DataDownload: FTC vs. Facebook
DataDownload: FTC vs. Facebook A weekly summary of all things Media, Data, Emerging Tech View this email in your browser
Hi.
Friends of the NYC Media Lab — hope you’re ok. You’d think things would be slowing down, but not so fast! The US Government is suing Facebook, for realz. VR meetings could be better than Zoom, according to Wired. COVID has resulted in an explosion of… wait for it… eBirding. Spotify has a genius way to curate its New Music Friday Playlist (spoiler alert, it’s humans!). Is my bias showing here a bit? A history lesson on the roots of Section 230. And Jason Kilar is practically giddy when he talks about how WarnerMedia’s latest move is going to kill windowing.
So, read and enjoy. And, if you are looking to support all the work we do with students, media, and the future of technology… we’d be very appreciative if you click this LINK. Five dollars. Or add a zero — or more — the Media Lab is a not-for-profit, and we’ve got a lot of work to do in 2021. We’ll put your generosity to good work, promise.
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Best-
Steve
Steven Rosenbaum
Executive Director
The NYC Media Lab
Steve@NYCMediaLab.org Must-Read Why the US Government Wants Facebook to Sell Off Instagram and WhatsApp
Last September, state attorneys general began investigating “whether Facebook broke any state or federal laws as a result of any anti-competitive conduct related to its dominance,” according to CNBC. This Wednesday, the FTC and 48 US state attorneys general filed two antitrust lawsuits against Facebook — less than two months after the DOJ filed an antitrust case against Google. Both lawsuits allege that Facebook is engaging in monopolistic behavior by buying up the competition and limiting user choices, and call for the company to essentially “be broken up by forcing it to undo its acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp.” (Though, the trial might not even start until 2022, and any divestments would take years.)
“No company should have this much unchecked power over our personal information and our social interactions,” said New York Attorney General Letitia James, who led the states’ lawsuit. In a blog, Facebook was noticeably affronted by the move: “The FTC and states stood by for years while Facebook invested billions of dollars and millions of hours to make Instagram and WhatsApp into the apps that users enjoy today…. Now the agency has announced that no sale will ever be final, no matter the resulting harm to consumers or the chilling effect on innovation.”
The two cases don’t just focus on the Instagram ($1B) and WhatsApp ($19B) acquisitions, but also Facebook’s treatment of developers: “They accuse the company of allowing producers of other software to use Facebook’s data to develop their own apps and connect them to its service, which benefited Facebook because it incentivized more people to join and use Facebook more often. But Facebook would then shut out those apps if it eventually deemed them to be a threat to its own business.”
8 min read
Read more VR Meetings Are Weird, but They Beat Our Current Reality
“When I pressed a button on the Touch Controller a tad too long, I ended up standing unnervingly close to another avatar, a fellow journalist. Then I remembered that you can’t catch the coronavirus from a digital simulacrum.”
A number of factors came together this year to bring enterprise VR meetings away from the fringe and a step closer to regular use — including the pandemic, both Oculus Quests, developers working to make things “stupidly easy to use,” and possibly the frustration of seeing the same living room walls for months on end. Spatial, the 800-pound gorilla in the XR meeting space, for example, runs on the web and AR and VR headsets. The company has logged some 500k meeting joins on their app, and this spring it saw a 130% jump in DAUs. Arthur, which is covered in this Wired piece, came out this week and recently received $2.5M in funding.
“During my Arthur VR onboarding, the company’s founder, Christoph Fleischmann, just happened to ‘drop in’ on our meeting in VR. It was no doubt planned, but the remarkably good spatial audio and the sudden appearance of this new person in my virtual world had all the markings of real-world spontaneity. I heard myself saying “nice to see you” to an avatar of another human, and meaning it.”
7 min read
Read More Tech+Media How eBird Changed Birding Forever
“At least 120 million observations are submitted per year, many through the handy eBird app, a kind of Strava-Yelp-Pokémon Go hybrid for birders.”
In 2002, a team of researchers at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology created eBird to help birders document sightings. Around that time, 9% of the global population was online — the app quickly caught the attention of birders who had been used to calling in rare sightings on payphones (and sending developed photographs via snail-mail) in the 90s.
Since then, eBird has logged 860M observations from 597k users — a collection that technically counts as one of the “world’s largest citizen-science projects,” with data used by researchers to study the evolution and movement of invasive species, and create live migration forecasts. Cornell has also released Merlin, which lets you identify birds using your camera. An oddly soothing piece about how technology changes an avid community for the better.
15 min read Read More Inside the Human Science of Spotify’s New Music Friday Playlist
“I think there’s actually some resentment in the industry over how influential [New Music Friday has] become.” — Major music label
Justin Lubliner, founder at Billie Eilish’s label Darkroom, Warner Records chief operating officer Tom Corson, and artist Mulatto, among many others in the industry, view getting on Spotify’s New Music Friday playlist as not just a chance for exposure, but as a career-changing moment for a musician — despite a relatively average 3.7M likes. The playlist, launched in 2014, is entirely human-curated — no Spotify algorithms involved — and looking through the variety of artists and genres this week shows that the gatekeeps are looking for listeners to experience something completely new, along with the usual dose of “Arianas, Gagas, Travises, Shawns and Blackpinks.”
5 min read Read More What the Washington Post Learned From Telling Readers What Day It Is
“The pandemic is a perpetual hump day.”
This is basically WaPo’s progress report on how their seven-day pop-up wellness course — What Day Is It? — is doing, in terms of email metrics. But it’s also a story about how a project can get derailed by a crisis, how a team repurposes pre-pandemic material to better suit the times, and how a wellness experiment is being conducted during a time when every day feels like Wednesday.
3 min read
Read More What We’re Watching How The Internet’s Foundational Law Was a Response to 90’s Porn
Vox released an excellent account in late November on how 90s interweb smut led to Section 230, the backbone of today’s internet economy. But it also addresses where Section 230 was too lenient, a point especially noteworthy given that both political parties are now trying to revoke the law, and the news that both Mastercard and Visa stopped allowing their cards to be used on Pornhub. (See here for the investigative piece that set things in motion, and here for a follow-up.)
9 min watch
Watch Now What We’re Listening To Podcast: Movie Theaters Are Dying. Did Jason Kilar Deal the Final Blow?
Kara Swisher interviews Jason Kilar, the CEO at WarnerMedia. Only seven months into the job, Kilar has already “unleashed one of the biggest industry shake-ups in recent history. Movie theater executives and filmmakers are reeling.” Kilar recently announced that “the full slate of Warner Bros. films will be simultaneously released in theaters and on the company’s streaming service, HBO Max.”
CNN’s Brian Stelter said that he hasn’t “listened to a podcast episode this lively in… weeks? No, in months. Kara Swisher’s conversation with WarnerMedia CEO Jason Kilar is well worth a listen or read.”
40 min listen
Listen Now Virtual Events Free Event: Is AI the Key to Fighting Fake News?
Date: December 14, 10AM EST
Join NYU DC Dialogues and the NYU Brademas Center for a conversation on how new AI tools could help social media networks and news organizations weed out fake news. Register Here.
Free Event: Data Behind the Music
Date: December 15
In this webinar, you’ll learn from industry experts who have mastered the art of using data to deliver an exciting and unique experience of music en masse. Register Here.
Free Event: Building the Future of Mobility
Date: December 16, 12PM-1PM EST
Join Shaina Horowitz (VP of Products and Programs, Newlab) and a panel of industry, academic and civic experts as they discuss how they are leveraging transformative technology to accelerate advancements in mobility. Register Here. A Deeper Look How Magical Is Apple’s M1 Chip, Really?
At one point, creating your own chipset is just what you did — IBM, Burroughs (whose founder was the grandfather of the experimental writer), Motorola, TI, HP, and others designed and built their own processors. But somewhere along the line they understood that “processors are really expensive to design and maintain; customers don’t care; and there wasn’t actually much [performance] differentiation anyway.” Eventually, we ended up with the likes of AMD and Intel, which designed and manufactured CPUs for other computer companies (though now it’s mostly Intel that does everything under one roof, since AMD went fabless).
These days we have something like: “the CPU is designed in one place, integrated in another, fabricated in another, and soldered into yet another company’s product. The product company — say, Nest or Dell or Chevrolet or Samsung — has no say whatsoever in their processor design, pinout, feature set, cost, fabrication, or timeline.” So where does Apple’s M1 chip fit? As EEJournal notes, the company reversed a bit of the current industry trend of disaggregation.
“Its M1 processor chip is based on an architecture licensed from ARM, but Apple creates its own implementation. That removes several links in the chain between instruction set and end product. Instead of buying a readymade chip and then designing a product to fit around it, Apple can design the chip it wants from the outset.”
6 min read
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