Axios

Justice Department Antitrust Chief Makan Delrahim said that he doesn't think the Supreme Court's American Express ruling would make it more difficult to take on the biggest online platforms over competition concerns. 

The ripples of the Supreme Court ruling in favor of American Express could be felt on the West Coast, with some arguing it would make it harder for antitrust enforcers to take on big online platforms like Google, Facebook and Amazon. Many of tech’s most profitable firms have created two-sided markets: Google and Facebook serve consumers on one side and marketers on another. Uber links up riders and drivers. Amazon serves customers and also the merchants who use its platform. All these situations make defining a monopoly more difficult.

When people think about the challenge that Facebook and Twitter pose to our democracy, they don't often think about James Madison and the Federalist Papers. But perhaps they should, argues constitutional scholar Jeff Rosen. Rosen pointed to Madison's writings in No. 55 of the Federalist Papers in arguing against direct democracy. "In all very numerous assemblies, of whatever character composed, passion never fails to wrest the sceptre from reason.

The US is putting up relatively meager competition in a potent new global tech race that, combined with the wave of go-it-alone nationalism led by President Donald Trump, is reshaping global politics and may lead to war, according to a major new report.  In the late 1950s, the US, facing a similar momentous challenge in Sputnik, threw all its resources into a single-minded effort to dominate the future.

For tech executives, the Trump administration's child separation policy provided a moment of clarity when the choice to speak out was relatively easy. But after Trump's executive order, companies were once again struggling to figure out how to respond.