Tom Simonite

The new fervor for tech antitrust has so far overlooked an equally obvious target: US broadband providers. “If you want to talk about a history of using gatekeeper power to harm competitors, there are few better examples,” says Benton Senior Fellow and Public Advocate Gigi Sohn. Sohn and other critics of the four companies that dominate US broadband—Verizon, Comcast, Charter Communications, and AT&T—argue that antitrust intervention has been needed for years to lower prices and widen internet access.

The US Digital Service emerged from the technological and political meltdown of the 2013 launch of healthcare.gov. After a squad of Silicon Valley techies descended to fix the site, President Barack Obama created USDS to get tech workers helping other parts of government. Under President Obama, the group’s missions included speeding immigration processes, and expediting the acceptance of refugees. Under President Donald Trump, the unit’s current leader, Matt Cutts, admits that he’s less likely to highlight those projects.

Police departments pay Amazon to use facial-recognition technology the company says can “identify persons of interest against a collection of millions of faces in real-time.”  More than two dozen nonprofits wrote to Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos to ask that he stop selling the technology to police, after the ACLU of Northern California revealed documents to shine light on the sales.