Stories from Abroad

Sidewalk Labs, a unit of Google’s parent company Alphabet, is proposing to turn a rundown part of Toronto’s waterfront into what may be the most wired community in history — to “fundamentally refine what urban life can be.” High-level interest is clear: Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Alphabet’s then-Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt appeared together to announce the plan Oct 2017. But some Canadians are rethinking the privacy implications of giving one of the most data-hungry companies on the planet the means to wire up everything from streetlights to pavement.

The government needs to diversify and strengthen its efforts to stop China from co-opting the US innovation economy to support its own global ambitions, industry experts told the House Oversight IT Subcommittee on Sept 26.  And tariffs probably aren’t the best way to do it, they said. “For more than 40 years, the US has encouraged China to develop its own economy and take its place alongside the US as a central and responsible player on the world stage,” said House Oversight IT subcommittee Chairman Will Hurd (R-TX). “China does not want to join us, they want to replace us.

Twenty-First Century Fox agreed to sell its 39 percent stake in the British broadcaster Sky to Comcast in a deal worth $15 billion, ending Rupert Murdoch’s yearslong ambition to take full ownership of the satellite service he helped found three decades ago. Murdoch, the executive co-chairman of 21st Century Fox, sold most of his empire to the Walt Disney Company this summer. The proceeds of the Sky sale will go to Disney, which plans to invest the money in its newest effort to sell its content directly to viewers via streaming services.

Nyarugusu on the border of Tanzania and Burundi, one of the largest refugee camps in the world, is an unlikely pioneer in how the telecoms industry views refugees. Established in 1996, it has population of 150,000. Vodacom, Vodafone’s African arm, installed a 3G tower within Nyarugusu in 2016, which it now shares with commercial rivals Tigo and Airtel. The tower is running at full capacity, according to the GSMA, the mobile industry trade body, but more striking is the average revenue per user of $4.40. That is slightly higher than the average revenue per user for the rest of Tanzania.

Comcast and the Walt Disney Company have long been rivals. But Brian Roberts, who runs Comcast, has recently become the Magic Kingdom’s nemesis in chief. He waged an unrelenting fight for 21st Century Fox over the summer, forcing Disney to pay about $18 billion more than it had planned in order to secure Rupert Murdoch’s entertainment empire. Then, on Sept 22, Comcast emerged as the decisive victor in a battle with Disney for control of the British pay-television company Sky. For Robert A.

Fight #1: The race to get 5G networks up and running, a three-way game among US, China, and South Korea. While the US may be technically first with 5G in a few places, China is spending significantly more and will likely be first with 5G en masse.

European laws and proposals meant to rein in tech giants are inadvertently empowering them. The laws — governing everything from privacy to copyright to content filtering — stem from concerns about the behavior of big platforms, like YouTube and Facebook. But big companies have more resources to comply with complicated regulations than small firms. The European Parliament recently passed a directive that would overhaul its copyright law and would force platforms to impose strict filters for copyright violations or face fines.

A growing number of governments now benchmark the status of broadband in their national broadband plans. The report shows for the first time that at least 15 countries now have strategies in place for promoting the safe use of Artificial Intelligence.

Microsoft is calling on governments to follow a set of principles for cross-border data access policies, including independent judicial review and dispute resolution mechanisms. Microsoft’s Sept. 11 call for law enforcement data access standards follows the European Commission’s introduction recently of proposed e-evidence legislation. In March, Congress passed legislation governing how U.S. law enforcement can access data overseas.

The European Parliament voted on changes to the Copyright Directive, a piece of legislation intended to update copyright for the internet age. MEPs approved amended versions of the directive’s most controversial provisions: Articles 11 and 13, dubbed by critics as the “link tax” and “upload filter.” Article 11 is intended to give publishers and newspapers a way to make money when companies like Google link to their stories, while Article 13 requires platforms like YouTube and Facebook to scan uploaded content to stop the unlicensed sharing of copyrighted material.