Ownership

Jeff Bezos finally talked about “the president.” After months of President Donald Trump berating Bezos’ two most visible companies, the Amazon CEO and Washington Post owner fired back. “It's really dangerous to demonize the media,” he said. “It's dangerous to call the media lowlifes. It's dangerous to say they're the 'enemy of the people.'" Bezos suggested President Trump take the high road and accept media scrutiny. "You don't take that job thinking you're not going to get scrutinized," he added. "You're going to get scrutinized.

Progressive candidates have laid out a series of sweeping policy proposals in their 2018 campaigns, including plans for the tech sector. With breakout Democratic candidates like New York’s Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez coming out in favor of aggressive measures to curb tech, we surveyed the landscape to gauge where other progressives stand on key issues like data privacy and antitrust. 

The Federal Trade Commission kicked off a series of hearings to discuss whether the agency’s competition and consumer protection policies should change to better reflect new technologies and companies. FTC Chairman Joseph Simons expressed openness to a new approach. “The broad antitrust consensus that has existed within the antitrust community, in relatively stable form for the last 25 years, is being challenged,” Chairman Simons said.

The Trump Administration appears to be following through on the president’s threats to online freedom of speech. The attorney general of the United States is convening a meeting with state attorneys general  “to discuss a growing concern that these companies may be…intentionally stifling the free exchange of ideas on their platforms.” Five Republican state attorneys general have been invited to attend so far.

A leaked video of Google executives trying to console employees who were upset after the election of President Trump has infuriated conservatives, who say the remarks illustrate the search giant's political bias and should prompt regulators to take a close look at the company.

In Aug it was reported that T-Mobile was asking the small operators that resell T-Mobile's excess network capacity (Mobile Virtual Network Operators (MVNOs)) to write letters and opinion pieces in support of the company's proposed $36 billion merger with Sprint. By helpfully suggesting talking points to resellers —including Mint Mobile, Republic Wireless, and Ting, all of which lease access from the Big Four network operators (Verizon, AT&T, Sprint, and T-Mobile) in order to sell phone and data services to customers, T-Mobile is following the usual "air of inevitability" merger playbook

House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) slammed Google as part of his ongoing criticism of the company's alleged bias against conservatives, mentioning its work with China, its search results accidentally showing one of the ideologies of the California Republican Party as “Nazism”, and for work it did to mobilize the Latino vote. “It’s their own executive that they said they have a silent donation where they tried to help people to help Hillary,” he said, referencing a report by Fox News’ Tucker Carlson that described an email sent by Google’s Multicultural Marketing department head.

Several potential presidential candidates for the 2020 election have expressed an interest in policies that would battle monopolies in the US, including in the tech industry, said Barry Lynn, the executive director of the Open Markets Institute. “Well more than six of the likely presidential candidates this next time around, we’ve had extensive conservations with about these issues,” he said.

On Sept 11, T-Mobile/Sprint Transaction Task Force Director David B. Lawrence, and Federal Communications Commission Wireless Telecommunications Bureau Chief Donald Stockdale sent a letter to T-Mobile and Sprint, saying the following:

Sept 11 we are pausing the FCC's informal 180-day transaction shot clock in [the T-Mobile/Sprint] proceeding. Additional time is necessary to allow for thorough staff and third-party review of newly-submitted and anticipated modeling relied on by the Applicants.

About two-thirds of American adults (68%) say they at least occasionally get news on social media, about the same share as at this time in 2017, according to a new Pew Research Center survey. Many of these consumers, however, are skeptical of the information they see there: A majority (57%) say they expect the news they see on social media to be largely inaccurate. Still, most social media news consumers say getting news this way has made little difference in their understanding of current events, and more say it has helped than confused them (36% compared with 15%).