Digital Content

Facebook's newly formed Oversight Board—a group of 20 lawyers, professors and other independent experts who consider appeals to decisions made by the company—has been charged with interpreting Facebook’s numerous detailed rules governing everything from the depiction of graffiti to swearing at newsworthy figures.

The upcoming sale of Yahoo and AOL to a private equity firm for $5 billion represents a massive media markdown. At their dotcom bubble peaks, Yahoo and AOL were valued at more than $125 billion and $200 billion, respectively, or $193 billion and $318 billion in 2021 dollars. AOL made one giant mistake. It famously bought Time Warner for $182 billion in cash and stock in 2000, saddling the company with debt just before the dotcom bubble burst and the rise of broadband made AOL's dial-up services virtually obsolete.

The web itself is built on an English-first architecture, and most of the big social media platforms that host public discourse in the United States put English first too. And as technologies become proxies for civic spaces in the United States, the primacy of English has been magnified. For Asian-Americans, the move to digital means that access to democratic institutions—everything from voting registration to local news—is impeded by linguistic barriers. 

Apollo Global Management agreed to pay about $5 billion to acquire Yahoo and AOL from Verizon as the wireless company exits its ill-fated foray into the media business. The private-equity firm is paying $4.25 billion in cash for a 90% share of the media assets. Verizon will keep a 10% stake and $750 million of additional preferred stock in the new company, called Yahoo, that will be formed to operate the business. Verizon Media, which mostly struggled to grow against Alphabet's Google and Facebook, generated $7 billion in revenue in 2020.

The behaviors of platform and social media companies have evolved under the heat of the spotlight. Regulation takes time, and a lot of hearings, to produce tangible results. One upshot of four years of high-profile hearings is that tech companies now know how to play the game. Sometimes the goal isn't to pass a law. Congress uses the bully pulpit to force companies to self-regulate.

Comcast continues to shift its emphasis from being a cable TV company to being a digital company. Comcast has: 19 million cable subscribers, a loss of 491,000 since December; 31 million broadband internet subscribers; a gain of 461,000; and 42 million sign-ups to the streaming platform Peacock, a jump of 9 million. Comcast sells something that has proved more durable than sports and entertainment: broadband, the piping that carries all streaming platforms. In the first quarter, sales increased 12 percent, to $5.6 billion.

Nearly every major social platform has recently introduced some form of tipping, allowing users to directly support their favorite personalities in real time. The popularity and availability of payment platforms such as Venmo, CashApp and Stripe are making it easier for tech companies to enable peer-to-peer payments on their platforms. For creators, getting money from users directly is critical because platforms are not financially incentivized to pay out most people directly.

Around the world, governments are moving simultaneously to limit the power of tech companies with an urgency and breadth that no single industry had experienced before. Their motivation varies.

California’s 2018 net neutrality law, SB-822, recently went into effect and concerns have been already raised about the legality of “zero-rating,” the practice by which commercial arrangements and unilateral decisions by network operators are exempted from consumer pricing. Under California’s net neutrality law, zero-rating and sponsored data programs violate the new law because certain content cannot be excluded from consumer data caps, or usage-based pricing. Turner Lee offers the following recommendations to state and federal leaders: