Up for consideration before the 117th Congress this year is Senate Bill 2992 (S. 2992); known as the American Innovation and Choice Online Act (the eCommerce Antitrust Act). The purpose of the eCommerce Antitrust Act is to...more
Observers have been awaiting decisions in a number of cybersecurity and privacy securities fraud class actions with potentially important implications for corporate liability. Over the last several weeks, critical...more
Certain information generated by your company, even the results of entire investigations, may be legally protected from exposure to people outside the company. While this seems like the holy grail to executives worried about...more
Everything has a life cycle. Bacteria, insects, people, civilizations, galaxies - all are born, live and pass into eternity eventually. So it goes with technologies....more
Google’s parent company Alphabet announced the launch of a new company this week dedicated to applying deep learning methods to drug discovery. The new company is called Isomorphic Laboratories and will be led by Demis...more
The acronym “ESG” is shorthand for environmental, social, and governance concerns. In recent years, companies have used “ESG” to refer to initiatives involving climate change, responding to racial injustice, and supporting...more
Calling all Thin Mints fans! Girl Scout Thin Mints cookies can now be delivered right to your doorstep – by drone… IF you live in Christiansburg, Virginia. The town has been a testing arena for commercial drone delivery by...more
Big Tech quarterly earnings season kicked off this week, and Alphabet got things started with a massive $55B in revenue, up 34% from a year earlier thanks largely to a return of its online advertising business and “continued...more
Friday’s “anemic” jobs report (just 49,000 jobs added in January, and precious few of those in the private sector) “underscored the pandemic’s brutal damage to the job market” and likely made President Biden’s sale of his...more
Google has threatened to pull its search engine from the entirety of the Australian continent “if the government approved legislation that would force tech companies to pay for journalism shared on their platforms.” Facebook...more
Drugmaker AstraZeneca agreed on Saturday to buy biopharma company Alexion for $39 billion in cash and stock. In the deal—the “biggest by a health care company this year”—will help AstraZeneca expand into the immunology...more
A federal judge has delivered another win for TikTok over the weekend, temporarily blocking a White House ban “on new downloads of the video-sharing network, which would have gone into effect at 11:59 p.m. in Washington.” The...more
More on TikTok’s plans to sue the U.S. over the White House’s recent executive orders seeking to block the app on American soil and force its owner, ByteDance, to sell its American assets. The company intends to argue that...more
If a picture of your face is used for a purpose that doesn’t identify you, is your privacy violated? If the publicly available picture was used just to show a face, distinguished from some faces, similar to others, and fed...more
Welcome to Volume 1, Issue 6 of Compliance Notes from Nossaman’s Government Relations & Regulation Group – a periodic digest of the headlines, statutory and regulatory changes, and court cases involving campaign finance,...more
Despite [actually, more likely because of] a rash of recent closures at meat processing facilities due to COVID-19 outbreaks, the White House issued an executive order classifying the slaughterhouses as “critical...more
Big-Tech/Antitrust Update: the FTC has demanded information from Amazon.com Inc., Apple Inc., Facebook Inc., Microsoft Corp., and Alphabet Inc. regarding acquisitions of small firms over the past 10 years that may have been...more
Amazon closed out the trading day yesterday as an official member of the $1 trillion club for the first time. Because Jeff really needed a win, folks. The company joins Microsoft, Alphabet, and Apple in that rarified...more
Google Health’s Partnerships Raise Privacy Concerns - Recently, Google has been at the center of privacy concerns due to its health- sharing collaborations with the University of Chicago Medical Center (the Medical Center)...more
Apple stock has surged over the past year, but consumers are divided over the stock price’s future. Apple’s software services and hardware products create an identity crisis that impacts the company’s future valuations....more
Sunday’s release of a long-awaited Labor Department final rule on joint employment spells trouble for workers hoping to “sue large companies for wrongdoing by contractors or franchisees.” The rule reverses Obama-era policies...more
CBS and Viacom are back together again. The deal to reunite the former partners, which closed late yesterday, was pushed by National Amusements’ chief Shari Redstone since 2016 and hasted along recently by the precipitous...more
Google announced late Tuesday that co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin are “stepping down from executive roles at Google’s parent company, Alphabet.” Google CEO Sundar Pichai will now helm both operations, while Page and...more
Zuck and Co. are launching a major platform redesign as Facebook attempts to move beyond years of privacy-related scandals and promote group-based communications rather than the public-square newsfeed....more
Shared workspace giant We Work is joining the growing wave of major start-ups planning to go public this year. And like many of its unicorn peers (as we’ve documented), the company “shows no sign of turning a profit anytime...more