Ownership

Google has started overhauling millions of search results in Europe—and neither the search giant nor its detractors are happy about it.

Google is allowing rival shopping-comparison services to bid for and resell advertising space at the very top of Google search results in Europe. The new ads appear alongside similar product ads from Google’s own shopping-ad unit, which Google said is bidding independently in the same auctions. The changes are part of Google’s effort to comply with a European Union antitrust decision that fined the company 2.42 billion euros ($2.71 billion) for using its dominant search engine to favor its own shopping ads at the expense of competitors’ -- and ordered it to start treating itself the same as its competitors. Google is appealing the decision, but is implementing its order to avoid noncompliance fines that can reach total 5% of its global daily revenue, or more than $12 million.

President Donald Trump charged that Facebook has “always” been opposed to him, suggesting it is part of a network of “collusion” along with national newspapers and cable news networks that have covered his White House critically. President Trump did not elaborate much on his comments, but his accusations — as always, communicated by tweet — come at a time when Facebook is the target of scrutiny by congressional and federal investigators, who are probing Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election.

The President tweeted, "Facebook was always anti-Trump.The Networks were always anti-Trump hence,Fake News, @nytimes(apologized) & @WaPo were anti-Trump. Collusion?..But the people were Pro-Trump! Virtually no President has accomplished what we have accomplished in the first 9 months-and economy roaring."

Why is Amazon looking more and more like an old-fashioned retailer? The company’s do-it-all corporate strategy adheres to a familiar playbook—that of Sears, Roebuck & Company. Sears might seem like a zombie today, but it’s easy to forget how transformative the company was exactly 100 years ago, when it, too, was capitalizing on a mail-to-consumer business to establish a physical retail presence. To understand Amazon—its evolution, its strategy, and perhaps its future—look to Sears.

Technology products, services, and sites are now where we get our news, debate topics of the day, and encounter what seems like an increasingly scary world. And people do tend to shoot the messenger. While the benefits of AI, algorithmic content filtering, and consumer electronics are easily taken for granted, technopanic will be driven by fear-mongering reports, fiction, and grandstanding politicians looking for someone else to blame.

The truth is that Silicon Valley is a shiny engine of innovation–and a bit of a frat house. Technology can both save and threaten the world; above all, it’s having an ever-growing impact on everyone’s lives. To use an old Facebook phrase, the public’s relationship status has officially and permanently changed from “friends” to “it’s complicated.”

Accusations that Google has tampered with search results are not uncommon and date back to the earliest days of its search engine. But they are taking on new life amid concerns that technology behemoths are directly — or indirectly — censoring controversial subjects in their response to concerns over so-called fake news and the 2016 presidential election.

In April, Google announced an initiative called Project Owl to provide “algorithmic updates to surface more authoritative content” and stamp out fake news stories from its search results. To some, that was an uncomfortable step toward Google becoming an arbiter of what is and is not a trustworthy news source. “They’re really skating on thin ice,” said Michael Bertini, a search strategist at iQuanti, a digital marketing agency. “They’re controlling what users see. If Google is controlling what they deem to be fake news, I think that’s bias.”

AT&T says the latest claims that it is ignoring the broadband needs of low-income residents in Detroit are false and that it continues to enhance speeds. In a new complaint filed at the Federal Communications Commission, the telecommunications company has been accused of ignoring the broadband needs of low-income residents in Detroit. The practice is called “digital redlining,” a process of income-based discrimination carried out against lower-income neighborhoods.

“We do not redline,” AT&T said. “Our commitment to diversity and inclusion is unparalleled." AT&T added that its network investments are in line with the rules set by the FCC's Communications Act and that it will present its side of the story. "Our investment decisions are based on the cost of deployment and demand for our services and are of course fully compliant with the requirements of the Communications Act," AT&T said. "We will vigorously defend the complaint.”

Opponents of Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai's restoration of the UHF discount, which helped pave the way for a possible Sinclair/Tribune merger, have taken their first shot in federal court, saying the decision was illegally arbitrary and capricious and served no public interest purpose.

Late Sept 25, a coalition of nonprofit media consolidation critics including Free Press, Common Cause, the National Hispanic Media Coalition and Prometheus Radio Project, laid out their case for why the decision to reinstate the discount was arbitrary and capricious and not in the public interest. The previous Democratic-led FCC had eliminated the discount as an outmoded artifact of the analog TV era. The groups, filing their opening brief in the US Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit, said the FCC did not present any "valid or factual legal basis" for the discount's return. "The best indication that reinstating the discount was not actually intended to maintain the status quo, is the fact that, just two weeks after the Commission issued its decision reinstating the discount, Intervenor Sinclair announced plans to acquire Intervenor Tribune," they told the court. That deal could give Sinclair, already the largest TV station group at slightly under the 39% cap, a reach of over 70% of the country.

[Commentary] As progressive luminaries like Tim Wu and Susan Crawford continue fighting for utility-style regulations for broadband providers, prominent conservatives like Tucker Carlson and Steve Bannon have begun demanding similar utility-style regulations for other internet “gatekeepers,” including major websites and online platforms like Google and Facebook. Even if you accept the premise of that argument — and reasonable minds disagree over just how much control is too much for one corporation to have — it’s far from clear that utility-style regulation is the proper response.

Indeed, in the dynamic markets for internet services, imposing true utility-style regulations would be a huge mistake. By giving up on market forces and ceding dominance to a single firm, utility-style regulation makes future competition impossible. Fortunately, strong antitrust and consumer protection laws can save us from this downward spiral of utility-style regulation.

The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation announced a major initiative to support the role of strong, trusted journalism as essential to a healthy democracy. The initiative is anchored by the Knight Commission on Trust, Media and Democracy, a panel of thinkers and doers from diverse backgrounds committed to creating more informed and engaged communities. This nonpartisan commission will explore causes for the erosion of trust in democratic institutions, in particular the press. It will also identify new thinking and solutions around rebuilding trust.

The Knight Commission will be chaired by Jamie Woodson, executive chairman and CEO of Tennessee’s State Collaborative on Reforming Education, and Tony Marx, president of The New York Public Library, the largest public library in the nation and the most used library system in the world. It will be run by the Aspen Institute, with $2 million in support from Knight. The initiative also includes the Knight Prototype Fund, which fosters accurate information in media and announced a new round of winners in June 2017, and Newsmatch, a partnership with Democracy Fund to support nonprofit news and investigative news outlets with matching grants during the end-of-year giving period; Newsmatch was initially launched by Knight in December 2016. Knight plans to build on the initiative further with the help of the commission and other partners.

Technology doesn’t always cooperate with us when we want it to. And sometimes governments don’t want to cooperate with it, either. At the United Nation’s High-Level Event on Innovation and Technology various snafus reinforced a key point that recurred at various conferences during UNGA week: That all the talk of using technology to fight poverty, hunger, and gender inequality is useless if we can’t get over the most basic hurdle—universal access to the internet, which less than half the world currently has. Only then can we attempt to use our digital savvy to tackle the 17 sustainable development goals (SDGs), the UN’s ambitious framework for solving global problems by 2030.

In order to achieve any of this, however, technology leaders in the private sector and government leaders in the public sector are going to have to learn how to get along. Traditionally positioned as opponents at opposite ends of the ring—the private sector wanting to make a profit, the public sector wanting to make a difference—UNGA treated both as equals and encouraged them to shake hands instead of throw punches. True, lasting, global change isn’t the responsibility of either party alone, but to move forward, they’re going to have to find some middle ground on the following issues.