Reporting

The Trump administration is following through with plans to allow American companies to continue doing business with Huawei, the Chinese telecom equipment giant, just weeks after placing the company on a Commerce Department blacklist. Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross said the administration will issue licenses for American companies that want to do business with Huawei “where there is no threat to national security.” And another top official suggested the move would allow chip makers to continue selling certain technology to Huawei. 

The Senate Judiciary Committee held a hearing "Protecting Innocence in a Digital World" July 9 on protecting kids online, and Big Tech came in for further criticism over its handling of the issue. Chairman Lindsey Graham (R-SC) said he hoped to learn a lot from the witnesses about the perils of social media sites, and the internet in general, for children. He also signaled there would be a follow-on hearing where Big Tech was called to account. 

President Donald Trump has summoned Republican lawmakers, political strategists and social media stars to the White House on July 11  to discuss the “opportunities and challenges” of the Web — but his upcoming summit, critics say, could end up empowering online provocateurs who have adopted controversial political tactics entering the 2020 election campaign. The high-profile gathering follows months of attacks from President Trump claiming that Facebook, Google and Twitter — all services the president taps to talk to supporters — secretly censor right-leaning users, websites and other conte

A Q&A with Gigi Sohn, Benton Senior Fellow and a distinguished fellow at Georgetown Law’s Institute for Technology Law and Policy.

The purported details in the account of Russia’s foreign intelligence service, known as the SVR, seemed improbable on their face: that Seth Rich, a data director in the Democratic National Committee’s voter protection division, was on his way to alert the FBI to corrupt dealings by Hillary Clinton when he was slain in the early hours of a Sunday morning by the former secretary of state’s hit squad.

The latest Microsoft Airband partner is Watch Communications, which will work with Microsoft to bring high-speed broadband to 50 counties in IN, 22 counties in IL, and most counties in OH. The Microsoft Watch Communications partnership will use a variety of broadband technologies, with an emphasis on fixed wireless operating in TV white spaces. TV white spaces technology uses vacant TV broadband spectrum, incorporating database technology to ensure that broadband providers only use spectrum that is available for unlicensed use in a geographic area.

President Donald Trump cannot block his critics from the Twitter feed he regularly uses to communicate with the public, a federal appeals court said, in a case with implications for how elected officials nationwide interact with constituents on social media. The decision from the New York-based appeals court upholds an earlier ruling that President Trump violated the First Amendment when he blocked individual users critical of the president or his policies.

As American regulators and lawmakers intensify their scrutiny of Big Tech, there is a lot of discussion about whether or how they could accuse the companies of violating antitrust law.

The United States Agency for Global Media, the government’s foreign broadcast service, already struggling to clean house after a series of scandals at flagship operations like Voice of America and TV Martí, is now being rocked by two new cases that have raised further questions about its journalistic and financial management. 

As talks on a data privacy bill reportedly lose steam in the Senate, two Democratic House aides said the House Commerce Committee is targeting the end of Sept or early Oct to introduce its own version of privacy legislation. Apparently, there are plans for Consumer Protection Subcommittee Chair Jan Schakowsky (D-IL) to head up the effort. One aide said the legislation is expected to include a few possible concessions that could fall by the wayside if the bill were to be reconciled with any Senate version through a conference committee.