Ownership

Rarely has President Donald Trump waged such a sustained campaign against a single entity as he has with recent broadsides against The Washington Post. Over the past week, Trump has repeatedly tweeted about the Post, its owner Jeff Bezos, and Amazon, the company that made Bezos his fortune. Bezos has remained silent and leadership at the Post restrained in the the face of the criticism, but April 5 the paper published a long story exploring the president’s charges and rebutting them at every turn.

On March 23, 2018, President Donald Trump signed H.R. 1625, Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2018. H.R. 1625's 2,232 pages make for a great read, but if you're looking for just the telecommunications policy highlights, let's thumb through straight to Division P, the Repack Airwaves Yielding Better Access for Users of Modern Services Act of 2018 or the RAY BAUM’S Act of 2018 which reauthorizes the Federal Communications Commission and does a whole bunch more. The bill completes a process began three years ago.

President Donald Trump’s decision in recent days to zero in on Jeff Bezos and Amazon.com as his latest Twitter targets has highlighted a severe fracture in American society, a divide between concrete and steel and zeros and ones, a split that is as much philosophical as it is economic, as much about the fraying of communities as it is about the shape of commerce.

When Zuckerberg was questioned about the company’s handling of user data and how it essentially handed it off to third parties, he demurred. “For some reason, we haven’t been able to kick this notion, for years, that people think that we sell data to advertisers,” said Zuckerberg. “We don’t.”

For years, Congress and federal regulators have allowed the world’s largest social network to police itself — with disastrous results. Here are four promising reforms under discussion in Washington: 

1. Impose Fines for Data Breaches
2. Police Political Advertising
3. Make Tech Companies Liable for Objectionable Content
4. Install Ethics Review Boards

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.

The Facebook data of up to 87 million people – 37 million more than previously reported – may have been improperly shared with Cambridge Analytica, the company has revealed. This larger figure was buried in the penultimate paragraph of a blogpost by the company’s chief technology officer, Mike Schroepfer, published April 4, which also provided updates on the changes Facebook was making to better protect user information.

In Dec 2016, shortly after the US presidential election, Facebook and five US news and fact-checking organizations—ABC News, Associated Press, FactCheck.org, PolitiFact, and Snopes—entered a partnership to combat misinformation. Variously seen as a public relations stunt, a new type of collaboration, or an unavoidable coupling of organizations through circumstances beyond either’s exclusive control, the partnership emerged as a key example of platform-publisher collaboration.

Comcast, Charter, and Cox have teamed up with ad sales company NCC Media to form a new division within NCC to design, deploy and sell unified advertising solutions across the country to participating NCC partners. The group will use non-personally identifying data and targeting capabilities to create advanced advertising products and will launch later in 2018. NCC is jointly owned by Comcast, Charter and Cox and provides national, regional and local marketers with advertising solutions that allow them reach consumers via TV programming and targeted online content on every screen.

Alliances between Silicon Valley powerhouses and their cousins in Seattle (WA) are constantly forming and breaking apart, with big names often coming down on the opposite side of policy and legislative debates. The result is that the “tech lobby” is far from monolithic, with big names in the industry often at odds with one another.