Tech Brew Ride Home - Wed. 06/05 - YouTube Takes Action-ish

Starting point is 00:00:00 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 Wednesday, June 5th, 2019. I'm Brian McCullough today. YouTube actually does make some changes. Peloton is going public. Could Prime open Amazon up to anti-competitive scrutiny? More on that sign-in with Apple controversy and why your local police

Starting point is 00:00:52 department might want to buy you a ring smart doorbell. Here's what you missed today in the world of tech. So I'm not in any way suggesting that this is related, but I guess my rant yesterday had crazy good timing because YouTube today announced its community guidelines were changing in order to ban videos that promote the superiority of any group over any other group in order to justify discrimination. This is widely expected to result in the removal of thousands of YouTube channels, quoting Casey Newton in The Verge. The Openness of YouTube's platform has helped creativity and access to information thrive, the company said in a blog post. It's our responsibility to protect that and prevent our platform from being used to incite

Starting point is 00:01:46 hatred, harassment, discrimination, and violence, end quote. The changes announced on Wednesday attempt to improve its content moderation in three ways. First, the ban on supremacists will remove Nazis and other extremists who advocate segregation or exclusion based on age, gender, race, religion, sexual orientation or veteran status. In addition to these categories, YouTube is adding cast, which has significant implications in India, and well-documented violent events, such as the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting and 9-11. Users are no longer allowed to post videos saying those events did not happen, YouTube said. Second, YouTube said it would expand efforts announced in January to reduce the spread of what it calls borderline content and harmful misinformation. The

Starting point is 00:02:35 policy, which applies to videos that flirt with violating the community guidelines but ultimately fall short, aims to limit the promotion of those videos through recommendations. YouTube said the policy, which affects videos including flat-earthers and peddlers of phony miracle cures, had already decreased the number of views that borderline videos received by 50%. In the future, the company said, it will recommend videos from more authoritative sources like top news channels in its next watch panel. Finally, YouTube said it would restrict channels from monetizing their videos if they are found to, quote, repeatedly brush up against our hate speech policies, end quote.

Starting point is 00:03:14 Those channels will not be able to run ads or use super chat, which lets channel subscribers pay creators directly for extra chat features. The last change comes after BuzzFeed reported that the paid commenting system had been used to fund creators of videos featuring racism and hate speech, end quote. So YouTube is, in fact, doing something. I guess, which is all I was kind of ranting about to begin with yesterday. This is largely about making rules around specific types of content, though. It remains to be seen if this is a fundamental change or if the algorithm is still primed

Starting point is 00:03:53 for addictive behavior. And if the bias in that case is still toward, as I said yesterday, the more provocative stuff. Connected bike and treadmill maker Peloton says it has confidentially filed for an IPO. Details are sketchy beyond that, quoting The Verge. Peloton did not clarify how many shares it intends to sell or what the price range would be. Its latest round of funding in August of 2018 valued the fitness company at $4.15 billion. Peloton CEO John Foley remarked last year that Peloton has a, quote, beautiful business model and that it was, quote, weirdly profitable.

Starting point is 00:04:36 Peloton began selling its connected indoor cycling bike in 2014. It has a monitor on which users can stream live or on-demand classes so they can follow along. Since its rise, other traditional cycling studios and fitness equipment manufacturers have come out with similar devices with brands like flywheel, SoulCycle, and Nordic Track, now offering either their own versions of either a connected bike or on-demand class content. In 2018, Peloton shipped its second equipment, the Peloton Treadtreadmill. It is rumored that the company may be working on its third piece of equipment, a rowing machine, after customers found the URL Pelotonrowing.com and other rowing-related domains registered under Peloton Interactive, end quote. Speaking of regulators and regulations, the SEC is suing kick for allegedly running an unregistered security sale

Starting point is 00:05:33 when it launched an ICO for its kin token during the great ICU bubble of 2017. You might know KIC as a messaging app, but yes, they raised $100 million via an ICO for cryptocurrency that was supposed to do something. Quoting CoinDesk, as alleged in the SEC's complaint, Kik had lost money for years on its sole product, an online messaging application, and the company's management predicted internally that it would run out of money in 2017. Kicks losses averaged about $30 million a year, according to the SEC, and earlier attempts by KIC to be acquired by a larger technology company had failed with seven potential suitors all

Starting point is 00:06:15 declining to buy or merge with the company. In early 2017, Kik sought to pivot to a new type of business, which it financed through the sale of one trillion digital tokens. The company sold its kin tokens to the public and at a discount of price to wealthy purchasers, raising more than $55 million from U.S. investors. The SEC complaint alleges that KIN tokens traded recently at about half of the value that public investors paid in the offering, end quote. Netflix says it is testing an Instagram-like feed. It's calling the feed extras, and it already contains things like trailers, photos, and alerts about new shows. Quoting variety. Users who are in included in the test group, can access it through a dedicated button, and it's not replacing

Starting point is 00:07:12 any of the app's other elements. Videos in the feed play automatically but without sound. Image galleries can be scrolled horizontally. Interestingly, these images aren't available anywhere else within Netflix's app. Also notable, the feed emphasizes sharing recommendations with others through third-party apps, as well as adding titles to your list. Trailers do not launch into full-length videos, users have to instead click through to a show, end quote. From the good luck with that one file, apparently last week at Facebook's annual shareholder meeting, 68% of outside shareholders voted in favor of ousting Mark Zuckerberg as chairman of the company. That is up from last year when a similar vote was held, and 51% wanted to boot Zuck.

Starting point is 00:08:07 Furthermore, 83.2% of outside shareholders also backed a proposal to scrap Facebook's dual share class structure. Currently, Class A shareholders have one vote for each share while Class B shareholders get 10 votes a share. Management and directors control Class B shares. In fact, Zuckerberg happens to own more than 75% of Class B stock, meaning he has roughly 60% of the voting power at Facebook. He and colleagues voted down the independent chairman proposal and the dual class share plans, meaning they were crushed despite the uprising from outside investors. Put another way, Zuckerberg and his closest allies always have the Trump card if they disagree with shareholders, end quote. And that's why I said good luck with that one. Mark Zuckerberg will never have to do

Starting point is 00:08:59 anything inside the confines of the Facebook corporate structure that Mark Zuckerberg doesn't want to do ever. More smoke around the regulatory fires that have sprung up over the past week. Sources are telling Jason Delray at Recode that the FTC has quietly been questioning Amazon's competitors about a range of issues, including Amazon Prime's bundling of services, and as to how Amazon competes with its own marketplace sellers. Let's take some of these lines of inquiry in order. First, we have the fulfillment by Amazon pricing structure. Fulfillment by Amazon or FBA allows Amazon's sales. sellers to use Amazon warehouses and let Amazon take care of all the packaging and shipping. Quoting Del Rey, Amazon charges their sellers more for FBA services when they are used for an order

Starting point is 00:09:54 placed on a competing website instead of on Amazon.com. For example, Amazon charges sellers $4.76 to pick, pack, ship, and handle customer service for an FBA item sold on Amazon that weighs between one and two pounds. That same item, though, would cost 75% more. or $8.35 in FBA fees if Amazon had to ship it out to a customer who bought the product on competing platforms like Etsy, eBay, or the seller's own online store. This discrepancy has caught the FTC's attention, Recode's source says, end quote. Then you have the notion of Amazon competing with sellers on its own Amazon marketplace. Amazon now has 100 in-house brands that compete with the brands that sell in the marketplace. The FTC is apparently

Starting point is 00:10:41 looking at how aggressively Amazon promotes its own brands at the expense of others, and if Amazon unfairly uses sales data from the marketplace to advantage its own products. And third, maybe most interestingly, you pay $119 a year to get all the perks inherent in Amazon Prime, right? Quoting Del Rey. But the FTC has shown interest in the question of whether this bundling of services allows Amazon to unfairly undercut competitors. one line of thinking. If Amazon doesn't need to profit directly from the annual Prime membership fee, and it's not clear that it does, how are competitors who have to make money from an individual service supposed to compete on price, end quote? So that is interesting. If Prime itself is a thing that makes Amazon vulnerable

Starting point is 00:11:32 to charges of anti-competitive behavior, boy, that's going after the Golden Goose, right? Webb Smith tweeted, quote, this ends with one answer. There's never been a more consumer-friendly platform. That's been the precedent since 1982. Structuralism doesn't matter. Facebook is vulnerable, Google is vulnerable, Amazon won't be vulnerable until consumers complain about prices and convenience, end quote. Well, frankly, Webb, I'm not entirely sure that that's true anymore. There continues to be more grousing about that sign-in with Apple service. According to Reuters, Apple's guidelines will require developers to put its sign-in with Apple login button above any other rival sign-in buttons, say from Facebook or Google.

Starting point is 00:12:30 Quote, the move to give Apple Prime placement is significant because users often select the default or top option on apps. And Apple will require apps to offer its button if they want to offer options to log in with Facebook or Google. Apple's guidelines do not appear to impose requirements on apps that have their own dedicated login system and do not use third-party buttons from Google or Facebook, such as apps from GameMaker Nintendo. Apple's button also works on websites. Its use will not be required there because Apple does not hold review power over websites the way it does apps on its own store, but Apple's guidelines still ask it to be given top placement if it is used, end quote. Which brings us back to the idea that this is an odd

Starting point is 00:13:19 time for Apple to be so aggressive about making this move, so nakedly directed at Facebook and Google, at the very time when the grip that it holds over the iOS platform generally and the App Store platform specifically has started to come under fire. As Casey Newton wrote in his newsletter, On the whole, I'm glad Apple built a login tool. With Snap's similar tool launching a year ago, you could argue that we are seeing the dawn of a new era of authentication products built on the idea of gathering as little data as possible rather than the reverse. Having a privacy-minded tech company building an identity product puts positive competition on its data-hungry rivals. And isn't competition the thing that people like me are always

Starting point is 00:14:02 begging for from the marketplace. But when a company with Apple's power in the marketplace makes a feature mandatory, it all starts to feel less like competition and more like brute force. Perhaps there is no user privacy-focused login tool compelling enough to get most developers to adopt Apple login voluntarily. But that's the free market at work. And I'd rather have the onus on Apple to make its products more compelling rather than on developers to bend to its will. In January, for reasons I found to be completely justified, Apple revoked the enterprise certificates that Facebook and Google rely on to run their businesses. But still, I said then, Apple's power over other tech giants ought to worry the rest of us. Here, Apple as our de facto privacy regulator has shown its face again.

Starting point is 00:14:52 I don't know how precisely to weigh the value of more private login tools against the cost of making an entire developer ecosystem captive to the policy whims of the world's biggest. company, but perhaps that's where our actual regulators, which is to say Congress, should intervene, end quote. The question around this is becoming, is the seemingly consumer-friendly sheen of privacy enough of a PR cloak to dress up what in any other context would have to be seen as an overly aggressive flexing of platform power. Finally, today, as consumers increasingly outfit their homes with cameras, especially smart cameras like the ring doorbell cameras from Amazon, there's one constituency that is absolutely thrilled. Local police departments. In fact, they're so thrilled, they might even pay for you to install one of these, quoting from CNET.

Starting point is 00:15:54 While residential neighborhoods aren't usually lined with security cameras, the smart doorbells popularity has essentially created private surveillance networks powered by Amazon and promoted by police departments. Police departments across the country, from major cities like Houston to towns with fewer than 30,000 people have offered free or discounted ring doorbells to citizens, sometimes using taxpayer funds to pay for Amazon's products. While ring owners are supposed to have a choice on providing police footage, in some giveaways, police require recipients to turn over footage when requested. More than 50 local police departments across the U.S. have partnered with Ring over the last two years, lauding how the Amazon-owned product allows them to access security footage in areas

Starting point is 00:16:42 that typically don't have cameras on suburban doorsteps, end quote. What was it I said last week? That's modern tech in a nutshell. For every convenience you get, you have to anticipate some sort of Orwellian or Kafka-esque trade-off as well. Oh, and some tech oligarch getting rich off the whole arrangement somewhere in the background. That's all for today. As always, I'm Brian McCullough, and you can follow me on Twitter at Brian MCC. The show subreddit where people tip me stories, two of which I use today, is R slash ride home. And also, feel free to talk amongst yourselves over there. You are some smart cookies in that subreddit. And as always, the link to the ad-free version of the show, which allows you to support my work on this show every day directly,

Starting point is 00:17:40 is the very bottom link in the show notes. Talk to you tomorrow.

Tech Brew Ride Home - Wed. 06/05 - YouTube Takes Action-ish

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