New York Times

A look at the long decline of competition in many American industries. It is a decline that stunts entrepreneurship, hinders workers’ mobility and slows productivity growth. Slowing this trend has emerged as a tempting new avenue to address the plight of a beleaguered working class. Reviving flagging American competition might even help stop America’s ever-widening inequality.

In April, President Barack Obama issued an executive order calling on government agencies to look for ways to bolster competition in the industries they monitor. Hillary Clinton drew competition into the campaign trail, chastising dominant corporations for “using their power to raise prices, limit choices for consumers, lower wages for workers and hold back competition from start-ups and small businesses.” And Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) made headlines last month when she called for antitrust agencies to crack down on Silicon Valley powers like Apple, Facebook and Google. Monopoly rents — the excess returns a company reaps when it does not have to deal with pesky competitors keeping prices down — could worsen inequality in a variety of ways. Joseph Stiglitz, the Nobel laureate from Columbia University who served as top economic adviser to President Bill Clinton, has asserted that exorbitant corporate profits are being run up through oligopolies and passed along to stockholders, raising the share of national income accruing to the rich.

John Brademas, a political, financial and academic dynamo who served 22 years in Congress and more than a decade as president of New York University in an all-but-seamless quest to promote education, the arts and a liberal agenda, died on July 11 in Manhattan. He was 89. His death was announced by NYU.

Brademas liked to say that being a university president was not much different from being a congressman: You shake hands, make speeches, remember names and faces, stump for a cause and raise money relentlessly. The difference, he said, is that you do not have to depend on voters to renew your contract every two years. As a Democratic representative from Indiana from 1959 to 1981, Brademas became known as Mr. Education and Mr. Arts. He sponsored bills that nearly doubled federal aid for elementary and secondary education in the mid-1960s and that created the National Endowment for the Arts and Humanities. He was also instrumental in annual financing of the arts and humanities and in the passage of Project Head Start, the National Teachers Corps and college tuition aid and loan programs.

[Brademas served on the Board of Directors of the Benton Foundation from 1981 through 1992]

Late on July 7, when sniper fire rang out across downtown Dallas (TX), a bystander, Michael Kevin Bautista, used his smartphone to stream the events in real time on Facebook Live. Within the hour, CNN was rebroadcasting the footage. The day before, Diamond Reynolds streamed on Facebook Live after local police in Falcon Heights (MN) shot her boyfriend, Philando Castile, ratcheting up a controversy surrounding how police officers treat African-Americans. The two real-time videos catapulted Facebook, in the span of 48 hours, into a spot as the prime forum for live events and breaking news. It is a position that the company has long jockeyed to be in as it seeks to keep its 1.65 billion members ever more engaged. Yet the brutal nature of the events that appeared on Facebook Live also put the company in a tricky situation.

Facebook is confronting complexities with live videos that it may not have anticipated just a few months ago, when the streaming service was dominated by lighter fare such as a Buzzfeed video of an exploding watermelon. Now Facebook must navigate when, if at all, to draw the line if a live video is too graphic, and weigh whether pulling such content is in the company’s best interests if the video is newsworthy.

In 2014, Messenger, a photo and text messaging service, appeared to be almost an afterthought at Facebook, the social networking giant. Messenger often took a back seat to the limelight enjoyed by WhatsApp, the messaging app that Facebook had bought for $19 billion. And Messenger’s capabilities were so limited that you could not send friends an animated GIF of a dancing Shiba Inu, as you could with many other messaging services. But since mid-2014, Facebook has been playing a furious game of catch-up with Messenger.

That June, Facebook’s chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, hired a PayPal executive, David Marcus, to take over Messenger and build it into a world-class competitor. The company has added a string of features to the service, including letting people send money to friends through the app, pull up a voice or video call, or order a private car from inside the app. On July 8, Facebook said it will also begin testing “secret conversations” inside Messenger, a feature that offers end-to-end encryption on some messages to be read only on the two mobile devices that users are communicating with. While it stops short of the full encryption that other messaging services like WhatsApp have adopted, it gives Messenger a heightened mode of security that Facebook hopes will attract global audiences to download the app.

Traditional media companies have struggled for years to adapt to a digital world, but the pressure on black-owned media has been even more acute. Many are smaller and lack the financial resources to compete in an increasingly consolidated media landscape. Advertisers have turned away from black-oriented media, owners say, under the belief that they can now reach minorities in other ways. Since well before the Civil War, publications and, more recently, radio and television stations owned and operated by African-Americans have provided an important counterweight to mass market media, simultaneously celebrating and shaping black culture — from politics and government to fashion and music. But as financial resources dwindle, black-owned media companies are struggling to maintain their presence.

Wael Ghonim’s anonymous Facebook page helped start a revolution in Egypt. Here is what he concluded about social media today

[Commentary] A fridge that puts milk on your shopping list when you run low. A safe that tallies the cash that is placed in it. A sniper rifle equipped with advanced computer technology for improved accuracy. A car that lets you stream music from the Internet. All of these innovations sound great, until you learn the risks that this type of connectivity carries. The early Internet was intended to connect people who already trusted one another, like academic researchers or military networks. It never had the robust security that today’s global network needs. As the Internet went from a few thousand users to more than three billion, attempts to strengthen security were stymied because of cost, shortsightedness and competing interests. Connecting everyday objects to this shaky, insecure base will create the Internet of Hacked Things. This is irresponsible and potentially catastrophic. It may be hard to fix security on the digital Internet, but the Internet of Things should not be built on this faulty foundation. Responding to digital threats by patching only exposed vulnerabilities is giving just aspirin to a very ill patient. It isn’t hopeless. We can make programs more reliable and databases more secure. Critical functions on Internet-connected objects should be isolated and external audits mandated to catch problems early. But this will require an initial investment to forestall future problems — the exact opposite of the current corporate impulse. It also may be that not everything needs to be networked, and that the trade-off in vulnerability isn’t worth it. [Tufekci is an assistant professor at the School of Information and Library Science at the University of North Carolina]

Lawmakers and Gov Jerry Brown (D-CA) said they had reached an agreement to expand the California film incentive program, capping a drive by entertainment industry unions, filmmakers and executives to bolster sagging movie and television production in the state.

The new tax-credit incentive will provide $330 million in state money annually for local film and television production, replacing an expiring program that was limited to $100 million a year.

The incentive will be offered for five years beginning with the 2016 fiscal year under the deal between Gov Brown and legislators, many of whom had been pressing for as much as $400 million in annual financing, to match similar incentives offered in New York.

[Commentary] The Federal Communications Commission, which could soon allow phone and cable companies to block or interfere with Internet content, has been deluged with more than a million comments. President Barack Obama offered some thoughts of his own by saying that the Internet should be left open “so that the next Google or the next Facebook can succeed.”

The FCC is trying to decide whether telecommunications companies should be able to strike deals with powerful firms like Netflix and Amazon for faster delivery of videos and other data to consumers. Obama’s statement about “the next Google” highlights one of the biggest problems with such agreements: Small and young businesses will not be able to compete against established companies if they have to pay fees to telephone and cable companies to get content to users in a timely manner.

President Obama is sending FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler and his fellow commissioners a message. They should pay attention.

[Aug 13]

[Commentary] Cellphones have provided humanity with many benefits. They have also enabled the most annoying among us to find new ways to disturb the peace in all sorts of public places, like trains, theaters and restaurants.

One shared space that has heretofore been protected from the chattering of cellphone users may soon join that list: airplanes.

The Federal Communications Commission, which has barred the use of cellphones in planes since 1991, is considering allowing airlines to decide whether their passengers can make calls.

Many frequent travelers and the unions representing flight attendants want a ban on all flights. We agree. There is no compelling reason to allow cellphone calls on planes other than to provide airlines with another source of revenue.

[Aug 8]