Marketplace Tech Marketplace
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- Technologie
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Monday through Friday, Marketplace demystifies the digital economy in less than 10 minutes. We look past the hype and ask tough questions about an industry that’s constantly changing.
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Government pressures tech behind the scenes, says former Facebook employee. It’s called jawboning.
It’s something government officials on both sides of the aisle are known to do: pressuring tech platforms to bend to their will, aka jawboning. But the line between persuasion and coercion, or even censorship, can get murky.
Last week, the Supreme Court heard arguments from two states alleging that the Joe Biden administration illegally coerced social media companies into blocking conservative content. Matt Perault, now with the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s Center on Technology Policy, says that in his former job working in policy at Facebook, jawboning happened all the time. -
What a privacy organization and Big Tech’s lead lobbying group think about internet regulation
When you look at the lawsuits aimed at blocking attempts to regulate tech, it’s usually not companies like Meta or Snap doing the suing. Oftentimes, it’s a group called NetChoice, which has emerged as Big Tech’s top lobbying force from Capitol Hill to the courts.
Today, a conversation with NetChoice General Counsel Carl Szabo and Megan Iorio, senior counsel at the Electronic Privacy Information Center, a nonprofit focused on privacy. They occasionally agree, but very often they do not.
Case in point: the California Age-Appropriate Design Code Act, which requires websites that children are likely to visit to provide privacy protections by default. It was set to take effect in July, but so far, Szabo’s group has successfully blocked it in court.
Marketplace’s Lily Jamali sat down with Szabo and Iorio and asked about how their groups interact. -
Africa’s gaming market is expected to top $1 billion in 2024
The number of gamers in Africa has doubled in recent years, but many gaming platforms require users to pay for subscriptions or make in-game purchases. That’s a problem for users who don’t have credit cards, but as the BBC’s Mo Allie reports, some fintech companies think they have a solution.
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Why crypto has made a comeback in the Philippines
Crypto is once again big in the Philippines. It first took off during COVID-19 lockdowns in 2021 with a now-defunct video game called Axie Infinity, where players earned money — often more than minimum wage — through non-fungible tokens, or NFTs. Of course, the crypto winter soon followed with the implosion of FTX in 2022, but now crypto is back in a big way on the island nation. Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino spoke with reporter Eli Tan, who recently visited and wrote about the scene for The New York Times.
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Lawsuits, fines and the tech at the heart of it all
When a company pushes false claims about using artificial intelligence in its business, that’s known informally as “AI washing.” It can feel like everybody’s doing it, but the Securities and Exchange Commission is cracking down on the practice. Plus, is the government’s communication with social media companies persuasion or coercion? The Supreme Court heard arguments this week in yet another case involving online speech. But first, the Department of Justice on Thursday announced that it’s bringing antitrust charges against Apple. Marketplace’s Lily Jamali spoke with Reuters Breakingviews columnist Anita Ramaswamy about all of these stories for this week’s episode of Marketplace Tech’s Bytes: Week in Review.
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What it means for nations to have “AI sovereignty”
Imagine that you could walk into one of the world’s great libraries and leave with whatever you wanted — any book, map, photo or historical document — forever. No questions asked. There is an argument that something like that is happening to the digital data of nations. In a lot of places, anyone can come along and scrape the internet for the valuable data that’s the backbone of artificial intelligence. But what if raw data generated in a particular country could be used to benefit not outside interests, but that country and its people? Some nations have started building their own AI infrastructure to that end in a bid to secure their “AI sovereignty.” According to venture capitalist Vinod Khosla, the potential implications and opportunities are huge.