Financial Times

An overhaul of Europe’s telecoms laws, aimed at stimulating investment in new networks, has been branded a missed opportunity for the industry. The new European electronic communications code, the biggest shake-up in the sector’s governance since 2009, was approved on June 6. The agreement coincided with the release of a European Court of Auditors report that showed the European Union’s goal of connecting half of the region’s households to ultrafast broadband with speeds of 100 Mbps by 2020 was well behind target.

On both sides of the Atlantic, interest in news is high. The daily dramas of the Trump administration and the rollercoaster of the Brexit negotiations have fuelled sales of online subscriptions to US and UK newspapers grappling with the transition from print to a predominantly digital business model. The picture is bleaker for local newspapers. In the US there has been a hollowing out of a once-mighty sector.

[Commentary] We in the US are deeply concerned about the way the European Union’s new privacy guidelines, which came into effect last week, will force big changes in the way US and European companies do business. Donald Trump’s administration supports the new General Data Protection Regulation’s goal of protecting personal online data while continuing to enable transatlantic data exchange. We are also committed to working with the EU to implement the new guidelines.

Cambridge Analytica, a data firm that worked for President Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign, is shutting down following disclosures about its use of Facebook data and the campaign tactics it pitched to clients. Apparently, the company decided to close its doors because it was losing clients and facing mounting legal fees in the Facebook investigation. The firm is shutting down effective May 2 and employees have been told to turn in their computers.

The European Commission is for the first time preparing to regulate how search engines such as Google operate, under draft proposals designed to bolster the rights of businesses and app makers that rely on big internet giants to sell their services. The European Commission has expanded its plans to regulate the relationship online platforms such as Amazon and Apple have with vendors to also include the practices of search engines such as Google. Under the plans, the tech platforms would be required to provide companies with more information about how their ranking algorithms work.