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...
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Another Publisher AI Copyright Suit – This Time Targeting Meta’s Zuckerberg
Report from MediaPost In Brief – Another coalition of major publishers and authors has filed a class-action lawsuit against Meta and CEO Mark Zuckerberg, alleging the company illegally downloaded millions of copyrighted books and journal articles from pirate websites...
Settlement Between the FTC and Kochava Defines Sensitive Location Data
Report from AdExchanger In Brief – The Federal Trade Commission announced a settlement with data broker Kochava over allegations that the firm engaged in unfair competition by improperly collecting and selling precise geolocation data from hundreds of millions of...
French Regulator Buys Suspicious Products and Reports Online Problems
Report from Reuters In Brief – France’s consumer protection agency, the DGCCRF, reported that it purchased over 600 “high risk” items from seven large foreign-based ecommerce platforms and deemed that 75% failed to comply with EU product safety or labeling standards,...
Utah Prohibits Adult Websites from Discussing or Offering VPN Services
Report from TechRadar In Brief – Utah is implementing a new law imposing a 2% excise tax on online adult content sites with a controversial provision aimed at reducing the likelihood that Utah residents will employ Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) or other digital...
Korean FTC Directs eCommerce Platforms to Revise Unfair User Terms
Report from The Korea Times In Brief – The Korean Fair Trade Commission (FTC), the country’s antitrust regulator, has directed seven major ecommerce platforms to make changes to their customer terms of service to better protect consumer rights and securely handle user...
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