John Eggerton

At an event celebrating the 20th anniversary of his Children's Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA), Sen Ed Markey (D-MA) said protecting children's privacy is a moving target, but a target that must be hit -- including taking on big companies who collect and mine children's data. Sen Markey said his strategy will be to push for extending COPPA protections to all children under 16 (currently it is under 13) and for an eraser button that allows parents and kids to delete information from their online history (the California privacy bill has such an eraser button).

Add Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Charles Grassley (R-IA) to the lengthening list of lawmakers who want answers from Google about the Google+ data vulnerability it chose not to tell its users about. Sen Grassley wants the company to explain how it is protecting personal info given that the "glitches" apparently went unaddressed for three years. Sen Grassley invited Google to join Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg at an April 10 hearing on data privacy and social media, but he says Google declined because it said it didn’t have the same data privacy issues as Facebook had.

The Justice Department has minced no words in its reply to AT&T's defense of its purchase of Time Warner, telling a federal court that the company's brief was "little more than a revisionist 58-page summary of the district court’s opinion." Antitrust chief Makan Delrahim said AT&T's brief "never resolves the district court’s erroneous rejection of the economics of bargaining and the principle of corporate-wide profit maximization, which are the basis of our appeal.” DOJ sasy the court's main error was "that the merger will not increase AT&T’s bargaining leverage."

The Federal Communications Commission’s lone administrative law judge has still not weighed in as to whether he will shut down the designated hearing on allegations that Sinclair Broadcast Group misled the agency about its proposed $3.9 billion purchase of Tribune Media, leaving that serious “lack of candor” charge hanging over the company. It has been more than 10 weeks since the FCC unanimously voted to refer the deal to Judge Richard Sippel, signaling it had issues with how Sinclair represented the spinoff stations in the deal.

Senate Commerce Committee Chairman John Thune (R-SD) hammered the Federal Communications Commission at a hearing for not investing enough in subsidizing and deploying broadband to rural areas like his home state, calling it an "unacceptable failure" and adding that he has urged FCC Chairman Ajit Pai to act immediately to correct the situation. Chairman Pai's office signaled it agreed the FCC's budget-control mechanism worked against closing the rural digital divide, and it was on the way to fixing it.

At the Senate antitrust subcommittee hearing on Oct 3, Department of Justice antitrust chief Makan Delrahim teased that the DOJ is wrapping up what it bills as a first-ever criminal case against the anticompetitive use of search algorithms in a "price-fixing scheme." Sen Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) asked about search algorithms used by companies "like Google or Yelp!" that use algorithms that can have "profound market effects," like disadvantaging less tech-savvy small businesses by "guiding users away from the best option at the cheapest price." He asked what resources Delrahim had to scruti

A complaint spearheaded by the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood (CCFC) and drawn up by the Communications & Technology Law Clinic at the Institute for Public Representation at Georgetown University Law Center has been filed with the Federal Trade Commission against Facebook, over Facebook's collection of children's personal information without obtaining the requisite parental permission. The complaint is leveled against the Messenger Kids app, a social media platform for children as young as five.

The Federal Communications Commission will vote later in Oct on rule changes for the upcoming auction of spectrum in the Citizens Broadband Radio Service (CBRS) band. According to a draft order released Oct 2, the proposed CBRS auction rules call for licenses to be awarded by county for a period of 10 years with the option to renew. The FCC is proposing lengthening license terms in the CBRS (3.5 GHz) band, "modestly" increasing the size of those geographic licenses--the plan is to auction the licenses sometime in 2019-and allowing them to be renewed.

The Federal Communications Commission and Federal Emergency Management Agency will conduct the first-ever nationwide test of the Wireless Emergency Alerts system Oct 3, an add-on to the Emergency Alert System (EAS) for TV and radio, which will get its fourth test the same day. Wireless alerts will be sent to cell phones at 2:18 EDT, with the EAS alerts to TV and radio outlets at 2:20.

Journalists are telling a federal court that there were solid reasons to believe that President Donald Trump's animus toward CNN played a role in the Administration's attempt to block the merger of CNN parent Time Warner with AT&T and that a lower court should have allowed that "selective enforcement" defense to be introduced and evidence of that claim presented.