The Xbox app will let you stream games straight to your TV without dedicated console hardware.
Microsoft’s partnership with Samsung has been rumored for weeks now.
Microsoft is entering new territory for its Xbox Game Pass subscription platform: smart TVs, no Xbox required.
On Thursday, the company announced a partnership with Samsung to bring a dedicated Xbox app to the electronics giant’s newest line of TVs, so subscribers to Game Pass can stream games straight to the display. You won’t need an Xbox, PC or any other separate hardware save a game controller to link with the Samsung display. You will, however, need a good internet connection to stream Xbox games from the cloud. The app will be distributed to compatible Samsung sets starting June 30.
The news marks a pivotal moment for Microsoft’s gaming division and an initiative it’s now calling “Xbox Everywhere.” The vision is to make its library of Xbox games available on virtually any screen, using cloud gaming in the absence of dedicated Xbox or PC hardware. The company is starting with Samsung, but it says it wants to work with other TV makers in the future, too.
Microsoft’s partnership with Samsung has been rumored for weeks now, and the company said a year ago that it had ambitions to make Game Pass available on smart TVs and through dedicated set-top box hardware. The company is in the process of building its own streaming device, said to be similar to a Roku puck, but it’s still in the development stage, according to a report from Windows Central last month. Microsoft isn’t sharing any new details about the device, codenamed “Keystone.”
That way, the company can sign up new Game Pass subscribers and grow its audience, even if those customers don’t own pricey consoles or gaming computers, and especially if they might be new to the hobby and hesitant to drop hundreds of dollars on hardware and software to get started.
Microsoft took the first steps toward this vision with the launch of its cloud gaming platform in 2020. Since then, the company has expanded access from PCs and Android phones to iOS devices and Xbox consoles, the latter allowing players to quickly try games without downloading them and to stream more graphically intensive titles on older Xbox hardware.
Going forward, one of the primary goals of Microsoft’s Xbox strategy is to expand its customer base well beyond the console audience, which includes a few hundred million customers worldwide but pales in comparison to the world’s billions of smartphone owners. “As we look to make gaming more accessible to even more people, and reach the three billion players globally, we’ve invested heavily in the cloud,” Xbox Cloud Gaming chief Catherine Gluckstein wrote in a blog post last month detailing the Xbox Everywhere initiative.
Gluckstein’s boss, Microsoft Gaming CEO Phil Spencer, has said similar versions of this countless times over the past few years. “At some point in our future, more people are going to be part of the Xbox community on mobile than they are on any other device, just by the nature of how many mobile phones there are,” Spencer told Axios last year.
Microsoft is planning a number of updates to Xbox Game Pass in the coming months. The company is expanding the subscription service to Argentina and New Zealand, and later this year it will let subscribers to Game Pass’ pricier Ultimate tier stream purchase games from the cloud, even if those titles are not part of its subscription platform. (Right now, Microsoft’s cloud gaming platform only supports Game Pass games.)
It’s also working on launching something it’s calling Project Moorcroft, a specialized game demo program just for Game Pass subscribers that sounds similar to Sony’s planned game demo program for its competing PlayStation Plus platform.
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Nick Statt is Protocol's video game reporter. Prior to joining Protocol, he was news editor at The Verge covering the gaming industry, mobile apps and antitrust out of San Francisco, in addition to managing coverage of Silicon Valley tech giants and startups. He now resides in Rochester, New York, home of the garbage plate and, completely coincidentally, the World Video Game Hall of Fame. He can be reached at nstatt@protocol.com.
The crypto investment company just hired veteran D.C. attorney Donald Verrilli to help its campaign to get approval from the SEC for its Grayscale Bitcoin Trust.
CEO Michael Sonnenshein told Protocol he's assembled a "deep bench of in-house legal talent" to support Grayscale's bid to convert its Grayscale Bitcoin Trust into an ETF.
Benjamin Pimentel ( @benpimentel) covers crypto and fintech from San Francisco. He has reported on many of the biggest tech stories over the past 20 years for the San Francisco Chronicle, Dow Jones MarketWatch and Business Insider, from the dot-com crash, the rise of cloud computing, social networking and AI to the impact of the Great Recession and the COVID crisis on Silicon Valley and beyond. He can be reached at bpimentel@protocol.com or via Google Voice at (925) 307-9342.
Grayscale CEO Michael Sonnenshein has been focused on the crypto investment company’s bid to offer the first bitcoin spot exchange-traded fund in the market.
He hopes the SEC will approve its application to convert its Grayscale Bitcoin Trust into an ETF, even though the SEC hasn’t approved any bitcoin ETFs to date.
But Grayscale is prepared to go to court if the SEC gives it a thumbs-down. It’s bound to be a tough battle. And this week, Grayscale brought in more firepower.
Grayscale said Tuesday it had hired veteran attorney Donald Verrilli, who served as solicitor general during the Obama administration, as a legal strategist. Verrilli’s hire, Sonnenshein told Protocol, would “round out our legal bench.”
He elaborated on Grayscale’s preparations for a potential legal brawl in an interview with Protocol, in which he also talked about the push to regulate crypto and the recent volatility in the market.
This interview was edited for brevity and clarity.
You’ve said that it’s a matter of when, not if, the SEC will approve a bitcoin spot ETF. How close are we in seeing that?
I think it's really tough to put an exact frame on when that's going to transpire. That is really up to regulators to approve here in the U.S. In the case of GBTC — that’s the ticker symbol for our bitcoin product — it's already out in the market, and it's been trading every day since mid-2015. It's emerged as the largest bitcoin fund in the world.
At this juncture, we asked the regulators to pull the product even closer into the regulatory perimeter and give it greater investor protection. The opportunity in front of regulators is to really give investors fair and safer and more familiar access to bitcoin as an investment by approving an ETF. They're certainly not, you know, protecting anybody by not taking action.
You have been quoted that you may sue the SEC if they do not approve your proposal. Is that still the plan?
Our team has been preparing for all scenarios as we approach the July 6 deadline, at which point the SEC will either approve or disapprove the application. We are certainly operationally ready to convert GBTC to an ETF. But certainly, in the event of a disapproval order, one possible outcome is that we would file a lawsuit against the SEC.
Why did you hire Don Verrilli?
I think "preparedness" is exactly the word that I would use. When I think about the Grayscale legal team, we've built a deep bench of in-house legal talent. We've been working closely with our attorneys for many years to develop many of the arguments that have been put forward in front of the SEC. What better way to continue to round out our legal bench than to bring somebody like Don on as a legal strategist given his decades of experience both in the public sector, representing the government as a former solicitor general, as well as [his] work in the private sector. So we're thrilled that he's part of the game.
Can you elaborate on that? How do you expect him to help in conversation with regulators? What are you expecting?
Having been a public servant and having been on the government side of a variety of legal actions, Don certainly brings a unique perspective that perhaps the hundreds of members of our team have not had the same experience with professionally.
It's been a year since Gary Gensler took over the SEC. What kinds of conversations have you had with him and his team about crypto?
If you take a big step back and look at the potential that the SEC was perceived to have under the chair’s leadership given that he entered his seat at the commission with much more than a simple working knowledge of the asset class, you continue to see progress throughout the last year. [That] has certainly been encouraging. But I do feel that Washington as a whole is getting impatient with the lack of progress being made at the SEC around issues like spot bitcoin ETFs and others.
If you look at where we are, you have the backdrop of the White House executive order that has certainly changed the narrative in D.C. with respect to engaging on crypto issues. You have bipartisan support for a brand-new bill that directly addresses regulation and regulatory frameworks around crypto assets.
So the temperature in D.C. has certainly changed. I certainly believe that this is an opportune moment for the SEC chair and the agency as a whole to further engage on these issues and to fulfill that White House executive order, demonstrating American competitiveness and its adoption of new and emerging technologies like bitcoin.
Speaking of temperature, there is also the view we are in another crypto winter. We've just had a major stablecoin crash. How have these developments impacted Grayscale?
Certainly the narrative around Terra’s collapse was taken notice of. But it was a cycle that petered out over a matter of days.
I feel that the U.S. continues to push for stablecoin regulation and ensuring that these protocols are functioning as they're designed to do so.
In terms of a crypto winter, it would certainly be far too early to say that is in fact the case just because prices have sold off.
Benjamin Pimentel ( @benpimentel) covers crypto and fintech from San Francisco. He has reported on many of the biggest tech stories over the past 20 years for the San Francisco Chronicle, Dow Jones MarketWatch and Business Insider, from the dot-com crash, the rise of cloud computing, social networking and AI to the impact of the Great Recession and the COVID crisis on Silicon Valley and beyond. He can be reached at bpimentel@protocol.com or via Google Voice at (925) 307-9342.
Joe Byrne is Vice President of Technology Strategy and Executive CTO at AppDynamics, a part of Cisco. His primary focus is on working with customers and prospects on APM strategy and helping with digital transformations. He also works closely with Sales, Marketing, Product and Engineering on product strategy. Prior to AppDynamics, Joe held technology leadership roles at Albertsons, EllieMae and Johnson and Johnson.
Over the last two years, technologists have come under unprecedented pressure to embrace digital transformation and innovation at record speeds. The pandemic accelerated the expansion of the digital economy at a rate that was previously unthinkable.
As a consequence, consistent availability and performance of the applications and digital services that customers and end users rely upon has never been more important. But at the same time, this has never been harder to achieve. To facilitate rapid innovation many technology leaders turbo-charged their move to the cloud and now preside over increasingly complex IT environments and sprawling cloud infrastructure.
Now the clock is ticking for IT teams to get control over their IT environments and achieve the level of visibility and insight needed to manage the next wave of digital change.
Full-stack observability is quickly emerging as a technology that can help solve some of these challenging and complex issues. The latest report from AppDynamics, The Journey to Observability, reveals a surge of organizations making serious moves to improve visibility within their IT environment with as many as 90% of organizations planning to be somewhere along the journey to full-stack observability during 2022.The next 12 months will be pivotal for many in this journey. Here we explore three important reasons why full-stack observability should be in every IT team’s toolkit as they prepare for the next wave of innovation.
Combat complexity, achieve real-time visibility
It’s no secret that there has been a massive increase in complexity for IT departments in the last few years as the world shifted online. The result is they were left to manage increasingly fragmented IT estates as they rushed to keep application and digital experiences running.
Technologists have been overwhelmed by data noise and have not had the tools readily available to identify which issues really matter and where to focus their efforts. But as we enter a new phase where immediate reactive response to the pandemic has evolved to proactive planning for the future, technologists need to find a way to tame complexity and manage data noise. Full-stack observability is enabling them to be more strategic in their approach.
This technology provides users with unified, real-time visibility into availability and performance up and down the IT stack for compute, storage, network and public internet, from the customer-facing application all the way into the back end. It enables IT teams to quickly and easily identify anomalies, understand dependencies and fix issues before they affect customers.
And the results are clear to see. Organizations that have already started the move to a full-stack observability approach are seeing results and clear return on investment (ROI). In the AppDynamics research, 86% of technologists reported greater visibility across their IT stack over the last 12 months when implementing full-stack observability.
Reduce costs with improved productivity and collaboration
When we look more deeply at the specific benefits that early adopters of full-stack observability are seeing, it’s clear that ROI and reduction in costs are achieved in a number of ways.
Half of IT teams say that a full-stack observability approach has led to improved productivity and 46% have reduced operational costs in the IT department as they now need to spend less time identifying anomalies and understanding dependencies in order to perform fixes. Others say they can also deploy team members to more strategic work that can better impact the business. 43% explain that they have seen better collaboration between IT operations, development and networking teams as they now have a single source of truth for data. No more working in silos with independent, disconnected monitoring tools.
Customers tell us they are removing themselves from the constant cycle of firefighting that has characterized most IT departments in recent years. Teams are becoming more productive and operational costs are falling because availability and performance issues are being addressed earlier and more quickly.
Against this backdrop of success, it perhaps shouldn’t be surprising that 80% of technologists believe that organizations that fail to make significant strides in their journey towards full-stack observability in 2022 will face competitive disadvantage versus their peers.
But where full-stack observability really comes into its own is when technology performance is directly linked to the most important business metrics. In fact, 98% of technologists believe that it’s important to be able to directly correlate performance across the full IT stack with business outcomes.
Full-stack observability with business context enables companies to digest IT performance to easily identify where they can prioritize performance and tackle issues that strategically impact their bottom line. This correlation of technology and business data allows IT leaders to make smarter, strategic decisions based on actual business impact.
Making the shift is absolutely critical in order for businesses to successfully embed a sustainable digital-transformation-as-usual culture across their operations to thrive in the post-pandemic economy.
And critically, whereas before IT teams may have had to battle to get buy-in from senior leaders for procuring new technology solutions — such as full-stack observability — business leaders are now huge advocates. 93% of technologists report that the wider business has been supportive of their efforts to implement full-stack observability, in terms of providing the necessary budget and resources.
This is a hugely significant development in the evolution of full-stack observability, suggesting that technologists are now well positioned to ramp up their implementation programs with the sponsorship and investment they need to deliver success.
It’s clear that the implementation of full-stack observability will be mission-critical for technologists as they shift gears and ramp up transformation programs. A full-stack observability approach is central to technologists delivering their organization’s future objectives, enabling them to be more strategic, prioritize resources and influence vital and strategic decisions that drive the bottom line.
Joe Byrne is Vice President of Technology Strategy and Executive CTO at AppDynamics, a part of Cisco. His primary focus is on working with customers and prospects on APM strategy and helping with digital transformations. He also works closely with Sales, Marketing, Product and Engineering on product strategy. Prior to AppDynamics, Joe held technology leadership roles at Albertsons, EllieMae and Johnson and Johnson.
Consumers will soon be able to convert fiat money into crypto at MoneyGram locations worldwide, opening up access to people without bank accounts or credit cards.
Crypto on- and off-ramps have been a roadblock for the industry. A partnership between Stellar and MoneyGram aims to solve that.
Tomio Geron ( @tomiogeron) is a San Francisco-based reporter covering fintech. He was previously a reporter and editor at The Wall Street Journal, covering venture capital and startups. Before that, he worked as a staff writer at Forbes, covering social media and venture capital, and also edited the Midas List of top tech investors. He has also worked at newspapers covering crime, courts, health and other topics. He can be reached at tgeron@protocol.com or tgeron@protonmail.com.
The lack of solid crypto on- and off-ramps — rails for efficiently converting dollars, yen, euros and other currencies into tokens — is a bottleneck that has held back the industry’s growth.
While wealthier people in big markets such as the U.S. can move in and out of crypto easily, it’s much more difficult if you’re in an emerging market and don’t have a bank account or credit card.
Stellar Development Foundation, which supports the Stellar Network, has come up with a way to address the problem. Through a partnership with money-transfer company MoneyGram that’s launching Friday, people can bring fiat currency to a MoneyGram location, convert it to crypto and convert crypto back out to fiat. The service will use the USDC stablecoin on the Stellar network.
The service — initially available in the U.S., Canada, Kenya and the Philippines and expanding to seven more countries this month and other countries later — is an example of the ways that new crypto markets are converging with traditional finance. It also shows how crypto needs to integrate with existing financial systems to bring in mainstream users.
The partners plan to add crypto cash-outs in almost all MoneyGram countries, more than 200, by the end of June.
“It's an interesting and tough problem,” said Anand Iyer, founder at venture firm Canonical Crypto, which hasn’t invested in Stellar but is actively watching the infrastructure market. “It makes a lot of sense to [have this deal], because that's the only way you're gonna get more crypto into the ecosystem.”
If Stellar and MoneyGram pull off the project and show they can attract new consumers to crypto, it could open up a much larger market for crypto and Web3, and serve as a model for other companies looking to increase access.
For Stellar, the deal is part of its goal of opening up access to crypto to underserved or unbanked populations. “From that standpoint, this really changes, potentially, a huge amount and really brings the cash-based world into the digital economy,” said Denelle Dixon, CEO at Stellar Development Foundation. “We're actually really trying to target those users that have cash and really grow their opportunity.”
Since Stellar launched in 2014, its focus has been payments. Last year, the company added USDC to its network, enabling people to pay much less than on other systems like Ethereum, due to Stellar’s low fees, which are typically a small fraction of a penny.
Especially in today’s bear market, boosting accessibility is a way to address the misconception that crypto is just for trading, since this improves other uses such as payments, Dixon said.
For Stellar, that the new product uses USDC instead of its native XLM token highlights the organization’s recent focus on stablecoins. Dixon sees the future of crypto payments in stablecoins. “We don't prefer XLM over anything else,” she said. “In fact, we prefer stablecoins. Stablecoins are a really nice way for payments to be leveraged.”
Bringing together a traditional financial company with a newfangled blockchain group was not simple. MoneyGram and Stellar began talking in 2019, and the companies then built an “adapter” that showed it was possible for Stellar’s and MoneyGram’s systems to connect.
The companies started talking about this current product March 2021. In one key meeting last summer, Dixon told MoneyGram CEO Alex Holmes that “the thing that had been missed in a lot of different spaces is how much blockchain and crypto needs MoneyGram.”
The product was built over the next several months, and a pilot began in November. MoneyGram has licenses and operations in 200 countries and territories, with more than 420,000 agent locations, which allowed for a relatively quick build. Mark Heynen, vice president of Business Development at Stellar Development Foundation, praised MoneyGram’s “ability to abstract out all the complexity.”
With this product, users can bring fiat currency to a MoneyGram location, convert it to crypto and convert crypto back out to fiat.Photo: MoneyGram
Stellar has seen payments grow more than 500% on its network over the past year, but it needs to increase access for retail users. In 2016, it launched its first anchors — a network of regulated financial institutions, money service businesses, stablecoin issuers and other providers of on-ramps and off-ramps. It now has about 50 anchors in places like Brazil, Nigeria, the Philippines and the U.S.
But most of the anchors on Stellar are regional players, and not all have physical cash-in or -out locations. MoneyGram will be a sort of super-anchor for Stellar.
This is how it will work: A customer initiates a transaction on a compatible wallet, then brings dollars or other fiat to a MoneyGram location. The agent verifies identity and loads the funds to the customer’s digital wallet as a MoneyGram transaction using the Stellar blockchain network.
Two self-custody wallets, Lobstr and Vibrant, will be live at launch, and the companies are working on supporting other custodial and noncustodial wallets. USDC creator Circle will help convert the funds, and United Bank Texas will handle settlement between Circle and Stellar.
MoneyGram said it is offering the service with no fees for the first 12 months to boost adoption. The price of transactions will eventually be competitive with buying and selling crypto or with sending remittances, said Holmes. The World Bank reports that average remittance fees paid on conventional money transfers in 2021 were a little more than 6%.
MoneyGram sees the Stellar deal bringing in new customers who want to get into or are already into crypto, as well as providing a new product for existing customers. Holmes notes overlap between immigrants who use MoneyGram to send money overseas and Latinx populations that show strong crypto interest. In addition, by integrating with Stellar, it enables any other wallet on that network to plug into MoneyGram, adding more potential customers.
Longer term, Holmes sees crypto as having potential not just in changing money transfers but also in helping redefine money. “If I had a U.S. dollar, and I put it into a stablecoin that was then accessible to someone in Argentina, that's a little bit different than saying I have to convert it all today when I go to pick it up or when I put it into my bank account,” Holmes said. “There are some interesting future concepts around how money moves, and does it really need to be instantly translated into fiat?”
Tomio Geron ( @tomiogeron) is a San Francisco-based reporter covering fintech. He was previously a reporter and editor at The Wall Street Journal, covering venture capital and startups. Before that, he worked as a staff writer at Forbes, covering social media and venture capital, and also edited the Midas List of top tech investors. He has also worked at newspapers covering crime, courts, health and other topics. He can be reached at tgeron@protocol.com or tgeron@protonmail.com.
Don’t know what to do this weekend? We’ve got you covered.
Our favorite picks for your weekend pleasure.
Nick Statt is Protocol's video game reporter. Prior to joining Protocol, he was news editor at The Verge covering the gaming industry, mobile apps and antitrust out of San Francisco, in addition to managing coverage of Silicon Valley tech giants and startups. He now resides in Rochester, New York, home of the garbage plate and, completely coincidentally, the World Video Game Hall of Fame. He can be reached at nstatt@protocol.com.
“Shining Girls” and “The Boys” are keeping us busy this week. But only when we’re not getting pummeled in Diablo Immortal, one of the best entries in the franchise. And the best part? It’s free.
Amazon’s adaptation of the very graphic comic series The Boys is back for a third season, with the first three episodes having dropped last week and the fourth premiering today. Just when you thought the show couldn’t get more ridiculous, disturbing and over-the-top, the Season Three premiere puts that concern to bed with an opening scene that perfectly captures the show’s mix of dark humor and ultra-violent spectacle. Squeamish viewers should probably steer clear of “The Boys,” but for those who like the series’ focus on corrupt, capitalistic superheroes who abuse their power, so far this season is delivering.
The latest game from Blizzard Entertainment, and the struggling studio’s first new release in over six years, is the mobile-first Diablo Immortal, a free-to-play take on the classic action role-playing series. While many fans have complained of the game’s microtransactions, a number of die-hard Diablo fans say it’s one of the best entries in the hack-and-slash franchise and one of the first premium mobile games that feels at home on a smartphone screen. You can play it on PC if you like, but Immortal is at the very least worth a try on your phone if you’ve ever enjoyed a Diablo game, especially because it costs nothing to download and play.
Following in the vein of popular miniseries thrillers like HBO’s “Sharp Objects” and USA’s “The Sinner,” Apple TV+’s new eight-episode adaptation of the 2013 novel from author Lauren Beukes has a lot going for it. The show has the excellent Elisabeth Moss in the lead role as a newspaper archivist still reeling from a violent assault, a detestable Jamie Bell as a villainous serial killer hunting Chicago women across decades and a truly mind-bending narrative that might make your head hurt a little. It’s best to go into “Shining Girls” without reading much about it; not knowing the plot until it slowly unfolds makes the show’s big reveals and many twists much more rewarding.
Patreon-funded YouTube channel People Make Games has made a major splash in games journalism in just a few short years, with high-profile exposés on Roblox’s exploitation of child creators and an explosive video on abusive indie game personalities. This week The Washington Post’s Nathan Grayson published a profile of the U.K.-based trio behind the enterprise. In the piece, Grayson weaves a telling narrative about the rise of reader-supported journalism that’s packaged and delivered in compelling new formats for an audience that spends little to none of its time reading traditional news sites.
A version of this story also appeared in today’s Entertainment newsletter; subscribe here.
Nick Statt is Protocol's video game reporter. Prior to joining Protocol, he was news editor at The Verge covering the gaming industry, mobile apps and antitrust out of San Francisco, in addition to managing coverage of Silicon Valley tech giants and startups. He now resides in Rochester, New York, home of the garbage plate and, completely coincidentally, the World Video Game Hall of Fame. He can be reached at nstatt@protocol.com.
The parties can’t agree on much — except that Congress should act on Big Tech sooner rather than later.
Both sides of the aisle are coming together over Big Tech.
Bradley Tusk (@bradleytusk) is a venture capitalist, political strategist and writer. He is the founder and CEO of Tusk Ventures, the first venture capital fund to work with and invest solely in high-growth startups facing political and regulatory challenges.
Bradley Tusk is co-founder and managing partner at Tusk Venture Partners.
We live in a society where each party instinctively opposes the views of the other. If Democrats say they like ice cream, Republicans say that ice cream has secret microchips that spy for the Chinese. If Republicans say they like apple pie, Democrats say the dessert is a symbol of oppression and must be banned. Sadly, it sometimes does reach levels almost this silly. But there seems to be one issue defying political gravity: tech regulation.
From Congress to the Supreme Court, from states to presidential candidates, from think tanks on the left to those on the right, the stars have aligned far differently around regulating Big Tech than they have for almost any other current issue.
For example, the U.S. Supreme Court recently issued a stay of a Texas law that was designed to ban online platforms from restricting user posts based on political views. The social media companies argued that the Texas law violated their First Amendment rights to control the content on their platforms. So you have what’s meant to be a pro-Republican position on the Texas law — preventing platforms like Twitter from banning people like Trump — against what’s normally a Democratic position, protecting the First Amendment.
But the outcome was surprising. The majority who voted to pause the Texas law — Chief Justice John Roberts (appointed by George W. Bush) and Justices Stephen Breyer (appointed by Bill Clinton), Sonia Sotomayor (appointed by Barack Obama), Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett (both appointed by Donald Trump) — make an unusual set of allies. And on the other side, Justice Elena Kagan (Obama), one of the most liberal members of the court, sided with Justices Samuel Alito (W. Bush), Neil Gorsuch (Trump) and Clarence Thomas (George H.W. Bush) to oppose the stay — not the usual coalition.
But justices aren’t beholden to voters, so maybe it’s easier for them to agree while everyone else still has to toe the party line. Disproving that theory, though, only requires one glance at the American Innovation and Choice Online Act in Congress. The bill prohibits dominant media platforms, defined by their market cap and number of users, from discriminating against other businesses that rely on their services. So for example, Amazon wouldn’t be able to make products from outside vendors far less attractive or easy to find than their own products.
The legislation, led by prominent Democratic Sen. Amy Kloubchar, passed out of the Senate Judiciary Committee in January with a 16-6 vote, reflecting broad bipartisan support. Republican Sens. Chuck Grassley, Lindsey Graham, Ted Cruz, Josh Hawley and John Kennedy all supported it, with Grassley and Kennedy both serving as co-sponsors. Passing anything in Congress is still akin to a miracle, but if one bill has a shot of passing this year, it may be this one.
The bipartisan trend toward regulating Big Tech even occurred during the 2020 presidential race, one of the ugliest races in history. Trump and Biden didn’t agree on much, but they did agree on one issue: revoking Section 230. Sec. 230 is a federal law that protects platforms like Facebook or Twitter from being sued for content posted by its users. In my view, it is the single biggest contributor to making the internet toxic. And that issue is so much of concern to both sides that Trump publicly called out “the horrendous tech giants,” and argued for repealing Sec. 230 at a rally in Georgia. Biden then said the same thing: “Sec. 230 should be revoked, immediately should be revoked, No. 1. For Zuckerberg and other platforms. It should be revoked because it is not merely an internet company. It is propagating falsehoods they know to be false.”
Now, given Washington’s ineptitude, Sec. 230 is of course still alive and well. But in a world where most issues are automatically doomed because one side’s support immediately prevents the other’s, there’s at least a chance something can get done.
The same holds true at the state level. California, a blue state if there ever was one, approved the California Consumer Privacy Act in 2018, giving consumers the ability to protect themselves and their data from big tech companies. The CCPA, which went into effect in 2020, contains a broad array of consumer protections, ranging from the right to opt out of a business’s sale of their personal information to the ability to request that business delete their personal information.
Which were the next three states to follow along? Colorado and Virginia, both purple states, and Utah, an extremely red state. The legislation in each state effectively does the same thing, providing consumers with some ability to protect their privacy and their data. If Big Tech regulation were a strictly partisan issue, this never would have happened.
Even think tanks on the left and right are in unusual places. No one ever confuses the Brookings Institution and the Heritage Foundation, but they both agree strongly on regulating Big Tech. Brookings supports the creation of a federal agency to oversee Big Tech. The Heritage Foundation has equated big tech to totalitarianism, calling for aggressive reforms to constrain tech’s ability to reshape society.
Unlike almost every other issue out there — guns, climate, immigration, education, health care, abortion and so on — regulating Big Tech appeals to elected officials, judges and scholars on both sides of the aisle. Does this mean we should now expect a torrent of bipartisan legislation that finally takes on issues like privacy, antitrust and platform liability? No. We’re still talking about the government; you should always bet on failure and incompetence. But if you wanted to find one issue that at least has a shot in an impending divided government — with a likely Republican-led House and Senate and a Democratic-led White House — regulating Big Tech may be your best bet.
Bradley Tusk (@bradleytusk) is a venture capitalist, political strategist and writer. He is the founder and CEO of Tusk Ventures, the first venture capital fund to work with and invest solely in high-growth startups facing political and regulatory challenges.
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