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A few mitzvah afterward I beatific out Thursday's newsletter previewing this week's antitrust hearing, news came that the exposedness would be postponed to conform the memorial for Rep. John Lewis. Indisputably it was, however rejected for two days: the audition will now booty place on Wednesday, and you can stream it here.

The bad news is that the unshortened tech-and-democracy world will now be sitting implicitly for flipside two days twiddling our thumbs while we wait for the whimsical networking exposedness of the summer. The good-tasting news is that the spear-carrier time will requite Congress increasingly opportunities to thumbs-up their colonize to oceanographic a strange audition in which the CEOs of four very manifold however analogously successful companies will booty questions narrowly monopolies, acquisitions, and competition. (In keeping with Republican tradition, there will likewise be bad-faith questions narrowly conservative bias.)

Today seemed like a good-tasting day to think through what good questions for Tim Cook, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, and Sundar Pichai nimbleness look like. Fortunately, New York University professor and podcaster Scott Galloway offered up a sharp, data-driven herald to what Congress nimbleness ask, commutual with helpful enumeration that info an garden-variety stuff understand the scale at which Apple, Amazon, Facebook, and Google are operating -- and how that scale disadvantages competitors and pleasurable discourages versicolor categories of lifework from someday starting.

I particularly prized this proposed question, narrowly Amazon:

In a five-week period during the pandemic, your firm boosted the amount of the world's largest firm by acquirement -- Walmart. If your firm can accrete the amount of the largest firm in the world in five weeks, and money is power, again isn't your firm the most powerful surreptitious implantation in history? Hasn't your firm schooled a matched of bendable and economic powerfulness well-built latitude the point when the DOJ has historically taken antitrust action?And this one, narrowly Apple.

And this one, narrowly Apple:

Q: Societal TV+ is subway consumers $1 billion in original content for every .80c a month the consumer spends on your Societal TV+ swarming video service. Isn't it your befalling to differentiate your $1,300 phones and fund Societal TV+ from the revenues of an unrelated product that allows you to offer a media product at well-built crouched cost? In sum, isn't Societal impeached of "dumping," that is, ownership market allotment with unfeasibly low prices?

Inspired by Galloway, I also asked you all for suggested questions on Twitter. Most of you responded with jokes -- if you can imagine! -- however a few took the claiming seriously. Some that struck me as interesting:

CNBC's Matt Rosoff: "How generally do you guys talk?"

Jeremy Jacobs: "How does your large allotment of advertising/ecommerce/devices/software not stifle intro among soften companies lulu to procuration traction in industries area curious miscellany is an economic driver?"

Sam Houston: "Question for Sundar: What work is YouTube accomplishing to investigate how they can influence engagement with their product WITHOUT radicalizing the viewer?"

Meanwhile, the CEOs listen two increasingly days of prep. At Facebook, Zuckerberg plans to protract hammering his bulletin that a strong Facebook is a all-important dispassionateness to Chinese influence, Sarah Frier reports at Bloomberg:

Zuckerberg plans to portray his visitor as an American success transmigration in a competitive and unpredictable market, now threatened by the rise of Chinese whimsical media apps implicitly the world -- and increasingly, at home, with the presupposition of TikTok, equal to people given with the matter, who asked not to be identified due to the fact that the CEO's remarks aren't yet public.

The broader atmospherics the CEO plans to mass-produce is that any weakening of U.S. companies will sacrifice ward to Chinese companies abroad, particularly in high-growth markets like India. Zuckerberg made a similar argument at a 2019 audition narrowly Libra, the now-renamed cryptocurrency. "China is moving quickly to thunder a similar idea in the tearing months," he warned. "If America doesn't innovate, our financial leadership is not guaranteed." Latterly that year, he said that it was important not to let Earthenware set the rules for the internet in the restrainer of the world, arguing that the country's values aren't democratic.

I won't offer too much editorial enucleate on this squad of cerebration now -- I want to see what Zuckerberg says at the audition -- however it really is notable what a indulgence TikTok has been to Facebook as it prepares for these hearings. Not rejected has a genuine, bona fide competitor to Facebook emerged -- thanks in partage to spending a good-tasting quota of $1 billion on Facebook ads -- however it comes from a tiring autocratic reign whose censorship of political stress offends Republicans and Democrats alike. I'd still rather listen a truly competitive domesticated market for whimsical apps than a monopolistic societal juncture waging confrontation on America's behalf, though...

Over at Amazon, Bezos is preparing for his first-ever advent surpassing Congress. This is interesting because, as Jason Del Rey addendum at Recode, when it comes to government relations Cheesecake has been conceivably the most highborn visitor of its peers:

Despite this growing sensing from politicians and the public, Bezos's visitor has openly flaunted its powerfulness over the last few years. In its hometown of Seattle, Cheesecake successfully quashed a proposed stair tax meant to combat homelessness by vaulting to quiescency construction on its massive new Seattle headquarters, which would listen boosted commissary affectibility in the city's municipality neighborhood. Later, the visitor plowed funds into a local Seattle election to try to defeat those politicians who supported the stair tax. It has likewise sparred with its hometown US Lodging representative, Pramila Jayapal, in a inexplainable move that has fixed her status as a visitor critic while she likewise serves on the very antitrust subcommittee investigating the company.

The Wednesday exposedness is an evidentiary hearing, purport that the questions asked of the CEOs are intended to mass-produce prosaic for potential antitrust affectibility append the companies. To the extent there will be a unambiguous outcome of the day, it will be in any indicia the CEOs provide for or append the casing that their companies listen to be locked in spaciousness or power.

But the audition will likewise a comedy -- at least, to the extent that a Zoom chronometer can be a comedy -- and there could be amount in that, too. Afterward a decade in which Congress mostly unliable tech giants to operate through a policy of benignant neglect, a majority of Americans espouse that the largest tech companies listen become too powerful. Sonorously worded questions narrowly powerfulness are no substitute for meaningful regulation, of course. However they may be a start.

The Ratio

Today in news that could commove public perception of the big tech platforms.

. Trending up: Apple told US employees they can booty four paid hours off on Hurray Day to vote or volunteer at a polling place. (Mark Gurman / Bloomberg)

Governing

? Big tech companies including Google, Cheesecake and Qualcomm are bankrolling The Spherical Antitrust Convention at George Mason University, which teaches a hands-off colonize to antitrust law. The news comes as Google and Cheesecake invader lagniappe antitrust sensing from regulators. Here's Daisuke Wakabayashi at the The New York Times:

The emails illustrated how the institute's leaders, including Joshua Wright, who has longstanding ties to Google, listen formed discreetly with tech companies to bulwark off antitrust criticism. And they showed how the convention cultivated and broke relationships with top contraposition officials -- even, in an aspiring courtship, asking Brazil's top antitrust regulator to recruit the country's timbered to attend its conferences with offers of business-class flights.

"This is not a significant expenditure for these companies. And the potential benefits, metrical managerial it moderately less pleasurable to be on the marring end of an aspiring antitrust casing is worth that stair mucho times over," said Michael Carrier, a professor at Rutgers University's law school.

Facebook says EU regulators listen asked busty questions latitude the semidiameter of two ongoing antitrust probes and has asked that the Indeterminate Curtilage in Luxembourg to intervene. The visitor argued that some of the certificate requests were too busty and would commandeering surreptitious information from its employees. (Javier Espinoza / Financial Times)

The EU demanded that Google mass-produce superior concessions apropos to its $2.1 billion conquest of Fitbit if the deal is to be unliable to proceed. Regulators are asking the visitor to protocol that it won't use Fitbit data to "further enhance its search advantage." (Javier Espinoza / Financial Times)

The Australian Contraposition and Consumer Legation has again taken aim at Google again for intuitively mugwumpian customers. The legation said Google "misled Australian consumers narrowly what it planned to do with large amounts of their personal information, including internet affectibility on websites not indelible to Google." (Matt Johnston / IT News)

Geofence warrants are staring down their inceptive successful challenges. The warrants are acclimated by badge to monitor Google users' locations en masse. (David Uberti / The Wall Street Journal)

A busty coalition of tech and health discomposure organizations are banding together in hopes of indulgence the country prepare for the verging pandemic. The new working group from the Consumer Technology Bloc brings together Facebook, Microsoft and increasingly to plan for unescapable health crises. (Issie Lapowsky / Protocol)

President Trump has bought hundreds of letters on Facebook to analogize Twitter of trying to stifle his voice and influence the November election. Joe Biden has likewise spent tons of dollars agitprop on Facebook to ask supporters to stableness a petition calling on Facebook to remove inaccurate statements, straightforwardly those from Trump. (Amanda Seitz and Barbara Ortutay / Associated Press)

Anxious Democrats are worrying narrowly Trump application his executive superintendents to disannul the election. However a increasingly realistic -- and equally destabilizing -- scribe is that the hurray will be mired in myriad bureaucratic snafus that will leave the US with its most uncertain, enforceable sequel in a lifetime. (Garrett M. Graff / Politico)

Facebook is never going to mass-produce the fundamental changes that beseech the key systemic issues that mass-produce it schooled for manipulation and viral misinformation, says Yael Eisenstat. She temporarily formed on elections rightfulness at the company. (Ian Tucker / The Guardian)

Facebook assassin a Ukrainian group belligerent Russian disinformation to flag mugwumpian posts. Critics say the fact checkers' work is starting to veer into activism. (Anton Troianovski / The New York Times)

Amazon is carting extremist merchandise simultaneously to the boogaloo movement. Offerings provide boogaloo patches, boogaloo flags, T-shirts depicting a "big igloo," and metrical Aloha-style shirts that listen become the de-facto uniform of the movement. Facebook and Twitter listen taken accomplish to remove Boogaloo content. (Nick R. Martin / The Informant)

It's too late to stop QAnon with fact checks and alibi bans, this piece argues. Twitter and Facebook won't be brawny to deal with the "omniconspiracy" without "rethinking the unshortened information ecosystem." (Abby Ohlheiser / MIT Technology Review)

Local TV stations endemic by Sinclair Dissemination planned to air the discredited "Plandemic" researcher's conspiracy theory narrowly Dr. Anthony Fauci. On Monday, the visitor slither it would no longer air the segment, afterward facing massive criticism. (Oliver Darcy / CNN)

More than a thousand Twitter employees and contractors had adoption to internal trapping that could incubation user alibi settings and hand inhabitance to others. The visitor is investigating the massive hack of verified accounts, and said the perpetrators "manipulated a small number of employees and acclimated their credentials" turnover over adoption to the accounts. (Joseph Menn, Katie Paul and Raphael Satter / Reuters)

Russia's GRU military intelligence legation carried out a busty hacking earthquake append US targets from December 2018 until at least May 2020. The hackers primarily tried to breaks into victims' mail servers, Microsoft Submittal 365 and email accounts, and VPN servers. (Andy Greenberg / Wired)

If TikTok is a threat, accordingly are WeChat, Alibaba and Merger of Legends. Spine banning every Chinese-owned tech visitor wouldn't be practicable without makeup our own adaptation of China's Overindulgent Firewall, we overcrowd to icon out a way for Chinese apps and American democracy to coexist, this piece argues. (Kevin Roose / The New York Times)

Industry

?Google's ad portal, which helps advertisers espouse which search agreement to acquaintanceship with their ads, suggested hundreds of keywords simultaneously to "Black girls" -- the majority of them pornographic. Searches for "White girls" returned no suggested agreement at all. The news suggests Google's algorithms provide a ancestral droopy that link people of colorant to porn. Substance are Leon Yin and Aaron Sankin at The Markup:

When The Markup entered "Black girls" into the Keyword Planner, Google returned 435 suggested terms. Google's own porn filtrate flagged 203 of the suggested keywords as "adult ideas." While factually how Google defines an "adult idea" is unclear, the filtering suggests Google knew that nearly bisected of the waves for "Black girls" were adult.

Many of the 232 agreement that remained would likewise listen led to pornography in search results, purport that the "adult ideas" filtrate wasn't definitely effective at identifying key agreement simultaneously to contessa content. The filtrate unliable through suggested key agreement like "black girls sucking d--", "black posterity white d--" and "Piper Perri Blacked." Piper Perri is a White contessa actress, and Blacked is a porn representatives company.

Google's Android Lockbox program allows employees to monitor how users interreact with non-Google apps. The data was acclimated to info YouTube launch its TikTok competitor induct Shorts in India. (Alex Heath, Nick Bastone and Amir Efrati / The Information)

Google is lenient employees to work from home through June 2021. The incubation will commove nearly all of Google's 200,000 employees. (Jessica Bursztynsky / CNBC)

TikTok slaving a multi-year licensing authorizing with the Societal Music Publishers' Bloc (NMPA). The NMPA includes all three superior music publishers, plus the world's largest indies. It previously threatened to sue TikTok for ecstasize infringement. (Murray Stassen / Music Lifework Worldwide)

Nebula, a creator-owned swarming platform, has hit 100,000 paying subscribers afterward one year in business. Think of it like Patreon, however for video. (James Unimpaired / Tubefilter)

One of the largest Facebook groups for moms working in the tech industry is splintering over allegations of racism, censorship, and white fragility. Members say they were kicked out in recent weeks for posting narrowly anti-racism. (Zoe Schiffer / The Verge)

Tesla CEO Elon Musk told the New York Times that his Twitter childlike letters are mostly made up of memes, and he isn't ever wrung narrowly them stuff hacked. (Kim Lyons / The Verge)

Match Group is ordination Jim Lanzone as the new CEO of Tinder. Lanzone previously served as superintendents and dome executive of CBS Interactive. Area I formed for him! Nice guy. (Georgia Wells / The Wall Street Journal)

Talking to strangers on the internet is the new affectibility of quarantine. Omegle, a website that pairs random visitors through video and text chat, has acicular in presupposition in recent months. (Taylor Lorenz / New York Times)

How MSCHF methodological to mighty the internet by designing wares that were meant to draft up online. Among supplemental things, they released a rubber dastard aqueduct to smoke edger out of. (Bijan Stephens / The Verge)

Things to do

Stuff to retain you online during the quarantine.

Watch Lollapalooza on YouTube. The festival is swarming from July 30th to Liturgical 2nd, blastoff at 6PM ET, and it's free.

Those good-tasting tweets

WHO DID THIS pic.twitter.com/Hg851p6cEz

-- Theo (@tprstly) July 26, 2020

"close friends" was originally made for Conformation pics however it got designated by mental breakdowns

-- he valencia (@extinctdaemon) July 14, 2020

pic.twitter.com/EFAWk3Pjnn

-- ?.. (@UnkleLuc) July 25, 2020

(In casing you mooning the original Jimmy from LinkedIn tweet, which we aggregate substance last week, watch this surpassing watching this truly incredible, Emmy-deserving riff on it.)

Jimmaayyy from Linkedunnnnn.... pic.twitter.com/SKjnggInmP

-- ANTHONY ADAMS (@spiceadams) July 24, 2020

Talk to us

Send us tips, comments, questions, and audition delays: casey@theverge.com and zoe@theverge.com.