The IT Nerd

US House representatives have unveiled the Ending Platform Monopolies Act today with Rep. David Cicilline (D-RI) sharing a statement that I found in The Verge that aims to take big tech down a peg or two:

“Right now, unregulated tech monopolies have too much power over our economy. They are in a unique position to pick winners and losers, destroy small businesses, raise prices on consumers, and put folks out of work,” Rep. David Cicilline (D-RI) said in a statement Friday. “Our agenda will level the playing field and ensure the wealthiest, most powerful tech monopolies play by the same rules as the rest of us.”

If eventually passed in the House and Senate, that could usher in the regulation of Apple, Amazon, Facebook, and Google to ensure that they don’t have too much power. I am not sure that this is a great thing to do. But I guess we will see how this plays out.

I’ve talked about the fact that President Trump has been whining and complaining about nuking Section 230 which would strip the protections from nearly every internet venue with user interaction. That would include Facebook and Twitter among others. The Break Up Big Tech Act of 2020, introduced yesterday by Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (D-HI) and Rep. Paul Gosar (R-AZ), seeks to strip companies of those protections if they take supposed actions like “acting as publishers and censoring certain users.”

The legislation if passed would remove Section 230 protections from online companies that perform the following activities.

• Selling and displaying targeted ads without a user’s consent
• Collecting data for “commercial purposes other than the direct sale of the interactive computer service.”
• Acting as a marketplace by “facilitate the placement of items into the stream of commerce.”
• Employing digital products intended to “engage and addict users” to the service.
• Acting as a publisher by using algorithms to moderate or censor content without opt-in from users

So this would effectively give Trump and conservatives who have been claiming that the Internet censors their voices what they want. Assuming that this passes. We’ll see if that actually happens or if this bill dies quietly after January 20th 2021.

The Central Intelligence Agency has conducted a series of covert cyber operations against Iran and other targets since winning a secret victory in 2018 when President Trump signed what amounts to a sweeping authorization for such activities, Yahoo News reported, citing former U.S. officials with direct knowledge of the matter:

The secret authorization, known as a presidential finding, gives the spy agency more freedom in both the kinds of operations it conducts and who it targets, undoing many restrictions that had been in place under prior administrations. The finding allows the CIA to more easily authorize its own covert cyber operations, rather than requiring the agency to get approval from the White House. Unlike previous presidential findings that have focused on a specific foreign policy objective or outcome — such as preventing Iran from becoming a nuclear power — this directive, driven by the National Security Council and crafted by the CIA, focuses more broadly on a capability: covert action in cyberspace.

The “very aggressive” finding “gave the agency very specific authorities to really take the fight offensively to a handful of adversarial countries,” said a former U.S. government official. These countries include Russia, China, Iran and North Korea — which are mentioned directly in the document — but the finding potentially applies to others as well, according to another former official. “The White House wanted a vehicle to strike back,” said the second former official. “And this was the way to do it.” The CIA’s new powers are not about hacking to collect intelligence. Instead, they open the way for the agency to launch offensive cyber operations with the aim of producing disruption — like cutting off electricity or compromising an intelligence operation by dumping documents online — as well as destruction, similar to the U.S.-Israeli 2009 Stuxnet attack, which destroyed centrifuges that Iran used to enrich uranium gas for its nuclear program.

Assuming that this is accurate, I am not sure that this was a good idea. Having checks and balances to ensure that this is an option that is only used if it is truly required would likely mean that these are targeted operations by the US with a limited scope and a low chance that the target will retaliate. But now that this is out there, countries with the ability to launch these sorts of cyberattacks will likely feel that they have the green light to retaliate. Or launch larger scale cyberattacks of their own with potentially devastating effects. That has the potential to create all sorts of chaos. And it may come back to haunt the US at some point.

The chief executive officer of Tata Consultancy Services which is Asia’s largest IT services firm warned that a U.S. freeze on thousands of employment visas by President Donald Trump will only raise costs for American corporations like Wall Street banks, auto manufacturers and drugmakers.

Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) CEO Rajesh Gopinathan told Bloomberg News the move has put massive stress on a huge swath of Indian-born engineers that have lived in the U.S. for years and helped support American clients, who will ultimately be the ones hurt most. His remarks were among the strongest public rebukes from India’s $181 billion IT industry since U.S. President Donald Trump’s June decree to halt approvals for a range of visas until the end of the year — including those for intra-company transfers. 

TCS and peers like Infosys have relied for years on the ability to send talent to work alongside their customers overseas, which include some of the largest electronics manufacturers and global retailers. Investors worry that the inability to do so will hurt their competitiveness in the largest international market. “The ignorance around this ruling should be addressed,” Gopinathan said via video conference on Friday. “Playing with the status of people who’ve moved away from families and committed to spending five-six years in a foreign country without immigrant status to deliver value to customers, is a short-term gimmick,” the executive said.

Now there is a bit of self interest at work here. Tata and Infosys are used by US companies because they are cheaper, not because they are better. The IT industry has been replacing competent local staff with less competent and cheaper Indian staff for years now. Every IT type like me has seen this happen. Many of us have seen the disasters these cheaper staff create and are quite happy to see curbs on H1B visas.

Here’s the flip side. This could send tech workers of all sorts running to other countries like Canada. As it stands, Canada was becoming a tech hub thanks to Trump administration policies. Now I have seen an acceleration of this because of the latest move by Trump. That cannot end well for the US.

It will be interesting to see how this plays out. My guess is that this is far from over.

If you’re Apple, Google, or Facebook, this may be a problem. As detailed by the Wall Street Journal [Likely Paywalled], the DOJ review targets practices of online platforms:

Justice Department officials said those agreements weren’t meant to be open-ended or all-encompassing. But in any case the department isn’t trying to pre-empt the FTC’s work, they said, and suggested the two agencies might explore different tech practices by the same company, as well as different legal theories for possible cases.

While companies like Facebook and Google perhaps have some “questionable” business practices, Apple perhaps doesn’t belong on this list. Though the The Wall Street Journal suggests otherwise when it comes to the App Store [Likely Paywalled]. In short, I wonder how much of this is about politics and how much of this is because there are actual problems with tech companies. I guess we’re about to find out.