With help from Emily Birnbaum, Leah Nylen, Bjarke Smith-Meyer and Mark Scott
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— Court intervention: Apple and the Justice Department are headed to court this morning, after the company balked at the DOJ’s information request from Apple in its antitrust suit against Google.
— Not what you think: Facebook doesn’t want you to think of it as a right-wing echo chamber. Its latest report to change that perception is drawing high-profile critics.
— Ministers, assemble: EU finance ministers are gathering next month to strategize their approach to the global tax deal, including a potential digital levy that has Americans up in arms.
IT’S THURSDAY, AUG. 19. WELCOME TO MORNING TECH. I’m your host, Benjamin Din. I missed this from Monday, but apparently Katy Perry has entered the misinformation debate. Any thoughts on who will weigh in next?
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DOJ, APPLE TO DUKE IT OUT IN COURT — Antitrust prosecutors are headed to court this morning in a dispute over how much information Apple must turn over as part of the Justice Department’s suit against Google. DOJ lawyers told U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta they have reached an “impasse” with the company over documents despite weekly negotiations since February.
Apple’s lucrative agreement to set Google as the iPhone’s default search engine is a key to the Justice Department’s case. DOJ alleges that Google pays Apple between $8 billion and $12 billion each year for the default spot — a sizable chunk of the iPhone maker’s $57 billion in profit last year.
In a court filing late Tuesday, Apple accused DOJ lawyers of “manufacturing an impasse” by making requests that were “unnecessarily burdensome.” The iPhonemaker alleged that the Justice Department has demanded it search emails and documents of top executives for terms relating to “nearly all aspects of Apple’s business over the last 20 years” — creating millions of hits.
— What to expect: Today’s hearing will be the second special hearing Mehta has called to deal with disputes over document production in this suit. The judge has taken a relatively hands-off approach so far, mostly requiring those at odds to continue their negotiations. That approach was enough to resolve earlier disputes between Google and Microsoft.
But that might not work as well with Apple, a company notorious for its reluctance to hand over internal information. (See any number of disputes with the company’s corporate monitor post-ebooks, Epic Games or the House Judiciary antitrust panel.)
— A long road ahead: DOJ filed its complaint against Google in October of last year, but the trial isn’t expected to begin until September 2023.
FACEBOOK GETS TANGLED UP — Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has waved away analyses suggesting Facebook is a right-wing echo chamber as “just wrong” — but the company hasn’t provided much data to back that up until now. Facebook on Wednesday published its first “Widely Viewed Content Report,” a 20-page document aimed at proving that Facebook is mostly family photos and nonpolitical links rather than a forum for conservative conspiracy theories.
“There’s a few gaps in the data that’s been used to date,” said Facebook’s vice president of integrity, Guy Rosen, on a press call, “and the narrative that has emerged is quite simply wrong.”
— Facebook’s Frankenstein: All of this began with a transparency tool that Facebook owns — CrowdTangle. CrowdTangle data consistently shows that the most-engaged links on Facebook come from conservative commentators like Ben Shapiro and Dan Bongino. And Facebook executives realized they had a problem on their hands when New York Times reporter Kevin Roose began tweeting out lists of the Top 10 most-engaged links on Facebook, often a who’s who of the country’s top right-wing provocateurs with a few mainstream media sites thrown in. Now, the company says CrowdTangle doesn’t tell the whole story.
— What’s in the report: The “Widely Viewed Content Report” is a mostly mundane rundown of the most-viewed domains on Facebook during the second quarter of 2021 — YouTube first, Amazon second, followed by UNICEF and GoFundMe. It lists the top-viewed links, including a Packers Alumni website, a hemp store, a Christian clothing store and a GIF of two cats walking with their tails wrapped around each other.
Most of the posts are not related to politics or public health, except the 11th most-viewed post of the second quarter is one asking, “Are you ditching the mask after the recent CDC requirement?”
— The pushback: The new report immediately faced a wave of criticism from researchers and journalists, many of whom pointed out that the data still doesn’t tell the full story. “There is no inherent reason that reach (how many people see a post in their feeds) is a better measure of popularity than engagement (how many people like/share/comment on it),” said The Times’ Roose. And the report doesn’t negate extensive reporting that shows the right wing has a massive advantage on Facebook.
It’s largely Facebook’s effort to take back the narrative about what its platform contributes to society — and it seems unlikely to make a dent. “This is anything but transparancy,” tweeted Brian Boland, Facebook’s former vice president of partnerships.
DATES TO KEEP IN MIND — Today is the deadline for the FTC to file an amended complaint against Facebook over whether it holds a dominant share in the “personal social networking services” market. Should it do so, here are some key dates to note:
— Oct. 4: Facebook’s deadline to respond to the amended complaint
— Nov. 17: FTC’s deadline to respond to a potential motion to dismiss from Facebook
— Dec. 1: Facebook’s deadline to reply to the FTC
EU HUDDLES ON GLOBAL TAX TALKS — The European Union’s finance ministers are planning to use the informal nature of September’s gathering of the bloc’s Economic and Financial Affairs Council (Ecofin, for short) to discuss the fine print underlying July’s global deal to overhaul the world’s corporate tax rules. The ministers will gather in Slovenia, which currently holds the EU presidency, allowing them cover for more frank conversations away from the public eye.
— The big picture: A total of 130 countries agreed last month to introduce a tax for the world’s 100 biggest companies and an international minimum corporate tax rate of 15 percent under the stewardship of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.
The finer details, such as administering the levies and what other national taxes would violate the deal, were left out. The plan is to have these loose ends tied up in October and will impact the European Commission’s plans to introduce an EU digital levy amid American opposition. (Originally set to be introduced in July, the EU announced it was pushing the proposed levy back until the fall.)
— Good prep: EU officials briefed on Ecofin’s tentative agenda said OECD Chair Mathias Cormann plans to talk through the topics with ministers. This should help prepare Trade Commissioner Valdis Dombrovskis and EU antitrust boss Margrethe Vestager for digital levy talks on the margins of the EU-U.S. Trade and Technology Council at the end of September.
SOCIAL MEDIA’S AFGHANISTAN PROBLEM — Silicon Valley pledged to work together to combat terrorism on its platforms. But the Taliban’s swift ascent to power in Afghanistan is posing a big challenge, Alex reports.
The coalition launched by major tech companies to fight online extremism says it’s best for each platform to determine its own approach in dealing with the Taliban on social media. But that’s created a patchwork of approaches that are inconsistently enforced across the major sites — and activists worry that posts shedding light on human rights abuses in Afghanistan could become collateral damage as the platforms take down Taliban content.
And it’s bigger than just the Taliban. Western far-right groups are piggybacking on the militants’ recent victory in their ongoing digital culture wars, our European colleague Mark Scott reports. That includes white supremacists, QAnon acolytes and other U.S. extremists likening the Taliban to their own fight against liberal values.
“The extreme far right-Taliban nexus is particularly worrying and probably surprising to many,” said Adam Hadley, director of Tech Against Terrorism, a nonprofit that works with smaller social networks in combating the rise of extremist content online. Read more in this morning’s edition of Digital Bridge, POLITICO’s transatlantic tech newsletter.
Rashida Richardson, a Northeastern University law professor, is joining the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy as a senior policy adviser for data and democracy. According to Northeastern: “Richardson will work with various federal agencies and executive offices to ‘advise the Biden administration on its approach to the use of data, emerging technologies, and civil rights and liberties.’” … Peter True is now comms director for the House Transportation Committee. He was previously deputy comms director for the Senate Commerce Committee Democrats. … Jeremy Kessel is joining Reddit after nearly 12 years at Twitter, where he was most recently senior director for global legal policy.
Jordan Wood is now a senior manager of strategic comms at Blokhaus, a blockchain marketing and comms firm. He previously was associate director of speechwriting for then-Vice President Mike Pence and is a Deb Fischer, Mitch McConnell and Brett Guthrie alum. … Greg Monahan is joining Binance as its global money laundering reporting officer. Monahan is a former U.S. Treasury criminal investigator.
The Oregon Department of Education is partnering with Google to offer Oregon public-school teachers free professional training and certifications for Google’s digital tools. … Following the earthquake in Haiti, Verizon is waiving calling charges to the country for its customers through the end of August.
Double agent: Andrey Shumeyko was an active member of the iPhone leaks and jailbreak community. “He was also spying for Apple.” More from Vice’s Motherboard.
Grab your passport: “Proof of vaccination in a tap? Smartphone developers want to make it that easy,” via NBC News.
Probe requested: Sens. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) and Ed Markey (D-Mass.) are calling on the FTC to investigate Tesla for potentially deceptive marketing practices around its driver-assistance technology, via WSJ.
Continued crackdown: “China rebukes 43 apps including Tencent’s WeChat for breaking data transfer rules,” Reuters reports.
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SEE YOU TOMORROW!
