Vox

[Commentary] It took me until 2016 to learn how to use the Internet and get my first smartphone, both at the age of 68. It may sound strange to you that I’ve gone this long without Internet access, but I’m not alone — studies show that 13 percent of Americans don’t use the Internet. Why did it take me so long to get online? The issue isn't that I didn't have easy access to an Internet connection. I live in Washington (DC), a big city with plenty of service providers and free Wi-Fi at the local Starbucks. Nor is it that I'm too old — yes, I'm a senior citizen, but I had plenty of opportunities in my younger years to get online. It's more complicated than any one reason.

The truth is I just never thought the Internet was for me. I never needed to learn it on the job working security in a correctional facility and at various DC government buildings. Overall, learning how to use the Internet has been a joyous experience for me.

[Marvia Applewhite lives in Washington, DC. Marvia learned how to use computers at Byte Back, a nonprofit that provides computer and career training to underserved DC residents. She hopes this article will encourage others her age to get educated and embrace and challenge the new world system instead of just settling.]

Here’s what American technology companies would have gotten had the Trans-Pacific Partnership been finalized.

• The TPP’s e-commerce chapter included the world’s first set of international trade rules that would have barred governments from blocking how companies share data across national borders.The Internet works by freely moving data across the world.
• In many of the participating countries it is not currently illegal to break the digital rights management, a digital lock that technology companies can add to their products to prevent piracy, tinkering and repair.
• Six of the twelve participating countries would have expanded their copyright terms an additional 20 years.
• Tech companies also were in favor of the TPP’s ban on “forced localization,” or laws that require a company to keep its citizens’ user data stored within its borders.

Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff says US regulators didn't pay proper attention to Microsoft’s purchase of LinkedIn, which he sees as a grab for data, not an acquisition of a social network. Salesforce entered Microsoft’s territory when it acquired Quip, a word processing app, earlier in 2016. “Microsoft wants to maintain their monopoly, and doesn’t want innovation in that area,” said Benioff. “So they’re going to say, ‘Now we’re going to integrate all this LinkedIn stuff into Office, so why would you want Quip?’”

Benioff said he pressed the Federal Trade Commission to review Microsoft’s LinkedIn deal for potential antitrust violations, but the agency decided not to investigate. Benioff, of course, made his own play for LinkedIn but failed to reach a deal. The European Commission, however, is looking into it. In Oct, the antitrust authority at the European Commission sent questionnaires to Microsoft’s competitors as they review the merger. Benioff contends the acquisition is anticompetitive because Microsoft can hinder access to LinkedIn’s data, making it harder for competitors.

A Q&A with Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist at New York University.

How much would you pay to read lots of stories, from lots of digital publishers, without having to look at many ads? Tony Haile wants to find out. Haile is the former CEO of Chartbeat, the real-time analytics software used by most of the digital publishing world. Now he’s at work on a new company: Scroll, a startup that wants to roll up a selection of stories from a wide variety of publishers and sell monthly subscriptions.

The big selling point for readers: Haile says they’ll have a better experience than the one they have now, when they read web pages clogged with crummy ads. The big selling point for publishers Haile wants to recruit: He says they’ll make more money sharing subscription revenue with him than they do with those crummy ads. Scroll is a bit difficult to describe, in part because it seems to combine elements of things people have already tried. And in part because Haile hasn’t put it together yet. He has raised $3 million from investors including SoftTech, OATV, Axel Springer, News Corp and the New York Times. And he’s currently out pitching publishers to sign up. It won’t launch until 2017. But let’s try walking through it: Haile wants to create a subscription service that gives readers an ad-free, or nearly ad-free, reading experience for stories from a wide variety of publishers.

The Democratic Party made itself vulnerable to Donald Trump’s insurgency by cultivating Wall Street, wealthy political donors, and other financial elites despised by the American public. President-elect Trump’s “drain the swamp” rhetoric — his promise to rid Washington of insider corruption and throw the money lenders out of the capitol — was almost certainly political grandstanding. Trump is already using lobbyists to staff the next government, and Chris Christie, a leader on his transition team, is mired in corruption scandals.

But strategically, President-elect Trump’s criticism of “the political establishment” clearly worked. It first worked in the primary against the Republican politicians whose billionaire backers poured dark money into politics. Then it worked again against a Democratic Party that, by acquiescing to the new rules created by the GOP, became roughly as tethered to superwealthy donors and Super PACs. “Democrats exposed themselves to Trump’s ‘anti-corruption’ message. They went on and on exploiting the system for themselves, and that made this line of, ‘Oh, I may be part of this, but I really am against it!’ very difficult for the voters to believe,” says Lawrence Norden, deputy director of the Democracy Program at the Brennan Center, in an interview. “And understandably so.”

[Commentary] Who is elected president will potentially have a significant bearing on tech. Hillary Clinton has a pretty detailed and well-articulated platform, with a particular emphasis on expanding broadband availability. She is likely to continue many of President Barack Obama’s initiatives and priorities. If Secretary Clinton is elected, it is likely that Federal Communications Commission Chairman Tom Wheeler will stay on until July or so. If she is true to form, expect FCC commissioners and senior-level FCC staffing to take on a “FOC” (Friends of Clinton, and by that I mean Hillary and Bill) flavor. On the other hand, President Clinton could signal intent to bridge gaps with the Republicans by ensuring a balanced FCC. The current FCC has three Democratic and two Republican commissioners, but the Democrats (especially Commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel) have not always been in lockstep with Chairman Wheeler.

If Donald Trump is elected, things are more of a wild card. To begin with, he has said little about the tech sector during the campaign, and there isn’t much to glean from his policy platform. Trump is likely to be much more hands-off than President Obama (who was very hands-on). He will also be more pro-business and anti-regulation, which is why his off-the-cuff remark about the proposed AT&T-Time Warner deal was surprising. If he ends up being Delegator in Chief, his appointments could have an outsized influence.

[Mark Lowenstein is the managing director of Mobile Ecosystem.]

You can bank online and shop online, but you can’t vote online. After all, transferring thousands of dollars with a click of a button should require more security than ticking a box on an electronic ballot, right? Wrong.

Online banking works by heavily verifying users’ identities, but, by law, voting in American elections has to be anonymous, which greatly complicates verifying voter identification. And although shopping online seems to work fine, billions are lost in the U.S. each year from Internet credit card scamming. But customers aren’t held financially responsible for fraudulent internet transactions, as banks don’t want to discourage online shoppers. American elections can’t afford to absorb that kind of risk. Results need to be tallied fast and, most importantly, be absolutely, verifiably correct. Five states do currently allow for military and overseas voters to submit their ballots through an online portal: Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Missouri and North Dakota. None are swing states. But until there’s some radical new discovery in computer security, experts across the board say Americans’ best best is to record paper ballots for the foreseeable future. The convenience is just not worth the risk.

Beneath the din of e-mail coverage and the mountains of clichés about populism, the mass-market media has simply failed to convey what’s actually at stake in the election. Regardless of which candidate the policy-light tone of coverage helps at any given moment, it represents a fundamental abdication of responsibility to explain to people what is going on.

The two candidates are running on very different policy agendas, agendas that in some ways contradict the media narratives about downscale “populists” versus cosmopolitan elites. And because House Republicans are both unified on policy and entrenched in safely drawn districts, there is a sharp asymmetry in terms of the direction of change. Donald Trump is nobody’s idea of a policy wonk, but he has signed on to a real agenda, and if he wins he’ll probably implement it. The public should hear about its contents before they decide whether to make him president.

On Facebook, more than a million people checked in to the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation in North Dakota on Oct 31, but that didn’t mean that many people were actually at the site. The action was an act of solidarity with indigenous water protectors and activists fighting the Dakota Access Pipeline, inspired by a viral Facebook post that began circulating from an unidentified source.

Social media has become a double-edged sword for activism. Platforms like Twitter and Facebook have become crucial ways for people to participate in and organize contemporary social justice movements. Even though “hashtag activism” has been used to demoralize a new generation of activists, social media tools like hashtags have allowed people to organize and amplify their messages beyond their local physical community and network faster than ever. Social media has also democratized who bears witness to these events and how. Yet while law enforcement have used social media to target criminals, activists have also been monitored on these platforms for their organizing efforts.