Ownership

Until the week of Sept 11, Facebook enabled advertisers to direct their pitches to the news feeds of almost 2,300 people who expressed interest in the topics of “Jew hater,” “How to burn jews,” or, “History of ‘why jews ruin the world.’”

To test if these ad categories were real, ProPublica paid $30 to target those groups with three “promoted posts” — in which a ProPublica article or post was displayed in their news feeds. Facebook approved all three ads within 15 minutes. After ProPublica contacted Facebook, it removed the anti-Semitic categories — which were created by an algorithm rather than by people — and said it would explore ways to fix the problem, such as limiting the number of categories available or scrutinizing them before they are displayed to buyers.

Google came up on the losing end of a previously-undisclosed third showdown with the federal government over demands for data stored overseas, a federal court in Washington has revealed. The disclosure of yet another court fight over the issue comes as the US Supreme Court is preparing to decide as soon as Oct whether to weigh in on the question of whether U.S. law permits authorities to use U.S. courts to obtain electronic records kept outside of the country.

Court filings made public show that in July Chief Judge Beryl Howell of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia rejected Google's challenge to a search warrant seeking company data stored abroad. Judge Howell agreed to hold the company in contempt for defying her order and to fine the firm $10,000 a day. However, the arrangement is largely symbolic, since a contempt order is needed to appeal such a ruling and she suspended the fine pending such an appeal. In fact, the firm and prosecutors jointly proposed the arrangement.

President Donald Trump blocked a Beijing-backed fund’s attempt to buy an American chip maker, signaling his administration will closely scrutinize Chinese investment in semiconductor technology. President Trump took the rare step of personally intervening in the transaction after the would-be deal makers asked him to overrule an earlier negative determination from the Committee on Foreign Investment in the US, a multiagency panel that reviews deals for national-security concerns.

According to a statement from the White House, President Trump believes the transaction could risk U.S. national security due to “the potential transfer of intellectual property to the foreign acquirer, the Chinese government’s role in supporting this transaction, the importance of semiconductor supply chain integrity to the United States Government, and the use of Lattice products by the United States Government.”

The days of unqualified praise from Washington are over for the country's biggest tech companies, whose size and power are increasingly drawing attacks from both the left and the right. Democrats are condemning Facebook for allowing 'fake news' and Russia-linked ads during the election, while conservatives accuse Google of silencing right-leaning viewpoints. President Donald Trump routinely accuses Amazon of dodging taxes, and right-leaning news organizations like Fox News and Breitbart have begun mocking Silicon Valley leaders as power-hungry and out of touch. Now, with Democrats talking tough about applying antitrust scrutiny to 'Big Tech' and Republicans condemning internet firms for their snap judgments about who gets to say what online, tech is encountering unaccustomed hostility from the political class — and tighter regulation no longer seems a far-fetched scenario.

[Commentary] The blinding rise of Donald Trump over the past year has masked another major trend in American politics: the palpable, and perhaps permanent, turn against the tech industry.

The new corporate leviathans that used to be seen as bright new avatars of American innovation are increasingly portrayed as sinister new centers of unaccountable power, a transformation likely to have major consequences for the industry and for American politics. People who think the money tech spends can buy protection from the political system misunderstand their dynamic: The transfers of money referred to blandly as “campaign finance” are equal parts bribery and extortion, and the system works best when the target is scared. And the political class can smell blood. That Zuckerberg campaign was, to the political world, blood in the water, a signal of a new vulnerability around his company and his industry. That’s a tough place to start before the committee.

Is your city fiber-friendly? Having fiber could make or break your city’s economic future with key development projects — just ask Amazon. Amazon recently announced its intentions to build a second headquarters, Hq2, outside its home base of Seattle, piquing the interests of cities all across the country. The new headquarters will bring in up to 50,000 well-paying jobs to whichever lucky city manages to land this tremendous development.

Here at the Fiber Broadband Association, we applaud Amazon’s wise choice to make optimal fiber connectivity a requirement for siting its second headquarters. No matter where Amazon chooses to build, we are glad that its headquarters will be fiber-ready.

Spurred in part by the news that T-Mobile will be giving Netflix to its subscribers (and their families) for free, the Parents Television Council is urging Netflix CEO Reed Hastings to employ content protections. The other spur was Disney's decision to pull its content in favor of its own streaming platform. "[N]ow is an opportune time for Netflix to recommit to providing families with both abundant, suitable programming choices and adequate parental controls,” PTC President Tim Winter wrote. PTC suggests Netflix's parental controls need tweaking, including by requiring a passcode to switch from a child's to an adult's profile, and better blocking of adult profiles and titles on its mobile app.

A group of antitrust experts has launched their own independent organization after they were pushed out of the New America think tank two weeks after raising criticisms of Google. The new group is called the Open Markets Institute, and its goal is “to protect this country's economy and democracy from corporate monopolies that undermine opportunity, competition, choice, and — as we have now personally experienced — freedom of expression.”

Open Markets is headed by Barry Lynn, the former New America scholar whose praise of the European Union’s decision to fine Google $2.7 billion for antitrust violations led to clashes with New America president Anne-Marie Slaughter. On Sept 13, the new independent group announced that its board of directors will include the activist and academic Zephyr Teachout and Franklin Foer, a journalist who just published a book on the dangers that tech giants pose to society. Open Markets will not accept funding from any for-profit corporations, the group said in its announcement.

Facebook’s enormous audience has long been catnip to advertisers. But the company’s vast ecosystem has come under scrutiny in 2017 from major brands, which are increasingly sensitive to the possibility of inadvertently showing up next to objectionable content. In response to those concerns, Facebook released a new set of rules that outline the types of videos and articles that it will bar from running ads. It also said it would begin disclosing new information to advertisers about where their messages appear on the platform and on external apps and sites it is partners with.

The rules, which will be enforced by a mix of automation and human review, restrict ads from content that depicts, among other topics, real-world tragedies, “debatable social issues,” misappropriation of children’s show characters, violence, nudity, gore, drug use and derogatory language. Facebook is extending the guidelines immediately to videos — which the company hopes will become an increasingly lucrative part of its business — and, in the coming months, to articles.

[Commentary] Generally speaking, there are two kinds of corporate players on the internet: companies that build infrastructure through which content flows, and companies that seek to curate content and create a community. Internet service providers like Verizon and Comcast, domain name servers, web hosts and security services providers like Cloudflare are all the former — or the “pipe.” They typically don’t look at the content their clients and customers are putting up, they just give them the means to do it and let it flow.

Because of the precise nature of Cloudflare’s business, and the scarcity of competitors, its role censoring internet speech is not just new, it’s terrifying. What makes Cloudflare an essential part of the internet is its ability to block malicious traffic from barraging clients’ websites with requests that take them offline. Cloudflare is one of the few companies in the world that provide this kind of reliable protection. If you don’t want your website to get taken down by extortionists, jokers, political opposition or hackers, you have to hire Cloudflare or one of its very few competitors. Social media platforms like Facebook are the latter. They encourage their users to create, share and engage with content — so they look at content all the time and decide whether they want to allow hateful material like that of neo-Nazis to stay up. While there have long been worries about internet service providers favoring access to some content over others, there has been less concern about companies further along the pipeline holding an internet on/off switch. In large part, this is because at other points in the pipeline, users have choice.

Private companies can make their own rules, and consumers can choose among them. If GoDaddy won’t register your domain, you can go to Bluehost or thousands of other companies. But the fewer choices you have for the infrastructure you need to stay online, the more serious the consequences when companies refuse service.

[Kate Klonick is a lawyer and doctoral candidate at Yale Law School who studies law and technology.]