The Big Tech Stories of 2022: The World vs Big Tech

there were a ton of them. So when I started just putting together a bullet list of stories that I felt were particularly important, that list quickly stretched to a couple of pages. And this was just a bullet list, right, I didn't give like context or anything. So this week we're going to look back and talk about what happened in two and why it was important, both in the text sphere and beyond. So this is just the first

of those episodes. I'm taking a little more time to kind of cover these and not just say, hey, look at this headline now before I jump into it. I also want to say I am not organizing these episodes chronologically, so it's not like we're gonna start in January and

end up in December at the end of them. Instead, I grouped stories kind of thematically, so that way we can, you know, look at things that were unfolding that we're maybe not directly related to each other, but kind of give an indication of general trends that sort of thing. Now that being said, our first story does happen to be one that began early in two and that story

is Microsoft's bid to acquire Activision Blizzard, the video game company. Now, first off, Microsoft is perhaps best known for the Windows operating system, more arguably the Office suite of products. Among gamers, it is widely known as the company behind Xbox and Xbox Game Pass, and Activision Blizzard is a video game company that traces its lineage all the way back to

nineteen seventy nine. In fact, Activision got started just four years after Microsoft launched, and that whole history is fascinating because Activision was a splinter group off of Atari. But the history of Activision Blizzard gets super complicated and has a lot of hairpin turns and dead ends, and honestly, I've done episodes about it in the past, so we won't go into a ton of detail. But then we also have to talk about Blizzard Entertainment, a much younger

game company compared to Activision. It had been founded in nine and Activision acquired Blizzard in two thousand and eight, and the consolidated power of these companies allowed it to perform quite well. In fact, depending upon how you want to measure it, Activision Blizzard is one of the top five largest video game companies in the world. But again this depends on how you measure largest, right. Do you measure it by revenue? Do you measure it by market capitalization?

But no matter how you look at it, Activision Blizzard is a very big, influential company in the video game space. Now, we first heard of Microsoft's plan to purchase Activision Blizzard in mid January twenty two. Microsoft's offer was to buy out Activision Blizzard for nine dollars per share in an all cash transaction, and that would amount to around sixty eight point seven billion dollars billion with a B. That's

a yawlsa right there. This was actually a hefty premium on Activision Blizzard stock, which over the last year hit a high of eighty six dollars ninety cents and a low of sixty dollars sixty cents, so bucks per share pretty attractive price, right, So you tell shareholders, hey, we're gonna pay you a premium on every single share you own. You just have to less know if you're cool with it. And the shareholders were like, we're totally cool with it.

But let's get a little more backstory, because this whole thing has a lot of complications. So first up, in one last year, several former and some current employees at Activision Blizzard came forward with accusations that the company was fostering a culture that allowed for sexual harassment, pay disparity, and discrimination. Further, that the CEO of the company, Bobby Codek, had been aware of these problems for years and had

failed to do anything about them. We heard many stories that were familiar to anyone who was paying attention during the Me too movement that the company's HR department was serving more as a shield for the company than as a department looking out for employees. That's something that the more cynical folks out there will say is the real reason HR exists in the first place, not to protect employees,

but to protect the company. Now in retrospect, it was clear that this Microsoft deal was moving behind the scenes while this Activision Blizzard scandal story was unfolding back in but while the scandal was unfolding, folks were wondering why the company was being so reluctant to address the concerns that were being brought forth. Meanwhile, Activision Blizzard was also

accused of trying to discourage employees from unionizing. There were pockets of employees in the company who wanted to organize into a union and in order to negotiate better working conditions and compensation. It's illegal in the United States for a company to try and prevent that from happening, so that was also unfolding at the time. Microsoft's announcement was

a bit of a relief for some people. The reaction among certain folks was that Microsoft was probably going to clean house if it took possession of Activision Blizzard, that it would do what the leadership at Activision Blizzard had seemed reluctant to do. But others worried that this would just mean employees would have an even harder time organizing because Microsoft was not exactly known for championing the rights

of workers. And then there were questions about whether or not various regulatory bodies around the world would resist this acquisition. After all, Microsoft and Activision Blizzard are both involved in the video game business, and you could argue, well, yeah, that's just one part of Microsoft's overall business. It's not their primary foecus. But it's still a major company in the video game industry. So would regulators view the acquisition

as a reduction in overall competition within the market? Would they worry that this newly merged entity would end up hurting consumers down the line and discouraging competition. Now, over the course of these concerns started bubbling up. Now he first really started seeing some resistance in the European Union. There were reports that Sony, another big player in the video game space, was bending the ear of regulators in

the EU and the UK. That there were concerns that these merged companies would hold certain popular titles like Call of Duty and not publish them to Sony's PlayStation platform. Now, Microsoft representatives said repeatedly that there were no such plans to withhold titles from Sony players. They were arguing that if they were to do that, they would be leaving money on the table and that it would make no sense financially to prevent them from going to to the PlayStation.

But then over here in the United States, the Federal Trade Commission or f TC, got involved. It has brought a case against Microsoft an Activision Blizzard to prevent the merger, and the analysts that I follow say that the cases, in their opinion, a fairly weak one, that while Microsoft and Activision Blizzard our competitors, that this merger does not necessarily indicate a reduction in competition for the overall market.

It seems to me that the general consensus is this deal will go through, but it will take longer than what Microsoft had hoped for originally. Now I say it seems because I just don't know. It may very well be that Microsoft will abandon its deal because on a similar note, this past year we saw one proposed merger fall through in the tech space due to regulatory obstruction.

In Video, the chip making company that's best known for its graphics processing cards, had announced way back in that it intended to purchase the British semiconductor company ARM, best known as the company that designs arms CPUs. So what ARM usually does is it designs the CPU architecture and then license that design out to fabricators that actually make the chips well. Way back in a Japanese conglomerate, soft Bank, which is a truly enormous company, purchased ARM for lots

and lots of money, like many billions of dollars. So in Nvidia was going to buy ARM from soft Bank for forty billion dollars, pending regulatory approval. That approval did not come. UK regulators were concerned that ARMS operations are a matter of national security. Keep in mind, ARM is a British company. Obviously, this is already complicated by the fact that ARMS current owner is a Japanese company, so it's interesting that national security became a big concern for

this particular transaction. Uh I will say that soft Bank reportedly is preparing ARM for a public offering next year, so in other words, ARM will again become a a traded company on the stock market like it was before

soft Bank took possession of the company back in. Meanwhile, companies that rely on ARM processors, which include competitors to in Vidia, we're worried that in Video's acquisition of ARM means that they would get cut off from access to those ARM processors, or that they would see a big price hike, and thus this would be bad for competition.

So those companies were objecting to this proposed merger, and the myriad of concerns from different sources ultimately led to Nvidia and ARM walking away from this deal that happened way back in February twenty two. By my reckoning, that was fifty years ago. It might just feel like that now. Some may point to this failed merger as one of the signs that the world in general is starting to push back against big tech, and I'm going to talk

more about that in just a second. But the Nvidia and ARM deal had a lot of complicating and unique factors, from concerns about competition to that national security angle, which you know most mergers in tech don't involve. And then there was a further monkey wrench thrown into the works in the form of a Chinese subsidiary of ARM, Armed China that really did not want to see the parent company change hands to an American owner. So you actually had a part of ARM itself that was objecting to

this merger. So, in other words, this Nvidio ARM deal had a lot of factors that I don't think translate to the industry at large. They were unique for that specific set of circumstances. But all that being said, twenty two undeniably was a year in which we saw growing scrutiny and resistance to so called big tech around the world. By the way, big tech that's just a phrase that refers to obviously the largest, most influential companies within the

tech space. And sometimes people who use big tech are really being more precise in that they're being imprecise in their language, but they're specifically referencing four or five companies, in particular Apple, Meta, Google, Amazon, and if they're referring to five, they throw Microsoft in there too. But big tech can also refer to other influential companies like Nvidia, or Oracle, or or ten Cent or Intel, those kind

of things. So when you read the phrase big tech, just keep in mind a lot of journalists use that as shorthand for those five companies I first mentioned. Others will use it to just reference big, powerful, influential tech companies in general. And here in the United States we saw some progressives but into positions of authority with regard to ensuring that markets stay fair and competitive, which was a real change of pace from the last I don't know,

like forty years. So they include Lena Kahn, who is the chair of the Federal Trade Commission or f TC, so she's the one leading the US charge against Microsoft and the Activision Blizzard merger. And there's also Jonathan Canter, who leads the Antitrust Division at the Justice Department. Figures like these are starting to throw roadblocks in the way of large tech companies which have long been used to being able to get their own way. For example Meta.

Now we're going to talk way more about Meta later on in this series of episodes about the big stories of two, but within this context, regulators have moved to block Meta from acquiring a tiny little VR company called

Within Unlimited and it's fitness app called Supernatural. They're saying that because the VR industry in general is a pretty small one, there are not that many players in the VR space, that Meta acquiring another VR company reduces competition in that space, and that this would be bad for VR moving forward. If VR and Meta becomes synonymous with one another, that could mean a reduction in competition and innovation,

and that's a bad thing. Now, we've also heard politicians float the idea of forcing Meta to break up into smaller companies, similar to how the US government broke up a T and T many years ago. Though I should point out a T and T kind of recombined over the years, like Terminator one thousand style, like all those little drops of mercury. So we'll see if that happens. Okay, We've got a lot more to talk about with this line of tech stories from two, but before we do that,

let's take a quick break. We're back, Okay. So we were talking about regulations and the tech industry and sort of a pushback on big tech. Well we really saw that take form over the European Union. Uh, they have been pushing back against big tech quite a bit this year, including Meta. At the end of this year, in two, a story that's unfolding as I'm recording this, the European Commission launched an antitrust investigation into Meta, specifically over how

the company handles classified ads on Facebook. So the regulators are arguing that Meta gives preferential treatment to its own Facebook marketplace classified ads over other types of classified ads that could be posted to Facebook. This aligns with a similar case against Meta brought by the Competition and Markets Authority, which is the regulatory authority in the UK. Similarly, we saw more arguments against Apple and also Google's policies of taking a cut of all in app purchases made in

iOS or Android apps, respectively. Now Apple tends to get a lot more focus about this, perhaps because until very recently, the company was strictly focused on only allowing users to download apps through the official Apple App Store, whereas Google

via Android has allowed sideloading since the very beginning. Uh Android sideloading is when you are able to load an app that's not in the official app store, and while Google makes it possible, the company does warn users that this particular ability could lead to problems because you might end up downloading an app that is malicious, so there are risks involved. But Google says, hey, you're adults, you can make these decisions for yourself. Apple says, you know what,

you don't know what's good for you. We're going to prevent that from happening, so you can only get them through the app store there too. I'm being a little facetious with this, but they are These are two fundamentally different approaches to how you allow your customers to get access to apps to run your devices. Apple wants a much more con trold ecosystem that's not likely to run a foul of Apple's other policies and procedures. So at the end of two we learned that Apple is now

preparing to change this policy. It's going to open up iOS devices to third party app stores in order to be compliant with EUS Digital Markets Act, which I'll talk about later in this episode. So this is not going to happen immediately, but it should become a reality next year, which is a good thing because this particular EU requirement will go into effect in T four. Now, you might

remember that this issue really made headlines. The issue of in app payments really made headlines when Epic Games, the company behind the massively popular title Fortnite, attempted to circumvent Apple's ecosystem by allowing players who play Fortnite on iOS devices to kind of have a work around so that they can make purchases within the game, but not through

Apple's official in app payment system. This was back in and then you had this massive battle between Apple and Epic that stretched into several court cases and lasted more than a year. Neither side was totally victorious by the end of it, but it's snowballed in. Over the last two years, we've seen growing resistance to this in app payment policy, though apparently it was news to Elon Musk, as he made a big stink over it while pushing

Twitter's subscription tier Twitter Blue. But we'll talk way more about Elon Musk and Twitter in another episode, not this one. I just don't have it in me. Plus, there's an ongoing story that is unfolding as I'm recording these, so I kind of want to see how it turns out anyway. To be clear, the issue isn't so much that Apple and Google take a cut of every in app transaction. That's not really the problem. I mean payment processors as a rule take a cut of every transaction. That's how

they make money. The problem is that Apple and Google prevent any alternative in app payment systems on their platforms. So the argument is that when there are no alternatives, there's no competition. And Apple tried to kind of be a little cheeky about this earlier this year and allowed some third party payment systems for certain types of apps, but they also charged a premium for merchants to use

these alternatives. So that meant that the app developer would actually see even more money diverted away from them and to the payment processor and to Apple, and would receive even less of every single transaction if they went with an alternative to Apples in app payment system. And you can bet that move did not go over well. Everyone said like, hey, we totally see what you're doing. Apple, cut it out now. It will be interesting to see how these stories unfold next year. The EU and the

UK in particular are taking a really tough stance. The US also is, but the US has had, like I said, decades of being very hands off, very uh almost lassa fair about how how companies have been able to conduct themselves and to consolidate. So this is like trying to act against a lot of momentum that had been building up for for years and years and years. In the United States, it's a little different here all right. Now, let's talk about the Use Digital Services Act and the

Digital Markets Act. These are two pieces of legislation that are shaking things up for tech in general, and both of them were put into effect this year, or at least enacted this year. The the actual rules end up having kind of a rolling effect on when they come into full power, so there will be time for the

tech industry to comply with all the different rules. The European Commission to the European Parliament proposed both of legislation way back in December, so it wasn't until this year that they were both passed into law after receiving lots of revisions and tweaks and whatnot. Now, in both cases, the acts helped bring into alignment the laws that the various member countries of the European Union have had in place relating to specific Internet matters. So what the heck

did these laws say? Well, the Digital Services Act or d s A is primarily focused on illegal content on the Internet and IT and related issues like content moderation policies. Now there are some policies that are going to sound

very familiar to my fellow Americans. At least, my fellow Americans are up to speed on concepts like safe Harbor and section to thirty of the Communications Decency Act, namely that a platform or an intermediary as the EU calls them, is not liable for the content that users post to that platform, meaning a platform is not to be held as the responsible party for a user posting something illegal

to that platform. So, for example, if I were to post illegal drug information like maybe I'm trying to sell drugs on Facebook, and I post that to Facebook in the EU, and it's against the law that Facebook would not be held accountable for the fact that I did that, except that this protection does have strict limits. Namely, once a platform becomes aware of the illegal material, it has

to act to remove that material. Failure to act means the platform will be held responsible for allowing the illegal material to stay up online and they can face some really hefty fines like ten of their overall revenue in the EU. That's massive. So also, because the EU is applying these rules to sites and services that have more than forty five million EU users, it's pretty clear that

regulators are really aiming this at big tech. This is a more strict stance than what we see here in the US with Section to thirty of the Communications Decency Act. The Digital Services Act also aims to strip away the mystery behind how sites and services like Facebook and TikTok

and YouTube work algorithmically. So essentially, the d s A says companies have to be able to explain how their recommendation algorithms work and and to do so, you know, beyond just hey, it just suggests things that things you'll like. So they have to explain how the algorithms pick and choose what contents is served up to users. They also have to be clear on how the company decides what

content to remove and when to remove it. So for companies that have policies they will remove certain types of material, they have to be very transparent in how they make these determinations. The d s A requires companies to explain how they match advertisers to users, you know, and what goes into targeted advertising, what kind of data gets pulled

and used for that purpose. Now, considering the e use protective stance around citizen data in the European Union, I suspect that last bit is going to end up shaking things up considerably for companies that depend heavily on ad revenue like Meta and Google. All right, well, let's switch over to the Digital Markets Act or d m A. So while the d s A is focused on illegal content online, the d m A aims to make e

commerce more fair and equitable. As such, it is aimed to encourage competition and to prevent monopolies and anti competitive practices. So the goal of the d m A is to put a check on big text so that the larger, morris ablished companies can't just push around, or gobble up or stamp out smaller companies. Now, considering that several tech companies got to where they are largely through numerous acquisitions, this could also be a huge blow to certain corporations

out there. Uh. If you were to search any of the Big Tech five and include the word acquisitions or mergers, you'd probably end up with a pretty lengthy list. Over the years, Meta in particular has a reputation for acquiring companies that would otherwise pull attention away from metas platforms. The company is known for either buying up potential competitors or attempting to copy them in an effort to minimize their ability to pull Meta users away to other platforms.

It is, by no means the only company to follow this philosophy, I should add, it's just notorious for doing it. It's pretty obvious that Meta is in the crosshairs in particular with the d m A. One of the acts measures is to make it illegal for any company that owns more than one platform from combining data from the

two or more platforms about the same users. So, in other words, if you're Meta and you have users on Facebook and on Instagram and they live in the EU, you cannot take the data of those users from Facebook and the data from those users on Instagram and combine them into one big database of information about those specific people. Right.

You can't combine these sources, and it's likely going to cause some technical challenges for some of these companies, which presumably have kind of developed into being an enormous data funnel, just gobbling up all the information from every outlet and combining it into like a a tasty data stew. The d m A concerns itself with gatekeepers. These are tech company that dominate in one or more areas within the

tech industry in general. So, for example, Google is indisputably the dominant force in Internet search, and as such it is a gatekeeper in that respect. Apple is a gatekeeper for payment services on iOS. Meta is a gatekeeper for social networking. These are the kind of ideas Amazon also big gatekeeper for online shopping. So the d m A says it is against the rules for any gatekeeper in whichever realm of tech they're looking at, to give its

own services preferential treatment over competitors. Amazon has been accused of doing this sort of thing in multiple places around the world, in India here in the United States. So the accusation is that Amazon tends to promote Amazon owned or Amazon affiliated brands over the belonging to competitors. So the d m A is saying, hey, you can't do that.

That's not fair. It would be kind of like if you were to go into a grocery store and all the store owned products are prominently displayed and they're easy to reach, and then all the other brands from anyone else are tucked out of the way and they're like place really high up on the shelves or whatever. That's an unfair practice, and that's what the d m A is looking to prevent in the future. The d m A and the d s A have a lot more in them, but I am probably gonna do full episodes

about each of them. The important thing for this episode is that these two massive pieces of legislation unify the use approach to online content and business, and they send a message to the big tech companies that they aren't going to have quite as much freedom to do whatever they please moving forward. Okay, still got some more stories to cover before we conclude this particular episode, But first let's take another quick break. We're back, and you know what,

We're still going to talk about the EU. But now let's talk about another measure that has forced one of the big tech companies to make some pretty significant changes

in the near future. The European Parliament passed a measure that will require all mobile devices, including phones and cameras and things like that, to adopt the us B C charging port by the end of so In other words, if you make a mobile device and you want to sell it in the EU, it has to have a USBC charging port equipped by It's also going to apply to laptop computers. Now, this law passed by overwhelming majority, her six hundred and two votes in favor of the measure.

There were only thirteen votes against it, and then there were eight members that abstained from the voting. And this measure means that one company in particular has to make a big change. In that company is Apple. Now, Apple has long leaned on proprietary charging ports and cables for many of its products since Apple iPhones as well as several other Apple products have used what Apple calls the lightning connector. By using a proprietary approach, Apple could achieve

a few goals. For one, the company could actually design ports and cables that had features that the USB standard didn't at the time anyway, So that includes the ability to plug a lightning cable into a charging port in either direction. In other words, there's no right side up or anything like that. That's a good thing for consumers.

It makes it easier to use the the cables. I don't know how many times I've had like a USB micro or USB Mini cable and I spent the first minute trying to figure out if I was trying to plug it in upside down or not. So, yeah, plugging an older USB cables can be kind of a pain. So this was a good thing. But Apple had other reasons for doing this approach. Whether we're a lot more

self serving. So a proprietary approach gives Apple more control over the supply chain, right and any company that wanted to make its own lightning cables would have to pay Apple a licensing fee in order to do it, so, in other words, locking down the ecosystem created revenue streams for Apple. You couldn't just go and buy a generic lightning cable and Apple gets no cut. Apple would get a cut no matter what, whether it came from Apple or it came from a company that was paying a

licensing fee to Apple. Now it might be more convenient for Apple users if their tech worked with industry standard cables, right like if it worked with the same cables that everything else works with. But that would mean Apple would be leaving money on the table. So Apple had resisted this for quite some time. Let the use regulations now require Apple to play ball. The EU regulators said that by adopting the standard, there will be a reduction of

E waste. People won't need to keep different incompatible cables in like a junk drawer, and then when one cable wears out, they have to go and hunt for the right one in order to have a replacement. Now they'll be able to grab any USBC cable they happen to have, and that will work just fine. Apple has said that forcing the company to adopt the standard is going to hurt consumers, But I don't think that very many people

took those arguments seriously. And so Apple looks like it's going to conform to the US wishes, which also means that we will likely see the same thing happen worldwide, though who knows. Maybe Apple will try to keep two separate line some products going where it keeps the lightning port everywhere else and it just does USBC for the EU.

We'll have to see. I don't think that would happen, just because I would imagine that that really complicates the supply chain and the manufacturing process, and it's just easier to adopt it worldwide. But we'll have to see. Okay, let's talk about another technological battle between government agencies and industries and tech companies. And this time, really we're looking at two tech industries that are in a battle with one another. That would be the telecommunications industry and the

aviation industry. So the United States Federal Aviation Administration or f a A is involved in this as well. Now, this all has to do with five G wireless communication, and this requires a bit of explanation. First of all, let's demystify five G for a second. It's very easy to refer to five G as being this super fast wireless internet connectivity solution, but really that's kind of misleading. For one thing, we're not so much talking about data speed,

we're talking about bandwidth. So in other words, it's not how fast the zeros and ones are zooming around. Rather, it's how many zeros and ones can zoom around at the same time and be accepted by your device or sent from your device. There's also the matter of latency, that's the delay between an action and its reaction. Now, you want latency to be really low for certain operations. Actually, really you typically want latency to be low for everything

because we've really grown impatient. We hate watching delays. But some operations low latency is absolutely critical, and one of five G s promises is a reduction in latency. But five G itself actually comes in a few different flavors. To be more accurate, there are a few different frequency bands within the electromagnetic spectrum that are called five G, and at the lower frequencies, five G isn't super duper fast, or rather doesn't have this enormous bandwidth, but it can

work over long distances, has a longer transmission range. Not the highest of five GS frequencies. You've got incredible bandwidth, but you have a very short range of transmission. Plus at the very high frequencies, the waves have trouble penetrating solid surfaces. So if there happens to be a wall or a ceiling or something like that between you and the transmitter, you're not going to be able to enjoy

those fibro light connections on your device through that particular transmitter. Now, the reason I say all this is because the marketing of five G can leave out some of these details, and so the basic consumer might expect to have an incredible wireless connection on their five G device, but in reality, when they actually use their device, they find the speed that they're enjoying isn't necessarily that much more impressive than what they had with LTE. But anyway, not all five

G is equal. That's kind of what I'm getting at now. The bit about five G that's important for this story is that high power, high frequency five G has the potential to interfere with specific older aviation equipment, in particular

radio altimeters. These are used by aircraft to determine altitude, in other words, how far from the ground the plane is, and as you can imagine, that data is pretty darn important, particularly for takeoffs and landings in low visibility situations specifically, so pilots kind of need to know how close they are to the ground in those situations. So then you have the us f a A, which is looking out for airlines and airports and such, essentially looking up for

the aviation industry. Then on the other side, you had the telecommunications companies like A, T and T and Verizon. They were looking to expand five G C band services across the country, including in areas that are around airports, and that's where you get our initial conflict. You had the telecommunications companies that were looking to tap into more customers selling them five G services, and you had the airline industry concerned that these services could potentially interfere in

aircraft operations. Now, the solution to this problem is actually fairly straightforward. Aircraft need a retrofit to shield radio altimeters from five G interference. Essentially, they need to swap out apart. They need the old radio altimeters to be pulled out and new and improved radio altimeters that are resist sent to this kind of interference to be installed. That's the solution. So it's literally about updating equipment to avoid the problem.

But here's the thing. That equipment is wicked expensive. We're talking like twenty grand per instance. And then when you think about the fleets of aircraft across different airlines or the number of aircraft that specific companies like Boeing sell, that mounts up really quickly. So there was another matter that needed to be settled. Who is going to pay

for it? Now? As you can imagine, neither the aviation industry nor the telecommunications industry wanted to be responsible for holding the bag when it came time to pay for these upgrades. The telecommunications industry was like, hey, this is your technology, it's your responsibility to do the upgrades. The aviation industry was like, hey, we wouldn't need to upgrade if you didn't start blasting interference near airports, so you should pay for the changes and early. That's what this

mostly boiled down to. So there was this kind of standoff between the telecommunications companies that were putting into place plans to launch these five G services around airports, and then you had the aviation industry that was saying, hey, if you do that, you're going to cause delays and worse, and it will be on your head. It was kind of like they were playing chicken with each other, and once you understood what was going on, it got a

little frustrating. In January of twenty two, the telecommunications companies reduced the transmission power of five G towers that were near certain very busy airports in the United States. This was a concession to avoid safety problems, particularly in low visibility situations. While everyone started to work on a more permanent solution, the deployment of five G around airports in

certain markets has been on hold in the meantime. This also has an impact on some populations that typically are underserved or sometimes unserved, because a lot of the neighborhoods around airports tend to be for you know, lower income areas of cities, and so part of the argument is that by delaying this, it is hurting those populations who don't have access to the technology they need in order to be connected productive members of society, which, you know,

there's some validity to that argument. Things are supposed to be on track next year, because that's when A. T and T and Verizon are gonna lift their self imposed restrictions that they've placed on themselves in order to you know, comply with the needs of the aviation industry, but recently Boeing asked federal regulators to delay that to to essentially force A ten too and Verizon to hold off on rolling those technologies out because they still need more time

to upgrade systems on planes to make sure that they are resistant to five G interference. So this is an ongoing struggle. Interestingly, meanwhile, in the EU, there are plans to allow passengers to use five G devices while they're actually on a flight. So here in the States the issue involves five G cell towers near airports. Like, we're not even talking about people in airplanes right now, we're

talking about the actual physical infrastructure around airports. Meanwhile, in the EU, next year, passengers will be able to use their cellular phones while flying through the air. And you might wonder what makes it safe to do that in the EU, But it's unsafe in the United States. And a big part of that hearkens back to what I said earlier about there being different flavors of five G

in the United States. The matter is about the so called C band of five G frequencies, these higher frequency, higher power UH transmissions than what you find in the EU. The EU uses lower five G frequencies than what we see around the United States, so it's not an Apple's

Apples thing. Five G is not five G depending upon where you are, or at least it's not the same five G. Now, all that being said, I'm not sure the average person is going to get great reception on flights in the EU, even if they are allowed to use five G devices. Cell towers have a limited transmission range.

This is why we need a lot of cell towers, because what happens is one cell tower will hand off service to the next, So as you move toward the edge of cell tower a's range of service, it can hand you off to cell tower B and your service isn't interrupted. But when you're way up in the sky, there's a distinct shortage of cellular towers around you, so you might not be able to get any signal anyway because you'll be at too high in altitude to do it.

It would be passe sable to actually outfit planes with pico cell towers, essentially these tiny little cell towers, and they would be able to cover the range of the aircraft with cell signals and then it would beam a concentrated data stream at terrestrial towers on the ground, but that would require even more equipment updates to planes, and

we're seeing how that's going so far. So all right, that is enough for this first episode about some of the big tech stories of two, and we're just getting started. We're gonna have a bunch more of these episodes because there's so much to talk about. I mean, Elon Musk and Twitter alone, I have a feeling is going to

be at least half an episode. We'll see. I don't know how much my tolerance can handle at this point because it's been such a crazy story this whole year, and that's the story that's currently unfolding as I record this. We're all waiting to find out if Elon Musk is actually going to step down as CEO, because he all the poll about it and asked his his followers should he step down or not, and the majority said yes you should. So we're waiting to hear what that amounts to.

I'm sure i'll talk about that and later on this week. Anyway, I hope you're all well. I hope your two was a good one. I hope three is even better, and I'll talk to you again really soon. Tech stuff is an i heart Radio production. For more podcasts from my heart Radio, visit the i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.