September 2014

Google is undertaking a long-term effort to improve its diversity numbers, the centerpiece of which is a series of workshops aimed at making Google’s culture more accepting of diversity. There’s just one problem: The company has no solid evidence that the workshops, or many of its other efforts to improve diversity, are actually working.

Google is attacking the problem with its considerable resources and creativity. But it does not have a timeline for when the company’s work force might become representative of the population, or whether it will ever get there. “I think it’s terrific that they’re doing this,” said Freada Kapor Klein, an entrepreneur who has long studied workplace diversity, and who is the co-chairwoman of the Kapor Center for Social Impact. “But it’s going to be important that Google not just give a lecture about the science, but that there be active strategies on how to mitigate bias. A one-shot intervention against a lifetime of biased messages is unlikely to be successful.”

Even years after the rise of Netflix and YouTube, traditional television is thriving. Americans are watching more broadcast and cable television than ever -- five hours a day -- and they are simply adding more time with videos by watching online.

Among all its competitors, CBS has exploited that traditional audience best, making it the most watched of the big networks for 11 of the past 12 seasons. “Although new digital entrants destroyed the revenue models and market capitalizations of newspapers, music and yellow pages, TV content producers have largely benefited from new digital entrants,” said Laura Martin, a media analyst at the investment firm Needham Co. That will likely change, analysts say, because younger viewers are spending more time on mobile devices than in front of the living room television set. CBS and other broadcast networks are in danger as consumers rethink expensive subscriptions for cable, where networks make a huge portion of their revenues from licensing fees and advertising.

Silicon Valley’s relationship with Washington is becoming much cozier, at least as far as political contributions are concerned. Yet it can be hard to tell, because the tech industry is not eager to show it.

The industry has spent $71 million so far this year on lobbying, and last year spent $141 million, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. Yet the information technology industry ranks near the bottom of an annual list that attempts to grade large corporations on how well they voluntarily and publicly disclose their political activities. At the most secretive end of the spectrum, two tech companies, Netflix and Salesforce, received a score of zero. At the most transparent end, three tech companies -- Microsoft, Qualcomm and Intel -- were ranked among the top five. Google, Amazon and Facebook all received below-average scores; Apple’s and Yahoo’s were slightly above average.

The flood of public interest in the Federal Communications Commission’s Open Internet proceeding revealed just how dated the FCC's online public engagement infrastructure has become.

As the system strained under the attention, grass-roots activists and staffers inside the FCC worked together, hour-by-hour, to keep it up and running. At times they got on each other’s nerves; at others they pulled together. But all were coping with the same decades-old technology that, no one can now deny, simply isn’t up to the age of digital civic engagement. The FCC online commenting system's sputtering was an embarrassment to an agency eager to prove it is competent enough to make rules around modern technology and a frustration for groups with names like Fight for the Future and Demand Progress that are eager to prove both their organizing chops and the rightness of their issue.