Category: Google Using Big Data in Politics

Streaming’s ESG Fail, and Why Artists Should Care About Data Centers and the Data Center Lobbying Connection

The music industry has a sudden interest in being very ESG. The public messaging on the “Music Climate Pact” seems to focus on all aspects of the music business EXCEPT streaming. Now why might that be? It may be because streaming is about the least ESG music and movie distribution method out there. Remember, ESG is a popular acronym that labels a company suitable for investing by people like BlackRock’s Larry Fink (who has been called out for investing heavily in the People’s Republic of China by none other than George Soros, which kind of says it all).

I thought this might be a good time to revisit the “data center lobbying” connection that we first posted about three years ago.

How much energy do Youtube videos use?

While they like the ESG label, they actually don’t look too hard at what they are applying the label to. A quick refresher–“E” stands for “Environment” which streaming fails for reasons we will discuss on the podcast and are discussed in the Minute Earth video above–especially true for YouTube and TikTok. “S” is for “Social” which company’s like Spotify fail miserably due to their exploitative royalty systems, multibillion dollar stock buybacks that only benefit insiders and income inequality. “G” is for “Governance”, and again companies like Spotify don’t get out of the gate on G because of their supervoting shares of stock that give Daniel Ek and his insider pal Martin Lorentzon 100% control over all Spotify governance decisions regardless of what Spotify’s replaceable board has to say or votes. And we haven’t even mentioned Tencent, the PRC surveillance company or Ek’s own investment in digital munitions.

So there’s that.

Senator 230

But–there’s also a connection in the US (and probably other countries) between the physical location of Big Tech data centers and political power. That’s called Senator Ron Wyden, who just happens to be on the wrong side of every copyright issue (including the unrealized capital gains tax that would crush songwriters and publishers who are selling their song catalogs).

It’s not just Ron Wyden–Senator Klobuchar has a data center connection, too, as does Senator Ben Sasse.

Be advised, then–when they start whinging about ESG, etc., for the music business, we should really be starting with streaming itself, and indeed, the entire Internet. And the political clout that goes with running that network of physical plant.

Greenpeace “Dirty Data” research. www.greenpeace.org/archive-interna…-greenpeace.pdf

Nature magazine sums it up (www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-06610-y):

“Upload your latest holiday photos to Facebook, and there’s a chance they’ll end up stored in Prineville, Oregon, a small town where the firm has built three giant data centres and is planning two more. [Hello, Senator Wyden.] Inside these vast factories, bigger than aircraft carriers, tens of thousands of circuit boards are racked row upon row, stretching down windowless halls so long that staff ride through the corridors on scooters.

These huge buildings are the treasuries of the new industrial kings: the information traders. The five biggest global companies by market capitalization this year are currently Apple, Amazon, Alphabet, Microsoft and Facebook, replacing titans such as Shell and ExxonMobil. Although information factories might not spew out black smoke or grind greasy cogs, they are not bereft of environmental impact. As demand for Internet and mobile-phone traffic skyrockets, the information industry could lead to an explosion in energy use.”

According to the National Resources Defense Council www.nrdc.org/resources/americas…ing-amounts-energy:

“Data centers are the backbone of the modern economy — from the server rooms that power small- to medium-sized organizations to the enterprise data centers that support American corporations and the server farms that run cloud computing services hosted by Amazon, Facebook, Google, and others. However, the explosion of digital content, big data, e-commerce, and Internet traffic is also making data centers one of the fastest-growing consumers of electricity in developed countries, and one of the key drivers in the construction of new power plants.

Google emits less than 8 grams of carbon dioxide equivalent per day to serve an active Google user—defined as someone who performs 25 searches and watches 60 minutes of YouTube a day, has a Gmail account, and uses our other key services.”

In Google-speak “less than 8” usually means 7.9999999999. So let’s call it 8. As of 2016 there were 1 billion active gmail users. So rough justice, Google acknowledges that it emits about 8 billion grams of carbon dioxide daily, or 9,000 tons. And based on the characteristically tricky way Google framed the measurement, that doesn’t count the users who don’t have a gmail account, don’t use “our other key services” and may watch more than an hour a day of YouTube.

@YashaLevine: Shahid Buttar, the cheesy Silicon Valley astroturfer challenging Nancy Pelosi from “the left”

As someone who grew up in San Francisco and wrote the book on the shady history of Silicon Valley — I simply can’t let this go. I mean, check it out: Turns out that the guy running to unseat Nancy Pelosi from “the left” is a corporate Silicon Valley astroturfer from the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

His name is Shahid Buttar.

Why is this significant? EFF is America’s oldest and most influential internet business lobby — an organization that has played a pivotal role in shaping the internet as it exists today. That privatized telecommunication system that’s owned by giant monopolies, powered by for-profit surveillance and influence ops, dominated by spies, and lacking any democratic oversight? Yep, that one. EFF is directly responsible for bringing it into being — and for making sure it stays privatized, shitty, and oligarchic.

As I wrote in my massive investigation into EFF’s shady history and it’s pro-Silicon Valley astroturf tricks for The Baffler a few years back, this organization has done an amazing job convincing us that it’s one of the good guys on the Internet — that it’s grassroots and on the side of the people. In reality, EFF has always been on the side of corporations, fighting against democratic control of Silicon Valley — from making sure ISPs could grow into giant monopolies to blowing up the first (and only) attempt to regulate Google’s surveillance business model back in 2004.

Read the post on Yasha Levine’s blog

@akarl_smith: After years of big spending, tech’s political machine turns to high gear

[Editor Charlie sez:  Practically the same lineup that attacked Mississippi Attorney General Jim Hood for trying to make Google come clean about violating the Controlled Substances Act in breach of both their NonProsecution Agreement and their shareholder lawsuit settlement.]

“I’ve never seen pushback in such a fashion before,” Terry Schilling, executive director of the American Principles Project, told NBC News.

NBC News reports that:

‘Every one of those think tanks and advocacy groups is backed by Google, Facebook or both:

TechFreedom, a tech-focused Washington nonprofit…the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a tech-focused civil liberties nonprofit…Engine Advocacy, an organization that advocates for policies that help startups…the Computer & Communications Industry Association [the main trade association for Big Tech]…Those concerns were echoed by a litany of conservative and libertarian-leaning think tanks. Libertarian think tank R Street…the Competitive Enterprise Institute, another conservative think tank, the Cato Institute, the American Enterprise Institute, and Americans for Prosperity lambasted the proposal too, calling it “the latest potential disaster” that “would blow up the internet.”‘

Read the post on NBC News

EFF Shill

julie samuels 2

PK Google Shills

Facebook and the Enemy Within: T-Bone Burnett’s Keynote at SXSW 2019

As usual, Henry gives an extremely relevant and literate dissertation on the loss of humanity imposed on us by Big Brother’s youngest sibling, Mark Zuckerberg–the boy who wouldn’t grow up, but who instead created an app for Room 101.

Please listen to T Bone when you have a quiet hour to yourself.

@cmu: As Copyright Directive campaigning starts up again, article thirteen opponents stung by London Times investigation plan to take to the streets

[Editor Charlie sez:  As David Lowery says, democracy dies in botness.  Even Spotify apologists are skeptical of the Google-backed Pirate Party tactics.]

Before attention formally returns to the draft European Copyright Directive next month, the Pirate Party’s representative in the European Parliament – Julia Reda – is hoping to get opponents to the more controversial elements of the proposals out onto the streets.

The copyright reforming directive has been in development for years, of course. For the wider music industry, the focus has been article thirteen, which seeks to increase the liabilities of user-upload platforms like YouTube….

Since the vote, the music industry has been very critical of tactics employed by the tech lobby, and especially big bad Google, in the weeks prior to the vote. Their campaigning, it’s argued, misrepresented what article thirteen is really about. Meanwhile opponents presented themselves as mere concerned internet users – when many were in fact funded by billion dollar tech giants – and used technology to artificially amplify their voice.

David Lowery’s The Trichordist website has run a number of articles exploring these tactics, all of which make for very interesting reading. Meanwhile The Times reported earlier this month how “Google is helping to fund a website that encourages people to spam politicians and newspapers with automated messages backing its policy goals”.

The newspaper put the spotlight on an organisation called OpenMedia, which counts Google as a platinum supporter, and which was also analysed by The Trichordist.

The Times wrote: “The campaigning site is intended to amplify the extent of public support for policies that benefit Silicon Valley”, before confirming that “the tools were recently used to bombard MEPs with phone calls opposing EU proposals to introduce tighter online copyright rules”….

While calling on people to join these protests, [Pirate] Reda has also hit out at the claims that automated tools – like those offered by OpenMedia – were used to make it look like opposition to the copyright directive was much more widespread than it really is.

She recently wrote on her blog: “We haven’t won yet. After their initial shock at losing the vote in July, the proponents of upload filters and the ‘link tax’ have come up with a convenient narrative to downplay the massive public opposition they faced. They’re claiming the protest was all fake, generated by bots and orchestrated by big internet companies”.

She went on: “According to them, Europeans don’t actually care about their freedom of expression. We don’t actually care about EU lawmaking enough to make our voices heard. We will just stand idly by as our internet is restricted to serve corporate interests. People across Europe are ready to prove them wrong: they’re taking the protest to the streets”.  [Nobody said that, the Times and Trichordist just said that there were campaigning tools paid for by Google to create a false impression.]

Read the post on Complete Music Update