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The Ennui of Learned Helplessness: Article 13 and the Five Lies in YouTube’s Content ID
March 29, 2019
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According to Wired (“Don’t believe the hype: Article 13 is great news for YouTube“), YouTube is positioned to be a big winner due to the Article 13 requirement for “upload filters”. If you’re keeping your brackets for “Most Googlely Journalist” in the post-Article 13 March Madness spin, Wired gets the three point play on this post–there are no upload filters in Article 13, so not quite sure what Wired is getting at here. But I digress.
Wired tells us:
[Article 13’s upload filters are] likely to be disruptive, for YouTube as for everyone else. There will be mistakes, disgruntled creators and meme-posters, protests against this or that algorithmic decision. But if anyone is going to eventually benefit from this, in the long run, that is YouTube.
Leaving aside the fact that Alphabet, YouTube’s owner, would probably have enough money to invest in licensing agreements with media companies and music labels – YouTube is uniquely positioned to capitalise on the internet’s sudden need for copyright filters. The platform itself has been using a type of copyright filter, its home-brewed Content ID, for over a decade. The algorithm compares newly uploaded footage against a database of registered videos, and demonetises (or takes down) any post containing matching content [which is also not quite right–it allows the user of Content ID to elect to block or monetize, with heavy pressure to monetize and not block].
While there have been instances of manipulation and egregious mistakes, Alphabet has invested more than $100 million in Content ID’s development, and the technology is already used by more than 9,000 broadcasters, movie studios, and music producers globally. [And there it is–we’ll come back to that] A vast number of other companies – virtually, every single platform and website that does not want to fall foul of Article 13 – could soon swell the ranks of Content ID’s users. Rather than an existential threat, Article 13 could wind up being a fillip to YouTube’s finances.
First, let’s dispense with an implication of that last assertion–that YouTube would profit from ContentID by licensing Content ID to third parties. There is absolutely no evidence that YouTube would do anything remotely like that, and even if they did, Google would likely still control who gets to put their works into ContentID in the first place. Wired doesn’t actually say this, but a reader might get that implication.
What is more clear is that Wired asserts YouTube would have a competitive advantage over other, smaller perhaps, platforms–not like they already do as the result of Google’s illegal favoring of its own products for which it is being fined billions in Europe. This due to the nonexistent “upload filters” that are not in the Copyright Directive (aka Article 13) but that the tech press keeps asserting are really there in one of the great gaslighting exercises of all time.
Remember–ContentID has a lot more to do with preserving YouTube’s US-based DMCA safe harbor and getting licenses for premium content (with higher advertising revenue, i.e., CPMs) than it does with some desire to do the right thing. That sentiment arguably does not exist at Google, YouTube, Facebook or any other Silicon Valley company with the notable exception of Apple.
Wired blows past the two key facts it its own story. First, the number of participants in ContentID: “the technology is already used by more than 9,000 broadcasters, movie studios, and music producers globally”.
This statistic comes from YouTube itself:
But strangely according to a 2016 story in the New York Times:
YouTube says that about 8,000 companies and organizations have access to Content ID and that independents may get access through affiliated companies and industry groups.
That’s right–the number of users of ContentID has increased–worldwide–by 1,000 in four years. Any idea how many new videos were uploaded to YouTube in that time? We may not have that exact number, but we do know this again according to YouTube’s own statistics:
That’s billion with a B. So just rough justice, don’t you think that if there are that many videos being viewed on YouTube there would be more than 9,000 worldwide users of ContentID?
The other relevant fact is that Wired breathlessly repeats that YouTube spent $100,000,000 on developing Content ID. According to Wikipedia (which I tend to believe in this case because it’s their benefactor Google), ContentID cost $60 million to develop by 2016 and as of 2018 Google had spent $100 million on the system.
Allow me to posit that $100 million for a system that can handle the volume on YouTube is chump change. One reason that it cost so little is that it is working for purpose–it is not intended to catch everything, it is only intended to catch works by the people who sign YouTube’s chump deal or people who are “important” (in the best traditions of YouTube’s founders).
Remember this line from the 2016 NYT story? “[I]ndependents may get access [to ContentID] through affiliated companies and industry groups.”
So you mean that some artists are more equal than others?
Exactly.
YouTube’s theory according to the NYT is that independent artists (such as five time Grammy-winner Maria Schneider who graced our pages with her groundbreaking essay on YouTube’s sleaze) are not harmed by YouTube’s “catch me if you can” DMCA shakedown because Content ID is widely available. The implication being if those pesky artists would just use the tools YouTube provides, there would be peace in the valley with sunshine, gum drops and puppy dog tails for everyone with happiness among the subjects of the Unicorn Kings.
The clear implication is that “independents” have nothing to complain about because they can get “access” to ContentID through “affiliated companies and industry groups”. “Affiliated” in this case means affiliated with YouTube (laughably called “partners”), and that means that the “companies and industry groups” have signed a ContentID license agreement which is essentially a nonnegotiable form contract imposed by Google.
Because Google wants to have the rights to use their IP all tied down.
Ahem.
This is another reason why Wired should not write to the Google press release.
So let’s start with what YouTube actually says about who gets ContentID:
And what are the “specific criteria” that copyright owners have to meet for their “substantial body of original material”?
So that quote from YouTube’s website arguably explains why there’s only 9,000 entities that have access to Content ID on a worldwide basis across all copyright categories (assuming that’s even true).
There’s at least five lies underlying Content ID, all of which you’d miss if you didn’t have the inside baseball insight into the unnecessarily complex Content ID system–and as we know, complexity almost always hides fraud.
Lie #1: Show Me Where I Signed Your Social Contract
The first point is why should artists be required to even deal with Content ID or YouTube at all? If an artist never consented to being on the site in the first place, why should Google be able to just exploit their work without consent? Why shouldn’t Google have to have a contract with the artists to exploit their IP? You know, the way you have to be approved and have a license to use Content ID. This is a core property rights concept underlying the new Copyright Directive in Europe–we hope that the US follows suit with DMCA reform.
There is tremendous cost associated with engaging with YouTube at all whether you qualify for Content ID or you don’t. In fact, as the Trichordist’s Streaming Price Bible demonstrates, YouTube’s royalties are so crappy that it’s entirely possible that the total cost of doing business with YouTube exceeds any royalties you could make–because the cost of dealing with YouTube varies directly with the size of your catalog.
So why shouldn’t artists be able to just say no and keep all of their music (or other work product) off of YouTube? Every penny spent trying to block unauthorized videos is a penny spent for YouTube’s benefit. And why is it we have to pay for this?
The truth is that it is not at all apparent that declining the opportunity to license YouTube wouldn’t actually be more profitable than dealing with the incredibly screwed up Content ID and CMS system.
So let’s not assume that Content ID and notice and shakedown are the only possible outcomes here.
Lie #2: Using Content ID Is Not Free
Even though Google doesn’t charge for Content ID, using the system is hardly free, especially for “independents”. In order to get “access” to Content ID, an independent artist needs to contract with a claiming company–and pay that company anywhere from 20% to 50% of their YouTube revenue.
And let’s be clear–claiming companies exist to fix YouTube’s mistakes imposed on the world due to YouTube’s legacy and highly inefficient DMCA notice and shakedown business. Every penny spent by an artist through giving a claiming company a revenue share is a penny spent for YouTube’s benefit by an artist capitulating to the notice and shakedown onslaught.
So saying that “independents” have “access” to Content ID through a claiming company “affiliated” with YouTube is a grotesque oversimplification. There are claiming companies that operate at the more lucrative end of the YouTube doing channel management and MCN or near-MCN business for which they may operate their own in-house advertising sales staff.
The claiming companies in reach of “independents” necessarily have to take a larger share of a smaller revenue stream in order to operate. And here’s what they don’t do:
Block.
Why do they only monetize? Because that’s what a revenue share means–revenue. Using Content ID to just block videos (especially UGC) would only be available for a fee (since there’s no revenue if you block everything). Independent artists can’t afford to pay a fee to block on YouTube so they typically will capitulate and monetize.
And who benefits from that? YouTube.
Why would blocking require a fee for service? If an artist just wants to bail out altogether, then that artist would set the automated controls of CMS to block worldwide. In order to make that blocking meaningful, there would need to be a lot of manual care and feeding to account for UGC leakage through the very porous Content ID.
That would include techniques like pitch bending to use the curious speed controls on the YouTube player which seem to have one purpose–defeating Content ID.
This is what’s called a royal pain in the trade, so anyone doing that work would have to be paid for the hours and hours and hours it would take to accomplish it. Since the artist can’t afford to pay someone else to do that work, the artist would need to do it in all their spare time. Which of course will not be very effective or may not happen at all.
I call this the ennui of learned helplessness.
Lie #3: Artists Cannot Access Content ID
By using the word “access” when it comes to Content ID, YouTube is equivocating yet again. If you are an independent artist and your distributor has a CMS account (and that’s a small group), do you have access to Content ID?
No. At best, you can tell your distributor what you do and do not want monetized. They will only devote so much time to you, however, and they won’t do the manual claiming on UGC, etc., at least not until you get some pretty significant traction on YouTube (meaning over 5,000 views or so on a particular video).
Your distributor will not allow you to get your hands on their CMS or Content ID dashboards. There’s a good reason for this, which is that the way Google licenses Content ID there’s a good chance that the distributor (such as Tunecore or CD Baby) could never get enough seats for its particular CMS license to allow all the distributed artists to have individual access, and there’s no view in Content ID that would show one artist’s tracks without showing that user all the other artist’s tracks handled by that distributor.
Why? Because YouTube doesn’t design the system for “independents”.
Lie #4: Independent Songwriters are SOL
Notice YouTube never talks about independent songwriters having “access” to Content ID. The closest that an independent songwriter comes to getting access to Content ID is if they opted into the HFA YouTube license connected to the out of court settlement of the class action against YouTube that was a companion case to Viacom v. YouTube (and which wasn’t certified as a class, but is often referred to as a class action by people wishing to avoid using the legal term “putative”).
So ask independent songwriters who opted in to the HFA license how that “access” is working out for them.
Lie #5: Content ID Is Another Nondisplay Use of Other People’s Stuff
Google has made a subspecialty of acquiring data for one use and actually using it for other purposes–undisclosed purposes.
Remember “GOOG-411”? This Google product was the “free” Google directory assistance (very similar to Google Voice). Former Googler (and former Yahoo!er) Marissa Meyer told Info World years ago that GOOG-411 was not intended to be what it appeared to be:
You may have heard about our [directory assistance] 1-800-GOOG-411 service. Whether or not free 411 is a profitable business unto itself is yet to be seen. I myself am somewhat skeptical. The reason we really did it is because we need to build a great speech-to-text model … that we can use for all kinds of different things, including video search.
The speech recognition experts that we have say: If you want us to build a really robust speech model, we need a lot of phonemes, which is a syllable as spoken by a particular voice with a particular intonation. So we need a lot of people talking, saying things so that we can ultimately train off of that. … So 1-800-GOOG-411 is about that: Getting a bunch of different speech samples so that when you call up or we’re trying to get the voice out of video [such as from YouTube], we can do it with high accuracy.
That’s right–Google told you the product was doing one thing, but in actual fact it was always intended to be something entirely different. The real action was in the background where users couldn’t see it. If Marissa Meyer hadn’t let it slip in an interview, you might never have known.
If you have a Content ID contract, check out this language in paragraph 2:
By providing Reference Files, you grant Google a non-exclusive, royalty-free, limited license to (a) store, copy (including the right to make temporary cache and storage copies), modify or reformat, excerpt, analyze, use to create algorithms and binary representations, create ID Files and otherwise use those Reference Files, the ID Files and the associated metadata in connection with the System…
And there it is: “otherwise use”. Pretty broad grant of rights, eh? You could say that “in connection with the System” is limiting, but how would you ever know what “in connection with” means?
Remember Google Books? Ever heard of “corpus machine translation“? Google uses the scans of the tens of millions of books it stole from authors in the background to improve its translation algorithms. If the authors had brought their case about that, do you think the court would have been so quick to find this obviously massively commercial application a fair use?
Bevo ≠ Unicorn King
Once again, YouTube has scammed their way past artist objections such as those in Maria Schneider’s post and Irving Azoff’s open letter. I think this is partly because the whole Content ID system is such inside baseball–once you accept the idea that requiring artists to use these legacy DMCA tools is even acceptable, which I don’t. Reporters just don’t know what questions to ask.
Now they do.
(Some of this post previously appeared on MTP in other posts.)
“Purchased Protest” Bombshell: Germany’s FAZ News Uncovers The Seamy Underbelly of Google’s Article 13 Lobbying
March 16, 2019
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The usual suspects got caught again. And you can’t have the usual suspects without Keyser Söze.
Constantin van Lijnden writing in the top German paper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung has uncovered the financial link between YouTubers in the paid service of Google to “protest” in favor of the multinational monopolist’s interests in the European Copyright Directive (aka “Article 13”).
In his story filed today “Gekaufter Protest?” or “Purchased Protest?”, van Lijnden’s reporting has turned up what appears to be proof positive that Google’s interference lobbying has sunk to new depths of depravity (translation courtesy of Google Translate, courtesy of Google Books):
According to research by this newspaper, several German Youtubers have been offered money by an interest group that appears under the name “Create Refresh” to position themselves in videos against Article 13 of the copyright reform, which is particularly relevant for the video platform. “I am writing for financial support available to content creators who want to protest against Article 13. Be it a video, memes or graphics – we are open to suggestions, “says Mirko Drotschmann, who trades on Youtube as “mrwissen2go “and has about 900,000 subscribers.
Similar offers have been received by the Clixoom Science & Fiction channels (over 500,000 subscribers), Pietsmiet (more than 2.3 million subscribers) and Jana Riva (around 50,000 subscribers). The latter were promised €2,000 for a critical opinion on Article 13. All four emphasize the finding that they have not responded to the offer and have wondered very much about it, as such attempts to collect money would otherwise be almost non-existent and money would be offered only for the promotion of products.
Google’s interference lobbying should come as no surprise. As MTP readers will recall, German Member of the European Parliament Helga Truepel was threatened with interference lobbying by Google’s lawyers during a trade mission to Silicon Valley:
MTP readers will also recall the humiliating failure of the pro-Google lobbying effort to turn out any actual humans to protest in advance of prior votes. I warned at the time not to underestimate Google’s ability to deliver protesters–one only need remember how the homes of Germans who opted out of Google Street View were mysteriously egged by “protesters” all in one night who also hung signs on their target homes stating “Google is Cool”.
The opposition to Article 13 is organizing a protest for March 23 and claims to have a number of cities in Europe targeted, mostly in Poland and Germany (two countries where Google has invested heavily in their academic missionary outposts for a decade or more). The efforts may be aided by the general waive of protests about a host of social issues sweeping Europe, not to mention a large Brexit protest scheduled for March 23–coincidentally. It may be possible to create the impression that one protest is about another topic altogether, particularly if the propagandist shows pictures of a protest in a wide shot that has no readable protest signs in frame.
Still, the logistics of getting protesters from one stronghold to a weaker outpost at a particular date and time was striking challenge given the geography. Van Lijnden addresses how Google’s lobbyists rose to the challenge in the FAZ article:
[T]he protest is financially supported: Under the name of “EDRI” [the European Digital Rights lobby shop] numerous net political NGOs has offered…to bear the travel and hotel costs of people who want to lobby in personal talks with the deputies of the European Parliament. According to EDRI, a budget of €15,000 is available, two-thirds of which would be provided by the Open Society Foundation founded by George Soros and one third by the industry association “Copyright 4 Creativity”. [MTP readers will have seen that bunch before back in 2015.]
The latter is also one of the supporters of “Create Refresh” and is led by Caroline De Cock, also managing director of the Brussels-based lobbying company “N-square”. Its clients include Google which as a parent company of Youtube would be hit hard by the reform. Such indirect lines from Silicon Valley to the aggravation and whipping of the protest can also be drawn elsewhere, such as the “Center for Democracy and Technology”, which is also listed as a supporter of “Create Refresh” and “Save your internet” and led by Nuala O’Connor, the former lawyer of Google subsidiary DoubleClick.
We wrote about the N-Square group back in 2015:
While Google itself is not a member of Copyright 4 Creativity, the organization is run by a long-time Brussels lobbyist whose firm represents Google, and even a cursory look at the Copyright 4 Creativity materials reveals some of the same rhetoric we have heard for years from the Google-funded anti-artist crowd. This, of course, is how the astroturf game is played.
“Purchased Protest?” is extraordinarily brave reporting by FAZ given the level of hostility that Google has ginned up in Europe through its interference lobbying efforts rivaled only by Russian bot farmers and Cambridge Analytica–if not inspired by them. Ahem. Vlad would be proud.
This isn’t the first time that a major newspaper has caught Google and its YouTube subsidiary faking an Article 13 protest or stirring the contagion pot complete with bots and Russomania. And of course David Lowery and Volker Rieck have done important work in exposing the rot.
But it’s the first time that Google money has been linked to YouTube “creators” engaging in lobbying efforts to assist Google’s political goals, attacking Google’s political enemies and supporting Google’s political allies–all of which smacks of electioneering requiring compliance with Europe’s election transparency laws.
And of course there’s no one who knows more about where to find individuals likely to carry Google’s water, knowingly or unknowingly, than the one company in the world that knows what you’re thinking before you do. Unbridled snooping by the pervy Google data scientists produces unimaginable benefits when that information is turned to political profit.
The first rate reporting in these bombshell revelations are all the more reason why the European law enforcement authorities need to open a criminal investigation into the whole mess. As van Lijnden concludes:
[Big Tech’s attempt] to buy critical voices in the channel that is relevant to the debate highlights the manipulative methods that have fueled or even generated parts of the protest.
Can I get an “amen”?
When it Comes to DC Lobbying, Google Outspends Big Tech Cohort–and the Peoples Republic of China
January 24, 2019
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As Susan Crawford tells us:
I was brought up and trained in the Internet Age by people who really believed that nation states were on the verge of crumbling…and we could geek around it. We could avoid it. These people were irrelevant.
It’s rather stark when you see it. We all know that Google is a government-level power and is enjoys a level of political influence on par with many countries, well ahead of its commercial rivals in the U.S.–and this doesn’t even count the tens of millions it spends buying academics and librarians or supporting the EFFs, Engines, R Streets and Fight for the Futures of the world.
Whether you take Big Tech as a group or individually, these companies–and especially Google–spend like they were countries.
Google’s lobbying spend compares favorably to South Korea’s spend in the U.S., which is the biggest foreign lobbyist according to Open Secrets:
And to the People’s Republic of China U.S. lobbying:
For Article 13 comparison, Germany and France came in at the end of the pack:
Germany Lobbying Spend 2017 and 2018
France Lobbying Spend 2017 and 2018
When you consider that all of the Big Tech lobbying spenders in the graph except Apple are also in the Internet Association and indirectly in the MIC Coalition, many things become clear. It means that Michael Beckerman, the head of the Internet Association who apparently has some modeling aspirations looking very Zoolanderesque, gets to buy nice things. But then as a wise man once said, brown shoes don’t make it.
MTP Podcast: Why Artists Should Care About Data Center Lobbying
January 18, 2019
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Show Notes
Today’s podcast is about the impact on climate of the massive data centers operated in states outside of California and New York by Google, Facebook, Amazon and others. I focus on Oregon and Nebraska, but there are many other locations. These massive building projects enable Google to exercise its lobbying muscle in states you wouldn’t expect and on the federal senators and representatives of those states on issues familiar with our old adversary: Artist rights, profit from human trafficking, drugs and brand sponsored piracy.
Are Data Centers The New Cornhusker Kickback and the Facebook Fakeout?
What’s Up With @SenSasse’s Vicious Little Amendment on pre-72?
Here Comes the Shiv: Sen. Sasse to Move to Strike the CLASSICS Act and Screw Pre-72 Artists
Carbon Clouds: Should Artists Ask Why Aren’t Google, Amazon and Facebook in the Green New Deal?
Greenpeace “Dirty Data” research. www.greenpeace.org/archive-interna…-greenpeace.pdf
Nature magazine sums it up (www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-06610-y):
“Upload your latest holiday photos to Facebook, and there’s a chance they’ll end up stored in Prineville, Oregon, a small town where the firm has built three giant data centres and is planning two more. [Hello, Senator Wyden.] Inside these vast factories, bigger than aircraft carriers, tens of thousands of circuit boards are racked row upon row, stretching down windowless halls so long that staff ride through the corridors on scooters.
These huge buildings are the treasuries of the new industrial kings: the information traders. The five biggest global companies by market capitalization this year are currently Apple, Amazon, Alphabet, Microsoft and Facebook, replacing titans such as Shell and ExxonMobil. Although information factories might not spew out black smoke or grind greasy cogs, they are not bereft of environmental impact. As demand for Internet and mobile-phone traffic skyrockets, the information industry could lead to an explosion in energy use.”
According to the National Resources Defense Council www.nrdc.org/resources/americas…ing-amounts-energy:
“Data centers are the backbone of the modern economy — from the server rooms that power small- to medium-sized organizations to the enterprise data centers that support American corporations and the server farms that run cloud computing services hosted by Amazon, Facebook, Google, and others. However, the explosion of digital content, big data, e-commerce, and Internet traffic is also making data centers one of the fastest-growing consumers of electricity in developed countries, and one of the key drivers in the construction of new power plants.
Google emits less than 8 grams of carbon dioxide equivalent per day to serve an active Google user—defined as someone who performs 25 searches and watches 60 minutes of YouTube a day, has a Gmail account, and uses our other key services.”
In Google-speak “less than 8” usually means 7.9999999999. So let’s call it 8. As of 2016 there were 1 billion active gmail users. So rough justice, Google acknowledges that it emits about 8 billion grams of carbon dioxide daily, or 9,000 tons. And based on the characteristically tricky way Google framed the measurement, that doesn’t count the users who don’t have a gmail account, don’t use “our other key services” and may watch more than an hour a day of YouTube.Upload today,
The Mother’s Milk of Algorithms: Google Expands Its Data Center Lobbying Footprint in Minnesota–Home to Senator Amy Klobuchar
January 14, 2019
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Data profiling requires a lot of computing power. Really a whole bunch. When you’re talking that much electricity, you’re talking government. When you’re talking government, you’re talking lobbying.
And in this case, looking at the political landscape from the data center point of view might explain a whole lot of oddball results. Like why do Senators from Oregon and Nebraska seem ready to abandon their constituents in favor of a bunch of out-of-staters that don’t have another connection to their states? And which moves are Google making now that might position them to be influential again in US presidential politics in 2020 and also be bad for the creative community? Maybe having juice all comes down to having the juice.
When Google and Facebook are scraping all your personal information and hosting all that user-generated pirated content, they need to really work over their algorithms. Bigly. And crunching algorithms requires gigantic data centers and gigantic data centers don’t run on magic elves.
No, electricity is the mothers milk of algorithms and electricity doesn’t come from magic elves generating special energy on treadmills imported from the Undying Lands.
How much electricity does it take for Google to invade your privacy…sorry…be Google? Google has not, to my knowledge, updated its voluntary 2011 disclosures on energy use. In 2011, Google’s continuous energy needs were roughly what it would take to power 200,000 homes in the U.S.–say Salt Lake City, Yonkers or Little Rock. Approximately 80% of that electricity is Google’s data centers. And that was eight years ago. According to a 2016 feature in the Guardian, Google accounts for the lions share of approximately 2% of greenhouse gas emissions in the world that power data centers. That’s right–the world. So presumably the reason they haven’t updated those 2011 disclosures is because the Google climate news isn’t good.
Google would like you to believe that they offset their carbon footprint through investing in renewable energy, which they do to a degree. But the people who really do the big investing in Google’s renewable energy needs are not just Google–they are that old standby, the old reliable for corporate welfare, the innovator of last resort. That’s right.
You.
We’ll come back to how you do that in a minute, but rest assured. You won’t be shocked, shocked. And we’ll always have Paris.
Regardless of who’s building their infrastructure, Google’s energy drain would make Google a very big electricity customer–very big. And then there’s Amazon and Facebook, too. Internet Association types, you get the idea. (Someone has to pay for Michael Beckerman’s $4,000 shoes.)
My bet is that the demand for electricity to run those algorithms needs to be spread out so hopefully nobody will notice the affect on the climate that the Silicon Valley party is having. This is due to the massive draw down of electricity and the crowding out of local users in the lucky localities where the taxpayer pays Google to locate their data centers. Where these data centers are located can create considerable political leverage for the already over-leveraged Google.
Let’s take a look at the most recent example, Google’s new data center in Minnesota, home to Senator Amy Klobuchar. (Senator Klobuchar was included in the recent list of potential 2020 Democratic Party presidential candidates in Politico.) Senator Klobuchar is–or at least was–a long-time ally of artists in the U.S. Senate.
According to Minnesota Public Radio, the biggest utility in Minnesota is selling over 300 acres of land to Google to locate a new $600 million data center in the city of Becker, Minnesota not far from Minneapolis. Fair market value, right? Maybe not.
After the data center is built, Google will immediately become one of the utility’s five largest customers. Although the utility “plans” to have “most” of Google’s data center needs met by renewable energy by 2050, it currently operates the largest coal-fired generator in Minnesota and is scheduled to replace that plant with a natural gas facility in the near future.
In order to get that natural gas plant paid for and opened, former Governor Mark Dayton side-stepped the customary process before the Minnesota Public Utilities Commission. How? Google’s favorite method of avoiding local elected officials–lobbying the state legislature.
What a coincidence.
And why was that new plant so important? According to local press, “[p]roponents say the legislation [authorizing the natural gas generator] is necessary to stabilize the Sherburne County economy, which will be hurt by the coal generators’ demise.” Sounds important. Sounds like back scratching–we can only get Google to move here if we get rid of coal, and we can’t get rid of coal without spending some more of the taxpayers’ money–not Google’s money, your money–on a new power plant.
How do you think the Mayor of Becker (population 4,568) feels about Google coming to her town? Think she’ll get in the way after the Governor and the state legislature have already mandated what is to go down? Because the county economy is dependent on the new power plant and the new power plant will in large part be dependent on Google.
Do data centers produce a huge number of jobs that might justify paying a company like Google to move to Becker, Minnesota? Not once they’re built--“the Minnesota Department of Employment and Economic Development said the…data center would involve 2,000 construction jobs and employ about 50 full-time workers.”
That’s right–50 jobs. So we build you a power plant and you give us…50 jobs.
This is about the same result as Senator Ron Wyden enjoyed from the data centers built in The Dalles along Oregon’s Columbia River watershed. (That would be the same Ron Wyden who is the former chair of the United States Senate Finance Subcommittee on Energy, Natural Resources, and Infrastructure…. No connection, I’m sure.)
But it seems that a handful of jobs is worth poking his finger in the eyes of the Oregon music community in Portland and beyond by consistently opposing fair copyright reforms and protecting Google’s cherished Section 230 safe harbor–which he’s proud to tell you he wrote. It’s also worth opposing the Stop Enabling Sex Trafficking Act and generally being as close to Google as one is to two.
You might also find that Nebraska’s wind farms explain Senator Ben Sasse’s sudden interest in screwing pre-72 artists in line with Google’s desire to block the CLASSICS Act, particularly when you find out that Nebraska is in an internecine struggle with neighbor Iowa to get another of Google’s data centers.
So the question is–now that Google is building a data center in Minnesota, will we discover that Senator Klobuchar and her colleague Tina Smith are suddenly finding that protecting Minnesota artists like Jimmy Jam, Terry Lewis, Sounds of Blackness, Prince and that Zimmerman kid from the ravages of multinational corporations is just not their thing after all?
Carbon Clouds: Should Artists Ask Why Aren’t Google, Amazon and Facebook in the Green New Deal?
December 18, 2018
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Let’s start out with a basic gut check–when you plug in an electric car to charge up the batteries, where do you think that electricity comes from? Magic elves or the same coal burning power plant or nuclear power station that the rest of the world uses?
Sure, you can have a renewable element to the energy mix, but let’s all remember that any activity that sucks down significant amounts of energy has a carbon footprint like anything else. If you really like the Green New Deal, you’ll probably feel like there’s a policy position that has at least the basics covered.
There’s just one problem–one of the biggest users of electricity is not on the list. No, they’re just not included at all in the Green New Deal. And who might that be?
Data centers. And not just any data centers–these are massive facilities owned by Google, Facebook, Amazon and others. Listen up Senator Ron Wyden and Senator Ben Sasse. This is for you.
Upload your latest holiday photos to Facebook, and there’s a chance they’ll end up stored in Prineville, Oregon, a small town where the firm has built three giant data centres and is planning two more. [Hello, Senator Wyden.] Inside these vast factories, bigger than aircraft carriers, tens of thousands of circuit boards are racked row upon row, stretching down windowless halls so long that staff ride through the corridors on scooters.
These huge buildings are the treasuries of the new industrial kings: the information traders. The five biggest global companies by market capitalization this year are currently Apple, Amazon, Alphabet, Microsoft and Facebook, replacing titans such as Shell and ExxonMobil. Although information factories might not spew out black smoke or grind greasy cogs, they are not bereft of environmental impact. As demand for Internet and mobile-phone traffic skyrockets, the information industry could lead to an explosion in energy use.
According to the National Resources Defense Council:
Data centers are the backbone of the modern economy — from the server rooms that power small- to medium-sized organizations to the enterprise data centers that support American corporations and the server farms that run cloud computing services hosted by Amazon, Facebook, Google, and others. However, the explosion of digital content, big data, e-commerce, and Internet traffic is also making data centers one of the fastest-growing consumers of electricity in developed countries, and one of the key drivers in the construction of new power plants.
Why might that be? Here’s some 2011 data from the famous “The Internet is Killing the Planet” infographic inspired by Greenpeace’s “Dirty Data” research (that seems to have been forgotten in the GND):
Based on Google’s most recent environmental report (2018) you have to tease out what Google’s actual carbon emissions is (in footnote 32):
- Google emits less than 8 grams of carbon dioxide equivalent per day to serve an active Google user—defined as someone who performs 25 searches and watches 60 minutes of YouTube a day, has a Gmail account, and uses our other key services.
In Google-speak “less than 8” usually means 7.9999999999. So let’s call it 8. As of 2016 there were 1 billion active gmail users. So rough justice, Google acknowledges that it emits about 8 billion grams of carbon dioxide daily, or 9,000 tons. And based on the characteristically tricky way Google framed the measurement, that doesn’t count the users who don’t have a gmail account, don’t use “our other key services” and may watch more than an hour a day of YouTube. You know, like kids for example.
And that’s just Google. Again from Nature:
Already, data centres use an estimated 200 terawatt hours (TWh) each year. That is more than the national energy consumption of some countries, including Iran, but half of the electricity used for transport worldwide, and just 1% of global electricity demand (see ‘Energy scale’). Data centres contribute around 0.3% to overall carbon emissions, whereas the information and communications technology (ICT) ecosystem as a whole — under a sweeping definition that encompasses personal digital devices, mobile-phone networks and televisions — accounts for more than 2% of global emissions. That puts ICT’s carbon footprint on a par with the aviation industry’s emissions from fuel.
Google Data Center in The Dalles, Oregon
What does this have to do with music? Actually, more than you might think. YouTube is one of the biggest carbon producers in the Google system. What’s consumed the most on YouTube? Cat videos? How-to screw in a lightbulb videos? No.
Music videos.
And then there’s streaming. However you might have felt about plastic discs, billions upon billions of streams uses up a lot of processing power. And it’s like all the world’s music is hosted in the cloud, sometimes literally. Remember “Own Nothing, Have Everything”? I don’t know if anyone could have thought of a more inefficient delivery method from a climate point of view, but I suppose it’s possible.
The fact is we are the forced enablers of what may end up being one of the biggest energy scams in the entire climate disaster, and it’s time to put the foot down. First of all, artists need to start asking questions of services like YouTube and the advertisers who support them.
And clearly, the Green New Deal needs to take a close look at this entire subject.
Google’s European Campaign Contributions on Article 13
August 24, 2018
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RITTER
They want what every first term administration wants…a second term.
From A Clear and Present Danger, written by Tom Clancy (novel), screenplay by Donald Stewart, Steven Saillian and John Milius.
MTP readers will recall that both the Times of London and Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung have confirmed the efforts by Google to influence the vote on copyright reform in the European Union. We called for that investigation on MTP and were mocked for doing so by the usual suspects.
Getting mocked by the usual suspects is how you know you’re onto something big, by the way.
But we owe a big thanks to the really stellar investigative work of Volker Rieck and David Lowery that exposed how Google uses astroturf front groups to “push its views” and for which it no doubt pays well.
There is, of course, a political dimension to this exposé that has not been examined thoroughly yet. It’s an important dimenstion because the Members of the European Parliament must stand for election next year, less than a year away. And the Member of the European Parliament who certainly appears to be as close to Google as 1 is to 2 is the lone Pirate Party representative.
The Pirate Party is a creature of proportional representation, an interesting practice in Europe (and other places) that allows political parties with very small constitutencies to field candidates and sometimes get elected to legislative bodies such as the European Parliament. The Pirate Party has one European Parliament representative elected from Germany, which is interesting because Google has also dropped a pile of influence-peddling cash in Germany according to the Google Transparency Project.
First, Google’s academic influence program in Europe has gone beyond funding existing academic institutions, as it does in the United States, to helping create entirely new institutes and think-tanks in key countries like Germany, France and the United Kingdom. In those countries, executives from Google’s lobbying operation have helped conceive research groups and covered most, or all, of their budgets for years after launch.
Google policy executives have acted as liaisons to steer their research priorities and host public events with policymakers.
For example, Google has paid at least €9 million to help set up the Alexander von Humboldt Institute for Internet and Society (HIIG) at Berlin’s Humboldt University. The new group launched in 2011, after German policymakers voiced growing concerns over Google’s accumulated power.
The Institute has so far published more than 240 scholarly papers on internet policy issues, many on issues of central importance to Google’s bottom line. HIIG also runs a Google-funded journal, with which several Google-funded scholars are affiliated, to publish such research.
The Institute’s reach extends beyond Germany, or even Europe. HIIG previously managed, and still participates, in a global Network of Internet and Society Research Centers [Silicon Valley’s answer to the Confucious Institutes] to coordinate internet policy scholarship. Many are in emerging markets where Google is trying to expand its footprint, such as India and Brazil.
So it must be said that when Google was caught with its hand in the cookie jar on Article 13, that astroturf effort must be viewed as part of a larger Google policy laundering operation that may include influencing elections. Certainly in a post-Cambridge Analytica world, one cannot simply ignore these dots and all are worthy of investigation for compliance with Europe’s campaign finance laws if nothing else.
For a minority political party representative of one in need of a message in the face of an imminent election, it simply cannot be ignored that garnering the finanical support of Google and Facebook’s astroturf operation for a campaign that directly or indirectly benefits a candidate may be welcome.
Getting Silicon Valley’s billions focused on motiviating the electorate around a particular issue of benefit to such a multinational bloc of monopolists might help motivate voters and guide them to the “right” candidate. As one of the usual suspects noted:
When the European Commission announced its plans to modernize EU copyright law two years ago, the public barely paid attention. This changed significantly in recent months.
Which was perhaps one of the electoral objects of the astroturf exercise.
Considering that political campaigns in Europe are typically of quite limited duration compared to the US (sometimes as short as 25 days before polling day), coming up with a an issue campaign that a political candidate–especially an incumbent–can leverage to increase their profile has got to be golden–particularly if that campaign may not rise to the level of a restricted political contribution or electioneering has got to be disclosed.
If that issue campaign can draw funding and support from U.S. based multinational corporations like Google and Facebook leveraging their user networks and advertising clout, all the better for a vulnerable candidate.
Because in the end, what every incumbent wants is another term. The Pirate Party already faces declining relevance and may lose the one seat they have in the European Parliament elections in a few months time. Especially if the the Pirate Party already struggles to field a winner. Faced with such an existential threat, who knows what compromises may get made and who knows what in-kind donations may surface.
Undisclosed compromises and in-kind donations.
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