Regulation

As Ted Sarandos and David Ellison play out a public spat over whose turn it is to play with Warner Bros., while trying to impress Trump and the regulators along the way, just remember that the real winners at the end will be HBO Max subscribers.

As Russia bans Roblox for spreading “LGBT propaganda” — now along with Snapchat and FaceTime too — it leaves homophobes with yet another thing to avoid, just in case.

UK regulator Ofcom announced it’s fined a porn provider £1 million (around $1.3 million) under the Online Safety Act because while it has age verification measures, they aren’t “highly effective.” That’s just a little more bite than the £20,000 ($27,000) fine it handed 4Chan earlier in the year.

President Trump is expected to announce a major rollback of Biden-era standards on Wednesday for 2022-2031 model-year vehicles, Reuters reports. Since stepping into office, his administration has worked to dismantle efficiency regulations meant to cut down pollution and save consumers money.

After being fined $3.5 billion by the EU for ad tech abuse, the search giant is, begrudgingly, proposing changes:

“All these nuke bros who know nothing about operating a reactor, they just want a free pass,” Allison Macfarlane, former chairman of the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission, tells Bloomberg. “They can have their free pass, but then they will have an accident.”

Italian regulators announced an age verification system that will be rolled out on November 12th to prevent minors from accessing around 50 websites that host pornographic content. The UK and France introduced similar rules this year, both resulting in a significant spike in VPN downloads.

In the memo, Gates tries to make the case that there’s too much focus on cutting greenhouse gas emissions and not enough on public health and poverty. It’s a narrative that lets polluters off the hook and plays into Trump’s efforts to rollback environmental protections and spread disinformation about climate change.

Coal-fired power plants pumped out as much as 20 percent more particle pollution during the last federal government shutdown in 2018 and 2019 as the US Environmental Protection Agency froze inspections.

After a ten-month investigation, the Competition and Markets Authority has designated Apple and Google’s mobile platforms with “strategic market status,” describing them as having “substantial, entrenched market power.” The companies now face extra anti-competition regulations in the UK, following a similar ruling for Google Search.

Luckily Brendan Carr is looking out for them, trying to waive onerous requirements like “telling customers what fees they’ll be paying” so that these plucky upstarts can soldier on.

With the government still shut down, the Trump administration announced more layoffs across the already decimated federal workforce. That includes EPA employees who worked on battery recycling and safety, plastics reduction, recycling and composting programs, and collecting solid waste data, according to the EPA union.

It only took nine months, but the Competition and Markets Authority has designated Google Search with “strategic market status,” meaning it’s eligible for extra UK regulation. AI Mode has been factored in, but not AI assistants like Gemini. Similar decisions on Android and iOS are due this month.

The Environmental Protection Agency wants to stop collecting data on greenhouse gas emissions from power plants and other polluting sites. The proposed rule change comes as the Trump administration attempts to get rid of the agency’s ability to regulate planet-heating pollution at all.

“They’re doing away with science,” Christine Todd Whitman, former Environmental Protection Agency administrator and former Republican governor of New Jersey, tells Bloomberg. That only makes it harder to prepare for the consequences of a warming world, from eroding coastlines to more devastating wildfires across the US.

“If they overturn this, it would leave the public responsible for cleaning up, not the companies that knowingly polluted the land,” University of California, San Francisco professor Tracey Woodruff tells The New York Times, which first reported on the proposal.