Platforms

At the start of the pandemic, a group of data scientists at Facebook held a meeting with executives to ask for resources to help measure the prevalence of misinformation about Covid-19 on the social network. The data scientists said figuring out how many Facebook users saw false or misleading information would be complex, perhaps taking a year a more, according to two people who participated in the meeting.

Should Google get front-facing internet platforms should be regulated as common carriers or public utilities has been kicking around for a while. Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost filed a l

Sen Steve Daines (R-MT) introduced the Preserving Political Speech Online Act (S.2338) to crack down on Big Tech and online platforms’ ability to discriminate against users based on their political speech and beliefs. Daines’ bill would enforce equal access to political candidates on online platforms as well as create a provision to prohibit the removal of content based on political beliefs. The Preserving Political Speech Online Act will:

Tim Wu, President Joe Biden’s competition adviser on the National Economic Council, said “There is a growing sense that the forms of market power we see today are often different from the ones that the merger guidelines had in mind.

The Internet Association (IA) has been shedding staff, losing influence on Capitol Hill and shrinking to near-obscurity in media coverage of tech policy debates in Washington, even as the industry faces controversies ranging from alleged monopolization to privacy to how it treats its legions of workers. The declining prominence of IA, a nine-year-old group that used to call itself “the unified voice of the internet economy,” comes as a larger fragmentation is splitting the tech industry’s lobbying efforts into factions. In its place, other tech-focused advocacy groups—including a new startu

President Biden is taking decisive action to reduce the trend of corporate consolidation, increase competition, and deliver concrete benefits to America’s consumers, workers, farmers, and small businesses. This Executive Order established a whole-of-government effort to promote competition in the American economy. The Order includes 72 initiatives by more than a dozen federal agencies to promptly tackle some of the most pressing competition problems across our economy. Once implemented, these initiatives will result in concrete improvements to people’s lives. The Order tackles four issues t

Social media has become as central to free speech as town meeting halls, newspapers and television networks were in prior generations. The internet is the new public square. In recent years, however, Big Tech platforms have become increasingly brazen and shameless in censoring and discriminating against ideas, information and people on social media—banning users, deplatforming organizations, and aggressively blocking the free flow of information on which our democracy depends. This flagrant attack on free speech is doing terrible damage to our country.

Three dozen states and the District of Columbia filed an antitrust lawsuit against Google, alleging that the company operates an illegal monopoly with its Google Play app store. The bipartisan antitrust suit adds to the company’s mounting legal challenges. Led by the state of Utah and filed in the U.S.

The majority of apps people use on their phones in the US come preinstalled by either Apple or Google. That’s the takeaway from a Comscore study that ranked the popularity of preinstalled iOS and Android apps, such as Apple’s Messages, alongside apps made by other developers. The first-of-its-kind report was commissioned by Facebook, one of Apple’s loudest critics. The timing, as Facebook likely intentioned, is apt: Apple and Google are increasingly under scrutiny for how they favor their own services over competitors like Spotify.

The smartphone became what it is by combining the functions of a host of other devices—telephone, camera, web browser, handheld games, music player—into one package. Now that process is moving in reverse.