DataDownload: Can Section 230 be “terminated”?
DataDownload: Can Section 230 be “terminated”? A weekly summary of all things Media, Data, Emerging Tech View this email in your browser
When you read about M&A, there’s always a question that lurks behind the headlines. Is it opportunistic or defensive? So this week, with a slew of transactions making news, it’s worth wondering. BuzzFeed buys HuffPo, Bertelsmann buys Simon & Schuster, Salesforce buys Slack… and more on the way. Consolidation is in the air.
Meanwhile, cyberattacks on America’s health systems by Russian criminals remind us all just how dependant on tech we are, as an outage at AWS had Alexa devices and Roomba vacumes all frozen.
The world is complicated — which is why we listen to Bill Gates and Rashida Jones on their “Ask Big Questions” podcast. This week they’re asking “Is inequality inevitable?” And the conversation is timely and relevant.
We’re looking forward to 2021, as the Media Lab embraces hard questions and invites you to help us look around the corner.
Ideas, feedback, thoughts? We always love hearing from you at Steve@NYCMediaLab.org.
Happy Thanksgiving -
Steve
Steven Rosenbaum
Executive Director
The NYC Media Lab
Steve@NYCMediaLab.org Must-Read What Is Section 230 and Can It Be ‘Terminated’?
Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act protects “interactive computer services” — FAMGA and below — from the legal liability of the content their users create. Essentially, it helped make the internet what it is today, for better or for worse. In Wired’s September opinion piece — Section 230 Is a Government License to Build Rage Machines — writer David Chavern called it an incentive for both vigilant and slack moderation (with the latter being much more prevalent).
Chavern suggested that while limiting the legislation won’t “stop the spread of all hateful content” it may, “at the very least, require the platforms to carefully track and filter what they promote.” But limitation isn’t on the government’s mind: both parties have suggested revoking Section 230 outright, though we’ll likely only find out if that happens next year. Though, experts previously told Newsweek that revoking the internet law was unlikely, “and [we] will instead see amendments or clarifications to the current provision.”
4 min read
Read more Patients of a Vermont Hospital Are Left ‘In the Dark’ After a Cyberattack
In late October a Vermont cancer center was struck by a cyberattack from a group of Russian-speaking hackers, plunging it into a darker time: “staff fell back on written notes and faxes, leafing through masses of paper to access vital information. They tried to reconstruct complex chemotherapy protocols from memory.” The ransomware attack was part of a larger wave that hit about a dozen US hospitals… except Vermont didn’t receive a ransom note: “it feels scouted in the sense that it would cause a ton of panic.”
9 min read
Read More Tech+Media Salesforce Could Buy Microsoft Teams Rival Slack Next Week Slack’s taking a hit, and Salesforce is considering to swoop in and purchase the chat app. As of October 2019, Slack’s DAUs hovered around 12M — and with spending cutbacks from larger customers along with downsizing or shutdowns during the pandemic, their numbers aren’t like to be anywhere near Microsoft Teams, which had 20M DAUs around November 2019 and currently has 115M DAUs.
Part of the reason is, simply, that Slack is expensive, even with their discounted pricing per user. Pre-pandemic, “[Slack] was charging users between $80 and $150 per user per year for a chat app, while Microsoft charged $60 a year per user for Office 365,” which includes Teams.
2 min read Read More The Penguin Random House–Simon & Schuster Merger’s About Amazon
Penguin Random House owner Bertelsmann has bought Simon & Schuster in a $2.18B deal. The result of which… is a titan that publishes a third of all books in the US. “On paper, this merger is deplorable and should [have been] blocked,” writes The Atlantic staff writer Franklin Foer (who’s published by PRH). In the end, authors will get the short end of the stick as the book business becomes more commodified, advances shrink, and, “like the movie industry,” further focus will be placed on sequels and stars. But that’s not even the biggest threat. As enormous as the merger is, it’s a reaction to Amazon’s dominance:
“The rise of Amazon accelerated the demise of Borders and the diminishment of Barnes & Noble. If it’s correct to worry about a merged company that publishes perhaps 33 percent of new books, then surely it’s correct to worry more about the fact that Amazon now sells 49 percent of them.”
4 min read Read More Social Media Companies All Starting to Look the Same
It’s fascinating and a bit sad to read what some social platforms started out as: Instagram launched a decade ago as a photo-sharing app targeted at artists and designers; Snapchat was just a temporal PM app for close friends; Twitter was a “public ideas platform.” But besides Reddit and Twitch (and even the former is now crowding its feed with live Broadcasts), every major social platform is adapting the successful ideas of every other major platform.
For example, this week Snapchat launched Spotlight — a TikTok-like “video tab within its app that, like TikTok, distributes videos based more on how popular they are than on who created them.” Meanwhile, in August, Facebook launched Reels for Instagram, its TikTok competitor. Here’s hoping Reddit won’t start thinking of adding Stories.
1 min read
Read More What We’re Watching Introducing Douglas — Autonomous Digital Human
Digital Domain — the VFX studio behind recent Marvel movies, AAA game cinematics, and some stunning VR work — is developing Douglas, “the most realistic real-time autonomous digital human in the world…. designed to break down the barriers in human-to-machine interactions, yielding conversations that feel natural and easy.” See Douglas on a live call below, and check out Trenario, a company doing something similar with digital presenters.
2 min watch
Watch Now What We’re Listening To Podcast: Is Inequality Inevitable?
2020 has brought to light a lot of issues, including the growing inequality in the US. We’re seeing huge gaps in income, access to healthcare, and quality of education across the country. Economist Raj Chetty joins the podcast to talk about his groundbreaking research on opportunity in America. Then Mayor Aja Brown joins the conversation to talk about how she’s leveling the playing field in Compton.
45 min listen
Listen Now Virtual Events Virtual Event: EdgeCut Sanity
Date: December 5, 1PM-4PM EST
EdgeCut presents an exciting roster of short performance works by an international group of artists on the theme SANITY — exploring the meaning of liveness, embodiment, and gathering in digital space. Register Here.
Virtual Event: Amazon AWS Re:Invent
Date: November 30 — December 18
“The world’s biggest cloud vendor has shifted its annual event online and spread it across three weeks.” (InfoWorld) Register Here. A Deeper Look The Tenuous Promise of the Substack Dream
Back in the 90s, when Steven Levy was writing a column for Macworld magazine, he came up with a ridiculous idea (at least, for 1995): what if he put the column on the internet, charged a dollar per edition, and completely bypassed Macworld? Levy knew this wasn’t feasible at the time — free email addresses had yet to arrive (actually, they were a year away), the tools weren’t there (“weblog” was coined in 1997), and PayPal and Stripe were years away.
Now, the pieces are in place, and there aren’t just billions glued to their screens, but plenty of freelance writers who are frustrated with being under a publisher’s thumb. Enter Substack, where you can read Casey Newton’s Platformer newsletter for $100 per year, or Luke O’Neil Welcome to Hell World for $69. The problem for authors then comes down to building an audience — and as Substack grows that audience will have more choices… and a limited budget. “Subscription fatigue” is already a thing.
Levy predicts that “in the long run, star writers like Newton or the former Rolling Stone scribe Matt Taibbi, another Substack luminary, will eventually rejoin bigger publications, just as orbiting objects in space are inevitably sucked in by Earth’s gravity. Among other things, it’s simply more fun to communicate with potentially millions of readers as opposed to a few thousand paying customers. “
9 min read
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