Wall Street Journal

Facebook wants to get us more politically active in the real world. Facebook has rolled out a nonpartisan civic engagement service in the US called Town Hall. It identifies your elected officials—even local ones—sends reminders to vote and goads you to pick up the phone. It is one of the first glimpses of how Facebook will execute on Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg’s vision of using the social network’s influence—built on keeping up with friends—to address humanity’s biggest problems.

[Commentary] If President Donald Trump announces that North Korea launched a missile that landed within 100 miles of Hawaii, would most Americans believe him? Would the rest of the world? We’re not sure, which speaks to the damage that President Trump is doing to his Presidency with his seemingly endless stream of exaggerations, evidence-free accusations, implausible denials and other falsehoods.

The latest example is President Trump’s refusal to back off his tweet of three weeks ago that he had “found out that [Barack] Obama had my ‘wires tapped’ in Trump Tower just before the victory” on Election Day. He has offered no evidence for his claim, and a parade of intelligence officials, senior Republicans and Democrats have since said they have seen no such evidence. Two months into his Presidency, Gallup has President Trump’s approval rating at 39%. No doubt President Trump considers that fake news, but if he doesn’t show more respect for the truth most Americans may conclude he’s a fake President.

The Trump administration at times wears its populist hat and at others its pro-business hat. When it comes to antitrust enforcement, investors are betting it is sporting the latter. Perhaps the clearest evidence of this wager is the spread between Time Warner’s share price and the price implied by AT&T’s deal for it, announced Oct. 22. If it were to close by the end of 2017, holders of Time Warner shares would stand to gain 12%. That compares with 21.6% on Oct. 31. The narrowing suggests investors are increasingly convinced that President Donald Trump won’t follow through on his pre-election threat to block the proposed merger. It also speaks to a general optimism about lenient antitrust enforcement under President Trump.

[Commentary] The number of internet users world-wide has roughly doubled in the past eight years to around 3.5 billion. The people who have come aboard in the past few years are spending their time in something that was overshadowed long ago in developed countries by apps: the mobile web browser.

Single-purpose apps like Facebook and Snapchat are the product of markets where monthly data plans and home Wi-Fi are abundant. App stores require email addresses and credit cards, two things many new phone owners just don’t have. In places like India, Indonesia and Brazil, it’s easy to buy an Android phone for as little as $25—even less for older second-hand (or third-hand) refurbished phones. But there’s likely to be little onboard storage, and the pay-as-you-go data plan is too precious to waste on apps, especially those that send and receive data even when you aren’t using them.

A group of Google adversaries announced a new formal complaint to the European Union’s antitrust watchdog over the Alphabet unit’s behavior with its Android mobile-operating service. The Open Internet Project, whose members include German publishing giants Axel Springer SE and Hubert Burda Media, as well as a handful of French internet companies, said it had filed a new complaint to the EU against Google because the technology giant had “imposed contractual restraints on manufacturers of Android smartphones and tablets, which make it virtually impossible for them to produce and market Google-free devices.”

The European Commission, the bloc’s antitrust watchdog, last April accused Google of using its Android mobile-operating system, which runs more than 80% of the world’s smartphones, to strong-arm phone makers and telecom companies into favoring Google’s search engine and browser on their devices. The latest complaint increases pressure on Google, as well as the regulator, to complete the various investigations into the company. In addition, the EU has formally accused Google of skewing its online search results to favor its comparison-shopping service and alleged the company violates the bloc’s rules by restricting how websites offering Google’s search function can show advertisements from other companies.

Chinese telecommunications giant ZTE Corp has agreed to pay $892 million and plead guilty to violating US sanctions on Iran and obstructing a federal investigation, ending a five-year probe that has raised trade tensions between the US and China. The penalties, among the largest ever in a sanctions case, were imposed on ZTE for a six-year-long plan to obtain technology products from the US, incorporate them into ZTE equipment and ultimately ship the equipment to Iran, US officials said.

Still, the company avoided a more devastating outcome: a supply cutoff of US components, which the Commerce Department slapped on ZTE in March 2016, prompting the company to come forward to negotiate the eventual settlement, according to US authorities. The Commerce Department suspended the sanctions during the talks and, in conjunction with the settlement agreement, it will now move to fully remove them, officials said. Without key components such as Qualcomm Inc. processors for its smartphones, ZTE’s ability to produce some of its major products could have been crippled in a matter of months, putting it at risk of bankruptcy.

On orders from Mark Zuckerberg, more than 100 employees at Facebook were put into what the company calls “lockdown” when they showed up for work one Thursday early in 2016. They had been plucked from other projects to focus on the chief executive’s top priority—making it possible for more than a billion Facebook users to stream video live. Zuckerberg had made a snap decision near the end of a product meeting in his glass-walled office in Menlo Park (CA), to work around the clock to roll out Facebook Live, which took just two months. “This is a big shift in how we communicate, and it’s going to create new opportunities for people to come together,” he wrote in a Facebook post during the world-wide launch in April 2016.

At traditional companies, major product launches often take years. Technology firms, and Facebook in particular, emphasize speed even though they know it means there will be problems to iron out later. And there were problems. The live-video rush left unanswered many questions with which Facebook is still wrestling, especially how to decide when violence on camera needs to be censored. According to a tally by The Wall Street Journal, people have used Facebook Live to broadcast at least 50 acts of violence, including murder, suicides and the beating in January of a mentally disabled teenager in Chicago.

Japanese telecom company SoftBank Group is orchestrating a deal between US satellite startup OneWeb and debt-laden satellite operator Intelsat SA in an attempt to deliver faster and cheaper internet connections world-wide.

OneWeb, which is 40 percent-owned by SoftBank, will buy Intelsat, combining two very different types of satellite fleets that would offer low-cost, versatile connectivity spanning the globe. As part of the deal, SoftBank will inject $1.7 billion into the combined company, in which it will hold a 40 percent stake. The deal, which is subject to approval by Intelsat bondholders, would lower Intelsat’s roughly $14.5 billion debt by about $3.6 billion, while allowing OneWeb to further expand its ambitious satellite-production and deployment plans in the next decade.

Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai he didn’t expect the agency to have a role in reviewing AT&T's $85 billion takeover of Time Warner. Chairman Pai said he understood the companies have structured the deal so that no airwave licenses would be transferred, something that would trigger a broad FCC review. “That is the regulatory hook for FCC review,” he said. “My understanding is that the deal won’t be presented to the commission.” That would leave the Justice Department as the sole federal agency reviewing the transaction. He said the FCC hasn’t had any interaction with the department concerning the deal.

Just over half of Americans think the media’s coverage of President Donald Trump has been too critical, a new Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll finds.

While 51% rate the media as too critical of President Trump since the presidential election, 41% say the coverage has been fair and objective, while 6% say the media hasn't been critical enough. It isn’t clear what role Mr. Trump’s barrage of attacks on the fairness and credibility of the press has played in shaping the majority’s opinion that coverage of his administration has been too negative. A majority of those polled, some 53%, also believes that the news media have exaggerated problems in the Trump administration. Some 45% say that is not the case.