Google just revealed that its annual developer conference, I/O, will be returning to the Shoreline Amphitheater in Mountain View, California, on May 10. Like last year’s event, the in-person event is set to be fairly intimate, though the company will be streaming the keynotes for free. In pre-pandemic years, I/O was a large event with multiple days of keynotes and workshops.

This scaled-down event appears to be largely focused on public-facing talks, which bring key updates to Google’s various operating systems like Android and Wear OS. AI has been a cornerstone of the show as well in recent years, and given all of the hype we’ve seen for services like ChatGPT and Google’s own Bard, I’d say there’s a good chance the company will be leaning even more strongly on the category at this year’s event.

Hardware, on the other hand, has always been a bit of a crapshoot. The budget Pixel 7a appears to be looming on the horizon, and Google didn’t offer much in the way of Nest smartphone hardware in H2 of last year, so that’s also a possibility.

Google notes,

Google I/O returns to Mountain View May 10 by Brian Heater originally published on TechCrunch

https://techcrunch.com/2023/03/07/google-i-o-returns-to-mountain-view-may-10/

Local governments in the southwestern U.S. are putting up $150,000 to back what they say is a pioneering effort to “turn air into concrete at scale.” The funds will help cover the cost of the “reference project,” a collaboration between two climate tech startups and a masonry firm in Flagstaff, Arizona.

The firms expect construction to kick off later this year, when the two startups install their tech within Block-Lite‘s existing facility. It’ll work like thisAircapture will suck carbon out of the air, and CarbonBuilt will retrofit Block-Lite’s curing chamber so the firm can use the CO2 to cure a lower-carbon recipe for concrete. CarbonBuilt’s recipe uses less cement and integrates industrial waste that “would otherwise be diverted to landfills,” such as fly ash, the startup said.

“In essence, we’re working with Aircapture to take CO2 gas from our atmosphere and then we turn it into a rock for permanent storage,” CarbonBuilt said in a statement.

The $150,000 award comes from the 4 Corners Carbon Coalition, which took its name from the Southwest region of the U.S. The group counts four municipalities as members — Salt Lake City, Utah; Santa Fe, New Mexico; Boulder, Colorado; and Flagstaff, Arizona. In a statement to TechCrunch, CarbonBuilt CEO Rahul Shendure called the funds “a great first step,” but said the firms involved would also put funds and time into the project. 

Efforts to reduce concrete’s environmental toll are a crucial part of decarbonization. Concrete producers on the whole are responsible for roughly 7% of industrial carbon emissions, the International Energy Agency, an intergovernmental group, estimated in 2018.

Aside from installing solar arrays onto its facility, Block-Lite produces masonry products the traditional way today, emitting a ton of carbon dioxide via the curing process. Through the award, however, Block-Lite told TechCrunch that it will eventually start selling “ultra-low carbon blocks to customers in Flagstaff and surrounding areas.”

Climate tech startups team up to decarbonize Arizona cement plant by Harri Weber originally published on TechCrunch

https://techcrunch.com/2023/03/07/climate-tech-startups-team-up-to-decarbonize-arizona-cement-plant/

YouTube announced today that it’s relaxing the controversial profanity rules that it introduced toward the end of last year. The company says the new rules ended up creating a “stricter approach” than it had intended. The new update to the policy allows creators to use moderate and strong profanity without risking demonetization.

The original policy that was introduced back in November would flag any video that used profanity in the first 15 seconds of the video and make it ineligible for monetization, which meant that YouTube wouldn’t run ads on such videos. The change was retroactive and some creators said they had lost their monetization status as a result.

YouTube said back in January that it planned to modify the new rules.

Although the new relaxed rules don’t revert these changes back to the platform’s old policy, YouTube is making some changes that will allow creators to be eligible for limited ads if they use strong profanity within the first few seconds of a video. Under the November update, such videos would have received no ad revenue. The company also notes that video content using profanity, moderate or strong, after the first 7 seconds will be eligible for monetization, unless used repetitively throughout the majority of the video. Once again, such videos would have received no ad revenue under the November update.

YouTube said that it will re-review videos from creators who had their monetization affected by the November policy.

The company also clarified how profanity in music is treated, and noted that moderate or strong profanity used in background music, backing tracks, intro/outro music can now earn full ad revenue. Previously, such content would have received no ad revenue. In addition, the use of any profanity in titles and thumbnails will still be demonetized and cannot run ads, as was the case before the update in November.

The new policy goes into effect starting today. It’s worth noting that although the new policy doesn’t address all of the concerns that creators had and is still somewhat vague, it should make it easier for a big chunk of creators to continue monetizing their videos without having to make major changes.

It’s clear that YouTube is trying to make its massive trove of videos more age appropriate and advertiser friendly, but retrofitting new monetization rules onto a platform like YouTube is a delicate balance, as the past few months have shown.

YouTube relaxes controversial profanity and monetization rules following creator backlash by Aisha Malik originally published on TechCrunch

https://techcrunch.com/2023/03/07/youtube-relaxes-controversial-profanity-and-monetization-rules-following-creator-backlash/

When the news hit Monday that Qualtrics was being acquired, it wasn’t exactly surprising. SAP never seemed enamored with the company in spite of spending a hefty $8 billion to buy it in 2018. It took the German software giant just two years before it decided to spin Qualtrics out again as a separate company. After years of expecting it to happen, Qualtrics finally went public in 2021.

While Qualtrics was operating as a separate company with its own board of directors, budgeting and ability to set its own direction, SAP was still the power behind the throne, controlling a whopping 71% of its stock.

SAP always seemed to have some buyer’s remorse when it came to Qualtrics. It was hoping to get a dose of cloud savviness and access to crucial customer data, two things that Qualtrics easily provided, but the two companies never appeared to quite fit. Acquired when Bill McDermott was still SAP’s CEO, it’s possible that his replacement, Christian Klein, didn’t feel the same affinity for the company.

Whatever the reasons, the company began shopping Qualtrics at the end of January. That decision helped boost the value of the controlled company. The best offer it received for Qualtrics came to around $12 billion from a collection of buyers including Silverlake and the Canadian Pension Board. Considering SAP’s 71% stake, its cut of that dollar figure comes out to around $8.8 billion, basically the price it purchased the company for in 2018 and not much more.

Qualtrics filed an 8-K form with the SEC over the weekend, reporting the parameters of the deal, including that Silverlake and its investment partners offered $18.15 per share. That number represents just a 6% premium over Friday’s closing price, per the Financial Times. (Note, however, that Qualtrics already saw appreciation after news of its potential sale was announced earlier in the year; a sale was already priced-in.)

It’s also worth noting that this is not a done deal, although it feels unlikely that anyone will come along and beat the number on the table. Regardless, we wanted to look at this price and determine, is it fair? Is it as low as it feels at first glance? Let’s dig into the numbers and find out.

Fair or unfair

To answer our question regarding the potential sale price for Qualtrics, and whether it’s being sold on the cheap, we’ll need to interrogate its pre- and post-announcement value. While the premium over Friday’s close wasn’t large, it begins to look much better if we extend our time horizon.

Is $12.4B a fair price for Qualtrics? by Ron Miller originally published on TechCrunch

https://techcrunch.com/2023/03/07/qualtrics-sap-purchase-price-analysis/

Today Reddit announced updates to its platform, including the test of a TikTok-like feature that separates text and video content into individual feeds. Dubbed “Read” and “Watch,” the two split-view feeds will allow users to switch from browsing text-based posts to videos, depending on their mood.

The new feeds are currently being tested but will roll out fully in the coming weeks, a Reddit spokesperson told TechCrunch. As part of the test, both the “Read” and “Watch” feeds will include posts that users are subscribed to as well as recommendations, at least for now, the spokesperson added.

The update is an attempt to simplify the discovery experience for Reddit users and let them choose the feed that they actually want to see (or read).

“By focusing on the core tenets of Reddit, new and existing users coming to Reddit will be greeted by better experiences and options to discover new and interesting content and communities in uncluttered spaces,” Pali Bhat, chief product officer of Reddit, said in an official statement.

Reddit wrote in its official blog post today that it also plans to launch updates to its video player to let users “easily engage in conversations while watching.” The company launched its native video platform in 2017.

Other updates coming soon to Reddit include a re-organized interface to decrease clutter as well as chat upgrades, storefront improvements and more. The most recent feature to launch was a new search capability, where users can search comments within a post on desktop and iOS and Android devices.

For the past few years, Reddit has incorporated video on its platform in many ways to try and compete with TikTok. In 2020, the company acquired a short-form TikTok-like video platform, Dubsmash, to integrate its video creation tools into Reddit. In August 2021, Reddit rolled out a TikTok-style video feed on its iOS app.

The company confirmed last year that it was exploring the idea of bringing more user-generated video content to its online discussion forums as well as a feature that would allow users to react to other videos.

A lot of companies have videofied their apps, including Amazon, SoundCloud and Spotify, which has been spotted testing vertical video feeds. Instagram and YouTube have also launched TikTok-style features, “Reels” and “Shorts,” respectively. Snapchat launched its “Spotlight” feature in 2020.

Updated 3/7/23 at 1:35 p.m. ET with responses from a Reddit spokesperson.

Reddit gets a TikTok-style feature that introduces a separate video feed by Lauren Forristal originally published on TechCrunch

https://techcrunch.com/2023/03/07/reddit-gets-a-tiktok-style-feature-that-introduces-a-separate-video-feed/

Image Credits: Alex Sholom (opens in a new window) / Getty Images

Brazil’s corporate venture scene is very much in its early days, but in the last few years, companies in sectors like mining, telecom and retail have been getting into the game.

“These CVCs should be structurally advantageous for Brazil’s startup ecosystem, as it introduces a stable pool of medium-term dry powder that could reduce volatility,” says hedge fund investment analyst Matheus Tavares Dos Santos.

Approximately one in three restaurants will go out of business in its first year. For construction companies, that figure rises to 53%.

But AI projects are the real heartbreakers: A Gartner study found that 85% are destined to fail “due to bias in data, algorithms or the teams responsible for managing them.”

Unfortunately, the profound fear of missing out means many organizations are jumping into AI projects with both feet even though they don’t fully appreciate the scope of work involved.

Full TechCrunch+ articles are only available to members.
Use discount code TCPLUSROUNDUP to save 20% off a one- or two-year subscription.

“The best way to ensure you are on the correct AI development path is to start your AI project without thinking about the models,” recommends Eran Shlomo, co-founder and CEO of Dataloop.

“Most of the data that the AI needs to perform at its best ability is not available to the development team,” he writes. “This creates a ‘chicken or egg’ problem: Businesses need production data to deliver a functional model, but the model needs to exist in order to go to production.”

In a post aimed at nontechnical managers and senior developers, he shares a framework for building a core team consisting of data scientists, domain experts and data engineers who can build a system that can learn from its mistakes iteratively.

Via collaboration, “the AI provides automation, speed and low costs” while the team steers “the AI to a correct result in a constantly changing environment.”

According to Shlomo, working along these lines generates a machine learning data flywheel, “essentially planning a learning system rather than an AI model that works properly at a single point in time.”

Thanks very much for reading,

Walter Thompson
Editorial Manager, TechCrunch+
@yourprotagonist

Despite the downturn, CVC gains traction in Brazil’s startup ecosystem

Brazil’s corporate venture scene is very much in its early days, but in the last few years, companies in sectors like mining, telecom and retail have been getting into the game.

“These CVCs should be structurally advantageous for Brazil’s startup ecosystem, as it introduces a stable pool of medium-term dry powder that could reduce volatility,” says hedge fund investment analyst Matheus Tavares Dos Santos.

Gatik’s Gautam Narang on the importance of knowing your customer

Image Credits: Bryce Durbin

As the toxic train derailment in East Palestine, OH, illustrates, our brittle legacy supply chains are long overdue for an overhaul.

Autonomous vehicle startup Gatik operates approximately 40 driverless heavy-duty semi-trailer trucks on routes up to 300 miles long, connecting distribution centers with smaller hubs.

Rebecca Bellan interviewed Gatik’s CEO and co-founder, Gautam Narang, to learn more about the company’s operations, investor expectations and how a shortage of human drivers is impacting growth.

“We have not done any free delivery ever,” he says. “We have been doing commercial deliveries since 2019, meaning every trip that we have made, we have been paid for.”

If you have more than one business model, you don’t have a business model

Image Credits: masterSergeant (opens in a new window) / Getty Images

If your startup doesn’t have a well-defined business model — and a backup in case the first one fails — it’s unlikely to get funded.

Haje Jan Kamps defines it as “the full stack of how your company operates: How you deploy your resources (money and people) to create products and attract paying customers, and how you retain those customers.”

There’s no need to stumble in the dark: Seed-stage founders can largely rely on LTV and CAC to shape strategy, since identifying “a repeatable business model” is Job One.

“The important thing is to narrow down the focus of your business model and how you’re going to focus your attention during the sales cycle of your product,” he writes.

Creating remote work rituals that stick

Image Credits: peepo (opens in a new window) / Getty Images (Image has been modified)

Remote teams have a lot of flexibility when it comes to when and how they work, but adding some structure can enhance productivity and transparency without sacrificing freedom.

“Ultimately, asynchronous work only serves you when you compartmentalize phases of work with your team,” says Stefanie Palomino, chief product officer and general manager at ROOM3D.

This post offers several tips that can help managers deploy active listening techniques that foster engagement, improve communication and, ideally, reduce the number of meetings that take place.

“The routines people create are negotiated over time, but it’s something we’ve come to take for granted.”

TechCrunch+ roundup: Building a core AI team, Brazil’s CVC climate, remote work rituals by Walter Thompson originally published on TechCrunch

https://techcrunch.com/2023/03/07/techcrunch-roundup-building-a-core-ai-team-brazils-cvc-climate-remote-work-rituals/

Amazon is permanently closing eight of its cashierless Amazon Go convenience stores in Seattle, San Francisco and New York. The eight stores will remain open until April 1, a spokesperson for the company told TechCrunch. The closures mark Amazon’s latest move to rein in some of its brick-and-mortar retail operations. The news was first reported by GeekWire. 

“Like any physical retailer, we periodically assess our portfolio of stores and make optimization decisions along the way,” a spokesperson for the company told TechCrunch in an email. “In this case, we’ve decided to close a small number of Amazon Go stores in Seattle, New York City, and San Francisco. We remain committed to the Amazon Go format, operate more than 20 Amazon Go stores across the U.S., and will continue to learn which locations and features resonate most with customers as we keep evolving our Amazon Go stores.”

The company debuted its first cashierless location near its headquarters in Seattle in 2016. Amazon says that it continues to grow Amazon Go stores, noting that it recently opened a new location in Puyallup, Washington.

The latest closures come a year after the company announced that it would close 68 brick-and-mortar retail stores across the U.S. and U.K. This included its Amazon Books bookstores, its pop-up shops in various markets and its 4-star stores, where customers could shop popular and highly rated products across Amazon.com. At the time, Amazon said would continue to work on its cashierless grocery stores and other new concepts.

The company has been tightening its retail prospects in other ways as well. Last month, Bloomberg reported that Amazon paused an expansion of its line of Amazon Fresh Grocery stores in order to evaluate how to make the stores stand out and compete with mainstream supermarkets.

Amazon is among numerous other companies that have been hit by economic uncertainty and have moved to rein in costs. The company paused construction on its HQ2 in Virginia last week, and laid off 18,000 employees earlier this year.

Amazon to close eight Amazon Go stores in Seattle, San Francisco and New York by Aisha Malik originally published on TechCrunch

https://techcrunch.com/2023/03/07/amazon-to-close-eight-amazon-go-stores-in-seattle-san-francisco-and-new-york/

When people think of the funding crisis in further education, thoughts normally turn to the rising price of a typical four-year college degree. But that’s not the only financial gap that exists: those who want to pursue hands-on careers in trades like medical technicians, automotive mechanics, welding, carpentry or air conditioning specialists also regularly find themselves out of pocket when it comes to paying for the required training that many of these jobs need. A startup called Fynn that has built a financing platform for these vocational hopefuls — a “SoFi for trade students” in a sense. It currently works with around 150 technical colleges in the U.S., and now with some traction — $4 million loaned since the platform first went live in the summer of 2022 — today it’s announcing $36 million in funding to continue building out its business.

Fynn’s funding is coming in two parts, an $11 million seed, and a $25 million debt facility for providing financing to students. The seed includes backing from Y Combinator, where Fynn first started as part of the Summer 2019 cohort (originally called TradeUp), and Susa Ventures.

Eric Menees, Fynn’s CEO and co-founder (with Ethan Anderson and Bhavin Gupta), said in an interview that the gap that Fynn is looking to fill is two-fold.

First, there is a distinct labor shortage globally. Countries like the U.S. have been hit with a triple whammy of more people than ever attending four-year schools, plus the knowledge worker and service industries (which require little to no experience or training) both growing, leaving a gulf that tradespeople used to fill. Trade jobs have the challenge of being at a higher bar: they may pay better than other service jobs (and some “knowledge worker” jobs) but to do them you need special skills and qualifications, and the work is by and large undeniably harder and potentially more risky.

Second, there is the issue of affordability. For those who do want to go into vocational jobs, typically they need to go through technical colleges to do so. And while the tuitions and the time periods are lower and shorter than those for four-year degrees, they are not insignificant.

“Some jobs like diesel mechanics have four-month training programs, and others like welding might be a year,” Menees said. Those periods are not directly proportional to tuition: it can cost between $15,000 and $20,000 to go through the welder training; while those four-month diesel mechanic courses are $10,000, he said.

And what’s more, because the colleges that teach these trades are not typically classified as educational institutions, those wanting to attend these are usually unable to access federal and state loan programs designed to give students a helping hand with finance.

“A typical profile for someone who wants to go to a trade school is an 18 year-old out of high school without credit history and working in something like the food service industry,” Menees said. “How is that kid supposed to get $10,000 to be in a mechanic program?”

Fynn takes an approach similar to that of others in other areas of vocational education like coding. It works on the principle of income share agreements, where it doesn’t require repayments until students have found jobs. It also gives users options like payment pauses and loan forgiveness if their jobs change or are lost. It also generally aims to be provide a very low-friction onboarding — promising answers in minutes to loan requests — but has built a risk assessment model that it believes has been solid at both providing financing for students at schools with strong course completion rates, and to would-be students who are most likely to graduate and get work.

Fynn says that currently those who take its loans and go through and complete courses get a 172% bump in salaries, and that currently 85%-90% of those who take loans get through their courses and get jobs.  (It also helps with job placement for those using its platform, a sign of how it might grow over time to cover other services beyond loans.)

Part of that risk model, Menees points out, involves “sharing risk with institutions in the space.” That is to say, big employers back these loans in part to get more talent in the door. They look to Fynn to do the vetting and take on the main part of the default risk, so that they do not have to.

“This provides a path to six-figure salaries” for people who might not have previously had it, Menees said.

Indeed, the fact that there aren’t a lot of financing options out there addressing the specific needs of vocation students says something about how this sector of the market has been overlooked, and in some regards misunderstood, up to now. Of course, Fynn’s success will almost certainly lead to more competition here, too. Why wouldn’t SoFi itself become the SoFi for vocational students?

For now, most of those would-be competitors have yet to pounce, though, leaving some interesting opportunities for Fynn.

“Having access to trade school programs shouldn’t be this complex, especially at a time when skilled workers are needed more than ever. There is still time to solve America’s labor-supply issues, which is good news,” said Leo Polovets, general partner at Susa Ventures, in a statement. “Our investment enables Fynn’s continued growth as a leader in skills-based education financing and allows them to continue helping low-income students achieve middle-class status through quality education.”

Updated to note that the company does not offer income share agreements.

Fynn raises $36M for a platform to finance students in vocational education by Ingrid Lunden originally published on TechCrunch

https://techcrunch.com/2023/03/07/fynn-raises-36m-for-a-platform-to-finance-students-in-vocational-education/

The economy is a bit better — kind of, maybe, sort of? While things appear to be trending in the right direction, it’s going to be a long road. Besides, if you’re unable to find work, positive macroeconomic trends are cold comfort. One of the nice things about having a platform like TechCrunch is the opportunity to help people in that difficult position.

I work in publishing and am well aware of the pain of being laid off — I’ve been through the process twice. A million strangers on LinkedIn can tell you how great you are and how none of this is any of your fault. You can also know these things to be implicitly true and still struggle with questions of self-worth.

Here in the U.S., your occupation is invariably the second thing people ask you about after getting your name. We invest so much of our identity in what we do. It’s not healthy, necessarily, but it’s the thing we spend most of our time doing. It’s also the foundation of many of our closest relationships. It can be easy to lose sight of the human toll of mass layoffs when we see numbers in the tens of thousands among tech giants.

Now some good news: Companies are hiring. As an industry, robotics is somewhat uniquely positioned here, given the growth it saw during the pandemic. It’s true that some big companies (Alphabet, Amazon) have slowed robotics investments. It’s also true that we’re going to see more companies get acquired or wind down.

But a lot of money was infused into automation, providing runways that will help many get out on the other side in one piece. If anything, a lot of this bad news will only serve to bolster the industry. Certainly, labor issues aren’t going away any time soon, nor is the drive to increasingly automate fields like fulfillment, construction, healthcare and agriculture, among others.

Simply put: It’s a bad time to be looking for jobs, but a good time to be looking for jobs in robotics. I’ve been featuring a handful of companies that are hiring in my weekly robotics newsletter, Actuator. This morning, however, I put out a call in hopes of getting enough together for a standalone post. I didn’t have to wait long.

TechCrunch isn’t a job board, of course. This isn’t a listing of all available roles in robotics. But if you were recently laid off, are a recent graduate or are just looking for a change, this will hopefully be a good place to start. If people like it, we’ll do it again. And hey, if you end up finding a job through this post, let me know on Twitter. Everyone likes a happy ending.

Addverb (6 roles)

ANYbotics (6 roles)

Automated Architecture (4 roles)

Boston Dynamics (45 roles)

Boston Dynamics AI Institute (11 roles)

Chef Robotics (13 roles)

Dexory (5 roles)

Figure (15 roles)

GrayMatter Robotics (9 roles)

Honest AgTech (10 roles)

Impossible Metals (2 roles)

Kewazo (10 roles) 

Kiwibot (30 roles)

Mighty Fly (2 roles)

Monarch Tractors (15 roles)

Righthand Robotics (7 roles)

Rigorous Technology (3 roles)

Sanctuary AI (18 roles)

Scythe Robotics (10 roles)

Urban Machine (5 roles)

Verdant Robotics (7 roles)

Viam Robotics (10 roles)

Whisker (10 roles)

A list of robotics companies that are hiring by Brian Heater originally published on TechCrunch

https://techcrunch.com/2023/03/07/a-list-of-robotics-companies-that-are-hiring/

Twitter has ruffled more regulatory feathers in the European Union by going ahead with a rollout of a much criticized paid verification feature without informing its lead data protection watchdog ahead of time — despite previously saying it would.

The product, known as Twitter Blue, lets users pay to get a blue check market on their account — mimicking the look of the legacy verification feature the platform offered prior to Elon Musk’s takeover of the company last year — as well as to access to a suite of additional features, such as the ability to edit tweets, undo tweets and get prioritized ranking in conversations.

Speaking to Reuters, the Irish data protection commissioner Helen Dixon said: “We’re a little bit more concerned this week now that we see that the blue tick subscription service is rolling out here in EU countries having been reassured that it wasn’t going to roll out in the EU and certainly not before there have been discussions with our office.”

The Data Protection Commission (DPC) told TechCrunch it’s continuing to engage with Twitter on the matter but declined further comment.

The revised subscription product launched soon after Musk’s takeover of the company last fall — after the new billionaire broom said he would open up access to the blue check marks for a fee. However Musk was quickly forced to pause the launch after verification chaos ensued.

The product was then relaunched in December — initially in the U.S., Canada, the U.K., Australia and New Zealand — with manual checks in place aimed at combating the rampant impersonation that had greeted v1.

Since then Twitter has continued to expand access to Blue. In January the subscription offering was made available to users in Japan. Then, in early February, it was opened up to more paying users — including the first countries in the European Union, as well as additional international expansions, including to users in Saudi Arabia, India, Brazil and Indonesia. So it appears to have taken the DPC about a month to realize that an EU rollout was happening without it being given the promised notice.

Rollouts of Twitter Blue to EU countries have amped up considerably over the past month. So the regional rollout is clearly not an oversight by a ‘hardcore’ Twitter staffer. (Per this list on a Twitter product page, the subscription offering is now available in France, Germany, Spain, Italy, Portugal, Netherlands, Poland, Ireland, Belgium, Sweden, Romania, Czech Republic, Finland, Denmark, Greece, Austria, Hungary, Bulgaria, Lithuania, Slovakia, Latvia, Slovenia, Estonia, Croatia, Luxembourg, Malta, and Cyprus.)

A key issue with Musk’s approach is that turning the blue check mark into a paid feature undermines the usefulness of it as a verification signal. It also risks turning the platform into a megaphone for those willing/able to pay for reach — since they get greater amplification of their replies in conversations vs non-paying users, whose views they may be drowning out.

Still, it’s important to note that Musk refined the initial (total) chaos of his relaunch of Blue — by launching a range of additional free (different colored) check marks and symbols, including to denote business accounts and company affiliations or government accounts. (But good luck trying to distinguish verified journalists on Twitter — some of whom do now appear to have had legacy check marks affirmed as “notable” under the new regime; while others have not and if you click on one of these legacy blue checks (indistinguishable from paid blue checks) you can still encounter a useless note that reads: “This is a legacy verified account. It may or may not be notable.”)

While there is no legal obligation on Twitter to forewarn its lead EU data protection regulator of incoming product launches, it is considered best practice — at least where concerns exist (as they have from the start of Musk’s reboot of verification) — and Twitter rowing back on an explicit pledge to do so is clearly being viewed dimly in Dublin.

There’s an additional important consideration here — related to Twitter’s ability to keep streamlining its regulatory risk under the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), as it does currently, by (mostly) dealing only with Ireland’s watchdog on issues of data protection, rather than having to field inbound from every concerned DPA across the bloc where its service is in use.

Twitter can do this because it claims a “main establishment” in the EU, in Ireland — allowing it to tap into the GDPR’s one-stop-shop mechanism. However, as we’ve reported previously, maintaining this status quo requires it to keep satisfying the bloc’s regulators that a decision-making function vis-a-vis EU users actually exists in Ireland. And any unilateral decisions taken by Twitter’s US-based leadership which push risky products out across the EU without keeping the DPC in the loop risk undermining the status of its Irish entity. So if Musk keeps up this authoritarian modus operandi it could bring the whole carefully constructed legal facade crashing down — landing him with a whole host of expensive GDPR problems.

It will certainly be interesting to see whether the DPC’s “heightened state of contact with Twitter” (as Dixon put it to Reuters), over the un-notified Blue rollout, leads to a meaningful reboot of Twitter’s approach in the EU — or, er, not.

Twitter Blue’s quiet rollout in EU frets watchdog over lack of notice by Natasha Lomas originally published on TechCrunch

https://techcrunch.com/2023/03/07/twitter-blue-eu-dpc-concern/