Stories from Abroad

The general data protection regulation, which has come into effect, has prompted a number of prestigious US-based websites including the Los Angeles Times and Chicago Tribune to shut off access to internet users in the EU.

[Commentary] In a few days, the nations of the European Union take the first step to establish a New Digital World Order when the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) goes into effect on May 25. For the first time, government has stepped in on a comprehensive basis to oversee the unregulated collection of personal information through the internet. Unfortunately, it is not the United States of America that is leading the world in protecting personal rights. Instead, the Old World is leading the New World.

The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) will go into effect on May 25th, and no one is ready — not the companies and not even the regulators. After four years of deliberation, the GDPR was officially adopted by the European Union in 2016. The regulation gave companies a two-year runway to get compliant, which is theoretically plenty of time to get shipshape. The reality is messier. Like term papers and tax returns, there are people who get it done early, and then there’s the rest of us.

European lawmakers pilloried Mark Zuckerberg at a hearing for Facebook’s recent privacy and misinformation mishaps and raised the possibility of new regulation, a more realistic threat than what the social media giant faces in the United States. Opening a hearing with key leaders of the European Parliament, the body's president, Antonio Tajani, described it as an "alarming scandal" that Cambridge Analytica, a political consultancy, could access the names, "likes" and other personal information of 87 million Facebook users. "The price paid by the users is in many cases data in exchange for f

The Senate Banking Committee rebuked President Donald Trump's efforts to ease sanctions on the Chinese telecom firm ZTE, which the intelligence community and trade regulators have warned poses a national security risk for the U.S.  The committee approved an amendment in an overwhelming and bipartisan 23-2 vote that would block President Trump from easing sanctions on ZTE without first certifying to Congress that the company is complying with US law.

Britain’s culture secretary, Matt Hancock, said that he was unlikely to block the American cable giant Comcast’s proposed takeover of the British satellite broadcaster Sky, the latest twist in a merger battle between Comcast and Rupert Murdoch’s 21st Century Fox. Hancock, said he was not inclined to intervene in Comcast’s $30.7 billion bid for Sky because the “the proposed merger does not raise concerns in relation to public interest considerations which would meet the threshold for intervention.”

One of the federal agencies that must sign off on the proposed merger between Sprint and T-Mobile is the Committee on Foreign Investment in the US (CFIUS), and that agency has become a more important factor in recent international merger-and-acquisition action.  Indeed, under the Trump administration and led by Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, the CFIUS played a critical role in ultimately blocking Broadcom’s attempted hostile takeover of Qualcomm over national security concerns.

Europe’s new data and privacy rules take effect May 25, clarifying individual rights to the personal data collected by companies around the world for targeted advertising and other purposes. Not much will change for you, at least right away; companies will keep on collecting and analyzing personal data from your phone, the apps you use and the sites you visit.

A year ago, President Donald Trump issued an Executive Order aimed at strengthening the cybersecurity of federal networks and critical infrastructure.  The order mandated that all federal agencies use the Cybersecurity Framework developed by the National Institute of Standards and Technology. In April, NIST released version 1.1 of the Framework, which shows how this voluntary approach can provide a first line of cyber defense for companies.

In 2013 Mark Zuckerberg debuted a bold, humanitarian vision of global internet. It didn’t go as planned—forcing Facebook to reckon with the limits of its own ambition.