SWAY: Should Big Tech stay out of politics?

 

 

Kara Swisher talks to Brad Smith, President of Microsoft, about the company’s new guidelines for political contributions, the six stages of antitrust grief, and how corporations and the and the US government missed the Solar Winds hack.

 

Topics include Australia’s antitrust / monopoly litigation against Google’s practice of monetizing new's publishers content. The Australian proposal / solution has the potential to be a game changer. Europe, Canada, and the USA are all watching this play out. Microsoft, Google, Apple will likely all be affected.

 

Apple leverages new's content producers access to it's Apple News(+) by taking a 50/50 cut, which is tough, but it's still better than what Google or Facebook compensate to those organizations doing the shoe leather investigative journalism.

 

Swisher and Smith also discuss the complex competitive global landscape in which Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft and others compete.

 

Finally, they discuss the Solar Winds hack.

 

UPDATE

Kara Swisher and NY Times cybersecurity reporter Nicole Perlroth debrief on Kara’s conversation with Microsoft’s Brad Smith. The focus here is on the Solar Winds hack and the increasing risk the United States faces from cyber threats.

 

Quote of the Day from Nicole quoting former Google CEO Eric Schmidt on Twitter’s terms and speech platform policy: “I believe in free speech, but I don’t believe in free speech for robots."