Ownership

A small liberal think tank has spent years urging Washington to crack down on the United States’ biggest tech companies — a lonely crusade that barely registered with the political establishment. Now the Open Markets Institute has become one of the most influential drivers of Democratic politics in the fight to rein in Facebook, Amazon and Google, seeing its ideas embraced by Elizabeth Warren and forcing presidential candidates like Bernie Sanders, Cory Booker and Joe Biden to take a side.

While social media companies and digital networks are relatively new, the problems of information laundering and manipulation are not. Of course, verbatim application of 20th-century media policy won’t work for today’s digital environment; some of it didn’t work very well last century either. But its core concerns should be taken seriously and its principles—especially transparency, responsibility and structural design to promote news investment—can be adapted for the 21st century.

The Senate Commerce Committee held an oversight hearing of the Federal Communications Commission. Some highlights:

e digital economy is a fact of life, but it is not all things to all people.  There has been robust public discussion about whether the broader economy, undoubtedly transformed by digital technologies, is working well for everyone.  While some commenters have tried to dispatch the antitrust laws to address these problems, I do not believe the antitrust laws are bent towards values other than competition. Therefore, the right question is whether a defined market is competitive.  That is the province of the antitrust laws.... As we think about antitrust enforcement in the digital eco

Google has fired about a half-dozen of its largest lobbying firms as part of a major overhaul of its global government affairs and policy operations amid the prospect of greater government scrutiny of its businesses. In the past few months, the company has shaken up its roster of lobbying firms, restructured its Washington policy team, and lost two senior officials who helped build its influence operation into one of the largest in the nation’s capital. The firms Google has dumped make up about half of the company’s more than $20 million annual lobbying bill.

The Federal Communications Commission is renewing the charter of the Advisory Committee on Diversity and Digital Empowerment for a two-year period. The purpose of the Committee is to make recommendations to the FCC on how to empower disadvantaged communities and accelerate the entry of small businesses, including those owned by women and minorities, into the media, digital news and information, and audio and video programming industries, including as owners, suppliers, and employees.

The House Judiciary Antitrust Subcommittee held the hearing "Online Platforms and Market Power, Part 1: The Free and Diverse Press", beginning its look at antitrust issues related to the practice of journalism in the age of online platforms with enormous market power. The News Media Alliance, whose president, David Chavern, was testifying, has called on Congress to give news outlets an antitrust exemption so they can flex some collective muscle and negotiate for compensation for all that news content being aggregated and distributed by Facebook, Google and other platforms.

Federal Communications Commission media ownership deregulation took its latest trip to Philadelphia (PA) June 11 as the FCC defended its latest rule changes against a challenge by Prometheus Radio Project in the US Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit.  Prometheus filed suit against the FCC's fall 2017 decision, under Chairman Ajit Pai, that eliminated the newspaper-broadcast and the radio-TV cross-ownership rules, among other deregulations. Joined by the Media Mobilizing Project, Prometheus wants the court to reverse the 2017 decision and require the FCC to "fully comply" with the court'

The newspaper industry has crawled up Capitol Hill once again to beg for an antitrust exemption it believes would give the business needed in its fight with Google and Facebook for advertising dollars. Currently, Google and Facebook collect 73 percent of all digital advertising. Members of the news industry believe that the two tech giants have exploited their dominance of the Web to unfairly collect digital dollars that rightfully belong to them.

In an interview with CNBC, President Donald Trump criticized the antitrust fines imposed by the European Union on US tech companies, suggesting that these tech giants could, in fact, be monopolies, but the US should be the political body raking in the settlement fines. “Every week you see them going after Facebook, and Apple, and all of these companies that are, you know, great companies," President Trump said. "But I will say that the European Union is suing them all the time." “Well, we should be doing this. They’re our companies.