Makena Kelly

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) ripped into Facebook during her weekly press briefing and accused the social media company of “schmoozing” the Trump administration out of tougher regulation. She said:

Sen Ron Wyden (D-OR) called on the Federal Trade Commission to investigate the ad-blocking industry for anti-competitive behavior. For years now, some of the largest tech firms have paid ad-blocking companies like Eyeo, which owns Adblock Plus, to avoid the software’s restrictions and have their ads displayed on devices. In 2015, a report showed that companies like Microsoft, Amazon, and Google were paying out ad blockers so that they could be added to a whitelist to avoid the software’s filters.

The future of the American mobile broadband industry has hinged on a small courtroom in lower Manhattan, where carriers and regulators are squaring off over a plan to reshape the wireless business as we know it. The last hurdle to T-Mobile's purchase of Sprint is a federal lawsuit, filed by ten state attorneys general in the Southern District of New York, accusing the merger of being anti-competitive. This is regulators’ last chance to stop the merger from going through, by proving that a merged T-Mobile will mean higher prices and worse service for wireless customers.

The Federal Communications Commission formally approved the merger between T-Mobile and Sprint. The vote comes months after the Justice Department greenlit the deal. Now, the T-Mobile-Sprint deal faces one more battle. A bipartisan coalition of state attorneys general are still trying to block the deal through a multistate lawsuit, and representatives from the two companies said that they won’t close the merger until that is resolved.

2020 Democratic presidential candidate Beto O’Rourke announced a sweeping policy plan to counter hate speech and gun violence in America that specifically proposes changes to Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, one of the tech industry’s most pivotal legal protections. Outside of proposing a nationwide gun licensing system/registry and requiring universal background checks, O’Rourke laid out a plan aimed at making social media companies like Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube more responsible for hateful content on their platforms.

Over a dozen right-leaning groups wrote to Congress asking leaders to reject any changes to Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act -- the law which relieves companies from liability for content posted on their platforms -- even in the midst of bipartisan calls from legislators to enact major changes to the law. Right-leaning groups like FreedomWorks and Americans for Prosperity see any changes to the law as a mistake.

Sen. Ed Markey (D-MA) took to the floor of the Senate in an attempt to force a vote on a bill to reinstate net neutrality on the one-year anniversary of its reversal. “Under Sen. McConnell’s leadership, the Republicans are trying to bury this bill in a legislative graveyard,” Sen Markey said, referring to the Save the Internet Act passed by the House in April. Sens. Ron Wyden (D-OR), Ed Markey (D-MA), and Maria Cantwell (D-WA) noted that the Senate approved a measure nearly identical to the one in the House in 2018. 

In an interview with CNBC, President Donald Trump criticized the antitrust fines imposed by the European Union on US tech companies, suggesting that these tech giants could, in fact, be monopolies, but the US should be the political body raking in the settlement fines. “Every week you see them going after Facebook, and Apple, and all of these companies that are, you know, great companies," President Trump said. "But I will say that the European Union is suing them all the time." “Well, we should be doing this. They’re our companies.

A lack of data and transparency from social media companies has been a crucial force behind Republicans’ accusations that social networks are biased against conservatives, piggybacking off of rising left-wing concerns about data privacy and market power. Again and again, conservatives, like Sens Ted Cruz (R-TX) and Josh Hawley (R-MO) have used personal stories and anecdotes to stoke resentment against platforms and their moderators. And with no broader data to disprove them, the anecdotes are hard to argue with.

T-Mobile and Comcast announced a partnership to combat the industry’s growing robocall problem. Starting April 17, the companies will begin authenticating calls made between their networks in order to verify for consumers when the caller is an actual human being. Americans received over 26 billion unwanted robocalls in 2018, and after a few light pushes from federal agencies like the Federal Communications Commission, carriers are beginning to deploy an authentication system that’s meant to combat them, known as the SHAKEN/STIR protocol.