Bloomberg

The Senate Intelligence Committee is still waiting on Twitter to answer questions in the committee’s Russia investigation, Committee Vice Chairman Mark Warner (D-VA) said.  “I’m disappointed. I’ve been disappointed throughout this” by Twitter Inc.’s failure to be more cooperative Vice Chairman Warner said. “The other companies met the deadline." Facebook and Alphabet's Google have delivered answers to detailed questions Senators posed after a public hearing with the three technology giants in 2017 on disclosures that Russians had exploited their networks.

The engineer who was fired by Google after he criticized its diversity policies is suing the internet giant, alleging that he and others at Google were harassed over their conservative political views. 

The Federal Communications Commission rejected calls to delay ending network neutrality rules over a flawed public comment system, saying it had not relied on thousands of identical or suspicious submissions in its decision making. “We reject calls to delay adoption of this Order out of concerns that certain non-substantive comments (on which the Commission did not rely) may have been submitted under multiple different names or allegedly ‘fake’ names,” the commission said in its final order released late on Jan 4.

Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai spent 2017 dismantling Obama-era rules on network neutrality. A handful of lawmakers in liberal-leaning US states plan to spend 2018 building them back up. Even supporters of state legislation on net neutrality think this may go too far. CA State Senator Scott Wiener (D-San Francisco) introduced a bill that would only apply to behavior within the state, saying any other approach would be too vulnerable to legal challenge. “We're expecting that there will be litigation,” he said.

The onset of a new year brings plenty of predictions, and so I will hazard one: Many of the biggest events of 2018 will be bound together by a common theme, namely the collision of the virtual internet with the real “flesh and blood” world. This integration is likely to steer our daily lives, our economy, and maybe even politics to an unprecedented degree. For instance, the coming year will see a major expansion of the “internet of things,” especially home and other smart devices subject to our commands.

The White House is banning its employees from using personal mobile phones while at work in the West Wing, despite concerns among some staffers that they’ll be cut off from children and other relatives trying to reach them.  “The security and integrity of the technology systems at the White House is a top priority for the Trump administration and therefore starting next week the use of all personal devices for both guests and staff will no longer be allowed in the West Wing,” press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said.