The European Commission has launched two separate antitrust investigations into Apple, focused on the App Store and Apple Pay.

The executive branch of the European Union said it would consider App Store rules that force developers to use its own payment and in-app purchase system. In a press release, the Commission referenced a complaint filed by Spotify more than a year ago. At the time, CEO and founder Daniel Ek argued that the 30 percent cut that Apple takes on all transactions — including in-app purchases, which includes Free to Premium Spotify conversions — meant that it would have to raise its prices beyond those offered by Apple Music.

“To keep our price competitive for our customers, that isn’t something we can do,” he explained in a blog post. Of course, it’s possible for Spotify users to upgrade their account on a different platform, including the web. But if you try to sidestep Apple’s payment system, the company will limit your marketing and communications with customers, Elk argued. “In some cases, we aren’t even allowed to send emails to our customers who use Apple,” he wrote. “Apple also routinely blocks our experience-enhancing upgrades. Over time, this has included locking Spotify and other competitors out of Apple services such as Siri, HomePod, and Apple Watch.”

The Commission said it had completed a “preliminary investigation” and found “concerns” that discouraged competition against Apple’s own services. “Apple’s competitors have either decided to disable the in-app subscription possibility altogether or have raised their subscription prices in the app and passed on Apple’s fee to consumers,” the executive branch explained in its press release. “In both cases, they were not allowed to inform users about alternative subscription possibilities outside of the app.”

[…]

The second antitrust investigation will look at Apple Pay, which is effectively the only mobile payments solution available to iPhone and iPad users.

Following a preliminary investigation, the Commission has “concerns” that the situation is stifling competition and reducing consumer choice on the platform. Vestager noted that mobile payments will likely increase even further as European citizens looks to minimize physical contact with physical money and store clerks.

“It is important that Apple’s measures do not deny consumers the benefits of new payment technologies, including better choice, quality, innovation and competitive prices,” she argued. “I have therefore decided to take a close look at Apple’s practices regarding Apple Pay and their impact on competition.”

Source: Apple Pay and the App Store are under EU antitrust investigation | Engadget

Voor 495 euro in een private jet naar Ibiza vliegen, met 25 kilogram bagage, luxesnacks en een glaasje champagne. Dat wil de Limburgse luchtvaartondernemer Philippe Bodson vanaf 4 juli onder de naam Flying Executive in de markt zetten. Op wekelijkse basis vanuit Brussel.

Een lijnvlucht voor private jets is geen primeur in Europa. Maar de timing is wel opvallend. Met dat concept roeit Bodson, de topman van ASL Group, naar eigen zeggen tegen de stroom in. ‘Het staat haaks op alle tendensen in de luchtvaartsector, die door low cost wordt gedreven. Maar het sluit perfect aan op de nieuwe noden van het postcoronareizen.’

Bodson, die op zijn 34ste een pilotenbrevet haalde en daarna van zijn hobby zijn beroep maakte door een eigen luchtvaartbedrijf op te richten, schakelt voor de nieuwe formule twee toestellen van het type Embraer in. Dat zijn vliegtuigen met een beperkt aantal zitplaatsen (respectievelijk 30 en 42) en meer beenruimte (plus 12 centimeter) dan op een gewone lijnvlucht.

De binnenruimte in die toestellen – met één zetel links en twee zetels rechts – biedt volgens hem ook een veel betere vluchtervaring. ‘Het voordeel is dat reizigers steeds alleen of naast een bekende kunnen zitten’, zegt hij. ‘In tijden van Covid-19 geeft dat een prettiger gevoel.’

Source: Belg opent lijnvlucht met private jets naar Ibiza | De Tijd

The following report appeared on Yahoo! Finance: Privacy-focused browser Brave was found to autocomplete several websites and keywords in its address bar with an affiliate code. Shortly after a user published his findings, Brave CEO and co-founder Brendan Eich addressed the incident and called it “a mistake we’re correcting.” Eich said that while Brave is a Binance affiliate [a cryptocurrency exchange], the browser’s autocompleting feature should not have added any new affiliate codes.

“The autocomplete default was inspired by search query clientid attribution that all browsers do, but unlike keyword queries, a typed-in URL should go to the domain named, without any additions,” Eich wrote in the thread. “Sorry for this mistake — we are clearly not perfect, but we correct course quickly,” he added.
Android Police reports the mistake occured more than 10 weeks ago — and that referrer codes were also included for other cryptocurrency-related sites: The browser’s GitHub repository reveals the functionality was first added on March 25th, and the current list of sites includes Binance, Coinbase, Ledger, and Trezor. Brave Software receives a kickback for purchases/accounts made with those services — for example, Coinbase says that when you refer a new customer to the service, you can earn 50% of their fees for the first three months.

The nature of these affiliate programs also allows the referrer — in this case, Brave Software — to view some amount of data about the customers who sign up with the code. Coinbase’s program provides “direct access to your campaign’s performance data,” while Trezor offers a “detailed overview of purchases.”
Brave CEO and co-founder Brendan Eich (who also created the JavaScript programming language) tweeted, “For what it’s worth there’s a setting to disable the autocomplete defaults that add affiliate codes, in brave://settings first page. Current plan is to flip default to off as shown here. You can disable ahead of our release schedule if you want to.

“Good to hear from supporters who’ll enable it.”

Source: Brave Browser Mistake Adds Its Referrer Code For Cryptocurrency Sites – Slashdot

Three online advertisers are suing Google for allegedly violating antitrust laws by monopolizing “digital advertising markets.”

“Google leveraged its stranglehold on online search and search advertising to gain an illegal monopoly in brokering display advertising on other companies’ websites,” the marketers allege in a class-action complaint filed last week in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California. The case was filed on behalf of Washington, D.C. tour company Grand Atlas Tours, Delray Beach, Florida-based Prana Pets (which sells herbs for dogs and cats) and the San Francisco law firm Hanson Law.

They claim Google “achieved this market dominance in part by acquiring rivals in the online advertising space, conditioning access to its search-results data and YouTube video advertising platform upon the purchase of its separate display advertising services, and ensuring those systems were not compatible with those of its competitors in online advertising.”

The complaint comes as the U.S. Department of Justice and a coalition of state attorneys general are reportedly preparing separate antitrust lawsuits against Google.

Grand Atlas Tours and the others allege that Google’s “pervasive monopoly conduct” has resulted in higher prices for advertisers and consumers, lower payments to online publishers and diminished competition in the online ad marketplace.

The complaint alleges both that Google commands a dominant position in search advertising, and that the company has leveraged its market power in search “to drive out competition in the separate market for display advertising services.”

Among other allegations, the marketers claim Google’s decision to eventually block third-party cookies in Chrome will make it “much harder for advertisers and competitors to efficiently bid on ads.”

Google said in January it plans to phase out Chrome’s support for third-party cookies within two years — a move often seen as privacy friendly, because it can prevent companies that have no relationship with consumers from tracking them. Mozilla’s Firefox, as well as Apple’s Safari, already automatically prevent ad-tech companies from using cookies to track people around the web in order to serve them targeted ads.

Source: Marketers Bring Antitrust Suit Against Google 06/02/2020

I’ve been talking about this happening since May 2019 and it’s becoming more and more common

Expedia Group’s new CEO isn’t mincing words about one of the company’s biggest challenges: Google’s dual role as a rival in online travel, and a key source of customers through search traffic and paid advertising.

“I think Google’s a problem — it’s a problem for everyone who sells something online, and we all have to struggle with that,” Peter Kern said during an appearance on CNBC on Friday morning, following his first earnings report as the CEO of the Seattle-based online travel giant.

His comments come amid reports that U.S. antitrust regulators are preparing a case against the search giant, focusing on its dominance of digital ads.

This Google conundrum is a recurring topic for Expedia Group, but Kern appears to be taking a different approach than his predecessor Mark Okerstrom did before he was ousted from the role last fall. Appearing on CNBC this morning, Kern says Expedia needs to learn to rely less on performance marketing, a form of advertising in which the cost is based on a specific outcome such as a click or sales lead.

“We just haven’t been as good on some of the basic blocking and tackling things that allow you to rely less on Google. And so we’ve used Google and performance marketing as our primary lever of whether we could grow at a certain rate or not, but we haven’t been great at merchandising, we haven’t been great at understanding the customer. We never had data across all our brands to understand if a customer had been at another of our brands and moved to a different one. We often competed in performance marketing auctions, our own brands against themselves. So we have a lot of our own work to do and to my eye, that means we have a lot of upside that is fully not reliant on Google or performance marketing.”

Expedia also addressed the Google issue in its quarterly regulatory filing: “In addition to the growth of online travel agencies, we see increased interest in the online travel industry from search engine companies such as Google, evidenced by continued product enhancements, including new trip planning features for users and the integration of its various travel products into the Google Travel offering, as well as further prioritizing its own products in search results.”

Source: Expedia Group CEO Peter Kern: ‘Google’s a problem for everyone who sells something online’ – GeekWire

Here is my May 2019 video about why the tech giants need breaking up

Many smart home device makers rely on subscriptions to keep a steady stream of money coming in, but Wink is learning how that strategy can easily go wrong. The company has announced plans to move to a $5 per month subscription on May 13th (yes, just one week from now), and it’s mandatory. Decline to sign up and you’ll lose access to devices in the app as well as all automations. “Long term costs and recent economic events” (read: COVID-19) prompted the move, according to Wink, and the company didn’t want to sell user data to offset the costs of running services for free.

If you think that both the short notice and the threat of a hard cutoff will anger customers… well, you’re correct. Reddit users and others are incensed. They’re being asked to pay $5 per month to keep using the devices they already have in their homes, and one week gives them very little time to either weigh the merits of a subscription or find alternatives. “Pay the ransom or they kill our smart homes,” one user said.

We’ve asked Wink for comment. However it responds, the decision highlights the risks of basing your smart home system around free services without some kind of core offline functionality. While that kind of system can be very alluring so long as it lasts, you’re also trusting that the company can keep those free services running indefinitely. If it can’t, your connected household might be rendered useless with little warning.

Source: Wink smart home users have one week to subscribe or be shut off | Engadget

A California state panel on Friday rejected a request from Elon Musk’s SpaceX for $655,500 in state job and training funds, citing the chief executive’s recent threats to move Tesla, the electric carmaker that he also runs, out of the state.

The snub comes as Musk has sparred with officials in Alameda County over his plans to resume production at the Tesla plant there, which was stopped because of the coronavirus.

Five members of California’s Employment Training Panel voted to reject the proposal and two voted for it, with one member absent, after discussing Musk’s tweets on Tesla’s reopening and media reports of layoffs at SpaceX’s Hawthorne, California headquarters in recent years.

“In my opinion, given the recent threats of the CEO to leave the state of California, and everything else we’ve discussed today, this proposal does not rise to the level for me to feel secure in supporting it,” said Gretchen Newsom, a panel member and the political director of an IBEW electrical workers union local.

“SpaceX is a different company, but they have the same CEO,” said Newsom, who is not related to California Governor Gavin Newsom.

Though a small amount of money, the funding was opposed by organized labor groups. Tesla and SpaceX are both nonunion shops.

Source: California officials reject subsidies for Musk’s SpaceX over Tesla spat – Reuters

A new study from The School of Business at Portland State University suggests that the aggressive cultures of private equity firms, like venture capitalists, might spill over into the companies that they fund. Venture capitalists are often the hidden players in business decision making, and they are funding startups like Uber, SpaceX and AirBnB.

With money, comes expectations

As a company grows through early developmental milestones, it becomes accountable to key stakeholders.

According to the study, companies often face challenges when balancing the tension between long-term socially responsible strategies and short-term demands associated with financial performance.

PSU Associate Professor of Management Theodore Khoury and colleagues published their study, “Is venture capital socially responsible? Exploring the imprinting effect of VC funding on CSR practices,” in the Journal of Business Venturing.

The study found that venture capitalist investors often push a business they are financing to prioritize long-term financially-based goals instead of socially responsible business ones, like fair wages, reducing carbon footprints or improving labor policies.

Venture capitalists often hold a large portion of the equity in the companies in which they invest, which gives them voting power to challenge or advocate for specific strategic directions and influence decisions that might jeopardize company returns.

The prioritization of financial success opens a floodgate, allowing behaviors such as sexual harassment at new companies like Uber to go unchecked.

“We find that venture capitalist-backed companies have poorer socially responsible practice records, which do improve over time, but at a comparatively slower rate than non-venture capitalist-backed companies,” Khoury said.

Unexpected consequence of greed

The PSU study also highlights how venture capitalists’ desires for financial surplus might end up causing more harm than good.

Uber agreed to pay $4.4 million dollars to settle federal charges of fostering a work culture wrought with sexual harassment. It’s just one of the dozens of Silicon Valley companies facing huge fines related to sexual harassment charges.

The researchers assert that socially responsible practices positively impact, rather than reduce, a company’s financial performance.

“Compared to non-venture capitalist-backed companies, venture capitalist-backed companies presented significantly lower assets, sales, tangible assets, inventories, returns on assets, profit margins and debt levels, as well as higher intangibles and current ratios,” the study said.

In addition to financial success, socially responsible practices help satisfy multiple stakeholders (like employees), enhance a company‘s market value, preempt government regulations, reduce risk, develop business resources and lower capital costs.

However, the researchers add that when venture capitalist-backed companies receive funding from firms with a responsible investment orientation and a broader stakeholder view, their socially responsible practice records are significantly better.

“Early-stage imprinting can happen from many sources, but when businesses take funding from certain investors, certain cultures, operating modes and ways of conducting business may start to take shape for the long term to affect a broader group of stakeholders,” Khoury said. “The effects of early-stage imprinting from venture capital funding can be hard to ‘undo,’ and there are social consequences.”

Source: New study spotlights the dark side of venture capitalist funding

Shares of Tesla Inc (TSLA.O) jumped more than 8% on Monday, putting Tesla’s market capitalization at $141.1 billion at the close. More importantly for Musk, Tesla’s stock market value reached a six-month average of $100.2 billion, according to an analysis of Refinitiv data.

Hitting a six-month average of $100 billion triggers the vesting of the first of 12 tranches of options granted to the billionaire to buy Tesla stock as part of a pay package agreed in 2018. Musk has already met two other requirements by hitting a growth target and far exceeding a one-month average $100 billion market cap.

Each tranche gives Musk the option to buy 1.69 million Tesla shares at $350.02 each. At Tesla’s closing stock price of $761.19, Musk would theoretically be able to sell the shares for a profit of $694 million.

Musk on Friday said on Twitter, “Tesla stock price is too high imo,” using an abbreviation for “in my opinion”.

That tweet sent Tesla’s stock tumbling 10%, shocking shareholders. Tesla, whose California factory is closed as part of the state’s coronavirus-related lockdowns, posted its third quarterly profit in a row last week.

Musk, who is also the majority owner and CEO of the SpaceX rocket maker, receives no salary or cash bonus, only options that vest based on Tesla’s market cap and milestones for revenue and profit growth.

A full payoff of all tranches would surpass anything previously granted to U.S. executives.

When Tesla unveiled Musk’s package in 2018, it said he could theoretically reap as much as $55.8 billion if no new shares were issued. However, Tesla has since issued shares to compensate employees, and last year it sold $2.7 billion in shares and convertible bonds.

Musk’s subsequent options tranches would vest at $50 billion increments of Tesla market capitalization over the agreement’s 10-year period, with the billionaire earning the full package if Tesla’s market capitalization reaches $650 billion and the high tech vehicle maker achieves several revenue and profit targets.

Source: Tesla stock rise appears to qualify CEO Musk for $700 million payday – Reuters

As predicted, the proprietary locking system Apple rolled out with its 2018 MacBook Pros is hurting independent repair stores, refurbishers, and electronics recyclers. A combination of secure software locks, diagnostic requirements, and Apple’s new T2 security chip are making it hard to breathe new life into old MacBook Pros that have been recycled but could be easily repaired and used for years were it not for these locks.

It’s a problem that highlights Apple’s combative attitude towards the secondhand market and the need for national right to repair legislation.

“The irony is that I’d like to do the responsible thing and wipe user data from these machines, but Apple won’t let me,” John Bumstead, a MacBook refurbisher and owner of the RDKL INC repair store, said in a tweet with an attached picture of two “bricked” MacBook Pros. “Literally the only option is to destroy these beautiful $3,000 MacBooks and recover the $12/ea they are worth as scrap.”

Source: Apple’s T2 Security Chip Has Created a Nightmare for MacBook Refurbishers – VICE

Way to highlight capitalist consumer planet unfriendly culture, Apple

CEO Elon Musk tweeted Friday that the company’s stock price was “too high” in his opinion, immediately sending shares into a free fall and in possible violation of an agreement reached with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission last year.

Tesla shares fell nearly 12% in the half hour following his stock price tweets — just one of many sent out in rapid fire that covered everything from demands to “give people back their freedom” and lines from the U.S. National Anthem to quotes from poet Dylan Thomas and a claim that he will sell all of his possessions.

The SEC declined to comment on whether this was a violation of a settlement agreement. Tesla did not respond to a request for comment. Musk did tell the Wall Street Journal in an email that he was not joking and that his tweets were not vetted in advance, a condition in the prior agreement reached with the SEC.

The meltdown on Twitter occurred as SpaceX — Musk’s other company — participated in a live press conference on one of its most important missions ever.

Tesla stock price is too high imo

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) May 1, 2020

Musk’s tweet comes almost exactly a year after he reached a settlement agreement with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission that gave the CEO freedom to use Twitter —within certain limitations — without fear of being held in contempt for violating an earlier court order.

Source: Tesla shares fall on Elon Musk “stock price too high” tweet | TechCrunch

Apple has agreed to settle a class-action lawsuit brought by folks upset the iGiant broke FaceTime overnight on millions of iPhones. The settlement amounts to a few bucks a device, meaning the Cupertino giant almost certainly made a net profit in the process.

This week the Tim Cook-led corporation said it would pay $18m [PDF] into a fund to compensate the estimated 3.6 million people living in California for whom the video-conferencing app suddenly stopped working on their iOS 6 smartphones in April 2014.

The $18m sum is a third of the fair compensation the lawsuit’s claimants had calculated. Apple had made it plain it would aggressively fight the case for years, though, and so a decision was taken to settle for a lower sum. After all, Apple has been battling for more than a decade a separate legal claim that ultimately led to the FaceTime breakage, and is still firing away even after the US Supreme Court snubbed it.

About half of the settlement money will foot lawyers’ bills and pay a company to disburse tiny checks to people, possibly as low as $2.44 to $3 per Californian, depending on how many claim. If there is any good news, it’s the fact those eligible won’t have to apply for it, but should receive e-checks to their email addresses: Apple estimates that it has the details for 90 per cent of those eligible, and we suspect the remaining 10 per cent won’t bother to collect.

The two people who brought the case, Christina Grace and Ken Potter, had four in-person mediation sessions and spent three years and countless hours trying to drag compensation out of Apple for killing FaceTime. They will get $7,500 apiece.

Meanwhile, the lawyers – Steyer Lowenthal Boodrookas and Smith in San Francisco and Pearson, Smith and Warshaw in Los Angeles – will get up to $7.9m, and the check disbursement company Epiq Systems will get $1.4m. No surprises there.

Apple changed the way FaceTime worked in 2014 because a court found the software infringed VirnetX’s patents, and Apple had been ordered to pay $368m. FaceTime was revised to avoid those patents, and a new version was pushed out in an operating system update, iOS 7.

Go slow

However, millions of iPhone owners chose not to update their smartphones because iOS 7 was resource hungry and slowed down their handsets, so they stayed on iOS 6. In order to avoid continuing to infringe VirnetX’s patents before iOS 7 was released, Apple had stopped using a peer-to-peer technique for routing calls, and instead put some FaceTime calls through a relay run by Akamai. But that relay cost Apple money.

And so, after iOS 7 was released, Apple let a digital certificate expire that killed FaceTime for anyone using iOS version 6 or lower, and thus there was no longer a need to operate and pay for the relay. Everyone was expected to upgrade to the non-infringing FaceTime in iOS 7, which didn’t need the Akamai’s system.

Apple claimed at the time this sudden loss of connectivity was a “bug,” and that users should upgrade to iOS 7 to fix the knackered chat app. But internal documents suggest that Apple knowingly broke FaceTime because it was costing it money. “Our users on [iOS 6] are basically screwed,” an Apple engineer noted in an internal email quoted in the lawsuit.

Source: Apple chucks $3 at iPhone users after killing FaceTime on iOS 6 because it didn’t want to pay connectivity charges • The Register

ICANN has vetoed the proposed $1.1bn sale of the .org registry to an unknown private equity firm, saying this was “the right thing to do.”

The DNS overseer has been under growing pressure to use its authority to refuse the planned transfer of the top-level domain from the Internet Society to Ethos Capital, most recently from the California Attorney General who said the deal “puts profits above the public interest.”

ICANN ultimately bowed to the US state’s top lawyer when it concluded today it “finds the public interest is better served in withholding consent.”

It gave several factors, all of which were highlighted by Attorney General Xavier Becerra as reasons to reject it: the fact that the sale would see the registry – which has long served non-profit organizations – turn from a non-profit itself into a for-profit vehicle; that Ethos Capital was a “wholly different form of entity” to the Internet Society; that the $360m in debt that was being used to finance the deal “raises further question about how the .org registrants will be protected”; and that the measures that Ethos Capital had put in place following an outcry were “untested.”

The decision will likely spark a mixture of relief and celebration from millions of .org domain holders, including some of the world’s largest non-profit organizations, many of which were certain that their long-standing online addresses were going to be milked for profit by an organization that never fully revealed who its directors or investors were.

Source: ICANN finally halts $1.1bn sale of .org registry, says it’s ‘the right thing to do’ after months of controversy • The Register

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) has delayed a decision on whether to allow the sale of the organization that controls .org registrations to a band of private equity ghouls after the California attorney general’s office issued a warning

Domain names with .org suffix are used by countless nonprofits, in part because the nonprofit selected by ICANN to run the .org top-level domain—the Internet Society’s Public Interest Registry (ISOC/PIR)—has kept the cost of registration very low year after year. In theory, though, running that .org registry could be a cash cow to anyone who bought it and jacked up the prices, as nonprofits seeking the renewal of .org domains would be a captive market. Such an opportunity would be especially alluring as ICANN removed price caps on .org registration fees in 2019.

That egregious scenario appears to be in the cards with Ethos Capital, a private equity firm that came out of nowhere to offer ISOC $1.1 billion for control of the PIR, which would be converted to a for-profit firm. (While Ethos appears to only have two employees, it is backed by the tight-fisted goons at Perot Holdings, Fidelity Investments owner FMR LLC, and Solamere Capital, which was started by Mitt Romney’s son.) Ethos has sought to allay concerns with a series of meaningless commitments, such as limiting price increase to 10 percent per year for the first eight years, or approximately 214 percent in under a decade.

ISOC has more or less admitted that it considered the $1.1 billion offer out of greed, with officials telling the L.A. Times the number was so huge “we couldn’t just say no without considering.” ISOC has cleared the sale to move forward, despite the opposition of its own Chapters Advisory Council and the troubling arrangement that PIR would take on $300 million in debt as part of the deal, putting it under immense pressure to rapidly increase revenue. But one big catch is ICANN has to approve the deal or it might fall through. As Ars Technica noted, ICANN’s governance structure allows only limited influence from the internet community and it is subject to only lax regulation from the feds, while the Ethos deal involves several former ICANN officials, so any approval would immediately come under suspicion.

In a letter dated April 15, state A.G. Xavier Becerra—whose office demanded to see confidential documents in January—put everyone involved on blast. Becerra’s letter opens by citing his authority to regulate California-based charitable trusts and public benefits organizations, then cites elements of ICANN’s charter to warn the org that it “must exercise its authority to withhold approval”:

ICANN selected PIR as the registry operator for the .ORG top level domain because of PIR’s commitment to “institute mechanisms for promoting the registry’s operation in a manner that is responsive to the needs, concerns, and views of the non-commercial Internet user community.” If, as proposed, Ethos Capital is permitted to purchase PIR, it will no longer have the unique characteristics that ICANN valued at the time that it selected PIR as the nonprofit to be responsible for the .ORG registry. In effect, what is at stake is the transfer of the world’s second largest registry to a for-profit private equity firm that, by design, exists to profit from millions of nonprofit and non-commercial organizations.

According to the Register, sources with knowledge of the matter said that the letter had unnerved ICANN enough to delay a planned decision on the sale from April 17 to May 4. The California Attorney General’s office declined to comment on whether its investigation into the deal has turned up new information, citing the inquiry’s ongoing nature. But the letter makes clear that the AG has identified particularly troubling elements of an already suspicious arrangement.

“PIR and Ethos have failed to respond to ICANN’s questions regarding PIR’s financial picture after the sale,” Becerra wrote in the letter. “PIR maintains that its anticipated income will be sufficient to service the $300 million loan necessary to complete this purchase and maintain its level of operation. Additionally, as a for-profit entity, PIR will now incur tax liabilities, and its loan will be due in five years.”

“It is, therefore, disturbing that Ethos has failed to identify the new services it contends will generate the necessary revenue to cover those expenses,” he added. “While PIR currently has sufficient income for its operations, as a nonprofit it pays no taxes and is not saddled with a $300 million loan and investors who expect a rate of return.”

Becerra then questioned whether ISOC actually has a legitimate reason to sell the PIR, how the Ethos deal would actually solve those problems, and whether the process by which it agreed to the sale was in good faith:

There has been too little information provided about the sale process by which the proposed transfer sale was agreed to by ISOC. If ISOC was concerned about diversifying its revenue streams, what did ISOC do, if anything, before deciding to sell the .ORG registry agreement? Why did ISOC not conduct a competitive bid process for a new registry operator if it wanted a change in the registry operator? Did ISOC explore options other than a sale to a private equity firm, given that its nonprofit status was key to PIR becoming the .ORG registrar? What consultation, if any, did ISOC conduct with its stakeholders prior to proceeding with the proposed sale?

Furthermore, Becerra warned that ICANN’s arrangement with ISOC to handle the .org registry through PIR “contains a presumption in favor of renewing the agreement following its expiration,” stating that section “makes no sense” if PIR is converted to a for-profit entity.

“Empowering a for-profit entity that could undermine the accessibility and affordability of the .org domain, which serves nonprofits, should concern all of us,” Becerra told Gizmodo in a statement. “We’re urging ICANN to deny the request to transfer control of the .org domain to a for-profit private equity firm. In California, we’re committed to an Internet that serves everyone and we’re simply concerned that this transfer puts profits above the public interest.”

According to the Register, ICANN’s founding CEO Mike Roberts and founding chairman Esther Dyson wrote a letter to Becerra earlier this month accusing ICANN of hypocrisy and urging him to delay the deal by six months.

Becerra didn’t explicitly threaten ICANN or ISOC in the letter, but he did end the letter by reiterating that his office has jurisdiction to intervene.

“ISOC and PIR are charitable organizations that are accountable to their community stakeholders and to the public at large,” Becerra concluded. “… This office will continue to evaluate this matter, and will take whatever action necessary to protect Californians and the nonprofit community.”

In a statement on its website, ICANN acknowledged the letter but disputed that the deal would make PIR beholden only to the demands of its new private equity overlords.

“The Attorney General’s letter does not take into account the recent work that PIR has done to make the entity more responsible to the community,” ICANN wrote. “ICANN requested that PIR strengthen the Public Interest Commitments to ensure meaningful enforceability; a draft of the revised PICs has been provided to the ICANN Board.”

Source: Sale of .Org Registry Stalled After California AG Steps In

Air Charter Service has told the BBC that the first flight will land on Thursday in Stansted carrying 150 Romanian farm workers.

The firm told the BBC that the plane is the first of up to six set to operate between mid-April and the end of June.

Government department Defra said it was encouraging people across the UK “to help bring the harvest in”.

British farmers recently warned that crops could be left to rot in the field because of a shortage of seasonal workers from Eastern Europe. Travel restrictions due to the coronavirus lockdown have meant most workers have stayed at home.

Several UK growers have launched a recruitment drive, calling for local workers to join the harvest to prevent millions of tonnes of fruit and vegetables going to waste. However concerns remain that they won’t be able to fulfil the demand on farms.

Source: Eastern Europeans to be flown in to pick fruit and veg – BBC News

Leading health experts have labelled Donald Trump’s decision to cut funding to the World Health Organization (WHO) as a “crime against humanity” and a “damnable” act that will cost lives.

The move also drew a rebuke from the head of the United Nations, who said the WHO was “absolutely critical to the world’s efforts to win the war against Covid-19”.

Late on Tuesday Trump declared US funding would be put on hold for 60-90 days pending a review “to assess the World Health Organization’s role in severely mismanaging and covering up the spread of the coronavirus”. The US is the single largest contributor to the WHO.

Richard Horton, the editor-in-chief of the Lancet medical journal, wrote that Trump’s decision was “a crime against humanity … Every scientist, every health worker, every citizen must resist and rebel against this appalling betrayal of global solidarity.”

Antonio Guterres, the UN secretary general, said it was “not the time” to cut funding or to question errors. “Once we have finally turned the page on this epidemic, there must be a time to look back fully to understand how such a disease emerged and spread its devastation so quickly across the globe, and how all those involved reacted to the crisis,” said Guterres.

“The lessons learned will be essential to effectively address similar challenges, as they may arise in the future. But now is not that time … It is also not the time to reduce the resources for the operations of the World Health Organization or any other humanitarian organization in the fight against the virus.”

Echoing Guterres’s plea, Dr Amesh Adalja, a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins University Center for Health Security, said the WHO did make mistakes and may need reform but that work needed to take place after the crisis had passed. “It’s not the middle of a pandemic that you do this type of thing,” he said.

Dr Nahid Bhadelia, an infectious disease doctor and associate professor at Boston University’s school of medicine, said the cut was “an absolute disaster. WHO is a global technical partner, the platform through which sovereign countries share data/technology, our eyes on the global scope of this pandemic.”

Laurie Garrett, a former senior fellow of the Council on Foreign Relations, said the decision was a “damnable” act by a “spiteful” Trump and would cost lives. “Meanwhile, WHO is the only lifeline most African, Latin American and Asia Pacific nations have.”

Lawrence Gostin, the director of the WHO centre on public health and human rights, predicted the US would ultimately lose out because other countries would step into the vacuum with increased funding. “In global health and amidst a pandemic, America will lose its voice,” said Gostin.

The WHO has come under fire over some aspects of its handling of the pandemic, and has been accused of being too deferential to China, considering the Communist party’s early suppression of information and punishment of whistleblowers. Much of the focus of the criticism has been on a 14 January tweet from the WHO that said “preliminary investigations conducted by the Chinese authorities have found no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission”. But WHO officials also told their counterparts in technical briefings on 10 and 11 January, and briefed the press on 14 January, that human-to-human transmission was a strong possibility given the experience of past coronavirus epidemics and urged suitable precautions.

The WHO has also been attacked over its continuing exclusion of Taiwan from membership because Beijing considers it to be Chinese territory. Trump’s decision to cut funding was welcomed in some quarters, including by the Hong Kong democracy activist Joshua Wong, who called the WHO an “arm of Chinese diplomacy”.

Trump’s pronouncement came amid sustained criticism of his failure to prepare for the epidemic, which has infected more than 600,000 people and killed more than 24,000 inside his country. The US is the worst affected country in the world in terms of infection numbers. On Wednesday it was reported that $1,200 relief cheques for as many as 70 million people could be delayed for several days because Trump wanted his name printed on them.

Source: ‘Crime against humanity’: Trump condemned for WHO funding freeze | World news | The Guardian

With just seven days left until it has to make a decision on the $1.13bn sale of the .org registry to a private equity firm, DNS overseer ICANN appears in chaos.

In a series of communications from senior executives, ICANN has embarked on a public negotiation with potential buyer Ethos Capital over the sale of the domain, while at the same time aggressively questioning its corporate structure.

A blog post from ICANN’s CEO Goran Marby late last week highlighted revised “public interest commitments” (PICs) that Ethos Capital had published as a way to resolve ongoing concerns over the sale, and gave the clear signal that ICANN is intending to approve the deal on April 20.

There has been a clear negotiation between the two sides: Marby’s post came one day after an email from Ethos’ lawyer (since published [PDF] noted that the new changes were in direct response to a letter from ICANN sent just a few days earlier. “In making these changes, they specifically focused on changes that go to the clarity and enforceability of the PICs as you mentioned,” Ethos noted.

At the same time as it is moving forward on a deal, however, ICANN continues to dig [PDF] into Ethos Capital’s unusual corporate structure: something that critics say is no more a corporate shell game designed to hide the true owners of the company.

ICANN is also looking at its financing of the deal, which financial experts have warned is typical of a debt-leveraged buyout where a founding firm is saddled with debt after the financiers walk away with a healthy profit.

Debt pile

“Can you please provide more detail on PIR’s current plans with respect to the repayment of the $360m term loan at the maturity date in light of Ethos Capital’s ten plus investment horizon for PIR?,” reads just one of dozens of pointed questions in a letter from ICANN to the company nominally in charge of .org, Public Interest Registry (PIR).

Another makes it plain that ICANN believes information is being hidden: “ICANN has specifically requested that PIR provide the entities and individuals that will ‘control’ PIR post-transaction as that is defined in PIR’s registry agreements. PIR has provided some information regarding share ownership but has not provided the specific information regarding ‘control’.”

There are no less than six different companies involved on the Ethos side of the transaction, all of them based in Delaware, a common base for shell companies, and all but one was incorporated on the same day, October 24, 2019.

In addition to Ethos Capital LLC, which was incorporated in May – the day after ICANN made it clear it was planning to remove price caps on .org domains in a decision worth tens of millions of dollars – there is also Ethos Purpose GP, LLC, and then four “Purpose Domains” companies: Purpose Domains Direct, Feeder, Holdings and Investments.

ICANN has asked for the directors of each of these companies and the structural connections between them but from published letters from Ethos and ICANN is it clear that Ethos has been withholding specific pieces of information.

Public interest

In addition to this mixed message, ICANN has still not outlined its decision-making process despite repeat calls from the internet community, including the world’s governments, to do so.

There is an obvious public interest in the sale of millions of .org domains but ICANN has repeatedly failed to say how or whether it will factor that in its decision. At a recent public meeting its general counsel failed to use the term “public interest” when discussing how a decision would be made; an omission that prompted the Governmental Advisory Committee (GAC) to pointedly note [PDF] that the ICANN Board had told it that “all options remain open and that the Board will consider the public interest in its decision-making.”

However, when PIR argued that ICANN only had grounds to reject the sale on issues of “security, reliability, or stability of services,” ICANN pushed back saying that it would not accept “any artificial restriction,” and noted “the obvious importance to the public interest of its operation.”

ICANN changes tune however when other groups point to “public interest” as a key reason for denying the sale. In his most recent letter to the GAC [PDF], ICANN’s chair Maarten Bottermann said that the organization “will apply a standard of reasonableness in making its determination on whether to provide or withhold its consent to the request.”

In a second sentence, he then notes that “the ICANN Board will continue to consider the public interest in all its decision-making using the totality of the information received.”

The difference between “apply” and “consider” is not lost on those watching the process; nor is the fact that ICANN has failed to define the term “reasonableness,” despite it now being the main factor of consideration.

[…]

Source: ICANN suffers split-personality disorder as deadline for .org sale decision draws close • The Register

Amazon is hiring an additional 75,000 workers at its facilities, on top of the 100,000 new positions it created last month, the company said Monday.

In March, the company said it would hire additional warehouse and delivery workers across the country amid a surge in online shopping during the coronavirus outbreak. Since then, Amazon said it has hired more than 100,000 new employees and, as a result, is staffing up even more to help fulfill orders.

“We continue to see increased demand as our teams support their communities, and are going to continue to hire, creating an additional 75,000 jobs to help serve customers during this unprecedented time,” the company said.

As it continues to hire more workers, Amazon has also raised employees’ hourly pay and doubled overtime pay for warehouse workers. Through the end of April, warehouse and delivery workers can earn an additional $2 per hour in the U.S., 2 pounds per hour in the U.K., and approximately 2 euros per hour in many EU countries. Amazon currently pays $15 per hour or more in some areas of the U.S. for warehouse and delivery jobs.

Amazon has announced several benefits changes on top of the pay increases. The company has allowed workers to take unlimited unpaid time off and provides two weeks of paid leave for workers who tested positive for the virus or are in quarantine.

Amazon said it expects to continue investing in pay increases, benefits and safety improvements for warehouse and delivery workers. The company previously expected to spend $350 million on pay increases, but now estimates it will spend more than $500 million on those efforts.

Despite the pay increases and benefits changes, Amazon workers from at least three facilities have staged protests to call for the company to better protect workers amid the coronavirus outbreak. A dozen workers told CNBC they felt Amazon needed to provide employees with paid time off, among other concerns.

Source: Amazon hiring 75,000 more workers as demand rises due to coronavirus

In the wake of reports last month that four US senators sold stocks shortly after a classified briefing on January 24 about the risk posed by the novel coronavirus, Timothy Carambat, a mechanical and software engineer, created a website to make stock sales by every senator more visible.

In an email to The Register, Carambat, who runs a design firm based in Covington, Louisiana, called Industrial Object, explained he was motivated to create Senate Stock Watcher after news broke that Senators Richard Burr (R-NC), Dianne Feinstein (D-CA), James Inhofe (R-OK), and Kelly Loeffler (R-GA) had dumped stocks before most people in America understood the implications of the outbreak. It is illegal for senators to buy and sell shares using non-public information.

Burr, chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, has been sued for alleged securities fraud, a charge he has denied. It is said he unloaded up to $1.7m in stocks in mid-February, particularly in hotel groups that would be later hit hard by the virus pandemic, all while receiving daily confidential briefings about the impact of the bio-nasty – and reassuring the public everything would be fine.

“As public servants, there are some senators making alarmingly large money movements at what would seem to be very fortunate timing in the market,” Carambat said.

“I understand some senators were previously very accomplished businesspeople, but in my opinion, the level of access they have to information currently is highly privileged and it would only make sense to keep their own financial best interests at heart.”

Details about the stock sales in news reports prompted Carambat to look into the source of the data, which turned out to be the US Senate Financial Disclosures website.

Source: Suspicious senate stock sale spurt spurs scrutiny scheme: This website tracks which shares US senators are unloading mid-pandemic • The Register

Two planeloads of Eastern European farmhands arrived Thursday in Berlin and Duesseldorf amid strict precautions to protect the country from the new coronavirus, as an ambitious German program to import thousands of seasonal agricultural workers got underway.

Seasonal workers had been caught up in the country’s ban on travel after the outbreak of the coronavirus. That left a massive deficit in personnel available to pick asparagus, which has already sprouted, and plant other crops in German fields, where some 300,000 such workers were employed last year.

Most came from Eastern European countries such as Romania, Bulgaria, Ukraine, and Hungary, where wages are much lower than in Germany, which is Europe’s largest economy.

Under the new program, workers need to fly to the country in controlled groups — to prevent the possible infection of others en route — and are subject to medical checks upon arrival. They then must live and work separately from other farmhands for two weeks, and wear protective gear.

Announcing the program, Agriculture Minister Julia Kloecker said it was a “pragmatic and goal-oriented solution” that would allow up to 40,000 seasonal workers into the country in April, and another 40,000 in May. She said the hope was to find an additional 20,000 over the two months among Germany’s own unemployed, students or resident asylum seekers.

“This is important and good news for our farmers,” she said. “Because the harvest doesn’t wait and you can’t delay sowing the fields.”

Ahead of time, interested workers have to register online and have their information checked by federal police. Farmers needing help register online with Eurowings, the airline contracted to bring the workers in, saying when they’re needed and where.

So far, 9,900 people had registered for April and another 4,300 for May.

Flights are then organized to bring in groups, and the first group of workers, 530 people from Romania, arrived on Thursday in Duesseldorf and Berlin, Eurowings said. Further flights were already planned to Duesseldorf, Karlsruhe, Leipzig, Nuremberg and Frankfurt.

Source: Germany Flies in Seasonal Farm Workers Amid COVID-19 Efforts | Time

A study by economists Sergio Correia, Stephan Luck and Emil Verner suggests that the best way to save your economy is to save your people. The authors looked at the economic impact of the Spanish influenza pandemic of 1918 on different U.S. cities. They concluded that the earlier, more forcefully and longer cities responded, the better their economic recovery.
A faculty affiliate from the Harvard Department of Economics writes in Bloomberg: [C]ities that implemented aggressive social distancing and shutdowns to contain the virus came out looking better. Implementing these policies eight days earlier, or maintaining them for 46 days longer were associated with 4% and 6% higher post-pandemic manufacturing employment, respectively. The gains for output were similar. Likewise, faster and longer-lasting distancing measures were associated with higher post-pandemic banking activity…

[T]his is at least consistent with the arguments my Bloomberg Opinion colleagues Noah Smith and Michael Strain have already put forward for why easing distancing measures too early would be potentially devastating for the economy… [I]t looks like the things we should be doing to save lives are also what we should be doing to save the economy.

Source: Pandemic Shutdowns Will Help the Economy, Too – Slashdot

Jeffrey Sprecher, the chairman of the New York Stock Exchange, sold $3.5 million in stock on February 26, a month after his wife, Senator Kelly Loeffler of Georgia, received a closed-door briefing about the covid-19 threat. According to SEC filings, Sprecher sold $15.3 million more in stock on March 11, at the beginning of the crash that has seen trillions of dollars wiped from the financial markets. Both stock sales were of Intercontinental Exchange (known as ICE), the company that owns the NYSE, and of which Sprecher just happens to be CEO.

The revelations about Sprecher come from a new report by CBS News, which examined filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). Loeffler’s own stock sales recently made headlines after it was revealed that she sold millions in stock the same day she received a closed-door January 26 briefing on the potential impact of the covid-19 pandemic. Loeffler denies having any knowledge of the sales done in her name.

What makes Sprecher’s stock sales a scandal? For one, they should have been reported as part of Loeffler’s financial disclosures, but were not. Senators have been required to give periodic financial disclosures since 2012 and those filings include any sales and purchases made by the politician’s spouse.

[…]

his wife had secret information about a global pandemic and both of them unloaded while she kept publicly saying everything was fine and dandy.

In fact, this was the video Loeffler posted to Twitter on March 10, the day before her husband unloaded $15.3 million worth of stock in his own company.

Sprecher and Loeffler are reportedly worth at least $500 million. Capitalism may be on its last legs during the covid-19 pandemic, but you can bet that millionaires and billionaires will do everything they can to keep it afloat. Even if a few million people have to die.

Source: New York Stock Exchange Chairman Sold Millions in Stock Before Crash

Senator Richard Burr is a real piece of work. In 2012 he was one of only three Senators to vote against the STOCK Act. This was a law put in place following a 60 Minutes expose about how Congress was getting filthy stinkin’ rich off of insider trading, since Congress was exempt from insider trading laws. The bill did pass — Burr’s vote against notwithstanding — and President Obama signed into law. Unfortunately, the next year, Congress passed (and Obama signed) an amendment that rolled the rules back for staffers, though it still does apply to elected officials themselves.

So, it’s quite interesting to see the news that Senator Burr just sold off a “significant percentage” of his stock holdings, according to a ProPublica article detailing the sale. A big chunk of that stock sale? In the hospitality industry that has been so hard hit. He had a big chunk of stock in Wyndam Hotels and Extended Stay America, but sold those off just before everything went bad. The timing is interesting:

Soon after he offered public assurances that the government was ready to battle the coronavirus, the powerful chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Richard Burr, sold off a significant percentage of his stocks, unloading between $628,000 and $1.72 million of his holdings on Feb. 13 in 33 separate transactions.

As the head of the intelligence committee, Burr, a North Carolina Republican, has access to the government’s most highly classified information about threats to America’s security. His committee was receiving daily coronavirus briefings around this time, according to a Reuters story.

Now, you might say that there might be another reason why he sold stuff off, but it certainly appears that Burr knew full well what was coming. And that’s because in another news bombshell from just a few hours earlier, a recording was leaked of Burr telling a private luncheon gathering that things were going to be bad — all at the same time he was insisting that the US was totally prepared for COVID-19. A month after he sold all that stock, and a few weeks after he told the private luncheon that the coronavirus was “much more aggressive in its transmission than anything that we have seen in recent history” and compared it “to the 1918 pandemic” he publicly was claiming that we had everything under control:

“Luckily, we have a framework in place that has put us in a better position than any other country to respond to a public health threat, like the coronavirus.”

He also said the same thing just days before selling all that stock:

Thankfully, the United States today is better prepared than ever before to face emerging public health threats, like the coronavirus, in large part due to the work of the Senate Health Committee, Congress, and the Trump Administration.

That op-ed also said:

The public health preparedness and response framework that Congress has put in place and that the Trump Administration is actively implementing today is helping to protect Americans. Over the years, this framework has been designed to be flexible and innovative so that we are not only ready to face the coronavirus today but new public health threats in the future.

And then he sold most of his stock earning somewhere between half a million and a million and a half dollars — most of which would have plunged in value if he’d kept it invested. And, the fact that such a large chunk was in the hospitality industry is telling: he would have likely realized were going to be hit hard by any form of lock down and the expected decline in travel due to the pandemic.

Hours after the Burr story broke, The Daily Beast highlighted how another Senator, the new Senator from Georgia, Kelly Loefler, sold off millions of dollars of stock the very day she was briefed about the COVID-19 threat. She literally tweeted that day:

And then she dumped tons of stock:

Loeffler assumed office on Jan. 6 after having been appointed to the seat vacated by retiring Sen. Johnny Isakson. Between then and Jan. 23 she did not report a single stock transaction from accounts owned by her individually or by her and her husband jointly.

Between Jan. 24 and Feb. 14, by contrast, Loeffler reported selling stock jointly owned with her husband worth between $1,275,000 and $3,100,000, according to transaction reports filed with Senate ethics officials.

For what it’s worth, it’s probably worth noting that Loeffler’s husband, Jeffrey Sprecher, is the chairman and CEO of the New York Stock Exchange. The stock sales included a bunch of retailers: Ross Stores, TJX (owners of TJ Maxx, Marshalls and a bunch of similar brands), and Autozone. All of those are struggling — TJX just announced it’s closing all its stores for at least two weeks.

Like Burr, Loeffler toed the Trumpian line that the country was all set to handle this pandemic that (spoiler alert!) it’s still not ready to handle:

Some might argue that while she didn’t have any transactions in the weeks leading up to that coronavirus briefing, and then sold a bunch of stock, she did make two purchases of stock in that period. But those really don’t help her case:

One of Loeffler’s two purchases was stock worth between $100,000 and $250,000 in Citrix, a technology company that offers teleworking software…

Yes, sold a bunch of other stock, but purchased stock in a company that enables telework, just weeks before practically the whole country moved to telework. The other purchase? Oracle. While Oracle stock has declined along with most of the rest of the market, given how much Oracle pushes itself as a “cloud” provider, you could see someone thinking it might get a boost as well.

Given all, a little other spelunking through the newly released financial disclosures for stocks sales in this period from three other Senators as well: Ron Johnson, Dianne Feinstein, and Jim Inhofe. The details of those sales don’t look quite as suspicious as the other two, but still might raise some eyebrows. Inhofe sold a bunch of Paypal, Intuit, and Apple stock. Feinstein sold a bunch of Allogene Therapeutics stock, a biotech firm doing cancer research — so it’s not clear that that’s related to pandemic info. Johnson made a bundle: between $5 million and $25 million in selling all of his share of a plastic extrusion company, Pacur, but that’s a private family company that he ran before becoming a Senator (his brother now runs the firm), and the sale was made to a private equity firm, and shows no evidence of being connected in any way to the pandemic (indeed, the company does plastic extrusion for medical devices, and you can see why that might suddenly be in more demand these days).

In a just world, someone would be looking into the Burr and Loeffler sales as insider trading. I’m not convinced that we’re in that world right now, though. In the meantime, as many of us are isolated at home, we can rest safe, knowing that Senator Burr and Senator Loeffler socked away a bunch of money while the rest of us suffer. The only surprising thing I will note, is that Burr, at least, is now receiving heavy criticism from both Democrats and Republicans, and even Tucker Carlson — usually a trusty voice repeating Trumpian talking points, has called for Burr to resign.

Of course, it’s worth highlighting one more point: profiting off the coming disaster is horrible and disgusting and awful. But it’s much, much worse to have spent weeks or even months knowing what disaster was about to befall the country and lying to the public about it.

The potential insider trading is dreadful and possibly criminal, but what could elevate this to a historic scandal is the idea that senators may have known enough to be alarmed for themselves yet still projected rosy scenarios to the public AND failed to make sure we were ready. https://t.co/PeMktkEPFA

— David French (@DavidAFrench) March 20, 2020

Source: Two Senators Sold A Bunch Of Stock After Being Briefed About COVID-19; While Telling The World Things Were Going To Be Fine | Techdirt