Court case

The Supreme Court announced that it would not decide whether federal prosecutors can force Microsoft to turn over digital data stored outside the United States. The move followed arguments in the case in February and the enactment of a new federal law that both sides said made the case moot.

On April 12th, the Irish High Court elevated a series of questions to the European Court of Justice (ECJ, the Supreme Court of the European Union) regarding the validity of key legal instruments used by American tech companies to process Europeans’ personal data. Judge Caroline Costello of the Irish High Court is concerned about the national surveillance practices of the United States and the level of privacy rights observed there.

Elizabeth Ann Pierce, the former chief executive of an Alaska telecommunications company, has been arrested after federal prosecutors accused her of forging contracts to induce firms to make more than $250 million in investments.

A businessman has won his legal action to remove search results about a criminal conviction in a landmark “right to be forgotten” case that could have wide-ranging repercussions. The ruling was made by Justice Warby in London. The judge rejected a similar claim brought by a second businessman who was jailed for a more serious offence. The claimant who lost, referred to only as NT1 for legal reasons, was convicted of conspiracy to account falsely in the late 1990s; the claimant who won, known as NT2, was convicted more than 10 years ago of conspiracy to intercept communications.

With the Justice Department's top antitrust attorney, Makan Delrahim, looking on from the government's table, AT&T's witness claimed that regulators' economic analysis of the Time Warner deal is "theoretically unsound" and riddled with inaccurate assumptions. "The evidence doesn't support the government's claim that this transaction will harm consumers," said Dennis Carlton, an economist from the University of Chicago's Booth School of Business.

Economist Carl Shapiro said his analysis of AT&T's purchase of Time Warner shows that US consumers could together pay an additional $571 million in the year 2021 if the deal is approved.

"The merger will in fact harm consumers and the harm is significant in terms of the dollar amount," Shapiro testified.

[Commentary] Recently, US District Judge Richard Leon raised the question of whether an arbitration condition would be enough to address the potential harms from the AT&T-Time Warner merger. This proposal would create a mechanism where both sides in a fee dispute concerning Time Warner programming would present a rate to a third-party arbitrator, who would pick the one that was more reasonable. AT&T-Time Warner would not be permitted to take channels off the air and cut the distributor off from its content during the arbitration process.

In the court case attempting to block AT&T's purchase of Time Warner, the Department of Justice is trying to prove that when you combine content assets like Time Warner’s programming with distribution assets like AT&T’s DirecTV, the company can force distributors to pay higher rates and favor its own operations over rivals. If the government’s argument succeeds, it will be bad news for a lot of media companies seeking to do deals. Comcast has particular reason to worry.

Gov Larry Hogan (R-MD) allegedly had a habit of blocking Facebook users and deleting comments when people criticized him, but a lawsuit has forced him to adopt a more open social media policy. Four Maryland residents sued the governor in a US District Court in August 2017, with help from the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Maryland. The ACLU announced that a settlement has been finalized, requiring Gov Hogan to implement a new social media policy within two weeks.