Cat Zakrzewski

Silicon Valley doesn’t just have to worry about antitrust action in Washington. States are becoming an important and perhaps more formidable force when it comes to addressing competition in the technology industry. “There’s been a tendency to just rely on the federal government to play the lead role,” said Gene Kimmelman, a senior adviser at Public Knowledge.

The Senate Judiciary Committee’s new tech task force leader, Marsha Blackburn (R-TN), wants to use her perch to hold tech companies accountable.

Technology experts are skeptical of President Donald Trump’s call for Internet companies to work with law enforcement and the Justice Department to develop tools to detect mass shootings before they even happen. They say the Trump administration has an especially bad track record on addressing violence on social media -- and has ignored major opportunities to take action on this front both at home and with other countries.

The Federal Trade Commission’s record-breaking settlement with Facebook will slap the company with a $5 billion fine and grant regulators exceptional oversight of the company’s business practices. But the FTC’s two Democratic commissioners, Rohit Chopra and Rebecca Kelly Slaughter, voted against the order and issued a warning that the fine was too small and the remedies should have gone farther. While the settlement winds down the FTC’s sweeping sixteen-month probe, it’s likely to trigger greater examination of whether the country’s top privacy cop is able to hold tech giants accountable.

Beyond the circus-like atmosphere of the White House social media summit, the conference had serious implications for Silicon Valley. It highlighted how President Donald Trump's attacks on Big Tech are creating more political jeopardy for the tech companies in Washington:

As Facebook prepares for increased competition scrutiny in the US and Europe, its top brass is repeatedly warning lawmakers and regulators that antitrust action could be a distraction from a much bigger threat: China.

Google, Facebook, and Twitter executives came to Capitol Hill to testify about election security. Instead, they faced a grilling about whether their platforms are biased against conservatives. A string of Republicans on the House Oversight and Reform Committee skipped questions about how the companies were tackling disinformation campaigns or preventing Russians from purchasing political ads on their platforms in the run-up to the 2020 election.

Sens Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) are criticizing Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai's decision to greenlight the merger of T-Mobile and Sprint -- the latest sign that antitrust issues are core to many of their 2020 platforms. Sens Sanders and Klobuchar say a merger of the telecommunications giants would leave consumers with fewer choices. Sen Klobuchar, who is expected to publish a book on antitrust issues later in 2019, said the deal could harm competition.

Accusing Twitter and Facebook of suppressing conservative voices, Sen Ted Cruz (R-TX) floated an overhaul to a key law that protects Internet platforms from legal liability for content posts on their sites, breaking up the companies, or even charging them with fraud. His three-part playbook: 

House Antitrust Subcommittee Chairman David Cicilline (D-RI) and House Judiciary Committee Ranking Member Doug Collins (R-GA) reintroduced The Journalism Competition and Preservation Act, making the case that the legislation is needed to level the playing field between tech giants and local news publishers. "It grows out of a recognition that we need to do something to give local media, local news publishers the ability to survive," Chairman Cicilline said. He argues that as ad revenue shifts from news publishers to Facebook and Google, it's time for Congress to intervene.