Tech Brew Ride Home - Thu – 02/18 – Facebook Calls Australia’s Bluff; Google Pays Off Murdoch

Episode Date: February 18, 2021

I’ll do my best to explain this Australia situation with Facebook and Google. SpaceX is our interesting raise today. Nvidia unveils a line of chips just for crypto. Does Apple want to set the standards for 6G? And if remote work is the future, why is Big Tech still building so much office space? Sponsors: Uber.com/techmeme Tovala.com/ride Links: Facebook restricts users, publishers from sharing news content in Australia (AP) Facebook calls Australia's bluff (Platformer) SpaceX Funding Round at $74 Billion Valuation Was Led by Sequoia (Bloomberg) NVIDIA Annoucnes CMP 30HX, 40HX, 50HX and 90HX GPUs For Mining, Cripples Hash Rate Of RTX 3060 (WCCFTech) Apple Hiring Engineers to Develop 6G Wireless (Bloomberg) If Work Is Going Remote, Why Is Big Tech Still Building? (Wired) 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 Tech meme right home for Thursday, February 18th, 2021. I'm Brian McCullough today. I'll do my best to explain this whole Australia situation vis-a-vis Facebook and Google. SpaceX is our interesting raise today. InVIDIA unveils a line of chips just for crypto. Does Apple want to set the standards for 6G? And if remote work is the future, why is big tech still building so much office space? Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. I don't know if you remember that story about, that Australian law where they were going to make tech platforms pay money to publishers, if they even linked to content from an Australian publisher, you might recall that Google said that it would

consider completely going dark in Australia if the law came into force. You might recall that I didn't really have an opinion on that, but I kind of wanted both sides to call each other's bluff just to see what would happen if Google went dark in a whole country. Meanwhile, Facebook was making similar noises about blocking news items in the news feed. It's been one of those rolling stories where every day there was seemingly another new wrinkle to it and a new headline. So I have been skipping talking about it because it was always just so incremental. Until now, that is. Ahead of this proposed law, which again has not been passed yet, Facebook has preemptively banned Australians from sharing or viewing news and all users from sharing and viewing news on

Australian news pages, quoting the Associated Press. Australian publishers can continue to publish news content on Facebook, but links and posts can't be viewed or shared by Australian audiences, the U.S.-based company said in a statement. Australian users cannot share content from domestic or international news sources, while international users outside Australia cannot share news from Australian sources. Quote, the proposed law fundamentally misunderstands the relationship between our platform and publishers who use it to share news content, Facebook's regional managing director William Easton said, it has left us facing a stark choice, attempt to comply with a law that

ignores the realities of this relationship, or stop allowing news content on our services in Australia. With a heavy heart, we are choosing the latter, end quote. So much hilarity then ensued because after Facebook brought the ban down in its algorithmic systems. Facebook ended up banning its own Facebook page on Facebook in Australia because it, in fact, publishes news. But at the same time, Australian authorities in public health, weather and other non-publishing media areas say Facebook has been removing their posts from their feeds as well. So it's not just, say, newspapers that are seeing their content blocked. But wait, there's more, because at the exact same time, Google has suddenly announced that it

has signed a multi-year global partnership with News Corp to provide content from its news sites, quote, in return for significant payments by Google, end quote. So see, that's been a wrinkle that we haven't mentioned before, and forgive me for dipping just the tiniest, most delicate little toe into political waters. But Rupert Murdoch, owner of News Corp, has been screaming for about 20 years that Internet platforms are basically stealing from publishers and should pay them. This law, this idea that you should pay money to share or link to something that someone else publishes, is basically right out of what he's been saying all along. So some people are suggesting that this Australian law

basically benefits Murdoch and his companies, his companies which basically completely own media in the country of Australia. Some people suggest that the government of Australia is very cozy with Murdoch's interests, but of course I'm not qualified to opine on any of that, and I am hereby ducking in case I got that wrong. But quoting the Wall Street Journal, Google is paying the media company tens of millions of dollars over the course of the deal, according to a person familiar with the matter. Don Harrison, Google's president of global partnerships, said content from News Corp publications would be available on several platforms, including a new product called Google News Showcase. News Corp owns the Wall Street Journal,

and news organizations in the UK and Australia. News Corp will also make new podcasts that will be available through Google's voice assistant technology and new videos for YouTube, the technology company's video streaming service. The audio and video content won't be exclusive to Google, the person familiar with the matter said. The agreement will have a, quote, positive impact on journalism around the globe, as we have firmly established that there should be a premium for premium journalism. News Corp Chief Executive Officer Robert Thompson said in a statement, end quote. So some are saying that this is Google caving into blackmail. Let me quote Professor Jeff Jarvis on Twitter. Google just announced a deal with News Corp. I hate this. It means that media blackmail works.

It sets a terrible precedent for the net. It gives Google yet more power over news. It is a win for the devil, Murdoch. I really hate that. What angers me most is that journalism organizations had no shame and no transparency about their conflict of interest, caching in their political capital to buy political favor and conspiracy to blackmail the tech companies. Journalism never reported on its conflict. In the end, Google and Facebook have a big bucket of bachshish that will go to old proprietors and their shareholders, not journalists. Don't fool yourselves, keeping them around a little longer and keeping upstart competitors out of the market. Google and Facebook won't change. They will maintain unread news features as loss makers to pay off the publishers. The publishers won't change because they got a little more money.

startups will suffer, news will suffer, society will suffer. Well done, everyone. And I am disappointed that the current proprietors of the net, Google and Facebook did not fight hard enough for the principles of an open internet. I get it. They're companies. They have the money to make this go away, but the net will suffer, end quote. Yes, even though this deal is being painted as a way to pay for journalism, to keep journalism alive, some are saying that this is, in fact, the equivalent of just putting cash in a suitcase and handing it over to publishers. Australia could have, say, just levied attacks on Google and Facebook and used that money to pay journalists' salaries, but no, this is money going directly to the shareholders of the

publishers involved. Some of it might trickle down to actual journalists, but like Professor Jarvis, I'd have to say I'm very skeptical of that. Some are also saying that Facebook banning news in the news feed is terrible because they're only taking down legitimate publishers, meaning that all of the news, in quotes, that will still continue to be posted on the news feed will be the usual garbage and conspiracy theories from non-professional publishers, the sort of stuff that your crazy uncle posts all the time. Although, as Thomas Bacadol points out on Twitter, only around 6% of the items on an average Facebook news feed are actually links to news items. The rest of your average news feed is very much.

the memes and pictures of your kids, etc. that you would expect, it's possible that Australians might not even notice that news is gone from their news feeds. If you can feel me furiously dissembling and equivocating on all of this, it's not because I'm afraid to pick a side. It's very much that I don't know what side to take here. There are so many different fractal angles to this story where even if I took a side on one small part of it, some other part of it would be completely in contradiction to whatever position I claimed. For example, as Benedict Evans has tweeted, quote, it is possible to believe both that Facebook is evil and that telling Facebook to pay a fee every single time anyone posts a link to a new site, but not any other kind of site is completely

insane. And yes, the law is links, not using content or publishing journalism, end quote. I suppose that my larger duty here is to explain what this could mean for the larger internet and the tech industry. And even there, while the repercussions are muddy, I maybe could side with Casey Newton, who has been against this law from the beginning, saying that, yes, Google and Facebook should support journalism, but not like this. Not in a way that breaks the open web. He also pointed out that the proposed code has an eligibility requirement that would deprive small publishers from getting paid at all. So again, how is that helping journalism? It sounds like it's really just helping big media. And as Casey says in this morning's platformer newsletter,

Google's payoff sets a bad, bad global precedent, quote. Google's capitulation means that Australian crony capitalism is now likely to be exported worldwide. Legacy media outlets will become richer, and also more dependent on the tech giants that they excoriate daily for having too much power over them. All the while, the media industry will continue to consolidate and it will be harder to get or keep a job in journalism. A bargaining code that truly sought to level the playing field between the platforms and the public would take these realities into account. There is still time to amend it before Parliament takes a vote, and here's hoping that lawmakers do both in Australia and beyond it, end quote. Here's an interesting raise from a company that you are all very much familiar with.

SpaceX has raised a funding round led by Sequoia at a $74 billion valuation. In its most recent, previous round this summer SpaceX was valued at $46 billion, quoting Bloomberg. It's unusual for Sequoia to make new investments at such a high valuation. At least one of the firm's partners has a long-time relationship with SpaceX founder and chief executive Elon Musk. Sequoia partner Rolf Bota was chief financial officer at PayPal Holdings when Musk was its CEO two decades ago. A person familiar with Sequoia's thinking said the firm is particularly enthusiastic about SpaceX's Starlink, a space-based high-speed internet service. The company has rolled out Starlink to more than 10,000 people in the U.S., Canada, and the

UK, and Sequoia is optimistic about its growth potential. SpaceX, based in Hawthor in California, was founded with the ultimate goal of creating a human colony on Mars. Its sky-high aims are capital-intensive, and the company had raised almost $6 billion before its most recent investment round, according to Pitchbook, end quote. Elon Musk is not the richest man in the world just because Tesla stock has gone parabolic in the last year. It's also because he just so happened to have also founded a $74 billion private space company. InVinia says, why deny reality any longer?

They've announced a line of dedicated crypto mining GPUs since everybody was basically using their GPUs to mine crypto, right? quoting WCCF Tech. Invidia has finally conceded to the overwhelming mining demand facing the GPU market right now and launched a lineup of dedicated cryptocurrency mining GPUs. Can we even call them that, considering they have no display port? The lineup is called CPM. This is short for cryptocurrency mining processor, while AIBs have previously rolled out in mining variants of GPUs without display ports.

This is the first time we are seeing an official product launch straight from Nvidia. itself. It is accompanied by an action that will likely be very controversial. Software limiting the hash rate of Invinia's RTX 30-60 GPU, which will be launching on the 25th to just 50% of its actual rate. Before we go any further, Nvidia is announcing a total of four CPMGPUs, out of which two, the Nvidia CPM 30HX and 40 HX will launch in Q1, and CPM 50HX and 90 HX will launch in Q2. At this moment, it is a lot. is unclear which HX correlates to which GForce GPU, although you can make some decent guesses using the memory size, which correlates to bus width and can give away the rough model number.

We can also use the hash rate and TDP to arrive at similar conclusions. With hash rates of up to 86 MHS, and these are likely unoptimized, considering Nvidia always under promises and over-delivers, it is clear that the company has plans to ensure a full lineup. Here is the thing, though. The RTX 3070, for example, has a hash rate between 50 and MHS. None of the CMPs in the table match this rate. I have a suspicion, or educated speculation, that what we are looking at also contains lower-binned dyes of the G-Force models with slightly lower core counts. This would allow NVIDIA to retarget some of those wasted dyes more efficiently. It is also unclear at this point how their decision to have RTX-3060 mining rate

will be received. Some would argue that if you are buying the hardware, you reserve the right to use it to its full potential. Another obvious problem could be the fact that software blocks are usually overcome quite easily when the wider internet puts its mind to it. We have even seen AMD GPUs get BIOS flash to their high-end siblings, so this would be like child's play for an enthusiastic coder unless Nvidia took hardware-based steps to mitigate this. Since a full G-Force GPU offers resale value, which is part of the ROI, a multi-million USD

mining operation would likely have enough research. resources to bypass this block. In other words, this restriction would likely only impact the retail miner and disallow actual gamers from recouping some costs by putting their GPU to mine part-time, end quote. Here's an interesting little Mark Gurman Apple rumor. Mark says, job listings reveal that Apple is looking to hire engineers to start work on 6G, indicating that Apple wants to be a leader in that forthcoming technology. Not only that, though, I'd say it indicates that Apple is interested in guiding the next cellular networking standard more explicitly, something it is never done before, quote, people hired for the positions will, quote,

research and design next generation 6G wireless communication systems for radio access networks, and participate in industry slash academic forums passionate about 6G technology, end quote. Industry watchers don't expect 6G to roll out until about 2030, but the job listings indicate Apple wants to be involved at the earliest stages in the development of the new technology. A company spokeswoman declined to comment. Late last year, Apple joined an alliance of companies working on standards for 6G and other next generation cellular technologies. The standards and timing for 6G are still loosely defined, but some analysts say the technology

could enable speeds more than 100 times faster than 5G, end quote. Remember, after that purchase of Intel's modem business, Apple is designing its own custom modems now. So connect the dots. Making sure the next-gen standard comports especially well with Apple hardware would be a nice differentiator for Apple. As I said at this point, if Apple were to get into the battery business, the only tech left that it's not doing itself for its iPhone hardware is basically the glass. Finally today, Wired asked something that I've been wondering about myself recently. If work really is going more remote and if the tech companies really believe it is, because they're leading the way forward toward that future, why are all the big tech companies then still building out office space at such a furious clip?

Quote, what gives? It all comes down in large part to simple math. Silicon Valley's giants are growing too fast to loosen their grip on physical space, even if in some cases they might want to. At the time, of Zuckerberg's remote work comments. Internal surveys showed that most employees were eager to get back to the office. And Zuckerberg said the transition to remote work could take 10 years. Meanwhile, in the last year alone, Facebook grew its headcount by 13,000, mostly in product and engineering, putting the total number of employees at more than 58,000. Alphabet added 16,000 for a total of 135,000. Those figures don't include thousands of contractors who also keep their campuses running. In the depths of the pandemic, quote, it's easy to lose track of the bigger picture, says Mark Murrow, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution who studies how cities attract high-tech development. For decades,

Murrow has been searching for evidence of decentralization, the spreading out of talent and wealth enabled by the so-called death of distance. The idea was that technology would make it possible for people to work from anywhere making offices and cities less relevant. What we got was the opposite. Fast-growing tech firms clustered in a few cities, as did what Murrow defines as innovation jobs in science and technology. Other cities grew, and technology companies did expand elsewhere, but tech hubs like San Jose and Seattle simply grew faster. With most people still working remotely, it's hard to draw long-term conclusion, says Robert Salmons, Director of Bay Area Research for Crushman and Wakefield, a real estate brokerage. One thing that is known, he says,

is that markets like San Francisco were overheated before the virus. Costs were little barrier to wealthy tech giants, but smaller companies were being pushed out, and even the largest firms had trouble finding enough space downtown. The tech campuses were changing, too. They had become more dispersed, reflecting a desire to be closer to where people actually live. New proposals have included more housing and less office space, often in response to pressure from communities facing spiraling housing costs, but also reflecting the changing needs for the companies themselves. Google's San Jose project is typical of that model, closer to where many of its workers live, and not every inch of space needs to hold a desk. In the near term, it might be more prudent to

focus less on who's leaving for Texas and more on the changes happening within the Bay Area. Workers, given remote options, may take them, but it's hard to uproot yourself from your home, your work life without a real tug to someplace else. You might figure a long commute is more tolerable if it's done twice a week and that it's time to buy a bigger place with room for an office or live in a preferred school district. With a company like Salesforce, it's hard not to wonder what will become of its enormous tower, which came to symbolize the harnessing of San Francisco's fate to tech and what that will mean for the surrounding area. How many climbing gyms can you put in a 61-story tower?

Omara asks. Individual neighborhoods may be reshaped depending on who comes back and what form that return takes. The companies for their part say they're still working that out, end quote. I'd like to real quick today shout out Ashwin from Clubhouse. He did me a solid this morning testing out some audio-related stuff, and all he asked in return was a shout out since he's a long-time listener to this show. So like a Lannister, I try to always pay my debts. Thank you, Ashwin. Also, I wanted to shout out all of you in Texas. Hope you're warm and well. Be safe. This is completely unrelated, and I hope you won't think I'm making light of something pretty scary.

But I've actually shared this on Twitter a couple times recently. I've gone down this weird rabbit hole of emergency prep buying. In recent months, I have a whole closet upstairs now filled with emergency med kits, emergency lights, lanterns, blankets, emergency water containers, even battery bricks that I can pre-charge in preparation for the power going out. I've been on this binge probably because of the pandemic, of course, right? This past weekend marks the one-year anniversary of when I bought $300 worth of emergency food that still sits in the closet. It was Valentine's weekend last year when news of the virus in Wuhan made me buy math. and canned goods for the first time. I've gone so far down the rabbit hole now that I've actually been sort of lust browsing those $20,000 setups where you can trick out your roof or your backyard with solar panels that you can hook into big backyard emergency battery rigs.

Like, is there such a thing as nerding out over prepper tech? I'm sure there is, and I'm there. Funny thing is it's made me have a sense memory of growing up in Florida. Every time a hurricane threatened, my dad would always kick into this weird action. mode where he'd be like, okay, boys, time to break out the window paneling, time to clear the yard, fill the bathtub with water, time to clear out the crawl space in case we have to shelter in there. I'm not saying he was ever actually looking forward to a disaster coming our way. Exactly.

It was more, well, I guess I can relate to it now. It's a dad thing. Feeling like you've got your family prepared makes your dad heart sort of feel good. It's a dad thing. And if you live long enough, I guess you grow to understand it. Talk to you tomorrow.