Marketplace Tech

Now that COVID-19 vaccines are pretty close to mass production in the U.S., it’s even more crucial to fight misinformation about them. That battle is going … OK. Twitter this week said it will ban users who spread COVID-19 vaccine misinformation after five strikes. Facebook last month said it would do more to remove misleading vaccine information on both Facebook and Instagram, including removing accounts. YouTube has said it banned COVID-19 misinformation, too. But in all these cases, enforcement is spotty and complicated by the fact that some social media influencers are finding that vaccine hesitancy is a great way to make a little cash. Molly speaks with Sarah Frier, a senior technology reporter for Bloomberg.

Google is getting rid of third-party cookies in its Chrome browser next year and will stop selling ads based on your browsing history. No more tracking you all over the web and targeting you with ads everywhere you are. The company also said in a blog post that it won’t replace cookies with another personal tracking technology. Google is moving to a “privacy first” strategy in which your online profile will be grouped anonymously with others like you, and you’ll get ads appropriate to your cohort. Molly spoke with Meg Leta Jones, a professor of communication, culture and technology at Georgetown. She said Google still has plenty of ways to get data about you.

Part of the problem with the COVID-19 vaccine is that the tech to get it isn’t accessible to the people who need it most. Online-only appointment systems are leaving out people without internet access or devices, and clunky, buggy websites are testing everyone’s digital literacy. For Nicol Turner Lee, a fellow at the Brookings Institution, it’s part of a bigger problem that needs a big solution. We’ve got tech that’s unevenly distributed, plus a struggling economy that needs to transition to the digital age. So Turner Lee proposes that big solution in a recent piece for Brookings: a Tech New Deal and a paid civilian corps of tech-savvy people to do building, training and outreach. The idea is that maybe the next big disaster solution won’t leave people behind.

So, here’s what’s going on with the chip shortage thing. First, among U.S. chipmakers, only Intel fabricates its own chips in the U.S. The rest contract with big companies, mostly in Taiwan and South Korea, known as fabs, which is short for semiconductor fabrication plants. The biggest are TSMC and Samsung. The facilities are incredibly expensive and take years to build and even upgrade. Now add in the pandemic, lots of people at home buying computers and slowdowns in the actual manufacturing, and there aren’t enough chips for cars, medical equipment or all those other devices. Last week, President Joe Biden requested $37 billion from Congress to kick-start the domestic supply chain for chips. Molly Wood talks with Anshel Sag at Moor Insights & Strategy about whether that will be enough money.

Telecom companies are spending a lot of money on wireless infrastructure to support their 5G networks. In an FCC auction announced last week, Verizon spent $45 billion on acquiring new spectrum. AT&T spent $23 billion. But wired infrastructure is not seeing the same kind of love. AT&T has stopped connecting new customers to its DSL network, and a report out last fall found that it has deployed high-speed fiber to only about a third of the households in its network. Molly talks with Angela Siefer, the executive director of the National Digital Inclusion Alliance.

Clubhouse is an invite-only audio app that came out last spring with a very small community of, at the time, mostly Silicon Valley tech-y people in it. Now, the app has 10 million active users on a weekly basis and a valuation of about $1 billion. And although there was recent buzz about SpaceX and Tesla CEO Elon Musk going on the platform, or even Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, many of the people who have driven Clubhouse’s growth have been Black influencers, musicians and comedians. Molly speaks with Aniyia Williams, a principal on the responsible technology team at Omidyar Network.

Small businesses rushed to get online during this pandemic. And suddenly, all kinds of companies wanted to help with that: Amazon, Facebook, Etsy, Intuit and Shopify, the Canadian company that helps merchants create websites, enable payments and ship goods to customers. Shopify had unprecedented growth last year. It revamped its Shop app, which tracks shipments, to include local shopping collections. And it’s got deals with so-called marketplaces, like Facebook and Instagram, Walmart and Google, to let merchants on its platform also sell on those platforms. Molly speaks with Harley Finkelstein, the president of Shopify. He told her a draw for small-business owners is that Shopify lets them own their own customers.

A proposed law in Australia would require Facebook and Google to pay publishers for news content that appears on their sites. In response, Facebook briefly pulled all links to news content in Australia last week, restoring them Monday. Google opposed the law but has negotiated deals with individual publishers. And Microsoft, pushing its search engine Bing, surprisingly welcomed the proposal, even saying Europe should adopt something similar. But fundamentally, paying for links is the opposite of how the web has always worked. Molly speaks with Tom Merritt, the host of the “Daily Tech News Show” podcast. He told her this is all about antitrust.

The Senate will hold a hearing Tuesday investigating the SolarWinds hacks. SolarWinds is a massive IT company that contracted with the federal government. Its ubiquity let hackers get into at least nine federal agencies, including the departments of — just to pick three of the scariest options — Defense, Homeland Security and Treasury. The breach is what’s known as a supply chain hack. They’re increasingly common because it’s hard for companies and governments to verify the security of every company they work with. But experts say it’s time to create disincentives for not doing that homework. Molly spoke with Camille Stewart, a cyber-fellow at Harvard’s Belfer Center.

Etsy has added at least 1 million new sellers to its platform since the pandemic began. We’ll find out the latest numbers when the company reports earnings this week. One of those new sellers is Amy Price. She’s a Broadway costume designer, or at least she was when Broadway shows were running. Now, she’s turned her stitching to face masks. As part of our series “My Economy,” here’s the story of how Price got an online business up and running.