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The Guardian Pulls Out of Facebook’s Instant Articles and Apple News

474 points by r3bl 10y ago

chmars 10y ago
Ah, Apple News. Americans might want to know that it is still not widely available in the rest of the world – probably another failed Apple project. I had some hope that Apple News could help RSS but that was apparently never Apple's intention.
- spiderfarmer 10y ago
  With Apple's budget, what on earth convinced them to not take the risk of launching in 20 countries at once? Google and Facebook really are the champion of multinational media endeavours.
  - iwintermute 10y ago
    Still waiting for youtube red here... And no date in sight. I don't even care about their "specials" - just opportunity to support favorite video creators (apart from patreon) without adv would be enough.
    - mnx 10y ago
      It baffles me that they didn't launch that internationally - it's not like they need to buy some special licences, they already show all the same content everywhere. And all the specials are being produced after the launch, so they can demand whatever licenses they choose. And there's very clearly demand. They have google music available in a lot of countries, and that seems a lot harder to pull off.
      - muro 10y ago
        Wasn't there some brouhaha about music when YouTube red was launching? Something about "independents" (think Adele, not highschool bands) complaining. Add to that e.g. music on YouTube in Germany. I would guess they would launch at the same time were it not for licensing.
      - deleted 10y ago
        [deleted]
    - spiderfarmer 10y ago
      I completely forgot about Red's existence. One of the problems with not launching internationally on day one.
      - iwintermute 10y ago
        I guess the difficulty is not technical but, again copyright related. There's no sane "available by default" policy applied worldwide. Or their predicted profits are negligible for small non-english speaking countries so why bother. (there's hope that it'll appear as google music in some distant future)
        mcintyre1994 10y ago
        FWIW it's still not in the UK either.
    - iwintermute 10y ago
      What's even more strange to me is their geographical limitations for existing customers: "[...] If you leave these countries, you won’t be able to save videos offline, videos won’t play in the background, and you will see ads. " [0] [0] https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/6307365?hl=en https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/6307365?hl=en That's just BS.
      - mikhailt 10y ago
        Why is it strange? It has been common practice for decades now, you couldn't even buy games in Japan and play it on US console 10-20 years ago. That's because you do not own the content, you are licensing the content and the content have geographical restrictions set in place by the content providers. Until everyone sign an agreement to get rid of geographical restrictons, nothing we can do.
        iwintermute 10y ago
        It's strange because in my mind I'm paying for youtube service of getting me videos (either with money or by wasting time on ads) And with this I would continue to pay for service AND also receive ads. I kinda understand perverted logic of licensing content and region locking due to price discrimination, but just in my mental model Youtube is more of a service provider than content seller. Edit: Either way, I'm paying for not seeing ads - so why would they still show them to me, after taking my money? It's their problem how they deal with second side (content creators & right owners, etc.) And right now it just seems like punishing paying customer (hey, adblocking is free :)
- IBM 10y ago
  It's actually a sleeper hit [1][2]. The Guaridan seems to be the anomaly. >Publishers are also paying increasing attention to Apple News, which added push notifications as part of a redesign last year and now delivers significant traffic thanks to the fact that it comes pre-installed on hundreds of millions of devices. [1] http://www.theverge.com/2017/4/16/15314210/instant-articles-facebook-future-ads-video http://www.theverge.com/2017/4/16/15314210/instant-articles-... [2] http://digiday.com/media/duopolys-shadow-apple-news-finding-favor-publishers/ http://digiday.com/media/duopolys-shadow-apple-news-finding-...
  - yabatopia 10y ago
    > It's actually a sleeper hit [1][2]. That's not the impression I get from reading both articles. Some publishers like Mic seem to be still in a honeymoon phase with Apple News, but there's a lot of criticism similar to Instant Articles. "Being committed to" and "spending a lot of time" doesn't equal to a financial success for publishers.
    - IBM 10y ago
      I follow Media Twitter pretty closely. Apple News has become a significant driver of traffic for a lot of publications. This contrasts to when it launched when no one thought it would amount to anything. Here's a few more stories http://www.niemanlab.org/2016/11/after-a-slow-start-apple-news-is-emerging-as-a-significant-traffic-driver-for-some-news-orgs/ http://www.niemanlab.org/2016/11/after-a-slow-start-apple-ne... http://www.niemanlab.org/2017/03/australias-public-broadcaster-is-using-apple-news-push-alerts-to-reach-new-younger-audiences/ http://www.niemanlab.org/2017/03/australias-public-broadcast... https://digiday.com/media/apple-news-the-telegraph/ https://digiday.com/media/apple-news-the-telegraph/
- ithought 10y ago
  Maybe if the video actually played on the links in Apple News.
- the_mitsuhiko 10y ago
  The most frustrating thing about apple news is the region locking of content :-/
- kirykl 10y ago
  Why would Americans care Apppe News isn't widely available elsewhere in the world?
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- freehunter 10y ago
  You're not missing much. I subscribe to a couple dozen different topics, but all I get is News, Entertainment, Cars, Sports, and Electronics, most of which are dominated by one source. I subscribe to my local mid-sized city news, and it's completely dominated by suburban high school sports scores. If I 'dislike' the sports scores, all of my local news goes away. There also doesn't seem to be a way to tell Apple why you're disliking something. I liked the story, I just don't like the clickbait headline. Show me the same story, but not from Buzzfeed. I have smaller topics like Ruby, Arduino, security, AI, etc subscribed but I've never seen anything from those subjects in my feed. If I scroll down far enough it starts going back days, rather than showing more subjects. I read it once or twice a day to keep up on big news, but I've given up any pretenses that it can be personalized in any way. It's a big-media news aggregator, that's it.
artana 10y ago
http://www.webmhs.com/2017/04/prediksi-real-madrid-vs-barcelona.html http://www.webmhs.com/2017/04/prediksi-real-madrid-vs-barcel...
w-ll 10y ago
How come the Apple News Feed in Siri isn't configurable? It doesn't even follow the sources of the News.app. It's constantly clickbaity or depressing. Who moderates and chooses that.
- fiatpandas 10y ago
  Unsubstantiated guess: Apple wouldn't be able to tell big publishers their active reach on the News platform is X million people if it limited the news in the widget to the app sources you've explicitly followed. I was also turned off by this and stopped using it for that reason.
ch215 10y ago
The trade magazine, Press Gazette, recently launched a campaign to 'stop Google and Facebook destroying journalism' http://www.pressgazette.co.uk/press-gazette-launches-duopoly-campaign-to-stop-google-and-facebook-destroying-journalism/ http://www.pressgazette.co.uk/press-gazette-launches-duopoly...
- criddell 10y ago
  They don't need Google or Facebook. The news business is doing a great job of destroying themselves.
  - throwaway91111 10y ago
    How do you figure, specifically?
    - criddell 10y ago
      Exhibit 1 would probably be the inaction of newspaper publishers 20 years ago as Craigslist took the classified ad business away. Exhibit 2 might be the NYT taking on massive debt 10-15 years ago even as it was pretty clear that their business was changing. Money was cheap and their magic 8 ball said outlook good, so that was all they needed. Exhibit 3 is probably the lack of care publishers have around the user experience on the web. AMP and IA is Google and Facebook saying "your product is great, your presentation is terrible". A 500 word story should load on a phone in under a second all the time. Exhibit 4 would be lowering of the editorial bar by lots of outlets. This is probably the big one in my opinion: * the NYT reporting in the run up to the Iraq war still bothers me, trust is hard to earn and easy to lose * editors know that there aren't always two equal sides to every story, but that's the format they have * their interview formats seemed designed so that a question with a yes or no answer can be spun on fly into a statement about something unrelated * when everything is called breaking news, nothing is breaking news * the patterns of news outlets are so obvious, that they are easy to manipulate (how many hours of television and lines of print were spent on Obama's birth certificate?) Exhibit 5 is probably the overly conservative approach to the web. A digital newspaper is the obvious path and it's the only one too many outlets are exploring. Buzzfeed is a nice exception. I don't even think they expect readers to go to their website. Buzzfeed packages everything for sharing and the content flows just about everywhere. I don't think the conservative behavior of most outlets is due to lack of ideas. Some very smart people (like Dave Winer and Jonathan Abrams) have expressed a lot of interesting ideas that nobody seems to be willing to experiment with. A decent amount of shrinkage in the news business was overdue. If you travel and read local papers, they are all almost exactly the same. If you watch local evening news, every program has the same format and basically the same set. There's a ridiculous amount of duplication and redundancy and getting rid of that frees up a lot of resources to work on other stuff. Fortunately, I think the shrinkage is mostly complete.
Angostura 10y ago
Sad to see The Guardian go from Apple News, though I respect their decision:(
- Phlow 10y ago
  As am I. I would pay a subscription fee to keep them on Apple News. That's where I read most of my news. If they aren't going to give me the option to pay them to keep using them, I'm not going to pay them, it's that simple. Pretty silly move in my opinion.
kartan 10y ago
This is one of the problems with monopolies, or maybe the bigger one. Once you are dominant in one business, search/mobile/messaging, you can take over other business without much effort. They are not news companies, they are not in the news business, they don't know it, and they have not done anything to be worth the trust of the public. They are just convenient because they are a monopoly in another area.
- gcb0 10y ago
  sadly, you just described news companies. almost none of them know about news, they just happen to own the largest distribution media in some region and because of that everyone have to listen to them. add to that that traditional media (tv, radio) you are limited by government allowing you to own a frequency.
  - malza 10y ago
    Those large media distributions didn't appear out of nowhere, they were built by entrepreneurs and communities. They slowly merged into the huge operations that exist today. That said, those publications have got so big that some have become divorced from reality... you only have to look as outlets like The Guardian and the huge losses they continue to absorb. Extreme even by industry standards.
twsted 10y ago
This is great, we all should support this. The web is at a crossroad and we should promote multiple platforms, old-style blogs, decentralized navigation, classic journalism, etc. For too many people, Facebook is the web and this is really sad and wrong. We must find other ways to pay for information and curated content, limiting tracking and defending privacy.
- blazespin 10y ago
  Oh, I dunno. I thought it was an interesting experiment. I think it still has its uses. Facebook is hardly a monopoly in the sense that google or microsoft was. I know tonnes of people who don't use facebook and the people who do use it, it's usually just to connect with friends. Facebook / instagram / messenger, from what I can see, are just hard charging innovative platforms trying to create products people like. Their businesses could crater pretty easily and the only reason it doesn't is because they keep trying different things. It's not like search and microsoft's OS dominance / network effects from their Office products. You don't need to log onto facebook in order to work, you chose to because it's fun and you can connect with friends. Google / MSFT have far deeper hooks.
  - madeofpalk 10y ago
    > Facebook [is] just hard charging innovative platforms trying to create products people like That's a pretty charitable interpretation of Instant Articles.
  - onion2k 10y ago
    I know tonnes of people who don't use facebook and the people who do use it, it's usually just to connect with friends. Facebook has 1.86 billion monthly active users as of Q4 2016[1]. At that time approximately 3.4 billion people used the internet. So a little over 1/2 the internet-using population, and 1/4 of everyone on Earth, has a Facebook account that they access at least once a month. If you drill down a bit about 80% of American adults use Facebook regularly[2]. You may know tonnes of people who don't use Facebook, but I think that's actually quite unusual. Outside of our HN-reading, privacy-interested, technically-competent bubble the overwhelming majority of people use Facebook, and Facebook does have an effective monopoly. [1] http://money.cnn.com/2017/02/01/technology/facebook-earnings/ http://money.cnn.com/2017/02/01/technology/facebook-earnings... [2] http://www.pewinternet.org/2016/11/11/social-media-update-2016/ http://www.pewinternet.org/2016/11/11/social-media-update-20...
mgiannopoulos 10y ago
The Guardian is trying to get subscribers and donations. I'm not sure how much Apple and Facebook help them facilitate that goal.
- H4CK3RM4N 10y ago
  I'm pretty sure Apple News supports subscription content, but not a patron-style subscription.
  - mgiannopoulos 10y ago
    Perhaps they didn't like Apple's taking a percentage of such subscriptions then.
fiatpandas 10y ago
Always seemed crazy to me that publishers were willing to give up so much for these integrations. The ability to have final say over how readers experience your information, and opportunities for freely measuring/analyzing that experience, should be key for news organizations that want to evolve. Integrating with FB IA & Apple News is giving up power for gains that may not be worth it in the long run.
Symbiote 10y ago
This discussion has reminded me that I intended to make a donation to the Guardian, since I read it every day and use an adblocker. The link for a one-off contribution is here: https://contribute.theguardian.com/ https://contribute.theguardian.com/ Or for a subscription, here: https://subscribe.theguardian.com/ https://subscribe.theguardian.com/ I tried the weekly paper edition for a while, but although it was posted on-time at the printers (in Britain or Austria), the Danish postal system usually delayed delivery to me by at least a week.
- danieldk 10y ago
  I tried the weekly paper edition for a while, but although it was posted on-time at the printers (in Britain or Austria), the Danish postal system usually delayed delivery to me by at least a week. Same here. I had a subscription and they'd usually arrive in Germany a couple of days too late. Luckily, Germany has Der Spiegel, which is also more than worthy supporting.
- RVuRnvbM2e 10y ago
  I've mentioned here before that I'm a Guardian Weekly paper edition subscriber, mostly because: * no tracking of the articles I choose to read, as in online news subscriptions * cross-section of articles that I wouldn't otherwise seek out (no filter-bubble) * very little advertising, none of it obtrusive It's also a great way to support real journalism, and learn about world news, not the parochial junk my local tabloids cover.
  - asQuirreL 10y ago
    There absolutely is a filter bubble, you just aren't the one doing the filtering. Not that I am philosophically opposed to the filtering, but rather the denial of its existence.
    - Pica_soO 10y ago
      Yes, but part of the newspaper experience of old was- that it breaks it. You paid for news, you usually wouldn't read- thus, you would at least skim it- thus such things could be relevant for everyone.
sghi 10y ago
I get why they've done it, and The Guardian is a site that I both contribute to and disable my ad-blocker for, but I will miss the speed at which the articles load on my ancient and rubbish phone. I'd still rather support them though!
inian 10y ago
I find it surprising that they are still going strong on AMP. I tend to club AMP along with Instant Articles, etc. Any thoughts on as to why this is the case?
- zigzigzag 10y ago
  I think they're similar in goal but quite different in implementation. AMP gives publishers a lot more control and apparently that shows up in ad revenue figures.
frik 10y ago
Would be great if some newspapers and other media cooperate and found a new friendly-minded ad-network. Provide old-school picture based banner ads with pay-per-click or pay-per-view models and no (or very small and fast) JS third party code/library.
- _eht 10y ago
  This is what the people want. Even those who don't realize it yet.
  - jbreckmckye 10y ago
    Unfortunately, it is not what advertisers pay for.
- nthcolumn 10y ago
  When everyone used combinations of AOL, Excite, AltaVista, Yahoo! and Google was just this trendy new shiny thing, one of the main attractions of the new kid on the block was advertising that was unobtrusive and sometimes even helpful. The reason for adblockers was not because 'uuuh advertising' it is because 'uuuh shit advertising'. Your page lit up like a christmas tree on acid, you could hardly see the content for the tidal wave of shit adverts for useless shit. Your shitty dial-up slowed to a crawl as it downloaded animated gifs and dozens of spy cookies. Google won because they weren't greedy bastards who completely took the f'ing piss out of people to the point where the service they were supposed to be providing was degraded to point of being unusable. THIS! This is why we can't have nice things! Because you go too far! Because you just can't help yourselves! And the information finds a way as it always has of routing around the damage. The media will have to add value for anyone to pay them for it and quite a lot of the time people will simply refuse to pay and be happy with the news from other sources who are happy to give it away, and it doesn't take a very cynical person to imagine that those sources may be less stringent or have some ulterior motives for doing so, so yes, happy days and best of luck with the banner ads and paywalls. uuuh.
Stranger43 10y ago
The problem with the "semi-auto" curated feeds that all of the Internet middlemen thinks is going to finally allow them to turn their online market share into profits is that the feed idea depend on the same omnibus newspaper model* that no longer works for the newspaper industry. The dead of the omnibus paper the press is forced to choose between a return to the old local/partisan model where the paper becomes a part of political movement and receives "patronage" from that movement in forms of paid subscriptions, or the yellow(named for the color of cheap paper) model that lives off scandal creation. *Most of the newspapers of the 90ies based most of their revenue off content sourced from their network of partners a model that only really worked because the paper had access to long distance communication networks too expensive/exclusive for widespread usage among consumers.
OliverJones 10y ago
Guardian spokesperson: "Our primary objective is to bring audiences to the trusted environment of the Guardian to support building deeper relationships with our readers, and growing membership and contributions to fund our world-class journalism.” Precisely. FB's brand with respect to news is damaged to the point where it's negative. FB is the place to get fake nuz. The Guardian and the Times are wise not to allow their content to move under the FB brand.
Someone 10y ago
If a paper becomes a part of a large feed, it risks becoming an interchangeable part and that means the aggregator can lower prices. In some sense, Apple faced that problem, too. It created its own sales channel, whereas the Guardian has one to fall back on. In contrast, Intel when faced with that problem in the PC market, choose to work on brand awareness through the "Intel Inside" campaign. Reason likely is that, to create their own sales channel, they would have had to start making PCs, thus competing with their own customers. So, Intel accepted that there were larger entities offering both their and their competitor's product, as long as it had ample opportunity to market its brand there. So, perhaps the aggregators should work on two things: pay more to their contributors, and allow contributors more to present their brand.
Operyl 10y ago
Dunno, as a user I'm a bit sad. I enjoyed having a simple native app to view all my news in, (Apple News). I was subscribed to The Guardian, but now I don't feel like I'll get my worth from their network if I have to change my daily flow just for their news site.
edwin_frc 10y ago
They has other firm
nthcolumn 10y ago
Most writers, be they novelists, journalists, bloggers or whatever label suits you, wish to write and hope to be paid well enough for it so that they can write some more. Most will acknowledge that they have a bias from the very outset (called 'eating'). If you are 'lucky' enough to have some semi-permanent arrangement with some publisher you will have their biases to contend with and if your employer accepts monies for advertising you will have their clients' biases to contend with and if they accept subscriptions you must contend with the bias of protecting the bubble into which the subscribers so willingly insert themselves because here in the United Kingdom, newspapers and even television media have, historically and quite openly, been arranged along political and socio-economic lines to the degree that if one took the Guardian one could be fairly assumed to be a 'middle-class, slightly-left of centre, hand-wringing, grammar school educated' whereas if you took the Telegraph you were ‘a cunt’. I find it especially relevant today what with all this talk of what is and isn't 'fake news'. Can 'good' journalism be paid for? What is 'good' journalism? And what are you paying for? Clearly some people do not wish to wander from the menu and can be justifiably upset having paid for a certain serving at having other unpleasantries appear on their plates. When you pay for your subscription and I do not mean to pick, you might wish to pay the Dirty Digger instead or as well as even, do you expect 'a' truth or 'the' truth? If the unbiased reporting of facts is what you are after then doesn't an aggregated feed from a variety of sources much better fit that goal? I could write more...
luhn 10y ago
Instant Articles is the best experience I've ever had reading an article online. It loads lightning fast and doesn't have bloated layouts or obtrusive advertising. I was shocked the first time I [unknowingly] clicked on an Instant Article. I think it's best for the internet's health that Instant Articles is slowly declining, but it did show me how much better the experience could be if people paid attention to that stuff. (I'm only commenting on the bigger picture, nothing about the Guardian specifically. They actually have one of the better websites out there.)
shomyo 10y ago
Who cares. Fake news.
nilkn 10y ago
Facebook has single-handedly almost ruined news consumption among certain demographics in the US. Your news feed is designed from the ground up with powerful artificial intelligence to become an echo chamber, and lots of FB users just don't understand this. They fall for it completely. I have more liberal friends than conservative friends, and my FB feed literally only shows me anti-Trump pieces (along with ads and other spam), some of which are astoundingly blatant in their bias. I have to go out of my way to seek out opinions from or articles shared by my conservative friends. Even if I do this frequently, FB still does not incorporate them into my feed. Instead, every single day, it shows me low-quality clickbait anti-Trump articles shared by someone who lived on the same floor as me in a college dorm 7 years ago with whom I shared one conversation in real-life and whom I've never interacted with on FB in any way aside from approving her friend request.
- rdtsc 10y ago
  > only shows me anti-Trump pieces (along with ads and other spam), some of which are astoundingly blatant in their bias. That's how radicalization essentially happens. In this case it's self radicalization + Facebook/Google AI bias. Nobody is taking them and placing them in Madrasa with a cleric preaching terrorism and such but it ends up with a similar setup at its core. I've seen what I considered rational, educated people, including college professors go off the deep end with anti-Trump conspiracies, calling for assassinations, the Russian puppet narrative and so on. And from their point of view it kind of makes sense, their news feeds and circle of friends is telling them those things every day. People wonder how does a young end up believing blowing themselves up will lead to virgins in heaven and it seems crazy, but this is not too far from it as well. It's essentially the same process.
  - eastWestMath 10y ago
    The Russian puppet narrative isn't exactly a conspiracy theory, several important members of his team have stepped down due to their ties with Russia. And the Russians are behind the hack into the DNC's email servers.
  - notahacker 10y ago
rdiddly 10y ago
"The draw of Instant Articles was that they load much faster than the Facebook links that take readers back to most publishers’ own sites." Are you serious, that is the draw? Apologies as needed from me (someone who doesn't know or care a thing about Facebook) but I'm surprised. Couldn't a publisher easily silver-bullet this just by removing the bloatware from their own site?
- Neliquat 10y ago
  Agreed. Give me a decent site, not AMP bs.
throwaway348929 10y ago
I would love a Netflix/Spotify-style news system where I pay a flat monthly fee, get articles from dozens or hundreds of providers, and absolutely, positively no ads. There's no other way I'll ever pay for a subscription to a single news source, and I'm going to continue to block ads. I agree with others that even just tracking what I read makes me not want to subscribe. I just want a news feed, possibly that I can tailor, and with no ads. I'll pay for it.
carlmungz 10y ago
I think it's way too late for media companies to regain any ground from platforms like Facebook, Snapchat etc. Their models need such a fundamental rethink and I'm not sure any of the execs in charge have to the stomach to do so.
esteves_ 10y ago
Good, less polution.
davidf18 10y ago
Thomas Frank ("What's the matter with Kansas, "Listen, Liberal (2016)), is an American journalist who was kicked off MSNBC and writes for The Guardian instead and not US MSM. Not only did US MSM (NYT, WaPo, ...) ignore Frank, they ignored the fact that Trump and Sanders were better at protecting STEM jobs by combatting H1-B Visa abuse than Clinton. (See ComputerWorld article below). https://www.theguardian.com/profile/thomas-frank https://www.theguardian.com/profile/thomas-frank He was warning the Democrats not to ignore the affects of globalization on the working class: March of 2016 Millions of ordinary Americans support Donald Trump. Here's why https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/mar/07/donald-trump-why-americans-support https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/mar/07/donald... After BrExit (July). The world is taking its revenge against elites. When will America's wake up? https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/jul/19/revenge-against-elites-americas-wake-up https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/jul/19/reveng... The first article I started sending to people in early June. He explains very clearly that the Democrats left drifted away from the strategy of FDR of supporting the working class and protecting American jobs. Hilary was for trade which decimated working class and for H1-B visas and illegal immigration which depressed wages for STEM and working class respectively. Trump was anti-trade, anti-illegal immigration, and anti-H1-B abuse (he complained when Disney of FL replaced 250 American IT workers with H1-B). Notably, HRC was more like Bush and Rubio wanted to expand H1-B. http://www.computerworld.com/article/3008726/it-careers/bernie-sanders-wants-to-raise-wages-of-h-1b-workers.html http://www.computerworld.com/article/3008726/it-careers/bern... "Sanders doesn't go into great detail about his work visa proposal, but at least he brings it up. His main opponent in the campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination, Hillary Clinton, doesn't discuss the H-1B visa at all in her "comprehensive" immigration platform. Among the leading Republican presidential candidates, Donald Trump, the billionaire developer, has emerged as the chief H-1B critic for his party. Like Sanders, Trump wants prevailing wages increased. Another candidate, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), is on the cusp of reversing his previously supportive position and is working on reform legislation. Republican candidates who are seen as H-1B supporters and would likely back an increase in the annual cap on the visas are former Florida governor Jeb Bush and Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.). Hillary Clinton may be more aligned with Rubio and Bush than she is with Sanders on the H-1B issue. While serving as a U.S. senator representing New York, Clinton traveled to Buffalo in 2003 to mark the opening of an office of IT services provider Tata Consultancy Services (TCS). That was 12 years ago, but the H-1B issue was very much a subject of controversy by then. TCS is one of the largest users of the H-1B visa. The Clinton links to the IT offshore outsourcing industry have continued since then through the work of the Clinton Foundation, where Tata has been participating in its STEM education efforts. In 2011, former President Bill Clinton was paid $260,000 by IT services provider HCL to deliver a speech."

474 points by r3bl 10y ago

Ah, Apple News. Americans might want to know that it is still not widely available in the rest of the world – probably another failed Apple project. I had some hope that Apple News could help RSS but that was apparently never Apple's intention.

spiderfarmer 10y ago
With Apple's budget, what on earth convinced them to not take the risk of launching in 20 countries at once? Google and Facebook really are the champion of multinational media endeavours.
- iwintermute 10y ago
  Still waiting for youtube red here... And no date in sight. I don't even care about their "specials" - just opportunity to support favorite video creators (apart from patreon) without adv would be enough.
  - mnx 10y ago
    It baffles me that they didn't launch that internationally - it's not like they need to buy some special licences, they already show all the same content everywhere. And all the specials are being produced after the launch, so they can demand whatever licenses they choose. And there's very clearly demand. They have google music available in a lot of countries, and that seems a lot harder to pull off.
    - muro 10y ago
      Wasn't there some brouhaha about music when YouTube red was launching? Something about "independents" (think Adele, not highschool bands) complaining. Add to that e.g. music on YouTube in Germany. I would guess they would launch at the same time were it not for licensing.
    - deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
  - spiderfarmer 10y ago
    I completely forgot about Red's existence. One of the problems with not launching internationally on day one.
    - iwintermute 10y ago
      I guess the difficulty is not technical but, again copyright related. There's no sane "available by default" policy applied worldwide. Or their predicted profits are negligible for small non-english speaking countries so why bother. (there's hope that it'll appear as google music in some distant future)
      - mcintyre1994 10y ago
        FWIW it's still not in the UK either.
  - iwintermute 10y ago
    What's even more strange to me is their geographical limitations for existing customers: "[...] If you leave these countries, you won’t be able to save videos offline, videos won’t play in the background, and you will see ads. " [0] [0] https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/6307365?hl=en https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/6307365?hl=en That's just BS.
    - mikhailt 10y ago
      Why is it strange? It has been common practice for decades now, you couldn't even buy games in Japan and play it on US console 10-20 years ago. That's because you do not own the content, you are licensing the content and the content have geographical restrictions set in place by the content providers. Until everyone sign an agreement to get rid of geographical restrictons, nothing we can do.
      - iwintermute 10y ago
        It's strange because in my mind I'm paying for youtube service of getting me videos (either with money or by wasting time on ads) And with this I would continue to pay for service AND also receive ads. I kinda understand perverted logic of licensing content and region locking due to price discrimination, but just in my mental model Youtube is more of a service provider than content seller. Edit: Either way, I'm paying for not seeing ads - so why would they still show them to me, after taking my money? It's their problem how they deal with second side (content creators & right owners, etc.) And right now it just seems like punishing paying customer (hey, adblocking is free :)
IBM 10y ago
It's actually a sleeper hit [1][2]. The Guaridan seems to be the anomaly. >Publishers are also paying increasing attention to Apple News, which added push notifications as part of a redesign last year and now delivers significant traffic thanks to the fact that it comes pre-installed on hundreds of millions of devices. [1] http://www.theverge.com/2017/4/16/15314210/instant-articles-facebook-future-ads-video http://www.theverge.com/2017/4/16/15314210/instant-articles-... [2] http://digiday.com/media/duopolys-shadow-apple-news-finding-favor-publishers/ http://digiday.com/media/duopolys-shadow-apple-news-finding-...
- yabatopia 10y ago
  > It's actually a sleeper hit [1][2]. That's not the impression I get from reading both articles. Some publishers like Mic seem to be still in a honeymoon phase with Apple News, but there's a lot of criticism similar to Instant Articles. "Being committed to" and "spending a lot of time" doesn't equal to a financial success for publishers.
  - IBM 10y ago
    I follow Media Twitter pretty closely. Apple News has become a significant driver of traffic for a lot of publications. This contrasts to when it launched when no one thought it would amount to anything. Here's a few more stories http://www.niemanlab.org/2016/11/after-a-slow-start-apple-news-is-emerging-as-a-significant-traffic-driver-for-some-news-orgs/ http://www.niemanlab.org/2016/11/after-a-slow-start-apple-ne... http://www.niemanlab.org/2017/03/australias-public-broadcaster-is-using-apple-news-push-alerts-to-reach-new-younger-audiences/ http://www.niemanlab.org/2017/03/australias-public-broadcast... https://digiday.com/media/apple-news-the-telegraph/ https://digiday.com/media/apple-news-the-telegraph/
ithought 10y ago
Maybe if the video actually played on the links in Apple News.
the_mitsuhiko 10y ago
The most frustrating thing about apple news is the region locking of content :-/
kirykl 10y ago
Why would Americans care Apppe News isn't widely available elsewhere in the world?
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
freehunter 10y ago
You're not missing much. I subscribe to a couple dozen different topics, but all I get is News, Entertainment, Cars, Sports, and Electronics, most of which are dominated by one source. I subscribe to my local mid-sized city news, and it's completely dominated by suburban high school sports scores. If I 'dislike' the sports scores, all of my local news goes away. There also doesn't seem to be a way to tell Apple why you're disliking something. I liked the story, I just don't like the clickbait headline. Show me the same story, but not from Buzzfeed. I have smaller topics like Ruby, Arduino, security, AI, etc subscribed but I've never seen anything from those subjects in my feed. If I scroll down far enough it starts going back days, rather than showing more subjects. I read it once or twice a day to keep up on big news, but I've given up any pretenses that it can be personalized in any way. It's a big-media news aggregator, that's it.

artana 10y ago

http://www.webmhs.com/2017/04/prediksi-real-madrid-vs-barcelona.html http://www.webmhs.com/2017/04/prediksi-real-madrid-vs-barcel...

w-ll 10y ago

How come the Apple News Feed in Siri isn't configurable? It doesn't even follow the sources of the News.app. It's constantly clickbaity or depressing. Who moderates and chooses that.

fiatpandas 10y ago
Unsubstantiated guess: Apple wouldn't be able to tell big publishers their active reach on the News platform is X million people if it limited the news in the widget to the app sources you've explicitly followed. I was also turned off by this and stopped using it for that reason.

ch215 10y ago

The trade magazine, Press Gazette, recently launched a campaign to 'stop Google and Facebook destroying journalism' http://www.pressgazette.co.uk/press-gazette-launches-duopoly-campaign-to-stop-google-and-facebook-destroying-journalism/ http://www.pressgazette.co.uk/press-gazette-launches-duopoly...

criddell 10y ago
They don't need Google or Facebook. The news business is doing a great job of destroying themselves.
- throwaway91111 10y ago
  How do you figure, specifically?
  - criddell 10y ago
    Exhibit 1 would probably be the inaction of newspaper publishers 20 years ago as Craigslist took the classified ad business away. Exhibit 2 might be the NYT taking on massive debt 10-15 years ago even as it was pretty clear that their business was changing. Money was cheap and their magic 8 ball said outlook good, so that was all they needed. Exhibit 3 is probably the lack of care publishers have around the user experience on the web. AMP and IA is Google and Facebook saying "your product is great, your presentation is terrible". A 500 word story should load on a phone in under a second all the time. Exhibit 4 would be lowering of the editorial bar by lots of outlets. This is probably the big one in my opinion: * the NYT reporting in the run up to the Iraq war still bothers me, trust is hard to earn and easy to lose * editors know that there aren't always two equal sides to every story, but that's the format they have * their interview formats seemed designed so that a question with a yes or no answer can be spun on fly into a statement about something unrelated * when everything is called breaking news, nothing is breaking news * the patterns of news outlets are so obvious, that they are easy to manipulate (how many hours of television and lines of print were spent on Obama's birth certificate?) Exhibit 5 is probably the overly conservative approach to the web. A digital newspaper is the obvious path and it's the only one too many outlets are exploring. Buzzfeed is a nice exception. I don't even think they expect readers to go to their website. Buzzfeed packages everything for sharing and the content flows just about everywhere. I don't think the conservative behavior of most outlets is due to lack of ideas. Some very smart people (like Dave Winer and Jonathan Abrams) have expressed a lot of interesting ideas that nobody seems to be willing to experiment with. A decent amount of shrinkage in the news business was overdue. If you travel and read local papers, they are all almost exactly the same. If you watch local evening news, every program has the same format and basically the same set. There's a ridiculous amount of duplication and redundancy and getting rid of that frees up a lot of resources to work on other stuff. Fortunately, I think the shrinkage is mostly complete.

Angostura 10y ago

Sad to see The Guardian go from Apple News, though I respect their decision:(

Phlow 10y ago
As am I. I would pay a subscription fee to keep them on Apple News. That's where I read most of my news. If they aren't going to give me the option to pay them to keep using them, I'm not going to pay them, it's that simple. Pretty silly move in my opinion.

kartan 10y ago

This is one of the problems with monopolies, or maybe the bigger one. Once you are dominant in one business, search/mobile/messaging, you can take over other business without much effort. They are not news companies, they are not in the news business, they don't know it, and they have not done anything to be worth the trust of the public. They are just convenient because they are a monopoly in another area.

gcb0 10y ago
sadly, you just described news companies. almost none of them know about news, they just happen to own the largest distribution media in some region and because of that everyone have to listen to them. add to that that traditional media (tv, radio) you are limited by government allowing you to own a frequency.
- malza 10y ago
  Those large media distributions didn't appear out of nowhere, they were built by entrepreneurs and communities. They slowly merged into the huge operations that exist today. That said, those publications have got so big that some have become divorced from reality... you only have to look as outlets like The Guardian and the huge losses they continue to absorb. Extreme even by industry standards.

twsted 10y ago

This is great, we all should support this. The web is at a crossroad and we should promote multiple platforms, old-style blogs, decentralized navigation, classic journalism, etc. For too many people, Facebook is the web and this is really sad and wrong. We must find other ways to pay for information and curated content, limiting tracking and defending privacy.

blazespin 10y ago
Oh, I dunno. I thought it was an interesting experiment. I think it still has its uses. Facebook is hardly a monopoly in the sense that google or microsoft was. I know tonnes of people who don't use facebook and the people who do use it, it's usually just to connect with friends. Facebook / instagram / messenger, from what I can see, are just hard charging innovative platforms trying to create products people like. Their businesses could crater pretty easily and the only reason it doesn't is because they keep trying different things. It's not like search and microsoft's OS dominance / network effects from their Office products. You don't need to log onto facebook in order to work, you chose to because it's fun and you can connect with friends. Google / MSFT have far deeper hooks.
- madeofpalk 10y ago
  > Facebook [is] just hard charging innovative platforms trying to create products people like That's a pretty charitable interpretation of Instant Articles.
- onion2k 10y ago
  I know tonnes of people who don't use facebook and the people who do use it, it's usually just to connect with friends. Facebook has 1.86 billion monthly active users as of Q4 2016[1]. At that time approximately 3.4 billion people used the internet. So a little over 1/2 the internet-using population, and 1/4 of everyone on Earth, has a Facebook account that they access at least once a month. If you drill down a bit about 80% of American adults use Facebook regularly[2]. You may know tonnes of people who don't use Facebook, but I think that's actually quite unusual. Outside of our HN-reading, privacy-interested, technically-competent bubble the overwhelming majority of people use Facebook, and Facebook does have an effective monopoly. [1] http://money.cnn.com/2017/02/01/technology/facebook-earnings/ http://money.cnn.com/2017/02/01/technology/facebook-earnings... [2] http://www.pewinternet.org/2016/11/11/social-media-update-2016/ http://www.pewinternet.org/2016/11/11/social-media-update-20...

mgiannopoulos 10y ago

The Guardian is trying to get subscribers and donations. I'm not sure how much Apple and Facebook help them facilitate that goal.

H4CK3RM4N 10y ago
I'm pretty sure Apple News supports subscription content, but not a patron-style subscription.
- mgiannopoulos 10y ago
  Perhaps they didn't like Apple's taking a percentage of such subscriptions then.

fiatpandas 10y ago

Always seemed crazy to me that publishers were willing to give up so much for these integrations. The ability to have final say over how readers experience your information, and opportunities for freely measuring/analyzing that experience, should be key for news organizations that want to evolve. Integrating with FB IA & Apple News is giving up power for gains that may not be worth it in the long run.

Symbiote 10y ago

This discussion has reminded me that I intended to make a donation to the Guardian, since I read it every day and use an adblocker. The link for a one-off contribution is here: https://contribute.theguardian.com/ https://contribute.theguardian.com/ Or for a subscription, here: https://subscribe.theguardian.com/ https://subscribe.theguardian.com/ I tried the weekly paper edition for a while, but although it was posted on-time at the printers (in Britain or Austria), the Danish postal system usually delayed delivery to me by at least a week.

danieldk 10y ago
I tried the weekly paper edition for a while, but although it was posted on-time at the printers (in Britain or Austria), the Danish postal system usually delayed delivery to me by at least a week. Same here. I had a subscription and they'd usually arrive in Germany a couple of days too late. Luckily, Germany has Der Spiegel, which is also more than worthy supporting.
RVuRnvbM2e 10y ago
I've mentioned here before that I'm a Guardian Weekly paper edition subscriber, mostly because: * no tracking of the articles I choose to read, as in online news subscriptions * cross-section of articles that I wouldn't otherwise seek out (no filter-bubble) * very little advertising, none of it obtrusive It's also a great way to support real journalism, and learn about world news, not the parochial junk my local tabloids cover.
- asQuirreL 10y ago
  There absolutely is a filter bubble, you just aren't the one doing the filtering. Not that I am philosophically opposed to the filtering, but rather the denial of its existence.
  - Pica_soO 10y ago
    Yes, but part of the newspaper experience of old was- that it breaks it. You paid for news, you usually wouldn't read- thus, you would at least skim it- thus such things could be relevant for everyone.

sghi 10y ago

I get why they've done it, and The Guardian is a site that I both contribute to and disable my ad-blocker for, but I will miss the speed at which the articles load on my ancient and rubbish phone. I'd still rather support them though!

inian 10y ago

I find it surprising that they are still going strong on AMP. I tend to club AMP along with Instant Articles, etc. Any thoughts on as to why this is the case?

zigzigzag 10y ago
I think they're similar in goal but quite different in implementation. AMP gives publishers a lot more control and apparently that shows up in ad revenue figures.

frik 10y ago

Would be great if some newspapers and other media cooperate and found a new friendly-minded ad-network. Provide old-school picture based banner ads with pay-per-click or pay-per-view models and no (or very small and fast) JS third party code/library.

_eht 10y ago
This is what the people want. Even those who don't realize it yet.
- jbreckmckye 10y ago
  Unfortunately, it is not what advertisers pay for.
nthcolumn 10y ago
When everyone used combinations of AOL, Excite, AltaVista, Yahoo! and Google was just this trendy new shiny thing, one of the main attractions of the new kid on the block was advertising that was unobtrusive and sometimes even helpful. The reason for adblockers was not because 'uuuh advertising' it is because 'uuuh shit advertising'. Your page lit up like a christmas tree on acid, you could hardly see the content for the tidal wave of shit adverts for useless shit. Your shitty dial-up slowed to a crawl as it downloaded animated gifs and dozens of spy cookies. Google won because they weren't greedy bastards who completely took the f'ing piss out of people to the point where the service they were supposed to be providing was degraded to point of being unusable. THIS! This is why we can't have nice things! Because you go too far! Because you just can't help yourselves! And the information finds a way as it always has of routing around the damage. The media will have to add value for anyone to pay them for it and quite a lot of the time people will simply refuse to pay and be happy with the news from other sources who are happy to give it away, and it doesn't take a very cynical person to imagine that those sources may be less stringent or have some ulterior motives for doing so, so yes, happy days and best of luck with the banner ads and paywalls. uuuh.

Stranger43 10y ago

The problem with the "semi-auto" curated feeds that all of the Internet middlemen thinks is going to finally allow them to turn their online market share into profits is that the feed idea depend on the same omnibus newspaper model* that no longer works for the newspaper industry. The dead of the omnibus paper the press is forced to choose between a return to the old local/partisan model where the paper becomes a part of political movement and receives "patronage" from that movement in forms of paid subscriptions, or the yellow(named for the color of cheap paper) model that lives off scandal creation. *Most of the newspapers of the 90ies based most of their revenue off content sourced from their network of partners a model that only really worked because the paper had access to long distance communication networks too expensive/exclusive for widespread usage among consumers.

OliverJones 10y ago

Guardian spokesperson: "Our primary objective is to bring audiences to the trusted environment of the Guardian to support building deeper relationships with our readers, and growing membership and contributions to fund our world-class journalism.” Precisely. FB's brand with respect to news is damaged to the point where it's negative. FB is the place to get fake nuz. The Guardian and the Times are wise not to allow their content to move under the FB brand.

Someone 10y ago

If a paper becomes a part of a large feed, it risks becoming an interchangeable part and that means the aggregator can lower prices. In some sense, Apple faced that problem, too. It created its own sales channel, whereas the Guardian has one to fall back on. In contrast, Intel when faced with that problem in the PC market, choose to work on brand awareness through the "Intel Inside" campaign. Reason likely is that, to create their own sales channel, they would have had to start making PCs, thus competing with their own customers. So, Intel accepted that there were larger entities offering both their and their competitor's product, as long as it had ample opportunity to market its brand there. So, perhaps the aggregators should work on two things: pay more to their contributors, and allow contributors more to present their brand.

Operyl 10y ago

Dunno, as a user I'm a bit sad. I enjoyed having a simple native app to view all my news in, (Apple News). I was subscribed to The Guardian, but now I don't feel like I'll get my worth from their network if I have to change my daily flow just for their news site.

edwin_frc 10y ago

They has other firm

nthcolumn 10y ago

Most writers, be they novelists, journalists, bloggers or whatever label suits you, wish to write and hope to be paid well enough for it so that they can write some more. Most will acknowledge that they have a bias from the very outset (called 'eating'). If you are 'lucky' enough to have some semi-permanent arrangement with some publisher you will have their biases to contend with and if your employer accepts monies for advertising you will have their clients' biases to contend with and if they accept subscriptions you must contend with the bias of protecting the bubble into which the subscribers so willingly insert themselves because here in the United Kingdom, newspapers and even television media have, historically and quite openly, been arranged along political and socio-economic lines to the degree that if one took the Guardian one could be fairly assumed to be a 'middle-class, slightly-left of centre, hand-wringing, grammar school educated' whereas if you took the Telegraph you were ‘a cunt’. I find it especially relevant today what with all this talk of what is and isn't 'fake news'. Can 'good' journalism be paid for? What is 'good' journalism? And what are you paying for? Clearly some people do not wish to wander from the menu and can be justifiably upset having paid for a certain serving at having other unpleasantries appear on their plates. When you pay for your subscription and I do not mean to pick, you might wish to pay the Dirty Digger instead or as well as even, do you expect 'a' truth or 'the' truth? If the unbiased reporting of facts is what you are after then doesn't an aggregated feed from a variety of sources much better fit that goal? I could write more...

luhn 10y ago

Instant Articles is the best experience I've ever had reading an article online. It loads lightning fast and doesn't have bloated layouts or obtrusive advertising. I was shocked the first time I [unknowingly] clicked on an Instant Article. I think it's best for the internet's health that Instant Articles is slowly declining, but it did show me how much better the experience could be if people paid attention to that stuff. (I'm only commenting on the bigger picture, nothing about the Guardian specifically. They actually have one of the better websites out there.)

shomyo 10y ago

Who cares. Fake news.

nilkn 10y ago

Facebook has single-handedly almost ruined news consumption among certain demographics in the US. Your news feed is designed from the ground up with powerful artificial intelligence to become an echo chamber, and lots of FB users just don't understand this. They fall for it completely. I have more liberal friends than conservative friends, and my FB feed literally only shows me anti-Trump pieces (along with ads and other spam), some of which are astoundingly blatant in their bias. I have to go out of my way to seek out opinions from or articles shared by my conservative friends. Even if I do this frequently, FB still does not incorporate them into my feed. Instead, every single day, it shows me low-quality clickbait anti-Trump articles shared by someone who lived on the same floor as me in a college dorm 7 years ago with whom I shared one conversation in real-life and whom I've never interacted with on FB in any way aside from approving her friend request.

rdtsc 10y ago
> only shows me anti-Trump pieces (along with ads and other spam), some of which are astoundingly blatant in their bias. That's how radicalization essentially happens. In this case it's self radicalization + Facebook/Google AI bias. Nobody is taking them and placing them in Madrasa with a cleric preaching terrorism and such but it ends up with a similar setup at its core. I've seen what I considered rational, educated people, including college professors go off the deep end with anti-Trump conspiracies, calling for assassinations, the Russian puppet narrative and so on. And from their point of view it kind of makes sense, their news feeds and circle of friends is telling them those things every day. People wonder how does a young end up believing blowing themselves up will lead to virgins in heaven and it seems crazy, but this is not too far from it as well. It's essentially the same process.
- eastWestMath 10y ago
  The Russian puppet narrative isn't exactly a conspiracy theory, several important members of his team have stepped down due to their ties with Russia. And the Russians are behind the hack into the DNC's email servers.
- notahacker 10y ago

rdiddly 10y ago

"The draw of Instant Articles was that they load much faster than the Facebook links that take readers back to most publishers’ own sites." Are you serious, that is the draw? Apologies as needed from me (someone who doesn't know or care a thing about Facebook) but I'm surprised. Couldn't a publisher easily silver-bullet this just by removing the bloatware from their own site?

Neliquat 10y ago
Agreed. Give me a decent site, not AMP bs.

throwaway348929 10y ago

I would love a Netflix/Spotify-style news system where I pay a flat monthly fee, get articles from dozens or hundreds of providers, and absolutely, positively no ads. There's no other way I'll ever pay for a subscription to a single news source, and I'm going to continue to block ads. I agree with others that even just tracking what I read makes me not want to subscribe. I just want a news feed, possibly that I can tailor, and with no ads. I'll pay for it.

carlmungz 10y ago

I think it's way too late for media companies to regain any ground from platforms like Facebook, Snapchat etc. Their models need such a fundamental rethink and I'm not sure any of the execs in charge have to the stomach to do so.

esteves_ 10y ago

Good, less polution.

davidf18 10y ago

Thomas Frank ("What's the matter with Kansas, "Listen, Liberal (2016)), is an American journalist who was kicked off MSNBC and writes for The Guardian instead and not US MSM. Not only did US MSM (NYT, WaPo, ...) ignore Frank, they ignored the fact that Trump and Sanders were better at protecting STEM jobs by combatting H1-B Visa abuse than Clinton. (See ComputerWorld article below). https://www.theguardian.com/profile/thomas-frank https://www.theguardian.com/profile/thomas-frank He was warning the Democrats not to ignore the affects of globalization on the working class: March of 2016 Millions of ordinary Americans support Donald Trump. Here's why https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/mar/07/donald-trump-why-americans-support https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/mar/07/donald... After BrExit (July). The world is taking its revenge against elites. When will America's wake up? https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/jul/19/revenge-against-elites-americas-wake-up https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/jul/19/reveng... The first article I started sending to people in early June. He explains very clearly that the Democrats left drifted away from the strategy of FDR of supporting the working class and protecting American jobs. Hilary was for trade which decimated working class and for H1-B visas and illegal immigration which depressed wages for STEM and working class respectively. Trump was anti-trade, anti-illegal immigration, and anti-H1-B abuse (he complained when Disney of FL replaced 250 American IT workers with H1-B). Notably, HRC was more like Bush and Rubio wanted to expand H1-B. http://www.computerworld.com/article/3008726/it-careers/bernie-sanders-wants-to-raise-wages-of-h-1b-workers.html http://www.computerworld.com/article/3008726/it-careers/bern... "Sanders doesn't go into great detail about his work visa proposal, but at least he brings it up. His main opponent in the campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination, Hillary Clinton, doesn't discuss the H-1B visa at all in her "comprehensive" immigration platform. Among the leading Republican presidential candidates, Donald Trump, the billionaire developer, has emerged as the chief H-1B critic for his party. Like Sanders, Trump wants prevailing wages increased. Another candidate, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), is on the cusp of reversing his previously supportive position and is working on reform legislation. Republican candidates who are seen as H-1B supporters and would likely back an increase in the annual cap on the visas are former Florida governor Jeb Bush and Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.). Hillary Clinton may be more aligned with Rubio and Bush than she is with Sanders on the H-1B issue. While serving as a U.S. senator representing New York, Clinton traveled to Buffalo in 2003 to mark the opening of an office of IT services provider Tata Consultancy Services (TCS). That was 12 years ago, but the H-1B issue was very much a subject of controversy by then. TCS is one of the largest users of the H-1B visa. The Clinton links to the IT offshore outsourcing industry have continued since then through the work of the Clinton Foundation, where Tata has been participating in its STEM education efforts. In 2011, former President Bill Clinton was paid $260,000 by IT services provider HCL to deliver a speech."