— First of its kind: CES held its first-ever session dedicated to whether Silicon Valley’s biggest companies should be broken up, a sign of how far the reckoning over the industry’s power has reached.
— A “troubling” data point: A DHS official said a study finding pervasive racial biases in facial recognition software raises a crucial question: Why is it happening?
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— Betting on blockchain: Digital-ledger experts say they would welcome more government involvement in their field, with one arguing that “the U.S. has to get its act together.”
IT’S THURSDAY IN VEGAS, where your hosts — Nancy Scola and Cristiano Lima — are looking forward to getting some time Friday to explore Eureka Park, CES’ startup showcase. A quick initial visit has one of your hosts eyeing a smart cutting board. If you haven’t subscribed yet to our pop-up POLITICO newsletter live from CES, you can sign up here. You can also dip into CES firsthand via the conference’s live video feed. Send Nancy and Cristiano your tips, questions and best recipes to nscola@politico.com and clima@politico.com or on Twitter @nancyscola and @viaCristiano.
CES HOSTS ITS FIRST-EVER ‘BREAK UP BIG TECH’ PANEL — Tech’s biggest summit held a panel this afternoon solely devoted to the debate on whether to break up industry giants Facebook, Google, Amazon and Apple. It was the first time CES has ever hosted a session on the topic, event organizers confirmed — a milestone that shows that concerns about the companies’ power and size are forcing an internal reckoning for the industry.
— The landmark discussion arrived as regulators and lawmakers in Washington and dozens of state enforcement leaders grapple with those same antitrust considerations and weigh next steps as part of a series of high-profile investigations.
— The session itself — titled “Should Big Tech be Broken Up?” — featured heavy skepticism from a largely industry-friendly panel. Asked the question at the heart of the discussion, Information Technology and Innovation Foundation President Robert Atkinson replied, “The answer is no.”
— Atkinson said any antitrust case should focus on a company’s conduct, not size. “The simple fact that the companies are big is not a problem in and of itself,” he said. Zach Graves, the head of policy at Lincoln Network, a right-of-center tech advocacy group, later decried the breakup proposals as an example of the “sledgehammer-style policy solutions” Washington officials float.
— But worries did not go unmentioned. Charlotte Slaiman, policy counsel for the consumer group Public Knowledge, said she was “very concerned about the power of big tech.” But she also suggested that regulators and lawmakers could take other actions to address those concerns, including enacting federal privacy legislation and creating a new federal regulator dedicated to oversight of the industry.
AI BIAS FINDINGS ALARM DHS OFFICIAL — Andre Hentz, the acting deputy undersecretary for science and technology, told us he’s unsettled by a recent federal study that found pervasive racial biases in facial recognition software systems. And he said the findings are “not lost” on the agency, which is working to address the issue. A sweeping analysis by the National Institute of Standards and Technology found facial recognition systems more frequently misidentified people of color than white people, in some systems up to 100 times more often.
— “That’s a data point that now we’re concerned about,” Hentz told Cristiano after speaking at a session on artificial intelligence, privacy and security. He added, “We are actively trying to understand what we can do to affect it in a positive way.”
— Hentz said part of the problem is figuring out what’s driving the misidentifications from a technical standpoint — “whether it’s a tonal thing or what is the underpinning science.” And there lies a possible remedy, he said, adding, “We’re going to need to create that science.”
BUT HOLD OFF ON THAT FACIAL RECOGNITION MORATORIUM — Michael Hermus, who served as DHS’ chief technology officer from 2015 to 2018, pushed back strongly on calls by some House lawmakers for Congress to place a moratorium on federal use of facial recognition software. “While it’s absolutely critical that we act responsibly and we take all these issues of privacy and security [with] utmost seriousness … if we were to put a moratorium on the use of AI we would fall even further behind in this arms race that we’re talking about for AI supremacy globally,” he said while speaking onstage with Hentz and other panelists.
— And it’s not just a tech issue, he said. “My view is it’s a national security imperative that we are able to make progress, rapid progress on artificial intelligence going forward. If we don’t it’ll be to our own great detriment. I think a moratorium is a terrible idea.”
GET YOUR GOVERNMENT INTO MY BLOCKCHAIN: It’s fair to say there’s no deep hunger among the CES crowd for getting government more greatly enmeshed in the inner workings of tech. As former FCC Commissioner Mignon Clyburn put it while moderating earlier in the week, “The one word everybody in this room hates to hear is the ‘R’ word: regulator.” But one real exception emerged today in Vegas: blockchain in general, and cryptocurrency in particular.
— Blockchain’s a bit different from other tech, in part because of its ties to finance, an industry in which governments have traditionally played a big role. What’s more, the thinking goes, government can help it enter the mainstream, something the panelists said countries like Singapore, Switzerland and the U.K. have done.
— “No [blockchain] entrepreneur in their right mind thinks of the U.S. first if they have other choices,” said Sandra Ro, CEO of the Global Blockchain Business Council, on a panel today — pointing to what she called the United States’ confusingly patchwork approach to distributed digital ledgers. “And the problem is, we’ve now got a global landscape where we have other choices,” said Ro, adding, “The U.S. has to get its act together.”
— “When you have the reputation of a global financial center, you have to maintain that,” said Ed Vaizey, a former British MP who, as Prime Minister David Cameron’s digital economy minister, helped push out a landmark 2016 government report meant to put the U.K. government on the tech’s cutting edge.
— Why hasn’t the U.S. figured out some coherent way of thinking about blockchain? The lone American legislator on the panel, New York State Assemblymember Clyde Vanel (D-Queens), attributed it to everything from the lack of tech sophistication among the elected to the raging “techlash.” Said Vanel, “We have to figure this out soon because we will keep falling behind the rest of the world.”
THE CUTTING EDGE OF ‘PORK’ TECH — Plant-based meat has been a big winner at CES, anchored by Impossible Foods’ high-profile rollout of its plant-based pork. An Impossible spring roll was the first course at CTA’s glitzy Leaders in Technology dinner Wednesday night at the Wynn, and the vegetarian entrée was an Impossible steak. After opening with a winding joke about feeding Christians to lions in ancient Rome, Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross took up the topic while introducing Impossible’s CEO, Stanford biochemistry professor Pat Brown.
— „The meat lobby is now blocking calling his product ‘meat,’” said Ross. “So I suggest calling his product ‘taem,’ which is meat spelled backwards. You could even use as a slogan, ‘Whichever way you spell it, it tastes the same.’”
— CTA CEO and President Gary Shapiro followed up with a joke about getting President Donald Trump to try a plant-based hamburger.
GIMME THAT GOOGLE GOODNESS — The hot ticket at the convention center? Google’s two-story gumball machine, a promotional device for the company’s voice-activated Google Assistant. Attendees insert a plate-sized coin into the machine and are rewarded with a giant “gumball” — a cantaloupe-sized canister containing one of about 30 different prizes, from a Google-branded beanie cap to a Nest home thermostat, which retails at around $250.
— At mid-afternoon Thursday, the wait to get a chance at a Google gumball was two hours long.
Protocol’s David Pierce and Janko Roettgers have called it: 5G is the buzzword of CES. People are talking about it on panels, in hallways and at poker tables. The most popular product here: „a thing you already own, but 5G!“
Beyond fast Netflix downloads, what will 5G offer? AT&T’s Chris Penrose gave David one of the best answers yet: „remote control of everything.“ Anything usually done in person — driving heavy machinery, multiplayer gaming, surgery, anything — could soon be done from thousands of miles away.
But it will initially do more for businesses than consumers. “5G is absolutely critical for us,” Pandora’s Chris Phillips told Janko, citing lower latency and better ad-insertion as reasons he’s excited. And the technology came up repeatedly in talks about the future of cities.
And it won’t usurp 4G completely in 2020. Most companies don’t know what to do with 5G, Penrose said: So many have approached AT&T looking for advice that it started a 5G consulting practice on the side.
Still, at least one CES attendee is already thinking forward. When 5G was mentioned during a privacy panel, he rolled his eyes and flashed a 10G pin on his lapel.
Elsewhere at CES: Wednesday night was party night, and musical guests were out in force. Snoop Dogg spinning at Twitter’s shindig; Stevie Nicks at JBL’s soiree; Drake at the Wynn into the early hours. No wonder today started slowly.
UP NEXT AT CES: Friday is the final day of CES 2020, which means we’re wrapping up our first-ever POLITICO pop-up newsletter live from the conference. We’ll be sharing our takeaways from the event, plus some of what’s still in our notebooks after five days in Vegas talking tech.
Source: politico.com
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