This week’s historic delay in selecting a Speaker of the House temporarily prevents Congress from moving forward. But once a Speaker is selected—hopefully within days—House members will be sworn in, and the work of legislating will begin. We will be looking for progress on several key tech policy issues, such as establishing federal data privacy rules and strengthening cybersecurity for the long term. Many state legislatures will also be considering their own data privacy bills in the coming months. We will also be watching the rollout of state broadband programs.
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Thank you—and now here’s our roundup of tech policy news and a featured podcast.
This Week in Washington
- FedScoop: President Biden has signed new legislation that will require the Department of Veterans Affairs to obtain an independent audit of its IT systems and cybersecurity programs.
- The Hill: At the end of 2022, President Biden signed the sprawling $1.7 trillion spending package to fund the government into next fall, wrapping up a year of several bipartisan legislative accomplishments for the president.
- POLITICO: The official CES lineup this year is laden with appearances from policymakers and wonks, including Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm, Sens. Mark Warner (D-Va.) and Jacky Rosen (D-Nev.), and a slew of policy assistants and members of the House.
- The Wall Street Journal: The Federal Trade Commission on Thursday issued a proposal to ban the use of noncompete clauses, a move that would allow workers to take jobs with rival companies or start competing businesses without the threat of being sued by their employers.
- StateScoop: The National Telecommunications and Information Administration announced last Friday that it has now awarded preliminary grants from its $45 billion “Internet for All” program to all 50 states, following the delivery of $6 million to Massachusetts
Article Summary
- New York Times: The effect of social media use on children is a fraught area of research, as parents and policymakers try to ascertain the results of a vast experiment already in full swing. Successive studies have added pieces to the puzzle, fleshing out the implications of a nearly constant stream of virtual interactions beginning in childhood.
- Reuters: A group of about 300 video game testers at Microsoft Corp subsidiary ZeniMax Studios have voted to unionize, the Communication Workers of America union (CWA) said on Tuesday, marking a first for the tech giant in the United States.
- Axios: After federal lawmakers failed to pass a privacy law last year, companies face what they’ve always feared and lobbied against: a patchwork of state-level laws that dictate how they collect, store and share consumer data.
- StateScoop: Delaware Chief Information Officer Jason Clarke says the state is looking to connect the last 12,000 addresses in the state that lack broadband.
- Wired: Europe is in the middle of finalizing its AI regulation (the AI Act), which aims to put strict rules on high-risk AI systems. Canada, the UK, the US, and China have all introduced their own approaches to regulating high-impact AI.
- CyberScoop: When hackers attacked a satellite internet provider in Europe on the eve of the Ukraine war, it disrupted internet communications at a vital moment for Kyiv’s defense.
- Bleeping Computer: Ransomware attacks in 2022 impacted more than 200 hundred larger organizations in the U.S. public sector in the government, educational, and healthcare verticals.
- Ars Technica: LastPass, one of the leading password managers, said that hackers obtained a wealth of personal information belonging to its customers as well as encrypted and cryptographically hashed passwords and other data stored in customer vaults.
Featured Podcast
WSJ Tech News Briefing
- Could Underwater Data Centers Make Cloud Computing Greener?
Cloud storage centers suck up a lot of energy. But when Microsoft tried putting data centers underwater a couple of years ago, it found the strategy greatly reduced energy use and improved performance. Now a U.S. startup called Subsea Cloud is pushing forward with similar plans. How much could underwater data centers do to alleviate emissions from our cloud usage? And what are the hurdles to getting there? Zoe Thomas hosts the first in Tech News Briefing’s four-part series on emerging climate technologies. (Could Underwater Data Centers Make Cloud Computing Greener? – December 27, 2022)