Report from Channel News Asia In Brief – Singapore’s Infocomm Media Development Authority (IMDA), the country’s digital and media regulator, has announced that app stores will soon be required to protect children from inappropriate apps through age verification...
EU and German Regulators Testing How Platforms Will Handle Elections
Report from Bloomberg In Brief – The European Commission and German Government are planning to perform a “stress test” on the major digital platforms on January 31 to determine their processes regarding the upcoming German elections. Meta, Microsoft, Google, Snap,...
Meta Wins Temporary Relief in India from WhatsApp Data Sharing Ban
Report from Reuters In Brief – A two-judge panel of the Indian National Company Law Appellate Tribunal (NCLAT) has temporarily halted the Competition Commission of India (CCI) order prohibiting WhatsApp from sharing user data with other services of its parent company,...
DST Act 3 – The Return of Trump and Threats of Tariff and Tax Retaliation
Report from the Financial Times In Brief – President Donald Trump has effectively pulled the United States out of the global corporate tax reform agreement at the OECD negotiated by the Biden Administration in 2021 and backed by 140 countries. That deal tried to...
European Consumer Group Argues Meta Ad-Free Plan Still Violates EU Laws
Report from Reuters In Brief – BEUC, a non-profit organization that represents European consumers, has expressed to EU data protection and competition enforcement authorities that it believes Meta’s latest subscription policy violates consumer and data protection laws...
Trump Blasts EU at Davos on Big Tech Fines
Report from Bloomberg In Brief – US President Donald Trump blasted European Union regulators in his address to attendees of the World Economic Forum annual conference in Davos, Switzerland, which he delivered by video just four days after his inauguration to start his...
CPSC Issues Final Order on Amazon Recall Duties for Marketplace Products in FBA
Report from AboutLawsuits In Brief – The US Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) has announced its final Decision and Order concluding its administrative litigation with Amazon and outlining the steps the company must take regarding some hazardous products sold...
DeepSeek Chatbot Upends AI Investor and Policy Ecosystem
Report from the Washington Post In Brief – DeepSeek’s AI assistant app and paper describing its technical infrastructure, which claims to have used far fewer and less advanced computer chips than the largest AI developers, undermined the core assumption of top AI...
Italian Regulator Blocks Meta’s Plan to Block Chatbots from WhatsApp
Report from TechCrunch In Brief – Italy’s competition authority announced that it has ordered Meta to immediately freeze a policy change that would ban rival generative AI chatbots from operating on WhatsApp. The order applies to WhatsApp in Italy pending the outcome...
Judge Blocks Texas Law Requiring Apple and Google to Verify User Age
Report from MediaPost In Brief – Federal District Judge Robert Pitman has blocked Texas from enforcing a new state law that requires companies that run app stores, like Apple and Google, to verify the age of users and obtain parental consent for users under 18 to...
Amazon Faces “Fair Pricing Policy” Price-Fixing Class Action in the UK
Report from the Retail Gazette In Brief – A UK consumer association is preparing a class action antitrust lawsuit against Amazon, alleging that its Fair Pricing Policy has harmed millions of shoppers by pushing third-party sellers using its dominant marketplace to...
Bluesky is Blocking Mississippi Users Rather Than Comply with Age Law
Report from the TechCrunch In Brief – Social networking startup Bluesky, which gained prominence as many progressives users looked for alternatives to X after its acquisition by Elon Musk, has announced that it is blocking users from the state of Mississippi because...
Appeals Court Upholds California Age Limits on Social Media Algorithms
Report from the Bloomberg In Brief – A panel of the Federal Ninth Circuit of Appeals largely upheld California’s “Protecting Our Kids from Social Media Addiction Act”, rejecting a First Amendment challenge from digital company trade group NetChoice. The measure...
FTC Chair Accuses Google of Employing Partisan Email Spam Filters
Report from the Reuters In Brief – The Chairman of the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has warned Google that the regulator has received complaints that its Gmail spam filters are treating email from Republicans and Democrats differently, allegedly blocking Republican...
Zalando Loses Challenge to Being Designated a DSA VLOP
Report from the Courthouse News Service In Brief – The arguments of Germany-based Zalando, Europe’s biggest online fashion retailer, that the platform should not be designated a Very Large Online Platform (VLOP) under the Digital Services Act (DSA), were rejected by...
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