By John Eggerton, Multichannel News, 9-18-20 Republican Federal Trade Commissioner Noah Phillips said the government should not rush into national privacy legislation. That came in an interview for C-SPAN's Communicators series. Phillips has repeatedly said to Congress that privacy means different things to different people. For some he said it meant control of their [...]
By John Eggerton, Multichannel News, 9-18-20 Big Tech has come under fire in Washington for not sufficiently policing its content. The hearing, “Mainstreaming Extremism: Social Media’s Role in Radicalizing America," will be held Sept. 24 at 11 a.m. via Cisco Webex video conference. No witnesses have been announced, but if they are from social media [...]
By John Eggerton, Multichannel News, 9-17-20 California Attorney General Xavier Becerra has filed the state's opposition to the Trump Administration's request for a preliminary injunction to block California's net neutrality law from going into effect. Enforcement is "on hold," as Becerra's office points out, until the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eastern District [...]
By John Eggerton, Multichannel News, 9-17-20 The FCC oversight hearing Thursday (Sept. 17) is entitled "Trump FCC: Four Years or Lost Opportunities," but FCC chairman Ajit Pai, a lead witness in the Democrat-led House Energy & Commerce Committee Communications Subcommittee clearly doesn't see it that way. In his prepared testimony, Pai talks about the [...]
By John Eggerton, Multichannel News, 9-17-20 The Consumer Technology Association said the Trump Administration's attempt to regulate online platforms that host third-party content would send the message to other countries that the U.S. is willing to regulate speech "if it offends the politically powerful." One of the most prominent and powerful of those would-be [...]
By John Eggerton, Multichannel News, 9-17-20 A hearing in the House Communications Subcommittee that was advertised as a Democratic attack on (and expected Republican defense of) the FCC panned out as expected, with the Democrats using the hearing to make it clear it was also an indictment of President Trump as he seeks to [...]
By John Eggerton, Multichannel News, 9-16-20 The Senate Commerce Committee has lined up a quartet of former Federal Trade Commissioners, including three former chairs, to talk about federal privacy legislation. The FTC has principal authority over online privacy enforcement, but that is confined to conduct that is anticompetitive or violates expressed policies on protecting [...]
By John Eggerton, Multichannel News, 9-16-20 Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.) said the U.S. has to start re-imbedding its values of openness, transparency, and respect for human and civil rights into global tech standards or let China continue its march toward using new tech for authoritarian control and market domination. Warner, vice chairman of the [...]
By John Eggerton, Multichannel News, 9-16-20 The Senate Judiciary Antitrust Committee weighed into the online advertising market Tuesday (Sept. 15) with an emphasis on the 600 pound gorilla in that space and whether it has exerted its power over anticompetitively, as critics have alleged. The tenor of the hearing was telegraphed in its clever [...]
By John Eggerton, Multichannel News, 9-14-20 Federal Trade Commission chairman Joseph Simons is cautioning against a rush to regulate big tech. That came in virtual remarks at the International Competition Network (ICN) annual conference. ICN is a convocation of global competition authorities. In addition to being FTC chair, Simons is former head of the [...]