Tech Brew Ride Home - Tue. 02/26 - Might the FTC Undo Some Tech Mergers?

Episode Date: February 26, 2019

The Game of Thrones when it comes to modern tech platforms is very much up in the air, Satya Nadella defends making the HoloLens for the US Army, could the FTC undo previous tech mergers and that big Casey Newton piece about Facebook content moderators. Sponsors: Tiny.website DataDogHQ.com/ridehome Links: Apple Music Integration Possibly Coming to Google Home Devices  (MacRumors) Apple Plans Sleep Tracking Feature for Future Watch (Bloomberg) Microsoft CEO defends US military contract that some employees say crosses a line (CNN Business) New FTC task force will take on tech monopolies (The Verge) Coinbase Lists Controversial Cryptocurrency XRP, Price Jumps 10% (Fortune) This 18,000mAh battery has a phone in it (The Verge) THE TRAUMA FLOOR (The Verge) Facebook Grappling With Employee Anger Over Moderator Conditions (Bloomberg) 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 ride home for Tuesday, February 26th, 2019. I'm Brian McCullough. Today, the Game of Thrones when it comes to modern tech platforms, is very much up in the air at the moment.

Satchi Nadella defends making the hollow lens for the U.S. Army. Could the FTC undo previous tech mergers and that big Casey Newton piece about Facebook content moderators? Here's what you missed today in the world of tech. The current era of platform plays can be dizzying. Back in the day, you did a software platform like Windows, and then you reap the rewards of everyone having to play in your ecosystem or essentially you were left out in Siberia. And in more recent years, we saw various platforms like Facebook,

or you saw the battle between Android and iOS, where everybody was busily carving up their own little moat-protected platform fortresses. But in the current era of everyone chasing subscriptions, and then there's also the voice assistance and a wide array of hardware devices for the home and the car and what have you. There are so many overlapping strategies around the edges now that it's not exactly clear cut

when trying to suss out what everyone is doing and why. Mac Rumors is reporting that within the Google Home app for iOS devices, there is currently a listing for Apple Music as a supported service. This suggests that Apple Music integration is coming to Google Home Devices, because Apple Music is not currently a supported service. Quote, in previous versions of Google's software,

Apple Music was listed in a separate, quote, limited availability section in the app, and also, quote, only available on iOS devices. The updated listing suggests that Apple could soon make Apple Music an option available for Google Assistant-powered playback on Google Home devices, much like it did with the Amazon Echo, end quote. Okay, so Apple wants Apple Music. to be available on every device available.

That makes sense. They, of course, want to be on Google Home and anything else they can get on. Total, total sense. Helps drive subscriptions if you can use that subscription anywhere. And I guess it helps Google Home to have the most popular services on its platform as well. Why have Spotify but no Apple Music? The widest array of choices drives sales of your hardware, which helps boost the reach of your platform, right? But then Apple doesn't let just any old Tom, Dick, or Harry on their home pod hardware,

or their Apple TV, for that matter, though that seems to be changing. So are we seeing a sort of sorting hat going on here? Is everyone choosing sides, and maybe if you want to create a smart assistant platform, if that's your most important strategic goal, then you decide to let anyone play on it. And on the other side, if subscription revenue is your most important goal, then maybe you exit the hardware game because you value platform agnosticism over all else.

But some players have multiple motivations, don't they? Amazon wants to dominate smart assistance, but it also seems to want to dominate home hardware, and of course it has subscription plays of its own. Same could be said for Google. And then weird as it may be to consider, in the services era, should we now think that maybe Apple

will increasingly eschew hardware in favor of wanting their services to be available everywhere? And again, where is Siri in the smart assistant race? As I say, weird times. The chips will eventually fall as they may, but it certainly feels like they're very much up in the air at the moment. Mark Gurman Apple Scoop Tuesday, but this one is not really that surprising.

Mark sources say Apple has been testing a sleep tracking feature for the Apple Watch for several months now, and some sort of sleep tracker could be, added to a future version of the Apple Watch as early as 2020. Mark points out that adding sleep tracking to the watch would help eliminate one of the main competitive advantages of Apple Watch competitors like Fitbit and Withings, who right now have the most popular sleep trackers. Also, he notes that Apple acquired Finnish startup Bedditt in 2017.

Beddett makes a sleep tracking sensor strip, which Apple actually sells under the Beddett brand. That might point to an answer to the question that I had, when I just glanced at this headline. When I sleep is when I charge my watch. So how do you deal with that? Quoting German, quote, one practical necessity for sleep tracking in a smart watch is a battery that can last multiple days.

Each Apple Watch model to date is advertised as being able to last a day with the need to charge it each night. In comparison, Fitbit's watches with sleep tracking are marketed as being able to last as long as a week on one charge. Some options may include Apple increasing the watch's battery life or creating a way to run sleep tracking overnight

as a part of a low power mode. It could also just require a battery charge in the morning, end quote. Follow up on that HoloLens 2 news from yesterday. When reading the coverage yesterday, I noticed that not a few people made the comment about the HoloLens 2 along the lines of, forget using this on the factory floor. The use case for this headset is obviously on the,

the battlefield. And actually, I did not know this yesterday, but Microsoft already has a $479 million contract with the U.S. Army for HoloLens usage. They signed it in November. The company could deliver 100,000 headsets over the course of the contract. Well, some Microsoft employees have noticed this and recently circulated a letter internally that read in part, quote, while the company has previously licensed tech to the U.S. military, it has never crossed the line into weapons development. With this contract, it does, end quote. Apparently more than 100 Microsoft employees have signed this letter. Well, after the HoloLens keynote at Mobile World Congress yesterday, Microsoft CEO Sachin Adela spoke with CNN business to respond to the employee pushback,

saying, quote, we made a principal decision that we're not going to withhold technology from institutions that we have elected in democracies to protect the freedoms we enjoy. We were very transparent about that decision and will continue to have that dialogue with employees, end quote. The Federal Trade Commission has announced a new task force that it says will monitor competition in, quote, technology-related sectors. Quoting from the Verge, the task force will include current officials working in the agency's Bureau of Competition in order to, quote, enhance the Bureau's focus on.

on technology-related sectors of the economy, including markets in which online platforms compete, end quote. It will also include 17 staff attorneys who will be tasked with investigating anti-competitive behavior in the tech industry, end quote. So, color me officially skeptical that this will amount to a hill of beans ultimately, but this little nugget is interesting or concerning,

depending on which side of the fence you come down on in terms of regulation or antitrust action regarding big tech companies. Apparently, the task force will also be charged with retroactively investigating mergers that have already been completed. The task force is going to be run under the auspices of the FTC's Bureau of Competition, and the following quote will reference Bruce Hoffman, the director of that bureau. Quoting from the Verge again, Hoffman confirmed that the task force would look into consummated mergers, but could not name any investigation specifically. When it comes to remedies for problematic mergers, Hoffman said that firms could be, quote, broken out or could be forced to, quote, spin off previous acquisitions as new competitors in order to recreate the markets pre-merger, end quote. Coinbase is officially adding XRP to its Coinbase Pro exchange, causing the price of that cryptocurrency to jump around 10% in the last 24 hours.

If you're not familiar with XRP, it is the digital asset tied to the startup ripple. the company that developed XRP to become the third largest cryptocurrency by market cap. XRP was designed for payments, specifically cross-border and cross-financial institution payments. In essence, it wants to replace the swift interbank payments system. On the Internet History podcast, I did an episode a couple months ago where I interviewed Ripple co-founder David Schwartz, so check that out if you want to learn more about Ripple and XRP. Ripple is a weird fish in the crypto space. it's hugely controversial in some quarters because of its willingness to work with big global banking in some ways

that run counter to the fiercely libertarian ethos of others in the crypto space. And Ripple stands are among the most vocal and strident in the universe of crypto tribes when it comes to defending their favorite crypto project. For our purposes, it is worth noting that both Coinbase and Ripple share very prominent Silicon Valley investors, among them Andriesen Horowitz. Fun little headline from Mobile World Congress. I'm going to literally use the actual Verge headline. This 18,000 mill-amp hour battery has a phone in it.

I'm speaking of the Energizer PowerMax P18K Pop. France's Avenir Telecom licensed the Energizer brand to make this phone. So that's a bit unusual. But what's more unusual, quoting Vlad Savov. from the verge. This dark blue unit measures in at 18 millimeters of thickness, according to Avenir's spec sheet, but stacking it side by side with a more conventional smartphone, I'd say a more accurate articulation of its thickness would be about three and a half iPhones. This phone is immense, or is it technically a battery with a phone in it? An epic battery of such proportions had better

last a long time and Avenir promises a week's worth of use or two full days, 48 hours of continuous video playback. That sounds conservative since we got a week from a phone with a battery measuring about half as large, end quote. So I have, among others, been arguing for a while now that bigger phones with bigger batteries should be a thing. And though this does seem like a bit of overkill. It is nice to see at least someone going in this direction, but still there's some obvious tradeoffs with a battery that big. Vlad says the battery takes eight hours to charge fully, and that's not even mentioning what it might feel like in your pocket to carry a brick around. Oh, and when you hold it to your ear to take a call, you fool on look like Michael

Douglas in that scene from the original Wall Street movie where he's talking on a 1980s cell phone on the beach. I didn't go with this story yesterday because I wanted to give Mobile World Congress its due, but I'm sure you've heard about it by now, Casey Newton's big investigative feature in The Verge about the secret lives of Facebook content moderators. Check the show notes for the story called The Trauma Floor, and please read it, not just because it's jaw-dropping,

not just because everyone in tech has been commenting on it for the last 24 hours, but also because I am scheduled to talk to Casey. about it for a weekend bonus episode this week. The first few paragraphs will rivet you, but also to give you a taste, let me quote from this summary passage, quote, collectively the employees described a workplace that is perpetually teetering on the brink of chaos. It is an environment where workers cope by telling dark jokes about committing suicide, then smoke weed during breaks to numb their emotions. It's a place where employees can be fired for making just a few errors a week, and where those who remain living,

fear of the former colleagues who return seeking vengeance. It's a place where in stark contrast to the perks lavished on Facebook employees, team leaders, micromanaged content moderators every bathroom and prayer break, where employees, desperate for a dopamine rush amid the misery, have been found having sex inside stairwells and a room reserved for lactating mothers, where people develop severe anxiety while still in training and continue to struggle with trauma symptoms long after they leave, and where the counseling that cognizant offers them ends the moment they quit or simply let go. The moderators told me it's a place where the conspiracy videos and memes that they see each day gradually lead them to embrace fringe views. One auditor walks

the floor promoting the idea that the earth is flat. A former employee told me he has begun to question certain aspects of the Holocaust. Another former employee who told me he has mapped every escape route of his house and sleeps with a gun at his side said, quote, I no longer believe 9-11 was a terrorist attack, end quote. So, yeah, this piece hits on a lot of themes we've been chewing over lately. A couple of follow-ups, even though I didn't even cover this yesterday, it should be noted that when Casey told Facebook he was running this story, Facebook allowed him to visit the content moderation offices run by the contractor. It is engaged for these purposes. That's the cognizant that was named in the previous quote. And Facebook put up a blog post recently titled, Our

commitment to our content reviewers. And according to Bloomberg, Facebook employees have been debating the piece as well. Quote, on Facebook's message boards, employees said that the specter of automating away content review jobs should make the company more sensitive to the lives of the humans doing the job in the meantime. It seems like the least we could do is treat people well before they get replaced, one of them wrote, end quote. Thank you, Princeton Tech Meetup for having me last night was good fun and hopefully it was a good talk for all y'all and thank you to the members of the mutant podcast army that did show up sorry that we didn't get a chance to talk more afterwards it wasn't just that i was signing books it was also that i had to catch a train so as not to

make it back to penn station after midnight but again tri-state area peeps we will have a new york city listener meet up soon i promise i'll let you know as soon as soon as you'll let you know as soon as as I know when we're going to do it. Talk to you tomorrow.