Technology Review

To understand how digital technologies went from instruments for spreading democracy to weapons for attacking it, you have to look beyond the technologies themselves.

[Zeynep Tufekci is an associate professor at the University of North Carolina and a contributing opinion writer at theNew York Times]

An ambitious smart-city project spearheaded by Alphabet subsidiary Sidewalk Labs has run into local resistance, causing delays. Waterfront Toronto, a development agency founded by the Canadian government, partnered with the Google sister company in October 2017 to create a futuristic neighborhood on the Toronto waterfront. Sidewalk Labs plans to fill the 12-acre plot with driverless shuttle buses, garbage-toting robots, and other gadgets to show how emerging technologies can improve city life.

Facebook, Google, and Amazon all have business models that require them to scoop up large amounts of data about people to power their algorithms, and they derive their power from this information. Like the oil barons at the turn of the 20th century, the data barons are determined to extract as much as possible of a resource that’s central to the economy of their time. The more information they can get to feed the algorithms that power their ad-targeting machines and product-recommendation engines, the better. Their dominance is allowing them to play a dangerous and outsize role in our polit

As the head of the Federal Communications Commission observed in a 1961 speech to broadcast executives, the industry’s revenue, more than $1 billion a year, was rising 9 percent annually, even in a recession. The problem, the FCC chairman told the group, was the way the business was making money: not by serving the public interest above all but by airing a lot of dumb shows and “cajoling and offending” commercials. “When television is bad, nothing is worse,” he said. That speech would become known for the pejorative that the FCC chairman, Newton Minow, used to describe TV: he called it “a vast wasteland.” It’s a great line, but there are other reasons to revisit the speech now, about 10 years after the emergence of another communications service—Facebook—that has become ubiquitous in American homes, a staggering financial success, and a transmitter of a lot of pernicious schlock. What’s striking today is why Minow said the vast-wasteland problem mattered—and what he wanted to do about it. As for why it mattered, Minow told the TV executives: “Your industry possesses the most powerful voice in America. It has an inescapable duty to make that voice ring with intelligence and with leadership. In a few years, this exciting industry has grown from a novelty to an instrument of overwhelming impact on the American people. It should be making ready for the kind of leadership that newspapers and magazines assumed years ago, to make our people aware of their world.” On that point in particular, Mark Zuckerberg apparently would agree.

Companies that do business online are missing out on billions in annual sales thanks to a bug that is keeping their systems incompatible with Internet domain names made of non-Latin characters. Fixing it could also bring another 17 million people who speak Russian, Chinese, Arabic, Vietnamese, and Indian languages online. Those are the conclusions of a new study by an industry-led group sponsored by the International Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), the organization responsible for maintaining the list of valid Internet domain names.

The objective of the so-called Universal Acceptance Steering Group, which includes representatives from a number of Internet companies including Microsoft and GoDaddy, is to encourage software developers and service providers to update how their systems validate the string of characters to the right of the dot in a domain name or e-mail address—also called the top-level domain.