With help from Steven Overly and John Hendel
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— Follow the (EU) leader: The European Commission’s sweeping plans to lead on AI and data regulation face enormous obstacles, but policymakers across the rest of the world are watching closely — and in some cases, taking cues.
— Campaign against campus surveillance gets results: UCLA dropped potential plans to deploy facial recognition — a move that could spur other schools to do the same.
— What’s next for Bloomberg?: Mike Bloomberg has his first presidential debate under his belt (it wasn’t pretty). Now, all eyes are on how he’ll deploy nontraditional tech and social media strategies to sprint ahead to Super Tuesday.
IS IT ME OR DO THE SHORTEST WEEKS FEEL THE LONGEST? IT’S (ONLY) THURSDAY; WELCOME TO MORNING TECH. I’m your host, Alexandra Levine. Congratulations to my POLITICO colleague Helena Bottemiller Evich for winning a George Polk Award for her work describing how a politicized Department of Agriculture ignored its own climate action plan. Read the first story in the package here.
Got a news tip? Write Alex at alevine@politico.com or @Ali_Lev. An event for our calendar? Send details to techcalendar@politicopro.com. Anything else? Full team info below. And don’t forget: add @MorningTech and @PoliticoPro on Twitter.
Tech of the Town
ALL EYES ON EUROPE — The European Commission outlined a five-year plan for putting its mark on artificial intelligence and data regulation, an ambitious undertaking that POLITICO’s Ryan Heath writes will face major obstacles. But industry lobbyists in the U.S. are watching closely nevertheless, as Europe has a track record of enacting rules with global reach. (We’re looking at you, GDPR.) John Miller, senior vice president of policy at the Information Technology Industry Council, told MT that the proposals percolating in Europe, while still in the early stages, suggest policymakers on either side of the Atlantic may take divergent paths to regulating emerging technologies.
— Brussels indicated it’s looking to take a European-centric view when setting technical standards and testing requirements for AI, while the U.S. approach has focused on flexible, international standards set by industry, he said. The ideas floated Wednesday also raise troubling questions about whether Europeans could ultimately require American companies to store data in Europe or turn over source code and algorithms for third-party vetting — policies that would contradict U.S. priorities in recent trade agreements. “It's a long time for some of these proposals to bear fruit,” Miller said. “But I think one thing that also bears mentioning is that in Europe, when a kind of regulatory train starts moving down the tracks, it usually isn't derailed quite so easily and usually something will come out on the other end.”
— While it's possible the final EU rules could have an outsize influence, Miller noted the Trump administration has staked out its own AI priorities through an executive order last year and increased funding for AI in this year’s proposed budget. Plus, the White House outlined broad guidelines for regulating AI last month and urged Europe to get on board. “I don't think that the U.S. is likely to be caught flat-footed by whatever comes out of the EU,” Miller said. “Certainly, speaking as ITI, we will track what's happening in Europe and engage very proactively to make sure that whatever ultimately does come out of the EU is something that we can support.”
COLLEGES CAVE ON FACIAL RECOGNITION FIGHT — A campaign opposing facial recognition on college campuses appears to be working: The University of California at Los Angeles, which had been weighing whether to use the software to surveil its premises, is disavowing any such plans in the face of pressure from digital rights and student activist groups.
— “We have determined that the potential benefits are limited and are vastly outweighed by the concerns of the campus community," administrative vice chancellor Michael Beck wrote in a letter to Fight for the Future, which along with Students for Sensible Drug Policy had been leading the charge protesting the rollout of the technology at colleges and universities.
— To prove a point about the flaws and biases inherent in some facial recognition technology, the groups said they used Amazon’s Rekognition software to assess publicly available arrest mugshots alongside photos of UCLA’s football and basketball teams (as well as some faculty members).
— “The results were disturbing — but predictable,” Fight for the Future said in a blog post, writing that out of 400 faces, "58 photos of student athletes or UCLA faculty members were falsely matched with images from the mugshot database. The vast majority of incorrect matches were of people of color. In many cases, the software matched two individuals who had almost nothing in common beyond their race, and claimed they were the same person with ‘100% confidence,’” the group wrote.
— Rashad Robinson, president of the civil rights group Color of Change, applauded UCLA’s action, responding that “while numerous universities are looking to deploy this technology on their campuses, study after study, including the latest from Fight for the Future, has confirmed that racial bias is a feature, not a bug, of facial recognition technology.” (A NIST study confirmed those pervasive racial biases.) Robinson also called for a federal moratorium on the technology, joining lawmakers who have made similar demands.
THE DEBATE WENT LIGHT ON TECH. SO WHAT’S NEXT FOR 2020’S TECH PLAYBOOK? — Las Vegas proved to be perhaps the most exciting debate yet for the country — but the most low-energy debate so far for tech policy. Sen. Bernie Sanders took his usual swipe at Amazon over the giant’s tax payments (or lack thereof), and Pete Buttigieg joined him in doing so, but the Democratic hopefuls otherwise skipped the issues dominating the tech world. With that, all eyes were on Bloomberg, who from the outset became the punching bag of the debate stage.
— What to watch next with Bloomberg: How he’ll continue to lean on tech and social media to amplify his campaign before California’s primary. “Bloomberg’s presidential campaign is hiring hundreds of workers in California to post regularly on their personal social-media accounts in support of the candidate and send text messages to their friends about him,” WSJ reported Wednesday. “The effort, which could cost millions of dollars, is launching ahead of California’s March 3 primary and could later be deployed nationwide. ... It is among the most unorthodox moves yet by the heavy-spending billionaire and blurs the line between traditional campaign organizing and the distribution of sponsored content.”
NIST TO TALK PRIVACY WITH SMALL BUSINESS — Walter Copan, who leads the Commerce Department’s National Institute of Standards and Technology, announced plans Wednesday for more data privacy outreach after the release of its privacy framework. Expect “a guide to help small and medium-sized businesses build in privacy as they seek to become the trusted big businesses of the future,” Copan remarked during a Center for Strategic and International Studies event. "Over the next few months, we’ll be reaching out to these innovative smaller companies, with their resource constraints understood, to better have a sense of how the privacy framework can help enhance their work and their operations.”
THE DISH ON DISH — DISH Network Chairman Charlie Ergen created a stir on Wednesday by suggesting a possible merger between his company’s satellite TV business and its primary rival DirecTV, now owned by AT&T (which may be eyeing offload opportunities). DISH, of course, has its plate full given its pledges to get into the 5G wireless market as part of the T-Mobile-Sprint merger transaction, if that deal is approved.
— “DISH, DirecTV, probably inevitable that those two should go together,” Ergen said Wednesday during the company’s earnings call. “That’s going to make some sense because you can’t swim upstream against a real tide of over-the-top big players.” Ergen did add that there “still could be regulatory issues there,” if that merger were to come together.
Transitions
“Matt Oczkowski, who served as head of product at Cambridge [Analytica] before it went bankrupt and shut down in 2018, is helping oversee the Trump campaign’s data program,” POLITICO’s Alex Isenstadt reports. The hire, Alex writes, is “likely to raise alarms among Trump critics and data privacy advocates who worry the president will push the technological envelope to get reelected in 2020.”
And here are other recent hires across several of the Democratic presidential campaigns, per POLITICO’s Zach Montellaro.
Meanwhile, tech entrepreneur turned tech critic (and former 2020 contender) Andrew Yang has joined CNN as a political commentator. … FCC Chairman Ajit Pai made new appointments across several working groups of the Advisory Committee on Diversity and Digital Empowerment. … Steve Kidera, former director of corporate communications for the media company TEGNA, has been named CompTIA’s senior director of communications and public affairs. … NTCA–The Rural Broadband Association honored nine members with NTCA Excellence Awards for their leadership in rural telecom and service to the industry.
Silicon Valley Must Reads
“The Great Google Revolt”: NYT Mag’s future-of-work issue explores what happened at Google after some of its employees tried to stop the search giant from doing work they felt was unethical.
The buzz around ‘boogaloo’: “An anti-government movement that advocates for a violent uprising targeting liberal political opponents and law enforcement has moved from the fringes of the internet into the mainstream in recent months and surged on social media,” NBC News reports.
Food for thought: “How Saudi Arabia Infiltrated Twitter,” via BuzzFeed News.
R.I.P.: Larry Tesler, the genius computer scientist behind the “cut, copy, paste” functionality we so heavily rely on day-to-day, has passed away, Gizmodo reports.
Quick Downloads
CCPA, and then some: About a month since California instituted the strongest consumer data privacy law in the nation, there’s already talk of another law — and it’s from the same guy behind the first, KQED reports.
The ransomware dilemma: To pay, or not to pay? Via Protocol.
FYI: The National Association of Broadcasters addressed concerns about the coronavirus ahead of its annual NAB Show in Las Vegas in April.
Million-dollar question: How much of the promise of 5G is likely to be realized anytime soon? New research from McKinsey Global Institute explores the era of connectivity on the horizon.
Tips, comments, suggestions? Send them along via email to our team: Bob King (bking@politico.com, @bkingdc), Mike Farrell (mfarrell@politico.com, @mikebfarrell), Nancy Scola (nscola@politico.com, @nancyscola), Steven Overly (soverly@politico.com, @stevenoverly), John Hendel (jhendel@politico.com, @JohnHendel), Cristiano Lima (clima@politico.com, @viaCristiano), Alexandra S. Levine (alevine@politico.com, @Ali_Lev), and Leah Nylen (lnylen@politico.com, @leah_nylen).
TTYL.
2020-02-20 15:00:00Z
https://www.politico.com/newsletters/morning-tech/2020/02/20/the-eus-outsize-influence-on-global-tech-785549
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