Ownership

The story was explosive if true: Google planned to buy Apple for $9 billion, according to a Dow Jones Newswire headline earlier this week. Dow Jones deleted the story after just a few minutes, explaining that it was accidentally published as part of a technology test. And sophisticated stock traders likely didn’t even have enough time to digest the news before it was corrected, much less take any action. Yet that brief bit of fake news was blamed for a minor jump in Apple’s stock price to about $158 a share before falling back to around $155.

But if the headline was too absurd to be believed who was likely momentarily tricked? Bots. An increasing portion of stock trades every day are controlled by computer algorithms, many of which scan Twitter feeds, news headlines and other social media looking for tidbits that can move markets. And much of that trading it taking place in a blink of an eye with high-speed traders who measure time in microseconds. In a recent research report, JPMorgan Chase estimated that just 10 percent of daily trading is done by human stock pickers. The growing reliance on technology rather than humans to make stock trades has made identifying disreputable news a bigger challenge, market industry veterans have said.

Masayoshi Son is taking another run at his dream to create a US mobile phone heavyweight, but a revived deal would be scrutinized by many of the same officials who batted down his last attempt. Staff attorneys inside the Justice Department’s antitrust division are likely to view any plans to merge his Sprint with T-Mobile US as a threat to competition in the mobile market, according to three people familiar with the staff’s thinking.

If they recommend to sue to block the deal, that would leave it to President Donald Trump’s new antitrust chief, Makan Delrahim, to decide whether to fight the tie-up, or overrule them and approve it. If he decides to oppose a deal, the Justice Department would file a lawsuit in federal court seeking to block the proposed tie-up and would need to persuade a judge that the combination is anticompetitive. The antitrust chief isn’t obligated to follow the staff’s position, but typically has. Delrahim, who was confirmed to his post at the antitrust division Sept. 27, hasn’t commented publicly on how he views the mobile market.

I am concerned the Federal Communications Commission is gearing up to approve a transaction that will hand a single broadcast company the unprecedented ability to reach more than 70 percent of American households. It hasn’t happened yet. But there are disconcerting signs.

Before I returned to the Commission, the agency inexplicably resurrected an outdated and scientifically inaccurate system for tallying station ownership, known as the UHF discount. It also reversed an effort to investigate joint sales agreements. Both steps helped speed the way for this transaction—which would combine two broadcasting giants: Tribune and Sinclair The bottom line is we are not going to remedy what ails our media with a rush of new consolidation. We are not going to fix our inability to ferret fact from fiction by doubling down on a single company owning ever more of our public airwaves.

Social media analyst Jonathan Albright got a call from Facebook the day after he published research recently showing that the reach of the Russian disinformation campaign was almost certainly larger than the company had disclosed. While the company had said 10 million people read Russian-bought ads, Albright had data suggesting that the audience was at least double that — and maybe much more — if ordinary free Facebook posts were measured as well.

Albright welcomed the chat with three company officials. But he was not pleased to discover that they had done more than talk about their concerns regarding his research. They also had scrubbed from the Internet nearly everything — thousands of Facebook posts and the related data — that had made the work possible. Never again would he or any other researcher be able to run the kind of analysis he had done just days earlier. “This is public interest data,” Albright said Oct 11, expressing frustration that such a rich trove of information had disappeared — or at least moved somewhere the public can’t see it. “This data allowed us to at least reconstruct some of the pieces of the puzzle. Not everything, but it allowed us to make sense of some of this thing.”

[Commentary] The actions that Facebook and Twitter take to police speech don't follow any kind of moral compass, are disproportionately applied, and—at least outwardly—seem completely arbitrary. For all of Silicon Valley's pretensions of being arbiters of free speech, these companies are fundamentally incapable of shaping a healthy public discourse. Making tough decisions, unfortunately, isn't always good for business.

Google will invest $1 billion over the next five years in nonprofit organizations helping people adjust to the changing nature of work, the largest philanthropic pledge to date from the Internet giant. The announcement of the national digital skills initiative, made by Google CEO Sundar Pichai in Pittsburgh (PA), is a tacit acknowledgment from one of the world's most valuable companies that it bears some responsibility for rapid advances in technology that are radically reshaping industries and eliminating jobs in the US and around the world. Pichai's pitstop in an old industrial hub that has reinvented itself as a technology and robotics center is the first on a "Grow with Google Tour." The tour that will crisscross the country will work with libraries and community organizations to provide career advice and training.

President Donald Trump took a moment during his interview with Fox's Sean Hannity to praise the host for his recent ratings rise since moving into the 9 p.m. timeslot to directly challenge MSNBC's Rachel Maddow. “I will say this, you have been so great,” President Trump said to Hannity during their Oct 11 interview. "I’m very proud of you.” “I am a ratings person. Has anyone seen his ratings? What you are doing to your competition is incredible," Trump said to Hannity. "Number one, and I am very proud of you. An honor to be on your show.”

Comcast is increasingly making demands in TV programming contract negotiations that would force its smaller rivals to raise their minimum cable TV prices, a lobby group for small cable companies told the Federal Communications Commission Oct 11. The American Cable Association (ACA), which represents nearly 800 small and medium-sized cable operators, asked the FCC to investigate the practice and prohibit it under its program access rules.

The issue relates to Comcast's ownership of regional sports networks that are marketed under the brand of Comcast's NBC subsidiary. Comcast wants to redefine the so-called "minimum penetration policy," essentially making it impossible for small cable companies to sell a cheap, basic tier of TV service that doesn't include higher-priced channels, the ACA alleged.

Rep Keith Ellison (D-MN) has asked Federal Trade Commission Chairman Maureen Ohlhausen for documentation of its long-running antitrust investigation of Google, which was closed in 2013 with no finding of antitrust violations. In 2013, the FTC concluded: "Google’s display of its own content could plausibly be viewed as an improvement in the overall quality of Google’s search product. Similarly, we have not found sufficient evidence that Google manipulates its search algorithms to unfairly disadvantage vertical websites that compete with Google-owned vertical properties."

That came despite complaints to Congress from some small online businesses that Google was disfavoring them in search. Rep Ellison points out that Google did volunteer to change some business practices in the wake of the investigation. "Given the impact Google has on small businesses, the flow of information, and that Google controls an outsize portion of the market for online search and online advertising, the public has a right to know what the Federal Trade Commission found in its investigation into Google," Ellison said in a letter to Ohlhausen.

[Commentary] As unprecedented as President Donald Trump’s relentless and angry attack on the media is, it’s important to realize that unless he wants to break the law by doing something like ordering wiretaps of reporters (as Nixon did), there’s not much he can do. He could create an enemies list and instruct his aides not to speak to certain journalists. But given how incredibly leaky his White House is, they’d probably ignore him. He can try to discredit certain news organizations, which he has done.

But you may have noticed that the main targets of his ire (CNN and the Times) are doing quite well in the Trump era. He has the power of the bully pulpit, but at least in this area, he’s finding it awfully hard to put his authoritarian impulses into practice. Which of course will only make him more enraged as he turns on cable news or picks up the paper and fails to find the praise he seeks. At least he’s got “Fox & Friends” to make him feel better.