New York Times

When it comes to Europe’s lengthy investigations into Google, Margrethe Vestager, the region’s competition chief, is hoping that the third time’s a charm. Vestager announced a new round of antitrust charges against the company — the third set since early 2015 — claiming that some of the company’s advertising products had restricted consumer choice. The efforts are part of her continuing push to rein in Google’s activities in the European Union, where the Silicon Valley company has captured roughly 90 percent of the region’s online search market.

“Google’s conduct, based on our evidence, is harmful to consumers,” she said. “Google’s magnificent innovations don’t give it the right to deny competitors the chance to innovate.” The announcement represents a setback for Google, which vigorously denied any wrongdoing in two previous European antitrust charges linked to Android, its popular mobile operating system, and some of its dominant online search services. It also comes at a difficult time for Europe’s competition authorities, which have been unable to land a knockout punch against Google’s perceived abusive activities in the region, despite investigations that date back to 2010. The stakes are high. Google could face fines of up to 10 percent, or about $7 billion, of its global annual revenue if it is found to have broken Europe’s tough competition rules.

An executive with NBCUniversal said he had been denied entry into Russia and detained for several hours July 13, raising the prospect that a growing spy and diplomatic confrontation could now be tipping into the world of business. The executive, Jeff Shell, who oversees the motion picture unit, said he was traveling to Russia on business when he was detained briefly and ordered out of the country. Shell said NBCUniversal had a movie operation in the country. He is also the chairman of the Broadcasting Board of Governors, the federal agency that oversees Voice of America, Radio Free Europe and other government broadcasters that are not well liked in the Kremlin.

Shell said he had arrived in Moscow around 11:30 pm and was making his way through immigration when he was pulled out of the line. “I was then taken to a small room and left alone for about a half-hour before someone came back with a document in Russian that they wanted me to sign,” he said. Shell said he refused, telling the Russian authorities that he would not sign something he did not understand. He said he was then given a translation of the document, which explained that he had been barred from the country. He said he was then escorted to another room at the airport and that he was locked inside for nearly three hours, until a flight to Amsterdam was arranged.

Cable news has functioned as the harrowing background soundtrack to much of 2015 and 2016. In covering terrorist attacks, protests against the police and a presidential election whose daily antics seem tailor-made for the overheated ethos of cable, Fox News, CNN and MSNBC have all won huge increases in viewership. But as they say on cable, we’ve just gotten word of some breaking news — and it’s not pretty.

Recently, the biggest story in the country was dominated by live-streaming apps made by Facebook and Twitter. Historians of television news often cite the 1991 Gulf War as the breakthrough moment for cable — a conflict that proved there was a market for round-the-clock coverage of the sort that CNN was offering. For most humans, the recent police shootings, the subsequent protests and the mass assassination of police officers in Dallas (TX) were a tragic commentary on modern American race relations. But for that subspecies of humans known as television executives, the events might also have functioned as an alarming peek at a radically altered future. What we saw was live streaming’s Gulf War, a moment that will catapult the technology into the center of the news — and will begin to inexorably alter much of television news as we know it. And that’s not a bad thing. Though it will shake up the economics of TV, live streaming is opening up a much more compelling way to watch the news.

A look at the long decline of competition in many American industries. It is a decline that stunts entrepreneurship, hinders workers’ mobility and slows productivity growth. Slowing this trend has emerged as a tempting new avenue to address the plight of a beleaguered working class. Reviving flagging American competition might even help stop America’s ever-widening inequality.

In April, President Barack Obama issued an executive order calling on government agencies to look for ways to bolster competition in the industries they monitor. Hillary Clinton drew competition into the campaign trail, chastising dominant corporations for “using their power to raise prices, limit choices for consumers, lower wages for workers and hold back competition from start-ups and small businesses.” And Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) made headlines last month when she called for antitrust agencies to crack down on Silicon Valley powers like Apple, Facebook and Google. Monopoly rents — the excess returns a company reaps when it does not have to deal with pesky competitors keeping prices down — could worsen inequality in a variety of ways. Joseph Stiglitz, the Nobel laureate from Columbia University who served as top economic adviser to President Bill Clinton, has asserted that exorbitant corporate profits are being run up through oligopolies and passed along to stockholders, raising the share of national income accruing to the rich.

John Brademas, a political, financial and academic dynamo who served 22 years in Congress and more than a decade as president of New York University in an all-but-seamless quest to promote education, the arts and a liberal agenda, died on July 11 in Manhattan. He was 89. His death was announced by NYU.

Brademas liked to say that being a university president was not much different from being a congressman: You shake hands, make speeches, remember names and faces, stump for a cause and raise money relentlessly. The difference, he said, is that you do not have to depend on voters to renew your contract every two years. As a Democratic representative from Indiana from 1959 to 1981, Brademas became known as Mr. Education and Mr. Arts. He sponsored bills that nearly doubled federal aid for elementary and secondary education in the mid-1960s and that created the National Endowment for the Arts and Humanities. He was also instrumental in annual financing of the arts and humanities and in the passage of Project Head Start, the National Teachers Corps and college tuition aid and loan programs.

[Brademas served on the Board of Directors of the Benton Foundation from 1981 through 1992]

Late on July 7, when sniper fire rang out across downtown Dallas (TX), a bystander, Michael Kevin Bautista, used his smartphone to stream the events in real time on Facebook Live. Within the hour, CNN was rebroadcasting the footage. The day before, Diamond Reynolds streamed on Facebook Live after local police in Falcon Heights (MN) shot her boyfriend, Philando Castile, ratcheting up a controversy surrounding how police officers treat African-Americans. The two real-time videos catapulted Facebook, in the span of 48 hours, into a spot as the prime forum for live events and breaking news. It is a position that the company has long jockeyed to be in as it seeks to keep its 1.65 billion members ever more engaged. Yet the brutal nature of the events that appeared on Facebook Live also put the company in a tricky situation.

Facebook is confronting complexities with live videos that it may not have anticipated just a few months ago, when the streaming service was dominated by lighter fare such as a Buzzfeed video of an exploding watermelon. Now Facebook must navigate when, if at all, to draw the line if a live video is too graphic, and weigh whether pulling such content is in the company’s best interests if the video is newsworthy.

In 2014, Messenger, a photo and text messaging service, appeared to be almost an afterthought at Facebook, the social networking giant. Messenger often took a back seat to the limelight enjoyed by WhatsApp, the messaging app that Facebook had bought for $19 billion. And Messenger’s capabilities were so limited that you could not send friends an animated GIF of a dancing Shiba Inu, as you could with many other messaging services. But since mid-2014, Facebook has been playing a furious game of catch-up with Messenger.

That June, Facebook’s chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, hired a PayPal executive, David Marcus, to take over Messenger and build it into a world-class competitor. The company has added a string of features to the service, including letting people send money to friends through the app, pull up a voice or video call, or order a private car from inside the app. On July 8, Facebook said it will also begin testing “secret conversations” inside Messenger, a feature that offers end-to-end encryption on some messages to be read only on the two mobile devices that users are communicating with. While it stops short of the full encryption that other messaging services like WhatsApp have adopted, it gives Messenger a heightened mode of security that Facebook hopes will attract global audiences to download the app.

Traditional media companies have struggled for years to adapt to a digital world, but the pressure on black-owned media has been even more acute. Many are smaller and lack the financial resources to compete in an increasingly consolidated media landscape. Advertisers have turned away from black-oriented media, owners say, under the belief that they can now reach minorities in other ways. Since well before the Civil War, publications and, more recently, radio and television stations owned and operated by African-Americans have provided an important counterweight to mass market media, simultaneously celebrating and shaping black culture — from politics and government to fashion and music. But as financial resources dwindle, black-owned media companies are struggling to maintain their presence.

Wael Ghonim’s anonymous Facebook page helped start a revolution in Egypt. Here is what he concluded about social media today

[Commentary] A fridge that puts milk on your shopping list when you run low. A safe that tallies the cash that is placed in it. A sniper rifle equipped with advanced computer technology for improved accuracy. A car that lets you stream music from the Internet. All of these innovations sound great, until you learn the risks that this type of connectivity carries. The early Internet was intended to connect people who already trusted one another, like academic researchers or military networks. It never had the robust security that today’s global network needs. As the Internet went from a few thousand users to more than three billion, attempts to strengthen security were stymied because of cost, shortsightedness and competing interests. Connecting everyday objects to this shaky, insecure base will create the Internet of Hacked Things. This is irresponsible and potentially catastrophic. It may be hard to fix security on the digital Internet, but the Internet of Things should not be built on this faulty foundation. Responding to digital threats by patching only exposed vulnerabilities is giving just aspirin to a very ill patient. It isn’t hopeless. We can make programs more reliable and databases more secure. Critical functions on Internet-connected objects should be isolated and external audits mandated to catch problems early. But this will require an initial investment to forestall future problems — the exact opposite of the current corporate impulse. It also may be that not everything needs to be networked, and that the trade-off in vulnerability isn’t worth it. [Tufekci is an assistant professor at the School of Information and Library Science at the University of North Carolina]