For TIME’s cover story on the future of business and the digitization of everything—which accompanies our list of the 100 most influential companies—we turned the space over to an artist who’s been at the forefront of the digital art movement for more than a decade.
Artist Mike Winkelmann (aka Beeple) wanted to take our readers inside his “canvas” to depict the stratospheric acceleration of the digitization of our world by creating an image that focused on his artistic process. The cover image depicts his actual computer interface mid design, complete with a wireframe render of a figure interacting on the left and a more complete version on right. He created this digital world using Cinema 4D and OctaneRender software that is powered by nearly a dozen Nvidia graphics cards. (Nvidia was just named one of TIME’s 100 most influential companies.)
“With this artwork I wanted to show how everyone is becoming more digital as more and more of our interests and identity are moving online,” said the artist, who is based in Charleston, S.C. “People’s sense of self is quickly becoming a mix of real and virtual.”
The artist’s work often includes elements of dystopian and post-apocalyptic worlds featuring political leaders and current events.
Artwork by Beeple for TIME
Winkelmann, who spent more than a decade creating digital works of art every day and posting them online to his millions of social followers, famously sold a collection of those titled Everydays: 5000 Days for a record-setting $69 million as a non-fungible token (NFT) at auction house Christie’s on March 11. It was the third most expensive piece of art sold by a living artist, after Jeff Koons and David Hockney.
As writer Andrew R. Chow wrote in TIME this March: NFTs are best understood as computer files combined with proof of ownership and authenticity, like a deed. Like cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin, they exist on a blockchain—a tamper-resistant digital public ledger. But like dollars, cryptocurrencies are “fungible,” meaning one bitcoin is always worth the same as any other bitcoin. By contrast, NFTs have unique valuations set by the highest bidder, just like a Rembrandt or a Picasso. Artists who want to sell their work as NFTs have to sign up with a marketplace, then “mint” digital tokens by uploading and validating their information on a blockchain (typically the Ethereum blockchain, a rival platform to Bitcoin). Doing so usually costs anywhere from $40 to $200. They can then list their piece for auction on an NFT marketplace, similar to eBay.
“People have been creating digital artwork for the last 20 years and it has just as much craft, message, intent, as anything made on a canvas and has just as much ability to affect people emotionally and intellectually,” Winklemann says. “It has been exciting through NFT’s to see people start to realize the value of this type of work and I think we’re just at the beginning of the next chapter of art history.”
In addition to his digital Everydays work, he has also created a variety of digital artwork including short films, Creative Commons VJ loops and virtual and augmented reality work. He has created concert visuals for Imagine Dragons, Justin Bieber, One Direction, Katy Perry, Nicki Minaj and Eminem. His commercial clients include Louis Vuitton, SpaceX, Apple, Samsung, Nike, Coca-Cola and Sony Pictures.
To follow up his Christie’s NFT drop, Winkelmann is releasing a Spring Collection on Friday, April 30 on the NFT site Nifty Gateway.
In March 2020, as businesses across the world sent non-essential workers home to slow the spread of the coronavirus, a 2.6 million-sq.-ft. General Motors plant in Kokomo, Ind., sat idle. At the same time, ventilators—the breathing machines essential to keeping critically ill COVID-19 patients alive—were in frighteningly short supply. And so within a week of pausing the plant’s operations, GM CEO Mary Barra launched it back into action, quickly transforming a dormant engineering building into an assembly line that delivered 30,000 ventilators in five months.
Barra says that approach, incubated in the crisis of the pandemic, is now a permanent cultural shift that has already led to faster timetables for GM’s bet-the-company push to sell only electric vehicles by 2035. “Now as we approach different projects, we say, ‘You know, we’ve got to go at ventilator speed because we know we have the capability to do that,’” Barra says.
Amid the disruption, pain and loss of 2020, the global pandemic provided a rare window into the future of business as it unfolded in real time. As governments in the U.S. and elsewhere stumbled, business loomed larger than ever: developing vaccines at record speed; providing the technology that enabled remote school and work; and keeping millions of people fed, clothed, entertained and in touch with ramped-up digital services.
The scope and speed of change was unprecedented, accelerating digital adaptation by as much as five years in a 12-month period. Disruption ruled, as legacy companies imploded. Everything that could be digitized was, from education and exercise to currency and cars. Nearly every business has become a tech business, one reason stocks have soared even as the pandemic devastated lives and livelihoods across the globe. Meanwhile, inequality also soared: almost 1 in 8 American adults reported that their household didn’t have enough to eat as 2020 headed toward its close; 9 million U.S. small-business owners fear their companies will close by the end of 2021. This too tells a story about the future of business.
For nearly a century, TIME has been a barometer of influence, and it’s hard to recall a moment when the corporate world has had a greater influence on our lives than it does now. That’s why we’re launching TIME Business, devoted to covering the global impact of business and the ways it intersects with our public and personal lives. Our first major project: the TIME100 Most Influential Companies, a new list—and an expansion of our iconic TIME100 franchise—highlighting 100 companies that are shaping our collective future, as well as the leaders who steer them.
The mission of TIME Business is to help illuminate the path forward. We’re in the midst of a reset, one that is already transforming the economy and what employees, customers and our broader communities expect of companies. Remote work has fundamentally changed how many of us experience our jobs and even the kind of work we do, throwing into high relief the benefits, such as flexibility and less commuting, as well as alarming shortcomings in areas such as childcare and protections for the most vulnerable workers. Millions of workers are reevaluating their priorities. How much time do they want to spend in an office? Where do they want to live, if they can work from anywhere? What kind of company is attractive to them and provides meaning beyond the paycheck? Surveys suggest unusually large percentages of workers globally are considering leaving their jobs this year, with those figures even higher for women—millions of whom quit during quarantine because of the impossible juggle of work and home-schooling—and higher yet for women of color.
And employees increasingly expect their companies to become leaders in social causes. This is a wholesale redefinition of corporate leadership, which for decades has focused on shareholder return. “In certain respects there’s a greater social conscience in business than when I look across some of our elected officials,” says Ken Chenault, a former CEO of American Express, who co-founded Stop the Spread—a nonprofit devoted to pulling the private sector into the COVID-19 fight—and more recently helped organize a group of 72 Black executives calling on companies to take a stand against voting-rights restrictions now under consideration in nearly every state.
TIME100 Companies is a glimpse over the horizon. In talking with the leaders of these businesses—which are large and small, U.S. and international, public and private—it’s clear that this is only the beginning. Innovations in AI, 5G, nanotechnology and biotech have kick-started what World Economic Forum chair Klaus Schwab calls a fourth Industrial Revolution that will fuse the physical, digital and biological worlds.
“AI is a watershed moment,” says Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia, a TIME100 company that over the past year has become the most valuable U.S. semiconductor company. Huang envisions a metaverse, a virtual world that is a digital twin of ours, a science-fiction concept that is just beginning to become reality. The metaverse, says Huang, whose company’s chips power some of the world’s mightiest supercomputers, “is where we will create the future … There will be a new New York City. There’ll be a new Shanghai. Every single factory and every single building will have a digital twin that will simulate and track the physical version of it.” (The digital artist Beeple, who created one of the covers for this issue, uses Nvidia technology “all running maxxed out” to create his canvases, adding, “I think we’re just at the beginning of the next chapter of art history.”)
For all of these worlds to prosper, we must preserve our global home: sustainability pledges are another powerful development marking the future of business, and a number of TIME’s most influential companies are singled out for actions on this front. While bad actors abound here, as do unsubstantiated “greenwashing” claims by major polluters, pressure to disclose, reduce and offset emissions is steadily growing, as are opportunities to do well by doing good. The revolutionary electric-car maker Tesla, for example, brought in $1.6 billion last year from regulatory credits it earned through selling zero-emission vehicles.
Ikea built its business on mass-produced and almost disposable furniture, but it is now working to bring about change with the goal of becoming climate positive, to reduce more greenhouse gases than it produces by 2030. “The only way we can exist as a business tomorrow … is by being sustainable,” says Jesper Brodin, CEO of Ikea parent Ingka Group. (Harvard Business School professor Rebecca Henderson, author of Reimagining Capitalism in a World on Fire, puts it more bluntly: “Business is screwed if we don’t fix climate change.”)
How we shop and pay for purchases is also in rapid transformation. A shift to digital payments was already under way, but as in so many industries, it was greatly accelerated by the need in the pandemic to reduce human contact. “People no longer want to handle cash,” says Dan Schulman, CEO of PayPal, which recently enabled customers to buy goods using their cryptocurrency on its platform. Fast-food giant Yum China, also on our list, is now using face-recognition software in some locations that allows customers to simply walk up, order and pay digitally, a sign of the possibilities but also the pitfalls of these new technologies for privacy and security.
Influence, of course, can be deployed for good or ill, and sometimes both at once. You will find on our list, and throughout our ongoing coverage, companies whose impact you admire and those whose impact you may not, even as they have reshaped entire sectors of the economy. DoorDash, along with other gig-economy companies, poured tens of millions of dollars into a California ballot initiative that would let it avoid classifying its drivers as employees under state law. Though Facebook strengthened its protections against foreign election interference to avoid a repeat of 2016, dangerous misinformation and even calls to violence continue to plague the platform. And for all its ubiquity, Amazon has faced a growing chorus of criticism, including reports of workers’ urinating in bottles to avoid being docked for bathroom breaks, a suit from New York State for allegedly putting employees’ safety at risk during the pandemic and a controversial fight against organizers of a unionization drive in Alabama.
Our aspiration is for TIME, in our company and in our coverage, to be among the ranks of businesses that drive positive action. When I started at TIME in 2013, our mission was often described as “explaining the world.” Today, we see it somewhat differently—it’s about telling stories about the people and ideas that shape the world, in hopes of doing our part to improve it.
A Bumble user who boasted to a match on the dating app about participating in the deadly Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol has been arrested and charged over his alleged role in the insurrection.
According to court documents, Robert Chapman of Carmel, N.Y., was charged Thursday with knowingly entering or remaining on restricted government property without lawful authority, as well as violent entry and disorderly conduct on Capitol grounds. The documents state his arrest came after a person he matched with on Bumble gave a screenshot of the conversation to law enforcement.
“I did storm the Capitol,” Chapman wrote, adding that he had spoken to reporters at the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal. “I made it all the way into Statuary Hall!”
“We are not a match,” his potential suitor wrote in response.
A New York man, Robert Chapman, has been charged with entering the Capitol on Jan 6. The FBI began investigating Chapman after they got a tip from one of his Bumble matches. The FBI included the Bumble screenshot in the charging documents. pic.twitter.com/ctHHYk44a5
Along with the Bumble screenshot, the court documents state that the dating app user also delivered a screenshot to the FBI of Chapman’s public Facebook page that appeared to show Chapman inside the Capitol. The page also included several text posts in which he bragged about taking part in the insurrection. Chapman is one of more than 400 facing criminal charges for allegedly forcing their way into the Capitol as part of a pro-Trump mob attempting to prevent Congress from certifying Joe Biden’s victory in the 2020 presidential election.
In the days following the attack, many participated in online efforts to identify those involved, ranging from sharing viral Twitter threads to purposefully trying to out alleged perpetrators by matching with them on dating apps. Bumble even temporarily removed its political identification filter “to prevent misuse” after a number of women tweeted about posing as conservatives to trick Capitol rioters into sending incriminating evidence.
We've temporarily removed our politics filter to prevent misuse. However, please rest assured that we prohibit any content that promotes terrorism or racial hatred, and we've already removed any users that have been confirmed as participants in the attack of the US Capitol.
Mitchell Yow’s pickup truck has decals advertising that the vehicle is all-electric, but sometimes people aren’t convinced. “That’s not really electric, is it?” bystanders will ask, often approaching him in grocery store parking lots in Surprise, Arizona, where Yow and his company Torque Trends, which makes gearboxes for converting gasoline vehicles to electric, swapped out the hulking Ford F-150’s V8 engine for an electric motor. The result doesn’t look like any zero-emissions vehicle most people have seen. “Even though they see it, and they read it, they don’t believe it,” says Yow. “They’ve never heard of an electric truck.”
That’s likely about to change. As automakers’ investments in electric vehicles (EVs) ramp up, pickup trucks are fast becoming a new front in the electrification wars. Manufacturers from Tesla to Ford are unveiling electric pickups—just last week, General Motors said it will deliver a 400-mile-range electric Chevrolet Silverado—though they have yet to hit the market. For automakers, the potential rewards are huge, as pickups accounted for one in five new cars sold in the U.S. in 2020. Environmental gains could be big, too. When it comes to typical highway or city driving, pickups are disproportionately wasteful; even the newest models have dismal fuel economy ratings. Getting pickup drivers to switch to more efficient options is essential if the U.S. is to decarbonize its economy, and electric pickups could also help automakers reach fleetwide fuel efficiency targets.
But for now, the possibility of mass conversion to electric pickups seems tenuous at best. Most EV buyers so far have been wealthy coastal dwellers, while pickup buyers tend to live in different areas of the country, often with different values and needs. “We’ve been thinking about it for a long time,” says Autotrader analyst Michelle Krebs. “We’re always saying internally, ‘Do you think anybody really wants an EV pickup truck?'”
Mitchell Yow’s fully electric Ford F-150
For one thing, there might not be a huge overlap between people currently interested in EVs and those who buy pickups. Historically, EV adoption has been the highest in liberal-leaning coastal states, especially California and Washington. States where pickups rule the roads, like Texas, Wyoming, and North Dakota, tend toward big skies and conservative values. On an individual basis, survey data have shown EV and hybrid buyers tend to lean Democratic, while pickup drivers lean Republican. One Oct. 2020 Strategic Vision survey showed that more than 50% of heavy-duty pickup buyers identify as Republicans, while less than 10% say they are Democrats. Meanwhile, Democrats bought 36% of midsize hybrids and EVs, compared to less than 20% bought by Republicans. Electric pickups’ potential is further limited by the fact that many states with high numbers of pickup drivers tend to have the worst EV charging infrastructure.
There’s also a deeper issue with some of the upcoming vehicles themselves. Auto industry analysts say that many of the new electric pickup trucks set to hit the market, like the Tesla Cybertruck, the Rivian R1T, and GM Hummer EV, appear to be aimed more at wealthy “lifestyle” buyers (coders who go rock climbing on the weekends, for instance) than “traditional” pickup truck buyers (who are more likely to use them for, say, pulling equipment around a farm or hauling building materials). That might mean that, in the near term, electric pickups might cut into sales of luxury EVs like the Tesla Model S rather than reduce demand for internal-combustion pickups.
“There is a bit of cannibalization within the [EV] segment; people will shift to whatever the cool thing is to have at the time, sadly,” says Jessica Caldwell, executive director of insights at Edmunds. “You may not necessarily be getting a lot of new buyers.”
But at least some longtime pickup owners are looking to switch. Matt Gehrisch, a 43-year-old information security consultant from northern-central Ohio—and a proud owner of a 2004 Chevy pickup—is excited about the upcoming EV options. “They’re going to have the kind of torque and performance that a diesel has, but without the diesel maintenance costs,” he says. “It’s gonna be really cool.” With no major EV pickups on the market, it remains to be seen how many drivers are similarly excited to switch. For now, it’s rare to find someone carting around building materials on electric power—though some are so impatient for zero-emissions pickups that they’re taking matters into their own hands. Simone Giertz, a YouTuber and inventor, went to the trouble of cutting up a Tesla Model 3 to make her own handicraft electric pickup. “I use her everyday, but she’s not waterproof, the trim is a little bit off, and the tailgate doesn’t work,” Giertz says. “She’s a little bit annoying to drive because it’s like waving a giant flag of ‘Look at me.'”
Simone Giertz’s heavily modified Tesla Model 3
Automakers like Ford—maker of the F-150, the best-selling pickup in the U.S.—believe other pickup fans are ready to go electric, too; it’s making a big bet on an electric F-150 expected out in 2022. “[Pickup drivers] have to rely on these products for their businesses and the tasks they’re doing, and so they’re very cautious about adopting a new technology, unless they know it is reliable,” says Ford Electric Vehicles general manager Darren Palmer. “They are naturally more cautious, because they need to rely on [their trucks] so much, but they are more open to it than we might have imagined.”
Pickup drivers have adapted to changes before. Some were skeptical, for instance, when Ford released an F-150 with a lighter, mainly aluminum body and smaller engine in 2014, but the change didn’t put a dent in sales. Ford’s new hybrid F-150 Powerboost, meanwhile, has been a hit. In the long run, converting pickup drivers to electric—and getting low-economy older models off the roads—may be less a matter of lifestyle branding or flashy styling than of offering reliable, cost-effective vehicles capable of meeting pickup drivers’ needs. “At the end of the day, I don’t need all the luxury,” says Gehrisch. “I just need a good, solid, reliable truck.”
Apple’s next major software update for the iPhone is set to give users more control of their privacy—and could significantly alter the way advertisers and app developers do business.
iOS 14.5, already in the hands of beta testers and scheduled for release later this month, puts serious restrictions on the informationthird partiescan gather from iPhone and iPad users without their permission. That data, usually used for ad tracking and targeting, is highly sought after by companies. Which is why the new privacy features are infuriating advertisers, app makers and some of Apple’s biggest Silicon Valley neighbors.Facebook has pushed back publicly against the new protections. While Google, which also uses the data in myriad ways, has resorted to less effective ad tracking measures, and avoiding triggering Apple’s new anti-tracking features.
What do Apple’snewapp tracking transparency(ATT)rulesdo, exactly? For one, they require app developers to submit information about the user data they collect, how it will be used and whether developers will further track users and send them targeted ads.As part of the new framework, each app’s privacy policy will be prominentlydisplayed on its App Store page, allowing users to see what data the app is using to track them, what it knows about them and whether that data is being sold to other businesses. Of course, data you willingly give over within apps, like searches and like, is still fair game and can be used without your express permission.
Apple leadership, including CEO Tim Cook and SVP of software engineering Craig Federighi, have spoken publicly about the need for increased consumer control over personal data. “At a moment of rampant disinformation and conspiracy theories juiced by algorithms, we can no longer turn a blind eye to a theory of technology that says all engagement is good engagement — the longer the better — and all with the goal of collecting as much data as possible,” said Cook at a virtual privacy-focused conference in January. The company’s even gone so far as to create abasic guideonhow data collected by apps without consumers’ knowledge is used to target people ininvasiveways.
Privacy advocates like nonprofit organization the Electronic Frontier Foundation say Apple’s moves are a win for consumer data protection. “The system reinforces itself by lulling consumers into the myth that it’s just ads,” says EFF’s Gennie Gebhart. “When we say it’s just ads, they are the visible tip of the iceberg of this sprawling data sharing network. It does not work in any user’s best interest.”
TheApp Storeinformation is displayed in an easy-to-read label that shows which apps are collecting what data–as long as they’re being transparent, of course. Developers can make their case to users in the app before asking for permission to access private data, but “…apps must respect the user’s permission settings and not attempt to manipulate, trick, or force people to consent to unnecessary data access,” according to Apple’s guidelines.
Users won’t see much of a change otherwise.Developers and ad-based companies, however, can expect their fortunes to fall by more than a little.Companies are expecting Apple’stightenedprivacy policytomake it harder for targeted ads to reach their… well, target. “Apple’s ATT changes will reduce visibility into key metrics that show how ads drive conversions (like app installs and sales) and will affect how advertisers value and bid on ad impressions,” said Google in a blog post describing changes it’s making to its ad tracking. “As such, app publishers may see a significant impact to their Google ad revenue on iOS after Apple’s ATT policies take effect.”
Facebooksaidit would display a prompt suggesting users enable tracking to see better personalized ads, but that the decision would have a disproportionate impact on small businesses depending on targeted advertising, a move the company says only benefits larger advertisers, including companies like Apple itself. Whether that will be enough to entice users to share intimate details like location datais an open questionfor the social network giant.Currently,app developersmustdisclosetheinformation they’re tracking, which has led to some ridiculously long disclosure lists from apps like Facebook and WhatsApp.
With the changes, consumersbecomemore aware of which companies want access to their data, while Apple can claim it’s protecting users from overreaching companies.The protectionsalso helpApple todifferentiate iOS from Google’s Android platform,especially for prospective buyersworried about privacyintrusions. A recent Bloomberg report detailed Google’s early efforts to create its own version of anti-tracking that would likely not require an opt-in prompt, but details are scarce.
Another worry for consumers: The data companies collect is sometimes soldunder the table. The $200 billiondata broker industryis lucrative, and hasmanyunlikelybedfellows.Operators of the Weather Channel app settled a lawsuit last summer that alleged the app misled millions of customers into sharing location data. The suit also alleged that the operators sold the information to third parties without consumers’ consent.ArecentMotherboard reportdetailed how the U.S. military’s counterterrorism branch used location data from multiple apps, including dating and prayer apps, to track users illegally.
While companies like Twitter and Snapchat have fallen in line with Apple’s new guidelines, Facebook has responded rather vociferously. The company took out full page ads in several newspapers to discuss the harmit says Apple’sad blocking tech will have on small businesses. It also started the Good Ideas Deserve To Be Found initiative, which “highlights how personalized ads are an important way people discover small businesses on Facebook and Instagram.”
Someadvertiserssee opportunityinthe shifting advertising landscape. To James Nord, CEO of influencer marketing agency Fohr, the changes present a chance to make brand ambassadors more important to businesses’ ad campaigns, as larger campaigns done through platforms like Facebook or Google become less effective on iOS devices. Fohr connects brands to influencers in relevant audiences, and helps them manage metrics like views, likes, and overall “effectiveness” at pushing a product.
Restricting apps’ access to user data makes targeted advertising more difficult, less effective and more expensive, which means an influencer’s predominantly “opt-in” audience of followers becomes all the more valuable. “We know what their interests are,” says Nord. To brands, that means marketing budgets might see a shift from Facebook’s pockets to a smaller, more focused group of influencers. To Nord, Apple’s established position as a hardware manufacturer allows it to use its privacy changes to its advantage–as its own marketing scheme to lure people away from competitors who make money by following your online habits.
For its part, Google is sidestepping the new change as much as possible, opting to avoid the app tracking transparency pop-up by opting to not use that Apple’s IDFA, a tool advertisers use to track users between apps, for advertising purposes. by avoiding Apple’s ad-tracking tool entirely. “When Apple’s policy goes into effect, we will no longer use information (such as IDFA) that falls under ATT for the handful of our iOS apps that currently use it for advertising purposes,” said the company in a blog post. “As such, we will not show the ATT prompt on those apps,in line with Apple’s guidance.” While the company is offering guidelines to prepare for iOS 14.5’s release, it also suggested advertisers should be ready for a “significant decrease in reach,” when it comes to advertising on iOS devices.
The U.S. Supreme Court sided with Google this week in a major decision that some legal experts are hailing as a victory for programmers and consumers. The Court ruled that Google did not violate copyright law when it included parts of Oracle’s Java programming code in its Android operating system—ending a decade-long multibillion dollar legal battle.
The Court’s ruling in Google LLC v. Oracle America, Inc. upheld long standing industry practices that have furthered development of software that’s compatible with other programs, legal experts tell TIME. The ruling means copyright holders for software “can’t maintain a monopoly over critical interface aspects,” argues Jeanne Fromer, a professor of copyright law at New York University School of Law—and those aspects can be used by both users and programmers to more easily switch between products.
“This is huge for a vibrant tech industry to continue innovating,” says Fromer. “In fact, that’s what the tech industry has long been built on… if this [practice] had been forbidden, there’s so many things in fundamental aspects of software that we wouldn’t have today.”
The Court did not rule on the broader issue of whether the code in question could be copyrighted. Rather, Breyer wrote, “The Court assumes for argument’s sake that the copied lines can be copyrighted,” so it could focus on whether Google acted illegally. While a ruling on the copyright status “would have provided a clearer safe harbor for software developers,” writes Peter Menell, a professor of copyright law at University of California at Berkeley School of Law who filed an amicus brief in support of Google, it still “provides some assurance” for people looking to use a similar approach to develop products.
The case stretches back to 2005, when Google included roughly 11,500 lines of code from an Application Programming Interface (API)—a tool that allows applications to more easily communicate by drawing on pre-written instructions—in its mobile Android operating system. The Java API had been developed by Sun Microsystems, which Oracle purchased in 2010.
Oracle filed its lawsuit against Google later that year, seeking as much as $9 billion in damages. Google contended that its use of the code was covered by the doctrine of “fair use”—which allows copyrighted material to be used by other parties without permission if it’s within the public’s interest, such as when the use is “transformative” or limited. A federal circuit court ruled in Oracle’s favor in 2018, deciding that Google’s use of the technology was illegal.
The Supreme Court overturned that decision on Monday in a 6-2 decision, with Justice Stephen Breyer writing the majority opinion and Justice Clarence Thomas and Justice Samuel Alito dissenting. (Justice Amy Coney Barrett did not participate as she was not yet on the court when the case was argued in October.)
In his opinion, Breyer wrote that Google’s use of the Java API, “which included only those lines of code that were needed to allow programmers to put their accrued talents to work in a new and transformative program,” was protected under fair use. Java was one of the most widely used programming languages at the time, and Google copied the lines to “allow the millions of programmers familiar with the Java programming language to work with its new Android platform,” he continued.
The 11,500 lines was only about 0.4% of the total Java code—which comprises around 2.86 million lines in total, he continued. And while Java was originally most used on desktop and laptop computers, Google used the API to make a whole new—and eventually widely popular—mobile operating system, which Breyer argued was “transformative.”
In his dissent, Thomas criticized the Court for avoiding what he viewed as the larger question.
“The Court wrongly sidesteps the principal question that we were asked to answer: Is declaring code protected by copyright? I would hold that it is,” he wrote. “The majority purports to save for another day the question whether declaring code is copyrightable. The only apparent reason for doing so is because the majority cannot square its fundamentally flawed fair-use analysis with a finding that declaring code is copyrightable.
“By copying Oracle’s work, Google decimated Oracle’s market and created a mobile operating system now in over 2.5 billion actively used devices,” Thomas continued. “If these effects on Oracle’s potential market favor Google, something is very wrong with our fair use analysis.”
In response to Monday’s ruling, Dorian Daley, the executive vice president and general counsel of Oracle, said in a statement that the “Google platform just got bigger and market power greater—the barriers to entry higher and the ability to compete lower.”
“They stole Java and spent a decade litigating as only a monopolist can,” he continued. “This behavior is exactly why regulatory authorities around the world and in the United States are examining Google’s business practices.”
In its response to the decision, Google called the ruling “a victory for consumers, interoperability, and computer science. The decision gives legal certainty to the next generation of developers whose new products and services will benefit consumers.”
While good news for developers looking to further interoperability of programs, the ruling might also help consumers, Lori Andrews, a professor of law at the Chicago-Kent College of Law, says in an email. Software underpins more and more aspects of society, and allowing fair use access to copyrighted code could potentially “allow challenges to any discriminatory factors built into the code” in the future, she argues.
But the ruling doesn’t necessarily mean software developed in a similar manner will always be protected under fair use. “Given the fact-specific nature of fair use, there remains some risk that some efforts to build [interoperable products]—partial or full [interoperability]—could be deemed insufficiently transformative,” Menell warns in an email.
Reusing some aspects of APIs is also a “longstanding” practice in the software industry, says Former, who argues it explains “some of the wide success” of the industry because it “makes software more available, and makes it easier for people to switch to better products.”
The Supreme Court has now affirmed Google’s use of that practice in the highest court in the land, in a ruling that could help “the software industry to continue to grow and not get stuck in obsolete programs or standards,” she continues. “So the ruling today is a huge victory for computer programmers and users, which is just about everyone these days.”
Pulling Ford’s new all-electric Mustang Mach-E out of a Brooklyn garage late this winter, I felt a little duped. It seemed more like I was driving a giant motorized iPad than the electrified successor to an iconic American muscle car. Just a few weeks earlier, the company’s sound designers told me about the lengths to which they had gone to design and digitally produce the perfect engine noise, experimenting with recordings of electric guitars, Formula E race-car engine sounds and the hum of high-voltage power lines. But inside the loaner car’s cabin, I didn’t hear anything at all. Then, while messing around on the vehicle’s touchscreen, I found—and immediately pressed—an all-too-tempting button to engage “unbridled mode.” Next time I hit the accelerator, the car took off, emitting the throaty, electric roar of a cyberpunk spaceship. Now that was more like it.
Because their motors have few moving parts, electric vehicles (EVs) are shockingly quiet. That might sound like a blessing for city dwellers and others sick of traffic noise, but it can create added risk for drivers (who rely on engine noise to get a sense of their speed) and pedestrians (who listen for oncoming traffic). For automakers, it also compromises decades of marketing based on the alluring rumble of a revving engine, especially in sports cars and trucks. “As a car person, there are a lot of expectations for what a car should sound like,” says Ram Chandrasekaran, a transportation analyst at consultancy Wood Mackenzie. “[Even] for a regular person who doesn’t care about V-8 engines or manual transmissions, there’s still an innate expectation that when you push the pedal, you hear an auditory response.”
So companies like Ford have turned to elite teams of sound designers to create new noises that play from EVs’ internal and external speakers, making them safer and more marketable. With EVs on the cusp of widespread adoption—analysts predict their share of U.S. auto sales will quadruple to 8.5% in the next four years—these specialists are getting a once-in-a-lifetime chance to create the sounds that will dominate 21st century highways and cities, just as the constant drone of internal-combustion engines dominated those of the 20th.
The sound designers who spoke to TIME for this story, from companies like BMW, Audi and Ford, often framed their work as an effort to encode their brands’ ethos into a sound. There’s precedent for that kind of auditory corporate soul-searching, from ESPN’s six-note fanfare to the Yahoo yodel. But there’s greater urgency to the automakers’ work: the longer it takes for people to switch to electric vehicles, the more damage internal-combustion engines will do to our planet. While EVs aren’t completely green—battery production and electricity generation exact an environmental toll—the scientific consensus is that they’re less harmful than gasoline cars. Ninety percent of cars on U.S. roads must be electric by 2050 to meet the Paris Agreement’s goals, but right now, only about 2 in every 100 cars sold in the country are nonhybrid EVs. And in order to sell, EVs have to drive well and far enough to meet people’s needs—as well as sound good to prospective buyers.
EV sales grew by 40% worldwide last year, to 2.8 million vehicles from 2 million in 2019, despite the global recession brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic. Shares in EV maker Tesla soared by over 700% in 2020 after record-shattering production numbers (though their value has since declined). Meanwhile, Chinese electric-car brands like Nio and BYD have unveiled new electric sedans to compete on the global level. Traditional automakers have largely acknowledged that the days of internal-combustion engines are numbered. Ford launched its flagship Mach-E late last year as part of an $11 billion electrification push. BMW aims to double its EV sales in 2021. GM declared early this year that it will make only electric vehicles by 2035. Volkswagen, which embraced EVs after 2015’s infamous “Dieselgate” scandal, could outpace Tesla’s EV sales as soon as next year, according to Deutsche Bank analysts. U.S. President Joe Biden’s victory, and the likely tightening of mileage standards, is likely to spark further growth in EVs.
Today’s EV buyers are largely what technology analysts call “early adopters”: people who see the benefits of a new innovation despite kinks yet to be hammered out. Convincing electro-skeptics will require advancements not just in performance, range and recharging infrastructure, but successful marketing too. That’s where sound designers come in. Regulators around the world require EVs to emit some kind of sound for safety reasons, though they’ve left it up to automakers to decide exactly what that sound should be—a big challenge, given that they could theoretically sound like just about anything. “It’s kind of like when [the 1993 film] Jurassic Park was made, and they had to come up with the sound of a dinosaur,” says Jonathan Pierce, a senior manager of experiential R&D at Harman, an automotive-technology company. “None of us has ever heard a dinosaur.” In this case, automakers are less re-creating ancient beasts than figuring out what will replace the ones they know so well, but are on the verge of extinction.
Courtesy BMWComposer Hans Zimmer’s Los Angeles studio, in June 2019
Sound designers have long helped craft everything from the roar of a car’s engines to the satisfying thump of a closing door. But they have never had the opportunity to shape the soundscape of the future on such a massive scale. For sound engineers, it’s like getting the chance to design not just the Guggenheim but the entire Manhattan skyline. In the notoriously rivalrous world of car design, there’s little agreement about what that soundscape should be.
Broadly, automakers are divided into two camps. The first includes those who’ve drawn inspiration from the sound of gasoline cars—or at least tried to make it sound as if something is at work under the hood, though often with a futuristic edge. Audi falls into this category, as does Ford, where sound engineers tried to make the Mustang Mach-E sound reminiscent of its gasoline-powered namesake. “It has to have a perception of power, a perception of grit,” says Ford sound-design engineer Brian Schabel. Engineers at British automaker Jaguar took a similar route, paring down the essence of a rumbling V-8 engine and high-revving motorbikes for its I-PACE electric crossover. “You want to get right to the good state where people are comfortable with it, they can understand it, and it’s not too weird,” says Jaguar Land Rover sound engineer Iain Suffield. Audi sound engineer Stephan Gsell agrees. “The vehicle is a technical device,” he says. “It’s not a musical instrument.”
On the other side are carmakers that have little interest in replicating the sound of a gasoline engine at all. “We shouldn’t be trying to communicate that there are moving pistons in this thing,” says Danni Venne, lead producer and director of innovation at Made Music Studio, an audio branding agency that designed the engine sound for a recent iteration of the Nissan LEAF. “We’re somewhere else now technologically.” The LEAF sound, Venne says, has “a little bit of a singing quality to it.” GM also took a step in the musical direction, creating EV sounds using sampled guitar, piano and didgeridoo. “We want it to sound organic, yet futuristic,” says GM sound engineer Jigar Kapadia.
Then there’s whatever BMW is doing with its i4 electric-sedan concept. At low speeds, the i4 sounds like an electrified orchestra warming up for a performance. But as it accelerates, the tone becomes deeper and lower. Then comes a high-pitched skittering effect, as if some kind of reality-bending reaction were taking place under the hood. “We conceived a sound to celebrate the car, intended as a highly complex performative art installation,” says BMW sound designer Renzo Vitale. Vitale, who worked alongside famed film-score composer Hans Zimmer on the i4, says it was his counterintuitive idea to make the noise deepen as the car gains speed. “It was a metaphoric way to say, ‘We are looking at the past,'” he says. Given Vitale’s curriculum vitae, it’s not surprising BMW ended up with an unconventional result: he composes electronic and orchestral music in his free time, used to play in progressive metal bands and, while getting his Ph.D. in acoustics at Germany’s RWTH Aachen University, created bold live performance art. “I was performing naked, painted black in crazy installations,” Vitale says.
While sound designers like Vitale are excited about the artistic potential in EV sound design, automakers are salivating over the marketing opportunities. One highly produced promotional video posted online by Audi dramatizes its engineers’ search for the perfect sound, featuring the team pensively observing helicopters and wind tunnels. Ford worked with a musician to produce an EDM track sampling the Mach-E’s engine tone. Zimmer features heavily in a recent BMW promo video advertising his work on the i4. “Sound underlines the soul of anything,” the composer says in the spot. “Right now, we are at a really exciting point, shaping the sound of the future.”
Courtesy AudiAudi sound engineers Stephan Gsell and Rudolf Halbmeir experiment with sound-production techniques
All this marketing and branding exuberance may die down if car buyers embrace vehicles that are simply quieter rather than noisy in a different way; EV engine tones may eventually be pared down to only the simplest, most essential sounds. Some experts think carmakers will start using retro gasoline-engine sounds in EVs. Others suggest they will include systems that enable drivers to customize their cars’ engine noises, to make them sound like anything from a motorboat to a spaceship. (Tesla CEO Elon Musk is particularly fond of similar gimmicks; Wikipedia’s “List of Easter eggs in Tesla products” includes more than two dozen examples.)
That last scenario alarms Trevor Cox, a professor of acoustic engineering at the University of Salford in the U.K. and author of The Sound Book: The Science of the Sonic Wonders of the World. “The submotive sound of every city is pretty much its cars,” says Cox. “As soon as you change the sound of cars, you’re going to change how the city sounds.” He argues that excessive customization and diversity of vehicle sound could turn urban soundscapes into jarring, chaotic disasters. “We have a sense of what hell would be like, because we lived through it when people first got mobile phones,” he says. “[Everyone] decided to have a ringtone that was individual, and you had this horrible cacophony.”
But plenty of people leave their smartphones in vibrate-only mode, and it’s likely that most EVs will end up being quiet compared with the gas-powered models we’re used to. That could have major benefits for city dwellers in particular, as studies show that constant exposure to traffic noise can increase people’s risk for high blood pressure, heart attack and stroke. Combined with their lack of emissions, EVs’ relative silence could even make it less awful to live near a major road, fundamentally changing urban design. For that to happen, some sound experts say automakers need to remember that what sounds innovative and interesting in a studio might inspire quite a different feeling for people out in the real world. “We need to have some self-imposed guardrails,” says Pierce. “Not only to do right by our customers but to worry about the society as a whole.”
Driving around New York City in Ford’s Mach-E, I thought about what the roads of the future might sound like. The not-quite-Mustang produced a humming, vaguely electric noise as it accelerated, halfway between a pony car and a Star Wars pod racer. Several EV sound designers spoke about being inspired by sci-fi movies; Zimmer himself composed the score for Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar. Those films may have created a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy, as our imagined futures shape the real sounds of our streets. While sci-fi movies tend to be dystopian, these designers’ work may end up making our future cities at least a little safer and healthier, with less sound and air pollution. But exactly what our streets will sound like when they’re crowded with EVs is still in the hands of those auditory specialists with their strings and synths. “Hans and I keep talking about elegance, the idea of bringing elegance to the streets,” says Vitale. “We want to share a vision of the sound of the future that maybe helps make cities a better place.”
Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg is telling everyone who will listen that it is time to regulate the internet. But do Facebook and other platform companies support meaningful oversight or simply a regulatory Potemkin Village?
Zuckerberg’s efforts began with a 2019 op-ed in the Washington Post, “The Internet needs new rules.” The article proposed four specific actions including things that Facebook was already doing. A few months later Facebook released a white paper reiterating the ideas. When it was presented to the European Union, the official responsible described it as “too low in terms of responsibility.” It is this same set of proposals that are the basis for Facebook’s multimillion-dollar television, print and digital advertising campaign proclaiming, “We support updated internet regulations.”
Affirming the need for oversight of digital platforms is a positive step and should be applauded. But for the last 20 years, tech companies such as Facebook have fought government oversight, warning that regulation would break the magic of digital technology and the wonders of “permissionless innovation.” Now, however, as other nations, and even states within the U.S., have made differing efforts to mitigate the harms delivered by Big Tech, a common set of national rules no longer seems so onerous.
A tried-and-true lobbying strategy is to loudly proclaim support for lofty principles while quietly working to hollow out the implementation of such principles. The key is to move beyond embracing generic concepts to deal with regulatory specifics. The headline on Politico’s report of the March 25 House of Representatives hearing, “D.C.’s Silicon Valley crackdown enters the haggling phase,” suggests that such an effort has begun. Being an optimist, I want to take Facebook at its word that it supports updated internet regulations. Being a pragmatist and former regulator, though, I believe we need to know exactly what such regulations would provide.
At the March hearing, Zuckerberg was asked by Vermont Rep. Peter Welch, a Democrat, if he would support creating a new federal agency to regulate digital platforms. The reply was encouraging: “The solution that you’re talking about could be very effective and positive for helping out.” Such an agency has been proposed by a group of former regulators of which I am part. If the haggling has begun, it is worthwhile to identify some of the items worth haggling over.
First off is the new agency itself. The preponderance of proposals in Congress are to give increased authority to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC). The FTC, its commissioners and staff are dedicated public servants, but the agency is already overburdened with an immense jurisdiction. There is a history of companies seeking to transfer oversight to the FTC in an effort to get its issues lost amid other the issues of other companies. Oversight of digital platforms should not be a bolt-on to an existing agency but requires full-time specialized focus.
The European Union has proposed a new regime to regulate platforms that have “gatekeeper” power. The United Kingdom has similarly proposed new oversight for platforms with “significant market share.” The United States, too, needs a focused and specialized government oversight to protect consumers and competition.
Digital companies complain (not without some merit) that current regulation with its rigid rules is incompatible with rapid technology developments. To build agile policies capable of evolving with technology, the new agency should take a page from the process used in developing the technology standards that created the digital revolution. In that effort, the companies came together to agree on exactly how things would work. This time, instead of technical standards, there would be behavioral standards.
The subject matter of these new standards should be identified by the agency, which would convene industry and public stakeholders to propose a code, much like electric codes and fire codes. Ultimately, the agency would approve or modify the code and enforce it. While there is no doubt that such a new approach is ambitious, the new challenges of the digital giants require new tools.
Such a structure could help deal with the current congressional concern about misinformation, for instance. The agency could identify harmful content as an issue, convene a code-setting group and instruct that group to develop behavioral standards by which the companies would build algorithms to curate content for veracity rather than revenue and identify and mitigate harmful content as an editorial responsibility. These standards could require transparency into such efforts and mandate audits to assess the platforms’ efforts.
The new agency could also develop a code of privacy practices. Currently, the “privacy protections” of the platform companies are not “protections,” but rather “permissions” to which the consumer must consent before being allowed to use the service. Those policies are typically indecipherable legalese and vary from one platform to another. The new agency could oversee, approve and enforce privacy expectations for the digital platforms.
It could also be an important part of efforts to promote and protect competition in the digital marketplace. The Justice Department and FTC would continue their enforcement of the antitrust laws, and Congress would consider whether and how to update those laws. Yet a limitation of antitrust enforcement is that it focuses on a single company rather than broad industry practices. The new agency could enhance competition through specified and enforceable industry-wide behavioral expectations that identify and ban anti-competitive activities while mandating the promotion of pro-competition activities.
“Technology has changed a lot since 1996,” the Facebook ads proclaim, “Shouldn’t internet regulations change too?” The answer is “of course.” The relevant question for the authors of the ad campaign is, just what kind of regulation does Facebook support?
President Biden faces challenges greater than any president since FDR. The country is struggling with a deadly pandemic that has shaken the economy and exposed its structural flaws. His political opponents refuse to engage with those challenges, choosing instead to focus their efforts on undermining democracy. Powerful business interests in technology, health care, finance, energy, and agriculture are pursuing agendas that make President Biden’s job all the more difficult. But perhaps the most uniquely destabilizing force in America today is the major internet platforms. Their business models fundamentally reduce human agency, and, in some cases, threaten democracy and public health, as we have seen during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Even if Republicans were willing to cooperate, there would not be enough time in the congressional calendar to address all of these issues through legislation. As things stand, the legislative calendar prior to the 2022 midterms is likely to be dominated by infrastructure and voting rights. Fortunately, there is much that the executive branch can do. Given the scope and novelty of the challenges, President Biden will be best served by appointees who share his bold vision and are willing to embrace new approaches to large and difficult problems.
The first round of appointments in the Biden administration include cabinet officers and other officials committed to reversing the worst excesses of the Trump years, in areas such as immigration, use of federal lands, and foreign policy. This is essential, but not enough.
The pandemic has exposed structural flaws in our economy caused by concentrated economic power. For forty years, the country has allowed markets to rule the economy with ever diminishing oversight, which has led to massive income inequality and the exploitation of essential workers. Employees are powerless to improve their lot, due to lack of alternatives and our country’s unique approach to health insurance and the financing of higher education.
A small number of choices led to our current predicament and the Biden administration has an opportunity, and perhaps a need, to reverse them all. The list begins with conservative jurist Robert Bork’s successful effort to free capital from regulatory constraints. The elimination of laws like Glass-Steagall in 1999 helped to shift the financial markets’ focus from capital formation for economic growth to capital harvesting through trading and private equity. The Obama administration’s decision in 2013 not to prosecute a major antitrust case against Google helped unleash surveillance capitalism. In each case, the benefits of these choices accrued to the privileged, while the harms—to the economy, public health, democracy, and the right to self-determination—have touched the overwhelming majority of Americans. For example, the repeal of Glass-Steagall helped lead to financial crisis of 2008, which cost Americans an estimated $12.8 trillion.
The costs of not prosecuting Google are still mounting, but that case enabled internet platforms to build a huge business on personal data and to influence and sometimes manipulate user behavior. In addition to undermining personal autonomy, platforms like Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, Google and others have amplified disinformation that harmed public health during a pandemic and democracy during two presidential elections. The concentrated economic power of internet platforms has also caused harm to journalism, book publishing, music, and a wide range of small businesses.
Internet platforms allow a separate reality for every American. Democracy depends on a shared set of facts, and the Biden administration’s voting rights agenda should include policies to limit harm to democracy from internet platforms. Such policies can help us fully beat the pandemic and revive the economy. In the short run, the best tool will be antitrust law enforcement by the executive branch. Antitrust is not a complete solution, but it can buy time for legislation.
Right now, Google and Facebook are the subject of two federal and five stage antitrust cases. The Antitrust Division of DOJ is leading only one of those cases. That needs to change. The top priority should be to intervene against the industries where concentration of economic power has aggravated the economic and human cost of the pandemic, specifically internet platforms, health care, agriculture, and banking.
This will require a new approach to antitrust enforcement, lead by new blood not involved in the formulation and execution of the policies of the past four decades. President Biden has taken a step in that direction with the appointment of Lina Khan to the Federal Trade Commission, but two key seats remain open: the chair of the FTC and the assistant attorney general at the top of the DOJ antitrust division.
For these critical roles, the administration must select nominees with the track record and integrity to inspire confidence among the public given that so many previous officials have been previously enlisted in Big Tech’s defense. Many names have circulated, all people with impressive experience. Unfortunately, many of those candidates played a role in formulating or defending policies that must be reversed.
The most qualified pick for this time and situation would be Jonathan Kanter, who began his career at the FTC, co-chaired the antitrust practice at one of Washington’s leading law firms, and developed the theories underlying successful antitrust actions against Google in Europe and the US. Given recent Republican support for antitrust intervention against internet platforms, an aggressive choice might be welcome in Congress.
Antitrust enforcement is not a silver bullet for the economy, but in the face of great challenges, it presents President Biden with a chance to halt a wide range of harmful behaviors and buy time for legislative action. But without the right person leading the government’s antitrust enforcement efforts, we won’t stand a chance.
