Ownership

Once one of President Trump’s most vocal opponents, Silicon Valley’s technology industry has increasingly found common ground with the White House. When President Trump was elected, tech executives were largely up in arms over a leader who espoused policies on immigration and other issues that were antithetical to their companies’ values. Now, many of the industry’s executives are growing more comfortable with the president and how his economic agenda furthers their business interests, even as many of their employees continue to disagree with President Trump on social issues.

Comcast would support a ban on paid prioritization as long as there is an exception for "specialized services" that benefit consumers, said Comcast senior executive VP David Cohen. Cohen's suggestion of a paid-prioritization ban with an exception for specialized services is similar to an early version of network neutrality rules that was passed in 2010 but thrown out in court in 2014.

Apple is revamping privacy controls for its devices and cloud services to comply with strict new European rules as Facebook faces a user privacy backlash. The iPhone maker said it will update its web page for managing Apple IDs in coming months to let users download a copy of all their data stored with the company. The site will also let customers correct personal information, temporarily deactivate their account, and completely delete it.

Facebook has a four-part plan to protect its platform from malicious attacks during the 2018 US midterm elections:

Federal officials sought to lay the groundwork March 29 for a key argument in its historic antitrust case against AT&T and Time Warner, attempting to show how the $85 billion megamerger could lead to sharp subscriber declines among AT&T's rivals in the TV business.

Sinclair Broadcast Group — a media company run by a family of multi-millionaire Republican donors — is on the cusp of owning enough local television stations to reach 70 percent of American households. On the day that Donald Trump was elected, it would have been all but impossible for any single broadcaster to claim that large a share of the local TV news market.

On March 27, the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit ruled in favor of Oracle, finding that Google may owe billions in damages. Nearly 7.5 years after the original lawsuit was filed, the case will now be sent back down to federal court in San Francisco to figure out how much Google should pay. "Google’s use of the Java API packages was not fair," the court ruled. In October 2016 when the case was appealed, after Oracle purchased Sun Microsystems and acquired the rights to Java, it sued Google in 2010. Oracle claimed that Google had infringed copyrights and patents related to Java.

[Speech] The main reason I am here and why I was pleased to accept the committee’s invitation to say a few words is to reinforce the importance of the Commission’s proceeding to create a small entity broadcaster incubator program.  Let me be abundantly clear: the lead proponent of this idea is the Chairman and I’ve been happy to support his work on the topic. We should all remember that the intent of an incubator program is to address the lackluster ownership of broadcaster station licenses by smaller entities, which includes women and minority groups. 

[Commentary] The problems at Facebook and others, real and perceived, at Google, Amazon and Apple have led to an easy consensus: The large technology companies should be regulated. Such an outcome would be a bad mistake — bad for the companies, of course, but also bad for us, their users, and bad for the country. I do not pretend to be unbiased in writing this. While I am about as tech-savvy as your average 72-year-old , I met Mark Zuckerberg when he was 20, and spent six years on Facebook’s board.

Amid sky-high cable bills, many TV viewers have sought to cut costs by firing their TV providers and switching to a relatively new crop of online alternatives offering fewer channels at a lower price. These “skinny bundles” are often streamed live over the Internet and on mobile devices, creating new experiences for TV fans. But that video revolution could be threatened if the government allows AT&T to buy Time Warner, according to one of America's first providers of live-streaming skinny bundles.