bbieron@platformeconomyinsights.com

Utah Taxes Advertising Revenue of Big, Addictive Social Media Companies

Report from Utah News Dispatch In Brief – Utah’s legislature has passed SB287, a bill imposing a 4.7% tax on the targeted advertising revenues of the largest social media companies. The bill targets digital platforms that generate at least $1 million in targeted...

Microsoft Opposes Immediate Pentagon Blacklisting of Anthropic

Report from Reuters In Brief – Microsoft is backing Anthropic in its legal challenge to the US Department of Defense (DoD) labeling the AI developer a supply-chain risk and blocking the company’s AI services from being used on any defense contracts. The...

White House Kills Some Utah AI Bills but Several Reach Governor Cox

Report from the Transparency Coalition In Brief – Efforts by officials in Republican-dominated Utah to position the state as a leader in regulating AI faced resistance from the Trump White House, which labeled one AI safety proposal “unfixable” and warned that some...

Meta to Add Digital Services Tax Surcharge to Ad Buys in Six Countries

Report from MediaPost In Brief – Meta has announced that it will soon add a “location fee” to advertising purchases targeting users in several countries to offset the cost of national digital services taxes (DSTs). The policy will begin in May, with full billing...

Meta Proposes Allowing AI Chatbots on WhatsApp in Europe for a Fee

Report from the Wall Street Journal In Brief – Meta has announced that it will allow third-party AI chatbots to communicate with users on its WhatsApp messaging platform for a per-message fee in response to pressure from the European Commission. The Commission...

UK Government Vexed About How to Apply Copyright Law to AI Training

Report from the Financial Times In Brief – The UK government is reconsidering a proposal that would allow AI developers, including giants like OpenAI and Google, to train AI models on copyrighted materials without obtaining prior consent from rightsholders. After a...

Kochava Settles Federal Trade Commission Location Privacy Lawsuit

Report from MediaPost In Brief – Data broker Kochava has reportedly negotiated a settlement with lawyers for the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) over allegations that the company improperly sold sensitive mobile device geolocation data. The terms of the deal have not...

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