Ownership

For years, Congress and federal regulators have allowed the world’s largest social network to police itself — with disastrous results. Here are four promising reforms under discussion in Washington: 

1. Impose Fines for Data Breaches
2. Police Political Advertising
3. Make Tech Companies Liable for Objectionable Content
4. Install Ethics Review Boards

In the court case attempting to block AT&T's purchase of Time Warner, the Department of Justice is trying to prove that when you combine content assets like Time Warner’s programming with distribution assets like AT&T’s DirecTV, the company can force distributors to pay higher rates and favor its own operations over rivals. If the government’s argument succeeds, it will be bad news for a lot of media companies seeking to do deals. Comcast has particular reason to worry.

The Facebook data of up to 87 million people – 37 million more than previously reported – may have been improperly shared with Cambridge Analytica, the company has revealed. This larger figure was buried in the penultimate paragraph of a blogpost by the company’s chief technology officer, Mike Schroepfer, published April 4, which also provided updates on the changes Facebook was making to better protect user information.

In Dec 2016, shortly after the US presidential election, Facebook and five US news and fact-checking organizations—ABC News, Associated Press, FactCheck.org, PolitiFact, and Snopes—entered a partnership to combat misinformation. Variously seen as a public relations stunt, a new type of collaboration, or an unavoidable coupling of organizations through circumstances beyond either’s exclusive control, the partnership emerged as a key example of platform-publisher collaboration.

Comcast, Charter, and Cox have teamed up with ad sales company NCC Media to form a new division within NCC to design, deploy and sell unified advertising solutions across the country to participating NCC partners. The group will use non-personally identifying data and targeting capabilities to create advanced advertising products and will launch later in 2018. NCC is jointly owned by Comcast, Charter and Cox and provides national, regional and local marketers with advertising solutions that allow them reach consumers via TV programming and targeted online content on every screen.

Alliances between Silicon Valley powerhouses and their cousins in Seattle (WA) are constantly forming and breaking apart, with big names often coming down on the opposite side of policy and legislative debates. The result is that the “tech lobby” is far from monolithic, with big names in the industry often at odds with one another.

[Commentary] As we remember the 50th Anniversary of the silencing of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s dream; as we March for Our Lives to end the senseless violence that continues to silence the dreams of so many; and as we continue to fight for justice and equality in social, economic, and digital treatment; we urge the Federal Communications Commission to take its rightful place in history by mirroring Dr. King’s legacy of compassion, equality, and opportunity. A good start would be for the FCC to act on several imperatives that will help to close the digital divide:

President Donald Trump’s repeated Twitter attacks on Amazon have already dented the e-commerce giant’s stock price. But if he really wants to hammer the company and its ultra-billionaire CEO Jeff Bezos, the president has some tools at his disposal — using the government's spending and regulating powers. Here's a look at the threats the company may face if President Trump follows up his words with action:

1. Postal rates
2. Cloud computing
3. Antitrust
4. State-level scrutiny

Apparently CBS has made an offer to acquire Viacom and the bid is contingent on its management team being at the helm of the merged entity. The all-stock offer is below Viacom’s current market valuation of $12.5 billion. In its offer, CBS proposed that Chief Executive Leslie Moonves and President Joe Ianniello would run the combined company for the foreseeable future, which could make Viacom CEO Bob Bakish an odd man out. Both CBS and Viacom are controlled by media mogul Sumner Redstone’s holding company National Amusements, which has a nearly 80% voting stake in each firm.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said the social network had no immediate plans to apply a strict new European Union law on data privacy in its entirety to the rest of the world, as the company reels from a scandal over its handling of personal information of millions of its users. Zuckerberg sadi that Facebook already complies with many parts of the law ahead of its implementation in May. He said the company wanted to extend privacy guarantees worldwide in spirit, but would make exceptions, which he declined to describe.