May 2018

AT&T-Time Warner to Court: DOJ Case Fell Apart

In a post-trial brief, AT&T and Time Warner said the government "came nowhere close" to proving the proposed AT&T-Time Warner merger violates antitrust laws. The companies said that the government's case was built on "non-probative competitor complaints, irrelevant slide shows," and a theoretical model of harm that collapsed under the weight of "real-world" evidence, then disintegrated upon first contact with real-world events, testimony, and data." The Justice Department had asserted that without spinoffs of Turner programming networks, the merger would mean substantially less comp

AT&T explains why it blocked Cloudflare DNS: It was just an accident

AT&T has been blocking the new Cloudflare DNS service, but AT&T says the blocking was unintentional and that it will fix the problem soon. The blocking is affecting AT&T home Internet customers who use an AT&T gateway. "With the recent launch of Cloudflare's 1.1.1.1 DNS service, we have discovered an unintentional gateway IP address conflict with 1 of their 4 useable IPs and are working to resolve the issue," said AT&T. Most of AT&T's customers should be able to access Cloudflare DNS using the alternate 1.0.0.1 address.

Can Facebook and Google’s new federal watchdogs regulate tech?

Facebook and Google must answer to new cops on the beat – a group of five fresh Washington regulators at the Federal Trade Commission who have the power to punish Silicon Valley if it misbehaves. But veterans of the 103-year old watchdog say that the agency increasingly runs the risk of being outmatched by the very tech giants it oversees without more cash, cutting-edge staff and stronger legal teeth.

The digital revolution is leaving black people behind

Black Americans are frequent users of technology, and have helped build social media platforms like Twitter and Instagram into the giants they are today. But they aren’t reaping the same economic benefits of the tech boom as white Americans, and low rates of black employment in the tech industry are a large part of the reason why. The State of Black America 2018, a report published annually by the National Urban League, compares how black and white people fare in a number of areas, including housing, economics, education, social justice, and civic engagement.

Senator Markey Urges FTC to Require Additional Privacy Safeguards at Facebook

Senator Edward Markey (D-MA) wrote a letter to the Federal Trade Commission commissioners expressing concern that Facebook violated a 2011 consent decree with the Commission.