazon is a savior these days for those avoiding stores; iPads are in hot demand and Instacart is helping to keep many self-isolating people fed. But the pandemic has also revealed the limitations and impotence of the world’s richest companies (and, we have been told, the most innovative place on earth) in the face of the public health crisis.

Wait, what? That doesn't seem "lame" at all. That kinda seems central to keeping much of the world safe, sane, and connected. And the next paragraph seems equally ridiculous:

Big tech doesn’t build anything. It’s not likely to give us vaccines or diagnostic tests. We don’t even seem to know how to make a cotton swab. Those hoping the US could turn its dominant tech industry into a dynamo of innovation against the pandemic will be disappointed.

Leaving aside the hilariously wrong "big tech doesn't build anything," this paragraph reads like "how dare pharmaceutical companies not build video conferencing software." Besides, tons of big tech companies are doing a lot (beyond the admitted list above) to help during the pandemic, including Google's and Apple's efforts to help with contact tracing, and then, of course, there are plenty of examples of the big tech companies of Silicon Valley trying to do more to help out in the pandemic as well. No matter what you think of Elon Musk, engineers at Tesla have been working on using a bunch of existing parts to build ventilators:

And that's already received praise (and some constructive suggestions) from healthcare professionals.

Basically, the entire premise of Rotman's article makes no sense at all, and he just keeps repeating it like if he says it enough, maybe people will believe him:

The pandemic has made clear this festering problem: the US is no longer very good at coming up with new ideas and technologies relevant to our most basic needs.

Except that we are -- as his own article makes clear. The fact that internet companies aren't magically creating vaccines isn't a condemnation of Silicon Valley innovation. I mean, at best, you could argue that it's a failure of big pharma innovation, but it seems a bit early to be saying that one way or another given that we're just a few months into this thing, and a bunch of innovations that are helping to rapidly create a vaccine, like genetic testing, have also developed with help from Silicon Valley.

The only way Rotman supports his premise is to argue that software/internet companies are producing software/internet products, rather than manufacturing physical goods. But, again, that's like saying "why doesn't Pfizer create videoconferencing software." It's not their business. And, perhaps Rotman should get out of Cambridge and come to Silicon Valley (well, post pandemic) to learn about how there'a a hardware renaissance happening in Silicon Valley, in part thanks to new innovations like 3D printing.

The whole article reads like Rotman had a premise, and then wrote the article despite the near total lack of any actual evidence to support the premise. It's a bad look for MIT's Tech Review, but what good has MIT ever brought the world anyway?

Filed Under: david rotman, hardware, innovation, pandemic, remote work, silicon valley, social distancing, software, technology

Joe Biden Can't Tell The Difference Between The 1st Amendment & Section 230; Still Thinks Video Games Cause Violence

from the okay-boomer dept

Joe Biden is the latest Democratic candidate for President interviewed by the NY Times editorial board, and if you're interested in tech policy, well, it's a doozy. Biden seems confused, misinformed, or simply wrong about a lot of issues from free speech to Section 230 to copyright to video games. It's really bad. We already knew he was on an anti 230 kick when he gave a confused quote on it late last year, but for the NY Times he goes even further:

Charlie Warzel: Sure. Mr. Vice President, in October, your campaign sent a letter to Facebook regarding an ad that falsely claimed that you blackmailed Ukrainian officials to not investigate your son. I’m curious, did that experience, dealing with Facebook and their power, did that change the way that you see the power of tech platforms right now?

No, I’ve never been a fan of Facebook, as you probably know. I’ve never been a big Zuckerberg fan. I think he’s a real problem. I think ——

CW: Can you elaborate?

No, I can. He knows better. And you know, from my perspective, I’ve been in the view that not only should we be worrying about the concentration of power, we should be worried about the lack of privacy and them being exempt, which you’re not exempt. [The Times] can’t write something you know to be false and be exempt from being sued. But he can. The idea that it’s a tech company is that Section 230 should be revoked, immediately should be revoked, number one. For Zuckerberg and other platforms.

CW: That’s a pretty foundational laws of the modern internet.

That’s right. Exactly right. And it should be revoked. It should be revoked because it is not merely an internet company. It is propagating falsehoods they know to be false, and we should be setting standards not unlike the Europeans are doing relative to privacy. You guys still have editors. I’m sitting with them. Not a joke. There is no editorial impact at all on Facebook. None. None whatsoever. It’s irresponsible. It’s totally irresponsible.

There is so much to talk about here. First of all, Biden admits upfront that the reason he thinks CDA 230 should be repealed is because of his personal dislike of Facebook's founder and CEO. It's one thing to argue that the platform creates harms and therefore we need a different regulatory approach, but to start out by saying you just don't like the guy, and use that as the basis for punishing the entire internet is... really something.

Second, Biden seems to be (again) confusing the 1st Amendment with Section 230. It's not Section 230 that allows people to post false things on Facebook. It's the 1st Amendment. You know, the thing that Biden is supposed to "protect and defend" if he becomes President.

Third, the comparison with the NY Times is completely offbase. The NY Times is also protected by Section 230 if a third party says something on its platform, they cannot be sued. And, similarly, if Facebook itself said something that violated the law, it can be sued. All 230 does is put the liability in the right place: on the actual speaker. Facebook is not "exempt" from any law. Biden is just wrong.

Fourth, he's not even talking about reforming 230, he's talking about revoking it. That's insane and would lead to crippling litigation and vast silencing of the public. It's not even in the realm of reasonable discussion.

Fifth, notice at casual he is about lumping in the rest of the internet, just because he dislikes Facebook. Take away 230 for the entire internet, even as it's what enabled free speech to really flourish on the internet. And, again, it's amazing how confused he is thinking that 230 is the issue when it's actually the 1st Amendment.

Sixth, the point about "editors" is also completely nonsensical. Editors have nothing to do with it, unless he's saying that no one should be allowed to be posted on the internet unless it's been edited first.

And just to be clear here, a lot of what Biden says in this interview is factually false. Yet, here, he's arguing that the NY Times should be liable for posting his falsehoods. And Facebook should be liable if people repost them there. And I should be liable because I'm posting his nonsense here. This is not someone who understand even the first thing about Section 230, how the internet works, or free speech online.

He continued with more word salad:

CW: If there’s proven harm that Facebook has done, should someone like Mark Zuckerberg be submitted to criminal penalties, perhaps?

He should be submitted to civil liability and his company to civil liability, just like you would be here at The New York Times. Whether he engaged in something and amounted to collusion that in fact caused harm that would in fact be equal to a criminal offense, that’s a different issue. That’s possible. That’s possible it could happen. Zuckerberg finally took down those ads that Russia was running. All those bots about me. They’re no longer being run. He was getting paid a lot of money to put them up. I learned three things. Number one, Putin doesn’t want me to be president. Number two, Kim Jong-un thinks I should be beaten to death like a rabid dog and three, this president of the United States is spending millions of dollars to try to keep me from being the nominee. I wonder why.

Civil liability for what? What exactly is the legal violation he's talking about? And notice, again, that he immediately resorts to a personal vendetta and stuff about Russia, ignoring that Facebook has a huge team constantly fighting and trying to take down Russian ads. Yet, Biden falsely states that Facebook was leaving them up to give Zuckerberg money. Does he not know how any of this works?

Of course, then he more or less admits the reason he hates Silicon Valley is because they opposed him on SOPA/PIPA. If you don't recall, for years, Biden was one of Hollywood's biggest friends in the Senate. Even once he became VP, he convened a "summit" about copyright in which he only invited maximalists. In the White House, he was the main voice pushing for SOPA/PIPA and apparently got quite upset when Obama eventually came out against the law. Here, he tries to rewrite history, pretending that SOPA/PIPA was just about "protecting" copyright and artists, when it was actually a massive tool for internet censorship -- and notice how he calls an internet exec "a little creep." He goes on to display near total ignorance and direct hatred for Silicon Valley and innovation.

There are places where [President Obama] and I have disagreed. About 30 percent of the time, I was able to convince him to my side of the equation. Seventy percent of the time I wasn’t when we disagreed, when he laid something out. And you may recall, the criticism I got for meeting with the leaders in Silicon Valley, when I was trying to work out an agreement dealing with them protecting intellectual property for artists in the United States of America. And at one point, one of the little creeps sitting around that table, who was a multi- — close to a billionaire — who told me he was an artist because he was able to come up with games to teach you how to kill people, you know the ——

CW: Like video games.

Yeah, video games. And I was lectured by one of the senior leaders there that by saying if I insisted on what Leahy’d put together and we were, I thought we were going to fully support, that they would blow up the network, figuratively speaking. Have everybody contact. They get out and go out and contact the switchboard, just blow it up.

And then one of these righteous people said to me that, you know, “We are the economic engine of America. We are the ones.” And fortunately I had done a little homework before I went and I said, you know, I find it fascinating. As I added up the seven outfits, everyone’s there but Microsoft. I said, you have fewer people on your payroll than all the losses that General Motors just faced in the last quarter, of employees. So don’t lecture me about how you’ve created all this employment.

The point is, there’s an arrogance about it, an overwhelming arrogance that we are, we are the ones. We can do what we want to do. I disagree. Every industrial revolution, every major technological breakthrough, every single one. We’re in the fourth one. The hardest speech I’ve ever had to make in my life, I was asked to speak at the World Economic Forum, to give an answer on, to speak to the fourth industrial revolution. Will there be a middle class? It’s not so clear there will be, and I’ve worked on it harder than any speech I’ve ever worked on.

The fact is, in every other revolution that we’ve had technologically, it’s taken somewhere between six years and a generation for a government to come in and level the playing field again. All of a sudden, remember the Luddites smashing the machinery in the Midlands? That was their answer when the culture was changing. Same thing with television. Same thing before that with radio. Same thing, but this is gigantic. And it’s a responsibility of government to make sure it is not abused. Not abused. And so this is one of those areas where I think it’s being abused. For example, the idea that he cooperates with knowing that Russia was engaged in dealing with using the internet, I mean using their platform, to try to undermine American elections. That’s close to criminal.

I can't even follow half of that word salad. It's nonsensical word spewing. The fact that the big tech companies don't employ so many people directly, completely misses the point that was being made: that the internet has enabled so many jobs around the world, not directly at those companies, but enabling so many people to start their own companies and businesses, and to create jobs at other companies because of the internet. Notice that Biden's world view is totally focused on how many jobs are created by single large companies. That's completely missing the point.

And that final paragraph is just bizarre. He's suggesting government has to "level the playing field" with each new technological revolution. But he can't explain when or how they did that. When or how did they do that with the Luddites? When or how did they do that with TV? When or how did they do that with radio? What is he even talking about?

At the end of this section he also insists that the internet is bad for children:

Well the tech industry, look, not everyone in the tech industry is a bad guy, and I’m not suggesting that. What I’m suggesting is that some of the things that are going on are simply wrong and require government regulation. And it’s happened every single time there’s been a major technological breakthrough in humanities since the 1800s, and this requires it. For example, you have children?

CW: No.

Well, when you do and you’ll watch them on the internet, it gets a little concerning. What in fact they can see and not see, and whether or not what they’re seeing is true or not true. It matters. It matters. It’s like — well, anyway.

It's like -- well, anyway. Yeah. Look, there is false information on the internet. There is false information elsewhere. Hell, much of this interview with Biden is him spewing false information. Perhaps children shouldn't be allowed to read it.

Or, perhaps, we teach our children how to be good information citizens, and teach them how to be skeptical and how to do more research. Perhaps, it's the job of parents and school teachers and other mentors to teach kids how to take in, filter, and understand information. Having politicians who don't know the first thing about the internet come in and tell them how to run things doesn't fix any of that. Indeed, it only makes the problem worse, by sweeping reality under the rug.

Not that any of the candidates running for President seem particularly good on tech policy, but Biden's outright hatred for the internet, and "creeps" in Silicon Valley seems to have completely clouded his thinking.

Filed Under: 1st amendment, copyright, free speech, innovation, intermediary liability, joe biden, mark zuckerberg, section 230, silicon valley, video games
Companies: facebook

Josh Hawley Continues To Pretend That Silicon Valley Isn't Innovative

from the nanny-state dept

Josh Hawley pretends to be against big government. He pretends to be against the "nanny state." But since the second he got into power, nearly everything he's proposed has been about increasing government control over industry. But just one industry. The internet/tech industry that he has personally decided doesn't work the way he thinks it should. Beyond trying to get rid of Section 230, Hawley has proposed a bill that literally makes design choices for internet companies. Earlier this year, he introduced another bill that tries to design features for online video sites. He's made it clear that he doesn't like internet site because his constituents like them too much, which seems odd.

And, just a week after the Wall Street Journal rightly mocked this approach, and explained that his constant refrain that there is no innovation coming out of Silicon Valley anymore is laughable... the very same Wall Street Journal has allowed Hawley to simply repeat his nonsensical claim that there is no innovation coming out of Silicon Valley (likely behind a paywall):

Men landed on the moon 50 years ago, a tremendous feat of American creativity, courage and, not least, technology. The tech discoveries made in the space race powered innovation for decades. But I wonder, 50 years on, what the tech industry is giving America today.

Nice poetic start... by essentially announcing to the world that you're totally ignorant of what's happening in tech and innovation today. That's one strategy.

Innovation in physics—the world of real things—has slowed, and America is losing its manufacturing process edge in key industries. Meanwhile, the landscapes of our cities and towns look about the same as they did half a century ago.

[Citation needed]. It's unclear how you decide that "innovation in physics... has slowed," but one simple point on that is that the easier challenges have been solved, and people are working on much harder stuff. Similarly, it's unclear how you determine that we've "lost our manufacturing process edge." According to whom? And what? The US is still a massive manufacturing country, neck and neck with China. It is true that fewer jobs are in manufacturing, but much of that is because of process innovations. And I'm not sure what the landscapes of our cities and towns have to do with anything at all.

There’s no question that Silicon Valley and the three or four corporate behemoths that dominate it have made it easier to share information. But the modern smartphone, the search engine and the digital social network were invented more than a decade ago. What passes for innovation by Big Tech today isn’t fundamentally new products or new services, but ever more sophisticated exploitation of people.

It's totally fair to note that innovation in search engines, smartphones and social networks has slowed down, but to argue that this is the end of innovation and that the only thing Silicon Valley is working on today is "sophisticated exploitation of people" is laughably ignorant. First of all, the smartphone is really only about a dozen years old. That's still a pretty damn recent innovation. Successful tablets are even younger. That's pretty recent.

And there's lots of other amazing innovation still happening -- in fact, much of it driven by the revenue successes of those older innovations that Hawley is now mocking: self-driving cars, space exploration, distributed ledger technology, artificial intelligence, health technologies, robotics. Hell, there are even a whole bunch of flying car companies out here these days. You literally have to willfully not look to argue that all anyone is doing out here is working on "exploitation of people."

To monetize older innovations, the dominant platforms employ behavioral scientists to develop interface designs that keep users online as much as possible. Big Tech calls it “engagement.” Another word would be addiction.

There is some fair criticism hidden within the sneering. It is reasonable to wonder if this is the best use of the time of some people who work on things like engagement (which, it should be noted, is fundamentally different from addiction). But if that work is actually about providing a better product that people find more useful, that's a good thing, no? I admit that there may be a fine line between building a better product and using tricks to keep people engaged when they shouldn't be. But it's still more of a line than Hawley is willing to admit here.

By getting their users to spend more time on their platforms, the social-media giants turn the customer into a data source to be sucked dry. Here’s how it works: The more attention users give the platform, the more personal information the platform extracts from them, recording every click, view and preference. Big Tech then converts this information into advertisements, all targeted with increasing precision—which produces even more advertising dollars for Big Tech.

Yes, that's the narrative that some people like to push. But here's the thing: there's no "sucking" anyone "dry." Data is not a finite resource. You don't go dry of data. And, yes, if these systems actually work in giving people more of what they want, then isn't that the market at work? Isn't that what people like Hawley always pretended they supported? And if, as I suspect, all this targeting doesn't work all that well in most use cases, then these efforts will flop and people will learn and move elsewhere.

What “innovation” remains in this space is innovation to keep the treadmill running, longer and faster, drawing more data from users to bombard us with more ads for more stuff.

Again, this ignores nearly every other bit of innovation happening in the Valley today. I hate to spoil this for Hawley -- who really seems to be itching for the job of "Product Manager, all of Silicon Valley" -- but the "engagement" jobs are not the ones that engineers and techies are excited about these days. It's all the stuff in the list above. The exciting jobs are in new areas, built on "moonshots" and exciting new technologies.

But here’s the problem. As we spend more time on that digital treadmill, our real-world relationships atrophy, sometimes to disastrous effect. Teen suicide is up. Twenty-two percent of millennials report that they have no friends. More than a few researchers have noticed a connection.

Everyone's got studies. Just recently we pointed to a pretty comprehensive and rigorous study out of Oxford that found almost no impact of social media on "adolescent life satisfaction." While there may be a clear correlation between social media use and depression/suicide, to say there's a causal relationship seems based on little more than speculation. The Oxford study actually tried to dig in and go beyond the correlation, and found that "social media use is not, in and of itself, a strong predictor of life satisfaction across the adolescent population." That's not to say it doesn't have any impact -- it clearly does. But, in many cases, social media use actually increased "life satisfaction," by giving people others they could talk to, often about topics they might not be able to discuss with people who are in the same general location. Focusing narrowly on assumed causation, as Hawley does, likely would mean taking away all of the benefits of social media, and the ability to connect with others in an attempt to weed out what negative effects there are as well.

At the same time, the dominant tech companies’ market concentration is stifling competition that might bring truly new and rewarding innovation. Want to raise money for a venture to challenge Facebook or Google? Good luck. The best pitch for a startup is a pitch for getting purchased by one of the tech giants a few years in. If they won’t buy you, they’ll just copy you.

If this were true, we'd likely see a decline in venture investing. But we don't. It keeps going up and up. And there are lots of entrepreneurs who want to challenge Facebook and Google. Most entrepreneurs talk about wanting to be "the next" Facebook or Google, just like those before them wanted to be the next Microsoft or Yahoo. It's kind of a thing that Silicon Valley specializes in. Indeed, I was just talking to a venture capitalist recently who is actively looking for startups to challenge Facebook and Google, because he thought those companies have gotten so big and so cumbersome that they're ripe for disruption.

Americans shouldn’t settle for this stagnation.

What stagnation?

It’s time we demanded more of Big Tech than it demands of us. That's why I’ve proposed banning the “dark patterns” that feed tech addiction. I’ve introduced legislation to provide consumers a legally enforceable right to browse the internet privately, without data tracking. I’ve advocated stepping up privacy safeguards for children and requiring tech companies to moderate content without political bias as a condition of civil immunity. And I’ve advocated more competition to spur real innovation for real people.

These are all fascinating, if misleading, ways to spin his legislative solutions, that amount to little more than kneecapping how tons of internet services work.

It should be no surprise that the tech companies have fiercely resisted these proposals at every turn, often with hysterical claims about breaking the internet or putting the American economy at a disadvantage to China—as if “autoplay” or “infinite scroll” were powering American productivity. If those are the weapons we’ll marshal in an economic battle with Chinese high-tech manufacturing, the war is already lost.

This is an odd one to point out. No one thinks that prohibiting auto-scroll will lead to China taking advantage. But people do worry about taking away Section 230, or other odd restrictions on every internet company -- including startup challengers to the big guys -- opening up the space for Chinese startups (who are already taking market share: see TikTok). But, really, the autoscroll thing is so odd to highlight because that's one of the most egregious examples of Hawley's nanny state tendencies. Literally telling companies how to design their products.

To the masters of Big Tech, I say: Raise your sights. If you want to be leaders for this country in this century, earn it. Build tools that enrich lives, strengthen society, create good-paying jobs, and improve productive capacity.

Again, if Hawley ever actually bothered to look around, he'd see that all of that is absolutely happening. But Hawley won't do that.

There was a time when innovation meant something grand and technology meant something hopeful, when we dreamed of going to the stars and beyond, of curing diseases and creating new ways to travel and make things. Those are the dreams that fuel the American future. Those are the dreams we need to dream again.

This is bizarre. Literally the hottest companies in Silicon Valley right now are all ones around "going to the stars and beyond, of curing diseases and creating new ways to travel and make things." Hawley is either deliberately lying about Silicon Valley or so ignorant as to be in no position to comment on it. The WSJ should have stuck with last week's op-ed, and rejected this nonsense one.

Filed Under: big government, innovation, josh hawley, nanny state, regulations, silicon valley

Why Europe Will Never Build Its Own Digital Giants

from the getting-it-all-wrong dept

A few years back, I was asked to create a presentation for a few visiting European executives, to explain "what makes Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley." It was a fun presentation, and one of the people who saw it later had me give it to an ever rotating crew of visiting European execs and policymakers (I even got to give the talk once over in the UK). I believe I did the presentation half a dozen times or so. The person who set up most of those talks later moved on to another job and it's been years since I last gave the presentation. It always led to an interesting discussion, though, because so much of what I talked about seemed to go against their core instincts about innovation (the presentation also debunks some of the common myths about the success of Silicon Valley). Maybe, one day, I'll get to give the talk again.

However, what fascinated me most was the general resistance to understanding the fundamentals of both innovation and the internet. But in the past few years, it's become increasingly clear that the EU's concept of the internet is almost entirely out of sync with how digital innovation works, especially with the ways in which the EU has gone about regulating the internet -- from the GDPR to the Copyright Directive, to the antitrust efforts, to the Terrorism regulation.

The Economist recently explored this issue, suggesting that Europe will never produce its own Google. While there are a few European tech success firms, they're still greatly limited and there are a lot fewer of them than elsewhere:

London, a global tech hub, is home to DeepMind, a leading artificial intelligence (AI) outfit; Stockholm is home to Spotify, a dominant music-sharing service; Cambridge-based Arm makes processor chips for almost all the world’s smartphones.

Yet still Europe lacks large firms in areas like social media, e-commerce and cloud computing comparable in scale to America’s Google and Microsoft, or China’s Alibaba and Baidu. Of the world’s 15 largest digital firms, all are American or Chinese. Of the top 200, eight are European. Such firms matter. They operate dominant online platforms and are writing the rules of the new economy in the way Cockerill’s innovations did in his day.

Unfortunately, rather than focusing on the constant regulatory attacks by EU policymakers on the key elements of innovation in the digital age, the Economist article falls back on the same old excuse we've heard from Europeans for years and years: the country has too many different languages and a complex set of different laws in each country:

Today, however, Europe’s patchwork is a disadvantage. New technologies require vast lakes of data, skilled labour and capital. Despite the EU’s single market, in Europe these often remain in national ponds. Language divides get in the way. Vast, speculative long-term capital investments that make firms like Uber possible are too rarely available on European national markets. True, there is progress. European universities are working more closely together, and in 2015 the EU adopted a new digital strategy that has simplified tax rules, ended roaming charges and removed barriers to cross-border online content sales. But about half of its measures—like smoother flows of data—remain mere proposals.

And while I'm sure there's some truth to that stifling some aspect of European success, it doesn't stand up to much scrutiny. After all, most of the giant American internet firms have figured out how to work in those vastly different European markets, despite not even being headquartered there. So clearly it can be done.

The larger problem, it seems has much more to do with the general distrust for disruptive innovations. The European approach, consistently, appears to favor slowing (or stopping) innovation unless all possible "harms" are minimized, even if this comes at the expense of the benefits. There are arguments to be made for this approach -- preventing harm is a laudable goal. But it leaves out the other side of the equation: it kills off massive amounts of benefits. This is not to say that the general approach should be a free for all, or that potential harms should be ignored. Nor is it to say that we should be purely utilitarian and weigh the two sides. But, an innovative approach that enables experimentation and learning, and a focus on providing much more benefits for the public seems to be much more effective at creating incredibly valuable services.

There is, of course, much more involved in building out a successful innovation ecosystem that builds hugely powerful services, but the EU seems to have little to no interest in actually figuring out how it can work.

Filed Under: eu copyright directive, europe, gdpr, innovation, silicon valley

Cable's Top Lobbyist Again Calls For Heavier Regulation Of Silicon Valley

from the glass-houses-and-all-that dept

After having just successfully convinced the Trump administration to neuter state and federal oversight of lumbering telecom monopolies, those same companies continue their unyielding call for greater regulation of Silicon Valley.

If you've been paying attention, you'll know that Comcast, AT&T, and Verizon's attack on net neutrality rules was just the tip of a massive, dysfunctional iceberg. Those companies have also convinced the Trump administration to effectively neuter FCC authority over ISPs, and are in the process of trying to ban states from protecting consumers from wrongdoing as well (you know, for freedom or whatever). With neither competition nor even tepid meaningful oversight in place, the kind of bad behavior we've long seen from Comcast appears poised to only get worse.

At the same time, top lobbyists for the telecom industry continue to insist it's Silicon Valley giants that are in need of massive regulation. You're to ignore, of course, that these calls are coming just as giants like Verizon, AT&T, and Comcast try to pivot more fully from broadband into online video and advertising, in direct competition with the companies' they're calling to have heavily regulated. Former FCC boss Mike Powell, now the cable industry's top lobbyist over at the NCTA, has been leading this charge for much of the last year or two.

Powell was back last week at an industry event insisting once again that government needs to step in and start heavily regulating the companies Powell's clients are trying to compete with:

"I think there is a fundamental underappreciation in policy circles about the extraordinary power of the platforms and the data that rides on these companies and value of that information both as a competitive advantage as a platform and the potential dangers to consumers. “That has always been a naive concept and one that I think government was entirely inattentive to for too long, only to wake up in 2018 to realize there are some consequences that are not necessarily affirmative."

Powell's of course trying to play up Silicon Valley's admitted and obvious naivete as it pertains to aiding the amplification of propaganda and racist drivel. But at the same time, of course, he's happy to ignore all of the obvious problems caused by his own sector's growing competition issues, which Powell will be happy to tell you don't exist. In fact back in March Powell gave a very similar speech during which he effectively accused Silicon Valley of most of the things the telecom sector has been doing for years:

"Our governmental authorities need to get a handle on what kind of market power and harm flow from companies that have an unassailable hold on large pools of big data, which serve as barriers to entry, allowing them to dominate industries throughout the economy. For years, big tech companies have been extinguishing competitive threats by buying or crushing promising new technologies just as they were emerging. They dominate their core business, and rarely have to foreclose competition by buying their peers. Competition policy must scrutinize more rigorously deals that allow dominant platforms to kill competitive technologies in the cradle."

While it's obvious that Silicon Valley has plenty of problems that need addressing, listening to Powell's advice (read: Comcast's advice) on these subjects is like getting fire safety advice from a serial arsonist. But for whatever reason it's advice that's clearly resonating in the Trump administration, which pretty consistently has called for antitrust inquiries into major Silicon Valley giants while neutering most meaningful consumer protections (from privacy to net neutrality) governing some of the most clearly anti-competitive and unpopular companies in all of American industry.

Filed Under: cable, competition, lobbying, michael powell, regulations, silicon valley
Companies: at&t, comcast, facebook, google, verizon