Monthly Archives: March 2019

Warren is on the warpath and she’s right

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One of the planks of Senator Elizabeth Warren’s emerging campaign is a radical proposal to break up the tech giants. She did a robust defence the other day of her proposal.

I’m with her all the way on that, as is Dave Winer. But, Dave writes,

we need to do more, and do it very soon. They [the tech giants] are destroying natural resources the way oil giants did before the government stepped in. However our political leaders, like most users, don’t understand.

The natural resource they are destroying is the World Wide Web, an open, unowned resource that has fostered the innovative environment that gave birth to Google and Facebook.

Google is acting as if it were the government, without any checks and balances, no oversight, no redress of grievances. They say they’re doing it for the good of the net, but we know they’re a huge corporation, and that’s not how it works.

Facebook is sucking the life out of the web, along with Medium (where Warren published her manifesto!). Some simple rules, if followed, would restore balance to the web ecosystem. But there are no rules here, so they run wild, and take whatever isn’t nailed down.

They’ve had a fantastic run, but it’s long past time for some rules, and consequences for not respecting that we all have ownership of the resource they are foreclosing on.

Yep.

The 5G enigma

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This morning’s Observer column:

The dominant company in the market at the moment is Huawei, a $100bn giant which is the world’s largest supplier of telecoms equipment and its second largest smartphone maker. In the normal course of events, therefore, we would expect that the core networks of western mobile operators would have a lot of its kit in them. And initially, that’s what looked like happening. But in recent months someone has pressed the pause button.

The prime mover in this is the US, which has banned government agencies from using Huawei (and ZTE) equipment and called on its allies to do the same. The grounds for this are national security concerns about hidden “backdoors”: it would be risky to have a company so close to the Chinese government building key parts of American critical infrastructure. Last week Huawei filed a lawsuit against the US government over the ban. New Zealand and Australia have obligingly complied with the ban, blocking the use of Huawei’s equipment in 5G networks. And last December BT announced that it was even removing Huawei kit from parts of its 4G network.

Other countries – notably Japan and Germany – have proved less compliant; the German Data Commissioner was even tactless enough to point out that “the US itself once made sure that backdoor doors were built into Cisco hardware”.

The UK’s position is interestingly enigmatic…

Read on

How to write about automobiles

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Here’s the Observer‘s Martin Love on the Mercedes G-wagon:

Looking across the street to where I’ve parked a whopping Mercedes G-Class, I watch a short scene unfold, which sends me plunging down memory lane. A little boy is walking to school with his mum. His younger sister is thrashing around in her pushchair like a netted salmon. Suddenly, they all stop. The boy has spotted the emerald green G-Wagon lurking across the road. His mum patiently wheels the buggy across to it and then, slowly, they inch around the car – the boy’s mouth gapes with incredulity. His toy car has been reborn as a colossal giant. At one point he delicately lays his hand on its immense flank – as if he’s touching a sleeping tyrannosaurus. He’s mesmerised by the car’s size and promise of power. It’s exactly what I would have done… Scratch that, it’s exactly what I did do a few days earlier, when I collected the car. If machines get you, they always will. And there are few with more emotional traction than the G-Wagon.

This barnstormer takes quasi-industrial styling and military machismo to nose-bleeding levels…

Funnily enough, as a recovering petrolhead who now drives a sensible hybrid, I know just what he means. Returning from Provence last Summer, we were parked at the Eurotunnel terminal waiting for our shuttle to be called. When we got back to the car after getting a coffee, there was a span-new G-Wagon parked next to us. And, despite myself, I had exactly the same reaction. It’s an astonishing vehicle. Completely OTT. But not repulsive in the way that the Humvee is.

Love finishes his essay nicely…

I popped across the street and asked the small boy if he’d like to climb in and “start her up”. He gleefully accepted… feet dangling, finger hesitating over the ignition, then the omnipotent roar of the engine. Start saving now, little guy.

Only £143,305 to go.

Zuckerberg’s ‘pivot’

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Zeynep Tufekci isn’t taken in by the Supreme Leader’s latest cant:

The platitudes were there, as I expected, but the evasions were worse than I anticipated: The plan, in effect, is to entrench Facebook’s interests while sidestepping all the important issues.

Here are four pressing questions about privacy that Mr. Zuckerberg conspicuously did not address: Will Facebook stop collecting data about people’s browsing behavior, which it does extensively? Will it stop purchasing information from data brokers who collect or “scrape” vast amounts of data about billions of people, often including information related to our health and finances? Will it stop creating “shadow profiles” — collections of data about people who aren’t even on Facebook? And most important: Will it change its fundamental business model, which is based on charging advertisers to take advantage of this widespread surveillance to “micro-target” consumers?

Stockpile loo paper now?

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Well, well. This from the august pages of Foreign Policy:

While Brexit preppers have stirred headlines in recent months with their preemptive purchases of essential items, the stockpiling of large manufacturers—and the lack thereof—matters most. For goods with short shelf lives, such as medicine and fresh produce, the limitation is quality: Store an apple or an antibiotic for too long and it will go bad. For goods that are large and bulky, such as toilet paper, the problem is quantity. And in the case of the United Kingdom, where the average resident uses an unrivaled 110 rolls of toilet paper per year, the highest figure in Europe, any meaningful measure of forward planning would require more real estate than is currently available.

This is just one of the terrible challenges that the paper industry—and the public—may face in the coming months, said Andrew Large, the director general of the Confederation of Paper Industries, the leading trade association for the U.K.’s paper-based industries.

“It’s very bulky and light in weight for its volume, which means you need an awful lot of warehousing space in order to be able to put down meaningful stocks of the material,” he said. While there has been some stockpiling—several weeks of finished rolls and perhaps months of unfinished pulp, according to Large—the practical limitations to stockpiling leave a great deal of uncertainty. This uncertainty, more than anything, is most worrying for the industry. “The thing that will cause a crisis,” Large said, “is if people do panic and they empty the shelves preemptively, whereas if normal buying patterns are continued, there would have been enough supply in the system for everybody to be fine.

This might be good news for the British tabloids. I mean to say, if there’s no toilet paper we’ll have to resort to Leopold Bloom’s strategy of cutting up newspapers and hanging the pieces on a hook.

AI hype

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From the Financial Times earlier this week.

I’m tempted to say that this blog is “powered by AI”. Except of course that it’s powered by, er, organic intelligence.

Facebook’s vassal state

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Since the late 1950s, my native land’s grand strategy — initially for survival and later for prosperity — was to be welcoming to foreign multinational companies. For half a century, that strategy worked well. But now it’s become problematic. Why? Because some of the giant multinationals which have made Ireland their European bases have become toxic.

Chief among these is Facebook, the leading data-vampire. Until the other day, we had our suspicions about the subservience of the Irish government to the wishes and requirements of the Zuckerberg empire. Now — thanks to two remarkable pieces of reporting — we have some evidence of the cosy relationship that developed between Facebook’s second-in-command, Sheryl Sandberg (the ‘Typhoid Mary’ of surveillance capitalism, as Shoshana Zuboff describes her) and the previous Irish Taoiseach (Prime Minister), Enda Kenny.

The first breakthrough came from my Observer colleagues Carole Cadwalladr and Duncan Campbell and was based on a leaked internal Facebook document which described, among other things, Facebook’s

“great relationship” with Enda Kenny, the Irish prime minister at the time, one of a number of people it describes as “friends of Facebook”. Ireland plays a key role in regulating technology companies in Europe because its data protection commissioner acts for all 28 member states. The memo has inflamed data protection advocates, who have long complained about the company’s “cosy” relationship with the Irish government.

The document also noted

Kenny’s “appreciation” for Facebook’s decision to locate its headquarters in Dublin and points out that the new proposed data protection legislation was a “threat to jobs, innovation and economic growth in Europe”. It then goes on to say that Ireland is poised to take on the presidency of the EU and therefore has the “opportunity to influence the European Data Directive decisions”. It makes the extraordinary claim that Kenny offered to use the “significant influence” of the EU presidency as a means of influencing other EU member states “even though technically Ireland is supposed to remain neutral in this role”.

The second revelation comes from a terrific investigation by the Irish Independent newspaper. This tells how, two days after the meeting the Taoiseach in Davos (where else?), Sandberg wrote to Kenny, warning him how changes to taxation or privacy laws might lead Facebook to consider ‘different options for future investment and growth in Europe’.

Her email reads:

“I also want to commend you once again for your leadership during your Presidency of the EU. You made enormous progress. When it came to the European Data Protection Regulation, you and your staff really internalised our concerns and were able to present them in a reasonable way, which has had a positive impact …We hope we can rely on you for your continued leadership on this regulation since we still have more work to do here. Along the same lines, I was pleased to hear that you are so involved in the OECD working group process on tax reform. These discussions will be very complicated and important, and we hope to be helpful to you identifying the implications with different options for future investment and growth in Europe. We are keen to collaborate with your office on this, just as we have on the DPR.”

Following the meeting in Davos, Facebook’s Senior Policy team, comprising 15 executives from Washington, California, Dublin, and across Europe, requested a personal meeting with the Taoiseach in Government Buildings, Dublin on February 6 2014.

Kenny did not meet the delegation but instead sent his special adviser, Paul O’Brien, the Secretary General to the Government, Martin Fraser, and two of the Taoiseach’s experienced assistant secretaries with responsibility for international economic matters, Lorcan Fullam and John Callinan.

But then Kenny was given the treatment that generally suborns impressionable technically-illiterate politicians: an invitation to Facebook’s headquarters in Menlo Park, California, in June 2014, where he was granted a 43-minute audience with Sandberg.

According to the Independent report, the mogul and her awestruck visitor discussed the need for one tax regulator in the EU, and also the issue of who would replace Billy Hawkes as the Irish Data Protection Commissioner (who was due to retire on August 31 that year). And a follow-up letter to the Taoiseach in June 2014 specifically mentions Billy Hawkes and the need for his replacement to be “a strong candidate”.

“While Mr Hawkes’s independence and integrity are undisputed”, says the Independent — with an attentive eye to legal niceties — “there is no doubt that Facebook would have been relieved in 2013, when Mr Hawkes refused to investigate claims that Facebook Ireland had transferred data to the States for examination by the NSA”.

Background: Hawkes had refused the investigation on the legal grounds that Facebook was entitled to send data from the EU to the US under EU Commission Safe Harbour provisions. Interestingly, though, when Sandberg was being granted personal access to the Taoiseach, a judicial review of Hawkes’s decision had been initiated in the Irish High Court. And of course, in the end, the European Court ruled that the ‘Safe Harbour’ agreement was invalid.

These are extraordinary revelations, though I suspect they will surprise nobody familiar with the servile cringe that Irish politicians habitually adopt when dealing with their corporate ‘guests’. Note particularly, the tone and content of the leaked emails. For example:

  • Referring to the tricky challenge (for Facebook) of European Data Protection Regulation, you and your staff internalised our concerns and were able to present them in a reasonable way, which has had a positive impact. …We hope we can rely on you for your continued leadership on this regulation since we still have more work to do here.

  • And, on tax reform, I was pleased to hear that you are so involved in the OECD working group process on tax reform.

Emphasis added. Pass the sickbag, Alice.