Millions of Americans could lose home internet access next month

For the millions of residents and visitors who commute in and out of the areas daily, billboards in Silicon Valley and the Bay Area have long been a way to see where the state of tech is at the moment — and where it’s headed next.

Yesterday, we explained San Francisco’s fraught relationship with the tech industry. Tech workers weren’t always welcome in the eyes of many other residents, and when the COVID-19 pandemic began, a lot of them left, taking their dollars with them. But on a recent Thursday evening, organizers of a block party downtown were trying to bring people back. Marketplace’s Lily Jamali spoke to Manny Yekutiel and Katy Birnbaum about their efforts to revive the city’s downtown.

Cities across the country are still trying to recover after the COVID-19 pandemic changed how and where many of us work, leaving big holes in downtown office districts. San Francisco, once teeming with tech workers, is no exception. But few cities have suffered the sustained reputational damage that San Francisco has. Marketplace’s Lily Jamali recently visited the city to meet with Heather Knight, The New York Times’ San Francisco bureau chief. Knight, who has been covering the city for more than two decades, offered her take on San Francisco’s image problem, economic situation and tech culture.

In the past week or so, Nvidia’s stock finally encountered the law of gravity — what goes up must eventually come down, at least a little bit. And we look under the hood of artificial intelligence companies that aren’t necessarily making headlines. Plus, the Supreme Court ruled against Republican-led states that accused the federal government of coercing social media companies into suppressing content. But first, major music labels, including Universal, Sony and Warner, are suing two startups that produce AI-generated music. The labels accuse Suno and Udio of using copyrighted works scraped from the internet to train their AI models. Marketplace’s Lily Jamali speaks with Anita Ramaswamy, columnist at The Information, for her takes on these stories in this week’s Marketplace Tech Bytes: Week in Review.

It feels like eons ago, but during a town hall on violence in America in 1994, then-President Bill Clinton took to MTV to reach the nation’s youth. Clinton’s openness to MTV and what The New York Times called “other unconventional media” had helped pave his path to the White House two years earlier. Fast-forward to today, and even reluctant politicians use TikTok to reach younger voters — President Joe Biden is no exception. His first post came just ahead of this year’s Super Bowl. We invited Marketplace’s senior Washington correspondent, Kimberly Adams, and Joshua Scacco, professor of political communication and director of the Center for Sustainable Democracy at the University of South Florida, to discuss the evolution of political messaging with Marketplace’s Lily Jamali. Scacco said Clinton’s MTV moment informed how future presidents, including his successor, George W. Bush, have engaged with Americans.

This week, we’ve been taking stock of how tech has both helped and harmed Americans trying to get abortions in the two years since the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade. After the Dobbs decision, some experts warned consumers that menstrual tracking apps would provide a means of surveilling abortion seekers. There was even a social media campaign on what was then Twitter advising people to delete their period trackers. But it’s turned out that the threat to privacy isn’t limited to those apps. Other digital data can actually be more likely to reveal an illegal abortion. That’s according to Albert Fox Cahn, founder of the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project. He told Marketplace’s Lily Jamali that everyday consumer apps generate sensitive data that can be used for abortion surveillance.

After the U.S. Supreme Court took away the federal right to abortion two years ago, telehealth has helped provide ongoing access, including to people in states where abortion is now banned. That was our subject Monday. Now we are looking into apps that link patients with abortion providers. Julie F. Kay, executive director at the Abortion Coalition for Telemedicine, told Marketplace’s Lily Jamali that digital privacy protections are far from equal across these services.

Two years ago this week, the Supreme Court ruled that abortions are not constitutionally protected in the U.S., a decision that would draw protests across the country. Since then, 14 states have outlawed abortions. Still, some people in those states have been able to cut through barriers to get abortions via telehealth, according to a recent report from the research project #WeCount. Usually, this requires a virtual visit with a telehealth care provider. The provider assesses the patient and gets their information, then can mail them mifepristone and misoprostol, which aid in ending a pregnancy. The Supreme Court preserved access to mifepristone in a ruling this month, which means it can still be prescribed and mailed to patients. Marketplace’s Lily Jamali discussed the increase in telehealth abortions with Ushma Upadhyay, professor of OB-GYN and reproductive sciences at the University of California, San Francisco, and a coauthor of the #WeCount report.

Big Tech subscription services are once again in the crosshairs of the Federal Trade Commission, nonprofits with links to OpenAI are becoming less transparent, and Surgeon General Vivek Murthy is urging Congress to require warning labels on social media. Marketplace’s Lily Jamali speaks with Paresh Dave, senior writer at Wired magazine, for this week’s Tech Bytes: Week in Review

Picture this: The year is 2014. The song “Happy” by Pharrell Williams is playing on every top 100 station, and the Ellen DeGeneres star-studded Oscars selfie has just “broken Twitter.” As all of this is happening, a bunch of content creators in certain corners of social media are about to start making a whole lot of money. Culture reporter Steffi Cao recently wrote in The Ringer that 2014 was the year that shaped the internet we know today. Marketplace’s Lily Jamali spoke to her about what happened online 10 years ago.

Over the past decade, China has placed more and more restrictions on the lives of its citizens — tightening its hold over what people can do, read and say.

When Bei Zhenying’s husband was arrested and sentenced to seven years in prison for “smearing” the country’s political system, she was left to pick up the pieces of his life. She now believes that her husband was the writer behind one of the most mysterious blogs on the Chinese internet, which for 12 years had ridiculed the ruling Communist Party from within the country.

Vivian Wang, a China correspondent for The Times, tells the story of the couple.

Guest: Vivian Wang, a China correspondent for The New York Times.

Background reading: 

• China took Bei Zhenying’s husband. She was left to uncover his secret cause.
• China’s search engines have more than 66,000 rules controlling content.

For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. Transcripts of each episode will be made available by the next workday.

Tuesday marks one month since the Palestinian militant group Hamas attacked Israel, killing 1,400 people and taking hundreds of hostages. Israel has responded by bombarding the Gaza Strip and killing more than 10,000 people there, according to the Ministry of Health in Gaza. The Israeli government has shut off power and fuel supplies to the more than 2 million people, mostly Palestinians, in Gaza. This weekend, Gazans suffered the third internet and phone blackout since Israel declared war on Hamas. Just over the border in Egypt, journalist Mirna El Helbawi has been working to enable people in Gaza to stay online and connected to the rest of the world. She’s part of a small group collecting donations of so-called eSIMs, which let users activate a cellphone plan on a mobile network without needing an actual SIM card.

Andrew Cushen is the Engagement Director at InternetNZ and leads the Community, Events and Communications teams ~

I speak for myself when I say that I take the internet and everything it affords for granted. These days, at least in terms of access, it’s not often that I think twice about grabbing my smartphone, messaging a friend, scrolling through apps, purchasing something via online banking or downloading and listening to a podcast (hi!) - but as we’ll explore today, not everyone is included in this powerful internet space. And not being included can have massive repercussions, which will only increase as our lives and our world barrel towards an increasingly digital future.

Our guest today is the very engaging Engagement Director of InternetNZ, Andrew Cushen, who has over 15 years experience in managing relationships, messages and issues across the Internet, telco and tech sectors. InternetNZ is a non-profit organization who are the guardians of the .nz domain names. They also have the social mission of creating an internet for New Zealanders that is safe, accessible and good, and a big part of their work advocates for digital inclusion.

In this episode, Andrew and I discuss what digital inclusion means, what some of the different elements of digital inclusion are and the straightforward, challenging and sometimes complex hurdles that exist within each of those elements.

This conversation with Andrew makes it hugely apparent that although many of us can leverage and do enjoy what the internet affords, in an increasingly digital world, we must ensure that we are not leaving anyone behind - but of equal importance is making sure that the internet is a safe and trustworthy place in which to be.

Although InternetNZ is a New Zealand based organization, this episode may provide some inspiration for ideas to pursue in relation to digital inclusion wherever you are in the world.

Shownotes:

You can learn more about InternetNZ by checking out their website. For specific info about Digital Inclusion, click here.

InternetNZ also support this show, which means that I am able to keep creating and you are able to keep listening to the different perspectives that are presented here at Selfie Reflective - so on behalf of us all, thanks a tonne, InternetNZ!

Tweet your thoughts on this episode to @selfiereflect or email selfiereflective@gmail.com

Blair Levin is one of the world’s foremost experts on internet access policy. In this episode, Blair and Matt discuss the lessons we can learn about internet access from experience with the pandemic so far, how broadband policy might look different in a Biden Administration, and the challenges of being a grandparent during the pandemic.

• Recent articles by Blair:

• National Broadband Plan: https://www.fcc.gov/general/national-broadband-plan

Nav Grewal tells us how she has transferred her skills in physiotherapy to virtual services. How to serve our community from home? LEARN HERE

Feel free to reach and find Nav in Instagram
@myvirtualwellness