Tech & Telecom news — Sep 5, 2018

S Winwood
S Winwood
Sep 5, 2018 · 3 min read

E-COMMERCE

Amazon just became the second public US company to reach a $1trn valuation (after Apple), and some analysts believe this will increase public concerns on the company’s increasing power, with politicians looking at the path to its potential dominance of the retail industry, and also at how it treats its workers (Story)

PRODUCTS & SERVICES

Content

The EU will force Netflix to follow standard protectionist rules for content exhibition, similar to those affecting e.g. movie theaters. A new legislation is under way requiring streaming apps to dedicate at least 30% of their catalogs to locally produced content. Not yet clear if this will force country-by-country fragmentation (Story)

Cybersecurity

In a sign of how the threat of cybersecurity incidents is growing for them, US cities are massively acquiring cyber insurance policies to cover hacker attacks and extortion demands, as well as legal liabilities and technical costs. All this before the digitization wave that everyone expects, and that will increase the threats (Story)

Devices

In their objective to lead the smartphone market across all major segments and geographies, Samsung is now working to fight vs. the Chinese vendors (Xiaomi, Huawei, Oppo) that have started to dominate the market for cheap devices. India will be key in this battle, and Samsung is now preparing to open a factory there (Story)

Regulation

Today, executives from Twitter, Facebook and (possibly) Google will visit US Senate, to meet a committee exploring Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election. This post at the FT claims that Senators should focus on algorithmic bias more than on human intervention, as drivers of “fake news” (Story)

In the case of Facebook, this time it will probably the COO Sheryl Sandberg who will be answering Senators’ questions. She’s often accused of not having reacted quickly enough to Facebook’s platforms signs of problems, and she’s now supposed to have been asked by Zuckerberg to fix the mistakes (a challenging job…) (Story)

In Europe, regulators are looking at another key legislative issue related to the digital economy: the EU will this week discuss proposals to adopt a new tax based on digital revenues, aiming to close the existing tax gap, linked to tech companies doing arbitrage by shifting taxable profits to lower-tax countries (Story)

HARDWARE ENABLERS

Networks

Asia is currently leading the 5G race, according to an analysis just published by network vendor Juniper, in which Japanese (NTT DoCoMo, SoftBank) and Korean (SK Telecom, LG U+ and KT) operators fully dominate the global Top-5, closely followed by AT&T and China Mobile. Interestingly, Verizon is not even in the Top-10 (Story)

SOFTWARE ENABLERS

Artificial Intelligence

In the quest of most tech giants (and particularly those dominating the cloud computing space) to simplify / commoditize the process to build Machine Learning models, IBM is working on a solution (using AI) to automate the selection of the right deep learning algorithm for each particular task (Story)

M&A

The race to build 5G networks as a geo-strategic asset is driving China to consolidate its internal telecom market, and there are rumors that the government is considering a merger of the #2 (China Unicom) and #3 (China Telecom) operators, to get the economies of scale required to fund a nationwide 5G deployment (Story)

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The most interesting news in technology and telecoms, every day

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The most interesting news in technology and telecoms, every day

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