With help from John Hendel and Mark Scott
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— Gearing up for battle: A formidable coalition of app developers is ready to take their fight against Apple and Google to Congress.
— Playing defense against misinfo: All U.S. adults are now eligible for a Covid vaccine. Are Facebook and Twitter doing enough to remove falsehoods that might deter them from getting the shot?
— Broad reach for broadband: Three congressional hearings today will touch on broadband with a likely focus on the American Jobs Plan.
IT’S TUESDAY; THE SUN IS SHINING. WELCOME TO MORNING TECH. I’m your host, Emily Birnbaum. Here’s a piece of trivia for you with the Lina Khan hearing coming up: How many women have served as FTC commissioners? Winner gets a nice, warm hug.
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APP DEVELOPERS BAND TOGETHER: The Coalition for App Fairness, a small-but-mighty group of app developers aggrieved with Apple and Google, has been aggressively pushing for legislation at the state level to change the way their app stores work, and they’ve been surprisingly successful at convincing state legislators to take up their fight. Now, they’re raring to take their efforts to Capitol Hill.
The group will get its time in the spotlight during the Senate Judiciary Committee’s hearing about app store issues on Wednesday. The witnesses will include Horacio Gutierrez, Spotify’s head of global affairs and chief legal officer; Kirsten Daru, Tile’s general counsel; and Jared Sine, chief legal officer at Match Group. All represent companies involved in the App Fairness coalition.
The fact that this hearing is happening at all is a win for the member companies, and they’re hoping that their stories of exhausting, unending fights with Apple and Google will pluck the heartstrings of antitrust hawks in Congress.
“[Apple and Google] operate as a cartel,” Kosta Eleftheriou, founder of keyboard app FlickType, told reporters in a call Monday, referring to the 30 percent cut that Apple and Google take from in-app payments. (Google spokesperson Julie Tarallo McAlister said the fees that developers pay cover “essential security updates and an array of developer tools.” Apple has said that 84 percent of apps in its store are free and developers pay Apple nothing.)
On the same call, David Heinemeier Hansson, Basecamp and Hey co-founder, called the Apple app store a “classic monopoly toll booth” and accused the company of using security as a justification for monopolistic practices.
— Reality check: The coalition was initially formed by Fornite creator Epic Games, according to court documents filed by Apple in its court battle with Epic. Apple claims in the documents that Epic created the coalition last summer and charged it with generating “continuous media and campaign tactic pressure on Apple/Google.” Epic recently hit a $28.7 billion valuation and another founding member, Spotify, boasts a valuation of $72 billion — in other words, not exactly “the little guys.”
(The coalition disputes claims that it primarily represents the views of Epic, pointing out that it launched with 13 members and now has 55.)
This group is serious about getting something done. In the last few weeks, they brought on heavy hitter Rick Van Meter, former communications director for the Senate Commerce Committee under Sen. Roger Wicker (R-Miss.), to run their messaging and outreach. (He’s part of a team leading the effort at top public affairs advocacy firm Forbes-Tate).
PRESSURE INCREASES OVER ANTI-VAX CONTENT: As all U.S. adults become eligible for the Covid vaccine this week, attention is shifting to how the social media platforms have enabled the spread of misinformation that could deter people from getting their shot.
— Attention from Capitol Hill: Sens. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) and Ben Ray Luján (D-N.M.) in a recent letter urged Facebook and Twitter to remove the “Disinformation Dozen,” a group of 12 people playing leading roles in spreading disinformation about the Covid-19 vaccines. The 12, identified in a new report from the Center for Countering Digital Hate, are the original sources for an estimated 65 percent of viral falsehoods about the vaccine. They include popular anti-vaxxers like Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Joseph Mercola, both of whom have promoted misleading information about the vaccine to their hundreds of thousands of followers.
“A crucial step to increase vaccine confidence is to address primary spreaders of this vaccine disinformation,” Klobuchar and Luján wrote. They called for “swift and decisive” action.
— Twitter said it has removed 22,400 tweets and challenged 11.7 million accounts worldwide in line with its Covid-19 misleading information policy. The company confirmed it has received the letter and intends to respond.
— Facebook said it has already taken action against some of the groups mentioned in the report. “Working with leading health organizations, we’ve updated our policies to take action against accounts that break our COVID-19 and vaccine rules — including by reducing their distribution or removing them from our platform,” Facebook spokesperson Andy Stone told MT in an email.
— The misinfo language barrier: A report out this morning from activist network Avaaz found that Facebook did a significantly better job of labelling and removing Covid-19 falsehoods for English speakers in the U.S. compared with posts in other languages, particularly those spoken in Europe. Avaaz looked at 137 posts across English, French, Italian, Portuguese and Spanish that fact-checkers flagged as pandemic-related misinformation. The company took action, on average, 74 percent of the time against English-language falsehoods in the U.S. versus 31 percent of Italian-language material.
— “It’s incredible,” Luca Nicotra, Avaaz’s campaign director, told POLITICO’s Mark Scott. “It’s under so much pressure, but it hasn’t had an impact on Facebook to detect misinformation.” (While Avaaz differentiated between English-language posts in the U.S. and elsewhere, it did not identify the exact location of users posting in other languages.)
That’s not exactly how the company sees it. Facebook said it had flagged and removed millions of pieces of Covid-19 misinformation across its platforms, and was working with 80 fact-checking groups worldwide to debunk claims. Still, there are two take-aways from the new report: 1) misinformation is still getting through Facebook’s global net, even when flagged by fact-checkers, and 2) The company appears to be giving more attention to problematic U.S. posts than misinformation elsewhere in the world.
TODAY: BROADBAND HITS THE HILL: Broadband is likely to pop up during at least three congressional hearings today, and looming large is how lawmakers will talk about President Joe Biden’s proposed $100 billion outline to fix the digital divide. These sessions come as Democrats and Republicans have repeatedly headed to the Oval Office this year to discuss details of Biden’s infrastructure ambitions.
— Three Cabinet officials are testifying before Senate appropriators about the American Jobs Act, including Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo, who is particularly outspoken about the digital investments being floated.
— Then there’s the House Agriculture Committee, which will hear from a Microsoft broadband official and other telecom companies about fixes to rural broadband shortfalls (and Microsoft, as the White House was happy to alert reporters on Monday, is signaling infrastructure plan support).
— And BlocPower CEO Donnel Baird is planning to tout community broadband during a House Energy and Commerce subcommittee hearing on clean energy. His organization began diving into ways to offer affordable internet to New York City consumers over the past several years, in part due to the demand for eco-friendly options like smart thermostats to connect to the internet. “They need internet to function properly,” Baird told John, describing struggles to work with the private sector to no avail. “Ultimately we just said screw it: we need to figure out how to provide community Wi-Fi.”
Baird’s efforts sped up over the pandemic, according to the CEO, and he sees the ideas animating his work in the White House infrastructure plans. He says he is bracing for the big telecom companies to fight this emphasis on cooperative ownership and wants to preserve it in any resulting legislation. “We’ve given the White House some advice,” he added.
BROADBAND LOBBYING BATTLES: Biden’s infrastructure plan is igniting a broadband lobbying fight, with multiple internet providers claiming Democrats are miscalculating and abandoning rural America — not to mention threatening the companies’ bottom lines. More from John in a new report today.
Google’s workforce issues: Protocol is out with an exploration of inequality at Google data centers across the country.
Inside the chip shortage: “Semiconductor producers are trying to increase output, but the small gains are unlikely to fix the shortfalls hampering production of everything from cars to home appliances to PCs,” The Wall Street Journal reports.
Tesla crash fallout: The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration is investigating the fatal Tesla crash where no one was in the driver seat. The Verge has more.
Equity by design: The Open Technology Institute has a new report about how to build tech products with nondiscrimination in mind.
Opinion: Chamber of Progress CEO Adam Kovacevich argues that the app store fight is about billion-dollar companies, not “jobs or small developers” in a new Medium post.
ICYMI: Apple is pledging to reinstate Parler on the App Store, while Google and Amazon are leaving open the possibility, Cristiano reports.
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SEE YOU TOMORROW!