New York Times

A blindness to boundaries is not uncommon for Silicon Valley entrepreneurs. But in Travis Kalanick, that led to a pattern of repeatedly going too far at Uber, including the duplicity with Apple, sabotaging competitors and allowing the company to use a secret tool called Greyball to trick some law enforcement agencies. To develop its own business, Uber sidestepped the authorities. Some employees started using a tool called Greyball to deceive officials trying to shut down Uber’s service. The tool, developed to aid driver safety and to trick fraudsters, essentially showed a fake version of Uber’s app to some people to disguise the locations of cars and drivers. It soon became a way for Uber drivers to evade capture by law enforcement in places where the service was deemed illegal.

Uber engineers assigned a persistent identity to iPhones with a small piece of code, a practice called “fingerprinting.” Uber could then identify an iPhone and prevent itself from being fooled even after the device was erased of its contents. There was one problem: Fingerprinting iPhones broke Apple’s rules. Apple CEO Tim Cook believed that wiping an iPhone should ensure that no trace of the owner’s identity remained on the device. So Kalanick told his engineers to “geofence” Apple’s headquarters in Cupertino (CA) a way to digitally identify people reviewing Uber’s software in a specific location. Uber would then obfuscate its code for people within that geofenced area, essentially drawing a digital lasso around those it wanted to keep in the dark. Apple employees at its headquarters were unable to see Uber’s fingerprinting.

[Commentary] Could it be that large tech companies — and Google in particular — have become natural monopolies by supplying an entire market’s demand for a service, at a price lower than what would be offered by two competing firms? And if so, is it time to regulate them like public utilities? Consider a historical analogy: the early days of telecommunications....

We are going to have to decide fairly soon whether Google, Facebook and Amazon are the kinds of natural monopolies that need to be regulated, or whether we allow the status quo to continue, pretending that unfettered monoliths don’t inflict damage on our privacy and democracy.

[Jonathan Taplin is the director emeritus of the University of Southern California’s Annenberg Innovation Lab ]

Trump’s anti-media Twitter posts still serve as reminders of his campaign vows to “open” libel laws, his veiled threats to punish corporate owners of news organizations whose coverage he does not like and his occasional calls for leak investigations. They took on a more ominous tone as the Justice Department began considering whether to bring a case against WikiLeaks that the Obama administration decided against pursuing, fearing it would start a trend of prosecuting news organizations and criminalizing journalism.

If the Trump administration decides it has no such qualms, then the president’s tweets just might wind up being journalism’s great insurance policy. His Twitter trail could be a gift to lawyers for the news industry during leak investigations into articles that made the president mad enough to pick up his Android and tap, Tap, TAP! It could provide great grist for legal arguments that the investigations are less about prosecuting damaging leaks than they are about punishing journalists. That, at least, is the view of Floyd Abrams, the titan of free speech jurisprudence. Abrams is seeking to re-educate the public about the thing that stands between it and, say, becoming Russia: the First Amendment.

In Washington (DC), AT&T has painted itself as an underdog that needs to merge with Time Warner in a blockbuster $85 billion deal to compete with powerful cable companies. But in several cities and states, AT&T’s actions send a different message.

In Nashville and Louisville, AT&T has sued to make it harder for rival broadband providers to use utility poles. In Missouri, Tennessee and North Carolina, the company has pushed for laws that block municipal broadband providers. In San Francisco, AT&T has fought efforts to open up apartment buildings to more internet service providers. In other words, AT&T has positioned itself as the incumbent telecommunications juggernaut that has acted to hamper competitors locally. With its giant deal with Time Warner under review at the Justice Department, AT&T’s contrasting federal and local actions are glaring. While AT&T’s two-sided messaging follows a strategy used by many big companies, any evidence that the telecom company thwarts local rivals could make the deal review tougher and invite costly conditions, telecom antitrust experts said — even though they still expect the acquisition to be approved.

Britain postponed on its regulatory review of 21st Century Fox’s proposal to take full control of the British satellite television giant Sky until after the country’s general election in June. The delay comes amid calls for British regulators to consider Fox’s handling of sexual harassment cases in the United States, which recently led the company to dismiss Bill O’Reilly, its highest-profile news anchor.

The regulator, the Office of Communications, commonly known as Ofcom, is reviewing the potential effects of a merger on media competitiveness and is testing whether the combined company would be “fit and proper” to hold a broadcasting license. The government cited the shifting political timetable as the reason for the delay.

Remember when federal regulators made rules that seemed tailored to benefit the technology industry? Not anymore. On April 20, the Federal Communications Commission is scheduled to take votes on two measures that would continue efforts to unwind rules created during the Obama administration. The first would make it easier for broadband providers to increase charges on other companies that connect to their networks. The second would ease the limit on how many stations a broadcast television company can own.

President Donald Trump recently signed a resolution to undo internet privacy rules that would have kept companies like AT&T and Comcast from selling users’ browsing histories and other personal data. Almost immediately, a number of states — among them Washington, Connecticut and Massachusetts — moved to pass new rules that would in effect replicate those nullified by Congress. But California, a pioneer of privacy protections, has so far been silent. That could soon change. Assemblyman Ed Chau, a Democrat who heads the Privacy and Consumer Protection Committee, said he was holding meetings on steps the Legislature could take to safeguard personal information.

Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai is taking the next steps to unwind Obama-era rules and other regulatory efforts that had restricted the abilities of telecommunication companies and broadcasters. With two items up for vote on April 20 that are expected to pass, Chairman Pai is carrying forward a swift Republican attack on telecom rules. The rollback will empower big telecom and media firms that have lobbied aggressively for deregulation, but consumer groups say it may also eventually put consumers at risk of higher prices and fewer options for services and media.

The two specific items to be voted on include a plan to make it easier for broadband providers to charge other businesses higher prices to connect to the main arteries of their networks. The action would clear the way for internet service providers like AT&T and CenturyLink to raise connection fees charged to hospitals, small businesses and wireless carriers in many markets where there is little or no competition for so-called backhaul broadband service. The other item up for vote is a move to ease the limit on how many stations a broadcast television company can own. The action is expected to invite more consolidation in that sector.

Bill O’Reilly has been forced out of his position as a prime-time host on Fox News, the company said on April 19, after the disclosure of multiple settlements involving sexual harassment allegations against him. His ouster brings an abrupt and embarrassing end to his two-decade reign as one of the most popular and influential commentators in television. “After a thorough and careful review of the allegations, the company and Bill O’Reilly have agreed that Bill O’Reilly will not be returning to the Fox News Channel,” 21st Century Fox, Fox News’s parent company, said in a statement.

O’Reilly’s departure comes two and a half weeks after an investigation by The New York Times revealed how Fox News and 21st Century Fox had repeatedly stood by O’Reilly even as sexual harassment allegations piled up against him. The Times found that the company and O’Reilly reached settlements with five women who had complained about sexual harassment or other inappropriate behavior by him. The agreements totaled about $13 million. Since then, more than 50 advertisers had abandoned his show, and women’s rights groups called for his ouster. Inside the company, women expressed outrage and questioned whether top executives were serious about maintaining a culture based on “trust and respect,” as they had promised last summer when another sexual harassment scandal forced the ouster of Fox News’s chairman, Roger Ailes.

Former Microsoft chief executive Steven Ballmer sought to “figure out what the government really does with the money. What really happens?” He plans to make public a database and a report that he and a small army of economists, professors and other professionals have been assembling as part of a stealth start-up over the last three years called USAFacts. The database is perhaps the first nonpartisan effort to create a fully integrated look at revenue and spending across federal, state and local governments. Ballmer calls it “the equivalent of a 10-K for government,” referring to the kind of annual filing that companies make. “You know, when I really wanted to understand in depth what a company was doing, Amazon or Apple, I’d get their 10-K and read it,” he said. “It’s wonky, it’s this, it’s that, but it’s the greatest depth you’re going to get, and it’s accurate.”