An FTC commish for the year 2021
Plus the future of bystander footage, “Endless Frontier,” and how NASA wound up inside our phones
Happy Friday and welcome to Slow Build, a new-ish newsletter by me, Nancy Scola, on tech and society. Let’s have some straight talk: Slow Build is a work in progress. There’s already a ton of great writing out there on tech, but we’re aiming to get to something a bit different here — a weekly weaving together of news, original reporting, history, analysis, observation, pointers, and more, fixated on how tech is impacting human life and vice versa. It’ll take a bit of time to get the mix and mode right. Feedback is like a gift from the heavens. Thanks for being part of the journey!
If you’re already enjoying Slow Build, please share it with others. And if you haven’t subscribed yet, I hope you’ll consider it.
THE FTC COMMISSIONER SEEMINGLY CREATED IN A LAB FOR THIS MOMENT
That’s the main takeaway from this week’s Senate confirmation of Lina Khan, an academic antitrust expert, to fill a seat on the Federal Trade Commission — where one of the more important moments came in the opening minutes in the form of an otherwise throwaway line from Washington State Democrat Maria Cantwell while doing the customary welcoming of the nominee’s family: “You look too young to be her parents.” It’s true, Khan is just 32, and if confirmed (there’s no reason to think she won’t be) she’ll beat Leon Higginbotham by about two years. Khan isn’t burdened with the sense of awe of the American tech industry that characterized the last Democratic administration. But she also doesn’t seem to carry any of the righteous anger that fuels many the sort of Twitter wars that some other antitrust advocates get drawn into, or start. (Nope, not naming names. I seek not war.) By all appearances, she approaches the question of how government should handle the tech industry to the greatest benefit of the American people with a cool, clinical compassion. It disarms would-be critics. The most opposition that Tennessee Republican Marsha Blackburn — who is enormously critical of tech but also no fan of rubber-stamping Joe Biden — could muster was a glancing reference to Khan’s “lack of experience,” about which she asked her to promptly follow up with written answers.
Khan arguably would be the first truly digital-native FTC commissioner, and while she comes at Silicon Valley as if it were just another kind of widget-maker with a lot of problems, she also brings to the job something that is surprisingly hard to find in Washington, even inside the FTC — a real in-the-weeds, data-informed understanding of how tech companies really and truly work. She wrote a landmark paper on the complexities of Amazon’s business model, and has studied the industry as a journalist, FTC staffer, Hill aide, and law professor. It adds up to equip her with a skillset she hinted at during the hearing in an exchange with Sen. Richard Blumenthal, Democrat of Connecticut.
Blumenthal:
“Can the FTC really enforce the law against behemoth corporations like Facebook, Google, and Amazon?”
Khan:
“I think one of the challenges is just the deep information asymmetries that exist between some of these firms and enforcers and regulators. I think it’s clear that in some instances the agencies have been a little slow to catch up to the underlying business realities and empirical realities of how these markets work.”
But more than that, Khan’s also reached the cusp of confirmation with a deep understanding of the intricacies of another institution: the FTC itself. At one point, Montana Democrat Jon Tester focused in on asking Khan about the political power of the country’s biggest agricultural companies. Khan, with a bit of a tilted smile, pointed back to a 1919 report on the meatpacking industry and said, “when the FTC did try to go hard here, its jurisdiction was stripped.” Translation: a hundred years later, she knows what she’s up against.
By the way, when I caught up with Silicon Valley Democratic congressman Ro Khanna by phone this week while he was microwaving his lunch, I asked him about Khan. His response? “It’s wonderful to see someone make it into a position in government based on merit.” The challenge, though, is that the default institutional setting for an FTC commissioner is ‘inconsequential.’ It’ll be on Khan to flip that.
—More: This just might be the world’s first global, synchronous push against concentrated corporate power.
POURING BILLIONS INTO TECH RESEARCH — Speaking of Congressman Khanna, he was celebrating this week the reintroduction of his bipartisan, bicameral Endless Frontier Act, which would drive $100 billion to the National Science Foundation to devote to technological development in areas like AI and advanced manufacturing.
The bill takes its name from a historic 1945 report from Vannevar Bush, the head of the Office of Scientific Research and Development, after he was asked by FDR how to keep war-time tech research going. (The rumor: Bush prodded FDR into asking.) The report set off years of fierce debate with West Virginia Democratic Senator Harley M. Kilgore, who wanted to spread science research beyond the country’s elite institutions. Khanna: “Bush made an incredible contribution to America, because [his model] allows America to outcompete the Soviets and win the 20th century. But Kilgore was right — we can’t just have science and technology spending concentrated.”
So today’s Endless Frontier Act has has $10 billion for at least ten “regional technology hubs” — also helpful for winning hearts and minds on the Hill. Khanna has been pushing since he came to Congress to spread tech beyond “Stanford and Santa Clara.”
Biden came out as a fan this week. Chuck Schumer’s pushing it in the Senate. Morning Tech has a great rundown of the obstacles.
ABOVE: The inaugural 25-member National Science Board in 1950. The two women: the anthropologist, physician, and nutritionist Sophie Bledsoe Aberle and the Nobel Prize-winning biochemist Gerty Cori.
IMPORTANT NEW RESEARCH from Rutgers’ Rashida Richardson attempts to give lawmakers and regulators a workable definition of automated decision systems — one centered on “social, political, and economic forces and contexts.” (65 pages; definitions on page 13)
Meanwhile, one aspect of Anne Milgram’s nomination by Biden to head DEA that’s flying under the radar: her advocacy for “moneyballing criminal justice” — and in particular, controversial pre-trial “public safety assessments.” That work’s absent from the bio distributed by the White House. (Among the past doubters: Vanita Gupta, confirmed this week to be the new #3 at DOJ, which oversees DEA.)
INTRODUCING “WEB BANKING” — VaccinateCA is enlisting volunteers to manually ‘scrape’ the web for inoculation info. Stripe’s Patrick McKenzie explains how.
(By the way, a question I’ve gotten: why “Slow Build”? It’s a nod to the thoughtful development of technology over time, adapting to feedback and changing conditions. But good question!)
“MAN DIES AFTER MEDICAL INCIDENT” — The Minneapolis Police’s initial anodyne reporting of George Floyd’s death is highlighting the importance of bystander footage – and, for what it’s worth, 17-year-old Darnella Frazier’s ability to spread it quickly and easily on social media. This is a government tech story, too: former Florida Democratic Senator Bill Nelson, in his confirmation hearing this week to head NASA, held up his mobile phone: “This camera was developed for the earth-observing satellites that NASA has built.” Here’s the history, and here’s what the Electronic Frontier Foundation says is its most current guidance on taping the police. Meanwhile, USC’s Allissa V. Richardson asks, “What’s the purpose of sharing violent police videos anymore?”
HAPPENINGS: The New Yorker is hosting an event on “how memes become money” next Wednesday, with staff writer Sheelah Kolhatkar, Beeple, Anil Dash, and MIT Media Lab’s Neha Narula. And the FTC is hosting a workshop on dark patterns, or “potentially manipulative user interface designs,” next Thursday.
WHAT ELSE:
Missing from all this on why Facebook went on lockdown only during the Chauvin verdict: the same reasons cities do?…The “In Machines We Trust” podcast tackles tech companies “moving into our wallets” (18 mins.)…”Is Facebook buying off the New York Times?”…Some Democrats credit “the massive digital-advertising effort the Trump campaign aimed at Latinos”…China’s “digital yuan” experiment…It turns out you can trick a Tesla…”Europe Proposes Strict Rules for Artificial Intelligence”…Is it ethical to scrub your parent’s YouTube history?…life at the mercy of TikTok’s algorithm…Ross Douthat wonders if Josh Hawley is right about Amazon...Some in Congress want police to get a court order before buying data…electric scooters take Manhattan…McDonald’s franchisees pay for McFlurry machines they can’t control…the crypto lobbyists are coming…Jen Pahlka on “How the Government’s Multibillion-Dollar Plan to Modernize Its Tech Could Go Horribly Wrong”…and tech workers are going all YOLO.
Thanks for reading, and see you next week.