ABEA.DE - Alphabet Inc.
| Previous close | 1,122.00 |
| Open | 1,122.40 |
| Bid | 1,115.00 x 0 |
| Ask | 1,115.60 x 0 |
| Day's range | 1,114.00 - 1,122.60 |
| 52-week range | 877.91 - 1,151.00 |
| Volume | 106 |
| Avg. volume | 1,825 |
| Market cap | 771.041B |
| Beta (3Y monthly) | 0.70 |
| PE ratio (TTM) | 22.59 |
| EPS (TTM) | N/A |
| Earnings date | N/A |
| Forward dividend & yield | N/A (N/A) |
| Ex-dividend date | N/A |
| 1y target est | N/A |
- Yahoo Finance
How to position your portfolio going into an election
The election may be a year away, but there are steps you can take now to make sure your assets are positioned correctly.
- Bloomberg
A Straight-Forward Way to Generate Above-Market Returns
(Bloomberg Opinion) -- Can you generate market-beating returns, or alpha, above and beyond the stocks you pick or by managing to time the markets? Yes, says Fran Kinniry, global head of portfolio construction at Vanguard Group, and this week's guest on Masters in Business.In 2001, Kinniry’s team created the concept of what the firm calls investor’s alpha, which is based on the idea that professional advice can add substantially to an individual's investment performance. He said that anywhere from 150 to 300 basis points of annual return can be added via a combination of financial planning, tax-loss harvesting and -- most of all -- behavior management. He also notes that many people lack the time, willingness and ability to manage their own portfolios well: People with those characteristics derive the greatest benefits from professional financial planning, earning benefits that exceed the costs.Kinniry’s His favorite books are here; a transcript of our conversation is available here.You can stream/download the full conversation, including the podcast extras on Apple iTunes, Overcast, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Bloomberg and Stitcher. All of our earlier podcasts on your favorite pod hosts can be found here.Next week, we speak with economics Nobel laureate Michael Spence about his work on the dynamics of information flows and market structures, and his book, "The Next Convergence: The Future of Economic Growth in a Multispeed World."To contact the author of this story: Barry Ritholtz at britholtz3@bloomberg.netTo contact the editor responsible for this story: James Greiff at jgreiff@bloomberg.netThis column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.Barry Ritholtz is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. He is chairman and chief investment officer of Ritholtz Wealth Management, and was previously chief market strategist at Maxim Group. He is the author of “Bailout Nation.”For more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.com/opinion©2019 Bloomberg L.P.
- Bloomberg
How to Tax Tech Monopolies
(Bloomberg Opinion) -- The question of how to distribute the fruits of the economy’s production is central to economics. Many take a utilitarian approach: Let the private sector produce what it wants, and then tax the wealthy to help the poor. Utilitarians don’t spend much time worrying about who deserves what; the goal is simply to maximize human happiness. Marxists tend to take a more class-based view, believing that the fruits of production ought to belong to workers.Then there’s Henry George. George was a 19th-century American economist who believed that land was the source of human inequality. As the population and the economy grow, he reasoned, land remains scarce, so rents go up. Landowners don’t actually produce anything that benefits the economy, but they capture much of the value created by workers and businesses that do use the land. Thus, land ownership is a vast engine of human poverty and concentration of undeserved wealth.Modern history seems to bear out George’s assessment. In the 140 years since George wrote his magnum opus “Progress and Poverty,” land has been a remarkably good financial investment across a range of developed countries:And much of the increasing wealth inequality documented by economist Thomas Piketty is due not to corporate profits, but to the increasing value of land.George believed that it was government’s job to redistribute these unearned profits on land ownership to the public at large. His preferred policy for doing this was a land-value tax, which is like a property tax with an exemption for the value of useful structures or other improvements that are built on top of the land. A century later, economists began to realize that land-value taxes are a very efficient way of funding local government services like education.The land-value tax is a simple, elegant policy on paper, but it tends to be tricky to implement. Some economists trained in the Georgist tradition have focused on more direct means of redistributing wealth earned from land. For example, Wolf Ladejinsky, who served as an adviser to the governments of Japan and Taiwan in the postwar years, engineered sweeping programs of agrarian land reform. Some credit these programs with jump-starting East Asian economic development, as well as creating a sense of fairness that diminished the appetite for communist revolutions.In the modern day, neo-Georgist ideas tend to focus on urban land rather than farmland. As the knowledge economy becomes more important, high-earning workers are crowding into cities, sending rents soaring. Housing co-ops, public housing and programs to help lower-earning people buy houses are all ways to redistribute urban land.But it’s unlikely that land reform and taxation, by itself, will be enough to make Americans feel like they’re living in a fair society. As spectacular profits accrue to the owners of a few dominant companies, it’s worth asking whether those companies have some advantages that, like land, allow them to make profits out of proportion to the value they create. Patents and ownership of online platforms might be two such assets.Economists call unearned profits “rent,” drawing an explicit analogy with the income earned by a landlord. One source of rent is monopoly power: When a company doesn’t have to face the pressures of competition, it can jack up prices beyond the efficient level in order to earn extra profits. Industrial concentration has been rising in the U.S. as a few so-called superstar companies gobble up market share. And as concentration goes up, profits have taken a larger share of economic output:Beefing up the antitrust system is a very good idea, but it won’t be sufficient to halt the rise of monopoly rents. Stronger unions and other pro-labor institutions can complement legal remedies.But the age of knowledge industries brings new challenges that older policies are ill-equipped to address. In the digital age, a lot more companies have strong network effects, meaning that the more people use a product, the more valuable it is. Facebook is the classic example: People are on the site not because it has the best features, but because all of their friends are on it.Network effects are a little like land, only in digital form. Because Facebook successfully occupied the social network space — kind of like claiming empty land — it’s difficult for later competitors to grow. It’s not impossible. More recent platforms such as Snap and Pinterest have carved out networks of their own, and eventually some newcomer may dethrone Facebook the way it dethroned MySpace. But the strength of network effects for first movers leads to market concentration and a few dominant companies.The patent system is another source of rent extraction: The government allows companies a temporary monopoly in order to encourage innovation. But since new technologies tend to build off of older ones, patents can allow first movers to block out the possible competition and hog profits for a long time.Modern-day Georgists should think about how to redistribute this digital land. Early ideas involve regulating online platforms to allow more competition, reforming the patent system and a progressive corporate tax that only kicks in when companies have very high margins.Businesses, entrepreneurs and inventors certainly put in plenty of effort and take plenty of risks to create new platforms and patentable innovations. But the rewards may be out of proportion to the value created. Finding new ways to redistribute the rents from digital land may help to avert damaging class warfare.To contact the author of this story: Noah Smith at nsmith150@bloomberg.netTo contact the editor responsible for this story: James Greiff at jgreiff@bloomberg.netThis column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.Noah Smith is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. He was an assistant professor of finance at Stony Brook University, and he blogs at Noahpinion.For more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.com/opinion©2019 Bloomberg L.P.
- Market Realist
Amazon and Snap: Why Google Investors Should Watch Them
eMarketer reported that Amazon is taking advertising market share from Google. Snap has also caught up with Google in the business of selling dynamic ads.
- Market Realist
Apple’s Self-Driving Car: Quanta Supplying the Tech
MacRumors recently reported that Quanta Computer supplied autonomous driving solutions to Apple. Apple has tested its self-driving car in Cupertino.
- Yahoo Finance
The Pixel 4 could be a breakout hit for Google
Google's Pixel 4 packs two exceptional cameras and enough slick features to make it a top pick for Android lovers.
- Market Realist
Will Apple Stock Reach $250 after Its Earnings?
Apple (AAPL) shares have been on an absolute tear this year. The stock has risen 50% year-to-date and closed trading at $236.41 last week.
- Bloomberg
Five Months After Huawei Export Ban, U.S. Companies Are Confused
(Bloomberg) -- Terms of Trade is a daily newsletter that untangles a world embroiled in trade wars. Sign up here. Five months after the Trump administration blacklisted China’s Huawei Technologies Co., its business seems alive and well while American firms still don’t know whether they can work with the Chinese company or not.The Department of Commerce in May added Huawei to what’s known as the entity list in an effort to block U.S. companies from selling components to China’s largest technology company, which it accuses of being a threat to America’s national security. Huawei has denied those claims.Despite those actions, Huawei reported last week that its revenue grew 24% in the first ninth months of 2019, boosted by a 26% jump in smartphone shipments. There are also signs that U.S. efforts to block the company from the development of 5G technology have yet to make a big dent: Huawei said it has signed more than 60 5G commercial contracts to date worldwide.LicensesThe entity listing, which requires American firms to obtain a government license in order to sell to blacklisted firms, has caused complications for U.S. companies.Tech leaders and their lawyers have argued for months in closed-door meetings with Trump administration officials that the blacklisting of Huawei, one of their biggest customers, is detrimental to their businesses. Many industry executives are confused about the administration’s end goals and haven’t been able to get clarity on when license approvals will be offered despite those discussions, according to several people familiar with the matter.President Donald Trump said in June after meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping in Osaka that he’d “easily’’ agreed to allow American firms to continue certain exports to Huawei. Weeks later Trump said he’d accelerate the approval process for licenses but none have been granted so far. The president as recently as this month green-lit the approval of licenses in a meeting with advisers, according to people familiar with the matter, but an announcement has yet to be made.The Commerce Department, in a statement, said it has received more than 200 license requests about Huawei and its affiliates. “Given the complexity of the matter, the interagency process is ongoing to ensure we correctly identified which licenses were safe to approve,” according to the statement. “Moreover, the Temporary General License remains in effect and was recently renewed.”Sales ImpactMicron Technology Inc.’s Chief Executive Officer Sanjay Mehrotra said in September that the lack of decision on its license applications could result in a worsening decline in sales over the coming quarters. The company gave a disappointing quarterly profit forecast last month, pointing in part to the Huawei restrictions. Broadcom Inc. in June also slashed its annual forecast, citing the U.S.-China trade war and disruption to its relationship with Huawei.One of the industry’s main arguments for allowing shipments of non-national security sensitive items is that Huawei can buy some of those components from competitors around the world, including South Korea, Japan and Taiwan.“Unless the ban succeeds in ‘killing’ Huawei, the result will be reduced U.S. global market share in a number of technology areas, something that will hurt, not help U.S. tech competitiveness,’’ said Robert Atkinson, president of ITIF, a Washington-based think tank.WorkaroundsSome firms have resumed shipments to Huawei even without a verdict on license requests. After a closer look at the rules since May, they determined they could continue supplying products based on an export control law. The rule doesn’t subject a product or service to the entity listing’s constraints if a company can prove that a piece of technology owes less than 25% of its origins to U.S.-based activities.Micron in June said it had resumed some memory chip shipments to Huawei. Intel Corp., the U.S.’s biggest chipmaker with plants in Oregon, New Mexico and Arizona, has as well. The company also has facilities in Ireland, Israel and China -- enabling it to argue that a chunk of the intellectual property in its chips isn’t created in the U.S.“We know many U.S. companies continue to ship to Huawei but do so using murky workarounds by way of other countries and third parties,’’ said Samm Sacks, a cybersecurity fellow at New America, a think tank. “It’s questionable whether the Huawei ban has helped U.S. national security so much as created a messy tangle of new problems.’’Atkinson cautioned not to over-interpret Huawei’s sales figures because the company has been stockpiling supplies for a while, in anticipation of the U.S. action. He said fourth quarter sales will be a more accurate indicator of the export ban’s impact, or whether the company has largely circumvented it.Huawei has said it expects U.S. export restrictions to reduce annual revenue at its consumer devices business by about $10 billion, in part because Google can no longer supply Android updates and apps from Gmail to Maps for the Chinese company’s newest handsets.U.S.-China DealTrump has indicated on various occasions that he’d be willing to consider removing the ban on Huawei for better terms in a trade agreement, drawing sharp criticism from China hawks on Capitol Hill.With the U.S. reaching a “phase one’’ deal with China earlier this month, the big question now is whether Trump will consider removing Huawei from the entity list or ease restrictions. When announcing the accord on Oct. 11, the administration said the issue wouldn’t be part of this initial pact but that it could be a part of phase two.To contact the reporters on this story: Jenny Leonard in Washington at jleonard67@bloomberg.net;Ian King in San Francisco at ianking@bloomberg.netTo contact the editors responsible for this story: Margaret Collins at mcollins45@bloomberg.net, Brendan MurrayFor more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.com©2019 Bloomberg L.P.
- Bloomberg
Google Search Shows Suspect Sites for Drug, Baby Teether: Study
(Bloomberg) -- Google searches for a popular antibiotic and a baby teething product send some users to suspect websites, according to a report released on Monday by a firm that tracks trademark and copyright infringement online.Earlier this year, six of the 10 results on the first page for the Google search “buy Bactrim online” showed links to websites that were “operating unlawfully and misusing” the Bactrim trademark, Incopro Ltd. said in the study.Another Google search for “wholesale Comotomo teether” produced nine organic results that directed users to an online marketplace or e-commerce website. Three of those sites listed “potentially harmful products that misuse the Comotomo trademark,” Incopro also reported.The results are based on searches Incopro ran using its software and data from web marketing firm SimilarWeb Ltd. Incopro wrote to Alphabet Inc.’s Google about its findings and the company said it got a written response from the internet giant, which it quoted in the study.“Google aggregates information published on the web returning users different web pages that relate to their search requests, but we don’t make any claims about the content of these pages,” Google wrote in its response, according to Incopro.Google has had a mixed record in dealing with contentious websites, Incopro said. The internet giant will remove website addresses from its search index for infringing copyright. But it won’t act when it is told that its search engine is pointing to sites selling counterfeits and infringing trademark rights, Incopro said. The firm noted that that other large internet companies including Facebook Inc., EBay Inc. and Amazon.com Inc. will take action in these cases.“Google takes the view that it is not (and cannot be) a ‘publisher’ when it is told that it is returning results for counterfeit web pages and so it does nothing,” Incopro wrote in its report. “If Google did remove these websites from their index these sites would be starved of oxygen and would fail.”The study suggests that Google search results for antibiotics are still showing suspect websites almost as much as they were three years ago, when another report from the Alliance for Safe Online Pharmacies showed 65% of search results for prescription drug terms led U.S. consumers to sites selling unapproved and dangerous medication.Search engines like Google should do more to protect consumers from unsafe results, Incopro said. “The FDA and other government bodies have limited resources and cannot be expected to solve every problem,” the report said. “Brand owners should be able to request that search engines de-index these sites themselves.”To contact the reporter on this story: Gerrit De Vynck in New York at gdevynck@bloomberg.netTo contact the editors responsible for this story: Jillian Ward at jward56@bloomberg.net, Alistair Barr, Anne VanderMeyFor more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.com©2019 Bloomberg L.P.
Yahoo Finance UKWhy Google has set up a global accelerator for startups
Marta Krupinska, head of Google for Startups UK, speaks to Yahoo Finance UK about the motivations behind the program.
- Bloomberg
Gojek’s 35-Year-Old Chief Is Joining Indonesia’s New Cabinet
(Bloomberg) -- Indonesian President Joko Widodo has offered the 35-year-old co-founder of the country’s biggest startup, Gojek, a position in his new cabinet, affirming the importance of the internet sector in propelling Southeast Asia’s largest economy.Nadiem Makarim on Monday told reporters he has accepted a cabinet post after resigning with immediate effect as chief executive officer of the ride-hailing giant he started nine years ago. That leaves the $10 billion startup, one of Southeast Asia’s largest, without its most visible leader at a time it’s pursuing funding to compete with arch-rival Grab Holdings Inc. Gojek said President Andre Soelistyo and co-founder Kevin Aluwi will take the helm as co-CEOs. The company will outline its next steps in the coming days, Gojek said in an emailed statement.Widodo, commonly known as Jokowi, will specify the role to be taken up by Makarim in a later announcement. Makarim’s appointment -- in line with the Indonesian president’s stated desire to include professionals and millennials in his second-term team -- shouldn’t disrupt operations at Gojek given its deep bench of experienced managers.“This means President Jokowi’s new cabinet will be filled with young people with ability to execute,” said Willson Cuaca, managing partner of East Ventures, one of the most active Indonesian-focused venture capital firms. “It shows that Indonesia appreciates what they’ve done for the country. For Gojek, it’s reached a point that even if Nadiem resigns, it’s business as usual.”The Gojek co-founder hails from a prominent Indonesian family. His grandfather was part of the delegation that won the country’s independence from the Netherlands in a 1949 conference at The Hague.“Since the beginning, my mission in Gojek has been to display Indonesia on the world’s stage,” Makarim told reporters when he announced his resignation in Jakarta on Monday. “So, this is a continuation of that mission, but this is certainly for the state and within a bigger scale.”Read more: Jokowi Eyes $7 Trillion Indonesia Economy With New CabinetGojek is the largest player in an Indonesian internet industry that’s booming as smartphone adoption there explodes. The world’s fourth most populous country with 264 million people has produced other unicorns including Tokopedia and Bukalapak, which are driving e-commerce and the digital economy more generally.Makarim started Gojek in 2010 as a call center arranging couriers in Jakarta. At that early stage, everything was done manually -- employees called motorbike drivers one by one until someone accepted an order -- and Makarim had to work at other startups in order to sustain Gojek.It was only in 2014 that the Gojek chief decided to introduce a mobile app, with backing from private equity investor Northstar Group. When that debuted in January 2015, the service was so popular that Gojek couldn’t cope with demand, Makarim said in an interview in 2016.Gojek today has more than 2 million drivers and 400,000 merchants, while its apps have been downloaded more than 155 million times in Southeast Asia. The company counts Google, JD.com Inc. and Tencent Holdings Ltd. among its investors and is seen as an icon for aspiring Indonesian entrepreneurs.Makarim was selected as one of 50 people who defined global business in 2018 by Bloomberg Businessweek.Southeast Asia’s Internet Economy to Top $100 Billion This YearTo contact the reporters on this story: Yoolim Lee in Singapore at yoolim@bloomberg.net;Viriya Singgih in Jakarta at vsinggih@bloomberg.netTo contact the editors responsible for this story: Edwin Chan at echan273@bloomberg.net, ;Thomas Kutty Abraham at tabraham4@bloomberg.net, Vlad SavovFor more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.com©2019 Bloomberg L.P.
- Bloomberg
Misuse of Alphabet’s Virus Scanner is Exposing Sensitive Files
(Bloomberg) -- Companies are misusing Alphabet Inc.’s virus scanner and similar products, and are unwittingly leaking data such as factory blueprints to intellectual property online, Israeli cybersecurity company Otorio Ltd. said.The firm said it discovered thousands of unprotected files from companies in the pharmaceutical, industrial, automotive and food industries as part of a project to research the malware logged by VirusTotal, which is owned by Alphabet cyber security subsidiary Chronicle. Otorio didn’t find any documents uploaded to VirusTotal that had been used in a cyber attack.“From what we found, we could design a very constructive hack. We found files that gave us a blueprint of how to infiltrate the production floor,” said Otorio Chief Executive Officer Daniel Bren, a reserve brigadier general who established the Israeli army’s cyber defense unit. “The companies’ trademarked secrets are on those blueprints.”VirusTotal makes scanned documents available to cybersecurity firms and researchers to help improve the detection of malware. Scanning incoming files for malicious attacks with online services is common practice, but some security teams are uploading files indiscriminately, without understanding the terms of use or the potential risk, Otorio said.The Israeli firm, which specializes in cybersecurity for industrial control systems, contacted VirusTotal about its findings in July, and Otorio said the company agreed that there was a need to raise awareness about how the service works and how security applications should be configured. The idea, said Bren, was to make the industrial sector aware of the problem so “they improve the situation, and not to poke them in the eye.”VirusTotal’s online terms of service states, in all caps, that users agree to only upload samples that they wish to publicly share and warns them not to submit anything that includes confidential, commercially sensitive or personal data without permission.Researchers working for academic institutions and cybersecurity companies can get access to the uploaded data after some screening and meeting certain criteria, which includes promising not to make commercial use of the information, Bren said. Rogue researchers may easily misuse this important service and publish documents, he said.A representative for VirusTotal said that the company screens all customers before giving them access to the data. Researchers don’t have searchable access to the file base and customers that are found to abuse any data are cut off, the representative said. VirusTotal will also remove information that’s uploaded by mistake.Google acquired VirusTotal in 2012 and the firm was later moved to parent company Alphabet’s Chronicle subsidiary.The types of project files uploaded may contain anything from information about supply chains to building entry points. Exposing them could lead to incidents similar to the ransomware attack that hit aluminum producer Norsk Hydro ASA in March, Otorio said. That attack caused production outages as the rogue agents stopped computer systems from working while they demanded a ransom.To contact the reporter on this story: Gwen Ackerman in Jerusalem at gackerman@bloomberg.netTo contact the editors responsible for this story: Riad Hamade at rhamade@bloomberg.net, Amy Thomson, Nate LanxonFor more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.com©2019 Bloomberg L.P.
- Yahoo Finance
Susan Rice weighs in on 'the danger' surrounding big tech
The international reputation of large American tech firms can impact how the global community perceives the U.S., says a former top national security official under Barack Obama.
- Bloomberg
Lawmakers Slam Apple for ‘Censorship’ of Apps at China’s Behest
(Bloomberg) -- U.S. lawmakers from both parties slammed Apple Inc. and Chief Executive Officer Tim Cook on Friday for “censorship of apps” at the “behest of the Chinese government.”Senators Ted Cruz, Ron Wyden, Tom Cotton, Marco Rubio and Representatives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Mike Gallagher and Tom Malinowski expressed concern about the removal of an app that let Hong Kong protesters track police movement in the city.“Apple’s decisions last week to accommodate the Chinese government by taking down HKmaps is deeply concerning,” they wrote in a letter to Cook, urging Apple to “reverse course, to demonstrate that Apple puts values above market access, and to stand with the brave men and women fighting for basic rights and dignity in Hong Kong.” Apple didn’t respond to a request for comment on Friday.Apple removed the HKmap.live app from the App Store in China and Hong Hong earlier this month, saying it violated local laws. The company also said it received “credible information” from Hong Kong authorities indicating the software was being used “maliciously” to attack police. The decision, and the reasoning, was questioned widely.Cook, in a recent memo to Apple employees, said that “national and international debates will outlive us all, and, while important, they do not govern the facts.” On Thursday, the CEO met with China’s State Administration for Market Regulation head Xiao Yaqing in Beijing to discuss consumer-rights protection, boosting investment and business development in the country, according to a statement from the Chinese regulator.The Cupertino, California-based company isn’t the only one referenced in Friday’s letter. The lawmakers mentioned recent headlines involving the National Basketball Association and Activision Blizzard Inc., a video game company that suspended a professional game player for supporting the Hong Kong protests.“Cases like these raise real concern about whether Apple and other large U.S. corporate entities will bow to growing Chinese demands rather than lose access to more than a billion Chinese consumers,” the lawmakers wrote.They also slammed Apple for removing other apps, including VPN apps that helped Chinese people get around the government’s online censorship. The letter said Apple has “censored” at least 2,200 apps in China, citing data from non-profit organization GreatFire. Apple says on its website that it removed 634 apps in the second half of last year globally due to legal violations.The letter implied that Apple made the removal decisions to maintain its huge business in China and appease the government. Greater China was Apple’s third-largest region by revenue last year, generating more than $50 billion in revenue.Apple is one of the rare tech companies that operates in China, with rivals like Google and Facebook Inc. hardly operational in the market. China’s importance to Apple means the company has to balance its own values with following local laws.In the past, the company has pulled the Skype and New York Times apps from its App Store in China. More recently, it removed a Taiwanese flag emoji for users in Hong Kong and Macau and was criticized for sending some browsing data to China’s Tencent Holdings Ltd. as part of a privacy feature.To contact the reporters on this story: Mark Gurman in San Francisco at mgurman1@bloomberg.net;Ben Brody in Washington, D.C. at btenerellabr@bloomberg.netTo contact the editors responsible for this story: Tom Giles at tgiles5@bloomberg.net, Alistair Barr, Robin AjelloFor more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.com©2019 Bloomberg L.P.
- Market Realist
Pixel 4: Google’s Latest Smartphone Disqualified in India
Google’s latest smartphone, the Pixel 4, won't be available for sale in India, the world’s second-largest smartphone market.
- Bloomberg
Amazon Needs a Leash
(Bloomberg Opinion) -- The New Yorker and the Atlantic have never been known for their business coverage, so when both magazines published long articles about Amazon.com Inc. in their current issues it signaled that something is in the air. That something is antitrust.More precisely, what’s in the air is the question of what the government should do to rein in the tremendous power of the big four tech companies: Facebook Inc., Alphabet Inc.’s Google, Apple Inc. and Amazon.Once the province of think tanks and law reviews, this topic has become such a public concern that 48 of the 50 state attorneys general are conducting antitrust investigations, presidential hopefuls are calling for tech giants to be broken up, and general interest magazines like, well, the New Yorker and the Atlantic are asking whether the companies abuse their market power. In this particular case, the magazines are asking it about Amazon.The Atlantic article is by Franklin Foer, who has long raised concerns about Big Tech. Five years ago, for instance, he wrote a cover story for the New Republic titled “Amazon Must Be Stopped.” It focused on Amazon’s dominance over the book business.This time around, he is writing about the unbridled ambition of Amazon’s founder and chief executive officer Jeff Bezos. (The new article is “Jeff Bezos’s Master Plan.”) “Bezos’s ventures are by now so large and varied that it is difficult to truly comprehend the nature of his empire, much less the end point of his ambitions,” Foer writes. He then goes through a list. Bezos wants to conquer space with his company Blue Origin. Bezos’s ownership of the Washington Post makes him a significant media and political figure. Bezos’s brainchild, Amazon, “is the most awe-inspiring creation in the history of American business.” And so on.He also points out that while critics fear Amazon’s monopoly power, the company is loved by consumers. “A 2018 poll sponsored by Georgetown University and the Knight Foundation found that Amazon engendered greater confidence than virtually any other American institution,” he writes. I have no doubt that this is true; Amazon’s obsession with customer service instills tremendous loyalty among consumers. It’s no accident that over 100 million people now pay the company $119 a year to be Amazon Prime members. That loyalty is also one reason taking antitrust actions against Amazon would be much more difficult than going after Facebook or Google. I’ll get to some other reasons shortly.Charles Duhigg’s New Yorker article “Is Amazon Unstoppable?” is both smarter about Amazon and more pointed about its power. Duhigg captures its relentless culture, comparing it to a flywheel that never stops. He described Bezos’s efforts to ensure that Amazon never loses the feel of a scrappy startup. The phrase that came to mind as I was reading Duhigg’s article was Andy Grove’s famous dictum: “Only the paranoid survive.”Duhigg is also interested in what Amazon’s critics have to say. Amazon paid no federal taxes last year. Amazon's work culture can be difficult for women who have children. Amazon’s warehouse workers are sometimes fired after being injured on the job. Amazon doesn't effectively police the sale of counterfeit goods on its site. (In the article, Amazon’s representatives deny these allegations.)Then there’s the fact that Amazon both serves as a platform for companies wanting to sell things and sells things itself. In other words, it competes with the same companies it enables. According to Duhigg, Amazon has been known to track items that do well, and then make its own version of the same item — which it then sells at a discounted price. (Amazon denies this, too.) Margrethe Vestager, the European Union’s commissioner for competition, told Duhigg that the practice “deserves much more scrutiny.”The story’s killer anecdote, at least as it concerns antitrust, is about Birkenstock USA LP’s experience with Amazon. Although Birkenstock sold millions of dollars of shoes using the Amazon platform, it was constantly hearing customer complaints that the shoes were defective. Why? Because, according to Birkenstock, Amazon allowed counterfeits to be sold on the site. Not only would Amazon not take down the counterfeit goods, but it also wouldn’t even tell Birkenstock who was selling them.Amazon also had stocked a year’s worth of Birkenstock inventory, which terrified the company. “What if Amazon decides to start selling the shoes for 99 cents, or to give them away with Prime membership, or do a buy-one-get-one-free,” wondered Birkenstock’s chief executive officer, David Kahan. “We were powerless.”Kahan’s complaints went nowhere. So he pulled Birkenstocks off Amazon. What did Amazon do? It solicited Birkenstock retailers, offering to buy shoes directly from them. Today, if you search for Birkenstocks on Amazon you’ll be deluged with choices even though the company itself refuses to do business with Amazon. I found a pair of Arizona oiled leather sandals — listed on Birkenstock's website for $135 — marked down to $60 on Amazon. Is it the real thing, or is it a counterfeit?The hard question: What do you do about this kind of behavior? On one extreme is the Democratic presidential candidate Senator Elizabeth Warren, who believes the most appropriate solution is to break up Amazon. At the other end of the spectrum, there are still plenty of antitrust economists who believe that if a $135 sandal is being sold for $60, that’s good for consumers. They argue that the government should just stay out of the way.I’m a proponent of breaking up Facebook, mainly because I believe if you force it to disgorge two of its prized platforms, Instagram and WhatsApp, you’ll instantly create serious competitors. That could help raise the bar on privacy, data usage and other concerns. But I’m not sure that would work with Amazon.For instance, if Amazon had to separate its highly profitable cloud service, Amazon Web Services, from its retail business the power dynamic between Amazon and the companies that use its platform would remain.What’s more, it’s harder to make a classic antitrust case against Amazon than it is against Facebook and Google. According to the research firm EMarketer Inc., Amazon is expected to account for 37.7% of all online commerce in 2019. By contrast, Google controls 89% of the search market.Still, for too many retailers, Amazon has the power to control their destiny, for good or ill. As the antitrust activist Lina Khan wrote in her now-famous 2017 article in the Yale Law Journal: “History suggests that allowing a single actor to set the terms of the marketplace, largely unchecked, can pose serious hazards.” I take that assessment to mean that government intervention at Amazon is needed.To my mind, the simplest and most sensible solution is from the economist Hal Singer: Don’t allow platform companies to favor their own products over competitors’ products. Singer calls this a “nondiscrimination regime,” and models it after the Cable Television Consumer Protection and Competition Act, which prevents cable distributors from favoring their own content over content from competitors. In that scenario, a company that felt it was being discriminated against by Amazon could bring a complaint to federal regulators just as cable stations can do now. This regime has worked well for the TV industry. It could work for Amazon, too.Secondly, the government should hold Amazon accountable for counterfeits. Counterfeiting is against the law, and although Amazon told Duhigg that it spends “hundreds of millions of dollars” on anti-counterfeiting efforts it’s no secret that many deceptively labeled goods are still sold on the site. (See, for instance, this recent Wall Street Journal story.) Companies like Birkenstock have a right to expect that a platform selling its products will rigorously police counterfeits — and will identify counterfeiters so manufacturers of authentic goods can take legal action.These are solvable problems. They don’t require extreme measures. What they do require is a government with the will to transform Amazon’s platform from what it is now, a vehicle that squelches competition, to one that lets competition flower.(Corrects paragraph eight to accurately describe the year in which Amazon paid no federal taxes and to more accurately describe the experiences of women with children who work for the company. Also changes language in paragraph eight to more accurately describe how effectively Amazon combats the sale of counterfeit goods on its site. Also corrects paragraphs 12 and 13 to accurately reflect pricing disparities between sandals sold on Birkenstock's website and those sold on Amazon.)To contact the author of this story: Joe Nocera at jnocera3@bloomberg.netTo contact the editor responsible for this story: Timothy L. O'Brien at tobrien46@bloomberg.netThis column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.Joe Nocera is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering business. He has written business columns for Esquire, GQ and the New York Times, and is the former editorial director of Fortune. His latest project is the Bloomberg-Wondery podcast "The Shrink Next Door."For more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.com/opinion©2019 Bloomberg L.P.
- Market Realist
If This Waymo Plan Works, Alphabet’s Costs Could Start Falling
Alphabet’s Waymo One plans to start using driverless cars for its autonomous taxis. The service is available to a small group of customers in Phoenix.
- Bloomberg
There Will Be No More Facebook Revolutions
(Bloomberg Opinion) -- “Twitter revolution,” “Facebook revolution” — these terms became widespread during the Arab Spring rebellions at the beginning of this decade. They’re outdated now: For today's protesters in Hong Kong and Barcelona, or for Extinction Rebellion activists in capitals around the world, the social networks and even messenger applications run by big U.S. corporations are becoming a secondary tool, and one not used for organizational purposes.After protesters in Egypt forced President Hosni Mubarak to resign in February 2011, one of the revolution’s public faces, Google executive Wael Ghonim, went on CNN to be interviewed by anchors Anderson Cooper and Wolf Blitzer. When Blitzer asked him what was going to happen next, the following exchange ensued:Ghonim: Ask Facebook.Blitzer: Ask what?Ghonim: Facebook.Cooper: Facebook.Blitzer: Facebook. You’re giving Facebook a lot of credit for this?Ghonim: Yes, for sure. I want to meet Mark Zuckerberg one day and thank him, actually. This revolution started online. This revolution started on Facebook.That was so 2011. If there’s any one app today’s protesters would want to credit, it’s Telegram. But not even this itinerant messenger, whose team was based in St. Petersburg, Berlin, London and Singapore before ending up in Dubai, plays the same kind of outsize role that Facebook and Twitter took on in previous protests, up to and including Hong Kong’s Umbrella Movement” of 2014. With its powerful group messaging functionality and “channel” feature which allows users to broadcast information, Telegram is the central media platform for the Hong Kong protesters of today, who are now pushing for greater democracy for the former British colony. It’s also the go-to tool for pro-independence Catalans who have taken to the streets to protest the long prison sentences for leaders of the Spanish region’s doomed 2017 secession bid. There, the secretive Democratic Tsunami group uses Telegram to communicate with its 150,000 followers. It also uses a Telegram bot to collect data for an app it created to map protest activities and street clashes. For its part, Extinction Rebellion has been moving from Facebook-owned WhatsApp to Telegram because it allows bigger group chats, and because it has a voting tool that allows independent-minded rebels to decide what they want to do. (This tool is also used in Hong Kong).Signal, the encrypted messenger, and Mattermost, an open-source alternative to the enterprise messenger Slack, also are popular among activists.Direct file transfers, encrypted messengers and specially created apps have become essential for spreading all kinds of material that might land its distributors in trouble — such as the fake boarding passes Democratic Tsunami sent out so protesters could get into the Barcelona airport on Oct. 14, causing more than 100 flights to be canceled.Of course, today’s activists still use social media platforms run by big U.S. corporations. But when they do it’s mainly for outward communication such as with the media, not with people actively involved in the protests. Since the Arab Spring, governments have mastered use of the big commercial social media networks themselves. Since the Hong Kong protests began, both Facebook and Twitter have complained about China’s attempts to use them for disinformation and counterpropaganda. Besides, many protesters believe their anonymity isn’t well protected on the social networks, Malek Dudakov of the Moscow-based think tank Center for the Study of New Communications wrote in a recent report about the use of the technology by the Hong Kong protest movement. Telegram, run by a nonprofit founded by Russian libertarian Pavel Durov, has a reputation for resisting government attempts at censorship and infiltration. Russia has attempted to block the messenger for refusing to hand over encryption keys to domestic intelligence, but Telegram has fought back and is still accessible in most of Russia. Mainland China has had more success in cutting off access to it. But even on Telegram, the risk of losing one’s anonymity is a potential problem. One protest group moderator in Hong Kong was arrested in June. Durov has accused China of trying to take his service down in Hong Kong with distributed denial of service attacks. Those efforts contrast with concerns that big U.S. companies are more likely to cooperate with the authorities.Earlier this month, Apple Inc. approved a smartphone map app that Hong Kong protesters have been using for distribution in its App Store after an initial ban. But then it swiftly took HKmap.live down again. Apple Chief Executive Officer Tim Cook explained that the Hong Kong cybersecurity authority had told the company that the app was being used by criminals to “target individual officers for violence and to victimize individuals and property where no police are present.” This episode prompted the Democratic Tsunami in Catalonia to release its own app for Android only — and not through the Google Play Store, in which most Android users get their apps.Even though its services are blocked in mainland China, Google has also behaved in a way some protesters, and even some of its employees, find suspicious. Citing an internal rule against the monetization of current events, the Play Store banned a game called “The Revolution of Our Times” that allowed players to act out the role of Hong Kong protesters. The game’s developers had promised to give 80% of their proceeds to charity.Big Tech’s role, even if unwitting, in unrest has always looked like an aberration. Where the profit motive is involved, cooperating with governments makes more sense than facilitating those who fight them. Now, the dust is settling on the tech revolution, and real-world revolutions need non-commercial tech tools. So protesters either design their own or fall back on open-source apps or those developed by nonprofits. Facebook and Twitter are where propaganda battles rage and insults fly, not where action is coordinated — and that’s a natural consequence of their evolution as big businesses that attract way too much government attention.So, if you’re wondering what comes next for all the modern-day protest movements, don’t ask Facebook.To contact the author of this story: Leonid Bershidsky at lbershidsky@bloomberg.netTo contact the editor responsible for this story: Melissa Pozsgay at mpozsgay@bloomberg.netThis column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.Leonid Bershidsky is Bloomberg Opinion's Europe columnist. He was the founding editor of the Russian business daily Vedomosti and founded the opinion website Slon.ru.For more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.com/opinion©2019 Bloomberg L.P.
- Bloomberg
What Happens to a Startup With a #MeToo Scandal and No HR Department
(Bloomberg) -- The MeToo movement has helped uncover the many ways men abuse positions of power, as well as the corporate fixers and financial settlements that enable such behavior. But what happens at a company just getting its start, with a few dozen employees, a board consisting of three men and no HR department?For Priyanka Wali, the experience was disillusioning. Soon after going to work for a two-year-old health care startup in San Francisco, she said her boss touched her knee and later commented in a meeting that he “wouldn’t mind” if she were his girlfriend. Wali, a contract physician, didn’t report the alleged behavior when it occurred in 2016, she said, because the company, Virta Health Corp., didn’t have a human resources department at the time.The situation festered until this year, when she and a colleague filed formal complaints with the company against the same manager. Virta, which now has 165 employees and a three-person HR team, commissioned an investigation in March and found their claims of harassment to be credible, according to a copy of the report reviewed by Bloomberg. The initial determination was that Wali would keep reporting to her boss because there wasn’t another manager available. That sparked an uproar in the office, and she was eventually reassigned to a new boss. But by then, damage had been done, former employees said. Their faith in management had been shaken, and several people said they sought jobs elsewhere as a result.“It is already hard enough to come forward after experiencing harassment,” Wali wrote in an email to Bloomberg. “I came forward to HR, and I ended up experiencing more stress as a result and had to eventually leave my job for my own psychological wellness.”Sami Inkinen, Virta’s chief executive officer, said in an emailed statement that his company “immediately took the complaint very seriously, worked hard to get the process right but should have handled parts of it better.” The company held an all-hands meeting in May, he said, “to openly acknowledge where we fell short, to explain what we did right and establish the highest possible bar for handling situations like this in the future.”A Virta spokesman said the initial decision to have Wali continue reporting to her manager was “a mistake” and that the company has taken steps to improve. The alleged harasser, Michael Scahill, no longer works at Virta. “I was very saddened and sorry to learn, years after the events, that some of my actions offended colleagues whom I respect greatly,” Scahill wrote in a email. “I never wanted to upset anyone and have apologized to those involved.”The allegations, whispered about within the office over the last couple years, caught the attention of the San Francisco Business Times in August, when the newspaper reported on a company investigation into claims by two unnamed women. One of the women, Wali, spoke to Bloomberg, as did three other employees who were there at the time. Their accounts, along with the investigator’s statement, shed new light on a dynamic that routinely goes unreported at very young companies and illustrates how workers can feel helpless when a startup isn’t equipped to field their complaints. California law extends sexual harassment protections to independent contractors, but neither woman has filed a lawsuit.“I came forward to HR, and I ended up experiencing more stress as a result.”For all the horror stories about established corporate policies and HR departments failing to protect employees or worse, the alternative can be similarly destructive. Many entrepreneurs wait years before establishing HR departments, said Elaine Varelas, a managing partner at Keystone Partners, an HR consulting and executive coaching firm. Startups tend to prioritize other specialties, such as finance or legal, as a cost-saving decision that can leave employees without recourse and allow culture problems to linger, Varelas said. “They say it’s for money, or they’ll say they have an employment attorney,” she said, “but it’s not the same.”Good HR policies can be undervalued at startups, Varelas said. Companies rarely advertise their response to sexual misconduct claims, despite how commonplace the issue is today. “Women aren’t going to work at a company that ‘deals with sexual harassment well,’” she said. “It’s not an enticing ad.”Inkinen started Virta in 2014 with two nutrition researchers and a noble mission: reverse diabetes in 100 million people. The Finland-born entrepreneur, a competitive cyclist and triathlete who once rowed across the Pacific Ocean with his wife, had little experience in health care but plenty at big companies. He worked at McKinsey & Co. and Microsoft Corp. He then helped start and run Trulia, a real estate search engine, until Zillow Group Inc. bought the company in 2014. For Virta, Inkinen would go on to raise more than $80 million from investors, including Venrock and Playground Global, an incubator founded by former Google executive Andy Rubin.Wali, a doctor specializing in internal medicine and obesity treatments, was working with patients and teaching medical students in the San Francisco Bay Area when Virta was starting up. She joined the company in late 2016 as a contractor, with the hope of soon getting promoted to full time. That plan quickly got complicated. In her first week on the job, Wali’s boss put his hand on her knee during a one-on-one meeting, according to the legal investigator’s report. Although it’s not covered in the report, Wali said the touching happened more than once. He made the comment about not minding if she were his girlfriend on a video conference call with colleagues present, according to Wali and the report. (Wali declined to name the man, but the report identifies him as Scahill.)In Virta’s early days, the company’s chief of staff handled what typically would be considered HR responsibilities. Virta hired a head of HR in October 2016, but she lasted less than two months—departing just two days before the alleged touching began, Wali said. A new chief of staff took on HR responsibilities. But Wali said it wasn’t clear to her who was in charge of HR at that time and that she saw no options for recourse. “I was worried that if I spoke up to someone in upper management about my boss’s behavior, it would jeopardize my chance of being hired as a full-time physician,” Wali wrote. “I kept quiet.” About a week later, Scahill invited her to join him at a medical society gala that he had initially planned to bring his girlfriend to, she said. His reasoning, she said, was that they could network together. She declined and purchased her own ticket.Around the same time, according to the investigator’s report, Scahill made repeated comments to another female contractor at Virta. He complimented her appearance and told her once that she was “gorgeous,” the woman told the investigator.Workers began making efforts to communicate the alleged behavior to management in 2017. The second woman contributed feedback for Scahill’s performance review that year describing him as “too flirtatious in the workplace,” though his supervisors didn’t read the responses before passing it on to him, the company spokesman said. In a survey the next year, a male employee wrote that Scahill “has made several disrespectful comments about women.” The feedback was reviewed by a supervisor, who discussed it with Scahill, the spokesman said.Like in other offices across the U.S., management at Virta were closely monitoring the fallout from the MeToo movement. The company put out its first employee handbook in April 2018, outlining a policy against harassment in the workplace, and instated a website for employees to share feedback and complaints anonymously. However, Virta still lacked a head of HR and reopened a search for the role in August that year. The general counsel was overseeing personnel matters, alongside legal functions, finance and other areas. At a staff meeting in October 2018, a worker asked about a post on the employer review site Glassdoor that referenced sexual harassment at Virta. Inkinen, the CEO, responded that the fastest way to get fired at Virta was to harass someone, according to a former employee who attended the meeting.Virta hired a new head of HR in January. A couple months later, Wali discovered she wasn’t the only one with concerns about Scahill. Colleagues openly discussed his behavior at a happy hour event in the office that Wali attended. Wali filed a complaint with the new HR boss, as did the second woman.In response, Virta hired an attorney from an employment law firm to investigate. Over the course of a week, the lawyer interviewed the two women, Scahill and six other employees. The resulting report described allegations of inappropriate comments and touching as credible and said he had stopped the behavior after early or mid-2017.Meanwhile, HR was staffing up. An HR representative, by then one of three people in the department, met with Wali in April and recounted the investigator’s findings, Wali said. She also learned in the meeting that she would still need to have the same boss, she said. “I asked the HR manager how on earth I could be asked to continue reporting to someone who had touched me inappropriately and made comments to me that made me feel uncomfortable?” Wali wrote in an email to Bloomberg.Distressed, Wali took time off to process the news. Virta management acknowledges it didn’t share the results of the investigation with staff, but word spread quickly of the report’s conclusions, former employees said. Some cited an inconsistency with what Inkinen had said the year before about taking a hard line on sexual harassment, one of the people said. Several asked their managers why Wali wasn’t offered a different boss.Four days after Wali was told she’d keep the same boss, Virta contacted her to schedule a call about the situation. She heard from another manager four days after that saying she could now report to him. She asked him to elaborate on the decision-making process and didn’t get a clear answer, she said. “At this point, I became very uncomfortable with how the company handled harassment in the workplace—specifically with what I felt was a lack of accountability and transparency with these decisions,” Wali wrote.Wali and the second woman quit on the same day in early May. Soon after, Virta executives asked for Scahill’s resignation. The following Monday, Inkinen held another staff meeting, this time to apologize. He said the company had made a misstep in not taking into account the emotional safety of its workers, according to a former employee who attended. The message didn’t stop several other Virta employees from leaving and citing the handling of the complaint as an impetus, said two ex-employees.One person who quit over the issue said they lost faith that executives took the welfare of their workers seriously. “No one reports stuff for fun,” the former employee said. “I think they underestimated the impact this would have on the team.”To contact the author of this story: Ellen Huet in San Francisco at ehuet4@bloomberg.netTo contact the editor responsible for this story: Mark Milian at mmilian@bloomberg.net, Anne VanderMeyFor more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.com©2019 Bloomberg L.P.
- Yahoo Finance
Sen. Wyden: People like Mark Zuckerberg should be punished for their lies
Oregon Senator Rob Wyden introduces a new data privacy bill,known as the Mind Your Own Business Act.
- Market Realist
3 Reasons Google Investors Should Worry about Amazon
Google’s advertising market is under attack from Amazon, which also stands as an obstacle in the cloud and smart speaker markets.
- Market Realist
France Retaliates to Google’s Refusal to Pay Publishers
France wants the EU to set up a special supervisory body for big tech companies after Google has refused to pay publishes for article extracts.
- Market Realist
Warren Restricts Campaign Donations from Big Tech CEOs to $200
Elizabeth Warren's campaign plans to limit donations from big tech firms. The presidential candidate has discussed breaking up Facebook, Google, and Amazon.
- Market Realist
TikTok and Facebook: Rivalry Continues to Escalate
TikTok is poaching Facebook's (FB) employees, according to a CNBC report. As a result, the rivalry between the two social media businesses continues to escalate.
- Engadget
Pixel 4 review: Android refined, but not perfected
The Pixel 4 is an exciting device, serving as a showcase for what Google thinks Android can be. It packs excellent cameras (including a new zoom lens), and improved voice Assistant, motion sensing radar, and an upgraded screen. But look past those features and bugs, half-finished software, and disappointing battery life paint a more complicated picture.
