Policy

Beginning in October, subscription companies will have to give New Yorkers an easy way to cancel recurring charges. The move seeks to revive a Lina Khan-era Federal Trade Commission rule that was struck down by the courts. Khan’s consumer protection chief, Samuel Levine, now works for NYC Mayor Zohran Mamdani.

My Trump phone review is here. And with that, it’s time to wrap up the weekly coverage. I’m not entirely done with the T1 yet — I’m still trying to find out how many buyers have one, and how and where it’s made — but I’ll give the execs at Trump Mobile a break for a bit.

The Xbox CEO, who announced mass layoffs at Xbox this week, will assess “the economic impact of new general-purpose technologies, including artificial intelligence, to inform the Federal Reserve’s policy judgments.”

That’s according to a report from Wired, which viewed a leaked database from the surveillance-heavy New York City venue that tracked celebrities’ race, gender identity, and sexual orientation. The list also assigned some stars a low to high “risk” level, with some labeled as “DO NOT HOST.”

Block has reached a $45 million settlement with 46 US states over allegations of inadequate fraud protection for its mobile payment service. The platform was accused of misleading users about its safety, and for expanding marketing when fraud claims recently spiked instead of strengthening protections. It must now provide 24-hour customer support and cease deceptive marketing.

Judge Sparkle Sooknanan approved the $1.5 million pocket-change settlement with the Fed over his violation of disclosure rules in connection with the purchase of Twitter. She said she had limited authority:

Following its $99 million class action agreement earlier this year, the company struck another settlement with the Federal Trade Commission and several states that sued it on antitrust grounds. Similar to the earlier agreement, the proposed settlement has a ten-year term requiring it to make repair resources available to farmers.

Apple added a bit more insight into that Broadcom deal announced a few days ago. It’s expected to “exceed $30 billion” and “lead to the production of more than 15 billion US-made chips” and “hundreds of American jobs.” The announcement comes with a line of obligatory flattery from CEO Tim Cook:

New York state is the latest place to prohibit smart glasses and other recording tech in courtrooms. Says Syracuse.com:

Instead of breaking down passthrough fees — which include costs related to government programs and third-party infrastructure owners — the FCC’s proposed rule change could allow broadband providers to lump them together into an “up to” amount. The FCC will vote on the change on July 22nd.

The trillionaire’s legacy of death under DOGE had a spotlight put on it recently, including from us. Musk responded with threats, including a threat to sue Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA) for citing the same study we did. Now he’s in a losing war against the reality of his ghastly conduct. The Guardian explains the saga so far:

Meta says four US states are seeking $1.4 trillion in penalties, according to Reuters, in a filing published ahead of an upcoming August trial that accuses the company of purposefully designing Facebook and Instagram to addict young users. Meta’s market cap is $1.5 trillion and it’s already lost back-to-back trials on the matter and settled another.

Governor JB Pritzker signed SB 315 on Monday, as first reported by CBS News. The “Artificial Intelligence Safety Measures Act,” passed in May, follows similar bills in New York and California aimed at improving AI transparency and safety, and will require independent third-party audits at AI companies.

Trump has injected himself into Netflix’s business dealings, intervened in the antitrust case against Ticketmaster, and turned the FCC into his attack dog. Now he’s reportedly sullied the beautiful game by pressuring FIFA president Gianni Infantino to review the suspension of the United States’ top scorer, Folarin Balogun.

The “heat dome” covering the US from the Midwest to the East Coast interrupted the Trump Administration’s Freedom 250 event at the National Mall, which shut down for about four hours, citing the temperatures, and said it would reopen at 5PM ET.

Elon Musk and Joe Lonsdale are doing their best to make sure “the high-tech future will have to be built in a way that blends church, state and market, to the benefit of those most able to seize public resources and turn them to private profit.” The extractive world of today’s technology — harvesting your data and attention, among other things — has created the Texan Ideology.

The search giant has lost its final appeal to overturn a record-breaking €4.1 billion (about $4.68 billion) penalty imposed by the European Commission over practices that abused Android’s mobile dominance. The charges date back to 2018, so it’s taken almost a decade to close the antitrust case.

ICE has denied it maintains such a database, but Mother Jones lays out some shifty wording that suggests Trump administration officials are dodging the question — including a spontaneous mention of the known Terrorist Screening Dataset. Given that 15 Minnesota activists are facing federal charges, it sure sounds like DHS may be tracking protesters after all.

A post on the Claude X account featured a video announcement. The reinstatement was announced last night, alongside a blog post by Anthropic about the weekslong negotiation process leading up to it.

AI data center projects are continuing to pop up across the US, with frequent opposition from locals concerned about their impact. Here are a few recent articles about the projects:

This report from Reuters says 34-year-old Michael Lines alleges that conversations with OpenAI’s now-retired GPT-4o model eventually pushed him to attempt suicide. He overdosed on drugs, but survived.