Politico

Tech Amendments Galore

As the House prepares to take up funding legislation for departments including Commerce and Agriculture, lawmakers are attempting to hitch provisions tackling facial recognition tech, broadband mapping, and 5G. One Republican amendment would slate $90 million for Department of Agriculture to use on broadband buildout in unserved areas. Another would boost f

230 Debate Escalates

Sen Josh Hawley (R-MO) is poised to announce new legislation on Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. The measure is expected to focus on enforcement of Section 230, the legal liability shield that immunizes tech platforms from lawsuits over user-posted content. It would open the possibility of treating certain tech companies as publishers and therefore more liable for the content that shows up on their sites.

Antitrust Agenda

The go-to metric for antitrust enforcers has long been increasing prices. Critics, however, have begun to question whether that approach needs an update, given that tech giants like Google and Facebook offer free services. And this week, some of the nation’s leading antitrust enforcers made clear they’re willing to take a broader view. Justice Department antitrust chief Makan Delrahim said his office will consider factors like privacy violations or free speech restrictions as signs that product quality and market competition have deteriorated.

The group at the center of the antitrust storm

A small liberal think tank has spent years urging Washington to crack down on the United States’ biggest tech companies — a lonely crusade that barely registered with the political establishment. Now the Open Markets Institute has become one of the most influential drivers of Democratic politics in the fight to rein in Facebook, Amazon and Google, seeing its ideas embraced by Elizabeth Warren and forcing presidential candidates like Bernie Sanders, Cory Booker and Joe Biden to take a side.

Newspapers’ Embarrassing Lobbying Campaign

The newspaper industry has crawled up Capitol Hill once again to beg for an antitrust exemption it believes would give the business needed in its fight with Google and Facebook for advertising dollars. Currently, Google and Facebook collect 73 percent of all digital advertising. Members of the news industry believe that the two tech giants have exploited their dominance of the Web to unfairly collect digital dollars that rightfully belong to them.

FTC went to Silicon Valley to solicit antitrust complaints

The Federal Trade Commission has sent top antitrust officials into the heart of Silicon Valley to seek out complaints about anti-competitive behavior, an unusual move that offers yet another hint about the government’s growing interest in policing the industry's giants. The weeklong tour included private meetings between leaders of the FTC's new technology task force and more than a dozen industry players to discuss the state of their businesses and market competition challenges, apparently.

Fresh Hurdle for Bipartisanship on Privacy

Two House lawmakers looking to craft a consensus data privacy bill found themselves on opposite sides of an emerging debate: whether legislation should create a new privacy division at the Federal Trade Commission. Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-IL), who heads the House Commerce Committee's Consumer Protection Subcommittee, said she’ll pursue that option.

President Trump suggests AT&T boycott to force changes in CNN coverage

President Donald Trump kicked off his state visit to the United Kingdom with a complaint about CNN, urging a boycott of the network’s new corporate owner, AT&T. He fired off a pair of tweets complaining that CNN, whose coverage the president often says is unfair to his administration, "is the primary source of news available from the US" in the UK.

Sen Cornyn: Commissioner O'Rielly Deserves Another FCC Term

Federal Communications Commissioner Mike O’Rielly’s current term expires in June 2019. Although he can remain seated until the end of 2020, he would need President Donald Trump’s renomination and a Senate confirmation vote to serve beyond then. Commissioner O’Rielly has said he wants another five-year term if possible. “I think he’s outstanding,” said Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX).

Why breaking up Facebook won't be easy

Busting up the nation’s tech giants would be much harder than making a campaign pledge. Corporate breakups are a huge, and rare, undertaking for the government, and a social media company like Facebook presents unique challenges that didn't exist with past antitrust successes like the dismembering of AT&T in the 1980s. Here are some of the obstacles standing in the way of turning this rallying cry into reality:

Amid censorship fears, Trump 2020 campaign 'checking out' alternative social network

Parler, a Twitter-like platform, was initially hatched in 2018 as a tool for digital news outlets to claw revenue back from big social networks like Facebook.

Inside Andrew Yang's (Anti-Tech) Campaign

Democratic presidential candidate Andrew Yang is both of the tech world and one of its harshest critics. Viewed from a great distance, Yang’s candidacy has a lot in common with the two political comets that streaked across the 2016 presidential campaign: Donald Trump on the right and Bernie Sanders on the left. Yang runs essentially the same playbook: embracing economic grievance, hammering the tech giants and other darlings of the ‘new economy,’ selling his case directly to the working American.

Huawei and the Homefront

Some lawmakers say the federal government should help small US wireless providers rip out and replace their existing Chinese network equipment. The Rural Wireless Association puts the collective price tag at $1 billion. Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-MD) said he would raise the issue with Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai and push for a solution in the Senate Appropriations Committee. “We need to provide support to those small and rural communities who have already installed some of this equipment and will need help in covering the costs of removing and replacing it,” he said.

‘Get Scavino in here’: Trump’s Twitter guru is the ultimate insider

With few allies left in the West Wing, President Donald  Trump frequently leans on Dan Scavino, his unassuming social media guru (officially: senior adviser for digital strategy), for affirmation and advice about how his most sensitive policies will be received. To admirers, Scavino is a social media pioneer who fine-tunes Trump’s critical bond with his supporters. To critics, he is a yes-man and enabler who has no business working in the White House. Scavino routinely provides rationalizations or justifications for the president’s most controversial policy directives. 

FCC's Hurricane Headache

House Commerce Committee Chairman Frank Pallone (D-NJ) raised concern at the Federal Communications Commission oversight hearing about the agency’s response to “major consumer problems,” suggesting the commission had been deferring to corporate interests when it comes to fixing things like “robocalls or widespread communications failures after disasters like Hurricanes Maria and Michael.” The criticism came days after the FCC’s Public Safety and Homeland Security Bureau issued a report detailing “the unac

Privacy + Antitrust?

Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-IL), whose House Commerce Subcommittee is leading efforts to craft privacy legislation, raised the prospect of tackling concerns over competition and data protection at the same time. Asked about next steps on privacy legislation, Chairwoman Schakowsky said the question is where to limit the “scope” of a bill. “You can really get into a whole lot of things,” she said. “There’s talk about breaking up the big tech companies. Is that a part of this? Is that a separate [issue]?

Questions Arise Over Trump's "Bias" Site

Public-interest groups and civil liberties advocates say there's no clear evidence Facebook, Twitter, Google, and other companies suppress conservative viewpoints. And they say they're troubled by the prospect of government officials, particularly President Donald Trump, seeking to intimidate Silicon Valley over the issue. "A more pressing problem than alleged 'censorship' of any particular viewpoint is the proliferation of misinformation, propaganda, hate speech, terrorist content, and harassment online," said John Bergmayer, a senior counsel at Public Knowledge.

Sen Graham: Can't We All Get Along

Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Lindsey Graham (R-SC) is hoping to get key committees on the same page when it comes to the tech industry and data privacy. He’s drafting a letter to leaders on Senate Banking and Senate Commerce committees to sort out jurisdictional questions related to the sector. “I’m going to have Sen. [Dianne] Feinstein and myself, we’re going to write a letter to the other committees of jurisdiction and see if we can come up with sort of a common approach to the issues,” he said. Sen Graham said the letter will likely be sent next week.

Kennedy's Net Neutrality Evolution

During a hearing on the Federal Communications Commission's budget, Sen. John Neely Kennedy (R-LA) called on the Senate to forge a new bill to enshrine net neutrality protections but appeared to back away from his earlier advocacy of the Obama-era open internet rules. Sen Kennedy once voted in favor of restoring those regulations, but he now sees “flaws” in that model. “I think we have more in common than we don’t,” he said. “We need to stop passing the buck and we need to pass a net neutrality bill.” But bipartisan consensus may prove elusive.