Government & Policy

TikTok Lite: EU closes addictive design case after TikTok commits to not bring back rewards mechanism

The European Commission has closed a Digital Services Act (DSA) investigation of a rewards feature in TikTok Lite by accepting commitments from the social media giant to permanently withdraw the feature from the EU. The TikTok Lite “task and reward” mechanism, launched in France and Spain earlier this year, lets users earn points for doing

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DSA vs. DMA: How Europe’s twin digital regulations are hitting Big Tech

It’s no accident that the European Union’s Digital Services Act and Digital Markets Act have such similar-sounding names: They were conceived together and, at the end of 2020, proposed in unison as a twin package of digital policy reforms. EU lawmakers had overwhelmingly approved them by mid-2022, and both regimes were fully up and running

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FTC and Justice Department sue TikTok over alleged child privacy violations

The U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and the Justice Department are suing TikTok and ByteDance, TikTok’s parent company, with violating the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA), a law that requires digital platforms to notify and obtain parents’ consent before collecting and using personal data from children under the age of 13. In a press

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OpenAI pledges to give U.S. AI Safety Institute early access to its next model

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman says that OpenAI is working with the U.S. AI Safety Institute, a federal government body that aims to assess and address risks in AI platforms, on an agreement to provide early access to its next major generative AI model for safety testing. The announcement, which Altman made in a post on

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Copyright Office tells Congress: ‘Urgent need’ to outlaw AI-powered impersonation

The U.S. Copyright Office has issued the first part of a report on how AI may affect its domain, and its first recommendation out of the gate is: we need a new law right away to define and combat AI-powered impersonation. “It has become clear that the distribution of unauthorized digital replicas poses a serious

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Spain’s antitrust watchdog fines Booking.com nearly $450M for unfair terms and restricting rivals

Spain’s competition authority, the CNMC, has found that online travel agency Booking.com abused a dominant market position over the past five years. It fined the company €413.24 million (or around $447 million at current exchange rates) on Tuesday. The CNMC opened an investigation of Booking.com back in October 2022, following complaints by the Spanish Association

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EU calls for help with shaping rules for general purpose AIs

The European Union has kicked off a consultation on rules that will apply to providers of general purpose AI models (GPAIs) — such as Anthropic, Google, Microsoft and OpenAI — under the bloc’s AI Act, its risk-based framework for regulating applications of artificial intelligence. Lawmakers want the Code of Practice to help ensure “trustworthy” GPAIs

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