Platforms

While Democrats' campaign launches have sucked up national attention, President Donald Trump's re-election campaign has quietly spent nearly twice as much as the entire Democratic field combined on Facebook and Google ads. Political advertising strategists say that this level of ad spend on digital platforms this early in the campaign season is unprecedented. The data (captured between December 2018 and now) provides a window into the Trump campaign's 2020 strategy, which until now has been virtually invisible aside from a few rallies.

Stung by obscene and pointed criticism, Rep Devin Nunes (R-CA) has sued Twitter and three users for defamation, claiming the users smeared him and the platform allowed it to happen because of a political agenda. The complaint, which was filed in Henrico County Circuit Court in Virginia, seeks $250 million in damages.

A Q&A with Sen Josh Hawley (R-MO). 

On March 8, 2019, Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) took to Medium to outline her plan to break up digital monopolies. Her proposal aims to restore competition in the tech sector and ensure online platforms play by the rules. Warren goes beyond the familiar “break ‘em up” rhetoric and actually offers sustainable sector-specific regulation -- an important step in advancing the policy debate around Big Tech.

The gatekeeper and competition issues caused by app stores aren’t going away. At the same time, solutions to them should seek to maintain the convenience, security, and privacy benefits of software that is at least somewhat screened, since we’ve learned from experience that allowing any app, from anywhere, to have unfettered access to a user’s computer or other device is not good, either. No one wants smartphones to become like the virus and “toolbar”-infested Windows 98 family computers of the past.

As privacy scandals mount at firms such as Facebook, Presidential candidate Sen Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) is positioning her data tax as a way to make technology companies think twice about how they share and profit from users’ data. But implementing such an idea might be difficult, experts noted. Taxing data means you have to know what such information is worth, for instance. Former Facebook employee Antonio García Martínez says data is often compared to oil, but that's a poor analogy because unlike oil that has a clear price, the ultimate value of data is unknown.

Some of the country’s most influential state attorneys general are signaling they’re willing to take action against Facebook, Google and other tech giants, warning that the companies have grown too big and powerful -- and that Washington has been too slow to respond. Some state officials feel that Washington bears some of the blame for the tech industry’s string of scandals in the first place.

It’s been almost exactly a year since news broke that Facebook had allowed the personal data of tens of millions of users to be shared with Cambridge Analytica, a consulting company affiliated with Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign. That revelation sparked an investigation by the Justice Department into the company's data-sharing practices, which has broadened to include a grand jury.

Regulating big tech is quickly becoming a central theme of the 2020 presidential race. But many of the tech-industry insiders I spoke with, including some who agree with Sen Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) that the big companies are too powerful, cautioned that some of the details in her proposal were too vague, and could backfire if put into effect as written. Warren’s plan is a bold first stab at reform, and some of her proposals make a lot of sense. But I’d offer a few edits.

Federal prosecutors are conducting a criminal investigation into data deals Facebook struck with some of the world’s largest technology companies, intensifying scrutiny of the social media giant’s business practices as it seeks to rebound from a year of scandal and setbacks. A grand jury in New York has subpoenaed records from at least two prominent makers of smartphones and other devices, apparently. Both companies had entered into partnerships with Facebook, gaining broad access to the personal information of hundreds of millions of its users.