Why default settings are important to a search engine’s success

Streaming giants Spotify and SoundCloud were both founded in Stockholm, and over the past two decades the Swedish capital has developed a reputation as a European hub for companies blending music and innovation. So why does this small Nordic city punch above its weight in music tech, and are start-ups still able to thrive there after a rocky few years for the global economy? The BBC’s Maddy Savage reports.

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

💡Une phrase à retenir ▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬   
Microsoft aurait proposé 100% de ses revenus publicitaires à Apple pour être le moteur de recherche par defaut sur Safari, sans succès. Dur!

📢L'épisode du jour ▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬   

Pour ce 74ème épisode, évoquons les relations ambigues entre Apple et Google. Côté pile, les 2 géants se font la guerre sur le positionnement d'entreprise et côté face, elles coopèrent. Retour sur 3 cas

* Google rémunère Apple pour être présent sur Safari: C'est sûrement l'annonce du procès antitrust en cours. Google remunèrait chaque année Apple à hauteur de 18 milliards de dollars pour être le moteur de recherche par defaut sur Safari, soit 36% de ses revenus publicitaires ainsi générés. Des accords similaires existent d'ailleurs avec Samsung & Mozilla.

Est-ce illégal? C'est tout l'enjeu du procès. Je note toutefois que Microsoft a essayé d'établir ce même type d'accord sans succès. 

Quoi qu'il en soit, pour Google et Apple ce partenariat est ultra stratégique, de manière à ce que les 2 puissent conserver leur position de leader

* Apple met des batôns dans les roues à Google pour le tracking: En se positionnant très tôt comme l'acteur qui défend les données personnelles, Apple s'est constitué comme l'anti-Google. En 2017, premier coup dur avec le déploiement d'ITP qui vise à bloquer les cookiers tiers au-delà de 1 jour. En 2019, seconde lame avec l'ITP 2.1 qui bloque les cookiers first party au-delà de 7 jours. Résultat, c'est devenu un enfer de suivre les résultats sur ses audiences Safari, même si le géant de Mountain View a rapidement déployé des rustines: conversion linker, consent mode, suivi avancé des conversions

* Pas d'entente sur la partie applicative: Aujourd'hui le marché français est 2/3 Android et 1/2 iOS avec des paniers moyens à l'avantage d'Apple. En conséquence de quoi, la firme à la pomme n'a jamais voulu partager ses inventaires publicitaires à Google et souhaite rester maître dans la gestion de sa régie. Ainsi, pour un annonceur qui souhaite faire de la sponsorisation pour son app, le passage par 2 plateformes media est obligatoire

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1. Abonnez-vous 🔔 pour ne rien manquer

2. Recevez les épisodes en avant-première grâce à la Liste VIP (gratuit)

3. Laissez un avis sur ma page Apple Podcast  🙏  

On today’s Tech Bytes, our review of the week’s biggest headlines, Meta strikes a preliminary deal with Chinese videogame maker Tencent, giving the company a chance to return to China 14 years after Facebook was banned there.

We also talk about the ransomware attack on a major Chinese bank, and how the Biden administration thinks American companies should respond to cyber extortion.

But first, a look at the recent revelations about Google and Apple’s complicated relationship. Earlier in its federal antitrust trial, Google said it paid Apple $18 billion a year to be the default search engine on iPhone web browsers. The government said that’s $18 billion worth of evidence of anticompetitive behavior. This week, a witness for Google accidentally disclosed the company was sharing 36% of ad revenue it made from Safari browser searches with Apple. Whoops!

Marketplace’s Matt Levin is joined by Anita Ramaswamy, columnist at Reuters Breakingviews, for her take on these stories.

Déjà débouté l’an passé, Google n’a encore une fois pas obtenu gain de cause devant le tribunal de l’Union européenne. Mercredi, celui-ci a validé l’amende infligée en 2018 par Bruxelles au moteur de recherche, pour abus de position dominante de son système d’exploitation mobile Android. Tout juste a-t-il légèrement revu à la baisse le montant de la sanction, la ramenant de 4,3 à 4,1 milliards d’euros. 

Cette décision, qui peut encore faire l’objet d’un appel devant la Cour de l’Union, la plus haute juridiction européenne, représente un important succès pour Margrethe Vestager, la Commissaire à la concurrence engagée dans une bataille féroce contre les géants américains du numérique.

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It's been a big week in the tech policy world, as the CEOs of Apple, Amazon, Google, and Facebook appeared before Congress to testify on the competitive dynamics in the tech sector. In this episode, Matt and Gene Kimmelman (Senior Advisor at Public Knowledge) discuss who performed well in this trial, some of the key questions that were raised, and what yesterday's hearing means for the future of tech policy. Listen in.