Politico

As the Senate geared up to pass its defense policy bill, the office of Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) unsuccessfully pushed to add language that would require that a provision mandating Pentagon-led test beds to examine sharing 5G airwaves come with a requirement that the government “solicit and consider the input of commercial wireless service providers, equipment manufacturers, and firms developing and operating spectrum sharing technologies” as part of planning. 

Senior Trump administration officials met to discuss whether to seek legislation prohibiting tech companies from using forms of encryption that law enforcement can’t break — a provocative step that would reopen a long-running feud between federal authorities and Silicon Valley. The encryption challenge, which the government calls “going dark,” was the focus of a National Security Council meeting. Apparently, senior officials debated whether to ask Congress to effectively outlaw end-to-end encryption, which scrambles data so that only its sender and recipient can read it.

As the House prepares to take up funding legislation for departments including Commerce and Agriculture, lawmakers are attempting to hitch provisions tackling facial recognition tech, broadband mapping, and 5G. One Republican amendment would slate $90 million for Department of Agriculture to use on broadband buildout in unserved areas. Another would boost f

Sen Josh Hawley (R-MO) is poised to announce new legislation on Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. The measure is expected to focus on enforcement of Section 230, the legal liability shield that immunizes tech platforms from lawsuits over user-posted content. It would open the possibility of treating certain tech companies as publishers and therefore more liable for the content that shows up on their sites.

The go-to metric for antitrust enforcers has long been increasing prices. Critics, however, have begun to question whether that approach needs an update, given that tech giants like Google and Facebook offer free services. And this week, some of the nation’s leading antitrust enforcers made clear they’re willing to take a broader view. Justice Department antitrust chief Makan Delrahim said his office will consider factors like privacy violations or free speech restrictions as signs that product quality and market competition have deteriorated.

A small liberal think tank has spent years urging Washington to crack down on the United States’ biggest tech companies — a lonely crusade that barely registered with the political establishment. Now the Open Markets Institute has become one of the most influential drivers of Democratic politics in the fight to rein in Facebook, Amazon and Google, seeing its ideas embraced by Elizabeth Warren and forcing presidential candidates like Bernie Sanders, Cory Booker and Joe Biden to take a side.

The newspaper industry has crawled up Capitol Hill once again to beg for an antitrust exemption it believes would give the business needed in its fight with Google and Facebook for advertising dollars. Currently, Google and Facebook collect 73 percent of all digital advertising. Members of the news industry believe that the two tech giants have exploited their dominance of the Web to unfairly collect digital dollars that rightfully belong to them.

The Federal Trade Commission has sent top antitrust officials into the heart of Silicon Valley to seek out complaints about anti-competitive behavior, an unusual move that offers yet another hint about the government’s growing interest in policing the industry's giants. The weeklong tour included private meetings between leaders of the FTC's new technology task force and more than a dozen industry players to discuss the state of their businesses and market competition challenges, apparently.

Two House lawmakers looking to craft a consensus data privacy bill found themselves on opposite sides of an emerging debate: whether legislation should create a new privacy division at the Federal Trade Commission. Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-IL), who heads the House Commerce Committee's Consumer Protection Subcommittee, said she’ll pursue that option.