The ACCC has published a discussion paper titled "Updating Competition and Consumer Law For Digital Platform Services". The aim here is to beef up our old friend, the Competition and Consumer Act, which sets out Australian Consumer Law, to better handle digital platforms. Some ideas the ACCC is floating include, "legislative prohibitions and obligations; codes of practice; giving a legislative authority rule-making powers; pro-competition or pro-consumer measures, if the inquiry identifies harm to either; and third-party data access regimes". This stuff would apply to all kinds of things like Telegram and Whatsapp, along with the usual suspects of Facebook, Google and Twitter.
The UK is forging ahead with an Online Safety Bill (where have I heard that name before???) and make it so "the biggest social media platforms will be legally required to offer ways for users to verify their own identities and control who can interact with them, including being able to block anyone who has not verified their identity or anonymous accounts". Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and other platforms might have to "ask users to verify their profile picture to ensure it is a true likeness, use two-factor authentication where a prompt is sent to a user's mobile phone to verify them or require a government-issued ID in order to create an account". Kinda creating two internets - an imaginary one where everyone uses their real name, ID and picture that's safe, and an anonymous one that's full of filth.
The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists got their hands on documents from an internal review of giant telco infrastructure company Ericsson's activities in Iraq. These documents how "tens of millions of dollars in suspicious payments over nearly a decade to sustain its business in Iraq, financing slush funds, trips abroad for defense officials and payoffs through middlemen to corporate executives and possibly terrorists". The report also revealed similar dodgy tactics in Lebanon, Spain, Portugal and Egypt, which are all new to the public and in addition to the bribes paid in Djibouti, China, Vietnam, Indonesia and Kuwait that got it into deep shit with the US DoJ back in 2019.
📻 Bullet in the Head - Rage Against the Machine
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