Ownership

[Commentary] The Mueller investigation of Russian efforts to influence the 2016 presidential election is shining a welcome light on the Kremlin’s covert activity, but there is no similar effort to shine a light on the social media algorithms that helped the Russians spread their messages. There needs to be. This effort should begin by “opening up” the results of the algorithms.  The government should require social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter to use a similar open application programming interface.

A federal judge has ruled against AT&T in its effort to force the Justice Department to reveal whether President Donald Trump inappropriately interfered with a regulatory review of the telecommunication company's $85 billion Time Warner merger.  The ruling from Judge Richard Leon rejects AT&T's argument that the government has singled out the company for special scrutiny. The move blocks an attempt by AT&T to draw Trump into the legal battle by raising questions as to what, if any, pressure he may have placed on antitrust regulators to stop the acquisition.

Thanks to a relentless news cycle — and a dedicated fan in the Oval Office — Fox News has defied the downward trends in the television business, notching its highest-rated year in 2017 even as audiences dwindled for many networks. But the mass migration of viewers away from traditional cable and satellite packages is accelerating. And now Fox News is plotting a leap into the uncertain digital future that rivals like CNN have so far put off.

Billionaire investor George Soros launched a brutal attack on big online platform companies at 2018’s World Economic Forum meeting in Davos. Now, his influential organization is "certainly examining new ways" to tackle the growing power of tech giants. With a global reach and an annual budget of more than a billion dollars, the Open Society Foundations has the ability to significantly shape the growing debate over the power of Big Tech.

The US indictment handed up against three Russian companies and 13 individuals shows starkly how ill-prepared the tech giants were for the type of aggressive influence campaign the Russians allegedly mounted. The details also suggest it won’t be easy to stop such tactics in the run-up to the midterm election in less than nine months, say researchers who study social media. Facebook, Google parent Alphabet, and Twitter have more than 100,000 employees and $150 billion in annual revenue combined.

[Commentary] Internet intermediaries are increasingly playing the role that publishers and editors once played. From selecting sources to curating trending news to deciding which news is real or fake, companies like Facebook and Google are at the forefront of how much of the world receives its news. Taken together, these internet giants are 10 times the size of the largest media organization 15 years ago, according to media expert Robert McChesney.

As bad as scraping for advertising revenue might be, there’s another way the Facebook threat could actually get worse: Instead of continuing to be a primary platform for news companies and trying to strike relationships with them, the company could decide to simply wash its hands of news entirely, either because it isn’t generating enough revenue, or because it has become too much of a political headache. To really come to grips with what its size and influence have wrought both in journalism and society at large, Facebook is going to have to not only change its outlook but also its culture

The Justice Department (DOJ) acknowledged that while President Donald Trump doesn’t like CNN, his unhappiness with the media outlet did not influence a federal antitrust case. “The president is unhappy with CNN. We don’t dispute that,” Justice Department lawyer Craig Conrath said at a pretrial hearing. “But AT&T wants to turn that into a get-out-jail-free card for their illegal merger.” The DOJ is trying to prevent the political argument from becoming part of the case. He also argued that CNN is not key to the government's opposition of the deal.

AT&T is demanding that the Justice Department hand over additional evidence to prove that President Donald Trump did not wield political influence over the agency as its antitrust enforcers reviewed the company's bid to acquire Time Warner. DOJ should produce a log of any conversations that may have transpired between the White House and Attorney General Jeff Sessions pertaining to AT&T's $85 billion merger, the company argued before a federal judge. Separately, DOJ should also be required, AT&T said, to disclose any conversations between AG Sessions and the agency's antitrust d

Charter Communications cannot use the federal network neutrality repeal to avoid a lawsuit over slow Internet speeds in New York, the state's Supreme Court ruled. The lawsuit was filed by New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman against Charter and its Time Warner Cable (TWC) subsidiary in Feb 2017.