Justice Department
WASHINGTON, February 19, 2020 – Attorney General William Barr laid out the case for “recalibrating” Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act in response to what he called a concentrated power over information that resides in the hands of Silicon Valley tech companies. Because “the big tech plat
Justice Department
WASHINGTON, February 6, 2020 – Assistant Attorney General Makan Delrahim surveyed the antitrust and merger landscape from the Crystal Room of the Willard Hotel using the example of the T-Mobile/Sprint merger. He defended it for allowing rural communities to have better broadband. Delrahim, who overs
Justice Department
The results from the Democratic Caucus in Iowa remained delayed, and the technology snafu is being blamed on an app designed to tabulate results that was made by Shadow, Inc., according to multiple press reports. The New York Times cites a person familiar with the app as saying that concerns about p
Justice Department
WASHINGTON, January 28, 2020 – Proponents of the high tech industry and law enforcement officials from several countries squared off, with fundamental disagreements about whether catching thousands of pedophiles or securing billions of people’s data represented the greater good. Researcher at the MI
WASHINGTON, September 17, 2019 – Congress on Tuesday put a spotlight on federal antitrust investigators scrutinizing Google and Facebook, as members of the Senate Judiciary Committee honed in on whether the Justice Department and the Federal Trade Commission were wasting efforts by investigating the
WASHINGTON, September 10, 2019 – The political world is all abuzz about breaking up big tech companies, but the overly broad breakup remedies being proposed by many are inconsistent with antitrust law as articulated by the Supreme Court, said Taylor Owings, counsel to the Assistant Attorney General
WASHINGTON, August 14, 2019 – Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai on Wednesday issued a final order (PDF) that would approve the proposed merger of T-Mobile and Sprint. But the negotiations over the proposed transaction between the two telecom companies continues at the state level “
Broadband technologies are getting better and faster, but access is still concentrated in metro and suburban areas, Kim Hart and Sara Fischer report in Axios. Despite efforts to narrow the digital divide, rural areas, small towns and low-income neighborhoods in big cities still struggle to have acce
Cloudflare, an online service that helps websites mitigate DDoS attacks, will be terminating its services for the forum 8chan following the El Paso shooting, the Verge reports. This opens the site to potential attacks that could shut it down entirely. “While removing 8chan from our network takes hea
Justice Department
WASHINGTON, July 31, 2019 — The Justice Department’s recently announced settlement on the T-Mobile/Sprint merger has drawn widespread criticism, even though the agreement maintains four nationwide carriers by drawing Dish Network into the marketplace. Dish has fiercely defended its ability to quickl
Justice Department
WASHINGTON, July 25, 2019 — The efficacy of antitrust enforcement against big tech companies was energetically debated at an Internet Governance Forum conference on Thursday. The current consumer welfare standard sufficiently supports robust antitrust merger analysis, claimed Keith Klovers, an attor
The Department of Justice announced Friday that it and the Attorneys General for five states reached a settlement with T-Mobile and Sprint regarding their proposed merger. The settlement requires a substantial divestiture package in order to enable a viable facilities-based competitor to enter the m
Justice Department
WASHINGTON, July 23, 2019 — Facebook, Amazon, and Apple stocks dropped on Tuesday after reports of a broad antitrust review of big tech by the U.S. Department of Justice surfaced. The review will “consider the widespread concerns that consumers, businesses, and entrepreneurs have expressed about sea
Justice Department
WASHINGTON, June 25, 2019 — Following the Federal Communications Commission’s recent order against robocalls, for added measure the House Energy & Commerce Committee Communications Subcommittee voted on Tuesday to approve a legislative measure against robocalls. The bill, known as the “Stopping Bad
Justice Department
BROADBAND BREAKFAST INSIGHT: California is merely the largest of the large number of states that have attempted to take a “federalist” approach to the “interstate commerce” of network neutrality. This sets up the first of many political flashpoints over the issue. Feds launch lawyers at California n
Justice Department
Telecom attorney Jonathan Lee takes down the U.S. Department of Justice Antitrust Division’s specious case against the AT&T/Time Warner merger in this detailed blog post, excerpted below. (Click on the link at the bottom for the whole argument.) Here’s the money quote: “This alleged harm is simply t
