With help from Eric Geller and Caitlin Oprysko
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— Ed-tech under the microscope: Days after the FTC’s new acting chair named ed-tech as a top focus, the agency is facing calls to investigate a popular math learning platform that two-dozen consumer groups allege is deceiving children, parents and schools.
— The trouble with rip-and-replace: A potential Commerce Department mandate to remove and replace telecom gear from foreign adversaries deemed national security threats could affect millions and cost billions, per a new analysis.
— Rallying around the rollout: LinkedIn unveiled a campaign to match health care professionals with vaccine distribution sites in need of volunteers, part of broader tech industry efforts to support the chaotic rollout.
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NEW FTC COMPLAINT: THE PROBLEM(S) WITH PRODIGY — A coalition of consumer advocacy and children’s privacy groups is lodging a complaint with the FTC this morning calling on the agency to investigate an ed-tech platform that they allege is deceiving schools and manipulating students in violation of federal law and “exacerbating inequities in education.” The action comes just one week after Rebecca Kelly Slaughter, in her first major speech as acting FTC chair, said that the exploding ed-tech industry — and the privacy and equity issues that come with it — would be a top focus for her agency.
— Prodigy, a gamified math platform that has surged in popularity during pandemic-era remote leaning, is marketed as “free for students and schools, forever.” But when playing from home, users are bombarded with ads, according to the complaint — pressuring kids and parents into buying a premium version that can cost north of $100, the filing says.
Prodigy’s marketing also cites a Johns Hopkins study as proof of its effectiveness as a math teaching tool, but the complaint points out that researchers and teachers in that study questioned the platform’s “lack of remediation and actual teaching.” These and other issues violate the FTC Act’s provision against unfair and deceptive practices, the coalition claims.
— “It’s bad enough when commercial apps deliberately frustrate and manipulate children into desiring in-game purchases, but Prodigy’s insidious business model is creating a new form of inequality in classrooms,” said Josh Golin, executive director of Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood, which led the complaint. Prodigy is “taking advantage” of parents in the challenging pandemic learning environment, he said, “and in the process, creating a clear line between the haves and have-nots in the classroom.”
Center for Digital Democracy, Center for Humane Technology, Electronic Privacy Information Center and Public Citizen are among the nearly two dozen other groups that signed on.
— A spokesperson for Prodigy stressed that its business model had been developed carefully with feedback from educators and that the majority of Prodigy’s audience — more than 95 percent — uses the platform for free.
“No paid subscription is required for students to continue receiving completely free access to all of the educational content in the game,” Prodigy’s James Bigg told POLITICO in an email. Without this business structure with optional memberships, he added, “we would be required to put all of our educational content behind a paywall, which contradicts our mission of providing full access to fun and engaging math learning.” He said Prodigy is committed to reviewing concerns and “making changes if necessary.”
BROADBAND LAND: RISKY TELECOM RIPPLES FAR AND WIDE — A pending Commerce Department rule requiring telecoms to remove equipment made by companies deemed to be national security risks will likely affect between 268,000 and 4,533,000 companies, according to a new department analysis. And while it’s difficult to put a price tag on that, Commerce estimated the total annual cost to be between $235 million and $20 billion (or between $210 million and $19 billion, depending on which discount rate is used). The six countries on Commerce’s list — China, Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Russia and Venezuela — account for more than half of the imports by U.S. companies in multiple computing and electronics sectors.
— How will the rule affect the U.S. economy? It’s likely to frustrate the industry. “The restriction of imports from adversarial nations will likely increase production costs of [telecom] firms as they substitute higher priced alternatives for restricted imports,” the department said in the regulatory impact analysis. And even the industry firms that don’t have risky equipment to deal with “may face higher production costs as they compete for a reduced supply of available inputs.”
LINKING UP: TECH AND THE VACCINE DRIVE — LinkedIn is the latest social media platform refashioning its services to support the chaotic rollout of Covid vaccines. It comes on the heels of similar moves by Amazon, Google and Airbnb — companies that are now in talks with the White House about how they can help the government’s response.
— The jobs hub announced it is offering to connect health care professionals with high-demand opportunities to administer the shots or perform other volunteer work related to distribution. LinkedIn will allow providers, pharmacies and governments to post these roles on the site for free through mid-May, and some nonprofits and disaster response groups to advertise free through the end of June.
“We are proud to do our part to help accelerate the distribution of vaccines by connecting essential businesses that need to quickly find healthcare talent with people who have the right skills,” LinkedIn’s chief product officer, Tomer Cohen, writes in a new blog post.
CHIPMAKERS PLEAD FOR DOMESTIC FUNDING IN RECOVERY BILL — A coalition of semiconductor manufacturers and other industry groups is pushing the Biden administration to include funding to incentivize domestic production of semiconductors in the next stimulus bill, my colleague Caitlin Oprysko reports in POLITICO Influence. In a letter Thursday to President Joe Biden, industry groups called for “robust funding” of programs enacted in this year’s NDAA designed to boost manufacturing in the U.S. Demand swings during the pandemic have caused chip shortages.
— The letter comes ahead of an expected executive order from Biden that will help address the global crunch for semiconductors, as we reported last week in MT. Signees include the Semiconductor Industry Association, TechNet and the Chamber of Commerce.
LISTEN UP: ‘THE FUTURE THIS WEEK’ BY POLITICO’S NANCY SCOLA — Want an easy way to catch up on tech news via your smart speaker? Join Nancy as she gives you three- to five-minute recaps of this week’s tech news, plus fresh insights. This week: why Facebook’s game of chicken in Australia over the future of news matters — a lot — for the rest of us.
John Costello, former deputy assistant secretary of intelligence and security at the Commerce Department, has joined the Center for a New American Security as an adjunct senior fellow in its tech and national security program.
‘The Digital Bridge’: In the latest edition of our new, weekly transatlantic tech newsletter, POLITICO’s Mark Scott delves into the upcoming U.S.-EU data-transfer deal, the growing global fight over microchips and how American states are embracing their inner-European. You can read more here and subscribe here.
Tech tax backlash: “Top lobbying groups backed by Amazon, Facebook, Google and other technology giants sued Maryland on Thursday,” WaPo reports, “seeking to scuttle a new state tax on their massive online-advertising revenues — and stop other local governments from following its lead.”
Google’s ethical AI shakeup: “Google will restructure its responsible artificial intelligence efforts to centralize teams under a single executive,” Bloomberg reports. “Google has sought to diffuse employee rancor stemming from the acrimonious departure of a prominent Black researcher, Timnit Gebru.”
Update on the Theranos trial: It’s still slated to happen in July, and new statements from the company’s lab chief Kingshuk Das indicate he’ll testify that leaders of the startup “pushed back against his assessment that its technology wasn’t accurate enough to use,” WSJ reports.
Glassdoor says: A new Glassdoor analysis featuring company ratings based on race and ethnicity found that “Apple had the highest overall company rating among Black or African American employees.”
Oracle wrinkle: “In its bid for TikTok, Oracle was supposed to prevent data from being passed to Chinese police,” The Intercept reports. “Instead, it’s been marketing its own software for their surveillance work.”
Tips, comments, suggestions? Send them along via email to our team: Bob King ([email protected], @bkingdc), Heidi Vogt ([email protected], @HeidiVogt), Nancy Scola ([email protected], @nancyscola), John Hendel ([email protected], @JohnHendel), Cristiano Lima ([email protected], @viaCristiano), Alexandra S. Levine ([email protected], @Ali_Lev), and Leah Nylen ([email protected], @leah_nylen).
TTYL.