Digital Content

PBS has secured carriage for its member stations on YouTube TV’s live TV and on-demand subscription service. Launching later in 2019, YouTube TV will livestream all PBS member stations that choose to participate.This is the first digital partnership of its kind for PBS and represents an important step as PBS expands its digital footprint to engage viewers where, when and how they consume content. In addition to the live channels for PBS and PBS KIDS, YouTube TV subscribers can access this content through YouTube TV’s VOD service and its DVR service with no storage space limits.

President Donald Trump promised to take “substantial reciprocal action” against France after the nation’s President Emmanuel Macron signed into law a tax on American tech giants. “France just put a digital tax on our great American technology companies,” President Trump said on Twitter. “If anybody taxes them, it should be their home Country, the USA. We will announce a substantial reciprocal action on Macron’s foolishness shortly. I’ve always said American wine is better than French wine!”

I worked with a fairly small group of early-stage internet policy wonks and helped create many of the basic rules that still govern the internet today. We missed a lot — a lot that turns out to have been important. 

Apparently, the  Federal Trade Commission opened an investigation into Facebook for possible antitrust violations, an early-stage probe that is examining competition in its oldest business -- social media. The agency has already contacted third parties that could aid in the investigation as it tries to understand competitive dynamics. Though the company has made many acquisitions and expanded into new businesses, including messaging, virtual reality and e-commerce, the FTC’s probe is focused on its most long-standing offering -- social networking.

After right-wing influencers and online provocateurs flocked to the White House for a summit on how they’d been suppressed across social media, a remarkable thing happened: Their social media audiences soared. 15 of the event’s invitees have seen their Twitter audiences grow by a combined 197,000 followers — a 75 percent jump over the number of followers they’d gained in the same time span before the event. On July 24, they put that new reach to good use, mobilizing on social media against the testimony of former special counsel Robert S.

Apple’s mobile apps routinely appear first in search results ahead of competitors in its App Store, a powerful advantage that skirts some of the company’s rules on such rankings. The company’s apps ranked first in more than 60% of basic searches, such as for “maps,” the analysis showed. Apple apps that generate revenue through subscriptions or sales, like Music or Books, showed up first in 95% of searches related to those apps. This dominance gives the company an upper hand in a marketplace that generates $50 billion in annual spending.

We should view user data as a public resource, akin to the broadcast spectrum. The spectrum broadcasters use is “owned by the people.” It is governed so as to assure that the select few who have the privilege to access the spectrum serve the public interest. User data, in its aggregate form, can — and should — be treated similarly, as a public resource. Just as broadcasters built their businesses on the collectively owned spectrum, social media platforms built their businesses on our data, data that are best thought of as being collectively owned.

Americans have complicated views about the role social media companies should play in removing offensive content from their platforms. A sizable majority of U.S. adults (66%) say social media companies have a responsibility to remove offensive content from their platforms, but just 31% have a great deal or fair amount of confidence in these companies to determine what offensive content should be removed.

While the White House created its hotline for social media bias tips, frustrated consumers had already turned to the Federal Communications Commission to lodge grievances about online platforms — despite the agency’s lack of jurisdiction over tech companies. Since 2018, more than 100 people filed complaints alleging bias or censorship from Facebook, Twitter or Google. The bulk of the complaints were aimed at Facebook and Twitter from self-identified conservatives, although some also complained about Google and YouTube.