Marketplace Tech

Part of the reason there's a backlash against Big Tech these days is because some of these companies are so big. They're big in terms of users (see: Facebook's 2 billion plus), big in valuation (Amazon and Apple have both topped a trillion dollars) and big in market share (more than 90 percent of all web searches happen on Google). The United States is taking baby steps toward possible regulation. Europe is taking more like Paul Bunyan-sized steps. But critics like Tim Wu argue these companies should have been slowed down long ago. Marketplace Tech’s Molly Wood talks with Wu, author of the new book, "The Curse of Bigness: Antitrust in the New Gilded Age." (11/13/18)

Justin Miller served for 11 years in the U.S. Army and deployed twice to Iraq. After being medically retired, he suffered from severe PTSD. He almost became one of the 20 military veterans and active service members who die by suicide every day. But he was saved, in part, by a serendipitous phone call from his friend Chris Mercado, a fellow vet, who helped talk him back. Now Miller and Mercado have collaborated with a team to build the app, Objective Zero, using social networking technology to make those kinds of vital connections between veterans immediate and easily accessible. We talk about it with Miller. And we hear from the Department of Veterans Affairs’ Jason Owen about how the agency is developing its own apps to help veterans with their mental health. (11/09/18)

The midterm elections could have a big impact on the tech industry. That’s because the backlash against Big Tech is one of the only issues out there that is pretty bipartisan. And on top of that, a couple of newly elected legislators have specifically made tech part of their agenda, be it net neutrality, privacy regulations, or even whether platforms are suppressing political voices. We dig into this in Quality Assurance, the segment where we take a deeper look at a big tech story. Issie Lapowsky, a senior writer for Wired covering politics and national affairs, tells Marketplace Tech's Molly Wood that both sides of the aisle have been considering ways to regulate Big Tech in recent years. (11/09/18)

Think of a music video you love to watch over and over on YouTube, or the hilarious meme you shared last. Proposed digital copyright laws in Europe and other countries kind of want to make those a little less common, and they have their roots in a 20-year-old American copyright law called the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Cory Doctorow is a writer and activist with the Electronic Frontier Foundation. He and the EFF have been talking about and litigating over the unintended consequences of the DMCA for almost 20 years now. We explore what some of those unintended consequences are.

Email can be a vulnerable way to communicate, especially if you're sending around valuable information because you're a politician or a journalist or an activist. High-profile email users are targets for hackers, trying to get them to click the wrong link and give up their passwords. Google offers a version of Gmail with extra security — you need a physical USB key to log in. Anyone can use it, but Google markets it to high-profile users. Mark Risher, head of Google's Account Security team and a creator of its Advanced Protection Program, talked to Molly Wood about it.

Once upon a time, when something you owned broke, you fixed it. We never even considered whether we were allowed to fix our products until the year 2000, when the Digital Millennium Copyright Act went into effect, making it illegal to circumvent any tech that locked up devices without authorization. So John Deere started telling farmers it was a copyright violation to fix their tractors. And Apple said it was a copyright violation to fix our iPhones or even open a repair shop. Just last month, the U.S. copyright office finally decided that you do have the right to fix your smartphone and lots of other electronics. Kyle Wiens, CEO of iFixit, a company that creates repair guides for electronics and sells tools and replacement parts, told Molly Wood we may have the right to repair, but repairing things isn't as easy as it used to be. (11/06/18)

 

The Federal Communications Commission estimates that Americans get 4 billion unwanted automated calls every month. And they work. We get scammed out of $9.5 billion every year. But if we can filter out most of the spam in our email, why haven't we solved robocalling? Because it’s a deceptively complicated problem to solve. (11/05/18)

Europe and the United Kingdom have been coming hard at the tech industry lately: tough privacy laws, fines for anti-competitive behavior, new types of copyright laws, and earlier this week, something called a "digital services" tax from the United Kingdom. Starting in 2020, the U.K. will take 2 percent of online revenue from tech companies, specifically Facebook, Amazon and Google, that make over $600 million a year. The rest of Europe is planning a similar tax, and the idea has even spread to South Korea, India, Mexico, Chile and other countries. Let's dig into this digital tax idea in Quality Assurance, the Friday segment where we take a deeper look at a big tech story. Molly Wood talks with Mark Scott, chief technology correspondent at Politico. (11/02/18)

In San Francisco next week, voters will decide whether the city's largest companies, most of them tech, should pay a tax that will raise money to help homeless families. Other cities have tried similar efforts. Voters in Seattle recently overturned a tax on large employers that would have funded affordable housing efforts, and the city's biggest tech employer, Amazon, strongly objected. But in San Francisco, the city's biggest tech employer is for the measure. Marc Benioff is the co-CEO of Salesforce, and yes, the guy who just bought Time Magazine. He's stumping for the ballot measure, called Proposition C. (11/01/18)

Earlier this week, Google announced $25 million in grants for organizations working on “artificial intelligence for social good." The included things like wildlife conservation, stopping sex trafficking and eliminating biases in algorithms that perpetuate racism and gender discrimination. It's an admission that algorithms and AI are not neutral, and more care must be taken with their design. Molly Wood talks with Jamie Susskind, author of the new book “Future Politics: Living Together in a World Transformed by Tech.” He argues that we can design algorithms that reflect our highest ideals. (10/31/18)