November 2018

The Department of Justice announced that it has reached a settlement with six broadcast television companies — Sinclair, Raycom Media, Tribune Media Company, Meredith Corporation, Griffin Communications, and Dreamcatcher Broadcasting — to resolve a DOJ lawsuit alleging that the companies engaged in unlawful agreements to share non-public competitively sensitive information with their broadcast television competitors. “The unlawful exchange of competitively sensitive information allowed these television broadcast companies to disrupt the normal competitive process of spot advertising in mark

Sens Ed Markey (D-MA), Tom Udall (D-NM), and Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) called on the Federal Trade Commission to launch an investigation into new evidence of manipulative marketing practices in apps directed at children. A new study recently published in the Journal of Developmental & Behavioral Pediatrics reveals numerous instances of children’s games using advertising techniques that appear to constitute unfair and deceptive practices under Section V of the FTC Act.

The Federal Communications Commission just gave the wireless infrastructure effort a lift by streamlining the rules for deploying small cells. I found last week’s editorial by the mayor of San Jose (CA) quite odd. Mayor Sam Liccardo argued that the new FCC rules to encourage faster deployment are an industry effort to “usurp control over these coveted public assets and utilize publicly owned streetlight poles for their own profit, not the public benefit.” But the new streamlining rules do no such thing. Public rights of way will still be public.