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Apple and Facebook spin antitrust claims: ‘We’re misunderstood’

September 25, 2020 Big Data

In late July, a Congressional subcommittee successfully compelled four major tech company CEOs to formally answer questions over allegedly monopolistic business practices — a public spectacle marred only by COVID-19-related isolation of the attendees. Amazon, Facebook, and Google faced some of the heaviest questioning, but Apple certainly didn’t walk away untouched, as it was peppered with evidence that its App Store was abusing its increasingly dominant position within the software industry.

The “Online Platforms and Market Power” hearing matters because it paved the way for formal antitrust actions against four of the world’s largest companies, technology or otherwise. Individually and collectively, they reach billions of people, with an outsized impact on the hardware, software, and services enterprises and end users rely upon every day. While all four of the tech giants portray themselves as ambitious good actors, there are certainly negative consequences to their actions.

Today, a group of developers announced the formation of a collective Coalition for App Fairness, backed initially by heavy hitters such as Basecamp, Epic Games, Match Group, Spotify, and Tile, as well as the European Publishers Council, News Media Europe, and several other founding members. Having already registered individual complaints with U.S. and European regulators, the group is now calling “for Apple to be held accountable” for price gouging and other anti-competitive policies after “nearly a decade with no oversight, regulation, or fair competition.”

What’s Apple’s latest response to these claims? New marketing. A new App Store promotional page implies that the public just doesn’t understand how benevolent Apple really is, and if they realized how much the company protects users against unsafe and fake content, a 30% cut of developers’ sales mightn’t seem so offensive.

If this sounds familiar, that’s because Facebook’s floating the “we’re misunderstood” defense, too. Empowering profoundly disruptive disinformation and misinformation campaigns? Maybe! But you have no idea how much worse it could have been. It’s a deft parry: Don’t worry about what we’re doing wrong; just focus on what we’re doing right.

So today, Apple wants you to know that the App Store’s 1.8 million apps could have been more bloated — over 2 million apps were removed due to lack of support for Apple’s latest OSes — and even dangerous. Hundreds of actual human beings screen and promote the apps, Apple says, rejecting over 1 million submissions for “objectionable, harmful, unsafe, or illegal content,” and in 2020 alone, deleting “over 60 million user reviews that were considered spam.” Using an automated system, Apple also screened 100% of apps for known malware, preventing them from spreading viruses to users’ devices.

While these data points are sort of interesting, they don’t do much to address the concerns that have rankled developers and regulators. Picture a shopkeeper responding to allegations of bullying suppliers by pointing out how nice his store is. “My shop doesn’t sell dirty stuff,” he might say, “and all of my employees — from salespeople to shelf-stockers — work hard to keep it clean. We even throw out things we can’t sell any more. If you don’t like my shop or my rules, shop somewhere else.”

That’s all well and good, but the regulatory angst isn’t really about the App Store’s pleasant shopping experience. It’s about how Apple deals with developers, and how they in turn feel pressured to substantially raise their prices, ultimately to the detriment of consumers.

No matter how nice Apple’s shop may look and feel, the simple fact is that most of its customers do not have the option to shop elsewhere for compatible apps. Apple has blocked rival app stores on all of its devices except Macs. And in some cases, it has forced multi-platform services to raise the amounts they charge some or all of their customers just to cover Apple’s 30% cut. The only question has been whether that conspicuously appears as a 30% higher charge just for Apple users or gets snuck in as a 15% higher charge spread across all of the service’s customers, regardless of platform.

Apple also suggests that it earns that full 30% by providing developers with all sorts of tools to fill the App Store’s virtual shelves. It doesn’t mention that it also charges developers an annual fee — one that’s arguably artificially small — to access those tools, or that it might need to be sued to prevent it from abruptly yanking one or all of an uncooperative developer’s accounts from the store if it arguably misuses those tools, even imperiling that developer’s global business outside the App Store.

The stakes are arguably even higher in Facebook’s case. Most people know that Facebook’s social network now reaches nearly 3 billion users around the world. But users are only beginning to discover the extent to which Facebook and third parties have abused their personal data — even recently, despite prior mea culpas. A related concern is that seemingly any company or political organization can use Facebook’s advertising and paid promotional platforms to spread information or misinformation to as many people as they can afford to target, a problem with massive public policy and health consequences that Facebook has only halfheartedly addressed.

Following a $ 5 billion settlement with the Federal Trade Commission over deceptions regarding consumer data gathered from PCs and mobile devices, nine state and D.C. attorneys general are currently investigating “whether Facebook’s actions may have endangered consumer data, reduced the quality of consumers’ choices, or increased the price of advertising.” Undeterred, Facebook is looking forward to mixed reality as the computing platform of the future, and to that end is fully subsuming its once separately managed Oculus mixed reality business. A recent email disclosed that Facebook will officially take legal responsibility for all of Oculus’s user data and platforms on October 11.

Facebook and Apple don’t get along; their CEOs have publicly traded barbs over monetizing users and the respective merits of their platforms. But at this point, neither of the CEOs nor their companies deserves the benefit of being called misunderstood. Facebook has an incredible social platform and excellent VR hardware offset by massive, ever-growing privacy and misinformation problems. Apple creates beautiful products, but nickles and dimes the developers and consumers who support it.

Each of these companies is too big to fail. But they should also be too big to keep playing such petty, anti-consumer games. Far from being misunderstood, Apple and Facebook have given the public enough time to realize who they are and what they’re capable of, positive and negative. Excuses and marketing aren’t going to change that; it’s time for these tech giants to take a long overdue look inward and adopt more sustainable business practices. If they don’t start acting reasonably on their own, regulators are clearly ready to act on users’ behalf sooner rather than later.

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Big Data – VentureBeat

Aclima: Bay Area skies were the worst on record during wildfires

September 22, 2020 Big Data

The San Francisco Bay Area’s skies were the worst on record for decades during the recent wildfires that produced a blanket of smoke and turned the skies orange, according to pollution measurement firm Aclima.

Aclima has placed sensors on a fleet of electric cars to collect daily pollution levels on a block-by-block basis in the Bay Area. For the past month, six of the largest 20 fires in California history poured smoke into the atmosphere, and new fires in Oregon and Washington also contributed to pollution levels that were the worst on record. This analysis is based on regulatory data showing a record number of consecutive Spare the Air days which go back to 2001.

Ash coated cars in Silicon Valley, and entire towns in the fire zone had to be evacuated. More than 3.5 million acres have burned from 7,900 wildfires. More than 5,800 buildings have burned, and 26 people have died.

Aclima said the fine particulate matter (PM2.5) levels on the ground had dropped some from late August to September 9. But PM2.5 concentrations quickly increased the second week of September as the blanket of smoke above mixed into the air we breathe on the ground.

Aclima: Bay Area skies were the worst on record during wildfires

Above: Aclima’s daily average pollution by county in the Bay Area.

Image Credit: Aclima

The company’s mobile sensing network measures and analyzes air pollution and greenhouse gases block-by-block (hyperlocal), weekdays and weekends, day and night, covering more than 5,000 square miles throughout the Bay Area. The analysis you see in the video draws from an aggregation of billions of preliminary data points Aclima generated. The PM2.5 concentrations over time were quite variable from August 16 onward.

The skies above San Francisco turned orange on September 9 (delineated by the orange bar in the graphs). Between counties, there tended to be more variation in maximum daily levels than in daily averages. Often, the readings of real-time sensors operated by the Bay Area Air Quality Management District, Air Now, and Purple Air didn’t match what people saw in the skies. On the day that the sky was orange, for example, the air was relatively clean.

That’s because, in the Bay Area, an inversion layer of cool marine air blew in from the ocean and was trapped beneath a layer of warmer air. The marine layer was stable, meaning there is no exchange of air between this lower level and the air above it. That trapped the bad air high in the sky, according to Aclima chief scientist Melissa Lunden, in an interview with VentureBeat.

Above: Aclima shows county-by-county spikes in Bay Area pollution.

Image Credit: Aclima

The sky was orange that day because the smoke particles scatter sunlight differently depending on the wavelength of the light. Normally, the gas molecules in the air scatter the blue light in all directions, and this scattered blue light is what we see. The smoke particles completely filter out the blue light while the longer-wavelength orange and red light gets through to our eyes.

While the orange glow was gone quickly, the smoke remained. Similar daily averages and maximums were found across all Bay Area counties, suggesting that the smoke was evenly dispersed across the entire Bay Area during this time period. The downward trend from September 14 to 15 continues through today.

In most California counties, both daily averages and maximums stayed relatively low compared to previous weeks until September 6. After that most levels rose, coinciding with several rapidly spreading fires including the Creek Fire and the Bear Fire, as well as fires outside of California.

Average daily ozone levels actually decreased as the smoke blanketed much of California. As PM2.5 levels rose, ozone levels began to drop on September 9 throughout the state. Ozone is typically elevated in summer due to photochemical reactions in the atmosphere triggered by sunlight and heat that generate ozone from other gases. In this case, the blocking of the sun and the subsequent cooling of the ground and air beneath the massive blanket of smoke likely contributed to declining ozone levels over the past week in many parts of the state.

Despite these decreases in ozone concentrations, sustained unhealthy levels of PM2.5 have prompted alerts from air quality agencies to stay indoors and avoid outside activities. The Bay Area experienced its longest sustained period of unhealthy air on record, emerging on Thursday from a 30-day streak of consecutive Spare the Air days.

The lightning storms, fast-moving wildfires, orange skies, falling ash, unhealthy air, and even declining ozone levels all serve as a stark reminder of the compounding impacts and unintended consequences of environmental destabilization, Aclima said.

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Big Data – VentureBeat

YEP! HER ACTIONS WERE HEROIC

September 16, 2020 Humor

Sheriff’s deputy with one year service helps save her partner’s life.

Of course, the shooter was a nigger.

The female Los Angeles County Sheriff’s deputy who was ambushed and shot in the face on Saturday has emerged as a hero for helping her partner who was also seriously wounded during the attack, a source familiar with the incident told Breitbart News.

The 31-year-old mother was one of two officers who were both shot in the face after an assailant approached their parked cruiser in Compton and opened fire on them. Both deputies remain in critical condition and are expected to survive the horrific attack.

Breitbart News learned the identities of both officers but refrained from publishing their names. On Tuesday, Britain’s Daily Mail published the name of Claudia Apolinar, reporting she is a former librarian who had graduated the L.A. Police Academy only one year ago.

Apolinar is the mother of a six-year-old child. She sustained bullet wounds to the jaw and arms, while the other officer — a 24-year-old male, also Latino — was hit in the forehead, an arm, and a hand.

On Saturday evening, the assailant approached the deputies’ cruiser, which was stopped outside the MLK, Jr. Transit Center in Compton. The unknown gunman fired multiple rounds into the vehicle before fleeing the scene on foot.

Breitbart News learned that Apolinar stumbled out of the vehicle after being shot and then helped her partner by applying a tourniquet to his wounds. She also put out a Help Call before administering the first aid.

Video has emerged that appears to show Apolinar moving her wounded partner to safety following the attack. The footage was posted to the official Twitter account of the LAPD Mission Station.

“She called for help, was able to rendered [sic] aid to her partner. She remained calm & stayed vigilant! Most of all SHE NEVER GAVE UP! She & her partner are heroes,” the LAPD Mission Station tweeted.

Multiple photos of the horrific incident have also emerged showing the wounded police deputies.

The Daily Mail reported that Apolinar was a rookie officer who worked as an aide in the L.A. County library system from 2011 and signed up to the Sheriff’s Department in 2017.

Both cops were taken to St. Francis Medical Center in Lynwood following the incident. Late Saturday, Black Lives Matter protesters congregated outside the hospital, yelling insults at police officers and wishing death on the two wounded deputies.

A video obtained by Breitbart News shows BLM protestors callings cops “pigs” and “executioners” while shouting, “I hope they fucking die!”

There are currently no suspects in the case, though an arrest could come as early as this week, a source familiar with the investigation told Breitbart News. The Sheriff’s Department has put out a $ 100,000 reward for information that leads to an arrest and conviction in the case.

Officials are looking for a black male around the age of 28 to 30 years old.

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Judge Allows Mo’Nique’s Suit Alleging Netflix’s Comedy Special Offers Were Discriminatory

July 20, 2020 Humor

Is it unlawful for a producer to throw out an opening low-ball offer and then not budge when the talent demands more? It might be, according to a novel decision on Thursday from a California federal judge.

The case concerns Mo’Nique, who felt insulted by Netflix’s offer for a comedy special. Her reps pleaded with Netflix to reconsider a “racially and gender biased offer” and asked, “What makes Mo’Nique, who has been labeled a living legend based on her awards from around the world worth $ 12,500,000 less than Amy Schumer to [Netflix]?”

That didn’t persuade Netflix, which soon felt the wrath of a lawsuit.

Now, rejecting a motion to dismiss and Netflix’s arguments that retaliation could be premised on a comedy special offer that never actually went away, U.S. District Court Judge Andre Birotte Jr. rules, “Mo’Nique plausibly alleges that, after she spoke out and called her initial offer discriminatory, Netflix retaliated against her by shutting down its standard practice of negotiating in good faith that typically results in increased monetary compensation beyond the ‘opening offer’ and denying her increased compensation as a result. Accordingly, Plaintiff has sufficiently alleged that Netflix’s alleged failure to negotiate and increase her ‘opening offer’ by straying from its standard practice are employment actions that are ‘reasonably likely to adversely and materially affect an employee’s… opportunity for advancement in… her career.’”

The decision points to the allegation that Schumer, a White comedian, was able to get her own offer increased by $ 13 million after she pointed to significantly higher compensation being paid to Dave Chapelle and Chris Rock. No such luck for Mo’Nique.

“The Court notes that Mo’Nique raises a novel theory here, namely that an employer’s failure to negotiate an ‘opening offer’ in good faith, consistent with its alleged customary practice which typically leads to increased compensation, constitutes an ‘adverse employment action’ for purposes of a retaliation claim,” states the decision. “While Netflix argues that the novelty of Mo’Nique’s claim and the absence of on-point legal authority for it should bar her retaliation claims outright, the Court disagrees.”

Here’s the full opinion.

Mo’Nique’s lawyer David deRubertis was pleased with the ruling. “Today’s ruling is an important victory for Hollywood talent who, just like all other workers, need protections against retaliation if they raise concerns about pay discrimination during the hiring process,” he says. “Employers in the entertainment industry need to take pay discrimination concerns seriously, fix them if the concerns have merit, and never retaliate against those who have the courage to speak up about equal pay.”

Source: The Hollywood Reporter

Nick Cannon “Taking Time Away” From Syndicated Radio Show

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The Humor Mill

We’re the Adults in the Room

April 18, 2020 CRM News and Info

Much of the talk about what happens after the coronavirus pandemic involves what could be new on our horizon. New approaches to working, schooling, vaccinating — it’s a quite extensive list.

All of it has something in common: The discussion is largely about what we’ll add to our armament, our lives, to better prepare us for never having to face the strictures of coronavirus, or whatever comes next, again. In this we can see the roots of the term, “fighting the last war.”

It’s what we humans do, left to our ordinary instincts. We fight the last war in part because we do not have a very good radar system for predicting the future. That is sometimes due to the reality that most of us can’t capture and filter all of the available information to come up with nuggets that point out a future direction.

Very recently in human history, we invented computers and analytics and algorithms that help get us closer to that nirvana, but so far even they fail us if we can’t put numbers on the raw data that cranks through our analytic engines.

The Most Important Word

A case in point, one that’s relevant to CRM, is encapsulated in a Washington Post
article published over the weekend, which reported White House rejection of a bailout for the U.S. Postal Service.

The service, rarely in robust financial health, recently has been battered by a decline in the number of packages it delivers, partly caused by the coronavirus situation. The CRM angle obviously is e-commerce related. The USPS is the last-mile delivery option for many vendors sending packages to rural America.

“The Postal Service projects it will lose $ 2 billion each month through the coronavirus recession while postal workers maintain the nationwide service of delivering essential mail and parcels, such as prescriptions, food and household necessities,” reads the Post article.

It goes on to say the service will be, “illiquid,” a splendid euphemism, by Sept. 30 under the present conditions.

To be sure, there are those who say the USPS should be run more like a business, and that a private sector CEO might be able to turn things around, put the service on a modern business foundation, and thus “cure” the problem. Hogwash. That only redefines the problem to make it easier to solve.

The USPS is chartered to do the hard and often unprofitable work no one else wants to do. The hard reality is that the most important word in the USPS’ name is the last: “service.”

The postal service is defined in the Constitution. It was not invented to make a profit or to be run along modern business principles. It is a service — like K-12 education, the patent office, the court system, the highway system, and myriad other government services that are designed in one way or another to promote democracy but not specifically, if at all, to turn a profit.

Essential for Democracy

The late Scottish economist, Angus Maddison, identified four essential characteristics of a successful democratic society: property rights, scientific rationalism, capital markets, and improvements in transport and communication.

Scientific rationalism enables us to understand the world and to invent solutions to its challenges. Property rights enable inventors to secure the rights in their inventions and hard work. Capital markets make it possible to connect capital and invention efficiently, thus funding research and additional investment. Transportation and communication enable us to share inventions with the world and to make profits that can be reinvested in still more invention.

The USPS falls into the last category, along with today’s Internet. Without transportation and communication — or more precisely, with degraded transportation and communication — a democratic society runs the risk, in small but quantifiable ways, of not only hobbling business, but also fostering citizen categories of haves and have-nots, a barrier to full democracy for sure.

That’s why we all should care about the USPS. Its advertising tells us that it delivers more packages (6.2 billion last year) to homes than any other service — not to mention the 75.7 billion marketing mail pieces and 54.9 billion first class mail items.

Imagine 6.2 billion packages without the USPS. If higher rates applied, might some of us reconsider some of our e-commerce orders? In these times, e-commerce keeps us out of brick-and-mortar stores where virus transmission is far more likely than shopping online.

The Trump administration makes no bones about its favored solution: to raise prices on companies like Amazon, founded and led by Jeff Bezos, who coincidentally owns The Washington Post, where the article first appeared, and which has been critical of the Trump administration (along with almost every other news outlet not named after a furry creature).

“Increasing rates too much would lead private-sector competitors to develop their own cheaper methods to deliver packages,” said Lori Rectanus, director of physical infrastructure at the Government Accountability Office, according to the Post.

In fact, companies like Amazon already are delivering packages through divisions they’ve spun up for that purpose. Still, the last mile and the destinations even Amazon Prime doesn’t reach, have to be reached somehow, and that means the USPS, because that’s the service that democratizes package delivery following the Constitution and Maddison’s pronouncements.

To be sure, we have seen this kind of debate over the Postal Service before, and every time the conventional wisdom comes around to the proposition that, love it or hate it, we need the postal service to do the job that no one else wants to do or can figure out how to do profitably.

In these coronavirus-addled days, the onus for protecting the transport and communications part of Maddison’s democracy prescription falls in part to us, to CRM, because over the last couple of decades CRM has gone from an interesting curiosity to an essential part of business and the world. We’ve come of age, and I am glad we had this talk.

The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of ECT News Network.

Denis%20Pombriant Were the Adults in the Room
Denis Pombriant is a well-known CRM industry analyst, strategist, writer and speaker. His new book, You Can’t Buy Customer Loyalty, But You Can Earn It, is now available on Amazon. His 2015 book, Solve for the Customer, is also available there.
Email Denis.

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CRM Buyer

WHAT IF HE WERE A COUNTRY AND WESTERN SINGER?

December 17, 2019 Humor

We’re supposed to feel badly because this (c)rapper says he’s being drugged and beaten in prison.

1. blood tests show no drugs
2. he has an extensive criminal record including sexual assault (feminists silent, naturally, because he’s a nigger)
3. the Grammys suck his ass at every opportunity

What does that say about the Grammys other than it’s a criminal-supporting enterprise?

Imagine if it were Travis Tritt, Clint Black or some other more modern CW singer? He’d be banned.

South Florida rapper Kodak Black is apparently having a tough time in prison and is posting about it on his Instagram account.

The jailed hip-hop artist, whose real name is Bill K. Kapri claims he was “laced with an unknown substance” while inside the Federal Detention Center in Miami. He says the substance gave him “an out of body experience and had me feeling like I was possessed and dying slowly.”

He goes on to say he was denied medical attention when he attempted to seek help.

But that’s not all. The rapper’s post says he is being subjected to beatings and torture inside the prison, where he is currently serving a 3 1/2-year prison sentence on federal weapons charges for lying on a federal application to buy guns.

The incarcerated rapper says he had a near death experience which “felt like dogs were tearing at my skin while they were grabbing and beating me while I was under the influence of this unknown substance that mysteriously hasn’t popped up in my Urine analysis and mysteriously the inmate I was fighting with went home the next day,” Kodak Black said.

He also blamed the guards for beating him so hard, he “had to be taken to the Box in a wheelchair.”

He says he’s been there for 45 days “without commissary, hygiene stressed out and on psych meds.”

In addition to all of that, Kodak says he’s had to mourn the death of his “brother Juice WRLD behind the doors.”

Black has a lengthy rap sheet in Florida, having been charged at different times with drug and weapons possession, armed robbery, sexual assault, probation violations and fleeing from officers.

The Grammy-nominated rapper, known for singles “ZeZe” and “Roll in Peace,” also faces drug, weapons and sexual assault charges in other states.

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ANTZ-IN-PANTZ ……