Wall Street Journal

The US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit rejected the Justice Department’s bid to roll back AT&T’s 2018 acquisition of entertainment company Time Warner, a second defeat for government antitrust enforcers who sought to sink the $80 billion-plus deal. A three-judge panel of the appeals court affirmed a trial judge’s ruling in June that found the deal was unlikely to harm competition. Justice Department lawyers have argued that the combination of the two companies would reduce competition and hurt consumers.

Millions of smartphone users confess their most intimate secrets to apps, including when they want to work on their belly fat or the price of the house they checked out last weekend. Unbeknown to most people, in many cases that data is being shared with someone else: Facebook. The social-media giant collects intensely personal information from many popular smartphone apps just seconds after users enter it, even if the user has no connection to Facebook.

AT&T plans to stop providing service to devices that use third-generation wireless technology in early 2022 as it makes room for more powerful standards. The decision follows rival Verizon Communications' warning that it will disconnect old 3G cellphones at the end of 2019. The companies are driven by necessity. Cellphone users with unlimited data plans stream more video on the go, testing the limits of what service providers can handle. Getting customers off 3G allows carriers to free up wireless frequencies for 4G signals over broader swaths of the radio spectrum.

British Members of Parliament have called for a regulator to police content on social media sites, financed by a new levy on tech companies, and an inquiry into the effect of disinformation on past electoral contests. Concluding an 18-month long investigation into “fake news”, disinformation and political campaigns, the House of Commons Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee also accused Facebook of “intentionally and knowingly” violating data privacy laws and said it should be the subject of a probe by the competition and data watchdogs.

Businesses with websites that can’t be navigated by the blind are getting pummeled with lawsuits. The new frontier in federal disability litigation has accelerated dramatically in recent years, with some companies now getting hit by lawsuits for the second or third time even after they’ve reached settlements to upgrade their sites. The complaints typically detail roadblocks that visually impaired individuals face when using “screen reader” tools that read the contents of a website aloud. The lawsuits often seek improvements to websites to ensure the technology functions.