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Let me touch on a few Federal Communications Commission-related issues that may be relevant and hopefully of interest to you. Children’s Television Regulations: We worked with those on either side of the debate to come up with a new framework that  both preserves existing shows for those who watch—no matter how small the audience—and gives stations more flexibility in meeting their requirements, both of which reflect the priorities I laid out when we started this process. Pirate Radio: Expect the FCC to take advantage of new technology to better pinpoint violations.

In light of continued rapid changes in technology, the Federal Trade Commission is seeking comment on the effectiveness of the amendments the agency made to the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Rule (COPPA Rule) in 2013 and whether additional changes are needed.

Senate Judiciary Committee Ranking Member Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) reintroduced the Bot Disclosure and Accountability Act, a bill to require disclosure of information concerning online social media bots. The Bot Disclosure and Accountability Act authorizes the Federal Trade Commission to enforce transparency requirements on social media companies regarding the use of social media bots that replicate human activity online.

As American regulators and lawmakers intensify their scrutiny of Big Tech, there is a lot of discussion about whether or how they could accuse the companies of violating antitrust law.

Sens.

Perhaps the biggest news of the week was the agenda for the Federal Communications Commission's July 10 Open Meeting, which FCC Chairman Ajit Pai laid out in a blog post on June 18, 2019. I'm traveling to New York this week; below is a shorter-than-usual weekly that takes a look at how Chairman Pai plans to take education out of the Educational Broadband Service -- and broadcast television.

The Department of Justice has reached settlements with CBS, Cox, EW Scripps, Fox, and TEGNA Inc. to resolve a Department lawsuit brought as part of its ongoing investigation into exchanges of competitively sensitive information in the broadcast television industry. All five companies are alleged to have engaged in unlawful information sharing among their owned broadcast television stations. Cox also owns Cox Reps, one of two large “Rep Firms” in the industry that assist broadcast stations in sales to national advertisers.

Google has been treating Beto O'Rourke's campaign ads as if they weren’t political content, raising questions over whether Google is capable of keeping its already anemic promise of transparency for political ads. Google has promised to put ads it receives from candidates for US federal political offices in its political ad archive, for transparency’s sake. But the Beto ads were missing from the archive. Google’s own rules don’t allow any political content in Gmail ads, but Beto’s campaign ads kept showing up there.

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.

$4.7 billion is the amount that Google made from the work of news publishers in 2018 via search and Google News, according to a study by the News Media Alliance. That $4.7 billion is nearly as much as the $5.1 billion brought in by the United States news industry as a whole from digital advertising in 2018 — and the News Media Alliance cautioned that its estimate for Google’s income was conservative. For one thing, it does not count the value of the personal data the company collects on consumers every time they click on an article like this one.