Tech cold war
Through the technological products that appear to us every day from Silicon Valley in San Francisco, California, it seems that we are facing an amazing world competing in the service of humanity, but the files being considered by the American judiciary reveal hidden battles similar to the Cold War in order to seize control of the market and consumers.
The relationship between Apple and Google is one of the basic features of the image of Silicon Valley in the modern era. For decades, the two companies have mixed enthusiastic cooperation with fierce competition, an example of which appeared when Apple co-founder Steve Jobs threatened that he would wage “war.” "Thermonuclear" attack on Google when it entered the field of smartphone manufacturing, according to a report by Bloomberg.
Since 2005, Google has paid billions of dollars to Apple to make it the main search engine on the Safari browser, a deal that brought together the two companies, which have a market value of trillions of dollars, in ways that raised some questions in Washington.
Following a meeting held by the two companies in 2018 to contribute to increasing the profitability of that deal, a senior Apple employee wrote to his counterpart at Google, “Our vision is to work as if we were one company.”
This message is a sample of potentially incriminating internal communications that came to light as a result of an antitrust lawsuit filed by the US Department of Justice against Google, a subsidiary of Alphabet.
The US authorities accuse the giant search company of blocking the way for competitors through deals such as those it concluded with Apple. This case is the first time since the lawsuit against Microsoft more than two decades ago that allegations of monopoly actions in Silicon Valley have been brought before a federal court.
Dismantling trust
The US Department of Justice is working to open cases related to Silicon Valley companies to dismantle monopolies targeting the technology sector
This moment marks the beginning of a new era of monopoly dismantling targeting the technology sector. The US Department of Justice filed another antitrust lawsuit against Google over its dominance in the advertising field.
The Federal Trade Commission, a sister agency that is more aggressive than ever under the leadership of its head, Lina Khan, is seeking to dismantle Facebook’s owner, Meta Platforms.
Expectations indicate that the committee will also file a lawsuit against Amazon for antitrust violations during this month, while the Justice Department’s investigation into Apple may result in another lawsuit during this year.
The first trial, scheduled to last 10 weeks, focuses only on allegations of Google's monopoly in the Internet search engine market, but if the Ministry of Justice wins it, it may seek to separate Alphabet's activity in search engines from other products, including the Android operating system and Google Maps.
If achieved, it would be the largest forced split of a US company since the breakup of AT&T in 1984. Regardless of the outcome of the case, the trial could harm not only Google, but its business partners such as Apple, whose executives would be forced to , They will testify and their emails will be scrutinized in public hearings.
Monopoly charges
Kent Walker, Director of Legal Affairs at Alphabet: Google's relationship with Apple is based on a mixture of cooperation and competition at the same time
Kent Walker, Director of Legal Affairs at Alphabet: Google's relationship with Apple is based on a mixture of cooperation and competition at the same time
The Department of Justice and 52 attorneys general representing US states and territories accuse Google of paying billions of dollars to maintain its monopoly in the search engine sector through deals with competing companies in the technology sector, smartphone makers and wireless service providers.
Google has concluded many such deals, but its deal with Apple is the largest. The deal, which the two parties concluded 18 years ago, made Google the main search engine for Apple and gave Apple up to 50 percent of Google’s advertising revenue from searches conducted by users of the engine. Apple's Safari search.
Google has rode Apple's wave of success in smartphones, and law enforcement has said the company now has a 90 percent share of the total search engine market. At the same time, Apple receives billions of dollars annually from its relationship with Google, and estimates indicate that it obtained $18 billion in 2022 alone, according to analysts at Sanford C. Bernstein & Co.”
The US Department of Justice's claim is similar to what was stated in the Microsoft case in the late 1990s. That case focused on Microsoft's practice of adding the Internet Explorer browser to computers running the Windows operating system, and then imposing technical obstacles to prevent computer manufacturers and users from installing competing browsers such as Netscape. Google rejects such comparisons.
Alphabet's director of legal affairs, Kent Walker, argued that Google's deals did not entail any technical barriers to switching to competing browsers, unlike Microsoft's browser presets at the time, and the process was simple.
“People don't use Google because they have to, they use it because they want to,” Walker said.
Google likened the search engine agreements to those that breakfast cereal companies conclude with grocery stores to obtain premium space on the shelves.
Automatic settings
The power of presets in the technology sector has been the subject of a large amount of research. Eric Johnson, a professor at Columbia Business School who studies decision-making mechanisms, said that the presence of presets can influence consumer choices even if the technical barriers to switching to other settings are low.
For example, 82 percent of participants in one study agreed to become an organ donor if the consent box was previously selected, compared to only 42 percent when the no consent box was pre-selected.
“It's not just about the effort involved in pressing a button,” said Johnson, who has spent 30 years researching how the offer of choices changes consumer behavior. It's about mental effort. “The crux of the matter here is that people don’t really want to think there is a choice or don’t even realize it.”
Apple demonstrated this power in 2012, when it changed the main mapping program on iOS devices and replaced it with its own mapping program, which people widely saw as less efficient.
Google analyzed the number of users it lost as a result of this change, and the amount of revenue it might lose if Apple switched to a different search engine.
The US Department of Justice said last year that this analysis inspired Google to renew the search engine deal when its term expired after 10 years.
One of the main inspirations for the original partnership was utilitarianism, according to Apple executive Eddie Cue. At that time, Windows and Microsoft's Internet Explorer browser were the market leaders.
Apple sought to provide an alternative, launching the Safari browser with new features, including a built-in search bar.
“The idea originally involved providing an easy way for users not to need to type the link address if they conducted a search in this field,” Q said in 2022 while testifying in the case. “We have eliminated this entire intermediate step.”
When Google and Apple concluded their deal in 2015, the Safari browser represented 1.3 percent of the browser and search engine market, but the browser's share rose with the success of the company's phones.
By 2014, Google was paying Apple about $1 billion annually to make Google's search engine the main engine on the Safari browser, according to a figure presented during a hearing in an unrelated case.
The deals, in which search engines push to be the main driver on browsers and mobile phones, are not unusual.
In addition to Safari, Google is the main search engine on the Firefox browser, which was developed by Mozilla's non-profit organization, through a deal that represented 83 percent of Mozilla's revenues in 2021.
Verizon, an American telecommunications company, agreed to pre-install Microsoft's Bing browser as its main search engine, and AT&T concluded a deal with Yahoo, but by 2011, AT&T, Sprint, and “T-Mobile” and “Verizon” have deals with Google that bring them between 15 and 40 percent of advertising revenues on devices that telecommunications service companies sell to customers.
In 2011, a Google executive wrote in an email included in court records in that case, that strategy was important because “otherwise, Bing or Yahoo could steal our Android search distribution at any time.” Our philosophy is that we pay revenue share versus exclusivity.”
Google dominance
In 2012, a Google executive told Federal Trade Commission investigators that the company's search volume could drop by as much as 50 percent if Apple replaced Google with its Bing search engine. “We pay for the promotional site and presets,” the FTC memo, leaked in 2012 and published by Politico in 2021, quoted him as saying.
By 2020, when the Department of Justice and states filed lawsuits, they estimated that Google was the main search engine in 90 percent of browsers on phones and in 83 percent of browsers on computers.
Google has never provided disclosures on how much it pays in those deals, but according to an FTC memo, the company paid between $10.9 and $13.1 billion in 2012 to maintain its status as a major browser.
In securities filings, the company disclosed total payments, including what it made to partners under revenue-sharing deals and the amounts it paid to website publishers and YouTube founders for advertisements. Those payments totaled $48.95 billion in 2022.
Extensive cooperation
When Apple and Google renegotiated their deal in 2016, the revised agreement between the two parties expanded the use of Alphabet's search engine to include Siri, which was using Microsoft's Bing search engine, as well as Spotlight, a search feature that helps find programs. And files on Apple devices.
The US Department of Justice said in its complaint that Apple CEO Tim Cook and Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai, who participated in those negotiations, met again two years later to discuss the possibility of the two companies working together to drive search revenue growth.
The director of legal affairs at Alphabet said that there is nothing wrong with such deals, and that Google believes that its relationship with Apple is a relationship based on a mixture of cooperation and competition at the same time. He added, "We work with them in a range of diverse fields and make our products and services available on iPhones, and at the same time we compete with them."
Although such a deal might have seemed benign in 2005, the situation has changed now that the two companies have become very large, according to Rebecca Allensworth of Vanderbilt Law School. The multi-billion dollar deal buys them a shield against any future competition. “You're not supposed to be able to cooperate with your competitors,” Allensworth said.
Washington : The Visa Photojournalism Festival discusses technical development
There are images that are very realistic, but they are not real
Although technology companies are promoting the benefits that humanity can gain from artificial intelligence products, especially after it has expanded to include all medical and artistic sectors, media workers are increasingly concerned about the interference of generative intelligence in the field of image making, which could contribute to the public’s fallacy about some the facts.
Artificial intelligence has many potential advantages that photojournalists can benefit from, but it also poses a threat to the media’s mission of disseminating the truth to the public if clear limits are not drawn for its use, according to a discussion at the Visa Photojournalism Festival, currently in its 35th session in France. .
As the use of artificial intelligence tools increases steadily, there is growing concern about their use by people who take credit for what the machine produces.
American photojournalist Laura Morton stated that “it is not possible to stop the development of these technologies,” which she felt herself during a report on the boom in technology companies in the American West and the increasing number of experts working in the field of artificial intelligence in Silicon Valley.
From this standpoint, she stressed the need for “major online platforms to bear responsibility for not allowing these images to be published in an incorrect manner.”
Earlier, a photographer won a competition by submitting a photo he created through artificial intelligence as a photo he took himself, but he had good intentions and returned his prize after he revealed what he had done.
The ability to modify images and change their real elements is more dangerous than generating images from scratch by artificial intelligence
Morton, like most of the speakers in the panel discussion that was held on Friday afternoon within the framework of the festival held in the city of Perpignan in southern France, including journalists and Internet workers, highlighted the importance of “humanizing” the tools for using artificial intelligence and the methods for using them.
During the panel discussion, a number of images generated by artificial intelligence were displayed on a large screen, covering, for example, the war in Ukraine, the earthquake in Turkey, and former US President Donald Trump, in addition to the work of American photographer Michael Christopher Brown entitled “90 Miles” about the Cubans crossing into Florida, noting that this The crossing was not filmed.
Swiss photojournalist Nils Ackermann considered that his colleague Braun “did not want to mislead people, and was transparent about his work.”
"It's a good way to wake us up by saying that it is possible in this era to create very realistic images," he added, "but they are not real."
He believed that this possibility was “very dangerous,” stressing the importance of learning in enabling one to scrutinize the source of the image, in order to avoid the risk of “refraining from looking at the images” on the “assuming that they are forged.”
The matter does not stop at images generated from nothing. Rather, “the most deceptive” in the opinion of the co-founder of the “Glosia” platform for artificial intelligence services, Alexander Lavallee, is the ability to “modify images and change elements in them” based on a real basis. “This is the danger,” he said.
The Secretary General of Google France, Benoit Tabaka, was keen to clarify that “artificial intelligence is not generative artificial intelligence,” and that it “already exists in the lives of all photographers,” and in their equipment, whether in terms of “automatic focus or light adjustment” in photographic machines, or “Automatic retouching” of cell phone shots.
However, entities working in the field of the Internet are seeking to develop tools to monitor images generated by artificial intelligence, contribute to monitoring and examining the quality of the images generated, and ensure that the technologies are applied ethically and legally.
Statistical techniques such as frequency analysis, color analysis, and structure analysis can be applied to detect any blurs or defects in the generated images.
These tools are based on “traceability,” meaning placing a fingerprint or watermark on images that allows them to be “distinguished” so that the general public knows that they are the product of artificial intelligence, and that the scenes they contain “never existed.”
Thierry Mino, head of the photography department at the economic daily newspaper “Les Zicos,” stressed that creating technological tools is not enough. Rather, there is a “human” role for photographers who enjoy “image culture,” which enables them to “monitor details” that raise doubts about the authenticity of the photo. Image.
He explained that it is also possible to use artificial intelligence to restore old photographs, or to digitize information that was handwritten on them in the past and turn it into metadata, or to analyze aerial photographs to detect the presence of mines or secret landing strips, for example.
A number of speakers considered that artificial intelligence could be a way out of the crisis facing traditional media, due to reader dissatisfaction and the boom in free content on the Internet.
Gregoire Lemarchand believed that “it may be an opportunity for major photography agencies that can add a label to real images, such as attaching the phrase ‘free of artificial intelligence,’ which subsequently enables them to commercialize real images.”
Niels Ackermann said, “Generating fake images has become so easy that it provides an excellent market for vectors of real images that is, for media outlets that are not good at monetizing their presence in the age of the Internet.”
As for Thierry Mino, he called on the media to be prepared because “generative artificial intelligence will enter editorial departments,” as it can produce newspaper articles automatically based on available data and information, and it can also be used to create quick reports on current events or basic information.
Artificial intelligence can help journalists analyze huge data and extract trends and patterns from it to produce more accurate and detailed reports. It can also be used to verify the authenticity of information and news and detect fake news.
Despite the benefits of using artificial intelligence in the field of journalistic editing, issues related to ethics, credibility and responsibility must be taken into account when using these technologies, and ensuring that journalists play an effective role in supervising and directing these tools to ensure the delivery of quality and reliable journalistic content.
Thierry Minoux said that as long as journalists report “what is real, there is no reason to use artificial intelligence.”