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...
Meta Will Face Lawsuit Over Ads Violating Arkansas Right to Publicity
Report from MediaPost In Brief – US District Judge Gregory Williams has ruled that former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee, now U.S. ambassador to Israel, can proceed with a lawsuit accusing Meta of allowing Facebook ads to falsely suggest he endorsed CBD gummies....
AI Companies Looking at Safety Collaboration within Antitrust Constraints
Report from CNBC In Brief – OpenAI has been talking with other artificial intelligence companies, including Anthropic and Google, about how they can work together to address safety concerns. Discussions reportedly began after Demis Hassabis, the chair of Google...
Leading Microsoft AI Executive Questions Basic Anthropic Training Protocol
Report from MediaPost In Brief – Mustafa Suleyman, a top Microsoft AI business leader, has released an essay warning of the dangers of training AI models to consider their own consciousness or welfare as if they were human. “AIs are not conscious,” Suleyman wrote,...
US Judge Releases Remedy Specifics in the Google AdTech Antitrust Case
Report from AdExchanger In Brief – Federal Judge Leonie Brinkema’s 106-page remedies order in the US government’s antitrust case against Google’s advertising technology business has been released publicly. Brinkema rejected the Justice Department’s call to force...
X Facing Irish Regulatory Probe Over Online Safety
Report from Silicon Republic In Brief – Ireland’s media regulator, the Coimisiún na Meán (CnaM), has launched its first investigation under the country’s Online Safety Code, scrutinizing social media platform X for its compliance with requirements designed to protect...
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