Report from the Miami Times In Brief – Federal District Judge Robert Hinkle has rejected the State of Florida’s motion to dismiss a lawsuit challenging its 2021 law that regulates how social media companies engage in content moderation. Hinkle has overseen First...
Indonesian Antitrust Regulator Rules on TikTok Shopping Acquisition
Report from Reuters In Brief – Indonesia’s antitrust authority has determined that TikTok’s acquisition of leading local ecommerce platform Tokopedia could lead to monopolistic practices and is imposing two years of behavioral remedies to protect competition....
European Commission Opens DSA Investigations of Porn VLOPs
Report from Euractiv In Brief – The European Commission has announced that it has launched a formal investigation of four major pornographic websites over concerns that they are violating the Digital Services Act (DSA) by failing to provide adequate protection for...
Washington Post Tech Workers Vote to Unionize
Report from the Hill Rag In Brief – More than two hundred of the over three hundred tech workers at the Washington Post, including engineers, product designers, and data analysts, have voted to establish the Washington Post Tech Guild (WPTG). The final vote was...
Italian Consumer Protection Authority Targets DeepSeek for Hallucinations
Report from Reuters In Brief – Italy’s joint antitrust and consumer rights regulator has opened a probe into Chinese AI start-up DeepSeek for allegedly failing to sufficiently warn users about the danger of false information arising from so-called “hallucinations” in...
Federal Judge Puts a Hold on Florida Law Regulating Teens on Social Media
Report from MediaPost In Brief – Federal District Judge Mark Walker has blocked enforcement of Florida law HB 3 that prohibits social media platforms that have so-called “addictive features”, such as showing “like” counts and automatically playing videos, from...
French President Macron Wants a Social Media Age Threshold of 15
Report from Politico In Brief – French President Emmanuel Macron has said that he supports setting an age limit of 15 for social media platforms in the European Union, and if the EU doesn’t follow through, his government will set that age standard in France. The...
X Sues to Block New York Content Moderation Transparency Law
Report from The Hill In Brief – X has sued the state of New York to block its law requiring social media companies to explain how they moderate some content. The platform successfully challenged a similar law in California on First Amendment grounds last year. New...
Trump Administration Walks Back Revenge Tax After Minimum Tax Deal
Report from the New York Times In Brief – The Trump Administration has called on Republicans in Congress to drop a controversial tax provision dubbed the “Revenge Tax” from the massive budget reconciliation bill. Referred to as Sec. 899, the measure would impose a new...
Second Circuit Panel Rejects Meta Pixel Tracking Tech as a VPPA Violation
Report from MediaPost In Brief – A panel of the Second Circuit Federal Court of Appeals has ruled that web companies don’t violate the federal Video Privacy Protection Act (VPPA), a 1980’s law designed to keep private the names of videos that customers rented, when a...
Appeals Court Rejects Apple Effort to Pause District Court Setting App Fees
Report from 9to5Mac In Brief – Epic Games has persuaded a panel of the federal 9th Circuit Court Appeals to reverse an earlier decision that had temporarily paused action in the district court that will determine the maximum level of fees Apple can charge app...
The Trump Administration’s Shifting View on AI Model Security Tests
Report from the New York Times In Brief – The Trump Administration is weighing a shift in policy to allow federal agencies to review advanced AI models, with officials discussing an executive order to establish an AI working group composed of government leaders and...
Big AI Industry Companies Reach Agreements with the Pentagon
Report from the Wall Street Journal In Brief – The US Defense Department has finalized agreements with eight major US technology companies to deploy their artificial intelligence tools in classified environments. The companies are OpenAI, Google, SpaceX (via xAI),...
Meta Threatens to Leave New Mexico Rather That Create Alternative Platforms
Report from MediaPost In Brief – Meta is warning it may withdraw Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp from New Mexico if a court grants an injunction sought by Attorney General Raúl Torrez requiring major changes to its platforms. Torrez is asking a federal judge to...
Australia Finally Releases Tax Plan for Tech Giants to Pay Media Companies
Report from AP News In Brief – After more than a year of talk, Australia has unveiled draft legislation to require Meta, Google and TikTok to pay a 2.25% tax on Australian revenue if they decline to negotiate agreements to pay Australian media companies for news...
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