Digital Content

Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which says apps and websites aren’t legally liable for third-party content, has inspired a lot of overheated rhetoric in Congress. Republicans like Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) have successfully framed the rule as a “gift to Big Tech” that enables social media censorship. While Democrats have very different critiques, some have embraced a similar fire-and-brimstone tone with the bipartisan EARN IT Act.

After lawmakers collected hundreds of hours of interviews and obtained more than 1.3 million documents about Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google, their chief executives will testify before Congress on July 29 to defend their powerful businesses from the hammer of government. The captains of the New Gilded Age — Jeff Bezos of Amazon, Tim Cook of Apple, Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook and Sundar Pichai of Google — will appear together before Congress for the first time to justify their business pract

As Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) and his colleagues outlined their opening salvo for coronavirus relief, there was scant sign of tech priorities, no provisions to close the digital divide (even ones top Republicans had floated) and not even the GOP’s own proposed 

The rapid growth of large platforms has caused some activists, scholars, and political officials to worry about their impact on competition. Concern seems to be aimed at two issues. First, certain companies, such as Amazon, sell directly to customers but also run a platform that connects third-party suppliers to customers. Some people are concerned that platforms could compete unfairly by using data about sales by third-party sellers to decide whether to develop and sell competing products. Second, because of network effects, many platform markets have one or two dominant players.

In response to Twitter’s decision to label one of the President’s tweets misleading, the Trump White House issued an executive order to limit Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act via agency rulemaking. In the Order, President Donald Trump calls for the Federal Communications Commission to “interpret” Section 230 in a manner that curtails websites’ ability to remove and restrict user speech. This article analyzes the Order and concludes that this effort will fail. First, the FCC does not have rulemaking authority to issue the proposed rules.

The European Union's top court threw a large portion of transatlantic digital commerce into disarray, ruling that data of EU residents is not sufficiently protected from government surveillance when it is transferred to the United States. The European Court of Justice ruled that a commonly-used data protection agreement known as Privacy Shield did not adequately uphold EU privacy law. US security authorities have far-reaching access to personal data stored on US territory that “are not circumscribed” in a way that is equivalent to EU rules, the court ruled. The court said that it was

An appropriations bill that would fund the Federal Communications Commission and Federal Trade Commission includes language that would limit President Donald Trump's effort to regulate social media, as well as provide billions to help better identify and close the digital divide, and use secure technology to do so. The bill, which includes funding for a number of agencies and programs, has $67,040,000,000 in "emergency infrastructure investments to respond to the economic collapse related to the coronavirus," most of which ($61,040,000,000) would go to pay for expanding broadband in unserve

When choosing the best video clips to promote from around the web, Alphabet’s Google gives a secret advantage to one source in particular: itself. Or, more specifically, YouTube. Google executives in recent years made decisions to prioritize YouTube on the first page of search results, in part to drive traffic to YouTube rather than to competitors, and also to give YouTube more leverage in business deals with content providers seeking traffic for their videos. A Google spokeswoman, Lara Levin, said there is no preference given to YouTube or any other video provider in Google search.

After turning the data-usage meter off for the last three months of the pandemic quarantine period, Comcast has restored its limit on residential broadband usage for most customers. But Comcast will now allow subscribers to use 1.2 terabytes of data before it imposes additional charges, as opposed to the pre-pandemic limit of 1 TB. The limit was imposed July 1. Comcast said it will now allow users to exceed the limit during one month without charges — it was previously offering two months’ worth of mulligans.

It appears the US Justice Department and a group of state attorneys general likely will file antitrust lawsuits against Alphabet Inc.’s Google for an array of anti-competitive practices in its search and