Tech is reshaping the world — and not always for the better. Whether it’s the rules for Apple’s App Store or Facebook’s plan for fighting misinformation, tech platform policies can have enormous ripple effects on the rest of society. They’re so powerful that, increasingly, companies aren’t setting them alone but sharing the fight with government regulators, civil society groups, and internal standards bodies like Meta’s Oversight Board. The result is an ongoing political struggle over harassment, free speech, copyright, and dozens of other issues, all mediated through some of the largest and most chaotic electronic spaces the world has ever seen.
President Donald Trump threatened a “substantial” tariff on Europe for what he claimed were “discriminatory” fines against US tech companies over alleged competition violations, most recently involving Google. While Trump claimed Europe’s high fines started during the Biden administration, some early fines were also imposed during Trump’s first term.
The state’s recently-passed “Fair Price Protection Act” targets “discriminatory surveillance pricing”; something the FTC is investigating and that New York is also looking at. The law puts a one-year halt on new electronic shelf labels while NJ investigates “the effects and impact” of the technology.
[State of New Jersey Governor’s office]
Trump’s ‘Golden Age’ of American science starts with dismantling it, while funneling billions into AI.
Brendan Carr’s FCC keeps approving the very drones it was supposed to ban. How did it go so wrong?
That was the message to Chinese companies from a confidant of leader Xi Jinping, who’s heading up domestic efforts to overcome Nvidia’s stranglehold on cutting-edge AI chips. Go read this report from the Wall Street Journal that lays out the global stakes and the likelihood that China can repeat the playbook that saw it upending (and then dominating) industries like drones, EVs, display panels, solar, batteries… you get the idea.
US District Judge Araceli Martínez-Olguín issued a decision Thursday extending her temporary restraining order to a total of 28 days, report The Wrap and Variety. The mega media merger is paused for now due to lawsuits by a group of state AGs and the Writers’ Guild of America, as the judge plans to “hear the two motions for preliminary injunction on the same schedule” and has scheduled a hearing for August 3rd.
Disclosure: The Verge’s editorial staff is also unionized with the Writers Guild of America, East.
With previous import taxes struck down by the courts or set to expire, the Trump administration announced a new set of tariffs ranging from 10 to 12.5 percent on 60 trading partners, including the EU. This time around, the administration is accusing dozens of countries of failing to enforce bans on forced labor as a justification.
Quoted by the New York Times, Peter Harell says the small difference between tariffs gives away the labor investigation as a smokescreen, and that, shockingly, “It’s not really about forced labor.”
Usually, the CPSC works with companies to voluntarily recall dangerous gadgets — but it’s making an exception for these Chinese water heater sticks sold at Amazon and eBay. For the first time since 1987, it writes, it’s using its power to sue over an “imminently hazardous consumer product” after confirming these ones catch fire. It says more such exceptions are coming.
404 Media, which has been all over ICE’s spying ways, has two pieces worth reading this week. Yesterday, it documented how the agency is gleaning personal information from credit card applications. Today, it has a an eye-popping piece on the scale of the agency’s surveillance tools. As always this stuff reminds me of Glenn Grohe’s 1942 poster: “He’s Watching You.”
OpenAI can’t afford another lawsuit, especially not with a company like Apple.
A typical account on the prediction market platform also tended to primarily bet on a single topic, according to research from Pew. Sports are huge categories for both Polymarket and its competitor, Kalshi.
Over the last few years, the two companies have sought to differentiate themselves from traditional sports betting — and have tried to undercut one another as they fight for market share in the US.
[Pew Research Center]
The conservative backlash is about jobs, the environment, quality of life — and China.
While Paramount’s $110 billion WBD merger is suddenly on hold in the US, in Europe, the European Commission is ready to allow it after Paramount agreed to concessions including giving up its stake in United International Pictures within 13 months of the deal closing.
[European Commission]
The push to solve issues, including the soaring energy demands of AI data centers, using AI, revealed “more than $5 billion in Federal commitments” across 278 awards and 342 institutions in its list of awards.
Big tech companies like Microsoft and Google have announced millions in compute and AI credits for the effort, but this WSJ report says the administration could give political appointees more power over grants, while prioritizing fellowships and awards for individuals could hurt large universities reliant on federal research funding.
[Nextgov.com]
The former Federal Trade Commission chair under Biden will help lead the city’s Economic Development Corporation, alongside newly announced president Anthony Shorris, who recently worked as a partner at McKinsey.
Khan was known at the FTC for pursuing antitrust action against Big Tech, which often riled up the business community.
Michael Kratsios, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy director, writes on X that Moonshot accessed Nvidia’s high-end GB300 processors in Thailand, which are subject to strict export controls. Kratsios also accuses Moonshot of distilling Anthropic’s Fable AI model to build Kimi K3, an open-source AI system claimed to rival flagship models from US companies.
A federal judge dismissed Google’s lawsuit against the web-scraping service SerpApi after finding that the tech giant’s allegations were “insufficient” to prove a copyright violation.
Google accused SerpApi of using “deceptive means” to scrape its search results, to which SerpApi argued that it’s just doing “what Google does to everyone else.“ The judge is giving Google 21 days to amend its complaint.
[Search Engine Roundtable]
Executive agencies including the Department of Labor and Department of Transportation are joining the app once declared a national security threat. Following the close of the deal to bring TikTok US under a US entity, the Justice Department said government employees are free to download it.
Both houses of France’s Parliament voted to approve a new law that could restrict under-15s from social media as soon as September 1st, while also banning cellphone use in high schools. Australia began restricting kids under 16 from social media last year, though a recent study found that many underage users can still access the platforms.
6,600 noncitizens were registered to vote between 2023 and 2024, due to a DMV error. Fewer than 400 voted, and were registered across both parties or unaffiliated (for context, 154 million voted in the 2024 election). Governor Mikie Sherrill (D) ordered their removal from voter rolls and launched an investigation.
[The New York Times]
In what is thought to be the largest copyright recovery case in history, a federal US judge granted final approval of Anthropic’s landmark $1.5 billion class-action settlement. In 2024, authors sued Anthropic over the training of its Claude AI chatbot using copyrighted works. Authors will be paid “as promptly as possible,” just as soon as lawyers take their $101 million cut.
A state court has granted a preliminary injunction against Kalshi, ruling its sports-related “event contracts” likely violate state online gambling bans. The judge rejected Kalshi’s defense that federal CFTC regulation shields it from state enforcement. Kalshi will likely have to geoblock Washington residents, marking yet another legal setback for prediction markets.
Chris Fall was picked to be the Trump administration’s leader of the US Center for AI Standards and Innovation (CAISI, previously called the AI Safety Institute until it was renamed last year) in April, but now CNBC and Reuters report he is out. The reasons for his departure are unclear, as is the role of CAISI in the administration’s constantly shifting priorities around AI.
[Reuters]
Since the beginning of the AI revolution, a few companies have claimed to be building the best and most powerful AI models. All of them were American. More recently, a few Chinese companies seem to have caught up, shipping models that are much cheaper and maybe also just as good. The Verge’s Hayden Field and Lauren Feiner join the show to explain how China made so much progress, the threat that progress represents to US companies and the US government, and what might happen next.
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The Artificial State author explains how counting everything breaks society — and how college grads booing AI might save us all.
Andy Burnham has now officially replaced Keir Starmer, and is reportedly planning to drop his predecessor’s plans to introduce a government-issued digital ID for all British adults by 2029. Burnham’s spokesperson told BBC News that resources allocated for the scheme will instead go towards “helping with the cost of living.”
