Big tech companies tend to make a lot of enemies — but there are none more powerful than the US government. Apple, Google, Amazon, and Meta are regularly called in front of Congress to fend off monopoly accusations — and lawmakers bring up bills to rein in the companies just as often. The Federal Trade Commission has taken a particularly central role, leading a lawsuit to sever Facebook and Instagram while blocking new acquisitions for Oculus and the company’s virtual reality wing. Like it or not, these regulatory fights will play a huge role in deciding the future of tech — and neither side is playing nice.
An order that required nonprofit groups to take down online videos of two former DOGE staffers being questioned under oath has been lifted, with US District Judge Colleen McMahon ruling that the risk of “embarrassment and reputational harm” isn’t enough to overcome public interest in the conduct of public officials.
ICE is supposed to be helping TSA at American airports. I didn’t see that at JFK.
Hey, remember that weird trade The Financial Times highlighted? The one about oil? Paul Krugman doesn’t like it — nor does he like the weird Venezuela trade or the one about death of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. I’ve written here about how ill-prepared the CFTC is for insider trading cases. Krugman has a solution: call some of it treason and let the FBI — well, the post-Kash Patel FBI — sort it out.
[Paul Krugman]
The former FBI head and special counsel passed away on Friday at the age of 81. Mueller had been a persistent thorn in the side of President Trump, who quickly took to Truth Social to declare, “Good, I’m glad he’s dead.” The New York Times has a lengthy obituary recapping his life and storied and, at times, controversial career:
Robert S. Mueller III, who led the Federal Bureau of Investigation for 12 tumultuous years, brought politically explosive indictments as a special counsel examining Russia’s attack on the 2016 presidential election, and then concluded that he could neither absolve nor accuse President Trump of a crime, died on Friday. He was 81.
The convicted crypto exec has been heaping praise on the president from behind bars. Most recently, posting on X through intermediaries that “Operation Epic Fury is working,” and backing Donald Trump’s war on Iran. According to CoinDesk:
The tone has drawn attention, given Bankman-Fried’s legal position. Presidential pardons have historically extended to financial crimes, and Trump has shown a willingness to grant clemency in high-profile cases. Ross Ulbricht, who operated a digital black market platform called Silk Road, was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole in 2015 before Trump freed him shortly after being sworn in in 2025.
Everyone was a bit caught off guard when the DOJ settled its antitrust suit against Live Nation. There was speculation that Donald Trump intervened to push for a settlement. Now the Wall Street Journal is reporting that was indeed the case:
After the trial began in March, Trump began calling around to ask why it hadn’t been settled. What’s the holdup? he wanted to know, according to people familiar with the matter. It was an extraordinary role for a president to play in a routine antitrust investigation.
On March 5, both sides met at the White House to hash things out, according to people familiar with the meeting.
The New York Times sued over the Pentagon’s more stringent policies late last year, and following today’s ruling, the Pentagon has been ordered to restore press passes for seven NYT journalists.
[The New York Times]
A Nevada judge has issued a temporary restraining order, saying the company can’t operate without first getting a gaming license. This is an escalation of a turf war between the states and the CFTC over who regulates prediction markets.
And the headline of the essay in which this happens asks if he should be burned at the stake. Father Paolo Benanti, the Papal AI advisor, doesn’t seem too pleased about Thiel’s Antichrist lectures, which Thiel has brazenly brought to Rome. “La Silicon Valley s’était lancée dans un coup d’État permanent.” I don’t think you need to know French to get the gist of that. one, but linked below is a summary of the essay. Make auto-da-fe great again??
[Universal Life Church Monastery]
I enjoyed this write-up of the Afroman defamation trial, which, by the way, he won. Mike Masnick cuts to the core: the police think they should be able to do whatever they want, including screwing up, without fear of embarrassment.
“The whole point is to make the cost of accountability so high that people stop trying. But Afroman showed up in an American flag suit and explained, calmly and clearly, that he makes funny songs, that these officers raided his house for no good reason, that they broke his stuff, and that he has every right to talk about it.” I think I’ll watch his videos again to celebrate.
After initially hitting 4Chan with a paltry £20,000 (about $26,500) penalty for hindering its investigation, Ofcom has now fined the website £520,000 ($690,000) for failing to comply with age assurance obligations. Should non-compliance continue, 4Chan risks facing additional daily fines of up to £800 (about $1,060).
The CFTC insists it’s the sole authority on prediction markets — but can the agency police insider trading?
A second row seat to the reality TV White House’s propaganda push.
From The Atlantic, on the market for Trump’s personal phone number and who has been calling lately:
So many people now call Trump on his private iPhone that his advisers have stopped trying to keep track. Sometimes in meetings, he will leave his phone face up, allowing staff to gawk at the flashing notifications of incoming or missed calls that pile up on his screen. Only some of them are from numbers that have been saved in the device. “It is literally call after reporter call,” the first official said. “It is just boom, boom, boom.”
He was commenting on deepfakes about Iran war being used to create online chaos. It’s quite the turn from a man who’s been aggressively deregulating the AI industry, blocking states from implementing their own safety guardrails, and personally using AI to spread political disinformation, smear opponents, and fabricate endorsements.
The FCC chairman has already targeted NBC, Comcast, ABC, NPR, PBS, and The View. And seems to believe it’s the media’s job to serve up propaganda. Now he’s trying to bully CNN over its coverage of the war in Iran. It’s not too surprising, though. We know Brendan Carr is a dummy.
The company recently hosted a series of speakers at AIPCon, including Cameron Stanley, the Department of War’s Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Officer, who gave a chilling demo of Palantir’s Maven Smart System, where anyone or anything can be targeted for a military strike with a “Left click, right click, left click.”
MS NOW reports that content creators were offered $1,500 to make videos attacking Kat Abughazaleh, a former journalist now running for office in Illinois’s 9th Congressional District. The offer came from a group called Democracy Unmuted, which has since updated its website to attack the MS NOW reporter who broke the story.
Search-and-rescue operations lacked access to pinpoint data on where tornadoes touched down, because Kristi Noem’s DHS spending policies are holding up approval of a $200k contract, reports CNN:
As the storms spread, officials from several states started contacting FEMA, asking why they couldn’t access the tornado tracking data… As of earlier this week, the tornado mapping contract still had not been renewed, the two sources said.
The decision reverses a 2024 order for TikTok to shut down its operations in the country, and comes after an agreement that TikTok will implement “enhanced protection” for Canadians’ personal information.
The Canadian Security Intelligence Service, which previously warned against using TikTok, said Canadians should “proceed cautiously” when joining new platforms and “conduct their own research on the type of data being collected,” CTV News reports.
In a court filing, US Customs and Border Protection official Brandon Lord says parts of the agency’s new refund processing system are currently 40 to 80 percent complete. According to Lord, the CBP will begin “performance testing in the next few weeks.”
The CBP previously estimated that the system would be done in April, as its existing tech wasn’t equipped to handle $166 billion in refunds.
Techdirt’s Mike Masnick on the history of the NSA and mass surveillance in America, and why Anthropic’s fight with the Pentagon should worry us.
You can find more details on the tech billionaire-backed plan to build a new 400,000-resident city in Northern California in this episode of the Volts podcast. Host David Roberts is interviewing its leader, former Goldman Sachs trader Jan Sramek, and in this first segment, starts to dive into things like water, urban design, and wildfires.
”The hacker expressed disgust at the presence of child abuse images on the device and left a message threatening to turn its owner over to the FBI, the person said.” Apparently they didn’t realize they were on an FBI server.
During an interview with Bloomberg, Emil Michael, the under secretary of defense for research and engineering, says Anthropic’s move to sue the Pentagon was an “expected reaction” to its designation as a supply-chain risk.
“I don’t think there’s a scenario where this gets resolved in that way,” Michael says, Bloomberg reports.
We have no reason to believe that Live Nation is about to bankroll a Broadway spectacular based on the First Lady just because it managed to settle with the DoJ. We’re just saying, it feels like there’s a precedent.
Bebopper:
In unrelated news. “Melania: The Musical” will start a nationwide tour in April. The BBC reports that Ticketmaster has invested $100 million in the venture, with shows scheduled at some of the nation’s biggest venues.
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