Ownership

Tronc, the publisher of The Los Angeles Times and The Chicago Tribune, announced Sept 5 that it had acquired The Daily News, the nearly 100-year-old tabloid that for decades set the city’s agenda with its gossip, sports and city coverage. The deal represents the end of an era for The News, which was long a voice for New York’s working class. It may also signal the end of the political influence of its owner, the real estate magnate Mortimer B. Zuckerman, who often used the paper’s bold, front-page headline — known as “the wood” — for commentary about candidates and politicians, locally and nationally.

The paper’s circulation, which exceeded two million a day in the 1940s, is now in the low hundred thousands. And The Chicago Tribune reported that Tronc purchased The News for just $1, plus the assumption of liabilities. But while The News wields less influence than it once did, it still has the power to resonate in the city and beyond. In 2017, the paper and ProPublica shared the Pulitzer Prize for public service for a series on the New York Police Department’s widespread abuse of eviction rules.

Lenovo Inc., one of the world’s largest computer manufacturers, has agreed to settle charges by the Federal Trade Commission and 32 State Attorneys General that the company harmed consumers by pre-loading software on some laptops that compromised security protections in order to deliver ads to consumers. In its complaint, the FTC charged that beginning in August 2014 Lenovo began selling consumer laptops in the United States that came with a preinstalled “man-in-the-middle” software program called VisualDiscovery that interfered with how a user’s browser interacted with websites and created serious security vulnerabilities.

As part of the settlement with the FTC, Lenovo is prohibited from misrepresenting any features of software preloaded on laptops that will inject advertising into consumers’ Internet browsing sessions or transmit sensitive consumer information to third parties. The company must also get consumers’ affirmative consent before pre-installing this type of software. In addition, the company is required for 20 years to implement a comprehensive software security program for most consumer software preloaded on its laptops. The security program will also be subject to third-party audits.

A messy, public brawl over a Google critic’s ouster from a Washington think tank has exposed a fissure in Democratic Party politics. On one side there’s a young and growing faction advocating new antimonopoly laws, on the other a rival faction struggling to defend itself.

At issue is a decades-long relationship between Democrats and tech companies, with Democratic presidents signing off on deregulation and candidates embracing money and innovations from companies like Google and Facebook. Now, locked out of power and convinced that same coziness with large corporations cost them the presidency, Democrats are talking themselves into breaking with tech giants and becoming an antimonopoly party.

Among its peers, Google is an unparalleled lobbyist. Between April and June 2017, Google spent $5.4 million lobbying the federal government, more than double the lobbying budget for Apple, a comparable global behemoth that also has to fend off regulatory scrutiny. The tech giant has also long funded a lengthy roster of think tanks, academics, and nonprofits that grapple with issues that could seriously impact Google’s bottom line, such as privacy, network neutrality, and tax reform.

So when the New York Times reported that the New America Foundation (a Google-funded think tank) severed ties with Open Markets (an antimonopoly group housed within New America) after complaints from a top Google executive (Eric Schmidt, executive chairman of Google’s parent company), it seemed like a rare glimpse at how Google wields its power behind the scenes. Emails between New America and Open Markets reviewed by WIRED and others also give greater insight into the way that funding from Google can influence a policy group's internal dynamics. The cornerstone of Open Markets’s advocacy work is the idea that consolidation of power erodes political liberties and democratic values. But the dustup shows how easy it would be for Google to manipulate public debate on national issues without leaving much of a fingerprint.

A Google spokesperson tells WIRED that its financial support does not interfere with any think tank’s “independence, personnel decisions, or policy perspective." But in emails, New America’s CEO and president Anne-Marie Slaughter comes across as more of a conduit than a firewall between New America’s donors and intellectual work of its scholars.

Various unions have lined up against the Sinclair/Tribune merger, concerned, among other things, that the meld's synergies will mean job losses. Asking the Federal Communications Commission to deny the $3.9 billion merger were the Communications Workers of America, the National Association of Broadcast Employees and Technicians and The News Guild.

"A merger between Sinclair and Tribune would reduce viewpoint diversity and competition, harm localism, and reduce jobs," the unions told the FCC in asking it to deny the application for license transfers. "Sinclair has been a leader in joint service and shared service agreements," they told the FCC. "These agreements result in fewer stations producing news, less time devoted to local news, and also fewer broadcast station employees and journalists. The primary cost-saving in these models is the reduction of employees through the elimination of locally-originated programming at one or more of the affected stations by duplicating (or triplicating) the same programming."

Alphabet Inc. is forming a new holding company designed to finalize its evolution from Google, the web search giant, into a corporate parent with distinct arms in far-flung fields like health care and self-driving cars. The new entity, called XXVI Holdings Inc., will own the equity of each Alphabet company, including Google.

The new structure legally separates Google from other units such as Waymo, its self-driving car business, and Verily, a medical device and health data firm. Google co-founder Larry Page announced Alphabet two years ago to foster new businesses that operate independently from Google. Technically, however, those units, called the "Other Bets," were still subsidiaries of Google. The new structure, unveiled Sept 1, enables the Other Bets to become subsidiaries of Alphabet on the same legal footing as Google. Google is also changing from a corporation to a limited liability company, or LLC. This won’t alter the way the business pays taxes, Johnson said. The switch is partly related to Google’s transformation from a listed public company into a business owned by a holding company.

Leaving aside the discussion for a minute on whether tech platforms like Google and Amazon actually might meet the definition of a monopoly under our nation’s antitrust laws (a precise and economically rigorous definition usually left to the Department of Justice, the Federal Trade Commission, or the federal (and sometimes state) court system), we seem to have forgotten about an important part of the digital ecosystem and whether it has a monopoly problem. It’s the one that’s hiding in plain sight and the evidence is in your mailbox (or inbox) every month when you get your cable bill.

Why does is matter if cable internet service providers have market power? When companies monopolize they may hurt consumers because they no longer have the incentives to compete on price or service, with the unsurprising result that even while profits for companies increase consumer satisfaction plummets and prices continue to rise.

[Commentary] Neither Google, nor Eric Schmidt, told New America to fire Barry Lynn or his colleagues. They did not have to. Academics fill an intellectual gap that regulators often don’t have time to fill themselves. They supply the knowledge that politicians either don’t possess, or have no time to ponder. Whether it’s because the whole system is increasingly marketised and reliant on corporate funding, or just that big corporates have switched on to this as a way to pursue their agenda, the pressure on experts to alter their testimony to serve the interests of business is only going to increase.

Silicon Valley is subtler, too. If you control the research that happens, you change the entire tack of the conversation. Furthermore, you change the perception of reality itself. If the academics arguing that modern platform monopolies cause damage to the competitive landscape are drowned out by hundreds more funded by technology firms arguing that everything is fine, they look like a lunatic fringe no matter how strong their arguments.

[Commentary] Six years ago, I was pressured to unpublish a critical piece about Google’s monopolistic practices after the company got upset about it. In my case, the post stayed unpublished. I was working for Forbes at the time, and was new to my job. In addition to writing and reporting, I helped run social media there, so I got pulled into a meeting with Google salespeople about Google’s then-new social network, Plus. The Google salespeople were encouraging Forbes to add Plus’s “+1" social buttons to articles on the site, alongside the Facebook Like button and the Reddit share button. They said it was important to do because the Plus recommendations would be a factor in search results—a crucial source of traffic to publishers.

NCTA-The Internet & Television Association, has stopped short of seeking outright denial of the Sinclair/Tribune merger, but it has major problems with it and suggests the Federal Communications Commission should consider disallowing new duopolies, even where they don't violate rules, and joint retransmission negotiations among commonly owned Sinclair/Tribune stations. That came in its response this week to Sinclair's lengthy defense of the public interest benefits filed with the FCC Aug. 22. NCTA says the FCC should, at a minimum, review the deal under current media ownership limits, not hoped-for changes to the rules, and "consider" conditions based on "past conduct and unprecedented size."