Hill, The

Lawmakers are working through the August recess to cobble together legislation on data privacy after missing a deadline they set to unveil a bill before the summer break. Advocates for a federal data privacy standard are feeling a time crunch as they fret over the limited number of days left in this session and the upcoming 2020 elections. Most importantly, CA's strict new privacy law is slated to take effect in Jan, raising the stakes for lawmakers who were hoping to pass a federal law before the stringent state-level rules go into place.

The $26 billion T-Mobile–Sprint deal faces one last major hurdle as a group of state attorneys general look to block the telecommunications mega-merger in court. “The state attorney general lawsuit has a lot of legal and factual merit,” said Sen Richard Blumenthal (D-CT), a former state attorney general who has been critical of the T-Mobile–Sprint deal. “No one can predict what the outcome in courts is going to be, but they have a lot going for them,” he added. The group of 13 attorneys general, along with Washington (DC), are moving forward with their litigation to block the merger, which

I worked with a fairly small group of early-stage internet policy wonks and helped create many of the basic rules that still govern the internet today. We missed a lot — a lot that turns out to have been important.