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(Bloomberg) — Explore what’s moving the global economy in the new season of the Stephanomics podcast. Subscribe via Apple Podcast, Spotify or Pocket Cast.Discomfort with female leadership in politics and business remains widespread, with less than hal…
November 19, 2019Read More
2018-2020 Ford F-Series trucks recalled for battery cable, headlight issues The Car Connection
November 19, 2019Read More
Tuesday: Data kept by the city reveals a more alarming portrait than a point-in-time count. Also: The streaming era has arrived.
November 19, 2019Read More
(Bloomberg Opinion) — Yandex NV, Russia’s biggest technology company, has figured out how to avoid nationalization or a foreign ownership ban. Big Tech in the U.S. should pay attention: The governance scheme Yandex appears to have worked out in consultation with the Russian government could be a good solution for companies that are de facto public utilities under private control.Yandex, set up in 2000 to monetize a search engine developed in the 1990s by the team of co-founder Arkady Volozh, is as close as it gets in Russia to a Silicon Valley-style internet giant. For a long time, it mainly aped Google’s services for the Russian market, but it has grown into a conglomerate that developed or bought up other businesses, from marketplaces to delivery projects. It’s not just Russia’s Google but Russia’s Amazon and Russia’s Uber, too (it first outcompeted Uber’s Russian operation, then swallowed it up). In fact, when Russian President Vladimir Putin signed a “sovereign internet” law earlier this year, officially meant to keep web services functioning inside Russia should the U.S. cut the country off from the worldwide computer network, many said Yandex would be that “sovereign internet.”Yandex’s size and its ability to match the tech giants have made the company strategic for the Russian government. As early as 2009, Volozh had to protect Yandex from nationalization or from being taken over by one of Putin’s billionaire friends by issuing a “golden share,” which could block the sale of more than 25% of the company’s stock, to state-controlled Sberbank.But the government also could be helpful when Yandex needed it. In 2015, the Russian tech giant filed an antitrust complaint against Google, which had been eating into its market share on mobile, and in 2017 Google had to settle with the Russian antitrust authority, allowing Android smartphone vendors to install Yandex apps. Now, the Russian parliament is considering a bill that would ban the sale of phones and computers without pre-installed Russian software. Yandex would be the main beneficiary.In Putin’s mind, that kind of protection comes at a price: Yandex must guarantee that it will never fall under foreign control. The previous “golden share” arrangement didn’t quite rule that out. Volozh and top employees control the company’s Class B stock, which gives them 57% of the voting power. If those shares are sold or their owners die, Class B shares will automatically convert to Class A ones, which are traded on stock exchanges, and foreign shareholders will end up with the most voting power.In July, legislator Anton Gorelkin introduced a bill that would limit the foreign ownership of strategically important internet companies to 20%. Yandex opposed it, but the government approved it, and it became clear that the bill would be passed. So Volozh began working feverishly on a solution, which was finally announced on Monday “after many months of discussion,” as Volozh wrote in a letter to employees. The company has set up a special body called the Public Interests Foundation, made up of representatives of Russia’s top math, engineering and business schools (most of them owned by the state) and Russia’s big-business lobby, the Union of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs. The foundation will have two seats out of 12 on Yandex’s board of directors, and it will have a veto on all deals involving 10% or more of Yandex stock, big intellectual property sales and any transfer of Russian citizens’ personal data.Putin’s press secretary, Dmitry Peskov, denied that the Kremlin had taken part in the discussions mentioned in Volozh’s letter, but praised Yandex for appreciating the company’s “special responsibility” and the “special attention” on the part of the state that it enjoys. Immediately after the Yandex announcement, Gorelkin called the solution “elegant” and pulled his bill. All this was immediately reflected in a share price spike.This may read like a distinctively Russian story, in which a group of business founders is trying to avoid a state takeover and the Kremlin prefers not to establish formal control over the national tech champion while keeping a close eye on it. The schools provide a convenient smokescreen both for the government and for investors. But what Yandex has done isn’t only relevant within the context of Putin’s Russia. It could be seen as a template for Big Tech, even though Yandex’s market capitalization, at $13.2 billion, is only a fraction of Alphabet Inc.’s ($910.6 billion) or Facebook Inc.’s ($562.9 billion).These two companies that make up the internet’s advertising duopoly, are often discussed along with Amazon.com Inc. as public services rather than mere businesses by politicians on both the right and the left of the U.S. political spectrum. Last year, Republican Representative Steve King of Iowa proposed treating Google and Facebook as public utilities. Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, a leading Democratic presidential candidate, would break up some of the Big Tech companies and designate some as “platform utilities” that would be banned from sharing user data with third parties and required to treat all users equally.Obviously, the tech firms are opposed to such heavy-handed regulation, but what they do on their own only brings them closer to a confrontation with governments, both in the U.S. and in Europe. Facebook’s refusal to police misleading political advertising and Google’s data-sharing practices scream for some kind of state interference. Like Yandex, the companies could act preemptively to set up governance structures that would veto business ideas viewed as damaging to society’s interests. Vesting veto powers in councils made up of the representatives of top universities and nongovernmental organizations could accomplish that purpose. If such a structure can win approval even from an authoritarian regime such as the Russian one (with the caveat that academic institutions in Russia aren’t as independent as those in the West), it could probably satisfy most Big Tech critics in democracies, too. The alternative, as in Yandex’s case, could be far more restrictive.To contact the author of this story: Leonid Bershidsky at [email protected] contact the editor responsible for this story: Jonathan Landman at [email protected] column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.Leonid Bershidsky is Bloomberg Opinion’s Europe columnist. He was the founding editor of the Russian business daily Vedomosti and founded the opinion website Slon.ru.For more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.com/opinion©2019 Bloomberg L.P.
November 19, 2019Read More
Anti-government protesters blocked access to a second major commercial port in southern Iraq on Tuesday, as bridge closures effectively split the capital in half, causing citizens to rely on boats for transport to reach the other side of the city. Sin…
November 19, 2019Read More
Britain’s opposition Labour Party on Tuesday took aim at “obscene” billionaires, pledging a radical redistribution of wealth to cut the power of the super rich and to introduce policies including a pay cap at some companies. The Conservatives are prom…
November 19, 2019Read More
The U.S. Commerce Department’s Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS) on Nov. 18 extended a temporary general license 90 days to give mostly rural telecommunication services providers more time to continue their existing business deals with Huawei Techn…
November 19, 2019Read More
Over Next 5 Years, Walgreens Hopes to Provide 50 Million More Vaccines Through Get a Shot. Give a Shot. Campaign DEERFIELD, Ill.-(BUSINESS WIRE)-Walgreens and the United Nations Foundation’s Shot@Life campaign announced today that the Walgreens Get a Shot. Give a Shot. program has helped provide 50 million lifesaving vaccines to children around the world since […]
November 19, 2019Read More
The key thing for Trump and his senior advisors to recognize is that peace with North Korea is possible and a reduction of the threat from Kim is attainable. Here is how to achieve it.
November 19, 2019Read More
(Bloomberg) — The European Union is poised to say potential 5G suppliers will be evaluated based on their home country’s laws, a stance that could exclude Chinese businesses from some lucrative contracts for the advanced telecommunications networks.“F…
November 19, 2019Read More
Rudy Giuliani, the former New York mayor at the center of the impeachment investigation into the conduct of Ukraine policy, makes a living selling cybersecurity advice through his companies. President Donald Trump even named him the administration’s first informal “cybersecurity adviser.”But inside the National Security Council, officials expressed wonderment that Giuliani was running his “irregular channel” of Ukraine diplomacy over open cell lines and communications apps in Ukraine that the Russians have deeply penetrated.In his testimony to the House impeachment inquiry, Tim Morrison, who is leaving as the National Security Council’s head of Europe and Russia, recalled expressing astonishment to William B. Taylor Jr., who was sitting in as the chief U.S. diplomat in Ukraine, that the leaders of the “irregular channel” seemed to have little concern about revealing their conversations to Moscow.”He and I discussed a lack of, shall we say, OPSEC, that much of Rudy’s discussions were happening over an unclassified cellphone or, perhaps as bad, WhatsApp messages, and therefore you can only imagine who else knew about them,” Morrison testified. OPSEC is the government’s shorthand for operational security.He added: “I remember being focused on the fact that there were text messages, the fact that Rudy was having all of these phone calls over unclassified media,” he added. “And I found that to be highly problematic and indicative of someone who didn’t really understand how national security processes are run.”WhatsApp notes that its traffic is encrypted, meaning that even if it is intercepted in transit, it is of little use — which is why intelligence agencies, including the Russians, are working diligently to get inside phones to read the messages after they are deciphered.But far less challenging is figuring out the message of Giuliani’s partner, Gordon D. Sondland, the U.S. ambassador to the European Union, who held an open cellphone conversation with Trump from a restaurant in Ukraine, apparently loud enough for his table mates to overhear. And Trump’s own cellphone use has led U.S. intelligence officials to conclude that the Chinese — with whom he is negotiating a huge trade deal, among other sensitive topics — are doubtless privy to the president’s conversations.But Ukraine is a particularly acute case. It is the country where the Russians have so deeply compromised the communications network that in 2014 they posted on the internet conversations between a top Obama administration diplomat, Victoria Nuland, and the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine at the time, Geoffrey R. Pyatt. Their intent was to portray the Americans — not entirely inaccurately — as trying to manage the ouster of a corrupt, pro-Russian president of Ukraine.The incident made Nuland, who left the State Department soon after Trump’s election, “Patient Zero” in the Russian information-warfare campaign against the United States, before Moscow’s interference in the U.S. presidential election.But it also served as a warning that if you go to Ukraine, stay off communications networks that Moscow wired.That advice would seem to apply especially to Giuliani, who speaks around the world on cybersecurity issues. Ukraine was the petri dish for President Vladimir Putin of Russia, the place where he practiced the art of trying to change vote counts, initiating information warfare and, in two celebrated incidents, turning out the lights in parts of the country.Giuliani, impeachment investigators were told, was Trump’s interlocutor with the new Ukrainian government about opening investigations into the president’s political opponents. The simultaneous suspension of $391 million in military aid to Ukraine, which some have testified was on Trump’s orders, fulfilled Moscow’s deepest wish at a moment of ground war in eastern Ukraine and a daily, grinding cyberwar in the capital.It remains unknown why the Russians have not made any of these conversations public, assuming they possess them. But inside the intelligence agencies, the motives of Russian intelligence officers is a subject of heated speculation.A former senior U.S. intelligence official speculated that one explanation is that Giuliani and Sondland were essentially doing the Russians’ work for them. Holding up military aid — for whatever reason — assists the Russian “gray war” in eastern Ukraine and sows doubts in Kyiv that the United States is wholly supportive of Ukraine, a fear that many State Department and National Security Council officials have expressed in testimony.But Giuliani also was stoking an unsubstantiated conspiracy theory that Putin has engaged in, suggesting that someone besides Russia — in this telling, Ukrainian hackers who now supposedly possess a server that once belonged to the Democratic National Committee — was responsible for the hacking that ran from 2015 to 2016.Trump raised this possibility in his July 25 phone call with the new Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy. It was not the first time he had cast doubt on Russia’s involvement: In a call to a New York Times reporter moments after meeting Putin for the first time in Hamburg, Germany, in 2017, Trump endorsed Putin’s view that Russia is so good at cyberoperations that it would have never been caught. “That makes sense, doesn’t it?” he asked.He expressed doubts again in 2018, in a news conference with Putin in Helsinki, Finland. That was only days after the Justice Department indicted a dozen Russian intelligence officers for their role in the hack; the administration will not say if it now believes that indictment was flawed because there is evidence that Ukranians were responsible.Whether or not he believes Ukraine was involved, Giuliani certainly understood the risks of talking on open lines, particularly in a country with an active cyberwar.As a former prosecutor, he knows what the United States and its adversaries can intercept. In more recent years, he has spoken around the world on cybersecurity challenges. And as the president’s lawyer, he was a clear target.Giuliani said in a phone interview Monday that nothing he talked about on the phone or in texts was classified. “All of my conversations, I can say uniformly, were on an unclassified basis,” he said.His findings about what happened in Ukraine were “generated from my own investigations” and had nothing to do with the U.S. government, he said, until he was asked to talk with Kurt D. Volker, then the special envoy for Ukraine, in a conversation that is now part of the impeachment investigation. Volker will testify in public Tuesday.Giuliani said that he never “conducted a shadow foreign policy, I conducted a defense of my client,” Trump. “The State Department apparatchiks are all upset that I intervened at all,” he said, adding that he was the victim of “wild accusations.”Sondland is almost as complex a case. While he is new to diplomacy, he is the owner of a boutique set of hotels and certainly is not unaware of cybersecurity threats because the hotel industry is a major target, as Marriott learned a year ago.But Sondland held a conversation with Trump last summer in a busy restaurant in Kyiv, surrounded by other U.S. officials. Testimony indicates Trump’s voice was loud enough for others at the table to hear.But in testimony released Monday night, David Holmes, a veteran Foreign Service officer who is posted to the U.S. Embassy in Kyiv, and who witnessed the phone call between the president and Sondland, suggested that the Russians heard it even if they were not out on the town that night.Asked if there was a risk of the Russians listening in, Holmes said, “I believe at least two of the three, if not all three of the mobile networks are owned by Russian companies, or have significant stakes in those.””We generally assume that mobile communications in Ukraine are being monitored,” he said.This article originally appeared in The New York Times.(C) 2019 The New York Times Company
November 19, 2019Read More
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