Linked List: February 6, 2017

Monday, 6 February 2017

Vizio Settles FTC Lawsuit Over Tracking TV Viewing ★

The Federal Trade Commission:

Vizio, Inc., one of the world’s largest manufacturers and sellers of internet-connected “smart” televisions, has agreed to pay $2.2 million to settle charges by the Federal Trade Commission and the Office of the New Jersey Attorney General that it installed software on its TVs to collect viewing data on 11 million consumer TVs without consumers’ knowledge or consent. […]

According to the agencies’ complaint, starting in February 2014, Vizio, Inc. and an affiliated company have manufactured Vizio smart TVs that capture second-by-second information about video displayed on the smart TV, including video from consumer cable, broadband, set-top box, DVD, over-the-air broadcasts, and streaming devices.

The lack of respect for consumer privacy in this case is just appalling.

Over 100 Companies File Opposition to Trump’s Immigration Ban ★

Kate Conger, reporting for TechCrunch:

Notably absent from the list of 97 companies are several who met with Trump prior to his inauguration: Amazon, Oracle, IBM, SpaceX and Tesla. Oracle CEO Safra Catz is serving as an advisor to the Trump transition team, while SpaceX and Tesla CEO Elon Musk has defended his decision to remain on an advisory council for Trump.

I’m not surprised by Oracle, IBM, or Elon Musk’s companies, but I am surprised by Amazon.

Update: Tesla and SpaceX have joined the brief, along with Adobe. Good for them.

Update: Looks like Amazon is officially opposed, but didn’t join this brief for legal reasons:

Amazon was one major company that didn’t join with the brief, which supported a case brought by Minnesota and the state of Washington opposing the ban on refugees and temporary ban on immigrants from seven Muslim-majority countries.

That’s because Seattle-based Amazon had already filed a declaration in the same case explaining how the ban negatively affects the e-commerce giant. Washington’s attorney general advised Amazon not to join the amicus brief since it’s a witness in the original lawsuit, according to a source familiar with the matter.

It turns out that Microsoft, also absent from the amicus brief, filed a declaration in the original case brought by Washington, as well.

Lina M. Khan in Yale Law Journal: ‘Amazon’s Antitrust Paradox’ ★

An almost book-length (seriously, over 25,000 words) analysis of Amazon’s end-run around antitrust regulation. It’s quite readable though. My summary would be that U.S. antitrust enforcement in recent decades is focused almost exclusively on consumer prices. If a monopoly isn’t price gouging customers, it’s not a problem. Khan makes a strong case that that mindset might make sense in the brick and mortar world, but it doesn’t make sense if the world of competitive online platforms.

And yes, the e-book price-fixing case against Apple is a perfect example. Khan writes:

In 2012, the DOJ sued the publishers and Apple for colluding to raise e-book prices. In response to claims that the DOJ was going after the wrong actor — given that it was Amazon’s predatory tactics that drove the publishers and Apple to join forces — the DOJ investigated Amazon’s pricing strategies and found “persuasive evidence lacking” to show that the company had engaged in predatory practices. According to the government, “from the time of its launch, Amazon’s e-book distribution business has been consistently profitable, even when substantially discounting some newly released and bestselling titles.”

Judge Cote, who presided over the district court trial, refrained from affirming the government’s conclusion. Still, the government’s argument illustrates the dominant framework that courts and enforcers use to analyze predation — and how it falls short. Specifically, the government erred by analyzing the profitability of Amazon’s e-book business in the aggregate and by characterizing the conduct as “loss leading” rather than potentially predatory pricing. These missteps suggest a failure to appreciate two critical aspects of Amazon’s practices: (1) how steep discounting by a firm on a platform-based product creates a higher risk that the firm will generate monopoly power than discounting on non-platform goods and (2) the multiple ways Amazon could recoup losses in ways other than raising the price of the same e-books that it discounted.

On the first point, the government argued that Amazon was not engaging in predation because in the aggregate,Amazon’s e-books business was profitable. This perspective overlooks how heavy losses on particular lines of e-books (bestsellers, for example, or new releases) may have thwarted competition, even if the e-books business as a whole was profitable.

(Via Philip Elmer-DeWitt, who has his own summary of Khan’s thesis.)

The Atlanta Falcons Had a 99.7 Percent Chance to Win Super Bowl 51 at One Point ★

I’ve been watching pro football for as long as I can remember, and I’ve never seen anything like that comeback.

Uber Hires Veteran NASA Engineer to Develop Flying Vehicles ★

Brad Stone, reporting for Bloomberg:

In 2010, an advanced aircraft engineer at NASA’s Langley Research Center named Mark Moore published a white paper outlining the feasibility of electric aircrafts that could take off and land like helicopters but were smaller and quieter. The vehicles would be capable of providing a speedy alternative to the dreary morning commute.

Moore’s research (PDF) into so-called VTOL — short for vertical takeoff and landing, or more colloquially, flying cars — inspired at least one billionaire technologist. After reading the white paper, Google co-founder Larry Page secretly started and financed two Silicon Valley startups, Zee Aero and Kitty Hawk, to develop the technology, Bloomberg Businessweek reported last summer.

Now Moore is leaving the confines of the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration, where he has spent the last 30 years, to join one of Google’s rivals: Uber Technologies Inc.

I don’t think it’s right to call these things “flying cars”, but man, whatever we wind up calling them, what an audacious plan.