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The biggest risk to Facebook — and the digital-ad business overall — would be a wide-ranging privacy-protection law on the order of the 2010 Dodd-Frank Act in the banking sector. That established the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, designed to keep predatory lenders in check, along with a host of new regulations.

Capitol Hill wants Facebook’s blood, but President Trump isn’t interested. Instead, the tech behemoth he wants to go after is Amazon. Trump's wealthy friends tell him Amazon is destroying their businesses. His real estate buddies tell him — and he agrees — that Amazon is killing shopping malls and brick-and-mortar retailers. President Trump also pays close attention to Amazon founder's ownership of The Washington Post, which the president views as Bezos’ political weapon.

What would it look like if Congress gave the Federal Trade Commission better tools to address online privacy? The most recent high-profile model comes from the European Union, where General Data Protection Regulation becomes the law of the land on May 25. GDPR focuses on ensuring that people who use online services know not only exactly what data those companies will take, but how they put it to use. One danger of an overly prescribed law is that technological solutions can outpace those mandates. 

Former Federal Trade Commission consumer protection enforcers say Facebook's response to the Cambridge Analytica scandal won't be enough to keep federal investigators at bay. "Just because they make changes moving forward doesn’t mean they can’t be investigated or sued for what they did before," said Jessica Rich, who stepped down as the head of the FTC's Consumer Protection Bureau in 2017.

[Commentary] A storm dubbed #DeleteFacebook is brewing in techie communities, on Twitter and — irony alert — on Facebook. The idea is this time is different from all the other times the social network has violated our trust. There have been many calls to boycott Facebook for past indiscretions. If we want the result to be any different this time, we need to address the broader problem. Aside from a dramatic change of heart from founder Mark Zuckerberg, getting Facebook to reform what data it collects and how it uses it requires destabilizing its business.

On March 22, the Federal Communications Commission will vote on an order to streamline environmental and historic preservation reviews for 5G facilities deployment. Reps. Frank Pallone (D-NJ), Anna Eshoo (D-CA) and Raul Ruiz (D-CA) wrote FCC Commissioner Brandan Carr, who is spearheading the FCC proposal, to ask him to reconsider, saying the order will short-circuit safeguards for tribal lands. The proposed order would render the National Historic Preservation Act (NHPA) toothless when it comes to protecting "tribally-significant" sites.

In a letter to the Federal Communications Commission Next Century Cities is pushing back on the FCC's efforts to exempt some wireless deployments from local historic or environmental reviews, saying they are being scapegoated unfairly as impediments to broadband deployment. Three dozen mayors and other elected officials signed the letter defending local decisionmaking in 5G small-cell deployments.

Federal Communications Commission rural broadband funding could increase by over $500 million if the commission votes to adopt an order circulated by FCC Chairman Ajit Pai. The the funding would include about $180 million for the current funding year for the nation’s smaller rate-of-return (ROR) carriers who get their support through traditional legacy mechanisms and up to $360 million over the next 10 years to ROR carriers who receive support based on the FCC's Alternative-Connect America Cost Mode (A-CAM). The $500 million would come, in part, from reserves.

Rep Mike Doyle (D-PA) announced the names of the Members of Congress who have asked to cosponsor his legislation to reject the Federal Communications Commission’s order to end the Open Internet and eliminate Net Neutrality. “We’ve made good progress so far in getting Members to sign on as original cosponsors of our bill to restore Net Neutrality, and I will continue to seek additional cosponsors in the weeks ahead,” Congressman Doyle said in releasing the list of names. “There’s overwhelming public support for preserving Net Neutrality, so it’s no surprise that there’s strong support in Con