Today, the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Antitrust, Commercial, and Administrative Law introduced a bipartisan package of bills to invigorate competition against dominant digital platforms.

According to reports, President Joe Biden has nominated Lina Khan for the Federal Trade Commission. Through her landmark academic work and her contributions to the work of Antitrust Subcommittee Chairman David Cicilline (D-RI), Khan has fought to hold technology companies accountable through stronger antitrust enforcement and improving competition law.

This week, Facebook announced that the company “will restrict publishers and people in Australia from sharing or viewing Australian and international news content” in response to Australia’s “Media Bargaining law,” which would require Big Tech to pay publishers for linking to news content. There is no doubt that civic journalism faces a global crisis, but Public Knowledge contends that imposing public interest obligations, like an Internet Superfund, on dominant platforms is a better way to support local journalism for our communities as opposed to blocking users sharing news online or encouraging Big Tech and Big Media to strike deals that benefit themselves — both are predictable outcomes of this flawed legislation.

France and Australia have moved forward with plans to force Google (and, in Australia, also Facebook) to pay existing media companies for linking to news content. In theory, the laws adopted in France and Australia are designed to compensate these news organizations for the benefit Google and Facebook derive from linking to news. But both […]

Across the globe, Big Tech is in the regulatory and antitrust hot seat. The European Commission has launched two major initiatives–the Digital Markets Act & the Digital Services Act–to rein in digital platforms and protect consumers. In the United Kingdom, the Competition and Markets Authority has its own plans for a Digital Markets Unit dedicated […]

Today, President Joe Biden named Commissioner Rebecca Kelly Slaughter as acting chair of the Federal Trade Commission.

What a week. On Tuesday, if you stayed up late enough (or woke at 3 a.m. Wednesday morning to a screaming baby, as I did) we saw Democrats win control of the Senate via a special election in Georgia. On Wednesday, we witnessed an armed insurrection on the Capitol Building, directed by President Trump in […]

Today, the European Commission announced a new regulatory package to rein in Big Tech: the Digital Markets Act. This proposed law represents an important step forward in the global fight to rein in the power of Big Tech. 

Today, the Federal Trade Commission announced that it has ordered nine social media and video streaming companies to detail how these tech companies collect, use, and present personal data; how they use that data to advertise; and how they measure user engagement. This appears to be part of a 6(b) study Chairman Simons previewed in March 2019. Public Knowledge previously urged the FTC to conduct such a study and commends the move to shine a light on the competitive impacts of these data practices.

Tomorrow, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg will testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee to discuss censorship, the suppression of news articles, and the companies’ handling of the 2020 presidential election. Last time Dorsey and Zuckerberg were brought in to the Senate to testify, the hearing turned into an opportunity for some […]