General
China’s tech industry relieved by Biden win – but not relaxed
Josh Horwitz and Yingzhi Yang, Reuters
China’s technology industry, one of President Donald Trump’s main targets in Washington’s tussles with Beijing, hopes Joe Biden can create a more constructive relationship – but few think the rivalry will deescalate, executives and analysts say. Trump’s four-year term has already taught the industry the importance of self-reliance, and China’s intentions to improve its domestic tech capabilities will not change, they said.
Election Day Gave Uber and Lyft a Whole New Road Map
Josh Eidelson, Bloomberg Businessweek
A year ago, California looked like an existential crisis for Uber and Lyft. Now, a $200 million political campaign has turned the state into a legal fortress for the same companies, one that could help them repel threats from Washington and elsewhere.
Biden wants to tackle legal protections for tech companies, though it’s unclear how he’d do it
Cristiano Lima, Politico
President-elect Joe Biden has made clear he has no plans to continue the Trump administration’s crusade against Silicon Valley over allegations of anti-conservative bias on social media — but his own game plan for online speech remains unclear. President Donald Trump signed an executive order in May asking federal agencies to narrow a 1996 law that shields internet companies including Facebook, Google and Twitter from lawsuits for hosting and policing user content.
Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates and other tech luminaries react to Biden’s victory
Annie Palmer, CNBC
Tech CEOs and Silicon Valley luminaries congratulated President-elect Joe Biden and Vice President-elect Kamala Harris after their victory in the U.S. presidential election Saturday. Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos celebrated Biden and Harris’ win in an Instagram post. Bezos said their victory signifies that “unity, empathy and decency are not characteristics of a bygone era.”
In Halting Ant’s I.P.O., China Sends a Warning to Business
Raymond Zhong, The New York Times
This was supposed to be the week that one of China’s biggest tech companies threw the most lucrative coming-out party in history, sending a swaggering message about the country’s economic might during the pandemic. Instead, China sent a different message: No private business gets to swagger unless the government is on board with it.
Intel’s Success Came With Making Its Own Chips. Until Now.
Asa Fitch, The Wall Street Journal
The Silicon Valley pioneer long held it had to build its flagship chips in its own factories; then it hit the wall and is considering outsourcing—a milestone in the story of America’s losing its manufacturing primacy
Intellectual Property and Antitrust
Google says it will not file motion to dismiss U.S. lawsuit
Diane Bartz, Reuters
Alphabet’s Google said on Friday it would not file a motion to dismiss a U.S. government lawsuit filed last month but would fight it in federal court. The U.S. Justice Department sued the $1 trillion (£760 billion) search and advertising giant in October, accusing it of illegally using its market muscle to hobble rivals in the biggest challenge to the power and influence of Big Tech in decades.
Telecom, Wireless and TV
Frustrated by internet service providers, cities and schools push for more data
Cyrus Farivar, NBC News
Months into the school year, the one thing many families have learned is how much they rely on a functioning internet connection to access remote classrooms. So education equality experts who are trying to chip away at the many challenges families are struggling with through the pandemic are starting by simply trying to identify which students aren’t connected to make sure those households have access to affordable packages.
Brazilian telecoms snub U.S. official over Huawei 5G pressure: source
Anthony Boadle, Reuters
Brazil’s top four telecom companies have decide not to meet with a visiting senior U.S. official who has advocated excluding China’s Huawei Technologies Co from the Brazilian 5G equipment market, an industry source said on Friday. The carriers declined a U.S. embassy invitation to meet on Monday in Sao Paulo with Keith Krach, U.S. under secretary of state for economic growth, energy and the environment, the person in contact with telecom sector executives said.
Dish won’t have major 5G market up and running until Q3 of 2021
Monica Alleven, FierceWireless
Dish Network is no longer expecting to have 5G running in a market by the end of this year. Instead, it expects to have its first major 5G market by the third quarter of 2021 as it waits to receive more radios from Fujitsu. Dish will have some preliminary small markets in the first quarter of 2021, but it will be the third quarter before it has a major market up and running, Chairman and co-founder Charlie Ergen said during the company’s third-quarter conference call on Friday.
Private 5G Networks Are Bringing Bandwidth Where Carriers Aren’t
Christopher Mims, The Wall Street Journal
In the hills of southwestern Wisconsin, atop grain elevators and silos, a small team of technicians is assembling a next-generation wireless 5G network piece by piece. They work for a rural broadband company, not a telecom giant, and their mission is bringing connectivity to homes that otherwise wouldn’t have it, rather than helping people max out the speeds on their new $1,000 phones.
Mobile Technology and Social Media
Trump to face stricter Twitter rules post-presidency
Tal Axelrod, The Hill
President Trump’s tweets will face harsher scrutiny from Twitter when he leaves office, losing protections the platform grants to world leaders. The tech behemoth treats violations of its policies from presidents and prime ministers differently from those of regular users, arguing the public should be able to see what their leaders are saying and that such posts are newsworthy in and of themselves.
Thousands of Facebook Groups buzzed with calls for violence ahead of U.S. election
Katie Paul, Reuters
Before Facebook Inc shut down a rapidly growing “Stop the Steal” Facebook Group on Thursday, the forum featured calls for members to ready their weapons should President Donald Trump lose his bid to remain in the White House. In disabling the group after coverage by Reuters and other news organizations, Facebook cited the forum’s efforts to delegitimize the election process and “worrying calls for violence from some members.”
YouTube is awash with election misinformation — and it isn’t taking it down
Rebecca Heilweil, Recode
In the hours and days after polls closed in the United States, misleading and outright false content about the presidential election was easy to find on YouTube. A slew of videos claimed to be proof of voter fraud, while the right-wing channel One America News Network (OANN) racked up hundreds of thousands of views on videos incorrectly declaring that Donald Trump had already won the election. YouTube was even running ads on some videos amplifying claims of voter fraud.
No social media is safe: How election misinformation spread on LinkedIn, Pinterest and Nextdoor
Cat Zakrzewski and Rachel Lerman, The Washington Post
Pinterest, LinkedIn and other smaller social media sites have again been forced into the war against misinformation this election cycle, showing the challenges of policing the spread of lies online. On image bookmarking-site Pinterest, researchers found a search for the phrase “stolen ballots” uncovered posts promoting baseless claims about the vote-counting process.
The Facebook ad boycott ended months ago. But some big companies continue the fight
Danielle Abril, Fortune
Several big companies continue to boycott advertising on Facebook, long after a high-profile corporate uprising against the service’s lax policing of hate formally ended over the summer. Verizon, Clorox, Coca-Cola, HP, and Lego are now in their fifth month of the ad boycott. Meanwhile, companies including Target, Nike, Netflix, Hershey, and Microsoft have vastly reduced their spending, according to digital marketing firm Pathmatics.
‘Nobody can block it’: how the Telegram app fuels global protest
Shaun Walker, The Guardian
One Sunday in August, two weeks after Belarus’s authoritarian leader Alexander Lukashenko declared an implausibly decisive victory in presidential elections, I joined a crowd of around 100,000 people as it moved through central Minsk. Protest in Belarus was no longer the domain of a few hundred hardy opposition figures, and the homemade placards many people carried illustrated how broad the coalition had become: “Let’s drink to love, from the bartenders of Belarus”; “Teachers against violence”; “Working class, go on strike!”
Cybersecurity and Privacy
Rights activists slam EU plan for access to encrypted chats
Frank Jordans, The Associated Press
Digital rights campaigners on Monday criticized a proposal by European Union governments that calls for communications companies to provide authorities with access to encrypted messages. The plan, first reported by Austrian public broadcaster FM4, reflects concern among European countries that police and intelligence services can’t easily monitor online chats that use end-to-end encryption, such as Signal or WhatsApp.
2020 was the first-ever presidential election where people cast votes via smartphone
Talib Visram, Fast Company
Security concerns abound about mobile voting company Voatz. But election officials who use them say they’re no riskier than the current methods we use for some special cases of voting.
Opinions, Editorials and Perspectives
We’ve Tracked Extremist Content on Facebook for Years: It Doesn’t Get Removed for Long
Gretchen Peters and Josh Lipowsky, Morning Consult
As Facebook bends to mounting pressure to stem the spread of domestic extremist content and conspiracy theories, declaring an expansion of hate-speech policies and shutting down recruiting efforts by militia groups, it’s pertinent to look at Facebook’s track record for responding to foreign extremism on its platforms. The Alliance to Counter Crime Online and the Counter Extremism Project have spent years tracking for how violent groups ranging from Mexican cartels to ISIS utilize Facebook.
Twitter and Facebook warning labels aren’t enough to save democracy
Geoffrey A. Fowler, The Washington Post
It was the equivalent of Big Tech slapping the “PARENTAL ADVISORY” labels from album covers on the president of the United States. President Trump tweeted that America’s election was being stolen, and Twitter put labels over his lies over a dozen times and counting. “This tweet is disputed and might be misleading,” it warned.
Research Reports
President-Elect Biden’s Agenda on Technology and Innovation Policy
Robert D. Atkinson et al., Information Technology and Innovation Foundation
The president-elect’s overall approach to technology and innovation policy appears to be formulated to engage the government as an active partner alongside industry in spurring innovation—but also as a tougher regulator of many tech industries and technologies.
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