David McCabe

Sen. Mark Warner's office has laid out 20 different paths to address problems posed by Big Tech platforms — ranging from putting a price on individual users' data to funding media literacy programs. The proposal is a window t0 the options available to US policymakers concerned about disinformation and privacy. Enacting any of these plans is a long shot in the near-term, but a shift in party control of Congress come November could give them more momentum.

Today’s tech startups have largely stayed out of the debate over whether antitrust law should be used to humble — and possibly break up — giants like Facebook, Google, and Amazon. Startups are often in position to lead the antitrust charge against major competitors. But entrepreneurs face a dilemma: If they go running to regulators, they have to admit they’re in danger and tick off a powerful player in their world. If they do nothing, they risk bleeding out. Tech giants have immense leverage over startups.

Facebook is hiring more engineers in Washington (DC) as it tackles problems, like countering online extremism and foreign election meddling, that have received attention from policymakers.  The plan to “quintuple” the social network’s DC engineering force underscores how the company’s future is more intertwined than ever with decisions made in the nation’s capital. The expansion comes after Facebook moved into a new 75,000 square foot Washington office that can accommodate the new workforce, with features that include a cafe serving multiple free meals a day similar to those in its Californ

The scramble among mobile carriers to amass airwaves for fifth generation (or 5G) wireless networks is picking up steam — and the frenetic pace will continue, even as industry players promise to begin rolling out 5G networks to consumers as soon as 2019. Regulators are rushing to make more spectrum available for what the industry promises will be super-fast speeds and quick response times perfect for applications like virtual reality and self-driving cars.

The ripples of the Supreme Court ruling in favor of American Express could be felt on the West Coast, with some arguing it would make it harder for antitrust enforcers to take on big online platforms like Google, Facebook and Amazon. Many of tech’s most profitable firms have created two-sided markets: Google and Facebook serve consumers on one side and marketers on another. Uber links up riders and drivers. Amazon serves customers and also the merchants who use its platform. All these situations make defining a monopoly more difficult.

The White House is in the early stages of determining what a federal approach to online data privacy should look like. The preliminary conversations show that the White House wants a voice in the contentious domestic and global debate about how to protect consumer privacy online. Gail Slater, special assistant to President Donald Trump for tech, telecom and cyber policy at the White House National Economic Council, has met with industry groups to discuss possible ways to put in place guardrails for the use of personal data, according to multiple sources familiar with the matter.

Former Federal Communications Commission Chairman Tom Wheeler says that there was no 2014 cyberattack meant to overwhelm the agency's comment system during the net neutrality debate, as claimed by a former agency IT official in emails recently published by Gizmodo. The Gizmodo story says that in 2017, after the agency claimed to have experienced a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) taking down its comment system, agency IT chief David Bray told the media that there had been a similar attack in 2014 — and that Wheeler had decided to keep the matter quiet for fear of copycat attacks. 

A collection of progressive groups will launch a six figure digital ad offensive May 21 telling the Federal Trade Commission to break up Facebook’s social networking empire. The groups are asking for the FTC to do three things:

Democratic lawmakers say they can make political hay of the battle over network neutrality among a small — but committed — group of midterm voters. The linchpin of that strategy is a vote in the Senate May 16 on a measure to undo the Federal Communications Commission’s 2017 repeal of net neutrality rules. That raises the prominence of the effort to preserve the neutrality rules — and will put at least some Republicans on record as opposing it.

The four new commissioners who joined the Federal Trade Commission -- with another waiting in the wings -- are poised to weigh in on major tech issues, from privacy to concentration of market power.