Tech Brew Ride Home - Mon. 08/17 – Why Regulatory Change For Big Tech Is Maybe Inevitable

Episode Date: August 17, 2020

Why I think regulatory impact for Big Tech is maybe inevitable. Amazon seems to be sniffing around Rackspace. The first “mass produced” smartphone with a camera underneath the display? An ex-Googler says Google Cloud’s deprecation policy is maddening. And why you can’t watch the movie Cocoon, even if you want to. Sponsors: ExtraHop.com/techmeme Metalab.co Links: Google says Australian news rule threatens free search services (Financial Times) Exclusive: Amazon in talks to invest in cloud services company Rackspace, say sources (Reuters) ZTE's Axon 20 5G smartphone will have the first under-display camera (Engadget) Dear Google Cloud: Your Deprecation Policy is Killing You (Steve Yegge) Results day is a diversity disaster. Here’s all the proof you need (Wired) Our Long, Arduous Attempt To Watch ‘Cocoon,’ And Why Some Classic Movies Seemingly Just Vanish (UpRoxx) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On April 4th, 2023, around 2 in the morning, a man was found stabbed multiple times on a sidewalk in downtown San Francisco. Hey, who did this to you? What happened next turned the story into a political firestorm. Reports have identified the victim as Bob Lee, the founder of Cash App. From Bloomberg Podcasts, this is Foundering, the Killing of Bob Lee, beginning April 16. Welcome to the TechMeme Right Home for Monday, August 17th, 2020. I'm Brian McCullough today. Why, I think regulatory impact for big tech is inevitable.

Amazon seems to be sniffing around Rackspace. The first mass-produced smartphone with a camera underneath the display. An ex-Gougler says Google Cloud's deprecation policy is maddening, and why you can't watch the movie Cocoon even if you wanted to. Here's what you missed today in the world of tech. Let's start today with a sort of regulatory potpourri, segment. First, Google is warning Australians that if the Australian government goes ahead with its plans to make Google pay for news content its services in Google News and on Google search,

that would end up threatening privacy, free speech, and YouTube generally, quoting the Financial Times. The U.S. company has also suspended a news licensing scheme and agreed with some Australian publishers this year as it seeks to blunt what the government has described as, quote, world-leading and necessary legislation aimed at creating a sustainable news media. Quote, we need to let you know about new government regulations that will hurt how Australians use Google search and YouTube. Google wrote in an open letter signed by its Australia managing director Mel Silva posted online on Monday.

Ms. Silva added that the proposed regulation, quote, would force us to provide you with a dramatically worse Google search and YouTube could lead to your data being handed over to big news businesses and would put the free services. you use at risk in Australia, end quote. Yeah, I wouldn't want your personal data being hoovered up by a big business like checks notes. Google, would you? And next, Germany's antitrust authority says it has launched an investigation into Amazon's influence over third-party merchants selling on its platform.

While at the same time, Canada's Competition Bureau says that it has opened an antitrust investigation into Amazon to determine if it hurts consumers and competition. So you might be saying, another day, another investigation opens somewhere in the world. Are you really going to tell us about every little investigation as it happens, Brian? No, I will not for obvious reasons. But I'm flagging this now, A, as a way to keep you aware that this stuff is still going on, that the thunder keeps rolling in the background in terms of regulatory stuff, but also, B, to make this point. Amazon only has to lose one of these cases once somewhere in the world in a big enough market somewhere in the world before they would be basically forced by default to change how they do things.

That's essentially true for all the big tech companies under the regulatory microscope at the moment, but let's stick to Amazon right now to make the point. All of these investigations all around the world into Amazon are running along the same rails, i.e., they believe that Amazon might be double dealing with the very same merchants, that Amazon makes money from on the Amazon platform. If even one of these investigations made Amazon change their practices or force them to divest themselves of the third-party marketplace in order to create a firewall between Amazon's business and third parties, then Amazon might have to do it. Consider this. As Reuters points out, quote, Germany is Amazon's second biggest market after the United States.

Up until 2013, Amazon had prevented traders from offering their products via other online. sites at a lower price than on its marketplace, a policy Germany's antitrust watchdog forced it to abandon. Last year, Amazon reached a deal with the German authority to overhaul its terms of service for third-party merchants, prompting the office to drop a previous seven-month investigation, end quote. In other words, what I'm trying to say is, as the thunder continues to roll on, consider that some sort of change in practice is probably inevitable for any one of these tech behemus. It's really only a question of when, not if, and to what degree. This just flew across my transom, so I don't have much more in the way of details other than

the rumor, but sources are telling CNBC that Amazon is in preliminary talks to acquire a minority stake in Rackspace. Quote, Rackspace helps companies migrate their data to Amazon web services, and the investment would strengthen the ties between the two companies. Rackspace also migrates companies to Alphabet's Google Cloud. Microsoft's Azure and VMware. There is no certainty that Amazon and Rackspace, which is majority owned by private equity firm Apollo Global Management, will agree a deal, the sources said. If there is one, it could take one to two months to negotiate it. The source is added, asking for anonymity because the matter is confidential. Rackspace and Apollo declined to comment, while Amazon did not respond

to a request for comment. Rackspace shares sort as much as 17% on the news, end quote. Yeah, Rackspace just went public back on August 5th, which makes one wonder why if Amazon was interested, they didn't approach Rackspace before that point. But then again, Rackspace did close down 22% on its IPO day, and until today at least, its stock price hadn't recovered at all. Also, one wonders about the regulatory prospects of this sort of deal, as wouldn't this be some serious vertical integration on AWS as part? but then again, we've spoken before about the fact that maybe certain companies see the necessity of making certain acquisitions before perhaps we get a different administration. ZTE says it will unveil the first mass-produced smartphone with a camera underneath the display. It's called the ZTE Axon 25G.

It's coming on September 1st, and well, here are some of the details on the camera that they might have gotten under the screen, quoting in gadget. The Axon 25G is expected to have a 6.92-inch OLED display, but there'll be no notches, punch holes, or other blemishes where a front camera would normally go. So far, most all-screen phones have used cameras that pop out of the top or side. ZTE notes that all the major industry players have been working on under-display cameras, but it's apparently the first one to bring one to market. We just hope that under-display tech has improved since we last saw it on an ApoPrototeporty. because that model showed a fair amount of hazing. The challenge is shooting through the display, which obviously isn't completely transparent.

ZTE didn't reveal any other specs, but a leak revealed that it could have a 32 megapixel front camera and 64 megapixel and 8 megapixel rear cameras. Other specs are rumored to be a 2460 by 1080 OLED display, system on a chip maxing out at 24 gigahertz, up to 12 gigabytes of RAM, and a 4,120 MAH, MAH, battery. The Axon 25G will be launched on September 1st, 2020, end quote. Over the weekend, a lot of folks were chatting about an essay from ex-Gougler Steve Yeggy, who lambasted Google's approach to deprecation on its cloud APIs. Given the cascade of responses, this seems to have resonated with a ton of people. Yegi describes a nightmare

scenario of working on projects only to get notices like this from Google Cloud. We are writing to remind you that we are sunsetting. Insert important service you are using here, as of August 2020, after which you will not be able to perform any updates or upgrades on your instances. We encourage you to upgrade to the latest version, which is in beta, has no documentation, no migration path, and which we have kindly deprecated in advance for you. We are committed to ensuring that all developers of Google Cloud Platform are minimally disrupted by this change. Now, quoting from Yeggy's rant slash essay, quote, in the Google world, deprecation means we are breaking our commitments to you. It really does.

That's what it ultimately means, at least. It means they are going to force you to do some work, possibly a large amount of rework on a regular basis, as punishment for doing what they told you to do originally, as punishment for listening to their glossy marketing on their website. Better software, faster, you do everything they tell you to do and you launch your application or service and then bang, a year or two later it breaks down. This is like selling you a used car that, that they know is going to break down in under 1,000 miles. Google's definition of deprecation reeks of planned obsolescence. I don't believe that it's actually planned obsolescence in the same sense that, say, Apple perpetrates, but Google definitely plans to break your stuff in a roundabout way.

I know because I work there as a software engineer for 12-plus years. They have loose internal guidelines about how much backwards compatibility to bake into service offerings, but in the and it's up to each individual team or service. There are no corporate level or engineering level guidelines, and the longest anyone has the courage to recommend in terms of deprecation cycles is try to give your customers six to 12 months to upgrade before you drape them over a barrel. This is hurting them far more than they realize, and it will continue to hurt them for years to come

because it's not part of their DNA to care about customers. The thing is, every single developer has choices, and if you make them rewrite their code enough times, some of those other choices are going to start looking mighty appealing. Developers are not your hostages as much as you'd like them to be. They are your guests, end quote. And I thought that Google was just flaky on their mass consumer-facing services. Anyway, if this rings true to you, I recommend checking out the essay because there's a lot of swearing and a lot of rending of garments in there, so could be cathartic to read for some of you devs. Also over the weekend, you may have

heard about this. I certainly saw it bubbling up on social media all weekend. Apparently, tens of thousands of high school students in the UK were downgraded in their school grades by an algorithm that replaced traditional exam scores. Why replace exam scores in the first place? Well, because of COVID. Lots of end-of-year exams didn't take place this year. So the algorithm was put in place to attempt to step in and use teacher estimates of expected grades. as well as historical performance by students in a given school to spit out what the student likely would have done on a given exam. Apparently, tens of thousands of students got results lower than they would have expected, and now the worry is that this will negatively affect their university

application prospects. So, a case of algorithms not fitting the human reality, here's why people think the algorithms were unfair, quoting from Wired UK. In Scotland, the government was forced to completely change tack after tens of thousands of students were downgraded by an algorithm which changed grades based on a school's previous performance and other factors. Anticipating similar scenes for today's A-level results, the government in England has introduced what it's calling a triple lock, whereby via stages of appeal, students will effectively get to choose their grade from a teacher assessment, their mock exam results, or a reset to be taken in the autumn. While that should help reduce some injustices, the result. The result

day mess could still have a disproportionate effect on students from disadvantaged backgrounds, with knock-on effects on their university applications and careers. The mess shines light on huge long-term flaws in the assessment exams and university admission system that systematically disadvantaged pupils from certain groups. Because of fears over grade inflation caused by teachers assessing their own students, those marks aren't being used in isolation. This year, because of coronavirus, those potentially biased teacher assessments were modified, taking into account the school's historical performance and other factors that may have had little to do with the individual student. In fact, according to TES, 60% of this year's A-level grades have been

determined via statistical modeling, not teacher assessment. This means that a bright pupil in a poorly performing school may have seen their grade downgraded because last year's cohort of pupils didn't do well in their exams. Quote, children from a certain background may find their assessment is downgraded, says Stephen Coran, a teacher and education expert. This is what happened in Scotland, where children from poorer backgrounds were twice as likely to have the results downgraded than those from richer areas. There's injustice in the appeals process, too, particularly in England where the decision over whether or not to appeal is up to the school, not the pupil. I think it's really scandalous that the pupils can't appeal

themselves, says Rimfeld, whose own child was anxiously awaiting their results. It's just astonishing the mess we've created, and it's really sad to see. There will be huge differences in which schools decide, or are able to appeal, inevitably, better-resourced private schools will be able to appeal more easily than underfunded state schools in deprived areas. Quote, the parents will pressure them, and they'll be apoplectic if their child does not achieve the grades they expected, says Quran. In the state system, meanwhile, quote, some schools will fight for their kids and others won't, and teachers are on holiday until term starts anyway, end quote. In other words, some exams couldn't take place as normal, so they put in place a system that tried to estimate what I. I say might have gotten on the exam had I had the opportunity to take it. And yet I have no control over how my exam was eventually graded at all. Yeah, I can see how that would feel like a raw deal,

especially if my chances at getting into a good school are on the line. And finally today, another sort of dystopian cautionary tale regarding our modern technological world, admit it. As everything has been fragmenting behind streaming walled gardens, you've maybe had the fear once or twice. What if my favorite movie isn't on one of the two or three streaming services I've deigned to actually pay for? Well, I've got a worse fear for you. What if your favorite movie can't be gotten anywhere? That's the fearful reality outlined by the folks at Uprox, when they decided they wanted to watch the classic 1980s, Wilford Brimley, Ron Howard, Steve Gutenberg movie, cocoon.

Uprocks couldn't watch it anywhere. They couldn't find it anywhere, even if they wanted to pay for or rent it. Quote, at first I did what I always do. I checked the internet to see if Kukoon was on any of the streaming platforms. It was not. Then I went to iTunes, and strangely, Kukun the return popped up, but not the original. I tried Amazon, no luck. I even tried YouTube, which sometimes has movies in full that the studios just kind of gave up on, but no.

And also, it wouldn't make much sense to dump a big movie like Kikoon onto. YouTube. Though if you want to watch the Kenny Rogers vehicle six-pack, well, you're in luck. I scoured the internet for anything about this and came across a GQ piece from December about notable movies that aren't available on streaming, and it does mention how Cacoon is impossible to find, so at least it alleviated my fears that I was just somehow missing something. From there, I just figured I'd do my handy trick of ordering the Blu-ray, and it'd soon be on its way, and I'd shortly be watching Cacoon in Beautiful HD. Well, no, not so quick, because it turns out Kekoon's 2010 Blu-ray is now out of print.

And since Kikoon is still a fairly popular movie, it's not cheap, hovering around $100. If you go searching yourself, don't be fooled by the moderately priced Blu-rays. Those are all Region 2, and you'll need a Blu-ray player from that region to watch it. There are many negative Amazon reviews from Angry Kikoon fans complaining their discs don't work on their players. As much as I wanted to see Kikun, I didn't want to spend $100. So, finally, finally, I found a Kikoon DVD from 2004 on eBay and bought it for $25.

When it arrived, it was one of those DVDs that has the full-screen version on the flip side of the disc. It's 2020, and this is how I watch Coon. Anyway, this all made no sense to me, and I wanted an explanation. Why was it so hard for me to find Coon? End quote. The author of the piece, Mike Ryan, started emailing anyone he could think of. He emailed the studio, emailed Ron Howard himself.

This, despite the fact that wasn't it a touchstone? movie? I'm pretty sure it was, so it should be on Disney Plus, you would think. Indeed, this is from later in his piece. To Disney's credit, the last thing I heard was an update that they were still looking into it. And look, I get it. Imagine working remotely for the last five months and having someone come out of the blue to ask, hey, you know that whole studio you just bought? Why did they not have cocoon? This one specific movie from 35 years ago available. Though I did like the idea that he would say, oh yeah, it's just an oversight and then hit a button and cocoon would be available for us to all rent or buy immediately. So yes, in my mind, at Disney headquarters, there's a button that says

cocoon, and once pressed, it shows up on all the streaming services. Though, if another Ron Howard movie Splash can be on Disney Plus, I don't see a reason cocoon can't be, end quote. It's a lesson that music fans have known for a while now. Nothing beats your own library if there's some piece of art that you can't live without. There are some super furry animals and new order tracks that I can only play because they live on my home server, and because I burned them from the original CDs that I bought all the way back in college. Or think of all those people who have those original Star Wars VHS tapes that they'll never part with in their lives, because they're from before George Lucas started messing with them. Grito shot first and all that.

Bottom line is, for some things, nothing beats physical ownership. Hey, hive mind, I've got an ask for you once again. As you know, we've been experimenting with pulling out segments of the show and releasing them on YouTube as little two to three minute clips. We're using a little program called Fusioncast to do that, which basically you just drop an MP3 file into it and it shoots out a video that you can then upload to YouTube. But you can only put one image into it at a time. So if you watch any of our videos on YouTube, you'll see there's only our podcast logo as a static image in the background. Here's what I'd love to do. Is there a program out there that quickly turns audio clips into video just like this,

but also allows you to throw multiple images in there as well? Like, I don't mean video. We don't have the means to do true video yet. But if, like, there was a story about Facebook and we could drop in, say, three different photos of Mark Zuckerberg, and then it just slowly moved them in the background, you know, Ken Burns effect style or maybe slowly zoomed in or out. I'd love it if there was a quick, dirty little program that did this, but if it's about creating a template and premiere or something

like that, let me know too. Basically, I just want to learn what the best practice is for this. If anyone has experience regularly creating videos in the method I just described, just get in touch and let me know the quickest way to do this on a regular sort of industrial scale basis. Thanks. Talk to you tomorrow.