Narrative: Trump's Tech Collision Course
Each narrative page (like this) has a page describing and evaluating the narrative, followed by all the posts on the site tagged with that narrative. Scroll down beyond the introduction to see the posts.
Twitter is suing the government for trying to unmask an anti-Trump account – Recode (Apr 6, 2017)
A new front has just opened up in the war between the Trump administration and the tech industry: Twitter is suing the government after it attempted to compel Twitter to reveal the identity of the people behind the @Alt_USCIS Twitter account. That account is allegedly maintained by employees of the US Citizenship and Immigration Service and has been highly critical of the Trump administration and its policies on immigration. In and of itself, that seems like no legal justification at all for unmasking the account’s owners, and that’s why Twitter is pushing back on free speech grounds. But the legal hook here may be that the account is using the name of the agency in its Twitter handle, and as such might just possibly be in contravention of trademark or copyright law, or anti-impersonation regulations. Regardless of the reasoning, this sets up yet another fight between the tech industry and the administration, though in fairness Twitter had resisted some earlier attempts by the Obama administration to get at the people behind accounts as well. It’s also an important test of one of the key tenets of Twitter’s value proposition as a free speech platform.
via Recode
FCC and FTC Heads Outline Policy on Internet Privacy (Apr 5, 2017)
In an op-ed in the Post this morning, the chair of the FCC and acting chair of the FTC write up their views on the internet privacy debate that’s been roaring in online tech publications over the last few weeks. As I’ve said previously (and discussed in depth in last week’s News Roundup podcast), the reaction on this topic has been overblown, and understanding poor, though the major players on the other side haven’t really helped themselves. The major ISPs only began communicating on the topic after the congressional vote was over, and only now are the FCC and FTC chairs communicating clearly about the issue. But the reality is that this issue of internet privacy can only really be resolved by new regulation from the FTC, which will end up once again having responsibility for online privacy as it did until 2015.
via FCC and FTC Chairs’ Editorial in The Washington Post
How Donald Trump crippled U.S. technology and science policy – Recode (Apr 1, 2017)
This is a great summary of a critical element in the disconnect between the Trump administration and the tech industry. Through Trump has Peter Thiel in a liaison role and recently appointed Matt Lira to an advisory role around innovation, he has left largely unfilled the traditional home of science and technology policy-making within the White House, the Office of Science and Technology Policy. The article argues that this, in turn, has made it very difficult for the tech industry to make its voice heard inside the White House on issues such as the executive orders on immigration, which was the first major point of friction between the two. The contrast between the Obama and Trump administrations here couldn’t be more clear, and the big question is whether the current situation will change in time or whether this disconnect will continue.
via Recode
Tech community “dumbfounded” by Mnuchin’s dismissal of AI impact on jobs – Axios (Mar 24, 2017)
Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin said in an interview that he felt AI taking Americans’ jobs was 50-100 years away, and it wasn’t a concern in the present. Predictably, a whole raft of tech folk who work on AI and are very much aware of jobs being lost to AI today reacted rather poorly to that statement. At best, this feels like yet another government official who doesn’t have a good grasp on technology, something that’s been a worry with the current administration since before it took office. But at worst, this means the government is far less likely to take any meaningful action on helping protect American jobs that might be lost to AI or to retraining workers so that they can find new ones if their old ones go away. Whether you believe either of those things are the government’s job or not is largely a matter of your philosophy on the proper role of government, but at the very least you’d want the government to have a realistic sense of what kind of impact AI will have on jobs and when, in order to make an informed decision.
via Axios
Airbnb, Lyft, and 56 other tech companies file brief opposing Trump’s revised travel ban – The Verge (Mar 15, 2017)
Lots of big tech companies and some smaller ones filed an amicus brief opposing the original Trump executive orders on immigration back in January. This time around, it looks like it’s almost exclusively the smaller companies doing the same with the revised order issued this month – Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, and lots of other large companies are missing this time. I haven’t yet seen comment from any of these companies as to why, and it may simply be either a matter of timing, but it’s interesting to see this shift after the opposition to the order was so high profile the first time around. That could signify that the companies are in fact not opposed to this version of the order, or it could simply be a sign that they’re choosing to pick their battles and, having made their broad objections known earlier, are now lying low.
via The Verge
Samsung Plans U.S. Expansion, Would Shift Manufacturing From Mexico – WSJ (Mar 9, 2017)
This didn’t get a ton of coverage on Wednesday, but it’s one of the first concrete statements we’ve seen from a major tech manufacturer that it is considering building new infrastructure in the US – all other reporting on this topic has either been unconfirmed by the company or has turned out to be something announced earlier. Samsung is fascinating in this context – unlike Apple and Amazon, it was never singled out for criticism during the campaign, and of course Trump himself uses a Samsung smartphone. But the company nevertheless seems keen to curry favor by building capacity in the US.
via WSJ
Apple, tech leaders will side with transgender youth in upcoming Supreme Court case – Axios (Feb 24, 2017)
This is a nice scoop for Ina Fried, who just moved from Recode to Axios. But more importantly, the news itself is a significant escalation of the comments several tech companies made this week about the Trump administration’s policy on transgender students and bathrooms in schools. This would now be the second time in as many months that several major tech companies find themselves on the opposite side of a high profile legal case from the new administration. What a massive turnaround from those first weeks after the election, when tech companies seemed afraid to say anything negative about the new US government.
via Axios
Apple and Google condemn Trump’s decision to revoke transgender bathroom guidelines – Recode (Feb 23, 2017)
This issue feels like it’s attracting a lot less attention than the immigration executive orders from a few weeks back, but that doesn’t mean that tech companies aren’t weighing in all the same. This article has comments from Apple, Google, and Salesforce opposing the administration’s actions, but John Paczkowski of BuzzFeed has been tweeting commentary from a number of other companies today including Facebook, IBM, and Dell. Unlike the immigration bill, where at least part of the rationale for opposing the administration was business related, this argument is being made entirely in moral terms, echoing some of the opposition to North Carolina’s “bathroom bill” last year. That’s interesting territory for big public companies to wade into – something we discussed on the Beyond Devices Podcast two weeks ago.
via Recode
Apple CFO says capital returns will rise if cash repatriation rate is lowered – Financial Times (Feb 14, 2017)
Apple CFO Luca Maestri spoke at the Goldman Sachs conference today, and although the audio quality of the broadcast was miserable, the FT seems to have been able to pick out the best bits. Two specific ones are detailed here – firstly, Apple still hopes to be able to repatriate more cash soon following a change in US tax policy, and secondly, it remains skeptical about more manufacturing in the US. On the former point, it sounds like Apple’s main focus for the repatriated cash would be increasing returns to shareholders and not big acquisitions – that’s not altogether surprising because it’s in keeping with past strategy, but there has been a rising chorus of voices saying that the returns to shareholders don’t seem to be having the desired effect on the share price. The US manufacturing comments also aren’t surprising – everything we’ve heard on this point as it regards Apple specifically has come from others – Donald Trump, Foxconn, and so on – not Apple itself. And certainly manufacturing any kind of high scale product like iPhones in the US would be almost impossible given the lack of appropriate infrastructure here.
via Financial Times
The six terrible ways your life will change when Net Neutrality dies – Mashable (Feb 9, 2017)
This kind of overblown rhetoric is what we’ve all got used to around net neutrality, but it’s still shocking. Though reasonable people can disagree on what should and shouldn’t be included in the definition of net neutrality, and how strongly it should be regulated, there’s no reasonable case to be made that the dystopian outcomes outlined in this piece are at all realistic. This isn’t helpful to the debate, because it’s so easily dismissed as hyperbole. For what it’s worth, my own take on the topic is here.
via Mashable