Ownership

Why is President Donald Trump putting so much energy into defending Silicon Valley — not his most natural constituency — through US trade policy? President Trump is treading a politically delicate path as he tries to help Big Tech improve its access to foreign markets at a time when the sector is increasingly becoming a punching bag in Washington.

To increase the quality of local journalism in Ohio, the Federal Communications Commission is requiring three newspapers to stop printing daily.  Back in 1975, a thousand media ecosystems ago, the FCC passed a well-intentioned rule that said a city’s newspaper couldn’t be owned by the same company that owns one of its TV or radio stations.

Tech has been given surprisingly little airtime during the 2020 Democratic primaries. It has rarely come up on the debate stage. While candidates such as Sen Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), Andrew Yang, and Sen Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) have made tech-related issues part of their platforms, the matter is often eclipsed by other political hot topics, including health care and taxes.

The Department of Justice’s Antitrust Division completed a nearly two-year long investigation into the standard-setting activities of the GSM Association (GSMA), a trade association for mobile network operators.

Don’t be surprised if the Federal Communications Commission and National Association of Broadcasters ask the US Supreme Court to weigh in on broadcast ownership deregulation. That comes after the full 3rd US Circuit Court of Appeals refused to hear the FCC’s appeal, supported by NAB as an intervenor, of a lower court decision to throw out most of FCC Chairman Ajit Pai's deregulation order. That order included eliminating the newspaper-broadcast and radio-TV cross-ownership rules.

TX Attorney General Ken Paxton announced that his office reached a settlement with T-Mobile resolving the state’s antitrust claims against the proposed merger of mobile wireless telecommunications service providers Sprint and T-Mobile. The agreement is designed to prevent the New T-Mobile from increasing prices for wireless services on Texans for five years after the merger is complete. The agreement also commits the New T-Mobile to build out a 5G network throughout Texas, including rural areas, during the next six years.

For those of you unfamiliar with the merger, 17 months ago, in April 2018, T-Mobile and Sprint announced that they would merge in a deal valued at around $26 billion dollars and sought permission from the Justice Department to do so.

Google, Facebook, Amazon and Apple defended their business practices in responses to detailed questions by House Antitrust Subcommittee lawmakers. The four companies received the questions from Subcommittee Chairman David Cicilline (D-RI) in Sept. Separately, the whole committee issued requests for extensive records on the firms’ business practices, acquisitions, executive communications and other issues. The companies also are in the process of responding to those requests.

The House Small Business Committee took its turn at running Big Tech through another Hill gauntlet at a hearing titled "A Fair Playing Field? Investigating Big Tech’s Impact on Small Business." Committee Chairwoman Nydia Velázquez (D-NY) started the hearing by praising Amazon and Google for agreeing to send witnesses, and pointing to the two empty chairs for no-shows Facebook and Apple.

The House Antitrust Subcommittee heard from two major players in the government's review of Big Tech and whether the antitrust laws have kept up with their exponential growth, but not before the legislators had staked out their own positions. Subcommittee Chairman David Cicilline (D-RI) pulled no punches, saying that the extreme concentration of online platforms may have some benefits, but they were clearly using their power to set market terms that enrich themselves and make it impossible to compete. He also commented on Google and Fitbit.