Platforms

A group of state attorneys general met with US Attorney General William Barr  to discuss antitrust concerns related to major tech companies, as the Justice Department launches a review of whether online platforms are reducing competition. New York, Texas, Arizona, and Louisiana, sent representatives to the Justice Department for the meeting with senior officials. 

I worked with a fairly small group of early-stage internet policy wonks and helped create many of the basic rules that still govern the internet today. We missed a lot — a lot that turns out to have been important. 

The Democratic anger over Facebook is the most potent sign yet of the peril Silicon Valley faces if the party regains full power in Washington: Investigations could become more intrusive, and the online industry could face punishments that have never realistically been on the table — including a ban on the kind of behavior-based advertising that supplies Facebook's fortune. Such repercussions could go even beyond the backlash that tech is experiencing under the Trump administration.

The new reality for big tech companies: Scrutiny from regulators and lawmakers has become a constant. For the past few years, American regulators appeared to be lagging as authorities around the world have stepped up their actions to crimp the power of Facebook, Google, Amazon and Apple. The contrast was starkest with European officials, who have passed laws and imposed a series of large penalties against big tech companies. But in recent months, American lawmakers and regulators have also ramped up their activity.

Apparently, the  Federal Trade Commission opened an investigation into Facebook for possible antitrust violations, an early-stage probe that is examining competition in its oldest business -- social media. The agency has already contacted third parties that could aid in the investigation as it tries to understand competitive dynamics. Though the company has made many acquisitions and expanded into new businesses, including messaging, virtual reality and e-commerce, the FTC’s probe is focused on its most long-standing offering -- social networking.

After right-wing influencers and online provocateurs flocked to the White House for a summit on how they’d been suppressed across social media, a remarkable thing happened: Their social media audiences soared. 15 of the event’s invitees have seen their Twitter audiences grow by a combined 197,000 followers — a 75 percent jump over the number of followers they’d gained in the same time span before the event. On July 24, they put that new reach to good use, mobilizing on social media against the testimony of former special counsel Robert S.

The Securities and Exchange Commission charged Facebook for making misleading disclosures regarding the risk of misuse of Facebook user data.  For more than two years, Facebook’s public disclosures presented the risk of misuse of user data as merely hypothetical when Facebook knew that a third-party developer had actually misused Facebook user data.  Public companies must identify and consider the material risks to their business and have procedures designed to make disclosures that are accurate in all material respects, including not continuing to describe a risk as hypothetical when it ha

We’re two and a half years into Donald Trump’s presidency, and one thing is clear: his administration keeps getting absolutely railroaded in tech policy fights. Almost every time he has picked a fight, his efforts have resulted in weak enforcement changes, whipsaw policy confusion among free-market conservatives, and / or outright losses.

The Federal Trade Commission released details of its settlement with Facebook over violations to a 2012 consent decree. Under the settlement, Facebook has agreed to pay $5 billion, create a privacy committee on Facebook’s board, and conduct a privacy review. The FTC alleges that Facebook repeatedly violated the 2012 order, and that the improper data collection and misuse by Cambridge Analytica was just a part of a larger problem. Some reactions:

Federal Trade Commission Chairman Joe Simons defended the FTC's $5 billion settlement with Facebook, saying that it was the best deal it could get with limited authority, and calling on Congress to pass comprehensive privacy legislation. Chairman Simons said he was faced with two choices, get an "excellent" settlement, as he suggested this was, or face years of litigation that would likely achieve "far less" relief than the FTC got, which he took pains to outline.