Marketplace Tech

This week, Sen. Josh Hawley, a Republican from Missouri, introduced a bill that would ban features that are supposed to keep us using tech for longer periods of time — like endless scrolling, autoplay videos and techniques like the Snapstreak in Snapchat. Host Molly Wood spoke with Adam Alter, who wrote the 2018 book “Irresistible: The Rise of Addictive Technology and the Business of Keeping Us Hooked.” He said before we ban the features, we need to know the harm.

The Japanese conglomerate SoftBank shook the tech and investment landscape over the last two years with its $100-billion Vision Fund. This week, SoftBank announced Vision Fund 2, which aims to raise $108 billion. Previously, a good-sized venture fund was less than a quarter of that amount — maybe $200 million tops. This fund could have a huge impact on the direction of future technology. It’s focused on artificial intelligence and data analysis, and of course, it’s making waves in venture capital all over again.

The digital economy depends heavily on access to the internet, and that is still not a solved problem here in the United States. Over 30% of Americans don’t have access to broadband internet — defined by the Federal Communications Commission as 25 megabits per second or higher — according to research released Tuesday by The NPD Group. The Pew Charitable Trusts wants to figure out why. Today, the organization’s Broadband Research Initiative is launching a new tool that lets anyone browse through broadband policies and funding in any state in the U.S.

There are a lot of different ways to have a career on YouTube that go beyond cat videos or comedy. Kati Morton found that out when she started uploading videos about mental health. She’s a licensed therapist and had a private practice. But over the past eight years, she’s shifted almost entirely away from it to bring her expertise to the masses via YouTube. Her channel has about 1,200 educational videos on mental health.

Law enforcement officials generally aren’t fans of what’s called end-to-end encryption — messages that can only be read by the sender and the recipient. They call it “going dark” and argue that encrypted communications make it harder to investigate or uncover crimes. Host Molly Wood spoke with Moxie Marlinspike, founder and CEO of the private chat app Signal Messenger, about what a ban on encryption — or giving law enforcement a back door to messages — might mean.

This week, the Federal Trade Commission fined Facebook $5 billion, ordered changes to the company’s board and handed down some data security requirements that Mark Zuckerberg personally must monitor and confirm. The FTC is also investigating Facebook for potential antitrust violations, and the Department of Justice is probing tech companies for anti-competitive behavior.

A new resupply mission is scheduled to arrive at the International Space Station on Friday. But these days, missions to the ISS are as much about business as they are about science. Seventy percent of the cargo in this week’s rocket is private-sector research projects — as in companies sending products to the space station for testing in microgravity.

The tech industry has well-known diversity issues around gender and race. Its lesser known, but age is the industry’s huge blind spot. In fact, 40 is the top age curve at a lot of tech companies. Google just settled more than 200 claims of age discrimination, and the complaint is becoming much more common.

PayPal reports quarterly earnings tomorrow. We’ll get an update on Venmo, the popular peer-to-peer payments app that PayPal owns. But as services like Venmo, Square Cash and Zelle have gotten more popular, there have been some growing pains. Fraud and scams, for sure, but also a lot of accidental payments; for example, typing in the wrong email address. When that happens, as people have sadly discovered, the money is gone.

Apple is known for beautiful, expensive products that get replaced often, either for status or because the battery is dying. When longtime designer Jony Ive left Apple last month to form his own design company, a lot of people reflected on his time at Apple: his influence on creating products that were hard to repair, prioritizing thinness and beauty over reliability, and whether, as Apple gears up to announce new iPhones this fall, that might change now that Ive is gone. (7/22/2019)