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Nine days after Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg dismissed as “crazy” the idea that fake news on his company’s social network played a key role in the US election, President Barack Obama pulled the youthful tech billionaire aside and delivered what he hoped would be a wake-up call.

For months leading up to the vote, President Obama and his top aides quietly agonized over how to respond to Russia’s brazen intervention on behalf of the Donald Trump campaign without making matters worse. Weeks after Trump’s surprise victory, some of Obama’s aides looked back with regret and wished they had done more. Now huddled in a private room on the sidelines of a meeting of world leaders in Lima, Peru, two months before Trump’s inauguration, President Obama made a personal appeal to Zuckerberg to take the threat of fake news and political disinformation seriously. Unless Facebook and the government did more to address the threat, President Obama warned, it would only get worse in the next presidential race. Zuckerberg acknowledged the problem posed by fake news. But he told President Obama that those messages weren’t widespread on Facebook and that there was no easy remedy.

Here are the five biggest issues causing lawmakers to look at the technology industry in a new, harsher light: The Russia investigation, A new antitrust movement, Culture wars, Sex trafficking, and Advertising algorithms.

Federal officials across the US government are investigating whether Russia sought to influence the 2016 presidential election by purchasing ads on social networks like Facebook. But President Donald Trump on Sept 22 dismissed the matter as a “hoax.”

Only a day earlier, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg acknowledged that foreign governments had used his company’s website to spread misinformation in the United States and around the world. So far, his company has pinpointed about 3,000 ads purchased by Russian sources ahead of Trump’s Election Day win. Despite the evidence, President Trump tweeted on Sept 22: "The Russia hoax continues, now it's ads on Facebook. What about the totally biased and dishonest Media coverage in favor of Crooked Hillary?"

Pandering to the base is a tradition as old as politics itself. But in the social media age, it’s easier than ever for politicians to take those tailored messages—the kind they might not like to share with the whole world—and disseminate them only to the people who are most likely to agree. And targeting allows campaigns to silo thousands of possible audiences with just a click, making it harder than ever to hold politicians accountable for all of it.

Some have taken to calling this type of ad a “dark post,” an overly nefarious name for what is, in actuality, just the way digital ads operate today. Technically speaking, Trump's ad buy works the same as one for the pair of Zappos shoes that somehow follows you around the internet. You’re seeing those shoes because Facebook thinks you're in the market for shoes. But President Trump isn’t running a shoe store; still less than a year into his term, he's already running a reelection campaign. And when the president sends one subset of the population a message that the rest of the population can’t see—especially one that's at odds with reality—it feels like a fundamental failure of government transparency.

After years of largely avoiding regulation, businesses like Facebook, Google and Amazon are a focus of lawmakers, some of whom are criticizing the expanding power of big tech companies and their role in the 2016 election.

The attacks cover a smattering of issues as diverse as antitrust, privacy and public disclosure. They also come from both sides, from people like Stephen Bannon, President Trump’s former chief strategist, as well as Sen Elizabeth Warren (D-MA). Many of the issues, like revising antitrust laws, have a slim chance of producing new laws soon. But they have become popular talking points nonetheless, amplified by a series of missteps and disclosures by the companies. The companies, recognizing the new environment in Washington, have started to fortify their lobbying forces and recalibrate their positions.

A group of House and Senate Democrats are calling on the US government to issue new “guidance” to stop foreign advertisers from spending money on Facebook, Google and other web platforms in a bid to influence American elections.

Federal law already bars that sort of political spending, but lawmakers — including Rep. John Sarbanes (D-MD) and Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) — stress in a letter to the Federal Elections Commission that countries like Russia “have routinely deployed sophisticated tactics in making political expenditures to evade detection.” To that end, the Democrats are asking the FEC — which oversees campaign finance —to offer suggestions for how to crack down on “loopholes” that allow foreign entities to use “corporate or nonprofit designations to evade disclosure.” And they want to help tech companies harden their own platforms to prevent that spending in the first place.

For now, though, the Democrats are asking the watchdog agency to issue a timeline for action and respond to their questions no later than Oct. 4.

The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals will hear arguments in a Federal Trade Commission throttling case against AT&T that has major implications for the agency’s reach over telecommunications companies. An 11-judge panel is taking a second look at the case, which centers on whether a carve-out in the FTC’s jurisdiction for "common carriers" should be based on a company’s activities or its status. A three-judge panel from the court sided with AT&T in 2016 and knocked down the FTC’s case against the telecom giant, ruling that the agency did not have the authority to bring the lawsuit against the company because of its status as a common carrier. The FTC asked the court to re-hear the case, and got support from the Federal Communications Commission and internet service providers including Comcast, Charter, Cox Communications and Verizon.

Here is a nice summary article. 

Apparently, Alphabet’s Google has proposed overhauling its shopping search results so that rivals can bid for space to display products for sale, as part of the company's efforts to comply with the European Union’s antitrust order. Under the proposal, Google would bid against rivals to display products for sale in the space above its general search results, apparently. Google would set itself a price cap that it wouldn’t be able to bid above, but competitors could do so if they wished. Rival shopping sites have hit back, saying an auction-based remedy wouldn’t assuage the EU regulator’s demands that the company treat its competitors’ offerings and its own shopping service equally.