Regulation

Starting today, more than 100,000 online services, including social media and gaming platforms, search engines, and pornography sites, are now required by the Online Safety Act to tackle criminal activity on their platforms, or risk facing significant fines. Action against “illegal harms” — which includes terrorism, hate, fraud, child sexual abuse, and assisting or encouraging suicide — are the first enforceable rules under the legislation, which could also notably be used to weaken global data encryption.

FTC staffers have continued to work on the investigation in recent weeks according to Bloomberg, a sign that Trump-appointed FTC Chairman Andrew Ferguson is going to prioritize scrutiny of tech giants.

That’s one of the minor changes the Justice Department made to its proposed final judgement in its antitrust case. The DOJ Antitrust Division is still operating under an acting chief as President Donald Trump’s nominee Gail Slater awaits confirmation. But so far, the government made only small tweaks to its asks based on discovery. It’s no longer asking that Google divest AI investments, for example, but that it give a heads up on future ones.

The Securties and Exchange Commission’s investigation was related to an almost two-year-old lawsuit against the struggling NFT marketplace, but has now been dropped as the agency backs off of its campaign against digital assets, reports Axios.

Italian prosecutors plan to drop an investigation opened against Google for allegedly failing to pay taxes on earnings in Italy between 2015 and 2019 after the tech giant agreed to pay a €326 million (about $340 million) settlement. That’s a sizable sum even for Google, but nothing compared to the $1 billion fine it agreed to pay France in 2019 following similar tax disputes.

The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) issued a memo freezing its election security efforts to review all work and positions “related to election security and countering mis- and- disinformation” at the state and local level since 2017, reports Wired. The review is reportedly set to conclude on March 6th.

The Federal Trade Commission has finalized an order imposing the fine, which DoNotPay agreed to last year. In addition, the company is forbidden from deceptively advertising, without proof, that its “so-called robot lawyer” is as good as a human lawyer.

Two days after DOGE head Elon Musk posted “CFPB RIP” on X, employees of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau headquarters in Washington, DC were told via email today to work remotely next week, as the office will be closed, reports Business Insider.

FCC chairman Brendan Carr said he expects CBS News to submit a transcript of a 60 Minutes interview with former Vice President Kamala Harris by the end of the day, writes The Wrap.

The President signed an executive order today to create the fund “within the next year,” and told reporters that the US could use it to purchase TikTok, according to Reuters.