Politico

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.

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 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.

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).

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:

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.

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.