With Loom Dead And Google Fiber Frozen, Google's Broadband Disruption Plays Aren't Looking So Hot

from the do-not-pass-go,-do-not-collect-$200 dept

When Google Fiber launched back in 2010, it was heralded as a game changer for the broadband industry. Google Fiber, we were told, would revolutionize the industry by taking Silicon Valley money and disrupting the viciously uncompetitive and anti-competitive telecom sector. Initially things worked out well; cities tripped over themselves offering all manner of perks to the company in the hopes of breaking free from the broadband duopoly logjam. And in markets where Google Fiber was deployed, prices dropped thanks to this added competition (fancy that!).

The fun didn't last. In late 2016 Alphabet began getting cold feet about the high costs and slow return of the project, and effectively mothballed the entire thing -- without admitting that's what they were doing. The company blew through several CEOs in just a few months, laid off hundreds of employees, froze any real expansion, and cancelled countless installations for users who had been waiting years. And while Google made a lot of noise about how it would be shifting from fiber to wireless to possibly cut costs, those promises so far appear stuck in neutral as well.

Now another Google broadband disruption play is meeting a similarly uninspiring end. Google Loon, Alphabet's attempt to use coordinated hot air balloons to provide supplemental broadband service to hard to reach areas, is being shuttered after nine years of development. While the company quieted many doubters who didn't think the project would work, it said it was never able to find a sustainable business model:

"While we’ve found a number of willing partners along the way, we haven’t found a way to get the costs low enough to build a long-term, sustainable business. Developing radical new technology is inherently risky, but that doesn’t make breaking this news any easier. Today, I’m sad to share that Loon will be winding down."

Unlike Google Fiber, Loon was less about disruption and more about supplementing existing service. Whereas Google Fiber directly challenged incumbent telecom providers, Loon was supposed to be a tool to work hand in hand with those companies to supplement existing and patchy cellular service, especially in less developed nations. It's fairly clear those companies weren't interested in partnering with a potential competitor in other spaces. And while Loon will be headed to the great project graveyard in the sky, the company hopes some of the coalitions built around the effort persist:

"The Loon team is proud to have catalyzed an ecosystem of organizations working on providing connectivity from the stratosphere. The world needs a layered approach to connectivity — terrestrial, stratospheric, and space-based — because each layer is suited to different parts of the problem."

To be clear, disrupting telecom isn't easy. It's a largely broken sector largely dominated by monopolies that are politically powerful because they're tethered to the nation's intelligence and emergency response infrastructure. And while Google may have not fully succeeded at disruption (in part thanks to dubious behavior by telecom monopolies), projects like Google Fiber certainly did help amplify a lack of US broadband competition, and provided a helpful template for a lot of communities eager to strike public/private partnerships to try and improve regional broadband infrastructure.

At the same time, the ongoing shift away from these moonshots despite a mammoth budget is highly reflective of how Google is a much less interesting and far less creative and courageous company than it was a decade ago. While it's understandable the company wouldn't want to throw a fortune at projects with no returns, the way it has backed away by Google Fiber -- firing employees and mothballing the project without really admitting the project is on ice -- is pretty reflective of a slow but steady culture shift away from the kind of curiosity and integrity that initially made Google so interesting.

Filed Under: broadband, competition, google fiber, loon
Companies: google

Funniest/Most Insightful Comments Of The Week At Techdirt

from the weekly-words dept

This week, both our winners on the insightful side come in response to Google threatening to pull out of Australia if the country goes ahead with demanding payments for linking to newspapers. Rekrul won first place with a question:

By this logic, shouldn't the newspapers be paying all the companies that advertise in them?

In second place, it's That One Guy with a response to Prime Minister Scott Morrison saying that Australia "won't respond to threats" while making threats of his own:

'How dare you not cave to our thuggery!'

'If you demand that we pay for a service we are offering for free we'll stop doing that' is now a threat? What a pathetic and obvious attempt to spin their attempted extortion and Google's refusal to cave as the government being the 'victims'.

Hey idiot, Google telling you that if you pass a Google tax they'll shut down in your country isn't a 'threat', it's simply reminding you of a core part of business, namely that if doing something only has negative effects you stop doing that thing.

I'm honestly not sure which explanation would make this less stupid at this point, whether they really think that Google will cave and pay the Google tax despite the multiple examples of that not happening, or if they are trying to drive Google off to benefit the larger publishers at the expense of the smaller ones that'll be screwed when Google leaves.

For editor's choice on the insightful side, we start out with one more comment on that post, this time from aerinai who underlined the slippery web-breaking slope of link taxes:

This doesn't stop

Once the publishers get Google and Facebook to pay... then they make small businesses pay for links, then it kills the free and open web.

These politicians are willfully ignorant of how the internet works and should be voted out. Unfortunately, being a jerk to 'big tech' is in vogue right now, so good luck with that...

Next, it's Bloof responding to a comment that compared Tom Cotton's call for soldiers on US streets to the dispersing of the crowd at the Capitol building:

Tom Cotton wanted the troops dispatched to crack down on people protesting because the police are murdering them without suffering any sort of consequence for their actions.

The Democrats had to put troops in the street because the right wing committed a terrorist attack in the capital and threatened more. They broke into the seat of power, planning kidnap and murder to install a tyrant.

One is an attempt to get support for a crack down on minorities and the left practising their freedom of speech, the other is trying to make sure the far right can't get close enough to murder the president. OMG, THEY'RE BOTH THE SAME, GUYS!

You really are a disingenuous moron.

Over on the funny side, both the top spots went to Stephen T. Stone. In first place, it's another response to Australia and Google:

A look at the near future…

Google: We’ll stop serving your entire country if you tax us for links.

Australian Government: We’d like to see you try!

[Google cuts Australia off from all Google services]

Australian Government: [shocked Pikachu face]

In second place, it's a response to this week's highlight in the world of terrible Section 230 opinions:

Damn. Even skiiers don’t zig-zag as much as that guy.

For editor's choice on the funny side, we start out with That One Guy getting very, very sarcastic about a MAGA conference threatening Politico with a lawsuit over its reporting:

No, that seems fair

Honestly I can't think of a single legitimate reason to ask sponsors of a republican run conference if the recent failed insurrection might impact their willingness to donate to the party given the repeated and consistent refutation by those within the party beforehand of the narrative that instigated the insurrection and the swift and unmistakable party-wide condemnation of the insurrection and willingness to punish those responsible afterwards, so gonna have to side with the conference here, Politico's actions are definitely 'fake news.'

Finally, it's Jason with a response to the former US Ambassador who is suing Apple and Google for making the Telegram app available:

bad guys use paper too, you know

If was foreseeable to OfficeMax that by allowing Hammermill Paper to continue to be available in its store that OfficeMax’s conduct could lead to fear of violence by individuals, such as [literally anyone I guess].

By failing to remove Hammermill Paper from the OfficeMax Store, Defendant has proximately caused [Plaintiff's] emotional distress.

Plaintiff has suffered injuries in an amount that exceeds $75,000.

Defendant’s failure to enforce their own guidelines against Hammermill Paper has caused [Plaintiff 1] and [Plaintiff 2] to suffer economic loss by being deprived of a key benefit of the purchase and use of their laser printer.

That's all for this week, folks!

Gaming Like It's 1925: Check Out The Early Bird Entries In Our Public Domain Game Jam

from the first-in dept

Sign up for the Public Domain Game Jam on itch.io »

We're on the home stretch of our annual public domain game jam! If you plan to submit something but haven't signed up, make sure you do it before it's too late — and if you're just waiting to play the great games that come in, you can head on over now and check out some of the early bird submissions.

Although only a handful of brave designers have decided to submit their entries before the deadline, we've already got a great-looking selection of games piling up for our judges to start playing on Monday. As expected, The Great Gatsby has been given a lot of attention: so far, we've got a platformer with beautiful pixel graphics, a stylish rhythm game, and not one but two tabletop roleplaying games, all based on the famous novel. But it's not all Gatsby stuff — there's also a competitive card game based on Smithsonian portraits, a game inspired by a 1925 jazz song, a game about Jewish surrealist painter Felix Nussbaum, and more.

There are likely to be a lot more entries before the jam ends tomorrow night at midnight (that's still enough time to whip something up, by the way) so if you play to play them all, you might as well get a head start.

A big thanks to all the designers who have already submitted their games, and all those with something in the works! Let's all start gaming like it's 1925.

Sign up for the Public Domain Game Jam on itch.io »

Filed Under: game jam, games, gaming like its 1925, public domain

Microsoft Patent: Chatbots Made From The Online Habits Of Dead People

from the digital-zombies dept

Every once in a while, you come across some story about chatbots. These tend to range from fun stories about how someone makes a chatbot to make some interaction more efficient to some large company making a chatbot that turns out to be horrifically racist thanks to its interactions with the general public. Good times all around, in other words.

But a recent patent granted to Microsoft is a whole different thing.

The patent describes creating a bot based on the “images, voice data, social media posts, electronic messages”, and more personal information.

“The specific person [who the chat bot represents] may correspond to a past or present entity (or a version thereof), such as a friend, a relative, an acquaintance, a celebrity, a fictional character, a historical figure, a random entity etc”, it goes on to say.

“The specific person may also correspond to oneself (e.g., the user creating/training the chat bot,” Microsoft also describes – implying that living users could train a digital replacement in the event of their death.

I'll go ahead and wait while you finish shivering in revulsion. Done? Cool, because we aren't done yet. The patent also lays out how the use of a deceased person's image could be used to create a 3D model of the dearly departed, allowing for the construction of not just a "chatbot", but one that uses images of a person to make the interaction with others more... personable. And, well, if all of this sounds like something that would have appeared in famed creepy-show Black Mirror, good instincts, because it already did.

The idea that you would be able, in the future, to speak to a simulation of someone who has passed on is not new. It is famously the plot of the Black Mirror episode “Be Right Back”, where a young woman uses a service to scrape data from her deceased partner to create a chatbot – and eventually a robot.

Most will point out that Black Mirror episodes tend to serve as warnings, not how-tos. But let's all take a breath here. The concept of being able to build some simulacrum for long lost family members or historical figures is no doubt interesting. And, assuming everyone involved understands the limitations for what this technology actually can do and is, the tech itself isn't particularly harmful.

But what we do need to pay very close attention to are the implications for privacy and transparency should anyone seek to opt into this. Otherwise, you can imagine a world where grandma, having died 2 years ago, suddenly reaches out to you on the internet and wants a quick chat. And that, I feel confident, nobody wants.

Filed Under: chatbots, dead people, deceased
Companies: microsoft

All Hands On Deck: Ensuring Innovation, Not Just Patents, From All

from the innovation-is-not-just-patents dept

As the Iancu era at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office comes to a close, one of the USPTO's initiatives has focused on promoting diversity in patenting. The newly established National Council on Expanding American Innovation, and the associated USPTO request for comments on a national strategy for expanding innovation, focus on having under-represented groups more involved in creating patentable inventions.

That's a laudable goal.  But we shouldn't be aiming just to have more under-represented groups receive patents.  More patents doesn't necessarily mean more innovation, it just means more patents.  Instead, we need to ensure that those groups are both provided the support to innovate and that their innovation is recognized.

To do that, we have to change how we talk about innovation.  In a recent article, Prof. Anjali Vats notes that the "stories that people tell about invention in the U.S. continue to focus on white men – the Benjamin Franklins, Thomas Edisons and Elon Musks – without affording women and people of color the same larger-than-life status."  Often, those stories focus on lone individuals, not teams.  Those failures lead to barriers to innovation by under-represented groups whose contributions may not fit that model.

As one example, many—including USPTO Director Iancu—like to lionize Thomas Edison as the prototypical heroic inventor.  They point to him as a role model.  But Edison is a perfect example of the problems with the "heroic inventor" story.  Edison employed a large staff who did much of the work of his inventions—without those "muckers", he'd have gotten much less done.  And of course, Edison was neither the inventor of electric light nor the inventor of a practical light bulb.  Alessandro Volta, the namesake of the word "voltage", generated light from electricity 80 years before Edison did.  Humphrey Davy invented the electric arc light, which was in wide use in the 1800s, although it was impractical for home lighting.

And while Edison devised a carbon filament bulb, his bulbs only burned for a few days before they burnt out. It was Lewis Latimer who devised a process for making a filament sufficiently useful to allow electric lighting to become widespread. Latimer also wrote the first technical book regarding electric lighting. He even drafted the drawings for Alexander Graham Bell's telephone patent—an application which beat Elisha Gray's competing application to the patent office by only a few hours.

Latimer was African-American, the son of an enslaved person.  His story isn't often mentioned alongside contemporaries like Edison or Bell when talking about American inventors, despite having been as or more responsible for the invention of electric light.  Similar "hidden figures" include Katherine Johnson, a NASA engineer, and other women who worked as "computers" for the Army, for astronomical calculations, and to support the Works Progress Administration.  

While these stories have been popularized, how many more unrecognized innovators are out there whose contributions were never recognized because they didn't fit the model of "lone inventor creates idea and patents it"?  How many more innovations could we have if that wasn't what was promoted as the primary model for innovation?

Instead of focusing on promoting patenting activity and lionizing heroic inventor stories, let's try to promote innovation and recognize forms of innovation that don't fit neatly into the patent framework.  Collaborative research, open-source and open-science models, and other such forms of innovation are at least as important as patents—let's give them at least as much priority.

Originally posted to the Patent Progress blog

Filed Under: innovation, patents, uspto

The Clock Is Ticking On Our Public Domain Game Jam!

from the weekend-project dept

Sign up for the Public Domain Game Jam on itch.io »

What are your plans this weekend? If you're like most of us living under pandemic lockdown, the answer is probably "not much" — but it could be "making a game using newly-public domain material!" All you have to do is sign up for Gaming Like It's 1925 and start exploring the wealth of works published in 1925 that have now run out of copyright protection and can serve as the basis for a great new analog or digital game. But don't delay — entries are due Sunday night at midnight!

If you've never made a game before, that might sound like it's not enough time — but a two-day game jam is actually a great way to try your hand at game design. Entries can be as simple as a few rules for a roleplaying game typed into a text document, or you could make use of a tool like Twine or Story Synth that's easy to learn and provides everything you need to create a simple browser-playable game. The important thing isn't complexity or fancy assets — it's a clever idea and a vision for building something new based on old material, to show why a growing public domain benefits us all.

Check out the game jam page for the full rules and some links to public domain works you could draw on, then join the jam and start working on your entry before midnight on Sunday, January 31st. Our judges will be playing the entries to select winners in six categories to receive some great Techdirt prizes (the winners of the 2020 jam are linked below, and you can read our judges' thoughts on them here):

• Best Analog Game (Previous Winner: The 24th Kandinsky)
• Best Digital Game (Previous Winner: You Are The Rats In The Walls)
• Best adaptation of a 1925 work (Previous Winner: The Hounds Follow All Things Down)
• Best remixing of multiple sources (Previous Winner: 192X)
• Best “Deep Cut” from a work not listed on any of the round up articles (Previous Winner: Legends of Charlemagne)
• Best Visuals (Previous Winner: Hot Water)

You can also check out the handful of submissions we've already received, but as in previous years most people are likely holding off until the last minute so they can tweak and perfect their entries — so hurry up and help show how a rich public domain fuels creativity!

Sign up for the Public Domain Game Jam on itch.io »

Filed Under: 1925, culture, game jam, public domain

Discord Takes Over Moderation Of r/WallStreetBets Server As Facebook Shuts Down Popular Stock Trading Group

from the everything-is-content-moderation dept

Apparently every damn story has a content moderation angle these days. The still ongoing GameStonks! story keeps getting more and more fascinating in all sorts of ways. Yesterday, we noted as a side note, that Discord had shut down the r/WallStreetBets server that many of the subreddit users had used to communicate. Discord claimed -- somewhat unbelievably -- that it had done so at this very moment because of a long term "hate speech" problem on that server.

But, then, a day later, Discord said it had re-enabled the server... but that the company itself was helping to moderate the server.

Discord staff are actively working with the server’s team to help with moderation. At least one Discord staffer, who is now in the new WallStreetBets server, is also helping with infrastructure problems related to the rapid growth the community is experiencing.

“WallStreetBets members have set up a new server and we are working with them,” says a Discord spokesperson in a statement to The Verge. “We will welcome the group back so long as they improve their moderation practices and follow our Community Guidelines. We have reached out to the moderators to provide them with support and advice, like we do for many of our large communities.”

This is kind of fascinating. We've always been interested in moderation setups at places like Reddit and Discord, because they show a different overall structure than the kind of content moderation questions we're used to seeing at Facebook/Twitter/YouTube. In those latter cases, it's one company who just sets the rules. But with Reddit and Discord, while there are company-wide rules, since those services are made up of mostly individual communities, the moderation is effectively left up to those who run those communities (the mods on Reddit or the server owner/admins on Discord).

But, here, Discord is stepping in to help with the moderating. And it's interesting that the company claims that it has done this "for many of our large communities" as well. It appears to be something of a hybrid model, though that raises a bunch of other questions as well. Still, it's interesting to see how these things evolve. And, at least at a first pass, this new setup appears to be working better than the old one:

There are now fewer people screaming in calls, using racial slurs, or blasting music to the hundreds listening in. The memes are now mainly emoji and text, rather than images that often included offensive material.

Meanwhile, the Stonks! trading content moderation questions are spreading. Facebook announced that it has shut down a popular stock trading group... but for a reason you might not have expected:

Allen Tran, a 23-year-old from Chicago who created Robinhood Stock Traders, said he woke up on Wednesday to a notification that Facebook had disabled the 157,000-member group. The notification, seen by Reuters, said without detail that the group violated policies on “adult sexual exploitation.”

Wait... what? Tran notes that he cannot recall any "adult content" ever appearing in the group. It's possible that someone at Facebook clicked the wrong button or something, but it's still bizarre. And, at the very least, will contribute to the various conspiracy theories about big companies ganging up to shutdown retail investors who had suddenly found the loophole to make hedge fund folks sweat a little.

Filed Under: content moderation, stonks, wallstreetbets, wsb
Companies: discord, reddit

The Lies Told About The EU Copyright Directive's Upload Filters May Help Get Them Thrown Out In Court

from the freedom-to-conduct-business dept

Although the main fight over the EU's Copyright Directive was lost back in March 2019, there are plenty of local battles underway. That's a consequence of the fact that an EU Directive has to be implemented by separate national laws in each of the region's 27 member states. Drawing up the local legislation is mostly straightforward, except for the controversial Article 17, which effectively brings in a requirement to filter all uploads. Trying to come up with a text that meets the contradictory obligations of the Directive is proving difficult. For example, although the law is supposed to stop unauthorized uploads, this must not be through "general monitoring", which is not permitted in the EU because of the e-Commerce Directive.

As the various countries struggle to resolve these problems, it is no surprise that they are coming up with very different approaches. These are usefully summed up in a new post on the Kluwer Copyright blog. For example, France is implementing the Copyright Directive by decree, rather than via ordinary legislative procedures. As Techdirt reported, the French government is pushing through an extreme interpretation that ignores requirements for user protections. Germany, by contrast, is bringing in wide-ranging new law that contains a number of positive ideas:

a new "minor use" exception that would legalise minor uses of third party works on online platforms.

In addition, the proposal also introduced the ability for uploaders to "pre-flag" any uploads as legitimate, protecting them from automated blocking.

It limited the scope of the requirement for platforms to obtain licences to "works that users typically upload". Platforms can meet their best efforts obligation to obtain authorisation by approaching collective management organisations and by responding to licence offers from rightsholders with a representative repertoire.

There is an irony here. One of the main reasons for introducing the Copyright Directive was to make copyright law more consistent across the EU. Article 17 is causing copyright law there to diverge even more.

The Kluwer Copyright blog has two more recent posts about Article 17, written by Julia Reda and Joschka Selinger. They look at an aspect of upload filters that could be of crucial importance in the case brought before the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) by Poland, which seeks to have upload filters removed from the Copyright Directive.

On several occasions, the CJEU has thrown out blocking injunctions for violating the service providers' freedom to conduct a business. In a recently published study on behalf of German fundamental rights litigation organization Gesellschaft für Freiheitsrechte e.V., the authors of this blog post argue that when ruling on the request for annulment of Article 17, the CJEU will have to balance all relevant fundamental rights, including the freedom to conduct a business. In this blog post, we will put the spotlight on this under-examined fundamental right. In part 1, we will discuss its relevance for the court case pending before the CJEU. We will examine the ways in which Article 17 places new burdens on online platforms that are fundamentally different from the voluntary copyright enforcement schemes employed by some of the larger platforms today. In part 2, we analyse those new platform obligations in light of the CJEU case law on the freedom to conduct a business and discuss the role of the proportionality mechanism included in Article 17 (5). We find that the legislator may have grossly underestimated the impact of Article 17 on the freedom to conduct a business.

The basic argument is simple. During the debate on the Copyright Directive, its supporters were deeply dishonest about how it would work in practice. They repeatedly claimed that it would not require upload filters, and denied that it would be hard to implement in a way that was compatible with existing EU laws. Unfortunately, the politicians in the European Parliament were taken in by these claims, and passed what became Article 17 without amendments.

But the case before the CJEU gives another chance to point out the truth about upload filters. The fact that they only exist for things like music and video, not all copyrightable material as Article 17 requires; that those don't work well; and that even these flawed systems can only be afforded by Internet giants like Google. In practical terms, this means that smaller companies that allow user uploads will be unable to comply with Article 17, since it would require the use of technology that would be expensive to develop or license, and which wouldn't even work properly. As such, a key argument in the CJEU case will be that upload filters represent an unjustified interference in the freedom to conduct a business in the EU, and should be thrown out. Let's hope the CJEU agrees.

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter, Diaspora, or Mastodon.

Filed Under: article 17, copyright, eu, eu copyright directive, france, general monitoring, germany, upload filters, user protections

Daily Deal: Lightkey Pro Text Prediction Software

from the good-deals-on-cool-stuff dept

Express yourself faster using the world’s leading word prediction software for Windows. Lightkey’s word prediction software learns your typing patterns and gradually predicts up to 12 words including punctuation marks, allowing you to compose emails 4 times faster, with confidence. It also includes over 60 content domains including technology, business, finance, law, academia, and more. Lightkey works for just about any application you use on a day-to-day basis including Outlook, Word, PowerPoint, and Chrome apps. It's on sale for $80.

Note: The Techdirt Deals Store is powered and curated by StackCommerce. A portion of all sales from Techdirt Deals helps support Techdirt. The products featured do not reflect endorsements by our editorial team.

Filed Under: daily deal