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Google has threatened to close its search engine in Australia — as it dials up its lobbying against draft legislation that is intended to force it to pay news publishers for reuse of their content.
Facebook would also be subject to the law. And has previously said it would ban news from being shared on its products owing if the law was brought in, as well as claiming it’s reduced its investment in the country as a result of the legislative threat.
“The principle of unrestricted linking between websites is fundamental to Search. Coupled with the unmanageable financial and operational risk if this version of the Code were to become law it would give us no real choice but to stop making Google Search available in Australia,” Google warned today.
Last August the tech giant took another pot-shot at the proposal, warning that the quality of its products in the country could suffer and might stop being free if the government proceeded with a push to make the tech giants share ad revenue with media businesses.
Since last summer Google appears to have changed lobbying tack — apparently giving up its attempt to derail the law entirely in favor of trying to reshape it to minimize the financial impact.
Its latest bit of lobbying is focused on trying to eject the most harmful elements (as it sees it) of the draft legislation — while also pushing its News Showcase program, which it hastily spun up last year, as an alternative model for payments to publishers that it would prefer becomes the vehicle for remittances under the Code.
The draft legislation for Australia’s digital news Code which is currently before the parliament includes a controversial requirement that tech giants, Google and Facebook, pay publishers for linking to their content — not merely for displaying snippets of text.
Yet Google has warned Australia that making it pay for “links and snippets” would break how the Internet works.
In a statement to the Senate Economics Committee today, its VP for Australia and New Zealand, Mel Silva, said: “This provision in the Code would set an untenable precedent for our business, and the digital economy. It’s not compatible with how search engines work, or how the internet works, and this is not just Google’s view — it has been cited in many of the submissions received by this Inquiry.
“The principle of unrestricted linking between websites is fundamental to Search. Coupled with the unmanageable financial and operational risk if this version of the Code were to become law it would give us no real choice but to stop making Google Search available in Australia.”
Google is certainly not alone in crying foul over a proposal to require payments for links.
Sir Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the world wide web, has warned that the draft legislation “risks breaching a fundamental principle of the web by requiring payment for linking between certain content online”, among other alarmed submissions to the committee.
In written testimony he goes on:
“Before search engines were effective on the web, following links from one page to another was the only way of finding material. Search engines make that process far more effective, but they can only do so by using the link structure of the web as their principal input. So links are fundamental to the web.
“As I understand it, the proposed code seeks to require selected digital platforms to have to negotiate and possibly pay to make links to news content from a particular group of news providers.
“Requiring a charge for a link on the web blocks an important aspect of the value of web content. To my knowledge, there is no current example of legally requiring payments for links to other content. The ability to link freely — meaning without limitations regarding the content of the linked site and without monetary fees — is fundamental to how the web operates, how it has flourished till present, and how it will continue to grow in decades to come.”
However it’s notable that Berners-Lee’s submission does not mention snippets. Not once. It’s all about links.
Meanwhile Google has just reached an agreement with publishers in France — which they say covers payment for snippets of content.
In the EU, the tech giant is subject to an already reformed copyright directive that extended a neighbouring right for news content to cover reuse of snippets of text. Although the directive does not cover links or “very short extracts”.
In France, Google says it’s only paying for content “beyond links and very short extracts”. But it hasn’t said anything about snippets in that context.
French publishers argue the EU law clearly does cover the not-so-short text snippets that Google typically shows in its News aggregator — pointing out that the directive states the exception should not be interpreted in a way that impacts the effectiveness of neighboring rights. So Google looks like it would have a big French fight on its hands if it tried to deny payments for snippets.
But there’s still everything to play for in Australia. Hence, down under, Google is trying to conflate what are really two separate and distinct issues (payment for links vs payment for snippets) — in the hopes of reducing the financial impact vs what’s already baked into EU law. (Although it’s only been actively enforced in France so far, which is ahead of other EU countries in transposing the directive into national law).
In Australia, Google is also heavily pushing for the Code to “designate News Showcase” (aka the program it launched once the legal writing was on the wall about paying publishers) — lobbying for that to be the vehicle whereby it can reach “commercial agreements to pay Australian news publishers for value”.
Of course a commercial negotiation process is preferable (and familiar) to the tech giant vs being bound by the Code’s proposed “final offer arbitration model” — which Google attacks as having “biased criteria”, and claims subjects it to “unmanageable financial and operational risk”.
“If this is replaced with standard commercial arbitration based on comparable deals, this would incentivise good faith negotiations and ensure we’re held accountable by robust dispute resolution,” Silva also argues.
A third provision the tech giant is really keen gets removed from the current draft requires it to give publishers notification ahead of changes to its algorithms which could affect how their content is discovered.
“The algorithm notification provision could be adjusted to require only reasonable notice about significant actionable changes to Google’s algorithm, to make sure publishers are able to respond to changes that affect them,” it suggests on that.
It’s certainly interesting to consider how, over a few years, Google’s position has moved from ‘we’ll never pay for news’ — pre- any relevant legislation — to ‘please let us pay for licensing news through our proprietary licensing program’ once the EU had passed a directive now being very actively enforced in France (with the help of competition law) and also with Australia moving toward inking a similar law.
Turns out legislation can be a real tech giant mind-changer.
Of course the idea of making anyone pay to link to content online is obviously a terrible idea — and should be dropped.
But if that bit of the draft is a negotiating tactic by Australians lawmakers to get Google to accept that it will have to pay publishers something then it appears to be winning one.
And while Google’s threat to close down its search engine might sound ‘full on’, as Silva suggests, when you consider how many alternative search engines exist it’s hardly the threat it once was.
Especially as plenty of alternative search engines are a lot less abusive toward users’ privacy.
Our reliance on internet-based services is at an all-time high these days, and that’s brought a new focus on how well we are protected when we go online. Today comes some news from one of the bigger companies working in the area of password security, which points how business is shifting for the companies providing these tools.
Emmanuel Schalit, the co-founder of popular password manager Dashlane, is stepping down as CEO of the startup. He is being replaced by JD Sherman, the former COO of Hubspot, as Dashlane makes plans to move more aggressively to court more business users.
“This is about thinking about its next leg of our scaling strategy, more B2B monetization after being strong in B2C,” Sherman said in an interview, praising his predecessor’s growth of the consumer business and noting his realization that “B2B was not his forte.”
Sherman’s career focus, in contrast, has been all about B2B. Before his eight years at Hubspot, he was the CFO of Akamai (which, as a CDN, also had security as a focus, albeit in a completely different way), and before that IBM.
Since accepting the offer, Sherman (pictured right) has been quietly working with Schalit — who will no longer hold any operational role — to get up to speed and will be taking over formally at the start of February.
Sherman is based out of Boston and will eventually commute to Dashlane’s HQ in New York: eventually, because everyone is remote-working at the moment, with Sherman himself getting hired in a virtual process.
The changing of the guard comes at an interesting time for the startup. Dashlane now has 15 million users, up from 10 million+ in 2019. That was the same year that Dashlane announced two significant rounds of funding just six weeks apart from each other: first a $30 million round (which appeared to have some debt as part of it), then a $110 million Series D that valued the company at just over $500 million. Its backers include the likes of Sequoia, Bessemer, FirstMark, Rho Ventures and consumer credit reporting giant TransUnion.
Sherman would not talk about current valuation, nor where the company is currently standing regarding its next financial steps, except to say that it’s in a good place and to provide the smallest of hints of an IPO on the horizon.
“The Series D was a healthy round for a subscription business,” he said. “Right now, cashflow is solid and we have the funding we need for our growth, so there is no urgent plan to raise money. When we do, we’ll see if it is an IPO round” — that is, the last round before an IPO — “or not. To me, it’s all about growing the business.”
My guess: that valuation has gone up, given the boost in user numbers, the growth of its enterprise business and the huge shifts in the market in the last year that have put a spotlight on companies that are making using the internet safer. (Also, note that Logmein, which owns competitor LastPass, was picked up by PE firms for about $4.3 billion in a deal that completed last year.)
Dashlane was founded focused primarily on providing password management tools for consumers. These still account for the majority of its users, but the Series D funding was in part to fuel a bigger push into the business market, and to generally get on the radar of more people.
The expansion into business users was a natural move in more ways than one. First, the consumer service is designed as a freemium offering, while businesses provide a more steady and guaranteed revenue stream. Second, there is a natural progression that comes from being a happy consumer user: you might want to have the same service for your online work life, too. That remains the strategy for Sherman.
“The plan is to have two sides to the business,” he said, using the well-worn consumer-to-business analogy of a flywheel to describe how it will work: “The more who use it, more businesses will start to adopt it and get comfortable with using a password manager.”
That strategy is lately getting a major fillip, in the form of the massive boost in online activity in the past year.
Activities like taking care of all your shopping, entertainment, social and work-related needs have all moved online in the last year, pushed into the virtual sphere by the emergence and persistent presence of the easily contagious and dangerous Covid-19 virus.
Some of that shift has worked out better than many thought it would, and now, some believe that even when the pandemic does get under control, a lot of us will still be using the internet to get all of those things done on a regular basis.
But while I’ve heard a lot of industry people describe that situation as “the genie is out of the bottle”, perhaps a more fitting expression might be that Pandora’s box has been opened. That is to say, the increased online usage has created an alarmingly large opportunity for malicious hacking, security breaches and misuse of our online identities.
This consequently has a pretty direct link back to Dashlane.
Password protection is one of the most important elements of keeping yourself and your information safe online, with, weak, stolen and reused passwords some of the biggest causes of security breaches both for consumers and businesses (by some estimates, you can track 80-90% of all security breaches back to password issues).
Beyond that, not least because of all the breaches we’ve now seen, the current market has become much more concerned about privacy and security (a trend manifesting in all kinds of ways), and that has bred a lot more awareness and appetite for the kinds of tools that Dashlane, and other companies that enable better online security, provide.
There will likely continue to be developments in the technology to both suss out bad actors and block them in their tracks when they do try to enter networks, and the technology sold to organizations to keep their and their customers’ information in the cloud in more secure ways will also be improved. But above and beyond all that, password managers are likely to continue to play a role in the mix.
Password managers may not always be a perfect solution — there have been a few cases of breaches over the years, and while they have not been in recent times, security researchers at the University of York in May 2020 identified vulnerabilities that could potentially be exploited — but they remain a relatively easy option for end users themselves to be more proactive in protecting their identities specifically by building a better way to guard their passwords. (Among all that, it’s also worth pointing out that Dashlane has never had a breach in its 10+ years of operations.)
And there are a number of routes to providing password management, including efforts from platform players themselves and more direct Dashlane competitors like 1Password and LastPass. Notably, some of the efforts to bridge some of that together, such as the “OpenYolo” project spearheaded by Google and Dashlane, have stalled over the years, in part because of the complexity of implementing it with other existing managers.
But even within that fragmented, competitive and (still at times) vulnerable market, Dashlane still has a lot of opportunities for growth.
“The business is strong and growing,” Sherman said. “The craziness around Covid and remote networking have raised the profile of password management and security in general. It’s a more difficult environment, but there is a tailwind there.”
Blobr, a Paris-based startup operating in the no-code space with tech to make it easier for companies to expose and monetise their existing APIs, has raised €1.2 million in pre-seed funding.
The round is led by pan-European pre-seed and seed investor Seedcamp, with participation from New Wave, Kima, and various angel investors. Blobr is also the first company to take investment from New Wave — the new European venture capital firm co-founded by Pia d’Iribarne and Jean de la Rochebrochard — since the VC confirmed it had closed $56 million in deployable capital from an all-star lineup of investors, including Iliad’s Xavier Niel, Benchmark’s Peter Fenton, and Tony Fadell of Apple fame.
Blobr, founded by Alexandre Airvault (CEO) and Alexandre Mai (CTO), is aiming to become the default “business and product layer” for APIs. This idea is to enable product and business people to manage and monetize a company’s application programming interfaces without technical knowledge or the need fo use up more internal engineering resources. And by doing so, the startup believes we’ll see much more innovative use of APIs as commercial data and functionality is made accessible by more third parties to build on top.
“We believe companies should stop thinking of APIs as mere pipes and start building them as products to unleash their power,” says Airvault. “This means APIs should be priced, customized and managed with a user-oriented mindset and not only a tech one”.
To make this a reality, Blobr is designed to empower product and business owners to “make data-sharing a profitable model,” while reducing their dependence on tech. “I believe this approach is what will drive the data exchanges to the next level,” he explains.
Blobr’s no code technology offers quite a lot of functionality already. From one existing internal API, you can filter confidential information or GDPR related data; it’s also possible to deliver different API output depending on customer segmentation so you only expose the data that’s needed; and API usage can be linked to usage based business models or a monthly subscription in Stripe.
Airvault says the startup’s main competitors include API management solutions from Google, IBM, Axway, and Mulesoft. “Those platforms are tailored for internal APIs but are not thought of and optimized to manage APIs as products. They are tailored for technical people whereas Blobr as a no code solution is built from scratch for product and business people to avoid technical people to be involved in the equation,” he adds.
The UK’s data watchdog has restarted an investigation of adtech practices that, since 2018, have been subject to scores of complaints across Europe under the bloc’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).
The high velocity trading of Internet users’ personal data can’t possibly be compliant with GDPR’s requirement that such information is adequately secured, the complaints contend.
Other concerns attached to real-time bidding (RTB) focus on consent, questioning how this can meet the required legal standard with data being broadcast to so many companies — including sensitive information, such as health data or religious and political affiliation and sexual orientation.
Since the first complaints were filed the UK’s Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) has raised its own concerns over what it said are systemic problems with lawfulness in the adtech sector. But last year announced it was pausing its investigation on account of disruption to businesses from the COVID-19 pandemic.
Today it said it’s unpausing its multi-year probe to keep on prodding.
In an update on its website, ICO deputy commissioner, Simon McDougall, ICO, who takes care of “Regulatory Innovation and Technology” at the agency, writes that the eight-month freeze is over. And the audits are coming.
“We have now resumed our investigation,” he says. “Enabling transparency and protecting vulnerable citizens are priorities for the ICO. The complex system of RTB can use people’s sensitive personal data to serve adverts and requires people’s explicit consent, which is not happening right now.”
“Sharing people’s data with potentially hundreds of companies, without properly assessing and addressing the risk of these counterparties, also raises questions around the security and retention of this data,” he goes on. “Our work will continue with a series of audits focusing on digital market platforms and we will be issuing assessment notices to specific companies in the coming months. The outcome of these audits will give us a clearer picture of the state of the industry.”
It’s not clear what data the ICO still lacks to come to a decision on complaints that are approaching 2.5 years old at this point. But the ICO has committed to resume looking at adtech — including at data brokers, per McDougall, who writes that “we will be reviewing the role of data brokers in this adtech eco-system”.
“The investigation is vast and complex and, because of the sensitivity of the work, there will be times where it won’t be possible to provide regular updates. However, we are committed to publishing our final findings, once the investigation is concluded,” he goes on, managing expectations of any swift resolution to this vintage GDPR complaint.
Commenting on the ICO’s continued reluctance to take enforcement action against adtech despite mounds of evidence of rampant breaches of the law, Johnny Ryan, a senior fellow at the Irish Council for Civil Liberties who was involved in filing the first batch of RTB GDPR complaints — and continues to be a vocal critic of EU regulatory inaction against adtech — told TechCrunch: “It seems to me that the facts are clearly set out in the ICO’s mid 2019 adtech report.
“Indeed, that report merely confirms the evidence that accompanied our complaints in September 2018 in Ireland and the UK. It is therefore unclear why the ICO requires several months further. Nor is it clear why the ICO accepted empty gestures from the IAB and Google a year ago.”
“I have since published evidence of the impact that failure to enforce has had: Including documented use of RTB data to influence an election,” he added. “As that evidence shows, the scale of the vast data breach caused by the RTB system has increased significantly in the three years since I blew the whistle to the ICO in early 2018.”
Despite plentiful data on the scale of the personal data leakage involved in RTB, and widespread concern that all sorts of tangible harms are flowing from adtech’s mass surveillance of Internet users (from discrimination and societal division to voter manipulation), the ICO is in no rush to enforce.
In fact, it quietly closed the 2018 complaint last year — telling the complainants it believed it had investigated the matter “to the extent appropriate”. It’s in the process of being sued by the complainants as a result — for, essentially, doing nothing about their complaint. (The Open Rights Group, which is involved in that legal action, is running this crowdfunder to raise money to take the ICO to court.)
So what does the ICO’s great adtech investigation unpausing mean exactly for the sector?
Not much more than gentle notice you might be the recipient of an “assessment notice” at some future point, per the latest mildly worded ICO blog post (and judging by its past performance).
Per McDougall, all organizations should be “assessing how they use personal data as a matter of urgency”.
He has also committed the ICO to publishing “final findings” at some future point. So — to follow, post-pause — yet another report. And more audits.
“We already have existing, comprehensive guidance in this area, which applies to RTB and adtech in the same way it does to other types of processing — particularly in respect of consent, legitimate interests, data protection by design and data protection impact assessments (DPIAs),” he goes on, eschewing talk of any firmer consequences following should all that guidance continue being roundly ignored.
He ends the post with a nod to the Competition and Markets Authority’s recent investigation of Google’s Privacy Sandbox proposals (to phase out support for third party cookies on Chrome) — saying the ICO is “continuing” to work the CMA on that active antitrust complaint.
You’ll have to fill in the blanks as to exactly what work it might be doing there — because, again, McDougall isn’t saying. If it’s a veiled threat to the adtech industry to finally ‘get with the ICO’s privacy program’, or risk not having it fighting adtech’s corner in that crux antitrust vs privacy complaint, it really is gossamer thin.
Today, I and (the great) @Caffar3Cristina write in @EURACTIV about antitrust & privacy. Failure by @ICOnews @DPCIreland and others to use powerful GDPR tools has allowed competition problems to fester, putting @CMAgovUK and others in a difficult position. https://t.co/DL842X8UGh
— Johnny Ryan (@johnnyryan) January 22, 2021
Apple is said to be working on a new version of the MacBook Air with a brand new physical case design that’s both thinner and lighter than its current offering, which was updated with Apple’s M1 chip late last year, per a new Bloomberg report. The plan is to release it as early as late 2021 or 2022, according to the report’s sources, and it will also include MagSafe charging (which is also said to be returning on Apple’s next MacBook Pro models sometime in 2021).
MagSafe would offer power delivery and charging, while two USB 4 ports would provide data connectivity on the new MacBook Air. The display size will remain at its current 13-inch diagonal measurement, but Apple will reportedly realize smaller overall sizes by reducing the bevel that surrounds the screen’s edge, among other sizing changes.
Apple has a plan to revamp its entire Mac lineup with its own Apple Silicon processors over the course of the next two years. It debuted its first Apple Silicon Macs, powered by its M1 chip, late last year, and the resulting performance benefits vs. their Intel-powered predecessors have been substantial. The physical designs remained essentially the same, however, prompting speculation as to when Apple would introduce new case designs to further distinguish its new Macs from their older models.
The company is also reportedly working on new MacBook Pros with MagSafe charging, which could also ditch the company’s controversial TouchBar interface – and, again according to Bloomberg, bring back a dedicated SD card slot. All these changes would actually be reversions of design changes Apple made when it introduced the current physical notebook Mac designs, beginning with the first Retina display MacBook Pro in 2012, but they address usability complaints by some of the company’s enthusiast and professional customers.
