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T-Mobile appears to be rallying former regulators and legislators to its side, while some congressional Democrats and some public interest groups are formulating their arguments against the deal. Sitting in the middle are the Federal Communications Commission and Department of Justice, which must sign off on the transaction. It’s unclear how those agencies might act on the deal: Although most observers see the Trump administration as favorable to big businesses, the DoJ filed a lawsuit against AT&T’s attempts to purchase Time Warner.

[Commentary] The Senate may soon be voting on net neutrality. The net neutrality debate is driven in part by the fact that Internet service providers (ISPs) have the technical ability and financial incentive to act as gatekeepers, picking winners and losers in the Internet marketplace. Perhaps an ISP will favor a particular airline reservation website or an online newspaper by blocking access to its competitors, or simply by making access to competitors’ content painfully slow.

Here’s what three government agencies will weigh as they consider the T-Mobile/Sprint merger.

[Op-ed] There is considerable confusion about what’s really at stake in the congressional debates over net neutrality and online privacy regulation.

Internet service providers celebrated  when the Federal Communications Commission voted to eliminate nationwide net neutrality rules that prohibit blocking, throttling, and paid prioritization. But now Internet service providers in California are terrified that they could end up facing even stricter rules being considered by the California legislature.

With bipartisan agreement, members of Congress said that Silicon Valley needed to be reined in with new regulations. But time and again, when the most pressing issues have landed on Capitol Hill — like gun violence, school shootings, immigration and border control — Congress has declared five-alarm fires only to fail to follow through on major legislation. The current zest for new privacy laws is also likely to stall as lawmakers wrestle with the technical complexities and constitutional vexations sure to emerge with any legislation to control content on the internet. Beyond the typical pol

[Analysis] Is it time to recognize that Facebook, and ‘Big Tech’ at large, may be a bug in our democracy? The Cambridge Analytica story reveals the harmful effects of business models that rely on massive data collection. What is lost is our privacy, contributing to the declining health of our democratic discourse. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg acknowledged the massive data comprise in an apologetic media tour. For many, Zuckerberg's response has been seen as a small concession that does not address the much bigger problem.

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.