Ownership

Amazon is making a serious effort to break into the digital advertising business, an arena dominated by its fellow behemoth competitors, Google and Facebook. The company is opening a new office in New York City, which it says will bring more than 2,000 jobs. The new space will also bring it closer to New York’s advertising agencies. Media agency executives have already said that they have been increasingly contacted by Amazon representatives trying to sell them and their clients ad space. Amazon has already begun to beef up its ad sales team and enhance its programmatic advertising business.

Google for the first time has uncovered evidence that Russian operatives exploited the company’s platforms in an attempt to interfere in the 2016 election, apparently.

The Silicon Valley giant has found that tens of thousands of dollars were spent on ads by Russian agents who aimed to spread disinformation across Google’s many products, which include YouTube, as well as advertising associated with Google search, Gmail, and the company’s DoubleClick ad network. Google runs the world’s largest online advertising business, and YouTube is the world’s largest online video site. The discovery by Google is also significant because the ads do not appear to be from the same Kremlin-affiliated troll farm that bought ads on Facebook -- a sign that the Russian effort to spread disinformation online may be a much broader problem than Silicon Valley companies have unearthed so far.

A group of Democratic Sens is asking regulators to investigate the potential effects of a merger between T-Mobile and Sprint. In letters to the Department of Justice and the Federal Communications Commission on Oct 6, the eight senators, led by Sen Amy Klobuchar (D-MN), said they are concerned that the potential deal could hurt consumers.

“Beginning an investigation into a merger of T-Mobile and Sprint now will allow your agencies to quickly, but fully, review the agreement if it is announced,” they wrote. “Indeed, multiple news sources are reporting that the two parties are close to a deal in principle. The likelihood of the transaction occurring combined with the serious issues that it raises provide compelling reason for DOJ and the FCC to begin investigating the potential transaction.” The letter was also signed by Sens Al Franken (D-MN), Patrick Leahy (D-VT), Richard Blumenthal (D-CT), Ron Wyden (D-OR), Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY), Edward Markey (D-MA), and Jeff Merkley (D-OR).

Facebook is going to require advertisements that are targeted to people based on "politics, religion, ethnicity or social issues" to be manually reviewed before they go live, according to an e-mail sent to advertisers. That's a higher standard than that required of most Facebook ads, which are bought and uploaded to the site through an automated system. It's also warning that it expects the new policy to slow down the launch of new ad campaigns.

The steps Facebook is taking to combat questions of Russian election interference strike at the core of the company's business. The ad buyers who spent $450 million on Facebook ads love the platform's speed and efficiency — something they fear will be diminished by inserting more human oversight of political ads before they go live. The company's action comes as a political ad disclosure bill gains momentum on Capitol Hill.

Facebook’s chief security officer, Alex Stamos, took to Twitter to deliver an unusually raw tweetstorm defending the company’s software algorithms against critics who believe Facebook needs more oversight. Facebook uses algorithms to determine everything from what you see and don’t see in News Feed, to finding and removing other content like hate speech and violent threats. The company has been criticized in the past for using these algorithms — and not humans — to monitor its service for things like abuse, violent threats, and misinformation. The algorithms can be fooled or gamed, and part of the criticism is that Facebook and other tech companies don’t always seem to appreciate that algorithms have biases, too. Stamos says it’s hard to understand from the outside.

[Commentary] One of the former most popular and influential instant messaging apps in the world, AOL Instant Messenger, or AIM, is shutting down on December 15. But if it weren't for a Federal Communication Commission regulatory decision in 2001, we might all still be using it.

Sixteen years ago, the FCC, the regulatory body responsible for things like television and radio, approved a merger between American Online and Time Warner, but with several conditions. As part of the deal, AOL was required to make its web portal compatible with other chat apps. The government stopped AOL from building a closed system where everyone had to use AIM, meaning it had to adopt interoperability—the ability to be compatible with other computer systems. The FCC required AOL to be compatible with at least one instant messaging rival immediately after the merger went through. Within six months, the FCC required AOL to make its portal compatible with at least two other rivals, or face penalties. The FCC's decision to force AOL to remain open provides a blueprint for how the government could similarly regulate today's gigantic internet platforms, like Facebook.

The House Intelligence Committee is asking officials from Facebook, Twitter, and Alphabet’s Google to testify publicly as part of its Russia probe on Nov. 1, the same day as a planned Senate Intelligence hearing. That would set up a marathon day for the social media companies, which are facing increasing scrutiny over the role their platforms played in Russia’s efforts to meddle in the U.S. election. The House panel previously said it was looking at sometime in October to bring technology companies in for a hearing.

Facebook cut references to Russia from a public report in April about manipulation of its platform around the presidential election because of concerns among the company’s lawyers and members of its policy team, apparently. The drafting of the report sparked internal debate over how much information to disclose about Russian mischief on Facebook and its efforts to affect U.S. public opinion during the 2016 presidential contest.

Some at Facebook pushed to not include a mention of Russia in the report because the company’s understanding of Russian activity was too speculative, apparently. Ultimately, the 13-page report, published on April 27 and titled “Information Operations and Facebook,” was shortened by several pages by Facebook’s legal and policy teams from an earlier draft, and didn’t mention Russia at all. Rather, it concluded that “malicious actors” engaged in influence campaigns during the U.S. presidential election but said it couldn’t determine who was responsible. The extent of Facebook’s understanding at the time of Russian influence is unclear. It wasn’t until a Sept. 6 Facebook newsroom blog post that the company publicly identified Russia as a source of such efforts.

There is a small but growing band of Silicon Valley heretics who complain about the rise of the so-called “attention economy”: an internet shaped around the demands of an advertising economy. These refuseniks are rarely founders or chief executives, who have little incentive to deviate from the mantra that their companies are making the world a better place. Instead, they tend to have worked a rung or two down the corporate ladder: designers, engineers and product managers who, like Rosenstein, several years ago put in place the building blocks of a digital world from which they are now trying to disentangle themselves.

There is growing concern that as well as addicting users, technology is contributing toward so-called “continuous partial attention”, severely limiting people’s ability to focus, and possibly lowering IQ. But those concerns are trivial compared with the devastating impact upon the political system that some of Rosenstein’s peers believe can be attributed to the rise of social media and the attention-based market that drives it. Drawing a straight line between addiction to social media and political earthquakes like Brexit and the rise of Donald Trump, they contend that digital forces have completely upended the political system and, left unchecked, could even render democracy as we know it obsolete.

Sinclair has told the Federal Communications Commission it is taking steps to spin off whatever stations it will need to comply with national or local ownership limits on its proposed $2.9 billion merger with Tribune, but that it is not identifying them pending possible Department of Justice input of FCC rule changes that could change the plan. If the FCC loosens its ownership rules that could also affect the plan, but Sinclair was focused on answering the FCC's questions about how the deal is currently being structured.

There are 10 markets where a combined Sinclair/Tribune would run afoul of FCC prohibitions on owning two stations in a market, and the deal, even with the UHF discount that means only half a UHF audience's station would count, would result in a 45%-plus national audience reach without some spinoffs-- and the current cap is 39%. Sinclair was responding formally to an FCC Media Bureau request that the broadcaster back up a number of its pledges to bring its proposed $3.9 billion purchase of Tribune stations within the FCC's current media ownership rules, including the duopoly and national ownership cap, as well as Sinclair's explanation of the public interest benefits of the deal.