Interesting since the government is in the pocket of the Murdoch empire. Since the blood letting of news and media started well over a decade ago, it's never found a way to catch up to the new world of tech giants controlling what people see.
And to control what people see is to control how they think and who to vote for, and before you know it you run nations who have convinced themselves they are democratic and free thinking.
It's a mistake to think the Australian government is doing this just for the good of its people. This is the same government that wants a sovereign backdoor into every system under the guise of anti-terrorism. The same govenrment who raided journalists from the national broadcaster to stop whistles being blown at the government and also to put the broadcaster back in its place.
So good luck legislating it. Perhaps try untangling some of your own hypocrisy first.
If you want support from Murdoch papers during election cycles you need to give them what they want. Which is for their businesses to be free from competition.
The National Broadband Network was crippled because it was a threat to Foxtel. And now Facebook and Google will need to be crippled because they are a threat to the Murdoch mastheads.
They think they can, but their time is over. Playing political games and being well-connected means jack all when large majority of the population doesn't buy or feed into your shit any more. Google and Facebook has way more power than the Australian government at this point. Should just have some intern transcribe thousands of loc into pseudo code and then release the gibberish to Australia who can then proceed to do fuck all with it.
This has been going on since the beginning of time. If it's not tech, it's a newspaper or magazine, spinning words around in print to elicit a response, a very specific one.
Matt Druge, drudgereport, did this today and it's exactly the problem: Headline read BCP agents helped across the border, with hands out, 5 illegals.
That's not how it went down and he left out a lot of important details. It did not stop the barrage of the right-wing internet news article commenters.
If you were from Australia I'd let your whole post go.
Murdoch isn't that powerful. When the media tells people what they want to hear, it's very difficult from the outside to figure out who's the one pulling the shots.
The AFP raided the ABC to ensure accuracy of a report about military action that was released under the reign of a far left management. Now that Ita Buttrose is in charge, you won't see that again.
The Australian people trust their own government several orders of magnitude more than the foreign SV tech companies that put people out of jobs and push around politics which America can barely reign in.
As an Australian, describing what the AFP did when raiding the ABC was intended as intimidation and nothing else. The report on the actions of the Australian military forces that may constitute war crimes. They know who leaked the information, he is already indicted for trial.
Similarly, and in the same week, raids by the AFP on a reporter from News Corporation, shows that your slur of ABC management as being "far left" is complete rubbish.
The management of the ABC has not changed. Ita Buttrose is the chair of the ABC board, which specifically does not involve itself in editorial decisions.
So Australians do not "trust" their own government, particularly after the various "anti terrorist" legislation that has creeped and allows ASIO etc to detain people for increasing periods of time without charge, or even notification that they are held (ie no habeas corpus).
The ACCC is one of the few Australian regulators that actually act on behalf of their stakeholders, ie the consumers of Australia.
Other regulators and law enforcement have either suffered extensive "regulatory capture" (particularly APRA and ASIC) or mission creep (AFP, "Border Force" etc).
Murdoch owns 2/3rd of all newspapers and their associated brands in Australia. Arguing that he's "not that powerful" is disingenuous.
IIRC, that raid was over an article that was a few years old at that point. If it was about national security, it wouldn't have been delayed that long. It was a political stunt and intimidation.
Google, Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp, Atlassian, and other significant concerned companies, please band together and stage a digital protest.
503 all your services, just for the city of Canberra (where our politicians congregate to shout insults at each other and legislate favours for their corporate donors).
A few days cutoff for Canberra will give enough momentum to bring us back from the current precipice, where many of Australia's software companies are realistically considering options for relocating out of Australia, and shifting all intellectual property to their newly created company headquartered in places like Singapore or Estonia or USA.
And then reopen again in Australia as a satellite subsidiary branch owned or licensed by the newly created foreign-domiciled (and now non-taxpaying) parent.
Let's hope it passes through. As much as companies would like to keep this as their trade secret, I as an individual have right to know what is the company doing with my data, and how exactly it process it and based on what logic interacts with me. Especially since those companies trends to dictate one significant part of the life experience of a person living on this planet.
If that would mean those company would just decide not to operate anymore on my country, I would still consider that as a net win.
With great power comes the great responsibility, and those companies showed that we can't count on then bring honest and open to us unless we force them to.
Its millions of lines of code that is bucketing various sessions and users into thousands of experiments where +10k lines are changing every day. I don’t think you’ll get that much value out of it.
Its like saying you have a right to toyotas cad files because you drive their car and trust it with your life. You wont be able to use it and it’s the wrong approach.
Your government isn't doing this out of strong ideological principles in order to protect the freedom and privacy of it's people. Your government is salty because big tech gets to screw you over without giving the govt it's cut. Don't be fooled, big tech is not your friend, but neither is the government.
I don’t think you can outrun this forever. Your Facebook feed, your LinkedIn feed and so on are all build to you specifically and once you reload it, there is no public record of what content has been pushed to you. This can be annoying, like when you spot an interesting LinkedIn post right as you’ve pushed up and you are never able of finding it again. It can also be illegal, like when you’re exposed to political campaigning that isn’t on public record.
Tech may have been able to get away with this for a really long time, but almost every political leadership around the world is gearing up to fight it. The internet and the big tech companies have simply gotten too big to ignore, and maybe it’ll be tough for the first movers, but this isn’t only happening in Australia. The GDPR was Europes first serious response, but it certainly won’t be the last. I think they’ll respond by doing what governments always do, with heavy regulation, and that’s what I think we’re witnessing the start of.
I’m not so sure that’s a bad thing. I prefer openness, and Facebook and Google aren’t transparent when they won’t tell you how their services build your results or who pays for it to look the way it does. I don’t think it’ll really break the internet or tech industry either, people are adaptive and someone will find a way to make a lot of money without selling everyone’s private data.
Maybe that’s not going to be Google or Facebook, but do we really care about that?
There are only two particularly feasible outcomes: (1) open, transparent algorithms & (2) open, transparent data.
If I were Google and FB, I'd be pushing like hell that regulators choose the first one.
And honestly, it's going to need to happen at some point.
Because there's going to be something that looks like a violation of the Fair Housing Act (f.ex., or any number of other laws promoting equality) and "Our algorithms handle it" isn't going to satisfy a judge.
Sounds good - as a Canberran, I think I'd really benefit from an involuntary social media detox for a few weeks!
This is a policy area in which it's completely legitimate for government to exercise its powers. A digital economy dominated by a handful of American companies is not healthy for our own software industry or our society.
I'll be looking out for the government's (and Labor's) response to this report - it will be interesting to see which recommendations they do and do not accept.
I see 2 problems with this. The first is that most of the algorithms they’re using are probably based heavily on machine learning, making them inscrutable not just to the general public but also to any experts they have auditing them. Fact is, Google and Facebook probably don’t know how their tech works half the time.
Second, this sets pretty bad precedent. Asking one of these companies to reveal the algorithms they’re using is tantamount to theft. Why should they hand over their golden goose just because a lot of people want it? What’s to stop the same government to take the technology of a smaller company by force later?
If people are interested in protecting the data Google displays, I think a better solution would be to go after who is leaking the information in the first place (e.g. if Google can crawl HIPAA info from another site, that’s the other site’s fault). If consumers willingly hand over their data to Google, on the other hand, that’s on them.
> Asking one of these companies to reveal the algorithms they’re using is tantamount to theft.
Intellectual property is a legislative creature. There was never a "natural law" conception of it and it largely didn't evolve in caselaw either.
That said, Australia has a constitutional guarantee against compulsory acquisition without payment on "just terms"[0] and which is not for a purpose supported by another Parliamentary power.
Such a case might not succeed (a case by tobacco companies against plain packaging was not successful in arguing that it represented an acquisition of their brands and trademarks[1]), but it would almost certainly reach the High Court.
If their Honours ruled that an algorithm or trained model was property within the meaning of the Constitution, it's likely that compulsory acquisition would require payment of billions, perhaps tens of billions, of dollars. At that point it would be easier to regulate it, which would be unlikely to trigger the guarantee.
I am, of course, not a lawyer. But Constitutional law was one of my favourite subjects before dropping out of law school.
> Intellectual property is a legislative creature. There was never a "natural law" conception of it and it largely didn't evolve in caselaw either.
IMO the issue isn't with IP but trade secrets which have a long and well established history within human endeavours. In fact, they are the basis of the patent system which intended to get them "freed" from companies so others could expand on their work.
There are other motivations for accountability besides consumer protection. The potential for disinformation is unparalleled. And both have proven in recent years that their judgment is not beyond approach. Trust is no longer an option.
The first is that most of the algorithms they’re using are probably based heavily on machine learning, making them inscrutable not just to the general public but also to any experts they have auditing them.
I still think this is going to be a big problem with regards to legislation and safety boards. I'm pretty sure they are not going to accept the black box decision making nature. They see the results of prejudice or unsafe decisions, real or imagined[1], and will probably see lack of ability to explain these actions clearly as hubris on the part of companies. The algorithm did it will not hold as an excuse.
They should hand over whatever they are required to by law if they want to be available in a country that demands they hand things over. This is no different to cooperating with legal warrants and other law enforcement requests.
As to how appropriate the request is, that’s up for debate, but it’s not theft.
Hand me over any intellectual property you own simply because I want it.. Lets not pretend there isnt a maltitude of pretty dumb laws that were passes simply because lets say "the law makers are not the sharpest tools in the shed"
I demand public minutes of all meetings at all news outlets, because their decision process is an algorithm that determines the content going out to the public
Exactly, if people can demand this of Google and Facebook it means they can demand this of every single company! People act like FAANG are the only companies with any influence and any user data.
The analogy doesn't quite hold. We can see the outputs of the editorial meetings because they're released to the entire public. Whereas the outputs of Google and Facebook models are tuned to each individual, it would be an incredible privacy violation to share those with the government.
But this creates a problem of incentives. In mass media, bad behaviour is highly observable and more likely to be punished or regulated. For example, Australia has defamation laws that are notoriously slanted against the media. Political communication is illegal without the name and address of the individual who authorised it. And so on.
But when each of us sees a different feed, it is impossible to both easily detect violations of law and to preserve individual privacy. Asking to see the algorithm at least allows for correction of potential biases. I expect however that increasingly, these companies will be required to internalise that regulatory function on pain of heavy fines.
Knowing the algorithms without having the data they operate on is useless.
And even if you had the two, at this point you still wouldn't be able to debug how a result is returned. The code is fairly complicated, there are many signals and quite a bit of ML.
source: worked as search ranking engineer and had quite a bit of difficulty debugging certain controversial results despite having access to everything.
There seems to be a significant incentive to getting data that fits the purpose and run it through these algorithms. It's probably not trivial, but paid experts should be able to deal with it pretty quickly.
It's probably enough to run confined experiments. I think you don't need all the data to derive the most important conclusions.
I know I probably don't speak for the people who are drafting these rules, but personally that doesn't bother me so much. I don't have a specific interest in knowing the computations that produced a particular result, I just want to force some kind of transparency on how this data is being used and stored.
Australia can try, but I don't see this happening. It's not only a trade secret for FB and Google but it would open the ecosystem to a crazy amount of gaming.
I watched the announcement and it seemed like more talk than action. A few new inquiries to report in a year or so and a new unit in the ACCC for big tech companies to capture. Not much new legislation, though.
“This particular branch of the [commission] will be able to be approached by various companies who believe that the algorithms have been misused,”
The lobby of accountants seems to desire approving every algorithm, including AI. I've seen this come up in government circles in Europe. Yearly approval of financial numbers, algorithms, and tech in general. All this is going to do is create more red tape and no real change.
Readit News
And to control what people see is to control how they think and who to vote for, and before you know it you run nations who have convinced themselves they are democratic and free thinking.
It's a mistake to think the Australian government is doing this just for the good of its people. This is the same government that wants a sovereign backdoor into every system under the guise of anti-terrorism. The same govenrment who raided journalists from the national broadcaster to stop whistles being blown at the government and also to put the broadcaster back in its place.
So good luck legislating it. Perhaps try untangling some of your own hypocrisy first.
The National Broadband Network was crippled because it was a threat to Foxtel. And now Facebook and Google will need to be crippled because they are a threat to the Murdoch mastheads.
This has been going on since the beginning of time. If it's not tech, it's a newspaper or magazine, spinning words around in print to elicit a response, a very specific one.
Matt Druge, drudgereport, did this today and it's exactly the problem: Headline read BCP agents helped across the border, with hands out, 5 illegals.
That's not how it went down and he left out a lot of important details. It did not stop the barrage of the right-wing internet news article commenters.
Murdoch isn't that powerful. When the media tells people what they want to hear, it's very difficult from the outside to figure out who's the one pulling the shots.
The AFP raided the ABC to ensure accuracy of a report about military action that was released under the reign of a far left management. Now that Ita Buttrose is in charge, you won't see that again.
The Australian people trust their own government several orders of magnitude more than the foreign SV tech companies that put people out of jobs and push around politics which America can barely reign in.
Similarly, and in the same week, raids by the AFP on a reporter from News Corporation, shows that your slur of ABC management as being "far left" is complete rubbish.
The management of the ABC has not changed. Ita Buttrose is the chair of the ABC board, which specifically does not involve itself in editorial decisions.
So Australians do not "trust" their own government, particularly after the various "anti terrorist" legislation that has creeped and allows ASIO etc to detain people for increasing periods of time without charge, or even notification that they are held (ie no habeas corpus).
The ACCC is one of the few Australian regulators that actually act on behalf of their stakeholders, ie the consumers of Australia.
Other regulators and law enforcement have either suffered extensive "regulatory capture" (particularly APRA and ASIC) or mission creep (AFP, "Border Force" etc).
A police raid for biased reporting is not a proportionate response. I don't care how biased and towards what wing.
IIRC, that raid was over an article that was a few years old at that point. If it was about national security, it wouldn't have been delayed that long. It was a political stunt and intimidation.
503 all your services, just for the city of Canberra (where our politicians congregate to shout insults at each other and legislate favours for their corporate donors).
A few days cutoff for Canberra will give enough momentum to bring us back from the current precipice, where many of Australia's software companies are realistically considering options for relocating out of Australia, and shifting all intellectual property to their newly created company headquartered in places like Singapore or Estonia or USA.
And then reopen again in Australia as a satellite subsidiary branch owned or licensed by the newly created foreign-domiciled (and now non-taxpaying) parent.
If that would mean those company would just decide not to operate anymore on my country, I would still consider that as a net win.
With great power comes the great responsibility, and those companies showed that we can't count on then bring honest and open to us unless we force them to.
Its like saying you have a right to toyotas cad files because you drive their car and trust it with your life. You wont be able to use it and it’s the wrong approach.
Tech may have been able to get away with this for a really long time, but almost every political leadership around the world is gearing up to fight it. The internet and the big tech companies have simply gotten too big to ignore, and maybe it’ll be tough for the first movers, but this isn’t only happening in Australia. The GDPR was Europes first serious response, but it certainly won’t be the last. I think they’ll respond by doing what governments always do, with heavy regulation, and that’s what I think we’re witnessing the start of.
I’m not so sure that’s a bad thing. I prefer openness, and Facebook and Google aren’t transparent when they won’t tell you how their services build your results or who pays for it to look the way it does. I don’t think it’ll really break the internet or tech industry either, people are adaptive and someone will find a way to make a lot of money without selling everyone’s private data.
Maybe that’s not going to be Google or Facebook, but do we really care about that?
If I were Google and FB, I'd be pushing like hell that regulators choose the first one.
And honestly, it's going to need to happen at some point.
Because there's going to be something that looks like a violation of the Fair Housing Act (f.ex., or any number of other laws promoting equality) and "Our algorithms handle it" isn't going to satisfy a judge.
This is a policy area in which it's completely legitimate for government to exercise its powers. A digital economy dominated by a handful of American companies is not healthy for our own software industry or our society.
I'll be looking out for the government's (and Labor's) response to this report - it will be interesting to see which recommendations they do and do not accept.
Second, this sets pretty bad precedent. Asking one of these companies to reveal the algorithms they’re using is tantamount to theft. Why should they hand over their golden goose just because a lot of people want it? What’s to stop the same government to take the technology of a smaller company by force later?
If people are interested in protecting the data Google displays, I think a better solution would be to go after who is leaking the information in the first place (e.g. if Google can crawl HIPAA info from another site, that’s the other site’s fault). If consumers willingly hand over their data to Google, on the other hand, that’s on them.
Intellectual property is a legislative creature. There was never a "natural law" conception of it and it largely didn't evolve in caselaw either.
That said, Australia has a constitutional guarantee against compulsory acquisition without payment on "just terms"[0] and which is not for a purpose supported by another Parliamentary power.
Such a case might not succeed (a case by tobacco companies against plain packaging was not successful in arguing that it represented an acquisition of their brands and trademarks[1]), but it would almost certainly reach the High Court.
If their Honours ruled that an algorithm or trained model was property within the meaning of the Constitution, it's likely that compulsory acquisition would require payment of billions, perhaps tens of billions, of dollars. At that point it would be easier to regulate it, which would be unlikely to trigger the guarantee.
I am, of course, not a lawyer. But Constitutional law was one of my favourite subjects before dropping out of law school.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_51(xxxi)_of_the_Consti...
[1] http://eresources.hcourt.gov.au/showCase/2012/HCA/43
IMO the issue isn't with IP but trade secrets which have a long and well established history within human endeavours. In fact, they are the basis of the patent system which intended to get them "freed" from companies so others could expand on their work.
There is too much potential for SERP manipulation for political ends. Be it regulation, unionization, candidate preference, social issues, etc.
Google and others like it may not overly abuse it now, but there certainly is potential for it.
I still think this is going to be a big problem with regards to legislation and safety boards. I'm pretty sure they are not going to accept the black box decision making nature. They see the results of prejudice or unsafe decisions, real or imagined[1], and will probably see lack of ability to explain these actions clearly as hubris on the part of companies. The algorithm did it will not hold as an excuse.
1) iPod shuffle play randomness
As to how appropriate the request is, that’s up for debate, but it’s not theft.
Yea I guess by definition if the state takes it's not theft. If the state kills it's not murder.
But this creates a problem of incentives. In mass media, bad behaviour is highly observable and more likely to be punished or regulated. For example, Australia has defamation laws that are notoriously slanted against the media. Political communication is illegal without the name and address of the individual who authorised it. And so on.
But when each of us sees a different feed, it is impossible to both easily detect violations of law and to preserve individual privacy. Asking to see the algorithm at least allows for correction of potential biases. I expect however that increasingly, these companies will be required to internalise that regulatory function on pain of heavy fines.
And even if you had the two, at this point you still wouldn't be able to debug how a result is returned. The code is fairly complicated, there are many signals and quite a bit of ML.
source: worked as search ranking engineer and had quite a bit of difficulty debugging certain controversial results despite having access to everything.
It's probably enough to run confined experiments. I think you don't need all the data to derive the most important conclusions.
Deleted Comment
The lobby of accountants seems to desire approving every algorithm, including AI. I've seen this come up in government circles in Europe. Yearly approval of financial numbers, algorithms, and tech in general. All this is going to do is create more red tape and no real change.
Just make online profiling illegal.