Financial Times

Australia’s competition watchdog has begun an investigation into the market power of Facebook, Google and other digital platforms to determine if they are harming the media and advertising industries. The probe follows an order by the government of a formal inquiry into the internet giants’ impact on the industry, as part of a shake-up of media laws in September.

Google and Facebook are set to attract 84 percent of global spending on digital advertising, excluding China, in 2017, according to a forecast from GroupM, the WPP-owned media buying agency, underscoring concerns that the two technology companies have become a digital duopoly. The research predicts that total global ad spending will increase by about $23 billion, or 4.3 percent, in 2018.

Apple’s main supplier in Asia has been employing students illegally working overtime to assemble the iPhone X, as it struggles to catch up with demand after production delays.  Six high school students said they routinely work 11-hour days assembling the iPhone X at a factory in Zhengzhou, China, which constitutes illegal overtime for student interns under Chinese law.

Apparently, the Justice Department has called on AT&T and Time Warner to sell Turner Broadcasting, the group of cable channels that includes CNN, as a potential requirement for approving the companies’ pending $85.4 billion deal. The other possible way for the merger to win approval would be for AT&T to sell its DirecTV division, apparently.

[Commentary] We should ask ourselves if we can find a way to re-introduce serious competition in social networking. Luigi Zingales and Guy Rolnik of the University of Chicago have proposed an intriguing idea. They build on the concept of “number portability”, the principle that you own your own phone number, and you can take your number with you to a different phone provider. The idea has promise in retail banking. Zingales and Rolnik suggest an analogy: social graph portability. The idea is that I could take my Facebook contacts with me to another service — call it “ZingBook”.

In some upside-down logic from the land of down under, Australian consumers have been able to upgrade their broadband internet access to the latest fibre-optic lines, only to receive slower speeds than over ageing copper wires. Such experiences are the absurd result of a grandiose government plan to bankroll what was supposed to be the world’s most advanced broadband network, called NBN.

[Commentary] With a speed many American internet users can only envy, the Trump administration is re-writing the rules for US internet providers. The administration is quite right that the industry has a serious problem: lack of competition. But a regulatory rollback, paired with the administration’s apparently sanguine attitude towards industry consolidation, will do nothing to solve it, and could make matters worse. The root problem is lack of competition in network construction and improvement. If consumers had more options, fewer rules would be required. President Donald Trump likes to talk about infrastructure investment. Encouraging investment in digital infrastructure — a natural area for private-public partnership — should be part of that agenda. That would do much more good than rolling back sensible if imperfect rules and waving through deals in an industry that already has the upper hand on the consumer.