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Technology
The third meeting of the International Grand Committee on Disinformation and ‘Fake News&, a multi-nation body comprised of global legislators with concerns about the societal impacts of social media giants, has been taking place in Dublin this week — once again without any senior Facebook management in attendance.
The committee was formed last year after Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg repeatedly refused to give evidence to a wide-ranging UK parliamentary enquiry into online disinformation and the use of social media tools for political campaigns. That snub encouraged joint working by international parliamentarians over a shared concern thatalso a cross-border regulatory and accountability challenge.
But while Zuckerberg still, seemingly, does not feel personally accountable to international parliaments — even as his latest stand-in at todaycommittee hearing, policy chief Monika Bickert, proudly trumpeted the fact that 87 per cent of Facebookusers are people outside the US — global legislators have been growth hacking a collective understanding of nation-state-scale platforms and the deleterious impacts their data-gobbling algorithmic content hierarchies and microtargeted ads are having on societies and democracies around the world.
Incisive questions from the committee today included sceptical scrutiny of Facebookclaims and aims for a self-styled ‘Content Oversight Board& it has said will launch next year — with one Irish legislator querying how the mechanism could possibly be independent of Facebook , as well as wondering how a retrospective appeals body could preventcontent-driven harms. (On that Facebook seemed to claim that most complaints it gets from users are about content takedowns.)
Another question was whether the companyplanned Libra digital currency might not at least partially be an attempt to resolve a reputational risk for Facebook, of accepting political ads in foreign currency, by creating a single global digital currency that scrubs away that layer of auditability. Bickert denied the suggestion, saying the Libra project is unrelated to the disinformation issue and &is about access to financial services&.
Twitter recently announced total ban on political issue ads also faced some critical questioning by the committee, with the company being asked whether it will be banning environmental groups from running ads about climate change yet continuing to take money from oil giants that wish to run promoted tweets on the topic. Karen White, director of public policy, said they were aware of the concern and are still working through the policy detail for a fuller release due later this month.
But it was Facebook that came in for the bulk of criticism during the session, with Bickert fielding the vast majority of legislators& questions — almost all of which were sceptically framed and some, including from the only US legislator in the room asking questions, outright hostile.
Googlerep, meanwhile, had a very quiet hour and a half, with barely any questions fired his way. While Twitter won itself plenty of praise from legislators and witnesses for taking a proactive stance and banning political microtargeting altogether.
The question legislators kept returning to during many of todaysessions, most of which didn&t involve the reps from the tech giants, is how can governments effectively regulate US-based Internet platforms whose profits are fuelled by the amplification of disinformation as a mechanism for driving engage with their service and ads?
Suggestions varied from breaking up tech giants to breaking down business models that were roundly accused of incentivizing the spread of outrageous nonsense for a pure-play profit motive, including by weaponizing peopledata to dart them with ‘relevant& propaganda.
The committee also heard specific calls for European regulators to hurry up and enforce existing data protection law — specifically the EUGeneral Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) — as a possible short-cut route to shrinking the harms legislators appeared to agree are linked to platforms& data-reliant tracking for individual microtargeting.
A number of witnesses warned that liberal democracies remain drastically unprepared for the ongoing onslaught of malicious, hypertargeted fakes; that adtech giants& business models are engineered for outrage and social division as an intentional choice and scheme to monopolize attention; and that even if we&ve now passed &peak vulnerability&, in terms of societal susceptibility to Internet-based disinformation campaigns (purely as a consequence of how many eyes have been opened to the risks since 2016), the activity itself hasn&t yet peaked and huge challenges for democratic nation states remain.
The latter point was made by disinformation researcher Ben Nimmo, director of investigations at Graphika.
Multiple witnesses called for Facebook to be prohibited from running political advertising as a matter of urgency, with plenty of barbed questions attacking its recent policy decision not to fact-check political ads.
Others went further — calling for more fundamental interventions to force reform of its business model and/or divest it of other social platforms it also owns. Given the companysystematic failure to demonstrate it can be trusted with peopledata thatenough reason to break it back up into separate social products, runs the argument.
Former Blackberry co-CEO, Jim Ballsillie, espoused a view that tech giants& business models are engineered to profit from manipulation, meaning they inherently pose a threat to liberal democracies. While investor and former Facebook mentor, Roger McNamee, who has written a critical book about the companybusiness model, called for personal data to be treated as a human right — so it cannot be stockpiled and turned into an asset to be exploited by behavior-manipulating adtech giants.
Also giving evidence today, journalist Carole Cadwalladr, who has been instrumental in investigating the Cambridge Analytica Facebook data misuse scandal, suggested no country should be trusting its election to Facebook. She also decried the fact that the UK is now headed to the polls, for a December general election, with no reforms to its electoral law and with key individuals involved in breaches of electoral law during the 2016 Brexit referendum now in positions of greater power to manipulate democratic outcomes. She too added her voice to calls for Facebook to be prohibited from running political ads.
In another compelling testimony, Marc Rotenberg, president and executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center (Epic) in Washington DC, recounted the long and forlornhistory of attempts by US privacy advocates to win changes to Facebookpolicies to respect user agency and privacy — initially from the company itself, before petitioning regulators to try to get them to enforce promises Facebook had renaged on, yet still getting exactly nowhere.
No more ‘speeding tickets&
&We have spent the last many years trying to get the FTC to act against Facebook and over this period of time the complaints from many other consumer organizations and users have increased,& he told the committee. &Complaints about the use of personal data, complaints about the tracking of people who are not Facebook users. Complaints about the tracking of Facebook users who are no longer on the platform. In fact in a freedom of information request brought by Epic we uncovered 29,000 complaints now pending against the company.&
He described the FTC judgement against Facebook, which resulted in a $5BN penalty for the company in June, as both a &historic fine& but also essentially just a &speeding ticket& — because the regulator did not enforce any changes to its business model. So yet another regulatory lapse.
&The FTC left in place Facebookbusiness practices and left at risk the users of the service,& he warned, adding: &My message to you today is simple: You must act. You cannot wait. You cannot wait ten years or even a year to take action against this company.&
He too urged legislators to ban the company from engaging in political advertising — until &adequate legal safeguards are established&. &The terms of the GDPR must be enforced against Facebook and they should be enforced now,& Rotenberg added, calling also for Facebook to be required to divest of WhatsApp — ¬ because of a great scheme to break up big tech but because the company violated its commitments to protect the data of WhatsApp users as a condition of the acquisition&.
In another particularly awkward moment for the social media giant, Keit Pentus-Rosimannus, a legislator from Estonia, asked Bickert directly why Facebook doesn&t stop taking money for political ads.
The legislator pointed out that it has already claimed revenue related to such ads is incremental for its business, making the further point that political speech can simply be freely posted to Facebook (as organic content); ergo, Facebook doesn&t need to take money from politicians to run ads that lie — since they can just post their lies freely to Facebook.
Bickert had no good answer to this. &We think that there should be ways that politicians can interact with their public and part of that means sharing their views through ads,& was her best shot at a response.
&I will say this is an area we&re here today to discuss collaboration, with a thought towards what we should be doing together,& she added. &Election integrity is an area where we have proactively said we want regulation. We think itappropriate. Defining political ads and who should run them and who should be able to and when and where. Those are things that we would like to work on regulation with governments.&
&Yet Twitter has done it without new regulation. Why can&t you do it?& pressed Pentus-Rosimannus.
&We think that it is not appropriate for Facebook to be deciding for the world what is true or false and we think that politicians should have an ability to interact with their audiences. So long as they&re following our ads policies,& Bickert responded. &But again we&re very open to how together we could come up with regulation that could define and tackle these issues.&
tl;dr Facebook could be seen once again deploying a policy minion to push for a ‘business as usual& strategy that functions by seeking to fog the issues and re-frame the notion of regulation as a set of self-serving (and very low friction) ‘guide-rails&, rather than as major business model surgery.
Bickert was doing this even as the committee was hearing from multiple voices making the equal and opposite point with acute force.
Another of those critical voices was congressman David Cicilline — a US legislator making his first appearance at the Grand Committee. He closely questioned Bickert on how a Facebook user seeing a political ad that contains false information would know they are being targeted by false information, rejecting repeated attempts to misleading reframe his question as just about general targeting data.
&Again, with respect to the veracity, they wouldn&t know they&re being targeted with false information; they would know why they&re being targeted as to the demographics… but not as to the veracity or the falseness of the statement,& he pointed out.
Bickert responded by claiming that political speech is &so heavily scrutinized there is a high likelihood that somebody would know if information is false& — which earned her a withering rebuke.
&Mark Zuckerbergtheory that sunlight is the best disinfectant only works if an advertisment is actually exposed to sunlight. But as hundreds of Facebook employees made clear in an open letter last week Facebookadvanced targeting and behavioral tracking tools — and I quote — &hard for people in the electorate to participate in the public scrutiny that we&re saying comes along with political speech& — end quote — as they know — and I quote — &these ads are often so microtargeted that the conversations on Facebookplatforms are much more siloed than on the other platforms,& said Cicilline.
&So, Ms Bickert, it seems clear that microtargeting prevents the very public scrutiny that would serve as an effective check on false advertisements. And doesn&t the entire justification for this policy completely fall apart given that Facebook allows politicians both to run fake ads and to distribute those fake ads only to the people most vulnerable to believe in them? So this is a good theory about sunlight but in fact in practice you policies permit someone to make false representations and to microtarget who gets them — and so this big public scrutiny that serves as a justification just doesn&t exist.&
Facebookhead of global policy management responded by claiming there&great transparency& around political ads on its platform — as a result of what she dubbed its &unprecedented& political ad library.
&You can look up any ad in this library and see what is the breakdown on the audience who has seen this ad,& she said, further claiming that &many [political ads] are not microtargeted at all&.
&Isn&t the problem here that Facebook has too much power — and shouldn&t we be thinking about breaking up that power rather than allowing Facebookdecisions to continue to have such enormous consequences for our democracy?& rejoined Cicilline, not waiting for an answer and instead laying down a critical statement. &The cruel irony is that your company is invoking the protections of free speech as a cloak to defend your conduct which is in fact undermining and threatening the very institutions of democracy itcloaking itself in.&
The session was long on questions for Facebook and short on answers with anything other than the most self-serving substance from Facebook.
Major GDPR enforcements coming in 2020
During a later session without any of the tech giants present which was intended for legislators to query the state of play of regulation around online platforms, Irelanddata protection commissioner, Helen Dixon, signalled that no major enforcements will be coming against Facebook et al this year — saying instead that decisions on a number of cross-border cases will be coming in 2020.
Ireland has a plate stacked high with complaints against tech giants since the GDPR came into force in May 2018. Among the 21 &large scale& investigations into big tech companies that remain ongoing are probes around transparency and the lawfulness of data processing by social media platform giants.
The adtech industryuse of personal data in the real-time bidding programmatic process is also under the regulatory microscope.
Dixon and the Irish Data Protection Commission (DPC) take center stage as a regulator for US tech giants given how many of these companies have chosen to site their international headquarters in Ireland — encouraged by business friendly corporate tax rates. But the DPC has a pivotal role on account of a one-stop-shop mechanism within GDPR that allows for a data protection agency with primary jurisdiction over a data controller to take a lead on cross-border data processing cases, with other EU member states& data watchdogs feeding but not leading such a complaint.
Some of the Irish DPCprobes have already lasted as long as the 18 months since GDPR came into force across the bloc. Dixon argued today that this is still a reasonable timeframe for enforcing an updated data protection regime, despite signalling further delay before any enforcements in these major cases. &Ita mistake to say therebeen no enforcement… but there hasn&t been an outcome yet to the large scale investigations we have open, underway into the big tech platforms around lawfulness, transparency, privacy by design and default and so on. Eighteen months is not a long time. Not all of the investigations have been open for 18 months,& she said.
&We must follow due process or we won&t secure the outcome in the end. These companies they&ve market power but they also have the resources to litigate forever. And so we have to ensure we follow due process, we allow them a right to be heard, we conclude the legal analysis carefully by applying what our principles in the GDPR to the scenarios at issue and then we can hope to deliver the outcomes that the GDPR promises.
&So that work is underway. We couldn&t be working more diligently at it. And we will have the first sets of decisions that will start rolling out in the very near term.&
Asked by the committee about the level of cooperation the DPC is getting from the tech giants under investigation she said they are &engaging and cooperating& — but also that they&re &challenging at every turn&.
She also expressed a view that itnot yet clear whether GDPR enforcement will be able to have a near-term impact on reining in any behaviors found to be infringing the law, given further potential legal push back from platforms after decisions are issued.
&The regulated entities are obliged under the GDPR to cooperate with investigations conducted by the data protection authority, and to date of the 21 large-scale investigations were have opened into big tech organizations they are engaging and cooperating. With equal measure they&re challenging at every turn as well and seeking constant clarifications around due process but they are cooperating and engaging,& she told the committee.
&What remains to be seen is how the investigations we currently have open will conclude. And whether there will ultimately be compliance with the outcomes of those investigations or whether they will be subject to lengthy challenge and so on. So I think the big question of whether we&re going to be able to near-term drive the kind of outcomes we want is still an open question. And it awaiting us as a data protection authority to put down the first final decisions in a number of cases.&
She also expressed doubt about whether the GDPR data protection framework will, ultimately, sum to a tool that can regulate underlying business models that are based on collecting data for the purpose of behavioral advertising.
&The GDPR isn&t set up to tackle business models, per se,& she said. &Itset up to apply principles to data processing operations. And so therea complexity when we come to look at something like adtech or online behavioral advertising in that we have to target multiple actors.
&For that reason we&re looking at publishers at the front end, that start the data collection from users — itwhen we first click on a website that the tracking technologies, the pixels, the cookies, the social plug-ins — start the data collection that ultimately ends up categorizing us for the purposes of sponsored stories or ad serving. So we&re looking at that ad exchanges, we&re looking at the real-time bidding system. We&re looking at the front end publishers. And we&re looking at the ad brokers who play an important part in all of this in combining online and offline sources of data. So we&ll apply the principles against those data processing operations, we&ll apply them rigorously. We&ll conclude and then we&ll have to see does that add up to a changing of the underlying business model? And I think the jury is out on that until we conclude.&
EpicRotenberg argued to the contrary on this when asked by the committee for the most appropriate model to use for regulating data-driven platforms — saying that &all roads lead to the GDPR&.
&Ita set of rights and responsibilities associated with the collection and use of personal data and when companies choose to collect personal data they should be held to account,& he said, suggesting an interpretation of the law that does not require other European data protection agencies to wait for Irelanddecision on key cross-border cases.
&The Schrems decision of 2015 makes clear that while co-ordinated enforcement anticipated under the GDPR is important, individual DPAs have their own authority to enforce the provisions of the charter — which means that individual DPAs do not need to wait for a coordinated response to bring an enforcement action.&
A case remains pending before Europetop courtthat looks set to lay down a firm rule on exactly that point.
&As a matter of law the GDPR contains the authority within its text to enforce the other laws of the European Union — this is largely about the misuse and the collection and use of personal data for microtargeting,& Rotenberg also argued. &That problem can be addressed through the GDPR but itgoing to take an urgent response. Not a long term game plan.&
When GDPR enforcement decisions do come Dixon suggested they could have a wider impact than only applying to the direct subject, saying therean appetite from data processors generally for more guidance on compliance with the law — meaning that both the clarity and deterrence factor derived from large scale platform enforcement decisions could help steer the industry down a reforming path.
Though, again, what exactly those platform enforcements may be remains pending until 2020.
&Probably the first large-scale investigation we&re going to conclude under GDPR is one into the principle of transparency and involving one of the larger platforms,& Dixon also told the committee, responding to a legislatorquestion asking if she believes consumers are clear about exactly what they&re giving up when they agree to their information being processed to access a digital service.
&We will shortly be making a decision spelling out in detail how compliance with the transparency obligations under Articles 12 to 14 of the GDPR should look in that context. But it is very clear that users are typically unaware. For example some of the large platforms do have capabilities for users to completely opt out of personalized ad serving but most users aren&t aware of it. There are also patterns in operation that nudge users in certain directions. So one of the things that [we&re doing] — aside from the hard enforcement cases that we&re going to take — we&ve also published guidance recently for example on that issue of how users are being nudged to make choices that are perhaps more privacy invasive than they might otherwise if they had an awareness.
&So I think therea role for us as a regulatory authority, as well as regulating the platforms to also drive awareness amongst users. But itan uphill battle, given the scale of what users are facing.&
Asked by the committee about the effectiveness of financial penalties as a tool for platform regulation, Dixon pointed to research that suggests fines alone make no difference — but she highlighted the fact that GDPR affords Europeregulators with a far more potent power in their toolbox: The power to order changes to data processing or even ban it altogether.
&Itour view that we will be obliged to impose fines where we find infringements and so thatwhat will happen but we expect that itthe corrective powers that we apply — the bans on processing, the requirements to bring processing operations into compliance thatgoing to have the more significant effects,& she said, suggesting that under her watch the DPC will not shy away from using corrective powers if or when an infringement demands it.
The case for special measures
Also speaking today in a different public forum, Europecompetition chief, Margrethe Vestager, made a similar point to Dixonabout the uphill challenge for EU citizens to enforce their rights.
&We have you could call it digital citizens& rights — the GDPR — but that doesn&t solve the question of how much data can be collected about you,& she said during an on stage interview at the Web Summit conference in Lisbon, where she was asked whether platforms should have a fiduciary duty towards users to ensure they are accountable for what they&re distributing. The antitrust commissioner is set for an expanded digital strategy role in the incoming European Commission.
&We also need better protection and better tools to protect ourselves from leaving a trace everywhere we go,& she suggested. &Maybe we would like to be more able to choose what kind of trace we would leave behind. And that side of the equation will have to be part of the discussion as well. How can we be better protected from leaving that trace of data that allows companies to know so much more about any one of us than we might even realize ourselves?&
&I myself am very happy that I have digital rights. My problem is that I find it very difficult to enforce them,& Vestager added. &The only real result of me reading terms and conditions is that I get myself distracted from wanting to read the article that wanted me to tap T-Cs. So we need that to be understandable so that we know what we&re dealing with. And we need software and services that will enable us not to leave the same kind of trace as we would otherwise do… I really hope that the market will also help us here. Because itnot just for politicians to deal with this — it is also in an interaction with the market that we can find solutions. Because one of the main challenges in dealing with AI is of course that there is a risk that we will regulate for yesterday. And then itworth nothing.&
Asked at what point she would herself advocate for big tech companies to be broken up, Vestager said there would need to be a competition case that involves damage thatextreme enough to justify it. &We don&t have that kind of case right now,& she argued. &I will never exclude that that could happen but so far we don&t have a problem that big that breaking up a company would be the solution.&
She also warned against the risk of potentially creating more problems by framing the problem of platform giants as a size issue — and therefore the solution as breaking the giants up.
&The people advocating it don&t have a model as to have to do this. And if you know this story about an antique creature when you chopped out one head two or seven came up — so there is a risk you do not solve the problem you just have many more problems,& she said. &And you don&t have a way of at least trying to control it. So I am much more in the line of thinking that you should say that when you become that big you get a special responsibility — because you are de facto the rule setter in the market that you own. And we could be much more precise about what that then entails. Because otherwise therea risk that the many, many interesting companies they have no chance of competing.&
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Veritas Genetics, a DNA testing startup, has said a data breach resulted in unauthorized access of some customer information.
The Danvers, Mass.-based company said its customer-facing portal had &recently& been breached but did not say when. Although the portal did not contain test results or medical information, the company declined to say what information had been stolen — only that a handful of customers were affected.
The company has not issued a public statement, nor has it acknowledge the breach on its website.
Spokesperson Rodrigo Martinez denied there was a data &theft& but provided no evidence for the claim. Its statement did not elaborate on the breach.
Bloomberg first reported the news.
Veritas, whose competitors include 23andMe, Ancestry and MyHeritage, says it can analyze and understand a human genome using an individualDNA, allowing customers to understand what health risks they may face in later life or pass on to their children.
Although the stolen data did not include personal health information, itlikely to further fuel concerns that health startups, particularly companies dealing with sensitive DNA and genome information, can&t protect their users& data.
Privacy remains an emerging concern in genetics testing after law enforcement have served legal demands against DNA collection and genetics testing companies to help identify suspects in criminal cases. Just this week, it was reported that a &game changer& warrant obtained in Florida allowed one police department to search the full database of GEDmatch, a DNA testing company, which last year was used by police to help catch the notorious Golden State Killer.
Some 26 million consumers have used an at-home genetics testing kit.
Updated with comment from Veritas.
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It would be an understatement to say the last few months have been rocky for Libra, Facebookproposed stablecoin.
Since its announcement in June, eBay, Mastercard and other members of the cryptocurrencyelite consortium have jumped ship(many due to direct pressure from legislators), a congressional hearing on Libra turned into an evisceration of Facebookdata and privacy practices,Federal Reserve Governor Lael Brainard assailed the projectlack of controls and the Chinese government announced its own competitive digital currency.
Critics, though well-intentioned, are missing the forest for the trees.
In spite of Librawell-cataloged risks and unanswered questions, there is a massive opportunity in plain sight for the global financial system; it would be a tragedy to let that opportunity be destroyed on the basis of Facebookreputation or Librahaphazard go-to-market.
Governments should heed the lesson of the U.S.-Soviet space race of the 1970s and use the idea behind Libra, if not the project itself, in &coopetition& to build a better, more inclusive global financial architecture.
A few key points to begin: first, Facebook is probably not the right actor to spearhead this initiative.
Mark Zuckerberg promises that Facebook will only be one board member in a governing consortium and that the project will comply with U.S. regulatory demands and privacy standards. But just as the company reneged on its promise not to integrate the encrypted WhatsApp into Facebookplatform, iteasy to picture Facebook pushing through standards that benefit itself at consumer expense. While Facebook would be a great platform to distribute Libra, its track record should make constituents uneasy about giving it any control.
Second, global payment systems are outdated and slow, and many businesses have been set up to extract rents from that fact. This burden disproportionately falls on the shoulders of poor consumers. People living paycheck-to-paycheck are forced into high-interest loans to smooth their cash flow due to slow settlement speeds. Immigrants sending money home pay up to 17 percent to move money across borders, costs that take a sizable bite out of some countries& GDPs. In a ubiquitous currency regime, however, foreign exchange fees would vanish entirely .
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Does it feel like your iPhone is being a little quick to shut down apps running in the background lately? Go update it.
Apple has just released iOS 13.2.2, which patches up this issue (which caused background apps to &quit unexpectedly&), along with a handful of other annoyances. While it doesn&t offer up anything in the way of big new features, itprobably worth the update just to make multitasking work the way itsupposed to.
Also getting fixed:
- A bug that caused iPhones to &temporarily lose cellular service after a call&
- A bug that causes certain emails (those that were S/MIME encrypted) to be unreadable
- Issues with using Kerberos single sign-on in Safari
- Issues with trying to charge while using a Lightning port-enabled Yubikey for two factor authentication
This patch comes just days after Apple shipped iOS 13.2, which, in addition to bringing a bunch of new emoji, flipped the switches that enabled Deep Fusion image processing on iPhone 11 and iPhone 11 Pro. If you didn&t already upgrade to iOS 13.2, nowthe time … with the disclaimer that iOS 13.3 is already in developer beta, so it&ll probably land before too long.
As usual, the 13.2.2 update can be found under Settings > General > Software update.
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1. Saudi Arabia reportedly recruited Twitter employees to steal personal data of activists
Saudi Arabian officials allegedly paid at least two Twitter employees to access personal information on users the government there was interested in, according to recently unsealed court documents. Those users were warned of the attempt in 2015, but the full picture is only now emerging.
According to the federal complaint, Twitter employees Ahmad Abouammo and Ali Alzabarah were both approached by the Saudi government, which promised &a designer watch and tens of thousands of dollars& if they could retrieve personal information on certain users. (Both Abouammo and Alzabarah are charged with acting as unregistered Saudi agents — spies.)
2. MicrosoftHoloLens 2 starts shipping
Earlier this year, at Mobile World Congress, Microsoft announced the second generation of its HoloLens augmented reality visor. Today, the $3,500 HoloLens 2 is going on sale in select countries.
3. California accuses Facebook of ignoring subpoenas in stateCambridge Analytica investigation
Californiaattorney general Xavier Becerra has accused Facebook of &continuing to drag its feet& by failing to provide documents to the stateinvestigation into Facebook and Cambridge Analytica.
4. Wrenchon-demand vehicle repair and maintenance service picks up $20 million
Equipped with diagnostic software and service trucks, Wrench meets fleet operators and consumers at their vehicles to provide servicing and repairs.
5. Thereno ‘perfect time& for giving employees feedback
For many managers, giving feedback often falls to the bottom of their priority list. According to Gallup, less than half of employees surveyed said they received feedback even a few times a year — yet 69% say they would work harder if they felt their efforts were better recognized. (Extra Crunch membership required.)
6. Google Pay comes to Curve, the banking platform that consolidates all your cards into one
Hot on the heels of adding support for Samsung Pay, Curve — the London-based &over-the-top& banking platform that lets you consolidate all of your bank cards into a single card — has added support for Google Pay.
7. Naspers CEO Bob van Dijk to talk about late-stage bets at Disrupt Berlin
South African internet company Naspers isn&t a particularly well-known name in the startup community. However, the company made an early investment in Tencent, and it still retains a 31% stake thatvalued at around $100 billion.
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The planned $26 billion merger between T-Mobile and Sprint has been approved by the Justice Department and the FCC, but itnot a sure thing yet. To sweeten the deal, T-Mobile is dangling three big free and cheap data initiatives that will only go through if the merger does. A little sugar helps the medicine go down.
Contingent on creating the &New T-Mobile,& there are three big moves planned, all of which, to be fair, sound great:
- 10 years of free 5G for all police, fire, emergency medical services and other first responders countrywide
- Free wireless service and reduced cost devices to 10 million disconnected households in the U.S. and Puerto Rico
- New $15/month prepaid plan with unlimited talk and text and 2GB of data
Obviously these are all aimed at making it seem like T-Mobile is concerned with the public good. And no one is disputing that these programs would help a lot of people out. It just feels like such a transparent play to balance out the anti-competitive risks of the merger.
FCC Commissioner Brendan Stark speculated in his dissent from yesterdayapproval decision that the merger would lead to three 900-pound gorillas that would ÷ up the market, increase prices, and compete only for the most lucrative customers.&
FCC Chairman Ajit Pai, on the other hand, asserts that the merger &will provide New T-Mobile with the scale and spectrum resources necessary to deploy a robust 5G network across the United States,& and make it competitive with Verizon and AT-T. (Disclosure: TechCrunch is owned by Verizon Media, but this does not affect our coverage.)
Although the regulatory hurdles are out of the way, the merger still faces a lawsuit from a collection of states that oppose the deal. Thatdue to go to court soon, but may be either dismissed or delayed due to the fact that the complaints were filed before the Justice and FCC approvals, and the stipulations with which that came.
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