Month: June 2020

HBO Max Won’t Hit AT&T Data Caps Because AT&T Owns HBO ⇥ theverge.com

Nilay Patel, the Verge:

According to an AT&T executive familiar with the matter, HBO Max is using AT&T’s “sponsored data” system, which technically allows any company to pay to excuse its services from data caps. But since AT&T owns HBO Max, it’s just paying itself: the data fee shows up on the HBO Max books as an expense and on the AT&T Mobility books as revenue. For AT&T as a whole, it zeroes out. Compare that to a competitor like Netflix, which could theoretically pay AT&T for sponsored data, but it would be a pure cost.

That’s why the last time we looked at AT&T’s sponsored data system, the only three streaming services we could find using it… were owned by AT&T. It’s also why sponsored data systems fly in the face of net neutrality principles. AT&T’s streaming services have a major advantage over its competitors, all of which run up against the cap. But there’s no net neutrality in the United States anymore, so AT&T is free to give itself preferential treatment.

Zero rating — the unfair treatment of a telecommunications-multimedia conglomerate’s own holdings — is something that remained effectively unconsidered by Judge Richard Leon when he ruled in favour of AT&T’s acquisition of Time Warner, yet is entirely obvious to anyone who has even the faintest idea about telecom strategy today.

For its part, Comcast has made Peacock free to subscribers because it owns NBC. Both AT&T and Comcast run utilities and movie studios — and exclusively license intellectual property created by the latter to be advantageously distributed on the network infrastructure of the former. It isn’t like Netflix or Disney are small companies, but neither can compete with that degree of vertical integration.

Apathetic antitrust enforcement created this mess, but the dismantling of net neutrality laws will entrench it.

I fully expect a resurgence of piracy as studios and ISPs attempt to isolate media. For obvious reasons, ISPs win either way, but a less stupid future would see the internet treated like a utility and less vertical integration. Perhaps that would culminate in streaming video platforms that work a little more like streaming music. Of course, Spotify’s is taking the opposite route with its podcast strategy; so, unfortunately, perhaps all streaming media is destined for a consumer-hostile model of exclusive intellectual property licensing and the bickering of large companies. C’est la vie.

Update: Three U.S. Senators are looking into the anticompetitive concerns of this decision.

A Coward Takes a Walk to a Photo-Op ⇥ washingtonpost.com

Alana Wise, NPR:

Escalating his rhetoric during a period of roiling national crises, President Trump on Monday threatened to deploy the U.S. military to cities or states that don’t take “necessary” actions to halt violent protests, saying the armed forces will “quickly solve the problem for them.”

Trump’s Rose Garden remarks came as just across the street, law enforcement officers deployed tear gas and shot rubber bullets to forcefully disperse peaceful protesters. Washington, D.C., had set a curfew Monday of 7 p.m. ET.

The protesters were removed from the Lafayette Square area across from the White House, apparently to clear the way for the president to walk to St. John’s Church, where he posed briefly for photographers, holding a Bible. Parts of the church compound were damaged by rioters on Sunday night.

Mark Helenowski adjusted the slick video produced by the White House, set to bizarrely stirring music, to more faithfully acknowledge the scene as it happened.

Eugene Scott, Washington Post:

Trump has been sympathetic to certain protests, those including people who support him. In addition to calling marchers, which included white-nationalist groups, in Charlottesville in 2017 “very fine people,” the president did not criticize Americans protesting stay-at-home orders when they got adversarial with police.

Trump’s effort to portray himself as a supporter of peaceful protests does not match his recent or long-term history. It was always unlikely the protesters going to the streets this week would buy into his claims that he supported their rights. The question after Monday is how will those he actually sought to reach out to with his march to foist the Bible feel their bond with him was strengthened, given the trade-off he made to get it.

Exactly. The president’s allies have responded mostly in the form of cowardly dodges and defence, but some have more clearly denounced such a ridiculous photo-op that sought to keep the story out of the frame. That is, of course, what the president wants; it is not what he ought to get.

Amazon Order Emails No Longer Include Item Details ⇥ mjtsai.com

Michael Tsai quotes two tweets; first, from Paul Rosania:

Amazon order confirmations and shipment notifications no longer include any item details. I could not for the life of me figure out why they would do this. They’re not scored on MAUs, they don’t need me to click through. Then I realized: is it so Google can’t see my order data?

Next, Andrew Chen of Andreessen Horowitz and formerly leading the “Rider Growth” team at Uber:

My guess – it’s not for google, but bc there’s email analytics cos that estimate sales of individual products based on parsing emails

At Uber, we used parsed competitor receipt data to estimate for instance, airport mkt share %, short trips mkt share etc

Chen is referring to email apps like Edison and inbox tidying services like Unroll.me, which scrape your messages for receipts and invoices used to create market trend reports. It wasn’t too long ago that many people found it outrageous that Google was using the contents of their Gmail inboxes to serve ads; now, people are willingly passing their entire email setup through marketing data companies. I think this is partly because people have become somewhat complacent with the erosion of their privacy, but I also think there is validity in a theory articulated by Cabel Sasser in response to Edison’s syncing bug last month:

What an interesting butterfly effect

Apple wants to preserve your battery life > email clients can’t check in the background > email clients set up servers to store credentials and check email to push notify you of new email > everyone’s email now exposed to huge security vector.

Apple obviously did not create this market, but its actions and priorities have likely encouraged its growth. Same, too, could be said of the App Store’s longstanding race-to-the-bottom prices that have only recently begun to turn around with widespread use of subscriptions.

To be clear: I am not claiming that, had the App Store encouraged similar app prices as on desktop computers and had background daemons been allowed, that this market would not exist. So long as personal data has value and meaningful privacy rules are absent, it seems inevitable that products will be invented to strip mine information through inventive sources. But the tradeoff of better battery life and less expensive apps does not come without a price.

It turns out that Amazon’s detail deficient email notifications are privacy-friendly, in a sense, but it’s Amazon’s sales data that is being protected.

Black Journalists and Covering the Storm That Never Passes ⇥ theroot.com

Danielle C. Belton, the Root:

We at The Root are fortunate in that we can comfort each other and find solace in our shared pain, but so many other black journalists at predominantly white-run media outlets don’t have this luxury — of someone asking if they are OK. Of someone asking, “do you need to take time off?” Of someone suggesting therapy or some other support to get through the crisis. Because often, to white people, this is just another news story. For us, this is our lives… and our deaths, displayed for public consumption, often without context or understanding.

As those exhausted look away for their own mental health, we cannot. We labor on because we have a cause bigger than ourselves. But it doesn’t mean we don’t turn to friends, family, colleagues and therapy to get through his, because we do. I ask for those consuming this news site and many, many other black journalists’ work understand that we are reporting while dealing with our own life-long post-traumatic stress from repeatedly bearing witness to our dehumanization and murder.

Police Erupt in Violence Nationwide Against Protesters of Police Brutality ⇥ slate.com

At protests against police brutality, those same militarized police forces are escalating confrontations and engaging in brutality. This violence is not new: it is perpetuated disproportionately against black Americans every single day, but also at demonstrations, though not all demonstrations. What is relatively new is that this violence is being documented, but it remains unaccountable. Campaign Zero notes ten policy proposals that can make a meaningful difference. After the brutality shown by police against persons of colour — and, I repeat, especially black Americans — and the lacklustre efforts at police reform over decades, shame on anyone attempting to make property damage a banner story.

As a neighbour sleeping next to an elephant, the past week in particular has been infuriating and exhausting — and, frankly, frustrating that there is only so much any one person can do to help. It requires all of us to commit to being non-optical allies.