 Today in Talking Science and Tech, we will be looking at the scrutiny that big tech companies have been facing in the last few months for anti-competitive practices. We see that both in the US and in Europe, big tech companies such as Facebook, Google, Apple, Amazon primarily are facing probes for exercising monopoly power and there are debates going on on how to limit this power. A US House final has recently released a report on this issue and today we are joined by Praveepur Kaisal who will be talking about these investigations, the behavior of these big tech companies and the dangers posed by the power they currently hold. So the monopoly power of these companies is what has drawn the attention of various regulatory agencies. In the United States, the Congress Judiciary Committee, whatever it's called, took up this issue and they identified four companies, Google, Facebook, Amazon and Apple. In the UK, also we have what's called a competition market authority. They have also taken up these issues and they have also talked about how the monopolization of these big platforms, it is harming both the interests of the users and a lot of other people too. So there are these two sets of issues. Earlier you had the European Union take up what would be called the privacy issues that these companies do not obey. The privacy laws that the European Union has passed and therefore they need to localize their data and also they have to obey the privacy concerns if they take data out of the European Union jurisdiction. We have also a similar set of issues but framed slightly differently in Australia where they have said if Google and Facebook uses information of these news platforms, they have to pay these news platforms. There's a whole range of issues which have been identified and as you know with Facebook, there's an additional issue both in the United States and in India regarding the role that Facebook plays in what is called promoting hate or building networks of people who essentially are militias, violent in their discourse if not anything else and therefore there is a promotion of a certain kind of networks within Facebook which are certainly not helpful to democracy. So these are the broad issues that have been framed. I'm going to talk about only two sets of issues here that what is it that Google and Facebook do and how do they earn their money and therefore how is it that what they're doing in terms of maximizing the revenue, how is against public interest. This is really the issue that I would like to take up. It's not only harming others which of course it is but it is also harming public interest and I think these are the two issues that we need to take up and if we start with this then we have to see the similarity between Google and Facebook, not so much others, Google and Facebook that the both really are dependent on advertising revenue. Google for about 82% of its more than 80% of its revenue that comes from essentially advertising and we have Facebook 98% of its revenue comes from advertising. So they are the two platforms today who have become dominant in terms of advertising or getting the ad revenues. Now if you take the ad revenues who does it hit? Okay Google and Facebook target consumers better that's the argument they can do better targeting they know what we are likely to buy what is it that we are looking for and therefore targeting ads better is more benefit for the companies giving advertisements and therefore they would like to of course use these platforms in preference to others that they can micro target the consumer. Now the problem is that if you take Google and Facebook in terms of information they are not platforms which produce anything they actually just make information available to their those who look at Google search engines use Gmail or various other tools that Google provides or of course Facebook Facebook itself now of course we also have WhatsApp and Instagram but primarily Facebook is the place where the users are the most engaged and therefore that has become the primary reason why advertisers give them ads that people are there eyeballs are there and now both these platforms do not produce any news they do not produce any content they are both produce serving us content produced by others so what happens to those who actually generate content they are generating content free for Google and Facebook make money but they themselves then don't have a revenue model and this has been the crisis of the newspaper or the larger media industry that increasingly there is a revenue model only for Google and Facebook nobody else and if that happens it destroys the basis of the news industry itself and that increasingly is also going to affect television already it is in the offing but certainly likely to increase but newspapers have been hit in a very big way so given that the primary news producers are not only the big New York Times or financial Times or the Wall Street Journal and so on but the regional papers the local papers the country specific papers all of them then don't have a revenue model and while New York Times or a Wall Street Journal may still survive these papers are not likely to survive either so what happens to this entire news gathering news platforms really what I would call content creation in terminologies of today what happens to them and if that completely is destroyed then of course you have a situation where you will not have democracy either because the lifeblood of democracy is press now even if the press wasn't free even if the press was biased at least there was a press which had certain rules certain rules of the game and were also regulated to a certain extent all of that goes through the window by the window and if that happens what is it that we can then expect in terms of content in the future I think that's a big question that is there and that is the existential crisis of media and in the larger sense it's existential crisis of democracy because we don't have information and at least a variety of information available to us variety of views available to us which we can go look at or subscribe to then we have a situation where just two players will decide in the world what is news and what is fake news and what is not to be promoted what is to be promoted this is mind control at a level which is far beyond anything that people in the 20th century those who are critical of the way the world was going the brave new world or 1984 none of them have predicted a level of mind control which is now open to Facebook and Google and both of them of course operate differently but nevertheless the net result is really this both of course have social media platforms of different kinds but Google has the search engine as its primary way of gathering information and of course the search engine is also what all of us use for doing various things as also the other tools Facebook really is the Facebook world that's the primary place it is in and both of them have different ways of keeping people and the dangers they both have are of a different kind so let's talk about what does Google do and I think that's a very important issue as we know Google in its search engine puts up certain set of results now before we go into the partiality of Google to itself that is something that we are going to discuss a little later but Google's basically the search engine results are such that if a search result comes say on the fourth page the likelihood of people seeing the result is very low so most of the people more than I think about 80 percent of the people will stop on the first page of the search and not go beyond it some who are more persevering will go to the second maybe the third very few will go to the fourth and beyond so given that Google's basic power comes from what it shows and what it doesn't show so if you decide that the world is what you would like it to be in the Google's world in that case what you show are results which conform to Google's view of the world so that's that is one issue so if you take Nelson Mandela you will find he was a Gandhian he believed in non-violence he won't find two things which are central to Nelson Mandela's life that he actually called for arm struggle against the Tappatid regime in South Africa he's a member of the communist party and it was they had given a call for an arm struggle he was very much a participant in arm struggle where he was arrested he in fact had a revolver with him which he decided not to use against the policeman who had accosted him so this is Nelson Mandela and he was not a Gandhian in the way people have portrayed him to be just because he agreed for a peaceful transfer of power in 90s didn't make him a Gandhian he certainly was not he considered himself a Marxist and a communist when he went to jail which is where he stayed for more than 30 years so now second part of it is that there is no mention of the role of the American embassy in his arrest while we now know that that played a very important role as well because they had known about his coming to town that day that he did you where he was likely to be and they were the one who passed the information on that's the information you will find maybe maybe you go to the seventh eighth page of a search you might find this information otherwise this has been sort of scrubbed from google so what you get therefore is a worldview according to google in this particular case worldview according to the united states what's conducive to the united states to show so there is an alignment that you have with google as a the largest search engine and a lot of other tools besides the its worldview and the worldview of the united states that is one part of it but the second and this is a business part of it that's important is that it also shows that if you want an information you don't today need to leave the google search engine what you tend to do is to just look at the results that come and most of the part of the question you have asked it tries to extract from the first site that you see on the second side that you see and condenses it in in that page in that in that ranked two lines of the show so that you actually quite often will not even need to leave the search page in order to click that link go down to the original page and see what has actually what was said over there now the important part of it is that if that does not happen then of course advertisements only go to google because you're not leaving the google world so what you get essentially is a situation where you don't have to leave the google world and if you're only in the google world only google advertise google advertisements then are something that you will watch and maybe you will click and that's where google makes its money so google's attempt is therefore to be predatory in the way it operates by not taking you to any other page except google itself so that is one part of it and therefore being able to retain your attention in this way it's a matter of selection it is not really a matter that if you're it's promoting you to connect with others but it is just retaining you in the google world itself that you want to see where the suppose you want to buy something you can see where to buy it we want to go to a restaurant you can go to a google map and get the directions so the attention of that you have is then restricted to what would be called the google properties so it's a more of not showing you or taking you to other pages and of course there is a more even worse violations that if there is something that google itself offers travel and so on then those are the ones which are likely to be shown and not the competitors products if the competitors are there then be shown below google in fact one of the internal documents with the congressional committee refers to is the fact that they have said the way ranking is done if google properties are ranked in the same way then they would not appear in a search engine on google search itself they would not appear so the rules of the search engine are tweaked in order to show google and a much higher ranking and this is what i talked about when we talked about the ranking part of it and why the ranking algorithm actually promotes google now if you look at facebook facebook is actually a different product so facebook operates by trying to create and this is the other part of it which i think the competition marketing authority of the uk points out that it operates on the basis of the social network social graph so it wants to connect you to people and there is now enough material evidence available in fact there is a particular person in facebook is quite high up he actually said our business is only to connect people that's all our business is and whether out of that evil happens that's not our problem so effectively connecting people is the business and if the connection leads to violence in the real world that is not the facebook's problem is effectively the position that is taken by this person who is a very senior facebook executive now what it's saying if you take away all the other parts of it that facebook's business is connecting people and the second part of its business is retaining them within the network itself and you don't leave facebook so you connect to others feeds what you show all of that is meant to retain your interest and the algorithm therefore when it wants to retain you wants to put you in touch with people who hold similar views then it slowly leads to the social graph your social graph being built in a way that you then connect to people who are like-minded you see posts which are of similar views to yours and also as we know emotions play a big part on people being retained to see facebook so those which can rake up hatred in fact tend to then also attract attention and then engage the people more you want to give comments you want to give your expressive opinions on that so this kind of divisive activities which is what is what is being now identified as hate speech fake news all of these things are in fact what keeps the facebook algorithm ticking because this is what makes people stay on facebook and facebook algorithms will suggest people with similar views therefore it builds a network if we take the recent recent exposures that have come this is very clear that facebook is not interested in controlling fake news or hate speech on its platform those which have real world consequences unless they're embarrassed unless it becomes a public relations disaster and this is something which again Sophie Zhang who came out gave wrote a 6600 word memo which Buzzfeed is reported in quite details but they it makes clear that they were not interested spending money on curbing this menace in fact insiders of facebook again which has been brought to public notice i think in wall street journal center 64 percent of the right wing network in Germany was because facebook itself promoted its members to talk to each other put you put each member the members in touch with each other through its recommendation of the facebook algorithms itself so what i'm saying is facebook and trying to build this network of like-minded people who will talk to each other exchange information and that's how the q and on controversy arose that's how also the whole issue about the shushant singh rajput in fact this is one of the issues that is there that a lot of this is like-minded people promoting it and finding each other through facebook and using facebook in a particular way this is what facebook actually is designed for to promote this kind of engagement and they know that this is so the intention is we shall allow this to happen and when we are embarrassed we'll say we are taking action we are doing something but in effect as many times they have said it nothing has really happened and this is the other part that why facebook is not simply a monopoly but some monopolies which algorithms promote hatred and divisive activities and this has real world consequences particularly in a number of countries in fact united nations report is there the human rights report is there on rohingyas and facebook's role and it's interesting that they have while they have castigated facebook that facebook did not cooperate with the united nations investigations on this count but they have held the facebook's posts were responsible and we know facebook and whatsapp have both have been responsible for real world violence now these are the issues that what that we need to also consider how do you address the monopolies is one part but how do you address the algorithmic spread of views which could have real world consequences i think this is the other issue we need to take up and therefore one thing is for sure while both of these reports have talked of different regulatory activities the US congress committee in fact that's a staff report suggesting that monopoly should be broken up that is the position they have taken but at the least both have said monopolies need to be regulated and that's something we need to consider that we need to regulate them and i think the most important part of that regulation is also making them transparent if there is a complaint to facebook today we do not know who it goes to who sees it what redress is done is there any answer given to us why it happened what if did it go to which human being did it go to can i bounce that complaint up if it has not been acted upon to a higher level all these are completely opaque facebook says it has an internal mechanism but it is completely opaque about its internal regulatory mechanism as we know that this is what sophie zang's article said and what all street journal also said that they act only when they're embarrassed and that we know that for instance the raja singh the telangana mla who posted in fact anti rohingya violent messages and other violent messages who had been flagged internally as a dangerous person along with anand tegre and kapil misra that this should be permanently banned from facebook facebook didn't take it down even when there were public complaints about it not only from individuals but ours and equality labs had done a detailed report submitted it to facebook given the complaints to them no action was taken till wall street journal asked the questions and when wall street journal asked the questions that's what when facebook takes action that's what in fact sophie zang says that when they're likely to be embarrassed only then does facebook takes action in fact when she raised some of the issues of the problems they said well press hasn't talked about it and this is sophie's memo which as i said bus feed has put made put in public domain at least parts of it she said they said well you know this does not have any implication that you are talking about if it was then press would have written about it and by press they mean actually uh us press and european union at best european union others don't count so i think these are the reasons why we are in the situation we are today that we need to consider that these monopolies need to be controlled they are danger to democracy in different ways the monopoly power is destroying the media industry as we know so all of this needs to be now taken into consideration how we do it is a challenge but various issues that that have been raised need certainly to be addressed otherwise as judge brandis said democracy and wealth are not compatible but the same way this amount of media power without generating any content is also not compatible and media is today the life blood of democracy