Americans Want Action on Monopolies, Robinhood Data Breach, Nationwide Comcast Outages
Tim Wu said ‘supermajority’ of Americans think government needs to address monopolies.
T.J. York
November 10, 2021 – Tim Wu, President Joe Biden’s pick for the National Economic Council and net neutrality advocate, said Tuesday that a “super majority” of Americans believe there should be a crackdown on monopolies, according to Market Watch.
“We feel strongly that we are playing our role in a democracy in responding to the will of the people, in fact, responding to what really is a supermajority of American citizens,” Wu said in a speech to the American Bar Association’s Antitrust Law Section Fall Forum, the report said.
The report added that Wu was citing a poll showing 67 percent of Americans think “the federal government should do more about the power of monopolies.”Wu was just one in a number of significant appointments by Biden to shore up the Big Tech agenda, including bringing in Google critic Jonathan Kanter as assistant attorney general of the Justice Department’s antitrust division, and Amazon critic Lina Khan as chairwoman of the Federal Trade Commission.
Robinhood suffers data breach
Trading platform Robinhood disclosed Monday that data was stolen for more than 7 million of its customers as part of a major data breach.
More than five million email addresses were stolen in the breach that was discovered on November 3, and an additional two million had their full names included.
Approximately 310 individuals had their names, birth dates and ZIP codes exposed during the breach and 10 individuals had even more account details revealed.
Robinhood stated that no social security numbers, bank account numbers or credit card numbers were exposed and no customer suffered financial loss as a result.
The company reported the breach and filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission as well as asked cybersecurity company Mandiant for help with investigating the breach.
The breach is the latest of many prominent cyberattacks in the U.S., with the Colonial Pipeline and the National Rifle Association also experiencing hacks, prompting government action to stymie bad actors.
Widespread Comcast internet issues
Starting Monday and into the day on Tuesday, Comcast Xfinity customers experienced broadband outages from coast to coast across the U.S.
Outage tracking website Downdetector showed that more than 53,000 people had reported Xfinity service issues as of Tuesday morning. Areas with prevalent reporting of outages included Chicago, Philadelphia, San Francisco and parts of New Jersey.
Comcast said it has now restored service for impacted customers.
The cause of the outages is not immediately clear, with users on Twitter complaining about a lack of communication from Comcast on the issues.
In August 2020, CenturyLink suffered similar widespread network outages in the U.S., impacting sites like Amazon, Cloudflare and Hulu.
