1. Monthly archive
  2. June 2018

June 2018

Deal Makers Brace for Ruling in AT&T-Time Warner Case

Disney’s offer to buy 21st Century Fox. CVS’s bid for Aetna. T-Mobile’s proposed merger with Sprint. The path for these blockbuster deals and others could be transformed in an instant on June 12, when a federal judge is expected to issue his opinion on the government’s effort to block AT&T’s merger with Time Warner. It is one of the most influential antitrust cases in decades, enthralling Hollywood, Silicon Valley and Madison Avenue. If the merger is blocked, some executives are likely to slim down their deal aspirations.

Benton Editorial

An Open Letter to My Daughters on Net Neutrality

Adrianne B. Furniss
        Furniss

Whenever we spend time together – and you give me grief for asking you, yet again, for help on something social media- or technology-related – I realize how freely you interact with digital technologies to consume, to share, to connect, and to learn. You and your peers are digital natives, well adapted to our new information era.

Facebook Gave Some Companies Special Access to Additional Data About Users’ Friends

Facebook struck customized data-sharing deals with a select group of companies, some of which had special access to user records well after the point in 2015 that the social-media giant has said it cut off all developers from that information, according to court documents.  The unreported agreements, known internally as “whitelists,” also allowed certain companies to access additional information about a user’s Facebook friends.

Sharpening Blades in the FCC's Regulation Weed Wacker

Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai (in)famously said, “We need to fire up the weed whacker and remove those rules that are holding back investment, innovation, and job creation.” On June 1, 2018, we learned a bit about how far follow-Republican FCC Commissioner Michael O’Rielly is willing to go to cut back consumer protections. In FCC Regulatory Free Arena, Commissioner O’Rielly highlights the pervasiveness of the “app economy” to argue that traditional companies regulated by the FCC should seek to be released from their regulatory obligations.

The Unsettling Hum of Silicon Valley’s Failure to Hire More Black Workers

Tech companies know that they have a race problem. But their efforts to address it have so far yielded little. Facebook Inc. says that 3 percent of its U.S. workforce is black, up from 2 percent in 2014, while black workers in technical roles stagnated at 1 percent. Only 2 percent of Google's workers are black, a figure that has remained static for the past three years. The Alphabet inc unit's efforts to increase that have sparked an internal backlash, with one former employee suing because of perceived discrimination against white and male candidates. Among 8 of the largest U.S.

© 1994-2026 Benton Institute for Broadband & Society. All Rights Reserved.