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From Vox
Why they’re not saying Ma’Khia Bryant’s name -
A funeral service is held for 16-year-old Ma’Khia Bryant at the First Church of God on April 30, 2021 in Columbus, Ohio. Bryant was shot and killed on April 20 by a Columbus police officer answering a domestic dispute call. | Scott Olson/Getty Images
The 16-year-old Black girl could never be the “perfect victim.”
After watching 15 seconds of police body camera footage last week, viewers of various races and political affiliations had made a decision: 16-year-old Ma’Khia Bryant was “the aggressor” — the “fat,” “huge,” “knife-wielding attacker” and “maniac” who deserved to be fatally shot by the police on April 20 in Columbus, Ohio.
According to these viewers, Nicholas Reardon, the police officer who immediately shot and killed Bryant, who was holding a knife, was justified. That she was a teenager in the middle of an altercation, in which she was presumed to be defending herself, did not matter.
Reardon shot Bryant dead about 20 minutes before a judge announced that a jury found former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin guilty of murdering George Floyd, a killing that catalyzed worldwide protests against police violence. For a moment, those seeking justice for Black life exhaled in relief, knowing that the officer who callously took Floyd’s life would be imprisoned.
But the cries for justice that applied to George Floyd did not ring out as loudly for Bryant. Even after it was discovered that Bryant was living in foster care, that she was in the middle of a fight with older women when police arrived, and that she was allegedly the one who summoned the police for help, people — some of the same peoplewho called for justice in Floyd’s case — used police talking points to justify the four bullets that Reardon unloaded into Bryant’s chest. She was brandishing a knife, many pointed out, which meant the other Black women needed to be protected.
Crisis response experts noted, however, that deescalation tactics — like commanding Bryant to drop the weapon, physically getting between the women, or simply communicating with her — could have kept everyone alive. In many recorded encounters between the police and white people carrying weapons, for instance, officers didn’t shoot first or even reach for their guns — they successfully managed to peacefully apprehend the suspect.
Bryant’s death has become a debate that questions a child’s actions — and worthiness to live — instead of another example of the racism of policing and the institution’s failure to provide wholesome support, care, and safety for the communities it serves. The insistence that Reardon had no other option than to take Bryant’s life to save others— though he risked everyone’s life in the process — displays the lack of consideration and value that society places on the lives of Black girls and women.
Treva Lindsey, a professor of African American women’s history at Ohio State University, told Vox that there are those who won’t see Bryant as a victim but as someone who brought this on herself. And even for those who do see her as a victim, they’ll still victim-blame, erasing the systemic oppression — including that Black children are far more likely to be in foster care than their white counterparts, and kids in foster care are often exposed to high levels of violence — that brought her to being killed at the hands of the police.
“People will say ‘I’m really sad this whole scenario happened, but had she not had that knife …’ That becomes the ‘but,’ the qualifier, the caveat. And too often we have a caveat when it comes to defending, protecting, and caring for Black girls,” Lindsey said.
The debate over whether police should have shot a child
On the afternoon of April 20, Ma’Khia Bryant reportedly dialed 911. The call was dominated by screams, but the caller said that someone was “trying to stab us” and “put hands” on their grandmother. “We need a police officer here now,” the person said. Body camera footage shows that when officer Reardon exited his vehicle, there were seven people outside of the home.
There was yelling, and a girl could be seen falling to the ground after being attacked by Bryant and kicked by an unidentified man standing nearby. Bryant, holding a knife, then lunged toward a woman dressed in pink who was standing up against a vehicle. Just moments after asking “What’s going on?” Reardon pulled out his gun yelled, “Hey! Hey! Get down! Get down!” (prompting the woman in pink to run away) and fired four shots at Bryant. Bryant immediately slumped to the ground next to the vehicle.
Interim Columbus police chief Michael Woods called the shooting a terrible tragedy for all those involved but said department policy states that an officer can use deadly force against someone when they appear to be inflicting harm on another person. He explained that the officers did not use a taser because there was an immediate threat of death. In addition, the chief said that officers aren’t required to verbalize to bystanders that they are about to fire their weapon.
The Columbus Police Department has long disproportionately used excessive force against Black people, coming under fire in recent months for the police killings of Andre Hill, a Black man police shot in a garage, and Casey Goodson Jr., a Black man who was entering his home.
Almost 55 percent of the department’s use-of-force incidents targeted Black people who make up less than 30 percent of the population. Other reports show how racism is rampant within the department’s ranks. With renewed attention on the department, the Ohio Bureau of Criminal Investigation is conducting a third-party investigation of Bryant’s shooting that will answer questions like what might have happened if Reardon did not shoot and what information he had upon approaching the scene.
Sill, many have already drawn their own conclusions. Bryant’s death sparked debate across media and social media about whether the officer should have shot the 16-year-old.
On Face the Nation, Rep. Val Demings (D-FL), a former Orlando police chief, vehemently defended the officers’ actions, saying that police are forced to make calls in the heat of the moment. “Everybody has the benefit of slowing the video down and seizing the perfect moment. The officer on the street does not have that ability. He or she has to make those split-second decisions, and they’re tough.”
On the popular radio show The Breakfast Club, host DJ Envy stated, “The whole situation is tragic and it’s sad because that system failed that young lady.” But he also added, “Every case is different, and in this case, if I pull up to a scene and see a girl chasing another girl about to stab a girl, my job as a police officer is to make sure that girl doesn’t get killed. And the law allows me to stop that killing or that stabbing by any means necessary.”
But as crisis interventionists pointed out, the police officer could have taken steps to deescalate the situation, savings all lives in the process. Psychologist Merushka Bisetty explained in an essay for Vox that children like Bryant may “present with aggression and an inability to self-regulate their emotions and, consequently, engage in behaviors that can seem aggressive or involve weapons,” but that doesn’t mean that these situations “require or should be met with violent force.” Instead, it’s the role of intervening professionals to stop an aggressive interaction from becoming fatal.
That the reaction to Bryant’s killing has turned into a debate about whether the use of force is justified is an attempt to “displace blame onto the victim and their family rather than on the systems that created situations that led to her death,” Bisetty, who has provided services in shelters, schools, and jails, wrote. “It is worth considering whether Bryant might have still been alive today if a mental health expert — or someone else trained in nonviolent deescalation — had responded to the call.”
It’s also worth considering whether the police officer would have fired shots if Bryant or the people involved in the altercation were white. There are countless examples of police peacefully apprehending white boys and men wielding weapons. Just last year police officers in Kenosha, Wisconsin, handed water bottles to and thanked 17-year-old Kyle Rittenhouse, a self-described militia member who carried an AR-15-style rifle during the unrest that followed the police shooting of Jacob Blake. Rittenhouse was allowed to leave the scene after fatally shooting two people and harming another, though the police had been informed that he was the shooter.
In other cases, white men have verbally threatened police officers and pointed weapons at them. In those situations, the police did not reach for their guns at all or ever use them. In 2019, 19-year-old Matthew Bernard who killed two women and a child led Virginia authorities, who tried to stop him with mace and a stun gun, on a naked chase before they eventually took him into custody.
White women, too, often get a softer side of law enforcement handling. Several white women who were part of the Capitol insurrection on January 6 could be seen on video being peacefully escorted down the steps of the Capitol building amid the chaos. In a tense July 2020 Detroit-area encounter, a white woman in a minivan pointed a gun at a Black mother while the Black woman’s 15-year-old daughter watched and screamed nearby. When the police arrived after six 911 calls, they ordered the white woman out of the van, put her on the ground, handcuffed her, and took her gun, according to the police.
Black women aren’t treated with the same patriarchal protections, however problematic, that are afforded to white women, Lindsey points out. The idea that Black women should be handled with care because they are women just doesn’t exist.
“We see an incredibly disparate treatment gap between what white women experience with police and what Black women experience with police,” she said.
In police encounters, racism and sexism work against Black girls and women
The level of dismissal and scrutiny that Black female victims face when they die at the hands of the police is unmatched. Bryant’s name is no longer trending, and even though her funeral was Friday, headlines about the fatal incident have dwindled. What narrative there is surrounding fatal police violence and police brutality often centers Black cisgender men and boys, leaving out Black women, girls, and trans people.
The focus on Black men and boys is warranted since they face the highest risk of being killed by the police: About 1 in 1,000 Black men and boys in America can expect to die at the hands of police, according to a 2019 study, a risk that is 2.5 times higher than for white men.
Likewise, the same study found that out of all women, Black women face the highest risk of being killed by the police. Black women make up 20 percent (48 total) of the 247 women fatally shot by the police and 28 percent of unarmed killings since 2015, according to a 2020 Washington Post analysis. All of this research does not include violent encounters between Black women and the police that do not result in death — such as cases of sexual harassment and assault.
But the realities of these statistics often don’t make the front page, or any pages at all. The invisibility of Black girls and women persists, many scholars note, because they stand at the complex intersection of their gender and Black racial identity. When it comes to their blackness, they’re not recognized as a group that needs protection. And this coupled with their status as women means that they cannot be trusted or believed.
“We still read blackness through the lens of masculinity,” Lindsey told Vox. “The strange fruit hanging from the tree is still Black men.” As a result, when Black women end up in encounters with police, society always asks, “Well, what did she do wrong?”
Lindsey said that we’re entrenched in a narrative that the police violence against Black women “is more of a blip and not a pattern for an investment,” though police violence always had a penchant for Black life across all genders.
These ideas go back to slave patrols, progenitors of policing in the United States. It was Black women who were on “wanted” postersfor escaping, Lindsey explained — like, for example, Harriet Tubman, who would have been killed by patrols for defying the state. And as Michelle F. Jacobs wrote in “The Violent State: Black Women’s Invisible Struggle Against Police Violence,” both Black men and women were killed, maimed and mutilated at the will of slave holders, but Black women were violently raped and sexually abused by both the slave holder and his employees as an economic necessity.
Jacobs points out that by the time the country gets to the Jim Crow era, stereotypes about Black women (they’re governed by libido and loose morals, are liars, and are aggressive) are solidified and become cemented in state policy. “Public benefits law, educational law, delinquency and neglect policy, and all aspects of criminal law have embedded the stereotypes as the normative foundation for how government evaluates, judges, and punishes Black women,” she wrote.
While state violence against Black bodies is often seen through the narratives of Emmett Till, Amadou Diallo, Mike Brown, and George Floyd, “What about Carol, Denise, Addy, and Cynthia — the four little girls bombed in Alabama?” Lindsey said.
Black women’s experience with the police — and the police’s desire to avoid accountability for killing — even gave birth to the intentionally passive term “officer-involved shooting.” In 1979, Los Angeles police officers shot Eula Love eight times in her front yard. The two officers were escorting a gas company employee to cut off her service.
According to the police, Love had a $22.09 money order for the gas company in her purse and a kitchen knife in her hand. One of the officers described Love as a “raging, frothing at the mouth, knife-wielding woman” and newspapers described her as “unemployed and overweight.” Love’s killing was one of the earliest instances in which police used the phrase “officer-involved shooting” to blur the truth, as opposed to the more direct language that the police shot and killed Love that is being advocated for today.
This decentering of the Black women’s experiences when it comes to state violence detracts from the bigger trends, forcing Breonna Taylor, whose name and face turned into a meme and unit of commodification, to become an exceptional case and not an example of a larger issue, Lindsey said.
Taylor’s death, in fact, only rose to prominence after video of Floyd’s death went viral. She was also perhaps the closest example we have of “perfect” Black woman victimhood since she was asleep in her bed when the encounter began. And yet people still found ways to blame her, claiming that she should not have engaged with a drug dealer who led police officers to her door that night.
Sandra Bland, another one of the more well-known recent cases of police violence against a Black woman, was blamed for being “combative” with the police when she was pulled over on a Texas road in 2015 for failing to signal a lane change. Police took Bland into custody at a local jail where she was pronounced dead, her death ruled a suicide. Right-wing commentators, white liberals, and people within the Black community itself said that Bland should have followed the police’s directions and not been confrontational in order to save her life.
For Black girls, criminalization and adultification start early. According to the 2017 Georgetown Law study “Girlhood Interrupted: The Erasure of Black Girls’ Childhood,” Black girls face “adultification bias” from as young as 5, which means adults perceive them to be less innocent and thus less worthy of nurturing, protection, and comfort. This too stems back to slavery, the report noted, since Black children were put to work as young as two and three years old and were punished for showing child-like behavior.
This can be seen in other instances of police violence against Black girls caught on camera. In a 2015 case of police brutality that went viral, an officer tackled, dragged, and pinned 15-year-old Dajerria Becton to the ground at a pool party in McKinney, Texas, after officers were called to the home over alleged trespassing. In February, police in Rochester, New York, pepper sprayed a 9-year-old Black girl after they responded to a report about “family trouble.”Video footage shows that the girl repeatedly screamed for her father as police handcuffed her. When she refused to get into the police vehicle, police pepper sprayed her. “Don’t do this do to me” she exclaimed, and officers responded “You did it to yourself.”
It is also how people have referred to Bryant.When Columbus Mayor Andrew Ginther shared the news of Bryant’s killing on Twitter, he wrote of the 16-year-old, “a young woman tragically lost her life.” People immediately reminded him that she was “just a girl.”
As scholar and activist Brittany Cooper noted, it was a Black girl that helped the world see what happened to Floyd. Darnella Frazier was 17 when she recorded Floyd’s death and accompanied by her 8-year-old cousin who also witnessed the murder so that the world could eventually see it. Without these Black girls, the small dose of justice that brought many people relief last week would have likely never happened.
Justice begins with visibility and accountability
A reason why there is debate over Bryant’s death is that it is difficult to educate the public if stories like hers rarely make the news — so when they do, there are preconceived notions that preclude nuanced views about policing and the sanctity of Black girlhood.
“There’s definitely an internalization of misogynoir inside and outside of our communities,” Lindsey said, referring to the term coined by Moya Bailey to explain how anti-Blackness and misogyny manifest in Black women’s lives. “So even beyond the sheer hatred of Black women, people really don’t understand these stories. [Black women and girls] are not legible. So even when we gain visibility, like in the Ma’Khia Bryant case, her story will remain illegible to folks.” People will continue to see a knife-wielding suspect as opposed to a traumatized 16-year-old girl.
To address this problem, Black legal scholars and feminist activists, primarily Kimberlé Crenshaw and Andrea J. Ritchie, launched the #SayHerName campaign in 2014 and released a corresponding report, “Say Her Name: Resisting Police Brutality Against Black Women,” to bring awareness to the forgotten victims of police brutality.
The report pointed out that Black girls as young as 7 (Aiyana Stanley-Jones) and women as old as 93 (Pearlie Golden) have been killed by the police, with officers escaping prosecution or conviction. “Say Her Name sheds light on Black women’s experiences of police violence in an effort to support a gender-inclusive approach to racial justice that centers all Black lives equally,” Crenshaw and Ritchie wrote.
But in the years since the campaign launched, people have muddled the meaning behind #SayHerName, even if inadvertently. The phrase has morphed into #SayHisName whenever a Black boy or man is killed by the police, and the collective #SayTheirNames became widespread in 2020 in the months following Floyd’s death to further elevate the movement for Black lives. But the crowding out of #SayHerName in favor of these other versions, takes away from the campaign’s original purpose and furthers the erasure of Black girls and women.
According to Lindsey, protests since Bryant’s death led by Black women, Black queer folks, and Black gender non-binary folks, have been ongoing. “There’s a good amount of non-Black allies and accomplices who have been present in this, but it still looks nothing like what we tend to see when Black men or boys are killed by police, in terms of sheer number,” she said.
Each time a Black girl, woman, trans, or gender nonbinary person is killed, it’s an uphill battle to bring awareness to their story. For Lindsey, the goal should never be to debate whether Black people are human or matter.
“It’s important for us to continuing highlighting and vocalizing how the inhumanity of white supremacy shows up in the lives of Black women and girls,” Lindsey said. “When we’re equipped with the full truth of how it operates, we have a better chance at rooting out the operating system of white supremacy and anti-Blackness.”
How the Indian government is silencing its critics -
A protester participating at a January 2020 rally against the arrival of Prime Minister Narenda Modi in Kolkata, India. | Indranil Aditya/NurPhoto via Getty Images
The Indian government is silencing its critics on Twitter and Facebook.
As the coronavirus pandemic rages in India, claiming thousands of lives, many Indians are turning to social media to demand that the government handle the public health crisis better. And now, the government is silencing these critics in its latest threat to the future of free speech on the internet in the world’s second-most populous country.
In recent weeks, the Indian government has requested that companies like Twitter take down content that it says contains misinformation about the Covid-19 pandemic. But critics say that India’s political leadership under Prime Minister Narendra Modi is using the premise of misinformation to overreach and suppress criticism of the administration’s handling of the pandemic.
A similar debate has also played out in the US around how companies like Twitter and Facebook should moderate harmful speech on their platforms, particularly when that speech comes from world leaders. But the issue has taken on an increased intensity in India, where the government is more aggressively and directly pressuring tech companies to block content it takes issue with.
“Internet companies are stuck between a rock and a hard place,” said Anupam Chander, a law professor at Georgetown University who focuses on the regulation of international speech online. “They face a government that is accusing them of essentially abetting a violation of law. At the same time, there are huge free expression concerns here.”
India is the world’s biggest democracy and has a history of robust political debate. Its constitution protects people’s rights to freedom of speech and expression — with some exceptions including for content it deems defamatory.
But under the Modi administration of the past several years, the country has expanded its internet regulation laws, giving it more power to censor and surveil its citizens online. The government has several levers to pressure US-based tech companies into compliance: It could arrest Facebook and Twitter staff in India if their employers don’t follow orders. Even further, India could yank Twitter or Facebook off the local internet in India entirely, as it recently did with TikTok and several major Chinese apps in June. And the government resorted to effectively shutting down the internet in Kashmir in February 2020 when it wanted to quiet political dissent in the region.
Now, the tension between US social media companies and the Indian government has reached an all-time high because of the fierce debate around Modi’s handling of the Covid-19 pandemic. And what happens next could determine whether Indians will continue to have the same kind of access to a relatively open social media environment or if the walls around what people are allowed to say online in India will close up even more. Some fear that the country may become more like China, where the government tightly controls its residents’ access to information and where US tech giants like Google and Facebook have tried — and failed — to operate successfully.
What happened with recent takedowns
In recent days, Twitter and Facebook have taken down or blocked political content that’s critical of the Indian government.
On Wednesday, Facebook confirmed that it temporarily blocked posts with a #ResignModi hashtag in India, but it later said it was a mistake because of content associated with the hashtag that violated its policies. Facebook has since restored access to the hashtag.
Facebook declined to comment on how many or what takedown requests it has received from the Indian government in recent weeks. A source familiar with the company said Facebook only took down a small portion of the total requests it received.
In sharp contrast to Facebook, Twitter is more transparent and discloses takedown requests through an outside organization, Lumen. Twitter acknowledged that the Indian government asked it to take down several dozen tweets recently, which were about the Covid-19 pandemic in India, as first reported by Indian news site MediaNama.
Recode reviewed the more than 50 tweets that Twitter blocked or deleted at the request of the Indian government in recent weeks. While some could be considered misleading — including one viral image showing devastationin India supposedly related to the pandemic which Indian fact-checker AltNews reported to be outdated — it wasn’t clear what was misleading about several other posts, which appeared to be straightforward news and political commentary.
The Indian Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology, which issues takedown requests to social media companies on behalf of the Indian government, did not respond to a request for comment. A spokesperson for Modi’s BJP Party also did not respond to a request for comment.
In response to Recode’s questions about how Twitter decides which posts to block or take down, a spokesperson for Twitter emailed Recode the following statement:
When we receive a valid legal request, we review it under both the Twitter Rules and local law. If the content violates Twitter’s Rules, the content will be removed from the service. If it is determined to be illegal in a particular jurisdiction, but not in violation of the Twitter Rules, we may withhold access to the content in India only.
The company also said it notified account holders directly when they receive a legal order pertaining to their account.
Many free speech advocates are quick to accuse social media companies like Twitter of too easily giving in to pressure from the Indian government. In the past, the company has taken a more aggressive and public stance against the Modi administration — such as in February when it refused to block political activists and journalists who used Twitter to criticize the Indian government’s new agricultural reforms, which many farmers in India had been protesting for months.
Now, during the pandemic, companies like Twitter are again being tested about how much they’re willing to follow the Indian government’s orders — and run the risk of being shut down entirely if they disobey them.
“It’s easy for us to say Twitter shouldn’t do this. But the question is whether it wants to continue operating in the Indian market,” said Chander. “It’s a very complicated dance.”
One route US social media companies could take is to try to contest the government’s recent takedown requests in the Indian courts, which Chander said are relatively independent of Modi.
The US government, which has a close relationship with India, could also pressure Modi’s administration to loosen its grip on social media. On Monday, White House press secretary Jen Psaki said that the Indian government ordering social media companies to block posts critical of the government “certainly wouldn’t be aligned with our view of freedom of speech around the world.”
The White House has other diplomatic leverage it could use, like threatening to cut off trade agreements or other diplomatic relations between the two countries. For now, the White House is focused on the larger issue of vaccine distribution in India. This week, the administration announced — under increasing global pressure — that it will reverse course and export Covid-19 vaccine materials to the country. So far there’s been no public indication that the Biden administration is considering taking any diplomatic action around the country’s stance toward social media.
Regardless, it’s clear that there’s a growing battle between the Indian government and US social media companies. What happens next will be a sign of where the future of free speech in the country seems to be heading.
Apple, Fortnite, and the Apple App Store: What’s at stake in the antitrust court case -
Apple CEO Tim Cook introducing new products at a virtual launch event. | Daniel Acker/Bloomberg via Getty Images
Suddenly, Apple has multiple antitrust fights on its hands. A new one starts Monday.
The trial that kicks off in a federal courtroom in San Francisco on Monday is extraordinary: Epic Games, one of the world’s most popular and valuable game companies, is suing Apple, the world’s most valuable company.
Epic wants Apple to make fundamental changes to its powerful Apple App Store. If it succeeds, it would change the way the app economy works.
One sign of the trial’s importance to both companies: Apple CEO Tim Cook and Epic CEO Tim Sweeney are both scheduled to testify during the trial. Sweeney even plans on attending the proceedings in person for three weeks.
But even though the Epic trial is … epic, it’s more of a leading indicator for Apple than a one-off. Apple has been able to run its app store by its own rules — no matter how much grumbling from big and little developers that created — for more than a decade. Now, a growing list of lawmakers, regulators, and companies are trying to change that using antitrust arguments. Even if Epic doesn’t succeed, someone else might.
If that happens, it won’t just affect a $2 trillion company and a constellation of companies that depend on its iPhone to get their software into your hands. It could affect iPhone users, too. In theory, if Apple is forced to loosen its grip on its app store, it could reduce prices for the apps you pay for today. Or, in Apple’s version of the story, it could make its iOS ecosystem more vulnerable to scams and malware.
The battle lines of the Epic-Apple fight were drawn last summer. That’s when Epic tried selling virtual currency on its popular Fortnite game without going through Apple’s app store, where it would have to pay a 30 percent tax to Apple. Apple responded, as Epic expected, by kicking Fortnite out of its app store, and then Epic responded by filing an antitrust lawsuit.
Epic wasn’t the first developer to complain about the rules Apple has set up around its app store, which is the only way developers can get their software onto Apple’s phones. Magazine and newspaper publishers, Netflix, and Spotify have also complained about the arrangement. All of them say that the 30 percent fee Apple takes from every transaction —that number can drop to 15 percent in some cases — is too onerous.
There are other complaints as well, like the way that Apple controls access to subscribers’ and buyers’ personal information or the way Apple prevents developers from telling customers they can also pay for services outside of the app store ecosystem — which could save customers or developers money.
But until Epic sued Apple last summer, no developer had taken on Apple directly. Instead, they tended to agree to Apple’s terms, or as Netflix and Spotify did, they stopped trying to sell things through the Apple App Store altogether.
Epic’s decision to sue seems to be driven partly by business reasons. If it didn’t have to pay Apple’s 30 percent tax, Epic could generate a lot more revenue from the sales of its digital currency, which players use to buy funny costumes and other ephemera. But other platforms that Epic uses to distribute Fortnite, including Sony and Microsoft, also take 30 percent cuts from microtransactions, and Epic doesn’t complain about that. Which is why the suit also seems driven by Tim Sweeney’s personal conviction that Apple, a company he says he used to idolize, is choking off developers’ ability to build interesting and innovative businesses.
Apple believes you should have a choice! Just not about payments. Nor stores. Nor a choice to play Fortnite. Nor a choice for developers to distribute apps directly. Apple thinks those choices should be Apple’s alone.
Last fall, Sweeney even compared his suit to the efforts of civil rights activists in the 1960s. And when criticized for that overreach, doubled down:
It’s a good article. Hey critics, please read what I said and tell me if it’s actually wrong: When the rules were wrongful, it was right to disobey them. That’s the comparison to the civil rights movement. pic.twitter.com/WMomQXwEjr
And unlike some other people who complain about Apple, Sweeney has the resources to do something about it: Epic is a very profitable software company currently valued at $29 billion — about $10 billion more than it was prior to suing Apple last summer — and Sweeney himself is worth an estimated $7 billion to $9 billion.
None of which means Epic will win its case. Its main argument is that Apple’s control of distribution for its iOS devices constitutes an illegal monopoly. But there isn’t a long legal history of courts ruling against companies that control the market for their own brand of products.
One major exception is a 1992 ruling against Kodak, which had been sued by vendors who repaired its copy machines; in that case, the Supreme Court said vendors who complained that Kodak forced them to use Kodak-made or Kodak-approved parts to fix Kodak machines had a viable antitrust argument. The vendors eventually won their case and received damages plus the ability to buy Kodak parts at reasonable prices.
Another example that Epic will likely reference is the Department of Justice’s campaign against Microsoft in the 1990s, when the software company essentially owned the PC market, but that case ended in a settlement. (Epic has hired antitrust expert Christine Varney, who headed up the DOJ’s antitrust division during Barack Obama’s tenure and also represented Netscape, the internet browser company, during the DOJ-Microsoft trial.)
Apple’s counterargument is fairly simple: The company says it can’t be a monopoly because it doesn’t own the phone market — it shares it with Google’s Android — and because Fortnite players can play the game on devices made by lots of other companies, including Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo. Apple also argues, more or less, that it built the Apple App Store and the iPhone, and so it should be able to set the terms that govern the ecosystem around them. Epic, it says, wants to run its own store, on its own terms, on Apple’s property.
Apple’s antitrust problems are growing
No matter who wins the Apple-Epic case in the first round of this battle, there is almost certain to be an appeal, so whatever happens in Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers’s courtroom won’t be the end of the story.
But it’s also not the only Apple antitrust story right now. Spotify says its music service operates at a disadvantage against Apple’s music service because Apple wants Spotify to pay a 30 percent fee on subscription revenue that it doesn’t charge itself. Spotify hasn’t sued Apple directly, but it has been pressing lawmakers in the United States and Europe to pursue antitrust actions against Apple, and it has made headway: On Friday, the EU issued a preliminary finding supporting Spotify’s argument.
In theory, an EU ruling could eventually result in a fine of up to 10 percent of Apple’s annual revenue. But any changes the EU eventually extracts from Apple could be huge because its app store is the core driver for Apple’s growing push to sell “services” instead of just hardware. Right now, services account for nearly 20 percent of Apple’s revenue.
Other charges could be coming in other countries. The United Kingdom is investigating Apple over similar charges, and this week the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission said Apple — as well as Google — needs “to improve outcomes for app developers and consumers” or face additional regulation. And in the US, where anti-Big Tech scrutiny has mostly focused on social media companies, a growing number of lawmakers have started to pay attention to the way Apple runs its app store.
Earlier this month, Sen. Amy Klobuchar held a hearing that focused primarily on Apple’s control of iOS apps, and included testimony from app-makers that have gone out of their way to support Epic in its court case, including Spotify and Match Group, the online dating company. Klobuchar, who just published a book about digital-age monopolies, appears set on making Apple her biggest test case. “You could still have a successful Apple, but still demand more consumer protections to make it easier for people to compete,” she told The Verge’s Nilay Patel earlier this month.
I’m skeptical about the overall narrative of a rising “techlash,” especially in Washington, where Democrats and Republicans don’t appear to be living on the same planet — which makes creating legislation that will rein in big tech companies quite challenging. But a variety of observers think that Apple and Amazon may be easier targets for lawmakers who want to slow down tech: Both companies run marketplaces and sell their own products in the same marketplaces. Forcing them to stop doing that may be a much easier task than determining how much free speech Facebook or Twitter should allow on their platforms.
So yes: For the next three weeks, watch the Apple-Epic fight — at the very least, it’s a chance to see two tech billionaires duke it out in public. But pay attention to every other antitrust battle Apple is fighting at the same time. Collectively, there’s a good chance they could change the way Apple — and your iPhone — works.
From The Hindu: Sports
Indian Premier League 2021 | Sunrisers Hyderabad remove Warner from captaincy, Williamson takes charge - SRH statement indicated that David Warner could be dropped from the playing XI.
Indian Premier League 2021 | Delhi aims for consolidation, Punjab wants spin trick to work again - The Narendra Modi Stadium track has shown that balls tend to grip and batting becomes difficult as the game progresses.
Indian Premier League 2021 | Seeking revival, Hyderabad changes leadership as they prepare to take on Rajasthan - Rajasthan Royals have won two out of their six matches so far while the Sunrisers Hyderabad have one victory from six games.
IPL 2021 | Wanted to bowl dot ball to De Villiers but ended up getting his wicket: Harpreet - Harpreet Brar clean-bowled Kohli and Maxwell and then set up an off-side trap to force De Villiers into trying a lofted shot without any success.
Shikhar Dhawan donates ₹20 lakh for buying oxygen cylinders - Dhawan has also decided to donate his prize money received in various IPL matches, at the end of the event.
From The Hindu: National News
Over 79 lakh COVID-19 vaccine doses available with States/UTs: Centre - The Centre has so far provided nearly 16.37 crore vaccine doses to States/UTs free of cost
Coronavirus | Scientists flag virus mutations that could ‘evade immune response’ - The forum of advisers, known as the Indian SARS-CoV-2 Genetics Consortium, or INSACOG, has now found more mutations in the coronavirus that it thinks need to be tracked closely.
COVID-19 death rate in second wave is less than in first wave: Sudhakar - Health Minister appeals to the people not to panic, but take precautions
OPD service in Jammu GMC, its associated hospitals to be suspended from May 3 - Decision taken in view of recent surge of COVID-19 pandemic and increase in patient load
COVID-19 vaccination for people in 18-44 age group begins at some private hospitals - Some private hospital chains commenced the COVID-19 immunisation drive for the 18-44 age group at limited centres in the country on May 1, officials
From BBC: Europe
Apple charged over ‘anti-competitive’ app policies - The tech giant faces a huge fine and may be forced to make changes to the App Store.
Bronze Age treasure found in Swedish forest by mapmaker - A man stumbled on ancient jewellery while surveying a forest for his orienteering club.
Haiti: Seven abducted Catholic clergy released - The case led to the resignation of the government in Haiti, where kidnappings have surged recently.
Eurozone suffers double-dip recession as pandemic impact continues - Activity in the bloc has been hit by a renewed surge in infections this year and Covid-related restrictions.
Brexit: Anger over government’s failure to get Norway fishing deal - One Hull-based trawler, which catches 10% of fish for UK chip shops, will be out of action for a year.
From Ars Technica
An ambitious plan to tackle ransomware faces long odds - Heavyweight task force proposes framework to tackle a major cybersecurity problem. - link
Ford’s ever-smarter robots are speeding up the assembly line - A transmission factory shows how AI may gradually creep into industrial processes - link
Disney gets special “theme park” exception to Florida’s anti-tech bill - A legal challenge to the new law seems inevitable. - link
More US agencies potentially hacked, this time with Pulse Secure exploits - Zeroday vulnerability under attack has a severity rating of 10 out of 10. - link
Mysterious health attacks like those seen in Cuba have come to DC - US security official was reportedly sickened outside the White House last year. - link
From Jokes Subreddit
I asked my wife, “I’m stuck on a crossword clue—Overworked Postman— can you help me?” -
A wife decides to take her husband, Dave, to a strip club for his birthday. -
They arrive at the club and the doorman says, “Hey, Dave! How ya doin’?”
His wife is puzzled and asks if he’s been to this club before.
“Oh no,” says Dave. “He’s on my bowling team.”
When they are seated, a waitress asks Dave if he’d like his usual and brings over a Budweiser.His wife is becoming increasingly uncomfortable and says," How did she know that you drink Budweiser?"
“She’s in the Ladies Bowling League, honey. We share lanes with them.”
A stripper then comes over to their table, throws her arms around Dave, and says “Hi Davey. Want your usual table dance, big boy?”
Daves wife, now furious, grabs her purse and storms out of the club.
Dave follows and spots her getting into a cab. Before she can slam the door, he jumps in beside her.
He tries desperately to explain how the stripper must have mistaken him for someone else, but his wife is having none of it.
She is screaming at him at the top of her lungs, calling him every name in the book.
The cabby turns his head and says, "Looks like you picked up a real bitch tonight, Dave.
