Lebanon Syrian Refugee

Millions of refugees need broadband, too - The Washington Post

While concerns about the costs and benefits of digital technology grow, there are still daily reminders of the good that innovation can and does do.

This week, for example, a group of senior communications experts, <a href="https://www.unhcr.org/5770d43c4">working with</a> the U.N. High Commission on Refugees, released its “<a href="https://www.broadband4refugees.org/plan">Global Broadband Plan for Refugee Inclusion</a>.” The detailed report calls for “all refugees, and the communities that host them, to have access to available, affordable and usable mobile and internet connectivity.”

At first glance, the idea of devoting scarce resources to ensuring refugees can go online may sound misguided. No one would dispute that the world’s <a href="https://www.unhcr.org/figures-at-a-glance.html">68.5 million refugees</a> require, first and foremost, much more basic support, such as food, shelter and safety.

But according to Blair Levin, the plan’s principal author, access to information and communications is a growing priority. ”Our research shows that refugees see connectivity as a critical survival tool, and are willing to make large sacrifices to get connected,” Levin said.

“Further, connectivity facilitates innovations — such as using secured digital <a href="https://www.unhcr.org/cash-based-interventions.html">cash-based support</a> — that improve the delivery of essential services and accelerate the refugees’ return to self-reliance."

Few people appreciate the potential of broadband connectivity as much as Levin. Among other things, he wrote the visionary <a href="https://www.fcc.gov/general/national-broadband-plan">U.S. National Broadband Plan</a>. Now a senior fellow with the Brookings Institution, he has advised dozens of other countries, states and cities on strategies to connect people to affordable high-speed Internet service and ways to improve the delivery of essential services.

As the report makes clear, the lack of connectivity among those displaced from their homes, and often their countries, is particularly acute. Nearly half of all refugees — about 32 million people — don’t use the Internet. Those who do may not make full use of its capabilities, because of factors such as a lack of key government applications and little native language support.

For refugees, the problems accompanying poor communications options are severe. Without inexpensive and reliable access, displaced people can’t easily locate and maintain contact with family members who may be scattered throughout the world. Connectivity is also increasingly necessary for access to health care, education, jobs and public safety.

The reasons for low adoption among refugees are mostly obvious, including the cost of mobile devices and service plans. Network access and electricity may not be available in the places where refugees live. Even something as basic as the lack of identity papers, which refugees often don’t have, can make adoption impossible. Many host countries require proof of identity just to obtain a SIM card.

Still, solutions to these kinds of problems aren’t hard to imagine. Because of continued improvements in key technologies, there may be as many as 1 billion offline consumers worldwide, including refugees, who could be made a part of digital life fully and cost-effectively.

Yet these customers remain largely invisible to existing providers tied to conventional management thinking, which trains business leaders to focus on developing strong relationships with existing customers and expanding incrementally to adjacent markets.

The result is a growing problem of what Omar Abbosh and Paul Nunes of Accenture and I call “trapped value” — a widening gap between what new technologies are capable of delivering and what existing institutions actually do with it.

Ultimately, the gap becomes so great that a combination of start-ups, forward-thinking businesses and leaders in civil society learn to innovate beyond the limits of old industry operating models, often by building new digital ecosystems. It’s that sudden release of potential economic energy that makes disruptive innovations, well, disruptive.

In “<a href="http://www.pivottothefuture.com/">Pivot to the Future</a>,” my new book co-written with Abbosh and Nunes, we demonstrate how companies across industries are changing the rules of business to overcome the trapped value problem.

A key insight of our research is that releasing trapped value often means sharing benefits with a wide range of stakeholders. Providing broadband for refugees, for example, may be profitable only if stakeholders consider not just the revenue they would receive, but the much greater value the service would generate for the users themselves, the industries with which they interact and, perhaps most of all, for society as a whole.

That’s the kind of radical new thinking we found in one promising example from our research: <a href="https://www.jio.com/">Reliance Jio Infocomm</a>, an Indian mobile communications start-up founded by Mukesh Ambani, India’s richest person.

At the time, India’s mobile market was experiencing intense competition among several providers. Most investors would have seen little opportunity for a new entrant, especially given the high initial costs of building a new communications infrastructure.

Ambani saw something different: a trapped value gap that was invisible to existing businesses. Although India’s middle class was largely online, the digital revolution had left behind the nation’s lower-income consumers — an enormous market that Ambani thought could be served profitably by breaking the rules.

Analysis: Bezos vs Ambani: The billionaire bout that had to happen

Jio’s counterintuitive solution was to build the world’s first network based entirely on 4G LTE technology — an advance in mobile communications that few of the company’s competitors were providing even to their wealthiest customers. The company actually offered Indian consumers the best and latest technology for the lowest price — a premium rather than a budget service.

Specially designed devices, compelling audio and video apps, and other innovations completed Ambani’s plan. The strategy worked brilliantly. Jio has attracted more than 200 million subscribers since its 2016 launch, many of them previously priced out of the mobile revolution. The company now operates the world’s largest data network, facilitating an explosive release of trapped value.

Ambani has gambled on an all-new LTE network that cost billions, knowing, however, that it would be both easier to scale and more affordable to operate. Where incumbents were charging as much as $60 per gigabyte of data transmitted over older network technology, Jio could charge less than $1.

Spreading the costs over such a large user base means there is plenty of released value to share. Beyond the benefits to users and Indian society as a whole, Jio has been profitable since 2017.

Can similar visionary thinking make the Global Broadband Plan for Refugees a reality? Levin thinks so. Although the plan lays out concrete steps to improve access, affordability and utilization, the most important step is bringing key stakeholders together to act in unison.

”While everyone would benefit from universal refugee connectivity,” Levin said, “none have the resources or authority necessary to unilaterally overcome all the obstacles. Connectivity for refugees is a collective-action problem, requiring a collective-action solution.”

That’s also the kind of solution that requires radical pivoting. It’s the approach Jio and other inclusive innovators are using to upend business as usual in the digital age.

Downes is co-author with Paul Nunes of “Big Bang Disruption:  Strategy in the Age of Devastating Innovation” (Portfolio 2014). He is a project director at the Georgetown Center for Business and Public Policy.

Larry Downes

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Millions of refugees need broadband, too

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Is the tech backlash going askew? - The Washington Post

As winter sets in, the dark days for technology companies have been getting longer.

We sympathize with the increased anxiety over the poor data hygiene practices of leading tech platforms. And we agree that legislation clarifying the duties of those who collect and use personal information is important, as is delineating enforcement responsibilities among agencies and jurisdictions.

We’re concerned, however, by the tendency of some to shoehorn pet theories into the debate — notably the <a href="https://www.bna.com/hipster-antitrust-comes-n73014473208/">passionate but incomplete argument</a> that it’s time to jettison decades of antitrust policy that limits the government to intervening only when market concentration has, or could, cause higher prices for consumers.

The vague alternative, proposed by critics on the left and right, is a return to a failed framework that boils down to, at best, a general belief that “big is bad” and, at worst, to politically-based payback for companies on the wrong side of an election.

Why Facebook is giving $300 million for local journalism

<a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/10/opinion/facebook-china-tech-competition.html">Writing recently</a> in the New York Times, law professor Tim Wu urged antitrust enforcers to launch sweeping lawsuits against Facebook and other “Big Tech” platforms that would likely last a decade or more. Anything less, Wu says, amounts to giving “these companies a pass when it comes to antitrust enforcement, allowing them to dominate their markets and buy up their competitors.”

The goal of Wu’s approach is not to actually win so much as it is to distract the companies’ leaders. The litigation is not a means but the end in itself. Paraphrasing Thomas Jefferson, Wu advocates spilling the corporate equivalent of the “blood of patriots,” attacking relentlessly regardless of whether there’s actually, you know, a sustainable case.

That logic is oddly aligned with the views of some, including President Trump and <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2018/09/25/inside-big-meeting-federal-state-law-enforcement-that-signaled-new-willingness-investigate-tech-giants/?utm_term=.31d81e50d136">his former attorney general</a>, Jeff Sessions, who believe they are justified in threatening companies they view as politically hostile on the fuzzy grounds that there is a <a href="https://thehill.com/business-a-lobbying/404472-trump-google-facebook-and-amazon-are-in-a-very-antitrust-situation">“very antitrust situation.” </a>

Wu’s best example of how this abuse of legal process works was the U.S. government’s 13-year crusade in the 1970s to break up IBM. At the time, IBM was the undisputed leader of the computer business.

T-Mobile announced a merger needing Trump administration approval. The next day, 9 executives had reservations at Trump’s hotel.

Though the government was never able to prove the company had, <a href="https://www.justice.gov/atr/case-document/united-states-memorandum-1969-case">as accused</a>, “undertaken exclusionary and predatory conduct with the aim and effect of eliminating competition,” Wu believes the cost and uncertainty for the company of the extended legal fight saved the U.S. economy, giving personal computers an opening to proliferate and unseat IBM’s mainframe computer “monopoly.”

Never mind that IBM was the most successful seller of PCs and, through its relationship with Lenovo, still is. The company was certainly hurt by the ultimately abandoned case, as were, in later examples, Microsoft, Intel, Qualcomm and others.

But do antitrust jihads really help consumers more than it hurts them? Probably not. While well-founded prosecutions, such as those leading to the 1982 breakup of AT&amp;T, did open critical markets, that success may not be duplicated elsewhere. In fact, Philip Verveer, a Visiting Fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School and the government’s lead counsel in the AT&amp;T case, <a href="https://shorensteincenter.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/Phil-Verveer-Practical-Considerations-Nov-2018.pdf?x78124">recently concluded</a> that unleashing antitrust against today’s platform companies would amount to little more than “an act of faith that a successful prosecution would bring about benefits.”

AT&T says it’ll stop selling your location data, amid calls for a federal investigation

There’s no need to gamble. The more effective regulator of digital markets has always been the happy confluence of engineering and business innovations in hardware, software and communications driving exponential improvements in speed, quality, size, energy usage and, of course, cost.

As computing continues to improve, markets become unsettled, innovation flourishes, and new leaders emerge. It’s not the arbitrary release of the “blood of patriots” that best corrects market imbalances. It’s the normal cycles of capitalism sped up by disruptive innovation, or what economist Joseph Schumpeter in 1942 famously called “creative destruction.”

If the tech sector was immune to that process, as some allege, we would expect stagnant productivity and wage growth, with profits protected and funneled to shareholders.

But that view doesn’t square with <a href="https://docs.google.com/viewerng/viewer?url=https://www.progressivepolicy.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/PPI_Competition-Concentration-2018.pdf&hl=en_US">recent findings</a> from Michael Mandel, chief economist at the Progressive Policy Institute. According to Mandel, who has been measuring the digital economy for decades, the technology sector broadly “accounted for almost half of non-health private sector growth between 2007 and 2017.” Technology prices, at the same time, “fell by 15%, compared to a 21 percent increase in the rest of the non-health private sector.”

Annual pay for tech workers (including hourly workers at e-commerce fulfillment centers) rose at more than twice the rate of other industries. Job growth in tech was four times faster.

Lower prices, higher pay and growing productivity: That doesn’t suggest a problem, or at least not one requiring radical restructuring of the companies driving the gains.

Consider the alternative approach taken in Europe, which has ramped up an aggressive attack of U.S. technology companies, applying the kind of expansive view of competition law urged by Wu and others. European businesses are still <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/innovations/wp/2015/06/08/europes-innovation-deficit-isnt-disappearing-any-time-soon/?utm_term=.a069ce23443b">largely no-shows</a> in the digital revolution, the result not of monopolies but of the micromanagement of employment, investment and infrastructure by regulators. Rather than freeing up local innovators to benefit European consumers, the European Union seems content simply to <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2018/07/25/eus-b-google-fine-escalates-an-undeclared-trade-war-with-silicon-valley/?utm_term=.0b567013b569">fine successful U.S. businesses</a>.

The European approach highlights another problem with calls for U.S. antitrust enforcers to punish platform companies just for their size. Looking ahead to the technology drivers of the near future, such as artificial intelligence and autonomous vehicles, any hopes for the United States to lead internationally depend on heavy investment today in research and development. Many of the highest-risk bets are being placed by, you guessed it, today’s “monopoly” companies.

So what should U.S. regulators do? The starting point is vigilance in applying tried-and-true tools to new harms. The Federal Trade Commission, for example, <a href="https://hbr.org/2016/05/the-downside-of-the-fccs-new-internet-privacy-rules">has already brought</a> over 150 enforcement actions against tech companies in the last decade for violations of consumer protection laws, reaching settlements that in many cases include decades of ongoing oversight and reporting.

The trade agency is <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2018/12/19/dc-attorney-general-sues-facebook-over-alleged-privacy-violations-cambridge-analytica-scandal/?utm_term=.c4459171be13">gearing up a broad review</a> of Facebook to see whether the company’s many embarrassing failures of the past few years amount to violations of a 2011 consent decree or, indeed, new violations. And the commissioners <a href="https://www.commerce.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/hearings?ID=8094A55F-C761-4731-8B88-3AFBF2D98F0B">recently told Congress</a> that they want additional resources and authority to better enforce existing law, joining a bipartisan call for targeted legislation, particularly on consumer data collection and use.

Tech’s loudest critics argue that the gears of government are turning too slowly. But that’s actually another reason why calls to simply throw out measured approaches to regulating competition are dangerous, despite their populist appeal. Even assuming new standards could be developed that wouldn’t stall the innovation engine driving the U.S. economy, rewriting federal competition law, realistically, would take Congress and the courts decades to hammer out.

Fortunately, the next wave of disruptive technology is always coming. It won’t fix everything. But if history is any guide, it will fix an awful lot — and do so without breaking everything that’s actually working.

<i>Blair Levin is a nonresident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. Larry Downes is project director at the Georgetown Center for Business and Public Policy.</i>

Blair Levin

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Is the tech backlash going askew?

Contributor

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COMBO-US-RUSSIA-IRAN-IT-POLITICS-HACKING

The summer of hate speech - The Washington Post

Over the past few years, pressure has been building on online platforms to do something — anything — about increasingly hostile, misleading and distasteful Internet content. The 2016 election, Brexit and other polarizing events have brought out some of the worst in human nature, much of it amplified and rapidly disseminated on free digital services.

Growing conflict over who gets to say what to whom and where, of course, is not limited to the Internet. Even here in Berkeley, Calif., the free-speech capital of the world, we have been engulfed in fights — some violent — <a href="https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2018/08/13/berkeley-free-speech-why-liberal-gave-up-college/">over which viewpoints should be heard</a> on the UC campus. Berkeley Free Speech Movement founder Mario Savio would not be proud.

But this year, largely unregulated Internet companies have fallen into a black hole of disgruntled users, hyperventilating activists <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/how-can-congress-police-the-internet-when-they-dont-even-understand-it/2018/08/20/46f6baa6-a4b4-11e8-97ce-cc9042272f07_story.html?utm_term=.d4ed85043995">and an angry Congress</a>. Facebook, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/07/technology/tech-companies-online-speech.html">Twitter</a>, <a href="https://www.wired.com/2017/08/instagram-kevin-systrom-wants-to-clean-up-the-internet/">Instagram</a>, <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2018/08/23/google-deletes-accounts-with-ties-iran-youtube-other-sites/?utm_term=.e4d7b96c2ab8">YouTube</a> and other social media companies are innovating wildly, implementing increasingly Rube Goldberg-like fixes to adjust their content policies and the technologies that enforce them.

“Users are calling on online platforms to provide a moral code,” says Daphne Keller, director of the intermediary liability project at Stanford’s Center for Internet and Society. “But we’ll never agree on what should come down. Whatever the rules, they’ll fail.” Humans and technical filters alike, according to Keller, will continue to make “grievous errors.”

Do not look to the Constitution to solve the problem. Contrary to popular belief, the First Amendment plays no role in determining when content hosts have gone too far, <a href="https://techcrunch.com/2018/08/23/the-consequences-of-indecency/">or not far enough</a>. That is because, as I regularly explain to incredulous students, free-speech protections limit only censorship by governments and then <a href="https://www.marketplace.org/2018/08/24/tech/regulating-what-people-say-internet-may-be-harder-it-sounds">only in the United States.</a>

Some <a href="https://www.fec.gov/updates/foreign-nationals/">restrictions on foreign nationals</a> — e.g., electioneering — are permitted. With very limited exceptions, private actors can press mute on whomever and whatever they want. Indeed, the Constitution protects the sites from government efforts to impose speech codes — moral or otherwise.

But while the First Amendment does not apply to the practices of Internet companies, the inevitable failure of platform providers to find the “Goldilocks zone” of just-right content moderation underscores the wisdom of the Founding Fathers. Picking and choosing among good and bad speech is a no-win proposition, no matter how good your intentions.

Larry Downes

Berkeley, Calif.

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