Marketplace Tech With Molly Wood

Anita Ramaswamy, columnist at The Information, joins Marketplace’s Nova Safo to break down all of these headlines. This episode was produced by Jesús Alvarado.

During the 2024 election, the cryptocurrency industry, including political action committees, accounted for nearly half of all of the corporate money going into the election, according to the watchdog group Public Citizen. That spending helped make Congress and the Trump administration more friendly to the crypto industry. Now, in the run-up to the midterms, the AI industry wants to replicate the crypto sector’s success. AI companies are amassing millions of dollars to help candidates that favor light regulation over AI. Marketplace’s Nova Safo spoke with Amrith Ramkumar, a reporter at the Wall Street Journal who recently wrote about this new pro-AI PAC network.

There’s a new class action lawsuit against Amazon Prime Video that’s once again elevating the question of ownership in the digital age: Who actually owns a movie, a song, a video game?Buy a physical copy, like a CD or DVD, and the answer is obvious. But buy a digital copy, and the answer gets very complicated. Marketplace’s Nova Safo spoke with Aaron Perzanowski, a law professor at the University of Michigan and author of the book “The End of Ownership: Personal Property in the Digital Economy,” to learn about the current state of digital ownership.

A recent report put out by the tech giant claims its AI model consumes very little electricity and water for a single query. Emma Strubell, an assistant professor at Carnegie Mellon's Language Technologies Institute, says that might not tell the whole story. This episode was produced by Jesús Alvarado.

Borders may be invisible to most shoppers, but for businesses, they often mean delays, extra costs, and reams of paperwork. And amid Trump’s trade war, global trade is now faster and more complex than ever. Those new pressures have sparked a boom in new "customs tech" companies promising to speed things up. The BBC’s Leanna Byrne reports.

Marketplace’s Nova Safo spoke with Joanna Stern, senior personal technology columnist at the Wall Street Journal, to discuss all these topics and more. This episode was produced by Jesús Alvarado.

It’s challenging for parents to get access to their kids’ data to look out for online harms. In Congress, there's a bipartisan push to change that with a bill called Sammy's Law, named after a teen who died of fentanyl poisoning in 2021. He purchased drugs on social media.Marketplace’s Nova Safo spoke with Will Oremus, tech news analysis writer at The Washington Post, who’s been monitoring the bill's progress.

Fifteen years ago, then-CEO Steve Jobs unveiled the iPad. His vision was for a lean-back device used mostly to consume content. Now, with the latest iPadOS 26, the device is evolving into something different — and perhaps something more useful. Craig Grannell got early access to iPadOS 26 and wrote about the system's laptop-like qualities in Wired magazine.

A lot of people are eligible to have their criminal records expunged. And there are tens of millions of such files out there for things like misdemeanors, low-level felonies such as drug offenses and even just arrests. LegalEase, a justice-tech startup is streamlining the process through the use of artificial intelligence.

Video gaming can be an expensive hobby. Nintendo’s latest Mario Kart game, Mario Kart World, released in June, costs $80, and it’s widely expected that Grand Theft Audio VI, coming out next year, will top $100. So are games becoming unaffordable … or do gamers not know how good they’ve got it? The BBC’s Will Chalk breaks it down.