Platforms

Michael O’Rielly has done yeoman work as a member of the Federal Communications Commission, but the White House abruptly pulled his renomination for another five-year term. The decision speaks better of Commissioner O’Rielly than of the President. Commissioner O’Rielly was scuttled for remarks about regulating speech.

Sen Ron Wyden (D-OR) says President Donald Trump’s recent handling of Federal Communications Commission nominations is a “disaster.” The Trump administration withdrew the nomination of FCC Commissioner Michael O’Rielly, shortly after O’Rielly criticized an executive order demanding that the agency unilaterally revise Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. Sen Wyden, one of the coauthors of Section 230, said the move called the agency’s independence into question.

The Federal Communications Commission's Consumer and Governmental Affairs Bureau will invite public input on the Petition for Rulemaking recently filed by the Department of Commerce regarding Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996. Longstanding rules require the agency to put such petitions out for public comment ‘promptly,’ and we will follow that requirement here. I strongly disagree with those who demand that we ignore the law and deny the public and all stakeholders the opportunity to weigh in on this important issue. We should welcome vigorous debate—not foreclose it.

A sizable disconnect appears to exist between the technology Americans are using and depending on in their daily lives and the knowledge base of people with the power and responsibility to decide its future and regulation.

It was the “Wizard of Oz” in digital format as the four titans of Big Tech testified via video before the House Antitrust Subcommittee. Just like in the movie, what the subcommittee saw was controlled by a force hidden from view. The wizard in this case—the reason these four companies are so powerful—is the math that takes our private information and turns it into their corporate asset. It is the 21st century equivalent of Rockefeller’s 20th century monopoly over oil. Unlike industrial assets such as oil, data is reusable. Data is also iterative, as its use in a product creates new data.

Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos of Amazon, Sundar Pichai of Google, and Tim Cook of Apple all dodged lawmakers’ most pointed questions, or professed their ignorance. The result was a hearing that, at times, felt less like a reckoning than an attempted gaslighting — a group of savvy executives trying to convince lawmakers that the evidence that their yearslong antitrust investigation had dug up wasn’t really evidence of anything. The performance wasn’t particularly convincing.

This week's big tech hearing underscored the deep discontent in Congress toward giant technology companies, but also divisions about what the problems are and how to address them. In more than five hours of adversarial interrogation before the House Antitrust Subcommittee, the chief executives of Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google owner Alphabet were accused of a range of unfair business practices. But Democrats focused more on the alleged stifling of competition to preserve their dominance, while Republicans honed in more on the platforms’ outsize grip on information and public debate.

The chief executives of Amazon, Apple, Google and Facebook -- four tech giants worth nearly $5 trillion combined -- faced withering questions from Republican and Democratic lawmakers alike for the tactics and market dominance that had made their enterprises successful. For more than five hours, the 15 members of an antitrust panel in the House lobbed questions and repeatedly interrupted and talked over Jeff Bezos of Amazon, Tim Cook of Apple, Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook and Sundar Pichai of

The White House said the National Telecommunications & Information Administration petition to the Federal Communications Commission on clarifying how Sec. 230 does and does not apply to third-party content online is an example of the President fighting back against "unfair, un-American, and politically biased censorship of Americans online." White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany said the petition was meant to "clarify' that "Section 230 does not permit social media companies that alter or editorialize users’ speech to escape civil liability."