Stories from Abroad

Nyarugusu on the border of Tanzania and Burundi, one of the largest refugee camps in the world, is an unlikely pioneer in how the telecoms industry views refugees. Established in 1996, it has population of 150,000. Vodacom, Vodafone’s African arm, installed a 3G tower within Nyarugusu in 2016, which it now shares with commercial rivals Tigo and Airtel. The tower is running at full capacity, according to the GSMA, the mobile industry trade body, but more striking is the average revenue per user of $4.40. That is slightly higher than the average revenue per user for the rest of Tanzania.

Comcast and the Walt Disney Company have long been rivals. But Brian Roberts, who runs Comcast, has recently become the Magic Kingdom’s nemesis in chief. He waged an unrelenting fight for 21st Century Fox over the summer, forcing Disney to pay about $18 billion more than it had planned in order to secure Rupert Murdoch’s entertainment empire. Then, on Sept 22, Comcast emerged as the decisive victor in a battle with Disney for control of the British pay-television company Sky. For Robert A.

Fight #1: The race to get 5G networks up and running, a three-way game among US, China, and South Korea. While the US may be technically first with 5G in a few places, China is spending significantly more and will likely be first with 5G en masse.

European laws and proposals meant to rein in tech giants are inadvertently empowering them. The laws — governing everything from privacy to copyright to content filtering — stem from concerns about the behavior of big platforms, like YouTube and Facebook. But big companies have more resources to comply with complicated regulations than small firms. The European Parliament recently passed a directive that would overhaul its copyright law and would force platforms to impose strict filters for copyright violations or face fines.

A growing number of governments now benchmark the status of broadband in their national broadband plans. The report shows for the first time that at least 15 countries now have strategies in place for promoting the safe use of Artificial Intelligence.

Microsoft is calling on governments to follow a set of principles for cross-border data access policies, including independent judicial review and dispute resolution mechanisms. Microsoft’s Sept. 11 call for law enforcement data access standards follows the European Commission’s introduction recently of proposed e-evidence legislation. In March, Congress passed legislation governing how U.S. law enforcement can access data overseas.

The European Parliament voted on changes to the Copyright Directive, a piece of legislation intended to update copyright for the internet age. MEPs approved amended versions of the directive’s most controversial provisions: Articles 11 and 13, dubbed by critics as the “link tax” and “upload filter.” Article 11 is intended to give publishers and newspapers a way to make money when companies like Google link to their stories, while Article 13 requires platforms like YouTube and Facebook to scan uploaded content to stop the unlicensed sharing of copyrighted material.

The European Union’s executive arm joined Google and a group of free-speech advocates to oppose expanding the bloc’s “right to be forgotten” beyond European borders. In arguments before the EU’s top court, the executive arm, as well as countries including Ireland and Greece, argued that a global application of the EU right would stretch the EU’s privacy laws beyond their intended scope—echoing at least some of Google’s arguments. “We don’t see extraterritoriality” in EU privacy law, said Antoine Buchet, a lawyer for the bloc’s executive arm, during questioning by EU judges.

Google will appeal an order to extend the European Union’s “right to be forgotten” to its search engines across the globe, arguing before the EU’s top court that the order encourages countries to assert sovereignty beyond their borders. National laws used to stop at the border. In cyberspace, they increasingly stretch around the world, as regulators in Europe, the US and Canada have started asserting legal authority over the internet across country lines.

The European Union approved Apple’s planned acquisition of British music discovery app Shazam, saying an EU antitrust investigation showed it would not harm competition in the bloc. The deal, announced in December 2017, would help the iPhone maker better compete with Spotify, the industry leader in music streaming services.