Alliances between Silicon Valley powerhouses and their cousins in Seattle (WA) are constantly forming and breaking apart, with big names often coming down on the opposite side of policy and legislative debates. The result is that the “tech lobby” is far from monolithic, with big names in the industry often at odds with one another.
[Commentary] As we remember the 50th Anniversary of the silencing of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s dream; as we March for Our Lives to end the senseless violence that continues to silence the dreams of so many; and as we continue to fight for justice and equality in social, economic, and digital treatment; we urge the Federal Communications Commission to take its rightful place in history by mirroring Dr. King’s legacy of compassion, equality, and opportunity. A good start would be for the FCC to act on several imperatives that will help to close the digital divide:
The Federal Communications Commission’s Broadband Deployment Advisory Committee (BDAC) was dealt yet another blow when New York City CTO Miguel Gamiño Jr. resigned from the committee's Model Code for Municipalities Working Group, raising questions whether the BDAC is going to survive much longer. Gamiño said in a letter sent to FCC Chairman Ajit Pai that the BDAC process has favored the interests of large service providers over the communities involved in crafting next-gen broadband strategies. His departure comes at what has been a trying time for the BDAC.
President Donald Trump’s repeated Twitter attacks on Amazon have already dented the e-commerce giant’s stock price. But if he really wants to hammer the company and its ultra-billionaire CEO Jeff Bezos, the president has some tools at his disposal — using the government's spending and regulating powers. Here's a look at the threats the company may face if President Trump follows up his words with action:
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.
Donald Trump’s presidential campaign has boasted often that it made better use of Facebook’s advertising tools than Hillary Clinton’s campaign did. An internal Facebook white paper, published days after the election, shows the company’s data scientists agree. "Trump’s FB campaigns were more complex than Clinton’s and better leveraged Facebook’s ability to optimize for outcomes," the author of the internal paper wrote, citing revenue of $44 million for Trump and $28 million for Clinton in that period.
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