Financial Times

Rupert Murdoch’s 21st Century Fox has agreed to new terms to acquire Sky, the pan-European TV group, in a deal worth £24.5 billion that is designed to see off a rival offer from US media giant Comcast.

Germany’s top telecommunications regulator has set its sights on US technology groups such as Google and Facebook, insisting that providers of messaging and email services should be regulated just like ordinary telecommunications companies. “What we are seeing is that the line between traditional telecommunications services and web-based services like [Google’s] Gmail and [Facebook’s] WhatsApp has become very blurred.

[Commentary] While opinions may differ on the soundness of the European approach, it is difficult to dispute that the European Union is currently leading the charge on protecting consumers’ personal information online. Its General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which went into effect in May, is setting the standard for data protection. The US only has a small window to get back in the game and influence the shape of global digital privacy norms.

Three hours into an interrogation by British lawmakers, Cambridge Analytica’s former chief executive Alexander Nix stood up and thrust a slide deck at Members of Parliament: “I’ve tried,” he said, “to take what is ostensibly quite a complex structure and simplify it.” His four slides told a straightforward story about the analytics company, which shot to prominence after it was found to have used data from millions of Facebook users in political campaigns.