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Midterms Impact (Big Tech and Others)
It looks like the Democrats are carrying both House and Senate in the midterms.
Democrats have made clear that, should they win, they'll investigate private-sector dealings with the Trump Administration. The Office of Legal Counsel of the DoJ already issued a memo [justice.gov] stating that certain presidential communications with private parties could be shielded from congressional discovery.
The private parties [whitehouse.gov] involved ... well, that's a long list.
On the investigative menu for now are the federal use of commercial spyware and hacking, consumer access to mobile immigration enforcement-monitoring applications, alleged political interference in news coverage, university settlements with the Trump Administration, protections against military AI use for domestic surveillance and autonomous lethal operations, reported errors in AI-assisted intelligence and military operations, expanded access to sensitive U.S. technology for the United Arab Emirates following investments in a Trump-family cryptocurrency venture, the use of a major dollar-pegged stablecoin in Iran’s shadow banking network, potential sanctions violations, online safety, automated consumer pricing, prediction markets, data center water infrastructure costs, potential for increased electricity demands by datacenters, plans to open federal lands to data center development, environmental impact of datacenters, data center developers use of NDA's with state and local officials, including restrictions on public disclosure, tax benefits supporting AI development and related lobbying, AI breaches of third-party platforms, data collection, retention, sharing, and safeguards by surveillance technology companies like Flock, law enforcement abuse of these same technologies, customer protections and market integrity in sports-event prediction markets, payments to online influencers for spreading election disinformation, algorithmic and surveillance pricing, the use of personal information and AI use to set prices, and on and on and on. [mofo.com]
(I'd link to the different Senate and House Committees that are already working on this, but for some reason these sites suddenly have considered me, at first, a security risk, than gave me 304s.)
On a related note, on the other side of the ocean, things are looking to get even more interesting for Big Tech too: Gemini is getting [reuters.com] into focus for copyright violations [europa.eu].
