Ownership

The UK's Competition and Markets Authority decided that Rupert Murdoch’s £11.7 billion bid to take full control of Sky would concentrate too much power in the media mogul’s hands, giving the Murdoch family “too much control over news providers across all media platforms, and therefore too much influence over public opinion and the political agenda”.  Walt Disney will have to decide whether to take full control of Sky when it completes its proposed $66 billion takeover of the entertainment assets owned by Murdoch’s 21st Century Fox group.

Commissioner Michael O'Rielly of the Federal Communications Commission said that regulators should not crack down on big tech companies like Facebook and Google. "I’m not interested in imposing like regulation on the edge community or the high technology community to create some kind of parity level" with internet providers, Commissioner O'Rielly said.

Facebook and Google have popularized scurrilous news sources through algorithms that are profitable for these platforms but inherently unreliable. Recognition of a problem is one step on the pathway to cure, but the remedial measures that both companies have so far proposed are inadequate, commercially, socially and journalistically. There has been much discussion about subscription models but I have yet to see a proposal that truly recognizes the investment in and the social value of professional journalism.

Major conditions imposed by regulators as part of Comcast's merger with NBCUniversal expired Jan 20, renewing debate over AT&T's takeover of Time Warner that the Justice Department is trying to block. When approving the merger in 2011, the Justice Department and Federal Communications Commission required Comcast-NBCUniversal to abide by more than 150 conditions.

Facebook plans to start ranking news sources in its feed based on user evaluations of credibility, a major step in its effort to fight false and sensationalist information that will also push the company further into a role it has long sought to avoid—content referee. The social-media giant will begin testing the effort next week by prioritizing news reports in its news feed from publications that users have rated in Facebook surveys as trustworthy, executives said Jan 19.

Prometheus Radio Project has filed suit against the Federal Communications Commission's recent decision to eliminate the newspaper-broadcast crossownership and loosen other broadcast regulations, saying the FCC "ignores evidence in the record, misinterprets evidence, and fails to consider important aspects of the record." Joined by the Media Mobilizing Project, Prometheus wants the court to reverse the decision and require the FCC to "fully comply" with the courts direction in remanding a previous Quadrennial decision after Prometheus challenged it. Prometheus argues that the Pai FCC also f

[Commentary] There is a justified fear that the tech titans will use their power to protect and extend their dominance, to the detriment of consumers. The tricky task for policymakers is to restrain them without unduly stifling innovation. 

Twitter is planning to notify users who may have been exposed to Russian propaganda during the 2016 presidential election, the company's head of public policy said during the Senate Commerce Committee hearing, "Terrorism and Social Media: #IsBigTechDoingEnough?". While the hearing was ostensibly about how social media companies can better combat terrorism, it veered onto other topics, primarily Russia.

Sprint renewed a promotion that offers a free year of unlimited service to customers who switch to the carrier and bring their own phone. The promotion is available to anyone who owns any one of roughly three dozen phones, including those from Apple, Samsung, Motorola, Google and others, but it appears mostly slanted toward unhappy Verizon customers. The new promotion is similar to the one Sprint unveiled in the summer of 2017. That promotion, described at the time by Wall Street analyst Craig Moffett as the “most aggressive promotion in the history of the U.S.

Apple said that it will spend $350 billion in development and create 20,000 jobs to the United States in the next five years, following the recent corporate tax changes and a greater push to increase manufacturing in the US.  As part of this investment, it will also build a new U.S. campus — focused on technical support for customers — in a location to be announced later in 2018.