Bloomberg

Sprint is unable to recover from crippling losses and has told regulators its purchase by T-Mobile would set up a stronger competitor to wireless leaders AT&T and Verizon. Customers are fleeing the smallest of the big four US nationwide providers at an increasing rate, Sprint told the Federal Communications Commission in a Sept. 21 meeting. Revenue is dropping and the company can’t cut much more after eliminating about $10 billion in annual costs.

The New York Times is suing the Federal Communications Commission for records the newspaper alleges may reveal possible Russian government interference in a public comment period before the commission rolled back Obama-era network neutrality rules. The plaintiffs, including Times reporter Nicholas Confessore and investigations editor Gabriel Dance, filed in the US District Court for the Southern District of New York Sept 20 under the Freedom of Information Act, seeking to compel the commission to hand over data.

Marc Benioff, the billionaire co-founder of software maker Salesforce.com Inc., is making a play to project his influence far beyond Silicon Valley with the purchase of Time magazine. The 53-year-old entrepreneur and his wife, Lynne, agreed to pay $190 million in cash to Meredith Corp. for the venerable but struggling print publication, stoking comparisons to Amazon’s Jeff Bezos and his $250 million acquisition of the Washington Post in 2013.

Microsoft is calling on governments to follow a set of principles for cross-border data access policies, including independent judicial review and dispute resolution mechanisms. Microsoft’s Sept. 11 call for law enforcement data access standards follows the European Commission’s introduction recently of proposed e-evidence legislation. In March, Congress passed legislation governing how U.S. law enforcement can access data overseas.

Washington officials once dazzled by the swashbuckling entrepreneurs of Silicon Valley are now openly questioning the freedom they’ve bestowed on Facebook, Twitter, and Google. Emboldened by a president who’s openly contemptuous of the companies -- despite his own reliance on Twitter -- and intelligence reports linking popular online sites to election interference, lawmakers from both parties grilled top tech executives this week about whether, and how, Washington should rein them in. 

If privacy is truly a thing of the past, then people should at least profit off their own personal information, says data rights advocate Brittany Kaiser. “The digital assets that you produce every day are your own human value.