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Policy

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.

The ‘beige Amazon influencer’ lawsuit is headed for dismissal

A high-profile lawsuit between two rival lifestyle and shopping influencers would have rewritten copyright law and changed the creator industry. Now, both parties are asking the judge to dismiss the case.

Mia Sato
International students sue over Trump’s social media surveillance plan

The State Department has suspended student visa interviews, putting applicants in limbo.

Gaby Del Valle

Latest In Policy

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Gaby Del Valle
A federal judge says Trump’s rationale for trying to deport Mahmoud Khalil is probably illegal.

Khalil, a Columbia student, was arrested by ICE in March over his involvement in pro-Palestine activism despite being a permanent resident. Citing a Cold War-era law, administration officials claimed Khalil’s presence in the country is detrimental to the US’s foreign policy interest.

In a 106-page ruling, judge Michael Farbiarz said the State Department never explained whether Khalil’s activism “affected US relations with any other country,” making the deportation effort “unconstitutionally vague.” For now, Khalil remains detained in Louisiana.

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Charles Pulliam-Moore
Paramount is willing to settle over Trump’s CBS lawsuit, but he wants more.

The Wall Street Journal reports that, while Paramount offered to pay Donald Trump $15 million to make him drop his lawsuit against CBS News over the way a 60 Minutes interview with Kamala Harris was edited, the sitting president wants upwards of $25 million and a public apology from the news organization.

The subtext here is obviously “grovel and supplicate if you want that Skydance merger to go through.”

Hyundai’s new EV factory is teeming with robots — and wariness about the future

The South Korean automaker’s new $7.6 billion factory is a bulwark against tariffs and EV-hostile policies.

Lawrence UlrichCommentsComment Icon Bubble
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Jay Peters
A federal trade court has blocked Trump’s tariffs.

The Court of International Trade ruled that President Trump can’t set impose his tariffs using the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, but the Trump administration will likely appeal, the Associated Press reports.

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Emma Roth
Rep. Nancy Mace reportedly asked staff to defend her online with burner accounts.

One staff member told Wired, “We had to make multiple accounts, burner accounts, and go and reply to comments, saying things that weren’t true—even Reddit forums.”

Mace (R-SC) also reportedly created burner accounts of her own to “monitor what people were saying about here and bolster her image,” and a recent deposition from her former aid suggested Mace “sits all night on the couch and programs bots” across social media platforms.

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David Pierce
“DOGE was more like having McKinsey volunteers embedded in agencies rather than the revolutionary force I’d imagined.”

Sahil Lavingia, the creator of Gumroad and one of the employees turned loose inside of the federal government, published a diary of his 55 days at DOGE. Some interesting details in here on how DOGE actually works, and what Lavingia found he could help improve. Oh, and the interview that might have gotten Lavingia canned? It’s mostly about how impressed he was with how well the federal government works.

DOGE Days

[sahillavingia.com]

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Dominic Preston
Trump’s tariffs trigger rare earth ripple effect.

After the US escalated global trade tariffs, China responded in kind. Most of the tit-for-tat has been paused since, but not the tight controls China issued on rare earth minerals and magnets, used in everything from smartphones to EVs. Those don’t just apply to the US though, and now the EU has warned that some European manufacturers are going to run out of materials in days, which will come at a “very significant cost.”

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Sarah Jeong
No kings?

In case you missed it, King Charles III opened Canadian parliament with a speech from a literal gilded throne, hailing “democracy, pluralism, the rule of law, self-determination and freedom” as “values which Canadians hold dear.”

Yeah, I don’t know either.

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Emma Roth
Read the EU’s full non-compliance decision against Apple.

Last month, the European Commission ruled that the App Store’s “anti-steering” policies — which put restrictions on developers pointing to external purchases — violate the Digital Markets Act. That ruling has since been published in full, stating that Apple must pay the €500 million within three months, or it will incur interest. Apple must also come into compliance with EU laws by the end of next month.

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Lauren Feiner
People are getting more personal on LinkedIn.

“The line between professional and personal is increasingly blurred,” says a LinkedIn document shown in a video deposition. Then-LinkedIn product executive Kumaresh Pattabiraman explains in the video that in the wake of the pandemic, “we observe that people are bringing their personal and their professional lives a lot closer together,” with people posting about everything from completing a marathon to their views on politics on LinkedIn. This seems to undermine the FTC’s claim that LinkedIn does not compete with Facebook and Instagram for personal social networking. He says friends and family have always been part of the LinkedIn experience, but even more so now.

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Emma Roth
Texas governor signs age verification law challenged by Tim Cook.

Governor Greg Abbott signed SB 2420 on Tuesday, which will require app store owners like Apple and Google to verify the ages of their users before they can download apps. Last week, Apple CEO Tim Cook called Abbott about the law in an attempt to intervene, according to The Wall Street Journal.

The law will go into effect on January 1st, 2026.

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Lauren Feiner
Facebook’s WhatsApp acquisition was ‘very unusual.’

In a video deposition Judge Boasberg watched a few weeks ago and the media is now being shown, former Morgan Stanley investment banker Ali Esfahani describes the whirlwind few days in which the $19 billion deal came together. The deal followed none of the usual steps Morgan Stanley would typically take contacting buyers and negotiating price on the company’s behalf, he says. Instead, after being called on a Saturday night, he showed up to a meeting to hammer out the deal, but “when we arrived, we realized the price had already been negotiated, the buyer had already been selected.” Esfahani says he felt like he was basically “being thrown a bone because of all the preemptive work that we had done.”

“They didn’t really require an advisor because there was no negotiation involved,” he testifies. “I don’t know of any other deal that has been done from soup to nuts in four days.”

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Lauren Feiner
The trial concludes.

After six weeks, the FTC’s anti-monopoly trial against Meta is finally over. The parties will need to file post-trial briefs, including Meta’s argument to strike FTC expert Hemphill’s testimony, and then it will be up to Judge Boasberg to write his opinion. Boasberg says he plans to “take a welcome respite from thinking about this” until the first brief is due. He thanks everyone for their “hard work over the last four and a half years” — a stark reminder of how long this case has been in the works — and adds that the “issues are certainly interesting, and I’ll await final submissions and get you my decision as expeditiously as I can.”

The media is now getting the chance to watch video depositions that the judge watched in chambers a few weeks ago, so we’ll update with any additional insights from those.

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Lauren Feiner
Meta wants to get the FTC’s expert testimony thrown out.

The company plans to move to strike Hemphill’s testimony, saying he prejudged Meta’s antitrust liability even before he was retained as an expert witness by the FTC. Huff pulls up a more full version of the 2019 presentation that Hemphill and former Biden official Tim Wu gave to the agency urging an investigation into Meta’s potential monopoly power, just a week before it opened its probe. Huff suggests that the agency ultimately took Hemphill’s litigation strategy advice, though the expert disagrees that’s what he offered. Huff shows a slide suggesting the FTC interview many of the witnesses that appeared in this case, including the founders of Instagram and WhatsApp. Hemphill says “it’s hardly brain surgery to talk to all the founders.” Huff also pulls up a post Hemphill and Wu wrote after the FTC filed its case, calling Meta a monopolist.

“Maybe it’s fitting that you end the case because you helped get it started in the first place,” says Huff.

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Tina Nguyen
Coinbase announces it will be a “major sponsor” of America250,

the committee organizing Donald Trump’s 250th anniversary celebration of the signing of the Declaration of Independence.

Coinbase’s Chief Policy Officer Faryar Shizad made this announcement during a panel at the Bitcoin Conference that included Chris LaCivita, the co-campaign manager of Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign. This isn’t their first donation to a Trump committee: Coinbase previously donated $1 million to Trump’s inauguration committee, and subsequently, the SEC dropped a lawsuit against Coinbase a month later.

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Lauren Feiner
People who like ads may spend less time on Facebook when they click on them.

When lower engagement correlates with users being served more ads, Meta suggests that might actually mean that users like the ads so much that they’re clicking them and spending their time on the advertiser’s site — not that they dislike ads so much that they leave. Hemphill concedes that he didn’t parse out how much of the decreased engagement was due to people liking or disliking ads, but says the distinction doesn’t seem important.

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Lauren Feiner
Platform outages have led to product changes at Meta.

On cross examination, Meta attorney Kevin Huff pushes back on Hemphill’s argument that temporary changes in user behavior around an outage should not get much weight, in part because businesses don’t make decisions based on such a blip. He shows an excerpt of Instagram chief Adam Mosseri’s testimony, where he said Meta observed an increase in time spent on its platforms during a 2013 YouTube outage, and as a result invested in building out video products like Facebook Live, at one point investing a billion dollars a year on content.

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Tina Nguyen
The Strategic Bitcoin Reserve Act will soon ramp up in Congress.

During Code and Country at the Bitcoin Conference, Sen. Cynthia Lummis (R-WY) mentioned that as soon as stablecoin bills are passed through Congress and signed into law, the Republicans were ready to gun on creating the Reserve. “It’s gonna be a heavier lift than I thought,” she added, because after watching her colleagues debate the GENIUS Act, it was clear that many of them “don’t understand” crypto.

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Justine Calma
The US reportedly doesn’t want to regulate CO2 from power plants anymore.

The Environmental Protection Agency is crafting a plan to eliminate greenhouse gas pollution limits on coal and gas-fired plants, the New York Times reports. Power plant emissions account for about a quarter of the nation’s planet-heating emissions.

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Lauren Feiner
Zuckerberg’s ‘really smart’ call.

The FTC has argued that Meta paid a premium for WhatsApp beyond its market value, which it was willing to do squelch a potential competitor. But Boasberg asks Hemphill to reconcile how that could be the case for Instagram as well, whose $1 billion price tag now looks quite low given its explosive growth and money-making ability. Hemphill says the price needs to be analyzed within the context of 2012. But the judge still wonders, “why can’t you think about it that Mark Zuckerberg is really smart,” and saw value where others didn’t?

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Lauren Feiner
Judge wonders if he should bother worrying about ‘amorphous’ quality measures.

Hemphill argues that Meta has reduced overall market output for consumers with its acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp, because consumers believe it’s reduced the quality of the services even if they’ve added users. But “users is a real concrete metric,” where quality is harder to quantify, Boasberg says, “so why shouldn’t we be focused on that?” Hemphill concedes it’s harder to measure, but says quality is an important aspect of the overall health of the market.

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Lauren Feiner
Meta’s pivot to Reels doesn’t undermine the argument for its monopoly power.

Meta has argued that sharing content with friends and family has become a much smaller portion of its business, as it competes aggressively with TikTok through its Reels video product, and that’s what the judge should focus on. But Hemphill says the fact that Meta has added products to its apps doesn’t mean its earlier products no longer matter. If a monopolist has power in one market, he says, that can give it a “leg up” in adding a new product, “even if it’s not as good as the competitors’.”

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Lauren Feiner
Does a one cent difference count as price discrimination?

Boasberg wonders how big of a difference he’d need to see in how many ads Meta serves to certain groups of users versus others in order to determine it matters in assessing its monopoly power. As a hypothetical, he asks if offering a product for a cent higher to some users would be enough to constitute price discrimination. Basically, he asks, “in quantifying the amount of discrimination that Meta is imposing, is that something that you can do such that it is meaningful?” He’s also asked, “how compelling does the evidence have to be regarding ad load?” Hemphill says there’s no magic number, but Meta’s own documents show that executives thought it would be meaningful to reduce the number of ads younger users see to increase engagement.

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Lauren Feiner
Is MeWe a red herring?

Carlton’s approach to measuring where users go when Facebook and Instagram aren’t available paints a disingenuous picture of how the social media market works, Hemphill argues. This is in part because MeWe — which offers the very personal social networking services the FTC says Meta has monopolized — would be very far down the list of places users diverted their time to during the outages.

“That’s an argument that MeWe’s in the market?” Boasberg asks, sounding perplexed. Hemphill says the analysis has to begin with looking at firms that offer similar products, and Carlton’s analysis leaves you with a “strange result.” Or, Boasberg counters, “the other argument is that MeWe is sort of a red herring that shouldn’t be considered.”

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Lauren Feiner
FTC expert critiques Meta’s ‘gotcha approach.’

Meta’s expert Professor Carlton argued last week that the court should consider which apps users turn to when Facebook and Instagram aren’t available, like during its 2021 outage. In that case and in his own experiment, users turned to TikTok and YouTube more than Snapchat, even though that’s the app included in the FTC’s market definition. Hemphill says this is a flawed argument against Meta’s monopoly power because it shows users diverted their time to apps that even its own experts would likely agree don’t “plausibly belong in the market,” like Google Chrome and Candy Crush. “This is an illustration of the problems that result when you pursue this kind of gotcha approach,” he says.

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Lauren Feiner
FTC v. Meta trial enters its final day.

The FTC has brought back its expert economic witness Scott Hemphill to rebut arguments from Meta’s experts about the company’s alleged monopoly power. Hemphill begins his rebuttal testimony by arguing that Meta’s experts used flawed analyses that do not get at the relevant questions to determine whether the company has monopolized a market for personal social networks.

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Dominic Preston
Chinese iPhone exports to the US are way, way down.

Shipments dropped 76 percent in April 2025 compared to the year before, as those from India grew by the same percentage, according to new figures from Omdia. April’s figures are low overall, but skewed by March’s efforts to rush 600 tons of product into the US before tariffs hit.

The big question is if Apple will keep prioritizing Indian-made iPhones now that Trump has threatened fresh tariffs on all phones that aren’t made in the USA.

Image: CNBC / Omdia
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Jess Weatherbed
The EU is cracking down on porn sites.

The European Commission has launched an investigation into Pornhub, Stripchat, XNXX, and XVideos under the Digital Services Act over concerns about their lack of “appropriate” age verification tools. Platforms found to have breached DSA rules can face fines of up to six percent of their annual turnover, but it will take several months to reach a verdict.

How a crypto bro shorted $TRUMP coin — and scored a dinner with the President

“A lot of people put on the same hedge trade as I did.”