The Trump administration reportedly plans to shutter the program that certifies products for energy efficiency and slaps the recognizable blue Energy Star label on refrigerators, washers, dryers, LED bulbs, and more. CNN and E&E News report that Energy Star is on the chopping block as part of a “reorganization” planned at the Environmental Protection Agency that would end key initiatives on climate change.
The judge opted to watch video testimony slated for the day in his chambers, so we’re done for the day. We’ll go live again this week when the trial continues.
A 2014 chat log between Systrom and Deng seems to undercut Deng’s testimony that he doesn’t recall Meta scaling back growth resources for Instagram. Deng says he doesn’t have enough context to confirm what he and Systrom were discussing, but described the chat as a “knee-jerk reaction” to an email they mentioned at the time. “Am I reading correctly we now have less growth support, not more?” Systrom asked. “This isn’t great for us,” Deng wrote at the time.
Deng, who moved to Instagram in 2013 until 2015 after working on Facebook Messenger, is challenging Instagram co-founder Kevin Systrom’s testimony that the app could have reached the same success without Meta and that the company deprived it of resources. Deng says Meta helped Instagram with speeding up high quality hiring, and sharing infrastructure and growth team staff. Still, Deng left Instagram several years before Systrom departed the company.
Deng, who led product for Facebook’s messenger product in the early 2010s, says he was not worried about WhatsApp growing into a big rival in the US. Since many people in the US had iPhones where they could send mobile messages including photos through iMessage, he says, “people just expected more here than just text messaging,” which was the focus of the simple WhatsApp service. “There’s nothing about what they did that signaled they remotely wanted to get into more expressive messaging.” he says.
Former product executive Peter Deng warned colleagues about the existential threat of mobile messaging apps moving into Facebook’s core space. In an October 2012 email, he called messaging rivals “the biggest threat to our product that I’ve ever seen in my 5 years here at Facebook; it’s bigger than G+, and we’re all terrified,” he wrote, referring to Google’s now-defunct social media competitor. “These guys actually have a credible strategy: start with the most intimate social graph (i.e. The ones you message on mobile), and build from there.” Deng testifies he was referring to the three mobile apps that had started adding such features, and not the one Facebook ultimately acquired: WhatsApp.
During an interview on NBC’s Meet the Press, President Donald Trump said he’d “be willing” to extend TikTok’s June 19th deadline if its China-based parent company, ByteDance, doesn’t reach a deal to divest the app’s US business in time. China backed out of a potential deal last month after Trump imposed up to 145 percent tariffs on goods imported from the country.
[bloomberg.com]
During its Search antitrust trial yesterday, a DOJ attorney produced a document showing that “80 billion of 160 billion ‘tokens’ — snippets of content — after filtering out the material that publishers had opted out of allowing Google to use for training its AI,” according to Bloomberg.
But that opt-out only applies to DeepMind models, Bloomberg reports — when asked if “the search org has the ability to train on the data that publishers had opted out of training,” DeepMind VP Eli Collins replied, “Correct — for use in search.”
For anyone who caught some of our stories about Trump’s first 100 days in office this week, I went on Decoder to talk a little more about the issues that six of our writers explored. For anyone who didn’t, I make the case for why you should check them out!
