We don't generally comment much on these sorts of things for 2 reasons. Firstly, ITP is a broad church and it's outside the areas that we - as an organisation - generally take a position on. Secondly, TechBlog's editor Paul Brislen usually covers this pretty well!

But there's a hugely important principle at stake and I think our community, as the largest tech community in New Zealand, should be thinking about all of this very carefully.

Let's start by thinking about three fundamental questions:

1. What is the Internet?
2. Who owns it?
3. Who is responsible for regulating it?

At this point our Network Admins might start talking about networks and routers and central DNS servers etc etc etc, and that's certainly true from a technical or structural perspective. But the reality is, the Internet is more than this; in fact, no person, company, or government owns the Internet; As one website puts it, it's owned by humanity itself.

But increasingly, what geeks like us think of as "the Internet" differs more and more from what the public - especially the younger public who never saw that side - see it as. 

Some of us see ones and zeroes, some see infrastructure, and some see immense possibility - both commercially and socially. But for many (most?) people, the Internet means Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, Twitter and Google. And maybe Netflix and a few others as well.

In short, the mindset has shifted as Internet access has become commoditised - just like we think of Electricity as the stuff that makes our devices and lights work (rather than the vast network of electricity generation and distribution), the Internet - for most people - has become what we do with it. And a huge part of that is on social media networks.

Now, if we accept that at least some regulation of "the Internet" is necessary to prevent the worst of humanity creating victims online, just as we expect Society's behaviour to be regulated to prevent people becoming victims offline, whose job is it to do so?

Putting aside some very significant jurisdictional challenges*, the answer has to be exactly the same as the offline world: the Government, via legally-formed laws and regulations.

Which raises a fairly crucial and fundamental conundrum.

Once a particular "service" such as Facebook has reached the point where it's basically part of the fabric of the Internet - and by extension, Society itself - as many of the services above have done, who is responsible for regulation of content?

To put it another way, we don't expect the power company to regulate what we do with electricity. We also don't expect "products and services" that use electricity to regulate our use - it would be daft to expect either the power company or heat-lamp providers, for example, to detect or prevent an individual setting up an illegal growing operation in their basement - or to cut off electricity because of it.

And it would certainly be daft for power companies or lines companies to start making up their own rules about what you can do with their power - over and above what's illegal or unsafe - and take action if you breach those rules. Quite rightly, there'd be a huge outcry.

Yet this is exactly what's happening - more and more - with "the Internet".

Let's take illegality out of the equation and accept that - arguably - mainstream social media and other companies have some sort of obligation to at least attempt to block illegal content. I'm sure somewhere in their terms and conditions the power company can cut you off is you use their power illegally as well.

It's not unreasonable to conclude that it's for the Government to regulate to the extent that content or behaviour is illegal regardless of whether it's online or offline. Unless you're an anarchist, that's a reasonable position to take and it's not too big a jump to then expect providers to have a role in preventing the publishing of content that is clearly illegal.

Some will argue with that, but let's put that aside for a moment and think about immoral, outrageous, offensive or unpopular - but not illegal - content.

Increasingly - and especially over the last few weeks since the brief occupation of the US Capitol building - social media companies like Twitter and Facebook have appointed themselves judge, jury and executioner on what content is acceptable on their platforms - both in "public" and "private" groups - and taken action against hundreds of thousands of people who have expressed views that differ from what they see as acceptable.

And there's that conundrum.

On one hand, it's their network so their rules. On the other, these companies have grown to the point that they're now a core part of the Internet itself - and their actions have a significant impact on everyone. They're now in a position to - and arguably do - shape public opinion by either shadow- or outright- banning views they don't approve of. 

Given the scale of these services, this means it's now up to a very small group of extremely rich and powerful unelected men (mostly) to decide what is acceptable speech and content for Society as a whole, above and beyond that deemed in law.

Surely we all have to agree that that's a problem.

And we're not just talking about speech. For example, these services have the proven ability to massively influence election outcomes and much more. At the other end of the spectrum, their algorithms can actively push content to you that research [pdf] suggests doesn't just shape opinion, but that can fully radicalise it. 

So what's the answer?

It surely has to be recognising that once a "service" reaches a large enough scale, their obligation has to at least partially expand from just their shareholders to society as a whole. And surely this has to include obligations around not censoring content and users except where content is explicitly illegal - as doing so infringes their right to free speech.

Secondly, as with every other facet of life, surely it should be solely up to Governments to deem what is illegal when it comes to speech and content.

Facebook especially has been calling for Governments to step up and devise rules around harmful content, a different model for platforms' legal liability and a "new type of regulator" to oversee enforcement. But so far, many Governments have shirked this responsibility in a way they never would in the offline world.

New Zealand, on the other hand, has been fairly proactive in this area and already has specific laws regarding harmful content online - primarily The Harmful Digital Communications Act 2015 - complete with 10 communications principles and an Approved Agency (Netsafe) who have a role resolving matters before they get to court. This law strikes a careful balance and focuses on an intent to cause harm and even includes a process for services to resolve complaints to the Agency about content.

Again jurisdiction* aside (and that's a massive aside), surely this - the law of the land - is what large social media networks should be following when it comes to policing content; rather than their own views? 

Should that not be an obligation, especially once a certain scale is reached (i.e. where their editorial decisions are impacting a significant?

This problem isn't going to go away, especially as more and more of "The Internet" falls into private hands. It's up to all of us to push for a solution that protects victims while ensuring fundamental rights are maintained. 

What do you think? Keen to read your views in the comments below.

* And yes, I appreciate jurisdiction is one of the biggest issues in this debate and I've conveniently skirted over it below. Personally, I think this is resolvable technically but either way, the article was already too long :). I'll address that in a future piece if there's interest.

This year has been the year of goat herding and we're not quite done yet. A quick perusal of the Before Times reveals a certain naivety that is quite touching to behold.

January

You bright and gorgeous beast of a month, with sunlight streaming onto us uninhibited by ozone of any kind. How bright and shining you looked, and how young and eager we all were (sort of) for the year ahead. Our biggest concern in January - Jeff Bezos being hacked by the Saudis, the need to figure out patch protection for Microsoft and gosh, aren't we doing well in terms of investing in our own home grown tech companies.

Little did we know what awaited us.

February

Short month, not much to say except we all have that nagging feeling we should be on holiday still and sadly we're not.

And that was it for the year. Really. The first sign of a story about COVID-19 (with 2000 dead and 75,000 affected worldwide) showed no inkling of the scale of what 2020 was going to bring for us. Some mutterings from yours truly about supply lines being affected, the just-in-time model, impact on universities without students coming to our shores and a pithy line about the official response: "The authorities have all responded far more eagerly to this outbreak than you'd expect from years of zombie movies, and I'm really pleased about that. But we might need to address a few of the ramifications that have reared their ugly heads before something larger and nastier hits."

It's OK, February Paul. There's plenty of time for ugliness to come.

Lockdown arrived with a hiss and a roar and lots of meetings. If there's a word of the year it'll have to be Zoom because the "little video conferencing app that could" became the video conferencing mega story of the year. Sure, there wasn't as much security as claimed and sure, there are plenty of other well-established options out there, but for some reason Zoom caught the public attention and while lockdown taught us to sneeze into our elbows, wash our hands for 30 seconds and how to squash the curve, Zoom gave us the new meeting etiquette, the "you're on mute" sign and some seriously new insights into our colleagues' home lives. From pets to Kylie Minogue posters, from rampant children to towel-clad husbands (all true stories), never before had we been so close yet so far away from our fellow workers.

We also learned all about contact tracing, about how it's done overseas, about what we need to do in New Zealand and QR codes versus Bluetooth versus The COVID card versus just writing it all down on a scrappy bit of paper.

And we learned about online shopping. Boy, did we ever - everything from food to digital content, from fruit and meat packs, to logging on at 0900 exactly to get the next supermarket pick-up slot. Those that were quick to adapt (like the grocery company that stopped sending fruit to empty corporate offices and instead set up a home delivery service) prospered and those that didn't… well, didn't.

Cloud services took off for corporates all around the world and if you didn't have a digital transformation programme of work underway in February, you did by June. Staff were not coming into the office any time soon so everyone needed access in ways we never had before.

Contact centre staff were probably the winners from all this. After wanting to work from home for years but constantly being rebuffed (it's an expensive, time consuming, distracting project to get everyone set up to work remotely) in the matter of days or maybe weeks every one of them was sitting in bed taking calls in their PJs with their headsets on and quite happy thank you.

There were other stories, of course. The US president remained a source of much entertainment and stress and of course fake news (some of it about us). There were a couple of elections. The social media giants continued to treat the concepts of defamation, privacy, objectionable material and the destruction of democracy itself as a PR exercise. We got to point and laugh at the Aussies as they tried to work from home using the digital equivalent of a plate load of damp spaghetti instead of fibre optic cable, and the anti-5G brigade finally got something to complain about as telcos began to roll out 5G kit in their networks, thus ensuring that sellers of conspiracy theories (and aluminium foil) remained flush all year long.

What will 2021 bring? Predictions are a mug's game but I'm pretty sure it won't be half as exciting and simultaneously as boring as 2020. Beyond that, who can tell.

Stay safe out there and we'll see each (one way or another) in The Future.

Good grief.

It's almost as if the US government doesn't really understand what Facebook does, how it does it or what the real issues are, but it knows people are mad as hell so it'll have a crack at regulating it the old fashioned way.

Facebook bought WhatsApp and Instagram (and it did so with regulatory approval) and has grown from strength to strength since then. Now the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is going to argue that Facebook is to be split up.

The last time the FCC did that on this scale it took the companies that had spawned from Bell (a company set up by the inventor of the telephone himself who actually got to capitalise on his own invention - something that rarely happens throughout history) and forced AT&T to sell them off. That was in 1982 and took a couple of years to complete. Fast forward to the 21^st century and those regional telephony companies have amalgamated back together again in the form of Verizon and AT&T.

Doing something similar to Facebook would result in three very strong operators each in their own niches continuing to dominate those niches because social media platforms are natural monopolies. Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, LinkedIn, WhatsApp, Instagram, Pintrest and even the newcomers like TikTok all have a different take on a social media user's needs and they don't compete with each other very much at all. How many of us have multiple accounts on multiple platforms to keep up with different groups or issues in different ways? Breaking up Facebook won't change that at all.

Instead, the regulators need to look deeper into Facebook's operating model, at its claims around how many clicks each ad gets, how much it charges advertisers, how it manages user-driven complaints about abuse, how it encourages users towards ever more extreme content, how it ignores privacy, defamation, copyright and other regionally variable pieces of legislation and then we might have something worth talking about.

Of course, that's not likely to happen when you look at the calibre of the congressional hearings or the types of questions being put to the founders and CEOs of the world's largest social media companies. Until the politicians understand what these companies do, what danger they represent and why they need to act, I fear we're going to be spending a lot of time on lawyers and the outcome will be meaningless at best.

It's a shame, because social media has a huge potential to be so much more than an advertising platform. It's an idea that is pretty idealistic and pure but at its heart, social media is about enabling creativity and encouraging connections and community building. It's about bringing people together in a way that wasn't possible previously.

I've seen it work tremendously well from the individual connections you can make or rekindle through to charitable support (if you'd like to donate to The Aunties let me know and I'll hook you up), lost toys returned to desperate owners and so much more. You can find your tribe online - the vertical integration allows you to connect with anyone who shares your views, your hobbies, your values regardless of where you are in the world. You need never be isolated or alone again.

But unfortunately that's treated as a byproduct, not the core proposition, and between the influencers, the brand ambassadors, the liars and charlatans and the disinformation professionals, and the companies themselves with a greed for ever more revenue and a constant demand for growth, the poor old users are squashed into boxes and fed a steady diet of fear, uncertainty and doubt.

Now if we could regulate that, I'd be a happy camper.

Version 3 of the app will be released tomorrow on both Apple and Google stores and the addition of Bluetooth is not intended to replace signing in to locations via the QR code diary, but rather enhance the capability should someone test positive in the community.

Bluetooth tracing - not tracking, which would imply an active monitoring of the user's location at all times - allows the user's device to record which other Bluetooth-enabled devices it has come into contact with. If one of those devices is carried by someone who tests positive, the system can alert all those devices to let them know to get tested and to isolate until they get the all clear.

The system doesn't store information in a central repository so users can be assured there is no state-level monitoring of their movements. In fact, anyone who does receive a notification of a positive result near them at some point won't know who that person was or where they were, just that they've been near someone with a positive result.

Not all residents in New Zealand have a mobile device that is capable of this kind of activity, so the Ministry of Health continues to urge everyone to record their own movements around the country. Usage of the app remains high - around 2.4 million Kiwis are using the app and the ministry estimates around 90% of those have a device that is capable of Bluetooth tracing - but not all scan in as often as they should. The hope is that by combining QR code self scan-ins with Bluetooth tracing, any outbreak can be swiftly identified and squashed.

The ministry continues to work on trials of the Bluetooth contact tracing card for those who don't have access to a smart phone and the recent trial in Ngongotaha, just outside Rotorua, saw more than 50% of locals sign up to be involved. The trial is looking at both the technology and its usability but also at user acceptance of, and willingness to use, a card that needs to be worn on a lanyard or carried in an external pocket.

The Exposure Notification Framework (ENF) developed jointly by Apple and Google is currently in use in 25 countries around the world and is only available to public health agencies.

Users who already have the app will be able to upgrade to the new version from Thursday.

Deloitte's Top 200 Index features the country's largest 200 companies by revenue, which collectively generated $173 billion in 2019. They span all sectors, from retail and agriculture to transport and construction.

But when it came time to choose some of the top performers of the year, Deloitte's team of judges leaned towards companies in tech-related industries.

The awards "recognised those businesses that have gone beyond simply responding and recovering, and are taking this opportunity to transform and rebuild for a stronger future," said Deloitte.

The criteria include the latest financial measures, as well as non-financial and other qualitative measures of organisational performance, such as corporate reputation, approach to environmental management and others.

Weighing up all of those factors Fisher & Paykel Healthcare named Company of the Year with chief executive Lewis Gradon winning Chief Executive Officer of the Year.

Rising to the Covid challenge

By any measure, it has been a massive year for the designer and manufacturer of high-quality health equipment. In the half-year to September 30, revenue was up 59 per cent to $910.2 million, while profit jumped 86 per cent to $225.5 million.

F&P Healthcare's hospital-related business internationally nearly doubled its revenue as it ramped up production to serve public health workers treating patients infected with Covid-19. The company's Optiflow and Airvo systems saw particularly strong demand.  

"This reflected a worldwide change in clinical practice. Informed by emerging studies and anecdotal evidence, respiratory specialists began leading with nasal high flow therapy before resorting to ventilators," F&P Healthcare noted in its half-year results.

At the same time, the company retained its position as one of the country's largest investors in research and development, which accounted for seven per cent of operating revenue in the half-year, $64.4 million.

Xero, which won the Best Growth Strategy category, also had a big year on the back of helping small businesses navigate the impacts of Covid-19 with its cloud-based accounting services in strong demand.

In the half-year to September 30, Xero turned a net profit after tax of $34.5 million, up from $1.3 million in the previous half-year period.

Operating revenue was up 21 per cent to nearly $410 million.

Animation Research founder Ian Taylor

Road to recovery

Chorus won the Most Improved Performance award, reflecting a change in the company's fortunes that included a strong rally in its share price, which is up 21 per cent so far this year. That reflects the company being able to put regulatory uncertainty behind it and successfully rolling out the majority of the ultrafast broadband network. Though further regulatory pressures remain as the Commerce Commission looks to change how UFB wholesale prices are calculated.

Finally, the Visionary Leader award wen to Animation Research founder Ian Taylor, who had to re-organise his business to adapt to the new reality of the pandemic. Running graphics and animation services around the world for some of the top sports events, Taylor had to overcome travel restrictions to allow his team to operate remotely from Dunedin.

The year also saw him team up with Sam Morgan to push the deployment of a Covid card device to improve contact tracing efforts to fight the pandemic. That effort ended in frustration as the Government moved slowly on the programme, though Morgan and Taylor can take some comfort from the fact that trials of a similar Covid card are now underway.

There are 11 companies on the Deloitte Top 200 index that could be considered to be in the technology or telecommunications space, with Xero, Datacom, Spark among the biggest and multinationals IBM and Samsung also featuring.

LibreOffice clearly has not had a facelift since the 1800s. Honestly, it was a giant leap back in time to the Netscape 3.1 era of design. The icons alone were quite quaint but what really got me was the bewildering array of tools on offer for managing a simple document and, more importantly, the things that were missing.

Office and Microsoft Word are sadly very similar in that regard. Sure, I can chose from a thousand fonts, I can format, I can paste with formatting, or without, or with some other form of formatting. I can publish as HTML, I can save as a PDF, I can justify to my heart's content. There are templates, there are designs and there are styles (these are different things) and I can merge with lists, with other documents or with previous versions of the same thing.

But all these tools are overblown. There are so many options and so many tools that can or might plug in that simply aren't necessary and a lack of the tools that are necessary.

What I wouldn't give for one set of accepted words across all my devices. Or those shortcuts we all develop (when I type in nez and add a space my processor fills it out to New Zealand. This has been the hardest sentence to write because of that) and which I have to reteach every version I come across.

I have set up one processor to automatically lose the formatting by default as it pastes copy into a document, but I can't find the setting to let me do that on the other one, yet both are linked to the same account and both have my name on them. Instead, we get extra tools and extra capability added on all the time that don't seem to actually be on the wishlist of users.

Which brings me, in a roundabout sort of way, to the Salesforce purchase of Slack.

Slack was really the flagship  product of the new era of productivity tools. Never mind bundling Word and Excel and PowerPoint together, Slack (and Trello and Jira and Teams and all the others) bring together cloud storage, collaborative working, messaging (including video chats), calendars and meetings project planning and so much more.

For the early days of the gig economy, Slack was the business. You could belong to Slack channels for different companies! You could share documents and manage workflows independently of each other yet have it all in one interface! Truly, these were the best of times.

But for all the make busy, organising and sharing that goes on, I often wonder just how much actual y'know work takes place on these channels. I'm often reminded of my eldest daughter who, when she was starting out in high school, would make folders for each class, colour coordinated with tabs and goodness knows what else. Then she would make flip cards with notes on them and hole punch them and add them in. It would take hours and looked great but I'm not sure it actually counted as studying. (Mind you, having said that, she got much better grades than I ever did so what do I know?)

Salesforce used to be a CRM system (customer resource management) but has ballooned in recent years, buying up associated products and their owners and bolting them all together. Radian 6, long the high-end social media management platform, was an early acquisition but there are plenty more since then, and today Salesforce lumbers along with all manner of beast and fowl flapping and slithering and grunting and squawking and it's not alone.

Microsoft's productivity suite now centres around Teams which is a fancy front end to its own cloud-based storage-slash-CRM thing wherein you can set up a group of users (a Team) and give them access to certain files, a private chat facility complete with emoji, bolt on your Outlook calendar and Microsoft Planner should you want to plan things (or you can add Monday or Jira or a dozen or more besides) and you can make phone calls, have video conference calls, send tweets over Yammer (are they Yams?) and also allows you to open documents in the relevant online version of the app (even if you have the app installed) and auto-save it to the cloud (if you're connected) but again, this is a new iteration of the world processor, spreadsheet, slide deck so you don't have any of the tools you've personalised over on the other version.

I can see where they were going with all this. A word processor that is connected to other processors means multiple users can work on a document all at the same time (Google does this astonishingly well - if you want to see collaboration in action watch a classroom of primary kids working on a Google Doc) but the way all these tools work is to give everyone a second-class experience and call it progress.

But with two giants like Salesforce and Microsoft ready to duke it out for the new office revolution you can bet we're going to see innovation thrown at us in spades in the coming months and years. And, while I question just how productive this will make us, in a time when so many are working remotely and we might need to drop everything and get out of the office and work from a different device, all these new office tools give us the ability to carry on regardless, and that's worth a huge amount.

Welcome to the new Office Wars.

In a letter to the minister, NZTech chief executive Graeme Muller wrote that with Clark also taking the consumer affairs, commerce and statistics portfolios, there was "considerable opportunity to advance financial technology, education technology, artificial intelligence, blockchain as well as digital identity".

But NZTech would still like to see a fully-fledged technology portfolio by the next election, a role that would also span hi-tech manufacturing and biotechnology.

"This respects the natural division between Research, Science and Innovation, a separate portfolio and what is essentially applied technology," wrote Muller.

NZTech recommended that a technology branch be established within the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment from 2022 "to take ownership of cross-cutting policy, skill development, funding/grants and the international promotion of New Zealand tech".

NZTech's proposed action to attract top tech talent

It urged the Government to forge ahead with its Industry Transformation Plan for Digital Technologies, but to use that as the basis for the first 'Digital New Zealand

Strategy', which it said should be in place by the start of 2023. 

The measures, as well as implementing a national strategy around artificial intelligence, would seem to reflect widespread concern in the tech sector that the Government lacks a cohesive strategy on how to leverage technology to boost the country's social, economic and environmental wellbeing. 

Clark has yet to make any substantive comments about where he plans to put his focus in his new portfolio areas. But the rest of the NZTech Briefing for Incoming Ministers should give him plenty of food for thought about what could be done in the next 100 days as well as in the course of Labour's full term.

The BIM spans areas well-canvassed ahead of the election, such as fast-tracking visas for high-tech workers and investors, boosting the ElevateNZ fund for tech start-ups and updating government procurement rules to give the domestic tech sector more of an opportunity to grow its capacity.

But NZTech also advocates for an overhaul of regulations to allow greater use of biotech tools such as gene editing, the formation of a plan to "end digital poverty" and the creation of an infrastructure forecasting and management system.

It would use AI to "aid and model decision support at both local and central government".

Think bigger

NZTech also suggests addressing what many see as a yawning gap in tech-related blue skies research funding. It wants to see a "standalone technology investigator-initiated research fund" separate to the Marsden Fund, which it says is "ill-suited to technology".

The NZTech BIM amounts to a wish list for a tech-sector craving strong leadership, better decision making and support to grow the digital economy quickly.

Some of the work, such as the Industry Transformation Plan, is already underway and will inform the priorities Clark has on his plate over the next few years.

But the subtext of the TechNZ BIM is that we need to think bigger and be more ambitious for tech. The challenge has been laid down - The question now is whether the Government will listen and act.

Read NZTech's Briefing Paper for Incoming Minister here.

The purchase is timely - COVID restrictions continue apace and globally IT-based workers are doing more work out of the office and away from the steely glare of middle managers. Having a tool that enables robust planning, team communication and cohesion and tracking capability is essential and for many users, Slack offers the best selection of tools on the market.

Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff said in a statement: "Together, Salesforce and Slack will shape the future of enterprise software and transform the way everyone works in the all-digital, work-from-anywhere world,"  while Slack CEO Stewart Butterfield is just as keen, saying "Personally, I believe this is the most strategic combination in the history of software, and I can't wait to get going."

Salesforce has expanded its portfolio of products beyond its original customer resource management (CRM) base over the past few years. Its warchest has paid for a number of acquisitions including a big chunk of data warehousing company Snowflake ($250 million), Demandware ($2.8 billion), MuleSoft ($6.5 billion), Vlocity ($1.3 billion) and Tableau, its largest purchase to date at $15.3 billion. It's also moved into social media management with the purchase of Radian6.

But Salesforce is up against a newly awoken Microsoft with its product set built on Teams and its suite of capability. Teams has been beefed up lately, with Microsoft taking on Zoom in the video calling space and bundling the capability in with its messaging app, planning tools and cloud-based storage capability to form the core hub of a new suite of office tools.

With Microsoft's embedded base in many corporations around the world, Salesforce will have its work cut out for it.

We've seen Google publish suppressed court details, we've seen Facebook share offensive material, we've seen tax manoeuvres that would leave a fighter pilot breathless and giddy and of course we've seen a gutting of local media outlets and capability, a thumbing of the nose at New Zealand's requirements for everything from defamation to the Fair Trading Act through to Broadcasting Standards Authority and beyond.

If every you've complained to Facebook about a post or a group you'll know the company has its own rules about what is considered acceptable content. No, you can't see them and no, you can't amend them but you must abide by them. Oh and if you break them, you can't appeal that decision.

This isn't a problem restricted just to New Zealand either. All around the world regulators and policy makers are struggling with tech and the disruptors, from Uber and AirBNB to Google to Amazon and others. They all used to say they of course would abide by New Zealand law and of course they would work with the authorities around making sure the services offered in New Zealand meet New Zealand standards, but they seem to have gone quiet on that front these days. Even venerable old Microsoft has settled with Inland Revenue and paid some tax, albeit far less than you'd consider likely for a company of its size with the amount of sales it makes in New Zealand each year.

As ever the Europeans are more than happy to write the book and then throw it at the tech giants. Google has racked up US$8 billion in fines and continues to argue through the courts about privacy and its monopoly or dominant market position on search.

But even with its impressive privacy laws and focus on user rights, the EU is constantly frustrated by tech efforts in this space. Across the pond in the United States, incoming president Joe Biden is expected to be somewhat less troublesome for tech companies than his predecessor, but if the Democrats win both Georgia senate seats in the run off in January, the majority rule will give the party the firepower it needs to go to town on the companies that don't pay tax, have helped spread false information and fake news and who continue to pretend they're not responsible for the content they carry. Currently, the tech stocks are surging high on the change of leadership, clearly expecting Biden to be hamstrung in any efforts to regulate, but that may soon change.

The EU is in the throes of introducing two new pieces of legislation - the Digital Services Act and the Digital Markets Act - that are designed to force tech companies to open their books, share information on how their algorithms work, allow regulators to see into the companies and their approach to managing content on their platforms.

Big tech is, naturally enough, horrified by this and feels it is being sorely done by. I doubt very much if those who have been on the wrong side of its decision making process would agree.

All of which puts New Zealand in a tricky spot. Do we go it alone and forge our own laws and requirements or do we wait to see how it pans out with the big boys and girls?

The argument against going it alone has often been that the tech companies will simply pull out, or stop offering those products in New Zealand. I simply do not believe they will do that. They understand the power of the network effect and shutting an entire country off rather than abiding by its requirements seems to be the last thing they'll want.

But, if the EU does introduce these new acts, and if the US does start to regulate, these companies will soon find that when you disturb the dragon in its den, even when it's sleepy and slow moving, you'd best be wearing your asbestos underpants because things will start to heat up. Eventually. Once it gets moving.

Here in Hobbiton we've already called big tech out for its failures around the Christchurch shooting. None of the companies have done more than pay public relations lip service to the idea of change - perhaps soon they will have to.

According to the data from Atlas VPN, 38% of gamers have been "hacked at least once" while playing computer games.

While trolling is not uncommon in online games - trolling was reported by 64% of gamers - bullying and hate speech was reported by 57% and unwanted sexual contact by 40%. More than one third (34%) also reported personal information being revealled online during game play.

This culture of toxicity has led to many gamers preferring to focus on solo play rather than mulitplayer games and reducing that is seen as the best way to get more players into shared game experiences.

None of this appears to have dampened player expectations or demand for online gaming. More than 900 million users play regularly around the world with more casual gamers playing on mobile devices. The global spend on games has passed the US$150 billion mark and is expected to hit US$200 billion by 2023.

Atlas suggests limiting the amount of private information users share online, installing multi-factor authentication and only downloading games from reputable sources.

The full report from Atlas VPN can be found here.

But the Bay Area authorities which govern a host of districts around San Francisco that are home to some of Silicon Valley's best-known tech companies and their workers, this week ditched a plan to require employers of more than 25 people to have their employees work from home 60% of the week.

The mass telecommuting proposal from the Metropolitan Transportation Commission was part of the Plan Bay Area 2050, which was approved in a 12-1 vote by Bay Area governments in September. But the requirement that companies organise their workers so that they work from home the majority of the time sparked a backlash among residents, employers and transport providers alike.

"The work-from-home mandate was the wrong solution and represented excessive regulatory overreach," said Bay Area Council CEO Jim Wunderman. 

"The old policy would have hurt the vitality of important business and employment centres, decimated our public transit systems and discouraged new businesses from coming to the Bay Area. Bay Area residents and businesses need flexibility," he added.

While working form home remains the default position for much of the tech workforce in Silicon Valley as employers take a precautionary approach to dealing with Covid-19, town planners fear a return to clogged freeways once business returns to normal.

Emissions cuts a priority

The Metropolitan Transportation Commission has a goal of reducing emissions from transport in the Bay Area by 19% by 2035. It sees telecommuting as a path to reducing those emissions and in September it backed up its case for mandated telecommuting with research that showed the bay Area, largely due to its high proportion of tech workers, was the best-suited region in California to remote work. 

But it also revealed racial disparities when it came to remote work. With 51% of white workers were found to be able to work from home in the Bay Area, only 33% of Black employees and 30% of Hispanics had the same opportunity.

While the 60% mandate has been withdrawn, the MTC has approved a new one that will require businesses with 50 or more employees to limit the number of employees driving to work to 40% by 2035.

The rest will have to take public transport, bike, walk - or telecommute. The proposal excludes agricultural workers and would need approval from the state legislature.

The backlash against the telecommuting mandate shows the challenges all major urban areas face in trying to curb emissions from transport. While working form home at least part of the week appears to be the norm now for many Kiwis following the pandemic, government and business leaders have also urge them to head back to the office to prevent the hollowing out of city centres where retailers and commercial property owners face dwindling business.

COVID struck in February and knocked the entire world on its butt. Economically, we're yet to see the full impact but socially and medically this has been a nightmare of a year. A global pandemic that coincided with an anti-science, big man political wave has seen the health professionals scrambling to convince people of the need for everything from social isolation to masks to hand washing, only to be rebuffed constantly all around the world.

And if we did do what we were told, that was to stay home, to isolate, not to go out, not to socialise and not to go to work. Offices and their shared surfaces are suddenly no-man's land to be avoided at all costs.

Instead of fighting off zombie hordes we've become generational teenagers, forced to sit on the couch and binge on box-set television.

Here in New Zealand we have done well. We've avoided the worst of the medical chaos and we've been able to react sensibly in ways many countries have found alien.

But one other sector has also done well through all of this, and that's the tech sector. This week has seen the launch of the annual TIN report into just what the year has been like and frankly the word for it is "robust".

You can see why of course. Even if your company isn't a "tech" company, you use and need a lot of tech gear to operate. Whether it's an EFTPOS terminal or a laptop, a website or an ERP system, most companies and organisations require at least some kind of kit if they're to order parts, build products, entertain their audiences or keep the tax system moving.

For many of us it was simply a case of picking up the laptop and not going into the office. Instead, we made ourselves at home at home, and became experts at Zoom, Teams, Skype, Google Hangouts and all the rest.

But for some companies, getting to that point was quite a journey in and of itself. Organisations quickly found that having a payroll system on a server in the office is fine if you're all at work but when you're at home that becomes a bit of a problem come payday. Others found that on-site storage and systems really should have been moved into the cloud some time ago, and yet more found that when their retail outlets were closed down, shoppers wanted to buy stuff online and were quite happy to have it shipped to them. If only they'd built an e-commerce platform when they had the chance.

This year saw the TIN200 reach$12.7 billion in annual revenue, up more than 8% of the previous year. That figure includes $9.4 billion worth of exports which amply demonstrates how strong the tech sector is becoming.

We're also the place to go for a good job. Last year we added more than 4000 of them, up 8% but even better than that, the average salary in New Zealand is more than $80,000 - around 21% higher than the average.

Growth, wages, opportunity, diversity - the tech sector stretches from the manufacturing end with Fisher & Paykel Healthcare (suddenly a boom stock) right through to game development or cloud services, accounting software or ERP systems. Whether you want to make movies or money, the tech sector has a role for you and the potential to take you out to the world.

It's also a story of regional economic opportunity. Sure, Auckland and the other main centres have the lion's share of jobs and prospects, but you don't have to be on Queen Street to be in the tech industry. Canterbury accounts for 7% of the industry, nearly 8% are in the Waikato and Otago has another 3.5%. You can and often do work from anywhere and that's great for our prospects as we come out of lockdown and emerge blinking into the future.

The trick now is to focus, to harness this opportunity and turn potential into factual. Next year and 2022 will be the real crunch in terms of economic pressure. While we wait for the rest of the world to open up we have to find new ways to earn a crust, and high value tourists with money to burn really is only one tiny fraction of what we need.

Tech can be the answer, and if this year's TIN report is anything to go by, it's worth getting off the couch for.

Before Google we had AltaVista, a search engine in the crudest of senses. It would search for the words you were looking for and would return a bajillion hits for anything remotely interesting.

There were all like that - just a hosepipe of madness spraying answers at you.

Then there was Dogpile, a search engine that combined FOUR search engines and gave you quadruple the results for even less accuracy.

Then there was all the advertising packed onto the page - you didn't know where to look, what to click, it was a nightmare.

Then Google arrived and it was clean and simple and the first result was usually the right one. They even had a box you could click on "feeling lucky" and it worked! This was a revolution.

Then Google started doing other things. Email and a browser and a bunch of cool stuff like maps and it was all free and better than the paid stuff you got from other providers.

These were the halcyon days because Google was taking it to The Man, in this case mostly Microsoft, and was winning. It's motto was: "Don't be evil" and we all laughed like loons because they could never be evil, right?

Right?

Companies are companies and we tend to forget that today's villains were often yesterday's heroes. Microsoft had freed us from the tyranny of IBM's control. It had introduced the home PC and built an empire on happy users jumping in with both feet.

But then the wheel turned and the brand stopped being the challenger and became the incumbent and Google came along and challenged everything (yay!) and Microsoft was the villain.

This happens all the time of course. Vodafone beat Telecom in the mobile market by being cool, but then became uncool and 2Degrees took up the mantle. Nokia was the hero device, then Blackberry beat it into a bloody mess and Apple came along and swept all before it, but then Android came along… you see how this goes.

Today it's Google's turn in the sinbin with the US Department of Justice accusing the tech giant of abusing its monopoly powers in search (where it has a more-than 90% user rate) and so it will be regulated. Somehow.

We've been here before - you'll remember the way the DOJ curtailed Microsoft's ambitions with a swift and decisive case that made sure we couldn't bundle the browser with the operating system. Yeah. That showed them. It only took a dozen years, legal fees equivalent to three solid gold globes the size of the moon and resulted in absolutely no change to the industry whatsoever.

And now they're at it again with pretty much the same game plan.

Governments really struggle to understand how to regulate tech companies. They think the power is in the bundle - and it is, to a degree - but it's not the core power of the tech giant. That power is in the way users of all stripes actually like a monopoly.

Think about when you're selling something. You go where the biggest market is - in New Zealand that's TradeMe but pretty much everywhere else it's eBay. We had eBay in New Zealand but TradeMe had already reached the tipping point where so many users were happy with it they didn't need an alternative, so eBay never took off here.

When you're buying something you go where the most sellers are - Alibaba or Amazon. Again, here we have two monopolies in their own geography offering limited options to us Kiwis, so there's a bit of room for a tussle but not much. And companies like Mighty Ape are doing very well in many market segments.

It's the same for search or for mobile devices or for social media pages. Think about Facebook, or Apple, Amazon, or Google and they each have their core base service offering that brings in enough cash they can attack markets that are adjacent to their own by offering a free alternative or by buying up the smaller players. But the power they have isn't in that conglomeration so much as it is in that initial monopoly.

So Google may well have a stranglehold on search, but forcing the company to pay a fine (even a big one) or perhaps even sell off a division like YouTube (which isn't even on the cards here) won't do a thing to the core offering. Regulation like this just does not work.

That's why I worry when politicians start talking about regulating social media. Breaking Facebook up into its component parts - Instagram, Facebook and WhatsApp - will not slow the company down at all.

A better approach to regulating tech is to insist they pay tax where they operate, insist they have a transparent appeals process, insist they allow competitors access to the app stores or to their messaging platform, insist they abide by community standards we get a say in.

That way we might actually effect change. But of course, that takes time and nuance and doesn't win elections quite so visibly so I don't think we'll see that any time soon.

And of course if there's an alternative solution out there we can always Google it.

Big Blue will next year create a new publicly-listed entity that will run its managed IT infrastructure business, which currently generates around US$19 billion in annual sales, a quarter of IBM's overall business. 

Some of those sales are reflected in IBM's New Zealand business, which generated $258 million in revenue in 2019 and profit of $20 million.

It will be a lengthy and expensive separation process that will ultimately rack up an estimated US$2.5 billion in costs. But ultimately, the move is about jettisoning a shrinking IT business so IBM proper can focus on cloud computing and leveraging its Watson supercomputing capability and AI tools.

IBM has endured a decade of quarterly revenue declines as traditional IT projects move to the cloud and to IBM's competitors.

"IBM is laser-focused on the US$1 trillion hybrid-cloud opportunity," said IBM's recently appointed CEO, Arvind Krishna, who previously led the company's cloud computing division.

"Client buying needs for application and infrastructure services are diverging, while adoption of our hybrid cloud platform is accelerating," he added.

"Now is the right time to create two market-leading companies focused on what they do best. IBM will focus on its open hybrid cloud platform and AI capabilities."

The question is whether IBM has left its cloud play too late. It trails AWS and Microsoft as cloud providers and is seen as more of a niche player with expertise in hybrid cloud solutions - serving those organisations that have infrastructure and applications spread across on-premises equipment as well as cloud platforms.

Still, last year's US$34 billion acquisition by of Red Hat by IBM has given the company leadership in cloud software, particularly around Kubernetes and cloud-container management. It has an opportunity to leverage that capability while growing cloud services to rival AWS and Microsoft. 

We have seen these types of spin-offs before, such as with Hewlett Packard, which in 2004 revealed a plan to split into two entities HP and HPE respectively focused on the personal computer and printer businesses and technology services.

While the market received the move favourably as it was announced last Friday, IBM has a mountain to climb to gain market share in a competitive cloud computing market where other players such as Alibaba Cloud are also looking to increase their footprint.

IBM's bread and butter business in New Zealand is in managed IT infrastructure and major outsourced government and corporate IT projects. Its cloud business is relatively small compared to Microsoft with its Azure platform and market-leader AWS. With both of those companies recently investing in local infrastructure, Microsoft with an upcoming $100 million investment in data centres, IBM will need to leverage its hybrid cloud specialities and the Red Hat capabilities it now has.

A crucial factor is IBM's deep R&D capability that is producing advances in AI and quantum computing. That innovation could give Big Blue an edge against rivals as it seeks to leverage tools in the cloud.

As a city dweller (246 Queen Street no less) it was … well, mostly it was quite easy as the building manager had seen the writing on the wall and got in a generator some time before. But the city centre was a ghost town, "buildings closed and windows were boarded" (or so the song goes) and it was during this time that Russell Brown went home and never came back.

Russell was the online reporter for IDG Communications and he took his laptop with him and never returned to the office. This was the first time I heard about anyone successfully working from home.

Fast forward to 2002 and my eldest daughter was born and I too went home and did not return. I was determined not to miss any milestones and the job of a daily newshound doesn't really gel well with an office full of reporters on a weekly cycle, and that's before we get to the monthly titles.

So determined was I to work from home that I worked above and beyond starting early and finishing late and producing more than ever before just to ensure nobody could ever say "well, you're slacking off so you'd better come back to the office".

I've been doing it pretty much continuously ever since and for me it works well. I'm vastly more productive at home than I am in an office where I'm easily distracted. I have Twitter for entertainment value plus the fridge is close to hand and the commute is excellent. But I fully appreciate it's not for everyone.

Interestingly, everyone has had a chance to sample the delights of the home office thanks to the world's most boring zombie apocalypse and that's produced some really interesting results that could have a longer-term impact on the way we do business.

Chris Herd, the founder of FirstbaseHQ, a US-based remote-working management company in the US, has interviewed about 1,000 companies in the US regarding their plans for remote working and the future, and the results are quite stark.

Sadly his results aren't up on the company blog yet, but in a Twitter thread he outlined some of the headline numbers.

Head offices are finished, he says, with companies expecting to cut office space by 40-60%. Around one third of the companies say they're doing away with office space altogether and move to remote-only working. This has a two-fold impact: companies can start hiring the best person for the job, not just the best person in a 30-mile radius; and employees can live where they want and still get the job they want. It's something of a win:win situation.

It also means both companies and employees can cut costs hugely. For employees there's less commute time, no parking hassles or bus/train timetables to juggle and no need buy trousers unless they really want to.

For companies, the savings are even greater. Office space costs around $20,000 per worker per year (a number that's not far off the figures I've seen for city space in New Zealand) and cutting that out of the company budget, even if you replace it with a $2000 a year per person budget for tech/office support at home, is an enticing idea. I'd love it if my employer outfitted my home office at that rate. I'd have new monitors, a better desk, my chair would get an upgrade… and that's a chunk of my internet connection paid for as well.

Indeed, many companies are already doing this - helping staff offset the increased costs of working from home by adding in a stipend to cover power, internet and what have you.

One of the biggest concerns Herd saw is around remote burnout - that is, staff working too hard because they can. Productivity has gone through the roof in many companies and the danger is staff will do what I did and forget where the lines are between work and life. I highly recommend getting that straight in your head as soon as possible. Herd says the smart companies are already working on ways to sort that out and that includes building in time to get together as a team (or a company) in ways that reconnect individuals with colleagues. Forget going to the pub on a Friday night, the most popular option is flying teams to remote locations for a week. Seriously now.

There are downsides of course. Personal injury rates are way up as staff work hard in non-ergonomic settings. Kitchen chairs, non-adjustable desks, you name it and we've all seen it on Zoom calls. Plus there's always someone from Legal saying "we can't accept liability" even though of course companies already do.

I asked around to see what the experience has been like here in New Zealand for employees and it's safe to say the reaction is mixed.

Sure, there are people like me who are well set up, have a job that is best done in this kind of environment and who have taken to it like ducks to water. But then there are those whose roles are quite different, who miss the office life, who feel isolated or whose home set-up is less than conducive to good work behaviour. For them, this has been a nightmare.

The two extremes seem to divide along tech-centric and non-tech-centric lines - tech folk are more used to sitting at a desk typing on a keyboard for a large part of the day so to them it's second nature.

Regardless of whether you like it or not, the new world order seems likely to be around for a while - even once we clear COVID out of the way. That kind of cost saving is too great for many companies to ignore and so long as the company pays attention to onboarding processes and culture building (proper culture building) then there's hope for a happy outcome.

Herd says that the split is around 90% for remote working in some form or other, 10% dead against it but I suspect that's a skew based on where his company is and what kind of customers he deals with.

While big team gestures and funds to enable good home office set-ups help, it's also the little things that will make life easier for staff. Reduced need for office space means perhaps take out all those hot desks and put in some more meeting rooms, and upgrade the coffee supply. Then when you do need to be in it's a nicer environment. And make sure everyone is treated equally when it comes to team meetings - if one is remote, everyone should be remote so you've all got the same access and same experience. Otherwise it's just awful.

Whatever your views on it, there is one upside I've yet to find anyone oppose. The soggy middle manager who judges employees not on output but on their time in the office, the clock watcher, his and her day is over. There's no need for those roles and instead we can actually assess staff on performance.

Finally we have a productivity tool that might lift us out of the doldrums.

It's much easier to collate votes if they're digital and the old days of taking several days if not weeks to get the final tally checked, re-checked and reported disappears almost entirely. Overseas' votes can be tallied in moments and non-standard votes (at the wrong polling station or newly enrolled on the day) can be counted straight away.

So why is it whenever the subject of online voting is raised lines are drawn and barricades built between the for and "hell no, don't do it" brigades? Just what is the downside of voting online?

There are a few elements to unpick in all this. First, we have to work out what the status quo is, how it works and what needs to be changed.

In New Zealand we have a largely print-based voting process. Marker pens, books of names, cardboard boxes and thousands of polling stations around the country. Overall the process works really well - we have very low rates of voter fraud, it's possible to enrol and vote at the same time and votes are generally tallied up and reported on very quickly.

Where we do fall down is in ever decreasing voter turnout statistics. Since 1981 where we saw 91.4% turnout, numbers have fallen to 79.01% in 2017. That's high compared with some countries but is a worrying trend and for many, changing the mechanism by which we vote could help.

Online voting has certainly helped with absentee voting - if you're offshore on voting day you can submit your vote digitally and the world hasn't ended.

But would online voting drive up user engagement? The recent experience with the Census would suggest otherwise - there, digitisation is being blamed for disastrously low turnout the next census is likely to be drastically different.

All of which is very interesting but doesn't directly address the concerns many have around any move to a digital voting regime.

The problem - expressed comprehensively by Stephen Judd in this piece - is that any move to a digital platform opens up two major issues: the potential for tampering and the  potential for a loss of trust in the result.

Currently if you want to tamper with an election vote you'd have to steal all the cardboard boxes from an electorate and doctor the papers. It's likely to be noticed by someone, which makes it very good at avoiding that kind of thing.

With online voting, that attack vector opens up hugely. While there are bound to be security teams working to ensure everything is fine, there will also be others (ranging from kids in basements right through to "state-level actors" who might want to nudge things) who want to do real harm.

Which leads to the second point - trust. At the moment trust in our election process is very high. It's easy to scrutise votes - you simply have to be able to count pieces of paper in a particular pile. With an online, digital voting system only the techs can really understand how the process works and that introduces the potential for questions and concerns and conspiracy.

Do we want to run the risk of a loss of confidence in our system in order to maybe increase voter turn out? What problem are we solving with a move to digital and what do we risk losing if we do make such a leap?

There are dozens of reasons why we are told EVoting won't work. It's insecure, it can be manipulated, it has privacy issues, it doesn't get the uptake we think it will, things could be calculated incorrectly, and so on. 

All of that may be true, but it shouldn't stop us from trying to make it happen anyway. For some strange reason, EVoting has become the modern technology version of Everest. We've been to the moon, we're working on heading to Mars, we're developing neural interfaces, wrangling AI in more and more exciting ways, making giant leaps and bounds across all kinds of technology but EVoting is IMPOSSIBLE. 

I don't believe it, and I think that a lot of the argument is based on FUD rather than good risk management. We often hear of the risks of EVoting, but these are never balanced against the risks of the current system, for example. 

We gave away privacy years ago and anyone who uses social media should have zero complaints about their privacy being invaded and exploited. I'm not saying we shouldn't protect our privacy, of course, we should, and there are methods to do that. I'm saying there is a double standard. 

Again, there are many layers of security that could be applied based on the standard 1,400 or more various international controls. There is no doubt that we could lock down EVoting to the same level of security as the NSA or other super-secret organisations. 

In terms of interference with an EVoting system, either to cause it to fail or to manipulate a result, again, there are safeguards that could be put in place. 

Perhaps worst of all is a common belief that it has no benefit. This is based on "other countries trying it" and not getting the uptake they expect. This is perhaps the most annoying aspect as a) I am not sure any comprehensive research has been done on whether people would use it more than a manual system or b) not taking into account that all countries have different cultures so how do we not know that Kiwis would take it up more than others have? 

A working EVoting system could also be leveraged by the Government as a tool for citizens to engage more frequently and provide richer data to decision-makers. It could also provide a path to younger voters who often feel isolated by the manual process of today.

For the country or company that produces the first rock-solid EVoting system, there will be a monetary reward. It could be sold to other countries and governments. 

With a technology industry that embraces New Zealand's innovative nature and number-8 wire culture, I believe we can create safe EVoting, certainly safer than the current system. 

In 1953 Sir Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay reached the summit of Mt Everest. They both had a dream, a plan, and a will to knock off what was considered to be an impossible task at the time, instead of complaining about how dangerous and difficult it was from the comfort of a chair beside a warm fire. 

Better to try and fail, than not try at all, and right now, we are not trying.  

If all this is alarming coming from me, imagine how I felt hearing it from a very senior economist who specialises in macro-level financial crises. He had the facts to prove it, I just have a cold dread which I'm more than happy to share with you.

The decade since the Global Financial Crisis has seen this movement gain steam and take over our democracies and move us to a world where the president of the United States says he may not step down if voted out of office - something that would have been unthinkable only a few years ago but which now is all too possible.

Is the era of the nation state coming to an end? Is the power once wielded by countries, with their access to mineral reserves and raw materials such as people no longer the power house it once was?

We elect governments to govern, to look after the people in society, but if they're not up to the job, if they can't afford to do all the things we need them to do, is there much point to it all?

All of which got me thinking about the alternate model and the rise of the tech giants.

Rather than being geographically based as businesses have traditionally been, these new businesses are verticals, serving customers wherever they can and scooping up resources on a global scale.

The user base is spread around the world across multiple jurisdictions. The customer base (often quite a different thing from the users, don't forget) is likewise spread across the world and the benefits of this globalisation is apparent to anyone who has bought a phone that was designed in the US manufactured in China from rare earth minerals dug up in the Congo and shipped to New Zealand.

It also means these companies can deploy cheap labour where possible, lower cost manufacturing where they need it and reap the benefits of fatter margins, and that's before we even start talking about taxation regimes and the games played there.

It's becoming increasingly more difficult to pin these companies down to a single set of rules or regulations around anything - from tax to defamation laws to objectionable material - and nations seem ill-suited to the idea in normal times, let alone when they're facing their own existential crisis.

If it all sounds horribly familiar it's possibly because this isn't the first time we've seen power concentrated in the hands of a few men outside the auspices of governments.

The second half of the 19th century saw a huge economic transformation spurred on by the western expansion in the United States.

Back then it was all about oil, transport links, steel, even financial market manipulation and it ultimately led to such a concentration of wealth in a few individuals all men with names you'll be familiar with: JP Morgan, Cornelius Vanderbilt, John D Rockerfeller who was once called the richest man in modern history and who was worth around US$300 billion in an age where personal tax was non-existent.

That sounds an awful lot like the lives lead by Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg and a few select others. They have cornered the market in terms of data and the modern goldrush that is the internet age. From retail shopping to social media, from search to maps to publications, the internet era is dominated by a small handful of companies that operated internationally and are bound by very few restrictions.

I was thinking about this when I saw my latest complaint to Facebook about fake 5G content was rejected as it didn't breach Facebook's community standards. There is no right of appeal, there's no sense that I can contribute to Facebook's standards, there is no process whereby I can influence Facebook's direction in the slightest way. Even shareholders have no say - Zuckerberg famously owns the majority so it literally is his vision that is implemented and nobody else's.

Ultimately, even Rockerfeller's oil empire was regulated - broken into more than 30 sub-companies - but his fortune remained largely intact. Regulating internet companies is going to be so much more difficult.

I asked the macro-economics speaker whether he thought the rise of the vertical businesses that take data from everyone and turn them into profits and who are seemingly beyond the control of any jurisdiction whether he was concerned. Yes, he said, but what can we do?

Welcome to Robber Barons 2.0.

Users of Microsoft Office 365, Outlook, Exchange, Sharepoint, OneDrive, Azure and Teams were unable to log on to their apps, instead receiving a "transient error" message. Some users who were logged into apps at the time of the failure remained logged in and able to access services, which suggests an authentication issue somewhere in the service.

Diagnosis of the problem is still underway and while initially Microsoft blamed a software upgrade, rolling back the changes didn't bring about any change in the problem. Microsoft resolved the issue later in the day but details as to the cause remain unclear.

The problem impacted users around the world and lasted for a couple of frustrating hours, however with cloud-based services increasingly being the standard model deployed by application providers, such outages are now part of the rich tapestry that is our modern working lifestyle.

The use of highly targeted "dark ads" (advertising that is only visible to a small number of Facebook users and which doesn't comply with election laws regarding advertising) helped ensure key voters in a number of so-called "swing states" were encouraged not to vote.

With over five terabytes of data relating to more than 200 million American voters, the campaign targeted black American voters in larger proportion. Black voter turnout in the US dropped for the first time in 20 years, says Channel 4.

The campaign was run in conjunction with now shuttered UK-based Cambridge Analytica, whose role in the UK's Brexit campaign and its access to Facebook data, was seen as instrumental in the close result in that referendum.

Facebook has been criticised for not doing enough to police the content it shares on its platforms and for allowing political advertising to continue even as evidence emerges of Facebook's role in in political interference and election fraud, not to mention genocide.

Indeed, Facebook's own employees are beginning to rebel, challenging founder, CEO and largest shareholder Mark Zuckerberg on his seeming unwillingness to change the way Facebook operates to remove some of the more extremist content.

Zuckerberg previously announced the establishment of an oversight board, which would have the power to veto decisions around political advertising on a case-by-case basis. The board is already under fire for not tackling current advertising and says it will begin operation in mid October.

The US presidential election takes place on November 4.

I'm talking about the phone companies and one in particular - Telecom - which was structured in such a way it could fend off competition while managing to appease the regulator for the best part of two decades.

The company was responsible for everything in the network stack from the trenches in the ground to the cables that were laid to the devices that could connect (remember the Telepermit?) to the billing relationship with the customer, the whole thing. Phone calls from Auckland to London cost a fortune even though the network had been upgraded and in reality the calls were cheaper than a call from Auckland to Taihape.

Ultimately competition arrived in the form of Clear Communications and then the internet landed and it's all a blur of acronyms and faded memories (0867 numbering scheme? Ihug? Cabinetisation? Loyalty schemes?) but eventually Telecom faced a stark reality: split into two different companies or be overbuilt by the government.

The monopoly control was broken and competition has flooded into the market ever since. We have three competing mobile networks, a regulator with teeth to ensure every player is equally unhappy (surely the best a regulator can deliver?) fibre to the home for a large part of the country and fixed wireless service for remote and rural areas.

It's not perfect but it's a damn sight better than we see in a lot of other countries and with the Level 4 lockdown many of us found we were better able to work from home than from the office. Productivity went up for many companies and we may have turned a corner in terms of soggy middle managers clock watching on our behalf.

But with every silver lining there comes a cloud and for the telcos it's the dumb pipe.

When they controlled everything from cable to app it was easy to pay for new, somewhat risky propositions because they earned a lot of money from bits that really didn't cost a lot to run. The international phone call is just one example - there was the monthly fee for doing nothing, the toll calling if you happened to be on the wrong side of the motorway, the bundles of TXT messages, the email service, the international roaming charges  - it all chipped in to the giant coffers and when competition reared its ugly head you had a healthy buffer from other services to fend it off.

Without that integration parts of the business had to stand on their own two feet and for some that was difficult. Market share and profitability have both fallen dramatically.

Of course, for users it's been great - costs have fallen and services have improved (although the Commerce Commission does point out that we all still buy services that exceed what we actually use so we're still paying more than we should. Ring your phone company and see what they can do for you or find one that can sharpen its pencil) and we have faster speeds, greater data capacities, in more places and with more choice than ever before.

But in parallel with this disruption and the race to the bottom, the telcos have become providers of network and little more. They are the dumb pipes that carry all the bits of data (and don't get me wrong, that's an essential service, literally so these days) and other companies provide over the top services.

These OTT providers make a lot of money. A lot. They don't need to provide the network, they don't need to provide the devices the users crave, they don't need to provide the content the users share - they'll create it for you! Instead, these companies saw that opportunity and began offering all those add-on services the telcos used to sell for fat margins but for free.

Google started it with Gmail. Nobody had time for Xtra or Vodafone or Ihug mail after that (it took a while to filter through but honestly, why would you pay a service that wasn't as good as the free one?). Who would have thought messaging apps would eat into TXT messaging's dominance? Or that free calling in the form of Skype wouldn't just be across your toll area but across the planet.

These companies made money in other ways and didn't need to put up barriers like fees because the product they sold was the user base itself.

Today's telco world is very different from that of 2010 never mind 2001. Back then you were a telco customer who used a certain type of phone. Today you're a phone user who happens to use a network. Back then you complained that services were expensive and limited to voice and TXT (if you were lucky). Today I can buy songs, books, television shows, movies, games, apps, I can be productive for work, write a novel (who has the time?) or compose music.

Our kids use their phones to film the most astonishing sequences for media studies and cut together great music videos or fake TV ads for school while making themselves internet famous (as if there was any other kind) on TikTok and they do so without any thought to what network they're using.

The era of the telco is over, but the era of the OTT provider is upon us and if anything it's about to get just as fierce as it was back before the market was regulated.

This week Apple has announced it will offer a bundled app service that includes music, television, games, news and fitness features all rolled up with a chunk of online storage to go with it. Companies that have existed around the edge of the Apple world are shrieking with horror - music streamer Spotify is claiming it's anticompetitive and fitness companies like Strava are revisiting their business plans for the year ahead.

Apple has built a powerful ecosystem around a device (now a family of devices) that locks the user in to products Apple authorises and apps that Apple approves. If you think you can make a better app than one Apple has in the store you might not get the chance to find out because Apple has been accused in the past of blocking access to the app store to prevent competition.

And with Apple clipping the ticket (to the tune of 30% for some items) on every dollar spent through its devices, it's no wonder these competitors are crying foul. Apple, and Google with its Android operating system, have found a way to sit at the centre of the supply chain and ensure they clip the ticket from both developers and content producers alike, not to mention the users as well.

However, the wolves are starting to circle - Apple's stoush with Epic Games (makers of Fortnite) has reached the lawyers-at-ten-paces stage and regardless of how this ends, it won't be pretty for anyone.

The vertically integrated model is back, it's just not all that bothered about the network end of town, just with the users and the consumption of content. It's vertical integration 2.0.

Committees, I was told a long time ago, are the cul de sacs into which good ideas are lured and then slowly strangled.

I sit on a number of committees and I can attest this is entirely true. There's something about the risk-adverse nature of a good committee that ensures nothing is ever done in a timely fashion, that the bureaucracy protects itself from outside intervention and that anything out of the ordinary is seen as a threat.

A colleague in the marketing world posted a LinkedIn piece the other day about the Cadbury television ad featuring the gorilla playing the drums to Phil Collins' song Air Tonight and how the award winning ad that grew the company sales by 10% was initially shunned by the committee responsible for approving it. It got me thinking about risk in the corporate world and how often companies are so risk adverse they create risk.

Risk is measured in two ways - how likely the thing is to happen and how much damage the thing will cause if it does take place. Earthquake risk, for example, is probably low on the former scale but high on the latter. Pandemics are likewise less likely than you fear but more damaging than you'd like.

COVID-19 is a case in point. The outbreak was unexpected, widespread and a lot more damaging than first thought. The initial denials of the scale of the problem lead to all kinds of problems further down the track and here we are today, mopping up as we go.

If committees are designed to strangle good ideas then what are governments for? After all, they're nothing but a series of committees strung together with a remit to retain the status quo. After all, they ARE the status quo - so how do you enact change quickly when something risky happens that needs a fast response?

The short answer is, of course, that you don't and sadly that's how empires fall. Not with a bang so much as with a denial, a no-comment, with a committee meeting.

We've been very lucky in New Zealand with our response to the COVID-19 outbreak. We had good warning, we had the right people in charge of the right departments at the right time and we had political leaders who are young and inexperienced enough (I say this kindly) to say "we will do what the experts tell us" rather than respond as we've seen elsewhere "I am the expert and I will tell you what to do".

It's lead to some good outcomes - but also has highlighted one or two issues with the way government works. It works incrementally, it works with known solutions and it doesn't jump to conclusions. It certainly doesn't react kindly to leaps of inspiration and someone saying "I can help, throw away your so-called experts and business continuity plans, I have the answer" and I suspect that's where Sam Morgan and the CovidCard came unstuck.

The CovidCard was to be a Bluetooth enabled credit card sized device worn on a lanyard around the neck for all to see. Anyone who went out of the house during lockdown would wear one, possibly by law, and the card would track which other cards you were near to during your day. Should you fall ill and test positive, your history of contacts would be downloaded and all those card holders would be contacted and told to isolate and test.

There were brochures with pictures of the card. There were even lanyards with branding for all to see. It must be serious if there are lanyards, right?

It was a bold leap over the existing technology and over concerns that were, at the time, plaguing the government around privacy, equity of access to a service, how best to track and trace individuals and how to rapidly clamp down on any resurgent infection.

It was so good there would be no need to lock down cities or borders and travellers could come to New Zealand and freely move about the place safe in the knowledge that they would be rapidly contacted if someone near them was found to be ill and communicable.

This was bold, it was radical, it was a giant leap forward. It was world leading.

All those things to a tech company spell success. To a government they spell risk. To a committee they spell disaster. What if we invest $100 million in a product that doesn't work as they claim? What if we build a system nobody wants to use? What if we build something that everyone else in the world says won't work? What if?

Sam pulled the plug on the card this week and got quite shouty about short sighted government gnomes (I'm paraphrasing here and I really like the word gnome) and you have to say he has a point. Sure, the card didn't have general support from the very people who would be required to use it (you know, the customers or "public"). Sure, the technology was never really discussed openly and the issues raised by various parties including the Privacy Commissioner were never really addressed. Sure, the present state moved dramatically while Sam was talking (the COVID-19 tracer app now has more than 2 million downloads, accounting for half the population over the age of 15 and is used 1.7 million times a day and is adding new features at a steady pace) making the sell even harder, but what an opportunity, right?

Sam threw his hands up in disgust and moved on, blaming tall poppy syndrome and a lack of vision. But that's exactly what governments and large bureaucracies do, right? They move cautiously and carefully. The overanalyse and they miss opportunities. Sam should know this - he was at the helm of submarine cable company Pacific Fibre and laid out a very good business case for a vital piece of critical infrastructure that was a guaranteed investment opportunity, but couldn't land the deal and the company folded. Less than five years later the telcos invested in a trans-Tasman cable and then Hawaiki Cable completed its connection to the US and now Southern Cross Cables has begun work on a new connection with the outside world. Sam's dream is now reality just not with Sam's company. 

There's another lesson from the PR world that I think can be applied here: you have to take them on the journey. You might have the best solution to the problem in the world but if you don't take your stakeholders on the journey with you from here to there, they won't buy into the vision. I suspect having branding and brochures but no technical specs probably didn't help much either. Trust and social licence are two parts of the same equation and without those you don't have a viable solution.

We won't get our CovidCard but we do have a COVID tracking app (although I would have preferred an open model that allowed other developers to plug in to the API) and we do have a world class response to a global problem. I hope Sam has learned from it because no doubt he'll be back to pitch more great ideas to the laggards that make up our investment community and our banks, our government's and our public. One day who knows? One idea might even stick.

But the same is not true for everyone. Citizens Advice Bureau (CAB) says its latest report - "Face to Face with Digital Exclusion" - shows around 10% of Kiwis don't have reliable access to the internet at a time when almost all services are being provided online, and that's causing many to miss out on support they might very well need during the COVID-19 crisis.

CAB, which offers support and advice for those who need a human face and whose clientele often include the elderly or those for whom English isn't their first language, is seeing a rise in demand for its services along with added cost as government departments no longer provide paper-based versions of their forms but require the applicant to print them off. Difficult to do if you don't have a computer or a printer. Those costs tend to fall on the CAB.

This digital divide isn't restricted to the elderly either, as man have suggested, but is spread across the age spectrum.

"Our report challenges the current approach being taken by government in its digital transformation of the public service - including the retreat of agencies from being physically present in communities. It's getting harder to access human support from government agencies, but people's needs for face-to-face services are as real as ever," says CAB chief executive Kerry Dalton.

While CAB would like government to "pause and take stock" of its approach to digitising the New Zealand economy and interactions with government in particular, there are a number of other avenues to take, including up skilling Kiwi families and ensuring devices and internet connections are more readily available to those who need them the most, including rural users as well as those in lower socio-economic sectors of society.

"Interacting with government services is often about accessing rights and entitlements and it's important that there aren't any barriers in the way. There needs to be genuine choice for people about how they can interact - whether online, face-to-face, through others or by phone. Particular attention must be given to the needs of Māori and Pacific Peoples who are being disproportionately disadvantaged," says Dalton.

It's one of the oldest games in the world - ringing the door bell and running away - but for the New Zealand Stock Exchange the digital version has proven to be something of a problem.

Denial of service attacks (and their distributed cousins) have been around as long as there have been internet connections and by now you'd think we would have figured out how to stop them.

In the early days some of these so-called attacks were just poorly configured servers failing to manage the workload. I remember the launch of the original Lotto website which would self-DOS itself by opening web browser after web browser with each click of the site thus crippling my Pentium MMX powered work PC. Or there was the fun of the Slashdot Effect, named of course for the original tech news website which was guaranteed to bring down any site that was linked to in a story.

I once interviewed Ben Goodger, the Kiwi creator of the Chrome browser, and when the Herald ran the story, some wag posted it to Slashdot which drove more traffic than the Herald had ever seen before. So extreme was the loading that Australian publications in the same stable (which had moved their services to the New Zealand operation to save costs) found themselves knocked entirely offline by one chance story.

Good times.

But that was 2004 and since then we have whole new management regimes that carefully monitor incoming data requests and take care of them. These days when a website goes down it's because of something breaking, surely? It can't be as simple as a DDOS attack? What about the company's upstream provider? What about the network optimation guys? What about the content distribution network the site uses to share its content with the rest of the world?

For a service like the NZX's website, which is critical to an essential component of our financial empire, surely it's well protected from cyber-attacks of all sorts?

Yet here we are, as I write three days in to a series of attacks that have taken the site offline as trading reaches fever pitch and sales records are ready to fall.

Of course, as quickly as our defences have matured and grown, so too have the attack vectors of the ratbags at the other end of the connection, and the tools available today are a lot more sophisticated. The actors too have changed - forget the kids in mom's basement pinging servers to find the one left unguarded; these days hackers are part of organised crime cartels driven by the commercial imperative.

And that seems to be the case here. The NZX isn't the only target - there are a multitude of financial service providers caught up in what appears to be a coordinated attack the work of an extortionist group intent on bringing in some cash.

Rather than a ransomware attack (encrypting the victim's data and holding it to ransom) this kind of attack threatens the victim with a denial of service attack unless they pay off the attacker. To prove they are serious the attacker will fire up the DDOS bots for a short period of time to prove their ability and willingness to use it. Typically the attacker will put up the price demanded each day until either the victim pays or works out how to block the traffic.

No doubt the authorities (whoever they might be) will be working to work out how the villain is and track them down to their secret lair but it raises a couple of questions that need to be answered.

Not only do we need to be smarter than these guys and actually bake cybersecurity in at a much more granular level to all our IT systems, we also need to rapidly ramp up the number of experts we have in the field and encourage more students to take up cybersecurity as a discipline as they think about career paths and getting into the workforce.

Both those things will require a change to the way we incentivise students and yes, may actually require the government to "pick winners" (something governments are notoriously reluctant to do, possibly because they're so bad at it) and say yes, we will encourage young people into this industry.

If you do know someone pondering the move, do encourage them. Not only will they have an entertaining time of it, they'll be in high demand for years if not decades to come. The demand for trained cybersecurity experts is growing like crazy at the moment and if the NZX's experience is anything to go by, that demand will slacken off for quite some time.

So, you would expect that parties campaigning this year would have robust tech policies that supported the industry. You would expect that, but you would be sadly mistaken.

Only two of the eighteen parties so far in this campaign have outright policies that look at the tech industry and innovation. Two.

This article is going to look at three brief topics. First, what a good tech policy should look like. Second, a look at the two parties that have an actual strategy. Three, why politicians "don't get tech."

Here is what I think good tech policy looks like, something that is simple, short, and achievable rather than a long list of promises and waffling using confusing jargon no one understands.

Technology industry policy

• The government recognises the social and economic value of a thriving technology industry and ensures that any broader policy decisions always involve thinking about that eco-system.
• Government creates export pathways for locally-based companies into our trade partners and heavily subsidises the process of the first contact with those markets to generate higher export earnings.
• Government fixes the total confusion that is tendering within New Zealand and the complete roadblock that is current procurement practices, instead, creating a market free from influence while making it transparent.
• The government recognises that only half the job has been done with internet connectivity and changes stance to ensure that 50% of rural New Zealand who still has poor connectivity is brought into the 21st century. 
• Government refines the current education pathway into technology, offering an apprenticeship scheme.
• Government creates a pathway for international technology companies to move and base themselves within New Zealand, "buddying" with local companies for support.

We need politicians to understand the value of the industry because it is increasingly evident that they do not. Each election over the past three or more has seen a decline in technology industry policy despite the sector proliferating. The industry can underpin ALL other strategies if it is engaged and managed well, providing innovative support to all other areas.

Despite the success of some locally based technology companies, the opportunity for export remains high. Most local technology companies immediately focus on trying to get government, who they see as spending a lot of money annual, on their product. However, the real value to New Zealand lies in exporting our technology products and services into the significantly larger global market. There are already mechanisms to do this, such as the Government to Government unit, but they are severely under-resourced.

The local market itself is a mess and has been for two decades. The tendering system and procurement processes are old, expensive, unnecessarily bureaucratic, and heavily weighted to large companies, which in turn favours multinationals. By freeing the market to operate transparently and without those current encumbrances, it will open up more opportunity for local and smaller technology companies to get involved in digitally transforming government and so increasing the quality of service to New Zealanders.

Our largest primary export earner is still food, and the bulk of that production occurs in rural areas. While significant gains were made with the ultrafast broadband across New Zealand urban areas, it is reported that 50% of rural areas still do not have useful internet or mobile access. This impedes the uptake of technology for our primary export industry and the implementation of new technology that could not only increase export earnings but also reduce carbon emissions.

On a personal note. I live in rural Wairarapa, ten kilometres from either Greytown or Carterton. My initial broadband speed when I got here, was less than 1Mbs. Radio was not available because of the terrain in the area and trees in the line of sight. Satellite was the only answer. The installation was around $1,200, with a two-year lock-in, for a service that varies between 8Mbs (at night) to 25Mbs (during the day) with a ping of about 900ms. In addition, I had to spend another $800, extending the wifi base point to reach the rest of the farm. It costs me $220 per month for the service, which is quite reliable, except in severe weather. Most farmers cannot, and will not, pay that kind of money for an internet connection.

An apprenticeship scheme in the technology industry would be a great way to train people quickly and get them working fast, because as we do move post-COVID, the demand of technology workers will go through the roof. Primarily because of the ever-increasing technical debt being incurred by New Zealand and the world.

As I have written before, we could make New Zealand an attractive place for overseas technology companies to work, live, and play. This would again increase our export earnings and bring diversity to the industry that we need more of.

The state of technology industry policy this election

Well now, the moment you have all been waiting for. What on earth is going on with parties and the glaring lack of policy?

The two parties that have comprehensive policies in this space are the Green Party and Sustainable New Zealand. When I researched the other sixteen parties, I could not easily find any technology industry policy. You may feel free to point out if I got this wrong in the comments with links, please!

The Sustainable New Zealand Innovation Plan is excellent. I know nothing about this party outside reading their policy and should point out I am not affiliated to any party. I will leave you to read it and encourage you to do so because it is particularly useful and a great place to start some debate. I.e. I do not think we need to pour money into any more hubs, that have promised much and produced little; however, the idea of investing in good ideas makes sense.

As per usual, every election, the Greens have a good, robust, simple set of policies for the technology industry. There is little you can argue with here, and it shows that they "get it."

Where are the other sixteen parties on technology industry policy?

Back in the 1950's I expect. Even parties like New Zealand First do not have a policy this time around, and the two major parties, do not appear to have either. This is surprising. But on balance, when you think about it, not that surprising.

National focusses on infrastructure, and even when it was in power, it treated technology policy the same as infrastructure, spawning the UFB network.

Labour has not had an excellent record with technology this term, being distracted by a series of crises that have needed to be managed. They have achieved almost nothing of their policy last time, and we all know the unmitigated PR disasters that dogged this area early in the term.

But all of this points to politicians who do not understand technology, and, are perhaps scared of it, especially after several high-profile IT projects failing in the last three years. It may be that they equate the technology industry with those high-profile failures as opposed to an enabling sector that could increase wealth, health, and quality of living by reducing our carbon emissions.

Various lobby groups have tried to educate politicians and have largely failed. There are many reasons for this, and the most likely one is that they were divided and conquered by bureaucrats after the last election who have shuffled them into working groups and kept them far, far away from the political leaders with influence.

Not targeting ALL significant parties with critical messages about the industry is probably also a mistake. We need to educate all politicians, whether in government or not, of the potential of the sector.

Finally, because the current government has declared this a "COVID election", the focus has been on that, not the future. Competing parties had an opportunity to reject that strategy, but have chosen to participate in that battlefield themselves, where they will most likely lose.

All politicians and parties had a chance to set out what the future looks like, with or without COVID, and how we could achieve that. Instead, they are mired in a field of mud, blood, and horror, fighting over every small point that can be battled.

Perhaps the broader tragedy in this is that appear to have very, very few strategic thinking leaders in the ranks of those that want to be in parliament.

If that is the case, then, we should consider moving ahead personally, and as an industry, and leaving them to follow along behind us.

As always, your thoughts are welcome. I appreciate your feedback. 

Ian is a long time technologist and industry commentator who is finding to reflect as he looks for his next engagement. He lives on a farm in the Wairarapa and when not working in technology writes, grows chillies, and trains horses with his partner.

New Zealand non-profit Tohatoha announced a bold new strategic direction today, expanding the focus of its programme to prioritise education to prevent the spread of disinformation and misinformation online, build community understanding of the risks and benefits of data-driven technologies, and support local businesses as they innovate to develop alternatives to surveillance capitalism as part of its vision for "a just and equitable digital world."  

Tohatoha, originally founded in 2007 as Creative Commons Aotearoa NZ (CCANZ), is well known for spearheading public dialogue on issues around digital technology, including copyright and open access. However, today it has a new and bigger mission: To enable big conversations with and within communities, while amplifying the voices of those harmed by digital technologies and working toward solutions to build a just and equitable Internet.

Tohatoha's CEO, Mandy Henk, says the group's vision has always been 'to realise the full potential of the Internet - advocating for universal access to research and education, and full participation in culture to build a stronger Aotearoa New Zealand'.

"In 2020, the dream of digital transformation driven by universal access and participation seems both more important than ever, and yet further away. That's why Tohatoha has decided to refocus on the unwritten subtext of that vision - justice and equity for the digital world."

Henk says the organisation's new strategic plan includes four areas of strategic focus, with the top priority being preventing online disinformation and misinformation. This is, she says, because "digital technologies are being used in ways that have devastating impacts on community trust and democratic communities around the world."

"Disinformation campaigns are sowing division, undermining electoral processes, and dismantling liberal democracies across the planet. We need to educate and collaborate at all levels - individual, organisational, governmental, and societal - to ensure that the technologies we build and use contribute to a more democratic society.

"Universal access and full participation can't come about unless we partner with those who lack access and with those who are excluded from participation. The future is ours to create - and the more deliberate and intentional we are about building that future, the brighter it will be--for all of us."

Henk says that while the new strategic direction has been in development for some time, it is fitting that it is being announced amidst the turbulent times of 2020.

"There's a positive lesson we can take from 2020, and it's that the world can change. Way back in 2007 when CCANZ was founded, the digital world promised a future of technological wonders, but today we are still far from delivering that potential to everyone," she says. 

"As an organisation we will continue to do our work through education, advocacy, and community building, and we will soon make some more announcements about what that's going to look like and how New Zealanders can participate."

For more information about Tohatoha's new Strategic Direction and its work in New Zealand, visit http://tohatoha.nz.

OHATOHA'S NEW STRATEGIC DIRECTION

Vision

A just and equitable digital world--for Aotearoa and the planet.

Mission

Enable big conversations with and within our communities, while amplifying the voices of those harmed by digital technologies and working toward solutions to build an equitable and just Internet.

Commitments

1. Our first commitment is to Te Tiriti O Waitangi. The transformation of New Zealand into a just and equitable digital nation is an aspiration that can best be achieved by centring around our nation's founding document and founding commitment. 
   
   
2. Our second commitment is that we will work to ensure that the digital world is as close to carbon-free as possible. Just as we did with COVID-19, so now we must do with climate change. As we build the social, technical, legal, and economic infrastructure for our future as a digital nation, we must also create a world that emits less carbon year after year. 
   
   

Areas of Focus

Our four programme areas build on Tohatoha's expertise as tenders of the digital commons. We have over a decade of experience working with New Zealand's public service, institutions, and communities to build New Zealand's understanding of the legal and ethical frameworks that govern how we use digital technologies. This plan expands on that work and updates it for the challenges of today. 

1. Education to prevent the spread of Disinformation and Misinformation … because digital technologies are being used in ways that have devastating impacts on community trust and democratic communities around the world. 
   
   
2. Building Frameworks and Knowledge about governments' use of data driven technologies … because data-driven technologies are transforming how governments collect, manage, and use information raising new questions about how to design transparent and safe public services.
   
   
3. Finding alternatives to Surveillance Capitalism … because the commodification of our digital interactions and activity has transformed the world into one with more people, participation, and problems online, but new business and ownership models have the potential to unlock a better digital world. 
   
   
4. Educating about Copyright, NZGOAL, and Open Access to Public Knowledge … because access to public knowledge is key to an open and transparent culture and government and to enable participation by communities throughout New Zealand.

In my last article, I looked at the challenges that the New Zealand Tech Industry currently faces and asked how we could reshape ourselves to take advantage of many opportunities to strengthen and grow a sector that is very important for the country as other significant revenue streams, such as tourism, collapse for the foreseeable future.

More than 250,000 Americans have investigated whether they qualify to move to New Zealand since the coronavirus pandemic took hold this year.

Hundreds of thousands of foreigners from other countries are also inquiring about living here or applying for residency as the deadly pandemic sweeps the globe.

With international death rates steadily climbing, our Pacific island nation is quickly becoming an attractive haven to live.

Covid 19 coronavirus: Americans visit Immigration NZ website every 30 seconds, tens of thousands consider shift to virus-free NZ

New Zealand is currently one of a handful of countries on earth that is seen as safe from COVID along with places like Israel and Singapore, both also with robust technology industries. Most other countries that were considered safe even a month ago, such as Australia and Switzerland, have now had significant issues with COVID.

Arguably, New Zealand could be the safest place on earth right now given our border policy (it is shut but there are pathways through) and our geographic location which has no land borders and is not easily accessible by sea. Japan is possibly also as safe.

We also have good internet infrastructure locally, and connecting to the rest of the world, which has functional capacity & redundancy. While latency starts to grow as we head toward the northern hemisphere, for Australia and South East Asia, it is more than adequate.

We are part of the Five Eyes network, which while it may preclude some countries from ever wanting to store data here or utilise computing resources, is attractive to the other Five Eyes partners. We also have ever-strengthening privacy laws, with more investment in the legislation coming before the end of the year.

Even though we are part of the Five Eyes network, we are relatively independent of the partners, putting our foot down when we have a point of principle and having trade relations with a variety of countries.

New Zealand itself is a highly desirable place to immigrate to given our landscape, culture, socially responsible policies, and cost of living in comparison to other cities around the globe.

There are two aspects to Fortress New Zealand I see as opportunities.

The first is to pour money into good infrastructure in the form of geographically diverse data centres along with other technology platforms, and the second is to move tech companies to New Zealand as their base of operations.

Data Fortress

New Zealand already has several data centres scattered across the country of which the majority are serving local customers. Microsoft is investing in a new data centre, which may also cause other global players to consider the same.

Globally, because of New Zealand's relative independence, and physical separation, the storing of data and provision of essential services makes us an attractive proposition for governments and companies that want a safe place to protect information assets.

On top of that, we have relatively cheap power that is, for the most part, green sourced. If Tiwai Point does close then that power is likely to become more affordable and in excess, further increasing attractiveness of our location.

The government is currently pouring billions of dollars into traditional infrastructure with parties that are campaigning in the general election promising the same. However, this conventional approach tends to focus more on roads and transport than high-value technology infrastructure with a view to the export market.

"Shovel Ready" projects have been the promise; however, the value of traditional infrastructure and the money that is distributed as a result (minimum wage workers on the end of a shovel) is low in comparison to technology "infrastructure", which could be powered by newly trained workers, our current technology industry, and all for a far higher economic value.

You can't export a road.

It is certainly worth investigating the value of investing in technology infrastructure as New Zealand faces ongoing pressure from the loss of tourism and the disruption of traditional food supply chains.

A great place to live, work, and play

COVID is likely too remain a problem globally for some years. I expect our border restrictions will be in place for at least another year, if not longer, depending on various models. This means that large parts of the world will continue to live in lockdown, and this will continue to affect technology companies.

Consider many of the data processing centres that were outsourced and offshored a decade ago remain closed or under capacity due to restrictions. Those workloads could quickly be rehomed to New Zealand where no such restrictions apply.

Also, we should be considering the fast-tracking of companies that want to rehome to New Zealand bringing their business and some or all their staff with them. We could buddy them with local technology workers and companies so they can learn the unique ropes of New Zealand.

Companies could choose the geographic region that they want to move into so distributing the economic gain across the country rather than concentrating it in a single metropolitan area. We've already seen this happening inside New Zealand.

Here's an example before lockdown, it's one of many.

When Straker Translations opened an office in Gisborne last year, it did so at the request of staff.

Rather than a second, more central Auckland office, employees suggested a regional office that could provide both a family friendly lifestyle and affordable housing.

Straker offers its Gisborne staff lifestyle benefits

If it can happen inside New Zealand, then it can happen internationally. It just takes will on the government's part to cut through red tape and allow companies to move part or all of their operations to the country. Right now that red tape focusses on skilled migrant categories or wealth. By opening to allow businesses to move, rapidly, we could increase the technology industry significantly.

I realise there will be criticism for these ideas, which is a very kiwi response, and I have deliberately kept them deceptively simple. However, we have an opportunity now to market New Zealand as the Switzerland of the South (minus COVID) and as a great place to move technology companies. Those companies will boost local economies, potentially bring innovation to New Zealand itself, and increase the export market significantly.

We also rise to challenges very well, and while some of these ideas may seem impossible, we've carried out far greater feats as an industry so I have no doubt we could find a way to make these ideas work.

Next, I am going to talk about what the central government could do to help the industry, mainly as we are in a general election year and so far, the policy has been entirely underwhelming. This close to the election that is disappointing, but not unusual, because our political parties "don't get" technology and they need too, fast.

Ian is a long time technologist and industry commentator who is finding to reflect as he looks for his next engagement. He lives on a farm in the Wairarapa and when not working in technology writes, grows chillies, and trains horses with his partner.

N4L, through a partnership with New Zealand Qualifications Authority (NZQA), expects 300 schools to undertake the checks which will look at each school's cybersecurity preparedness, but other factors that might disrupt an exam, such as patchy wifi coverage in an exam room or internet connections lacking the capacity to accommodate hundreds of students logging on at once.

The cybersecurity issue is no trivial one - N4L says that last year when it first offered the digital health checks, it helped a school continue with a digital exam while it was hit with an online security attack.

Orewa College expects 700 students to sit up to 17 exams between November 16, when the exam schedule kicks off with Te Reo Rangatira and physics and December 9, when it closes with dance and earth and space science.

Making sure kids can connect

"These assessments give our school the assurance we need that there will be no unexpected surprises during the exam period," said Orewa College deputy principal, Sue McCarthny.

"I was really impressed how thoroughly N4L checks all the exam rooms, and in doing so they picked up a few shortfalls which could have led to an issue during exams that we weren't prepared for," she added.

The health checks come amid a big government push to ensure that at least two-thirds of NCEA exams can be delivered digitally by 2022. The benefits of digital exams include less administration, lower error rates, getting results to students more quickly and saving paper and money as online forms replace thousands of paper booklets.

Going digital also puts the exam in the familiar environment of the modern student reducing exam day nerves.

Education minister Chris Hipkins yesterday announced a $69 million package for the education sector, $20 million of which will fund the development of digital identities for secondary students, allowing them to log on to access their exams and results when they're released.

Facebook-like log-on

"We expect this work a little bit like a Facebook or Google login where people have an online profile and can log in into a wide range of websites and services," said Hipkins.

"On top of that, the Government is bolstering centralised ICT and cybersecurity support to give all state and state-integrated schools the option to sign up. This will reduce the burden on individual schools to provide the support and upgrades themselves."

Around $49 million in funding will go towards offering that centralised support, some of it through N4L.

The digital exam push is currently still centred around exam rooms at schools. But other countries hit with pandemic stay at home orders have had to adopt technology, such as facial recognition and remote monitoring via webcam, to keep tabs on students completing their exams at home and to stamp out cheating. 

It is clear the sharemarket observers do not think the US government has either the mandate or the will to interfere with the companies they own.

By any metric these four companies - Facebook, Amazon, Google and Apple - are more powerful than most countries. Between them they amount to a US$7 trillion market cap and when you add up the user numbers you surely reach the point of no return.

Democracy as we know it has no role in the next wave of corporate growth. It's politics versus business and this time, business holds all the cards.

In previous years we've seen lesser companies challenged by the US political system. Bell, the original telco giant, was broken up, although each of its parts grew to be bigger and stronger than the original. Before that the oil rush lead to obscene amounts of wealth being handed over to small numbers of well-placed individuals - the likes of John Rockerfeller (America's first billionaire) was worth 1.5% of the US GDP in 1937.

Each in turn has clashed with federal government as it tries to rein in the excesses and balance out the problems inherent in having one person with that much power. Because that's what money represents, of course - the power to do what you want, and in the first part of the 20^th century John had all the power.

Today fortunes are being created by men who are quite willing to ignore the rule of law and act as though they are above it. Jeff Bezos set up Amazon and is now a multi-billionaire - well on track to be the world's first trillionaire - and yet his workers struggle with ghastly working conditions and minimal wage salaries.

On top of that is the question of taxation - each company has found its own way to avoid paying tax in most of the jurisdictions in which they operate and countless thousands of lawyer-hours have been spent trying to bring them in from the cold. Occasionally one or the other will throw a few million dollars at a public relations-friendly activity, but paying tax to support the ecosystem that spawned them never appears to be on the table.

These four companies are, effectively, beyond the law and will continue to operate as such because the politicians don't understand just what kind of monster they've created. Part hydra, part Frankenstein, it lumbers ever forward destroying competitors, soaking up more money simply by existing and ignoring the needs of the society in which they play a key part.

Facebook, with its total unwillingness to act as the publisher it has become, continues to sway political activities around the world, from the US election to the UK referenda and beyond. Amazon now sets the price at which basic goods and services are offered in dozens of countries, yet pays tax in none of them. Google once boasted that it would "do no evil" but has since reached out from search engine optimisation to domination of advertising and ensuring the destruction of many media organisation, and Apple (for whom I have a lot of respect given the rollercoaster of its story) dominates the mobile story in ways Nokia could only dream of.

Each adds value, yet equally each adds a cost that they refuse to acknowledge.

So what is a government to do? Clearly these companies won't be pulled into line with kind words, with suggestions or with public calls for decency. Facebook promised the earth after the Christchurch slayings but nothing has changed and nor will it.

If we are to ensure the society we've grown up in remains intact it's time to look at regulation but not the kind being proposed in the US. There's no point breaking Facebook up and making it sell off Instagram. That's child's play. Regulation on a global scale is required to ensure these companies pay tax, are held accountable for the laws their users break, have to allow competition and are forced to play fair with suppliers, with users and with competitors.

That's a very big ask but the thing that is at stake isn't a market dynamic or an economic segment, it's society as we know it. I think we should probably have a crack at defending it.