Report from Euractiv In Brief – In a major one-on-one interview with leading podcaster Joe Rogan, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg framed the company’s public policy battles in Europe in the context of “censorship” and argued that incoming President Donald Trump should step...
UK CMA Open Probe of Google Search Under New Competition Law
Report from CNBC In Brief – The UK Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) has opened an investigation of Google under the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumer’s Act (DMCC) to determine if the digital giant has “strategic market status” (SMS) under the new law...
TikTok Reported to be Planning Full Shutdown on Sunday Absent Reprieve
Report from Reuters In Brief – TikTok is reported to be planning to shutdown their US app on Sunday, January 19th if the US Supreme Court or Biden Administration does not issue an order delaying the effective date of the federal law requiring the company’s US...
OpenAI Removes Political Bias Landmine from AI Policy Document
Report from TechCrunch In Brief – OpenAI quietly edited its “Economic Blueprint” soon after release to remove language in the section on “the proper rules” for AI that called for AI models to be “politically unbiased by default”. The report is part of a public policy...
Supreme Court Justices Sound Amenable to Age Checks for Online Porn
Report from the New York Times In Brief – Several members of the Supreme Court’s conservative majority appear willing to overturn a 2004 decision that prohibited requiring online pornography sites to use age verification techniques to keep underage users off their...
Supreme Court Upholds TikTok Law
Report from Platform Economy Insights In Brief – The US Supreme Court decisively ruled against the First Amendment challenges of TikTok and a group of content creators against the federal law that requires the business to be sold by China-based ByteDance to a new...
EU Commission Expands X Investigation to Include Recommender Systems
Report from Euronews In Brief – As expected, the European Commission has announced the expansion of its ongoing investigation of X under the Digital Services Act (DSA) to include reviewing the operations of its recommender systems, including the algorithms that...
European Commission Reviewing Ongoing Big Tech Investigations (or Not)
Report from the Financial Times In Brief – The European Commission is reported to be undertaking an internal review of all the investigations of major US tech companies begun during the past year, including under the Digital Markets Act (DMA) regulating the largest...
Digital Giants Agree to Updated EU Hate Speech Code of Conduct
Report from The Verge In Brief – The European Commission announced that the Code of Conduct on Countering Illegal Hate Speech Online + has been formally integrated into the Digital Services Act (DSA). The updated code builds upon the initial EU Code of Conduct created...
President Trump Fully Revokes President Biden’s Executive Order on AI
Report from Bloomberg In Brief – President Donald Trump revoked President Biden’s Executive Order on Artificial Intelligence as one of the 78 Biden Administration executive orders and memorandums included in his Inauguration Day Executive Order fully rescinding...
French Court Rejects Effort to Fully Ban Shein
Report from Wall Street Journal In Brief – Shein scored a win in French court with a ruling that rejected a government effort to fully suspend the ecommerce platform in France for three months. French authorities had sought the shutdown after finding third-party...
Federal Appeals Panel Rejects Effort to Judge Meta Pixel as “Wiretapping”
Report from MediaPost In Brief – A panel of the Third Circuit Court of Appeals has upheld the January dismissal of a class-action complaint alleging that Quest Diagnostics violated California’s wiretap law by sharing users’ web browsing information with Meta through...
Trump Administration Planning Executive Order on State AI Regulations
Report from Politico In Brief – The Trump Administration is exploring an executive order that aims to override restrictive state AI laws, although its release before Thanksgiving was abandoned due to pushback that included prominent state-level Republican officials....
Trump Administration Continues Linking Tariff Relief to EU Tech Regulation
Report from Bloomberg In Brief – European digital policies are again being raised by the Trump Administration in US-EU trade talks, with Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick linking lower tariffs on European steel and aluminum to the EU taking “the foot off” their...
Polish Competition Authority Challenges Apple App Tracking Privacy Policy
Report from Reuters In Brief – Poland’s antitrust agency, the UOKiK, is the latest regulator to announce a formal investigation of Apple’s App Tracking Transparency (ATT) policy that requires all third-party apps to get explicit approval from iPhone users to collect...
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