Free Republic

European regulators are clamping down on Silicon Valley companies because they are “jealous” of the success of the technology industry in the US, according to PayPal co-founder and investor Peter Thiel. Speaking about the looming threat of regulation for these companies, Thiel said that the “threat is probably greater in Europe” and there are “good reasons and bad reasons”. “The good reasons are these privacy concerns and the bad reasons are there are no successful tech companies in Europe and they are jealous of the US so they are punishing us,” he said at the Economic Club of New York...

French Economy Minister Bruno Le Maire says it's "unacceptable" that Google and Apple unilaterally impose prices and other contractual terms on software developers, and that this is hurting France's startups. Le Maire predicted the tech giants could face sanctions amounting to millions of euros, according to AFP. It’s not the first time the French government clashes with Google. It has repeatedly criticised the company for paying little tax in France by transferring its revenues to a subsidiary in Ireland, where taxes are much lower. Wednesday's move comes amid growing fears of an international trade war pitting the United States against...

A former employee of YouTube (a subsidiary of Alphabet, parent of Google) alleged in a recently filed lawsuit that YouTube is discriminating against white and Asian men. “YouTube last year stopped hiring white and Asian males for technical positions because they didn’t help the world’s largest video site achieve its goals for improving diversity,” the suit alleges. Liberal discrimination against white men is nothing new, but many people are caught by surprise to see such explicit discrimination against Asian males in the name of diversity from one of the most progressive companies in one of the most liberal zip codes....

If you’ve been paying attention you know that it’s #TransformationTuesday – the day we explore all the ways  Obama and his mignons are still trying and/or succeeding in fundamentally transforming America. Many of these transformers are in government but the public sector harbors some as well: take Google for example. Long known as a bastion of leftist biases, censorship and abuse of it’s search engine monopoly it recently has used its power to shutdown YouTube videos (mostly conservative) that it doesn’t approve of. “The Google Machine” and a handful of other high-tech companies rule the Internet through a combination of...

Johan Land has a life that stands out even among Silicon Valley’s tech elite: He’s the lead product manager at Waymo (formerly known as Google’s self-driving car project), a job that keeps him glued to computer screens and fixated on the future. Excelling at his work, Land said, requires an obsessive focus on it. But maintaining that passion — especially with his fourth child on the way — means knowing when to detach. Land’s secret to success: relaxing with a glass of wine in the back yard alongside his wife, kids and the family’s 13 chickens and three sheep. It’s...

Stratumseind in Eindhoven is one of the busiest nightlife streets in the Netherlands. On a Saturday night, bars are packed, music blares through the street, laughter and drunken shouting bounces off the walls. As the night progresses, the ground becomes littered with empty shot bottles, energy drink cans, cigarette butts and broken glass. It’s no surprise that the place is also known for its frequent fights. To change that image, Stratumseind has become one of the “smartest” streets in the Netherlands. Lamp-posts have been fitted with wifi-trackers, cameras and 64 microphones that can detect aggressive behaviour and alert police officers...

A female technology startup founder filed a lawsuit Wednesday against a Silicon Valley-based venture capitalist for alleged sexual assault on an overnight flight from San Francisco to Minneapolis. Rachel Danae Vachata, a 29-year-old co-founder of technology companies, alleges that 73-year-old venture capitalist Lucio Lanza “preyed on” Vachata by threatening to use his position to make or break her companies and then repeatedly groped and attempted to kiss her during the flight last July, according to the complaint filed with the Santa Clara County Superior Court. Lanza is the founder and managing director of Lanza techVentures, based in Palo Alto. He...

San Francisco is experiencing a “mass exodus” as tens of thousands of residents leave the Bay Area while an influx of immigrants flood the sanctuary city, according to KPIX-TV. What’s going on? For the first time in decades, more people are leaving San Francisco than there are new people moving to the city. The mass exodus has propelled the Bay Area to the nation’s leading city for “out-migration.” One of the reasons for the exodus is the cost of living in San Francisco. According to the Mercury News, the median price for homes in Silicon Valley fall anywhere between $800,000...

Hillary Clinton has hired two political operatives from her 2016 presidential campaign to help manage Onward Together, the project she founded this spring with former governor Howard Dean to fund and support a coalition of Democratic groups led by activists and organizers. The new additions, Emmy Ruiz and Adam Parkhomenko, held central roles on Clinton’s campaign: Ruiz delivered key victories as state director in Nevada during the primary and in Colorado during the general election; Parkhomenko worked in headquarters as her director of grassroots engagement before moving to the Democratic National Committee. Both served on Clinton’s first presidential bid in...

With the debate over immigration to the U.S. as fiery as ever, a new analysis suggests that Silicon Valley would be lost without foreign-born technology workers. About 71 percent of tech employees in the Valley are foreign born, compared to around 50 percent in the San Francisco-Oakland-Hayward region, according to a new report based on 2016 census data.

The Federalist has some takeaways from James Damore’s civil suit against Google, which he accuses of discriminating against white male conservatives. You gotta see this stuff to believe the corporate culture there. Excerpts: In a section claiming Google tries to “stifle” conservative parenting styles, the suit reads: “Google furnishes a large number of internal mailing lists catering to employees with alternative lifestyles, including furries, polygamy, transgenderism, and plurality, for the purpose of discussing sexual topics. The only lifestyle that seems to not be openly discussed on Google’s internal forums is traditional heterosexual monogamy.”A footnote next to the word “plurality” adds:...

It’s time to carve out room for a new exhibit on the history of Silicon Valley. With two objects — a stock ticker tape that highlighted the high-tech industry’s successes and a stained-glass image of a lion holding a compass — you can tell the story of a legendary Sunnyvale restaurant. It’s one that has stood witness to thousands of power-broker discussions, hiring interviews, IPO parties — and multimillion-dollar deals. After 35 years, the Lion & Compass will close this Friday, and the corner where its dining rooms, imported English bar and tropical garden now sit will become high-density housing....

There is now more freedom of speech in Beijing than in the San Francisco Bay area — and this could kill the Silicon Valley tech industry. While right-wing commentators have been saying this for years, it’s extremely unusual to hear it from the lips of a Silicon Valley tech guru as impeccably liberal as Sam Altman. Altman, influential and respected CEO of Y Combinator — an accelerator program for Silicon Valley start-ups — has triggered outrage in the tech community for having dared to suggest that political correctness has gotten so bad that it threatens to destroy their business model....

Eastern Europeans have a saying: we’ve just got out communism, after 45 years of Hell, only to discover that the West is marching (this time benevolently) into the same hellhole we’ve just managed to escape from. And this is not a joke either. The West’s essential institutions are pathologically corrupted by cultural Marxism, which is just another word for communist infiltration. The Church, the higher learning institutions, the mass media, the corporate culture, the body politics, everything leans heavily on the left nowadays both in the United States and in Western Europe. And anyone who’s to the right of Mao...

This summer, Twitter Inc.’s new diversity chief met employees to discuss whether they felt welcome at work. Among those who said they sometimes felt excluded, according to people familiar with the matter, were conservatives. The feedback reflects the strains in Silicon Valley as technology companies seek to bolster diversity of all kinds among their hundreds of thousands of employees. For the mostly left-leaning companies that includes cultivating ideological variety, just as they are trying to with underrepresented groups like women and minorities. “There is a lot happening in the world, and we need inclusion now more than ever,” Twitter’s diversity...

FCC chair Ajit Pai tore into edge providers Tuesday (Nov. 28) in a speech in which he defended deregulating ISPs.Pai told a Future of Internet Freedom conference in Washington that edge providers like Twitter are a bigger threat to the Open Internet than internet service providers, who were targeted as the gatekeepers under his Democratic predecessor, Tom Wheeler. He says edge providers "routinely block and discriminate" and the government should not abet their efforts to dominate the internet.In a speech in which Pai defended his order to roll back Title II, he said that some Silicon Valley players have been criticizing the...

LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman is not shy when expressing his opinions of President Trump. The entrepreneur, who now sits on Microsoft's board of directors and is a partner at venture capital firm Greylock, campaigned publicly for Hillary Clinton and in March said that Trump was even worse than he feared. In an interview with CNBC's Julia Boorstin at the Disruptor 50 event in San Francisco on Wednesday night, Hoffman had perhaps his harshest words yet about the president, calling him "worse than useless" and saying that he'd "take someone randomly picked from a phone book" over him as president. He...

The high-profile entrepreneur helped start Draper Fisher Jurvetson.Famed venture capitalist Steve Jurvetson is leaving his job at Draper Fisher Jurvetson in the wake of an investigation into sexual harassment. Jurvetson is the highest-profile venture capitalist to be forced from his job amid an industrywide evaluation of how Silicon Valley treats women. Jurvetson sits on the board of two of tech’s flashiest companies, SpaceX and Tesla, and the news has already stripped him of those posts, at least temporarily. DFJ announced the move in a letter to limited partners on Monday. The firm released a statement to Recode that read: As...

On a recent weeknight, writing instructor Ellen Tara James-Penny sits with a student in a parking lot near San José State University for more than an hour, explaining the perils of “hasty generalizations” and other pitfalls in college-level writing. Then, James-Penny and her husband get into their aging Volvo sedan and drive a few blocks to a local church, where she sleeps in their car with one dog and he sleeps in a tent a few feet away with the other.Despite the four college courses she teaches, and the master’s degree she earned a few years ago, James-Penny is homeless....

Twitter has blocked Republican Rep. Marsha Blackburn's (Tenn.) Senate campaign announcement ad, ruling that a pro-life statement was "inflammatory."At one point in the video, Blackburn, who announced last week that she is running for the Senate in Tennessee, heralded how she "stopped the sale of baby body parts," a reference to her investigation into Planned Parenthood's reported practice of "donating" body parts in return for monetary compensation.But a Twitter representative told the Blackburn campaign that Twitter blocked the ad from being promoted, calling it "an inflammatory statement that is likely to evoke a strong negative reaction," the Associated Press reported Monday. Twitter said...