Technology

Google will now allow ads to run on addiction-related keywords and phrases after a nearly year-long ban instituted to crack down on shady providers cashing in on vulnerable patients. A small group of providers vetted by a third party have been approved by the company to appear in results for searches like &help quitting pills& or &meth addiction.&

The ban on these ads was rolled out in stages starting in September of last year in the U.S. and going global in January. It was provoked by a series of reports showing that people looking for help were being essentially traded like commodities and sent to incredibly expensive &addiction centers& that often provided little recovery help at all.

At the time Google pledged to keep the ban in place until it could find a way to reintroduce ads safely and ethically, and it has taken its time doing so. All addiction-related ad words were shut off completely, and while this introduced problems of its own (people searching for &help quitting pills& don&t want the WebMD page for addiction) it was probably the only logical choice.

Following this, Google partnered with LegitScript, a Portland company that specializes in verifying medicine-related businesses online. It has a 15-point checklist to make sure businesses are licensed and compliant, list medications and treatment plans, demonstrate qualifications and professionalism (i.e. not a quack operating out of their living room), have no shady history or what have you and so on. The whole list is here.

Only recovery and addiction centers vetted by LegitScript will be allowed to run ads against addiction-related queries on Google.

Recovery Centers of America (RCA), which has a handful of facilities around the country, is one of the first wave of approved advertisers.

&What they were trying to get rid of were these ‘lead aggregators& that were posing as treatment centers, but were basically selling the patients,& said RCAdirector of marketing strategy and operations, Grant McClernon. &They wanted people who were operating under state scrutiny, providing real treatment.&

&It was a wild wild west out there,& added Bill Koroncai, the companydirector of communications. &So we support Googlework to weed out the unethical providers in the industry.&

They explained that Google originally planned to greenlight 30 providers — which is to say facilities, of which a provider like RCA might have just one or dozens — but they were inundated with applications and had to expand the first wave of the program to closer to 100.

Thatnot necessarily indicative of a rush on Googlepart; it seems more likely that the larger number turned out to be the realistic one if most regions and most needs were to be served. With 30 facilities you wouldn&t even have one in every state.

Addiction treatment providers won&t be treated any differently from other keyword purchasers, except that there will have to be a yearly check-up process through LegitScript to make sure they&re still worthy of being included.

Itprobably wise that Google didn&t get into the vetting process itself; this sets an easier precedent for the ad giant in that when conflicts like this one come up, it doesn&t have to hire a specialized team dedicated to combating fraud in that specific domain.

A Google representative said that ads should start running as soon as the companies paying for them are certified, which could be right now depending on the region and keyword.

Yesterday, Spotify became the third tech platform in just over a week to take a stance on Alex Jonescontroversial far-right and conspiracy theorist content. The streaming service removed several Infowars podcast episodes due to their violation of thepolicy against hate content that Spotifyreleased in May. This action follows strikes given against Jones by both YouTube and Facebook for videos containing content that violated those companies& policies, including Islamophobic and transphobic hate speech and child endangerment.

In a statement toBloombergon Wednesday, a spokeswoman for Spotify said the following:

We take reports of hate content seriously and review any podcast episode or song that is flagged by our community. Spotify can confirm it has removed specific episodes of ‘The Alex Jones Show& podcast for violating our hate content policy.

While Spotify did not reveal the specific episodes removed or the specific terms of the policy they violated, the possibilities for removal cited in its updated policy include &content whose principal purpose is to incite hatred or violence against people because of their race, religion, disability, gender identity, or sexual orientation.& The policy also states that these violations do not necessarily include &offensive, explicit, or vulgar content,& but specifically hate speech with the intention to cause harm.

Other episodes of the Infowars podcast are still available on Spotify, as well as Apple Podcast and Stitcher.

While this strike against Jones does come on the heels of YouTube and Facebookprevious actions, Jones is not the first to have content removed via Spotifynew policy. In May, the company pulled music fromR. Kelly and rappers XXXTentacion and Tay-K, as well.

To monitor its service for content violating its hate-speech policy, Spotify is collaborating with rights advocacy groups such asThe Southern Poverty Law Center, The Anti-Defamation League, Color Of Change, Showing Up for Racial Justice (SURJ), GLAAD, Muslim Advocates and the International Network Against Cyber Hate. Additionally, the company has built an internal monitoring tool calledSpotify AudioWatch andis asking users to help flag hate content.

Decisions to police hate speech on tech platforms like Spotify, YouTube and Facebook have stirred up a lot of strong emotions on both sides of the debate. Balanced between open source and private enterprise, the path forward for these companies to create the safest and simultaneously &most free& space for their users is still being precariously trekked daily.

Some people have postulated that autonomous ridesharing carswill never need to parkand cities of the future will not need street parking, parking lots or parking garages. But parking is far from dead. In fact, the$100 billion marketmay be poised to grow.

We&ve heard from parking startup founders that many Silicon Valley investors have rejected parking as a thing of the past, rallying around alternatives — for example, investing more than $100 million in valet parking startups that didn&t pan out. Even these parking investments are a drop in the bucket compared to the estimated$80 billion invested in autonomous vehiclesin just the past three years.

In these peoples& minds, autonomous cars will simply whisk us off to our destination, then pick up another passenger, collect their groceries from Draeger&s, or simply spin around in circles waiting to pick them up again. &Autonomy is nigh, and the opportunities are endless, but parking is not one of them,& they ponder as they wait for their Tesla Model 3 to be delivered.

Sarcasm aside, parking can play a positive role in our cities today andtomorrow.

Reducing street parking for good

Parking is not dead, but maybe on-street parking should be. Dockless, free-floating, shared personal mobility devices (scooters, bicycles and more) have been dumped on cities by the likes of Bird, LimeBike and Spin. San Francisco has taken actions to &clean up& these eyesores that crowd sidewalks, with City Attorney Dennis Herreraissuing these companies cease-and-desist ordersfor &creating a public nuisance on the citystreets and sidewalks.&

Voices from the transportation community were quick to point out the irony of these actions. They were quick to describe personal vehicles as dockless, free-floating,unsharedpersonal mobility devices that are perfectly acceptable eyesores that crowd already congesting roadways.

And maybe they have a point. Off-street parking is widely available in cities, but largely underutilized. So why do we still have on-street parking Part of the reason has been a lack of information, and at great cost. AnIBM surveysuggests that parking searches take between 13-32 minutes, account for up to 30 percent of traffic and produce harmful emissions. And think of the wasted gas. In todayinformation age, is information a good excuse

Admittedly less sexy than autonomous cars, parking technology companies that provide real-time parking availability in off-street garages are solving these costly search problems. For scale,MIT professor Eran Ben-Josephestimates there are 800 million surface parking spaces in the United States and cover up to one-third of downtown land area in some cities. Increased utilization of private and municipal garages should push local governments to start removing on-street parking. This opportunity is huge for many densely populated cities.

As long as on-street parking is available, people will use it. If governments move to abandon on-street parking, then they — alongside entrepreneurs and innovators — can use the new space for more productive uses.

Ridesharing

What are those more productive use cases One is obviously more traffic lanes to improve throughput in our congested cities. Another would be to expand bike (or shall I say, personal mobility device) lanes or even sidewalks to encourage safe pedestrian traffic. Another would bededicated pick-up and drop-off lanesfor ridesharing companies. A dedicated pick-up and drop-off curbside for ridesharing could reduce some of the congestion it may be creating in cities through ad hoc methods today.Lyft* has even proposedwhat a walkable, lower-congestion Wilshire Boulevard in Los Angeles could look like in the future.

Perhaps the cities could even make up for lost parking revenue by introducing usage fees for personal mobility devices that are free floating, or ridesharing companies that use the curbside lane.

Between parking, ridesharing and additional lanes, some folks have cited an impending battleground for the curb. It is a battle that parking should probably lose.

Autonomy

Although I would argue that billionaire investors have the picture wrong in their head, autonomous vehicles will arrive — eventually. The idea here is that autonomous cars will operate constantly, delivering passengers here, there and everywhere all day, and that the need for parking will diminish. Maybe so.

However, returning to the valet parking companies mentioned above,Zirx pivoted to Stratim Systems because they saw that there was a need to provide fleet management service for these free-floating car-share services. The same need will exist for autonomous vehicles. They will need to be refueled and/or recharged. They will need to have their interiors cleaned. They will need to have their sensors calibrated and cleaned. They will need to be repaired and maintained. Where will this happen

Perhaps that is the future of off-street garages, and these new revenue streams are where the $100 billion market may be poised to grow.The technology-forward garagesthat can attract these new mobility business models by providing value-added services will be well-positioned for the ridesharing and car-sharing fleets of today and the autonomous fleetstomorrow.

The road ahead

Technology companies working with automakers, transportation network companies and fleet managers make it easy to reserve off-street parking today. They are alsopositioned for the future of autonomous drivingtomorrow. An increase in garage utilization should diminish the need to have on-street parking, which would open up real estate for more productive use. Eventually ridesharing and autonomous fleets may cut into the parking market, but those technology-forward parking garages, and even refueling stations of today, will be able to deliver value-added services, like cashless payment, charging stations and fleet management, to their business models.

*Disclosure: Autotech Ventures is an investor in Lyft.