Platforms

News companies are reversing course on hard subscriptions—once seen as a safer alternative to the volatile ad market—in favor of flexible paywalls, membership programs and more ads. A strategy focused mainly on subscriptions requires upfront spending on premium content. That takes time to pay off—and many publishers don't have the cushion for that in the current ad slowdown. At the same time, many outlets have learned that simply throwing a paywall up over your previously free content doesn't work either. It throttles ad revenue without capturing enough new subscribers.

Netflix confirmed that it has notified its customers in Florida that it will begin on February 15 adding to their monthly bills "the state tax rate" for streaming services, which is 5.07% of their regular fees. Netflix referred to 

In January at the World Economic Forum, Nick Clegg, president of global affairs at Meta, called a nascent effort to detect artificially generated content “the most urgent task” facing the tech industry today. Now, Mr. Clegg has proposed a solution.

Google will no longer be keeping a backup of the entire Internet. Google Search's "cached" links have long been an alternative way to load a website that was down or had changed, but now the company is killing them off. Google "Search Liaison" Danny Sullivan confirmed the feature removal in an X post, saying the feature "was meant for helping people access pages when way back, you often couldn't depend on a page loading. These days, things have greatly improved.

Senators of both parties are focusing their criticism on a law that Congress passed in 1996—a law that paved the way for social media as we know it. That law, said Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL), “needs to change.” The statute in question is Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which gives online service providers broad immunity from lawsuits over their users’ posts, with the goal of promoting free expression online. Over the years, it has survived court challenges, legislative pushes, and an executive order by President Donald Trump. Now, it is in Congress’s sights once again.

CEO's from Meta, Snap, X, TikTok, and Discord testified in a contentious and emotional Senate hearing on child online safety. Lawmakers invoked the stories of online child abuse victims—many of whom sat directly behind the tech leaders—to issue a stunning rebuke to Meta's Mark Zuckerberg and other executives.

There's one thing uniting big and small tech companies operating in Europe: they can't stand Apple's approach to complying with the European Union's new Digital Markets Act (DMA). The DMA designates six big tech companies as online gatekeepers—Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, ByteDance, Meta, and Microsoft—and obligates them to open their platforms to competition. Apple's DMA compliance plan allows developers to set up alternative app stores and avoid Apple's in-app payment system.

Social media platforms faced a range of controversies in recent years, including concerns over misinformation and data privacy. Even so, US adults use a wide range of sites and apps, especially YouTube and Facebook. And TikTok – which some Congress members previously called to ban – saw growth in its user base. According to a Pew Research Center survey of 5,733 U.S. adults conducted May 19-Sept. 5, 2023:

President Biden issued a landmark Executive Order to ensure that America leads the way in seizing the promise and managing the risks of artificial intelligence (AI). On January 29, Deputy Chief of Staff Bruce Reed convened the White House AI Council, and agencies reported on their 90-day actions tasked by the Executive Order. The Executive Order directed a sweeping range of actions within 90 days to address some of AI’s biggest threats to safety and security. To mitigate these and other risks, agencies have:

In conversations with a slew of business leaders about the economic implications of generative AI, a recurring theme cropped up: that AI-driven productivity gains are the world's best hope to limit the pain of a demographic squeeze. As computers get better at doing jobs humans have traditionally done, the risk of mass displacement of workers is created. But the flip side is an emerging shortage of working-age humans in most advanced economies and a murky future for globalization, which effectively expands the global pool of workers. The big macroeconomic question for the coming decade is wh