2021年6月24日 星期四

On Tech: What Congress wants from Big Tech

House lawmakers have gotten serious. A package of bills poses existential threats to the tech giants.

What Congress wants from Big Tech

Brenna Murphy

First there was so much shouting. And now there is action. (Maybe.)

The bad mood about the power of Big Tech companies has a new and perhaps surprising development: House lawmakers wrote a package of proposed legislation that, if it all passes — a very big "if" — could fundamentally change Google, Facebook, Amazon and Apple as we know them.

I asked my colleague Cecilia Kang to walk us through the bills, and how we got here.

Shira: What does this legislation propose to do?

Cecilia: There are six bills that in different ways attempt to limit the power of big tech companies. One bill to provide more funding to government agencies that keep a check on corporations isn't that contentious.

Tell me about the contentious ones.

One of the proposals is being called the "Amazon bill" because it wants to limit companies that own a platform, or a hub for multiple companies to sell their goods or services, from also selling its own products on that platform. That is what Amazon does. It might force a breakup of Amazon.

Another would make it illegal for companies to give preference to their products. That could mean that Google couldn't show YouTube videos or Google shopping listings as prominently in its search results.

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Another bill would make it harder for companies to acquire start-ups. Under that law, Facebook might not have been permitted to buy Instagram and WhatsApp.

How did so many lawmakers, Republicans and Democrats come to believe that the tech giants needed to fundamentally change?

There was a turning point when Russians abused Facebook, Google and Twitter to try to divide American voters around the 2016 election. Politicians, fairly or unfairly, felt animus against all tech companies.

That helped to cement a mostly bipartisan consensus — although not always for shared reasons — that Washington needed to be less hands-off with technology companies. And antitrust law is now perceived as a way to address a set of perceived problems with tech, including for some Republicans perceptions of bias against conservative voices and views.

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Did Big Tech companies mess up and create too many enemies in Washington, or was it inevitable that they would be targeted for new laws and regulation?

Both. From my conversations with lobbyists at big tech companies, there's some regret that the companies misjudged how much good will they had with politicians and regulators. And tech companies' Washington policy offices may not have fully articulated to their bosses on the West Coast how much lawmakers had turned against Big Tech.

But look, a handful of technology companies are the most valuable companies in the country and influence the economy, labor practices, how people find information and the ways we live. That exposes the companies to scrutiny.

How are the companies responding to these bills?

Their central message is that lawmakers risk creating far more problems than they might solve. Apple says, for example, that people will be exposed to sketchy apps if Congress requires the company to let people download iPhone apps outside its official store. Lobbyists have said that Amazon might be forced to stop Prime delivery for some products.

Is there a united front among Google, Facebook, Amazon and Apple?

Not necessarily. There are some disagreements about policy. Facebook seems open to one of the proposals that would make it easier for people to take their data from one app to a competitor. Google is against it, and says it exposes people to scammers.

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There's also visceral anger. Quite a few tech companies, not just the biggest ones, resent Facebook for what they believe the company has done to tarnish the entire industry. A lobbyist told me that it's difficult for Facebook to push back against antitrust legislation after many scandals. Apple, which is at odds with Facebook in almost every way, is effectively lobbying lawmakers on behalf of it and Facebook.

Sorry for the cynicism, but what if Big Tech just waited for divisions and fighting among lawmakers to kill the legislation?

Are you sure you haven't worked in lobbying?! That's a classic strategy and it's not an illogical bet that Congress won't get its act together. But these antitrust bills, especially the ones that make acquisitions more difficult or would force companies to pull apart their businesses, are existential threats to Big Tech. The companies have to fight them.

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Before we go …

  • A middle class retirement account, at $5 billion: ProPublica examines how ultrawealthy Americans including Peter Thiel, a prominent investor in young tech companies, accumulated multi-billion-dollar, tax-free fortunes in what are supposed to be retirement accounts for those with far more modest savings.
  • Can e-commerce giants help India's shopkeepers? The 20 million small stores in India known as kiranas dominate shopping in the country. Bloomberg News reports that Amazon and the Walmart-owned e-commerce site Flipkart are teaming up with the shops — including providing them with inventory management apps and using the stores to ship deliveries — to sell more merchandise in Indian communities.
  • Dr. Reddit? Wired writes that a Reddit forum called DiagnoseMe, where people ask strangers for medical advice, is not as bad as it sounds. DiagnoseMe is quite good at policing itself and encourages people to advocate for themselves in the sometimes hostile health care system.

Hugs to this

Why did mom duck and her ducklings cross the road? To go to a bagel shop. (They later made their way safely to a park.)

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2021年6月23日 星期三

The T List: Five things we recommend this week

Two new loafers from Martiniano Lopez Crozet, portraits of botanicals — and more.

Welcome to the T List, a newsletter from the editors of T Magazine. Each week, we share things we're eating, wearing, listening to or coveting now. Sign up here to find us in your inbox every Wednesday. And you can always reach us at tlist@nytimes.com.

BOOK THIS

A Landmark Hotel Reopens in Boston

A Deluxe King room at the Langham, Boston.Courtesy of the Langham, Boston

By Michaela Trimble

T Contributor

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The Langham, Boston, one of the city's landmark hotels located near the Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy Greenway, has reopened after an extensive, multiyear renovation. While the property debuted in 2003, in the former 1920s-era Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, the Langham Hospitality Group tasked architect Dyer Brown and interior design firm Richmond International to oversee its next evolution, including a refreshed ground-floor lobby with emerald bankers' lamps, marble slab countertops and velvet banquettes, and a revitalized Lincoln Ballroom. Of the 312 rooms, the loft-style suites offer two-story, brass-embossed windows with views of the neighborhood, while the property's penthouse suite features a living room complete with a baby grand piano and an elegant dining room for eight. Guests can imbibe gin- and bourbon-based cocktails at the Fed, a lounge reminiscent of the city's Jazz Age bars, and enjoy family-style dishes like roasted porchetta and cioppino stew prepared by chef Stephen Bukoff at the Italian restaurant Grana. langhamhotels.com.

SEE THIS

Brilliant Blooms Captured by Kate Friend

Left: a rose, photographed at the Cotswolds home of the architect John Pawson, for Kate Friend's "John Pawson, White Rose, Cotswolds" (2020). Right: the wild strawberries in the studio space of the photographer Juergen Teller were plucked from an urban plot conceived by the landscape designer Dan Pearson for "Juergen Teller, Strawberry, Latimer Road, London" (2020).Kate Friend

By Aimee Farrell

T Contributor

When British still-life photographer Kate Friend began asking fellow artists and creatives to share their favorite flower, she wasn't prepared for the response she'd receive. "The plants became a way into people's lives," she says. "Sometimes they were an incredibly moving reminder of a late mother or a lost child." Traveling around the British Isles with her Pentax 67 since the summer of 2019 — and, when possible, throughout lockdown — Friend found herself setting up makeshift sitting studios in sheds, offices, barns and backyards to capture an array of plant life that's as eclectic as the people behind them. Now, the project has given rise to a poignant, and surprisingly intimate, series of botanical portraits on exhibition at the Garden Museum in Lambeth, South London. There's artist Maggi Hambling's rambunctious 30-foot cactus, fashion designer Molly Goddard's fluffy pink ranunculus and designer Margaret Howell's perfectly preserved hydrangeas, among others. "Each flower is an emblem of the person who chose it," Friend says. "Kate Friend: Botanical Portraits, As Chosen By …" is on display at the Garden Museum through Aug. 1, gardenmuseum.org.

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WEAR THIS

Handmade Loafers From Buenos Aires

Two new loafers from the Martiniano Resort 2022 collection. From left: the Volker and the Pollok, available this November.Marcelo Setton

By Minju Pak

This year marks the 10th anniversary of the "glove shoe," Martiniano Lopez Crozet's elegant slip-on that spent the past decade populating the closets of both men and women. Its slow-burn growth in popularity is in part due to the designer's aversion to the fashion industry's fixation with expansion. "It's a bit opposite for my brand," he explains over email, "because in order to keep up with the quality of the shoes, I only work with two small manufacturers in limited productions." Though the glove shoe — which, like all of Lopez Crozet's designs, are handmade in Argentina, where he is from — accounts for 60 percent of his production, his foray into loafers was a natural development: "I was influenced by three Argentinian staples: the loafer, the espadrille and the riding boot," he writes. Now, his 2022 resort collection includes two new loafers: the high heel Volker and a flat called the Pollok, both of which will be available in stores later this year. Before Lopez Crozet became a shoe designer, he spent 16 years in the band Los Super Elegantes, which was chosen to perform at the 2004 Whitney Biennial, where he learned to "approach projects through research and then make them." The lesson has served him well. The Volker, $587, and Pollok, $564, will be available this November, martinianoshoes.com.

VISIT THIS

A Natural Wine Bar Opens in London

Left: in the private dining room of Bar Crispin, the wine cabinet is made of raw steel while the lampshades are hand-painted by Viola Lanari. Right: Lanari's plaster, steel and glass stone pendant lamps are suspended in the main bar, with turquoise steel candlestick holders by Jermaine Gallacher.Oskar Proctor

By Sophie Bew

T Contributor

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Long since the Beatles visited London's Carnaby Street in the '60s, Kingly Street, which runs parallel, has "become a bit corporate," says entrepreneur Dominic Hamdy, who recently opened the natural wine bar and restaurant Bar Crispin on the block. Determined to bring a sense of longed-for artisanship to the area, he turned to British designer and design dealer Jermaine Gallacher for his idiosyncratic eye. Cue the iconic '80s black tubular steel and PVC string Spaghetti chairs by Giandomenico Belotti for Alias — enough to seat 20 on the ground floor and 12 in the private dining room in the basement. Elsewhere in the space are custom-made mirrors, benches in aubergine and chocolate bull hide and roughly hewn plaster pendant lamps from London-based sculptor Viola Lanari. The setting, along with a modern European menu of small plates and a vast wine list with varieties from volcanic regions in Tenerife, Sicily and Greece, makes for a perfect pit stop for those hoping to experience a more laid-back vibe. 19 Kingly Street, London, crispinlondon.com.

LOOK AT THIS

Svetlana Kana Radević's Long Overdue Retrospective

The Hotel Zlatibor in Užice, Serbia (left), designed by the architect Svetlana Kana Radević (right).Left: Mirko Lovric, courtesy of the Museum of Yugoslavia archive. Right: courtesy of the Svetlana Kana Radević personal archive.

By Kat Herriman

T Contributor

"Skirting the Centre: Svetlana Kana Radević on the Periphery of Postwar Architecture," the first major retrospective of the late Yugoslav architect and designer, is currently on view at this year's Venice Biennale of Architecture. The show, held at the Palazzo Palumbo Fossati, comprises a collection of recently discovered drawings, writings and photographs from the architect's life and professional projects. Blueprints and images of her inaugural and prizewinning building, the Hotel Podgorica — a Brutalist structure that sits along the Moraca River — christen the entryway. From there, the works unfold like a diary, documenting an oeuvre that has, until now, gone largely underrecognized. Radević is, in fact, known as the first female Montenegrin architect, having studied with titans like Louis Kahn in the U.S. and Kisho Kurokawa in Japan. She went on to establish a practice all her own, one that married traditional construction techniques and flourishes of the region with the antifascist principals of the day, evident in her Hotel Zlatibor in Užice, Serbia, and Hotel Mojkovac, in Montenegro. Most of her structures — memorials, a residential tower and other hotels — stand in Podgorica, Montenegro's capital, and were constructed after the region had been decimated by the 84 bombs dropped during World War II. Twenty years after her death, Svetlana Kana Radević is finally getting her due. "Skirting the Centre: Svetlana Kana Radević on the Periphery of Postwar Architecture" is on view through Nov. 21, 2021, at the Palazzo Palumbo Fossati, S. Marco, 2597, 30124, Venice, Italy, labiennale.org.

FROM T'S INSTAGRAM

A Tour of Cranbrook Art Museum's Collections Wing

The campus of the Cranbrook Art Academy in Bloomfield Hills, Mich.Andrew Moore

The campus that contains the Cranbrook Art Museum and its sister educational institution, Cranbrook Art Academy, located outside Detroit in the suburban enclave of Bloomfield Hills, is "probably the most designed environment you will encounter in the United States," says the museum's director, Andrew Blauvelt. Last week, the museum opened a survey of work by more than 200 former students and faculty from the school, which was founded nearly 90 years ago by the newspaper magnate George G. Booth, and became famous as the cradle of midcentury modernism, with design titans such as Florence Knoll, Charles Eames, Eero Saarinen and Harry Bertoia all studying and teaching at the institution. The great Finnish architect Eliel Saarinen (father of the architect Eero) designed the over-300-acre campus, built on fallow farmland; served as the school's first president; and remained living and working there until his death in 1950. In anticipation of the exhibition, we took a tour of the campus and the Collections Wing, a.k.a., the Vault, an aboveground storage area created to house the art academy's historically significant and ever-evolving collection. To see more, visit tmagazine.com — and follow us on Instagram.

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