Tech Brew Ride Home - Tue. 07/07 – Will The US Government Ban TikTok?

Episode Date: July 7, 2020

TikTok pulls it’s app completely for the Hong Kong market. But could the US ban TikTok in the US market? And India shows us what happens when TikTok gets banned. Palantir is about to IPO. A new video compression standard is actually a big deal. And Alphabet’s Loon “moonshot” hits a major milestone. Sponsors: Doubleup.agency LinkedIn.com/ride Links: TikTok to pull out of Hong Kong (Axios) U.S. is ‘looking at’ banning TikTok and Chinese social media apps, Pompeo says (CNBC) India’s TikTok shutdown has left careers and fortunes in tatters (Wired) Secretive data startup Palantir has confidentially filed for an IPO (TechCrunch) Palantir Technologies Files to Go Public (NYTimes) Fraunhofer’s VVC promises to reduce video file sizes by 50% to improve mobile network efficiency (VentureBeat) 73. "Father" of the MP3, Karlheinz Brandenburg (Internet History Podcast) U.S. tech chiefs to testify before House antitrust panel on July 27: committee (Reuters) A Bird? A Plane? No, It’s a Google Balloon Beaming the Internet (NYTimes) 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 Tuesday, July 7th, 2020. I'm Brian McCullough today. TikTok pulls its app completely for the Hong Kong market. But could the U.S. ban TikTok in the U.S. market? And India is showing us what happens when TikTok gets banned in a market. Palantir is about the IPO.

A new video compression standard is actually a pretty big deal. And Alphabet's Loon Moonshot project hits a major milestone. Here's what you missed today in the world of tech. I told you yesterday that social media platforms were hitting the pause button in terms of cooperating with requests from authorities for user data in Hong Kong. Well, TikTok has gone one step further and actually pulled the TikTok app completely from the Google Play and Apple App Store in Hong Kong in light of that new security law we talked about yesterday. TikTok says it doesn't and wouldn't share user info with the Chinese government. quoting Axios. In light of recent events, we've decided to stop operations of the TikTok app in Hong Kong. A spokesperson told Axios on Monday night, observers have said the new law forces companies doing business in Hong Kong to provide user data to the Chinese government, as well as to comply with censorship requests. The move comes as TikTok parent bite dance has looked to more clearly separate TikTok, which operates outside of China from a similar app used within mainland China.

The company has said that TikTok has not shared data with the Chinese government, nor would it, a position that would be difficult, if not impossible, to maintain under the new law, end quote. Now, Hong Kong is not a very big market for TikTok. Estimates are that there are maybe only around 150,000 TikTok users in Hong Kong, but at the same time, remember I just read you about TikTok wanting to distance itself from the Chinese government. remember that when I tell you this. In an interview on Monday, U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said that the U.S. is, quote, looking at banning TikTok and other Chinese social media apps in the U.S., quoting CNBC. When asked in a Fox News interview if the U.S. should be looking at banning TikTok and other Chinese social media apps, Pompeo said, quote, we are taking this very seriously. We are certainly looking at it. We have worked on this very issue for a long time.

said, whether it was the problems of having Huawei technology and your infrastructure, we've gone all over the world, and we're making real progress getting that out. We declared ZTE a danger to American national security, Pompeo added, citing the two Chinese telecommunications networking companies. Quote, with respect to Chinese apps on people's cell phones, the United States will get this one right to, end quote. So I don't have an opinion either way on potentially banning TikTok. So don't get the impression from what I'm about to say that I'm somehow rooting for this or hoping that it happens. But if such a thing did happen, if the U.S. banned TikTok, like, that would be absolutely wild. On the one hand, how big a deal would it be if a major social network suddenly went away?

I'm not suggesting people would riot or anything, but, you know, as Mike Butcher only kind of sort of was joking on Twitter, quote, well, this would lose Trump the election for Gen Z right off the bat, end quote. But at the same time, remember how the teens allegedly organized that attempt to buy fake tickets to the Trump rally on TikTok? Maybe Trump sees TikTok as a weapon wielded by his political enemies in more ways than one. But also, again, what would happen? Like, would some alternative platform rise up to take all the suddenly high and dry TikTokers in? Facebook just announced it was shutting down. TikTok clone. It's been a while since there was a full-on platform diaspora. I guess the canonical example

is Reddit becoming Reddit because users fled dig on mass. But in a modern, mature social platform sense, what would happen if a platform suddenly disappeared? Would the community just evaporate? Like we've seen platforms sort of sort by generational cohort, the youngs onto Snapchat first and Instagram and now the younger youngs onto TikTok. But how would the sorting happen if a platform straight up evaporated? Again, not hoping that this would happen, not even thinking it will. I think this is probably posturing for leverage on the part of the U.S. government. But if it did happen, it would be absolutely fascinating. And one other angle here. What about the TikTok creators and influencers? Because look, this is all happening in India right now. Remember, India,

banned TikTok outright. So how's that going? Well, Wired takes a look at the whole situation. And among other things, it's been devastating for, as I said, TikTok influencers. Let me quote from this piece. In the western city of Surratt, TikTok creator Shavani Kapila with 10.9 million followers was in tears because she was unable to access the app any longer. Until then, she was known in her neighborhood as the girl who makes TikTok videos. Now she says she feels like her past two years, quote, do not exist anymore. I still open the app 40 times a day, just out of habit, says Capilla, whose account name was at little gloves, a nod to her tiny hands, quote, TikTok gave birth to me, made me who I am, end quote. And now she doesn't know how to charge ahead, rebuild the same audience, and how to

pay her bills. Vats and Capilla are among the 1.2 million Indian creators. who turned to TikTok to express themselves, building a sprawling network of followers and pad their bank accounts in a good month. VATS would end up earning around $2,000 to $2,700, and during a bad month, it would only go as low as $670. On average, a Category A influencer could charge up to $4,000 to $5,300, but these account for a small percentage of the overall creator economy, end quote. See, India was actually TikTok's biggest market outside of China, 200 million monthly active users. So on the one hand, relating to the previous segment, TikTok doesn't want to lose the U.S. market on top of losing the Indian market. But also, this is what we've spoken about before, about the whole idea of the balkanization of the web, of the web and the internet fracturing into dozens of different internets all along, shifting.

and confusing geopolitical lines. The piece does mention that a bunch of homegrown Indian TikTok clones are rising up, but, you know, people losing their followers and thus their actual livelihoods. You think losing your save game on Grand Theft Auto that you've been playing for years would be devastating. Well, it's a whole new world when you think about people literally losing the fame that they accumulated. Palantir has apparently filed its S-1 with the SEC. The first step in going public. When you file an S1, there's a reason that they often say you're filing confidentially.

No word from Palantir at this point on when the IPO could actually happen. How many shares would be offered? The price range of the shares and thus were unable to guess on the valuation at the moment. Quoting TechCrunch, confidential IPO filings allow companies to bypass the traditional IPO filing mechanisms that give insights into their inner workings, such as financial figures and potential risks. Instead, Palantir can explore the early stages of setting itself up for a public listing without the public scrutiny that comes with the process. The strategy has been used by companies such as Spotify, Slack, and Uber. However, a confidential filing doesn't always translate to an IPO, end quote.

Aha! Secrecy! Really on brand for Palantir, don't you think? If you're not familiar with Palantir, well, here you go, quoting from TechCrutch again. Palantir is one of the more secretive firms in Silicon Valley, a provider. writer of big data and analytics technologies, including to the U.S. government and intelligence community. Much of that work has drawn controversies from privacy and civil liberties activists. For example, investigations show that the company's data mining software was used to create profiles of immigrants and consequently aid deportation efforts by the ICE, end quote. And this is from the New York Times, quote, Palantir is one of the tech industry's most

valuable private companies with a valuation of $20 billion. $2003 by Peter Thiel, Joe Lonsdale, Nathan Gettings, Stephen Cohen, and Alex Karp, who is its chief executive. The company began working with governments, law enforcement, and the defense industry to analyze and process their data, but has expanded into other areas. Palantir has attracted more than $3 billion in venture capital funding from investors, including Incutel, the investment arm of the Central Intelligence Agency, Founders Fund, Mr. Teal's investment firm, Fidelity and Tiger Global Management. despite persistent speculation about its prospects as a public company Palantir had avoided listing its shares in part because of the secretive nature of its business. A public listing would reveal a fuller picture of Palantir's work, particularly with government agencies for the first time, end quote. Fraunhofer, that sort of weird hybrid society and research institution in Germany,

that brought us the MP3 codec all those years ago, has announced H.266, also known as VVC, a new video compression standard that Frounhofer says cuts file sizes by around 50% compared to its predecessor, and it does so without compromising image quality in any way. In fact, quoting VentraBeat, VVC is Fraunhofer's direct sequel to HEVC, the high-efficiency video coding standard that's been in use since 2013. While H-EVC was considered to be impressively adept for its time at cutting down video file sizes, VVC is being billed as a quantum leap encoding efficiency, reducing data requirements by around 50% without compromising visual quality. As a result, Fraunhofer says, a 4K video that previously required 10 gigabytes of data for 90 minutes of video,

can now be encoded in 5 gigabytes of data, ideal for streaming ultra-high-resolution videos to TVs or 360-degree panoramic videos to VR headsets. Since 4K, 8K and 360-degree videos contain far more data than the sub-2K and smaller videos that dominated TVs and monitors for the first half of the 2010s, they're much more likely to fill devices and choke mobile networks, a factor that made commercial transmission of such videos extremely difficult, if not completely impractical. Versatile video coding, which is what VVC stands for, promises, to enable efficient transmission and storage across all video resolutions, ranging from the classic 480PSD, through 8K, as well as supporting HDR color palettes, which require more bits per pixel

for superior rendering of brightness, darkness, and intermediate shading. Additionally, VVC supports adaptive resolution changes and tile-based streaming with the ability to support wider color gamuts and resolutions even higher than 8K in the future. As was the case with each prior protocol. H-266-V-C will require new encoding and decoding chips, which Fraunhover says, quote, are currently being designed, end quote. Major chip and technology companies, including Apple, Erickson, Intel, Huawei, Microsoft, Qualcomm, and Sony are all industry partners, virtually guaranteeing widespread adoption from an early date, end quote.

You might think that this is a boring story, you know, yay, some new file type that makes stuff smaller. But actually, this sort of stuff is often huge. Again, the MP3, which the Frownhofer society developed, upended the entire music industry. And actually, if you want to hear more about how Frownhofer works, how they're these amazing digital compression wizards, and how they actually quietly make a ton of money licensing what they do, over at the Internet History Podcast, I once interviewed Carl Heitz-Brandenberg, one-time head of the Fronhofer Society and inventor of the MP3. If you're curious, link to that episode of the Internet History Podcast in the show notes. Quick follow-up here.

We now have a date for when the Fab Four will testify before the House Judiciary Committee relating to antitrust issues. The Fab Four, of course, means the CEOs of Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google. Mark your calendars. It's going to be July 27th. But also note, they will be allowed to appear virtually. So that's going to be wild. Maybe we should all just get on a mega Zoom call or something. Here's the statement from House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerry Nadler and Antitrust Subcommittee Chairman David Sissaline. Since last June, the subcommittee has been investigating the dominance of a small number of digital platforms and the adequacy of existing antitrust laws and enforcement. Given the central role these corporations play in the lives of the American people, it is critical that their CEOs are forthcoming. As we have said from the start, their testimony is essential for us to complete this investigation, end quote.

Finally today, a milestone worth marking. Alphabet's Loon is that moonshot company that wants to deliver internet via balloons. Yes, balloons, if you'll remember. Well, Loon has apparently started providing internet service in Kenya today. in the first ever commercial deployment of its tech. Loon is delivering 4GLTE to tens of thousands of people living in a remote 31,000 square mile area in Kenya, again via balloon. Balloons that hover 12 miles in the stratosphere, way above where commercial airplanes fly,

quoting the New York Times. Lune, a unit of Google's parent company Alphabet, launched 35 balloons in recent months in preparation for Tuesday's start. It is collaborating with Telecom Kenya, the East African Nations, third largest carrier. The balloons had previously been used only in emergency situations, such as in Puerto Rico in 2017 after Hurricane Maria wiped out cell towers. Loon bills the service as a cost-effective solution to the difficult challenge of bringing internet access to people in underserved remote areas. The Kenya venture is being closely watched by telecom providers and other countries as a test of

whether the technology is reliable and the service can be profitable. The balloons made from sheets of polyethylene are the size of tennis courts. They are powered by solar panels and controlled by software on the ground. While up in the air, they act as floating cell towers, transmitting internet signals to ground stations and personal devices. They last for well over 100 days in the stratosphere before being returned to Earth. By allowing phone companies to expand their coverage where needed, the balloons are intended to offer countries a cheaper option than laying cables or building cell towers. This could be effective in Africa, where just over 28% of the continent's 1.3 billion people were using the internet in 2019, the lowest rate in any region worldwide,

according to the International Telecommunication Union, a United Nations agency. And even as more users have come online, internet costs remain too high for many Africans. The Kenyan authorities have said the balloons will help the country retain its competitive advantage in technological innovation. In the course of the testing, that led up to Tuesday's launch. Over 35,000 users on the telecom network connected to the internet through a loon balloon. The users, some in remote towns in Kenya, use the service to stream video, browse websites, and make video and voice calls on applications like WhatsApp, end quote. Running behind today, Tuesdays are always, always my busiest day. So nothing much to say today.

Talk to you tomorrow.