With help from Cristiano Lima, John Hendel and Tim Starks
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— Facebook pushes scrutiny aside: The company’s launch of “Facebook Shops” and acquisition of Giphy have made one thing clear: neither political headwinds nor competition from Silicon Valley neighbors have deterred the social network’s expansion.
— Back in action: The Senate Commerce Committee holds its first markup in more than two months today to address the FCC inspector general nomination and a bill to help the Commerce Department up its IT game.
— POLITICO Q&A: E&C’s top Republican, Greg Walden, told POLITICO that lawmakers have all but missed their chance to move forward federal privacy legislation this Congress, accusing Democrats of not making it enough of a priority.
GREETINGS, TECHLINGS: IT’S WEDNESDAY. WELCOME TO MORNING TECH! I’m your host, Alexandra Levine.
What’s happening in Washington’s tech circles? Drop me a line at [email protected] or @Ali_Lev. An event for our calendar? Send details to [email protected]. Anything else? Full team info below. And don’t forget: Add @MorningTech and @PoliticoPro on Twitter.
PROGRAMMING NOTE: Due to the Memorial Day weekend, Morning Tech will not publish on Monday, May 25. It will return Tuesday, May 26.
FACEBOOK: SCRUTINY, WHAT SCRUTINY? — If Facebook is sweating the intense scrutiny from Washington over its growing power, you couldn’t tell from the social network’s latest expansion decisions. The tech giant on Tuesday unveiled its biggest push into e-commerce to date, rolling out a new online storefront for business owners that could put it in direct competition with other industry titans like Amazon. The move follows Facebook’s recent announcements that it’s buying animated images company Giphy for a reported $400 million and growing its virtual video conference offerings in a bid to challenge the upstart Zoom.
— The view from Zuck in Silicon Valley: Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg touted the announcement as part of the company’s “efforts to help with the economic recovery around Covid-19.” And while he acknowledged in an interview with Bloomberg that the move may bring political headwinds, he said that alone shouldn’t stop them. “Any new thing that we do is going to have scrutiny,” Zuckerberg said. “That’s certainly something we think about in everything we do. But at the same time, I don’t think you can let the fact that there will be scrutiny and questions prevent you from doing things that you think are going to be good.”
— The view from Washington: The company’s rationales for its recent expansions aren’t landing with critical lawmakers, who say the moves have troublingly given the tech giant more access to new troves of user data. “These days Facebook is starting to look an awful lot like WeChat, a one-stop surveillance shop for the Chinese government,” Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) told MT in a statement. “Only Mark Zuckerberg would think that’s a good thing.” Facebook’s acquisition of Giphy was met by similar blowback in Washington.
IS COVID-19 FUELING SOCIAL MEDIA EXTREMISM? — That question will be a key talking point at a virtual forum today held by the House Homeland Security Committee, whose leaders have grilled major platforms on their efforts to crack down on extremist content. “Terrorists’ use of the internet has been magnified by this public health crisis, with social media and gaming platforms increasingly being used for recruitment and propaganda here and around the world — particularly as people spend more and more time online at home,” Rep. Max Rose (D-N.Y.), who is co-hosting the session, said in his prepared remarks for the forum, and which were shared with MT.
— ‘Conspiracy bingo’ all over again?: The event will also feature remarks from Anti-Defamation League CEO Jonathan Greenblatt and Soufan Group CEO Ali Soufan. Greenblatt in his planned remarks warns that extremists right now “are using fear — stoked by widespread anxieties about health and job security — to amplify their dangerous, hateful messages,” including online. The event follows a POLITICO report by Mark Scott and Steven Overly that outlined how the coronavirus outbreak is “providing a global rallying cry for conspiracy theorists and far-right extremists on both sides of the Atlantic.”
TECH QUOTE DU JOUR: PICHAI ON DORSEY — ”I’m glad Twitter is running a kind of one-end-of-the-spectrum experiment. So thanks, Jack. It’s good to see that end of the spectrum,” Google CEO Sundar Pichai said in an interview with The Verge, when pressed about whether he will follow Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey’s lead in telling his employees they can work from home forever. Pichai said productivity is down in some parts of Google, so “we’re probably going to be conservative in it. We want to make sure things work well.”
SENATE COMMERCE TO VOTE ON AIRWAVES, FCC IG — In its first markup since March 11, the Senate Commerce Committee will vote this morning to advance the nomination of John Chase Johnson to be FCC inspector general as well as the committee leaders’ Spectrum IT Modernization Act, S. 3717, which they recently introduced with Armed Services Committee leaders.
— The bill would require the Commerce Department’s National Telecommunications and Information Administration, which is at the center of various administration fights over 5G, to submit a plan to Congress for revamping NTIA’s IT systems. Verizon senior VP Robert Fisher recently offered his endorsement, saying the bill strikes the right balance by seeking to update government agency tech tools without upending the U.S. regulatory model.
INCOMING: MORE ‘TECH TASK FORCE’ ACTION — Rep. Michael McCaul of Texas, the top Republican on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, on Tuesday designated technology as one of the “pillars” of his newly formed China Task Force, and named GOP Reps. Adam Kinzinger (Ill.), Chris Stewart (Utah), Elise Stefanik (N.Y.), Mike Gallagher (Wis.), John Joyce (Pa.) and Denver Riggleman (Va.) as tech co-chairs. “Each of these pillars represents a key focus area where U.S. leadership and democratic values counteract Chinese Communist Party (CCP) malfeasance globally,” McCaul said in a statement.
POLITICO Q&A: E&C’S GREG WALDEN — As the next many (many, many?) months remain in limbo in Washington and across the country, the House Energy and Commerce Committee’s top Republican, Rep. Greg Walden, spoke with my colleague Tim Starks about what more the Oregon congressman hopes to achieve before retiring at the end of this Congress. On the tech front, Walden said Congress almost surely missed its chance to move forward federal privacy legislation, and he criticized Democrats for not making it more of a priority. “It’s politics more than policy,” Walden said of the hold-up on a nationwide data privacy bill.
— “Senator Wicker and I were committed to moving forward on bicameral and bipartisan legislation [in] this space, and doing it in early 2019,” Walden told POLITICO. “But guess what: I don’t have the gavel. I have one on the shelf. And I’m going to be Chairman in exile. So, you know, we’ve tried to work with our colleagues, I just don’t think they feel the urgency some of us do on setting national standards.”
— “There’s also a reluctance, if you’re from California, to overturn what California has done,” Walden said in reference to the state’s landmark Consumer Privacy Act, which took effect in January. “I’m not saying you necessarily overturn it — we could come together on improvements, or build off of it — but I just don’t see it happening during Covid, and given the short few legislative days ahead. I don’t see it happening during the pandemic. They kind of got everything they want already.”
— Walden’s grim assessment of a nationwide privacy bill comes weeks after top Senate Republicans and congressional Democrats floated separate privacy proposals tied to Covid-19.
Nicol Turner Lee was promoted from fellow to senior fellow at the Brookings Institution’s Center for Technology Innovation. … Leigh Ann Benicewicz, former senior communications manager at Reddit, has joined Cloudflare as director of public relations.
Tech activism: “Google says it will no longer build custom artificial intelligence tools for speeding up oil and gas extraction, separating itself from cloud computing rivals Microsoft and Amazon,” AP reports — a move that follows a report from the environmental activist group Greenpeace documenting the tech giants’ work for oil companies.
Plus: Some GOP backlash.
Dispatch from Canada: “Canada’s top competition enforcement agency says Facebook Inc. will pay a C$9 million penalty after the watchdog concluded the company made false or misleading claims about the privacy of Canadians’ personal information on its platforms,” POLITICO reports. (That’s a fine equal to nearly $6.5 million.)
Amazon’s biggest outbreak: “A warehouse in the foothills of the Poconos has had more known Covid-19 cases than any of Amazon’s others after missing early opportunities to protect workers,” NYT reports.
Palantir, please: The Department of Veterans Affairs is the latest agency to lean on Palantir to support its coronavirus surveillance efforts, FedScoop reports, using the company’s software to monitor hotspots and make decisions accordingly.
While you were quarantining: “Your face mask selfies could be training the next facial recognition tool,” CNET reports.
Tech for good: Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt and his wife, Wendy, donated nearly $5 million to NPR to create regional newsrooms and boost local coverage, NPR reports.
Podcast OTD: The Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, an industry-friendly think tank, is getting into the podcast game with “Innovation Files,” which just launched and will explore the intersection of tech, innovation and public policy.
Tips, comments, suggestions? Send them along via email to our team: Bob King ([email protected], @bkingdc), Heidi Vogt ([email protected], @HeidiVogt), Nancy Scola ([email protected], @nancyscola), Steven Overly ([email protected], @stevenoverly), John Hendel ([email protected], @JohnHendel), Cristiano Lima ([email protected], @viaCristiano), Alexandra S. Levine ([email protected], @Ali_Lev), and Leah Nylen ([email protected], @leah_nylen).
TTYL and go wash your hands.
