Nebraska is the first state to receive a federal waiver to ban the purchase of soda and energy drinks under the benefit program for low-income Americans long known as food stamps.

The move, announced Monday by U.S. Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins, would affect about 152,000 people in Nebraska enrolled in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, which helps families pay for groceries.

"There's absolutely zero reason for taxpayers to be subsidizing purchases of soda and energy drinks," Nebraska Gov. Jim Pillen said in a statement. "SNAP is about helping families in need get healthy food into their diets, but there's nothing nutritious about the junk we're removing with today's waiver."

ARKANSAS MOVES TO BAN 'JUNK FOOD' FROM SNAP PROGRAM: 'DEFINITION OF CRAZY'

Six other states — Arkansas, Colorado, Kansas, Indiana, Iowa and West Virginia — have also submitted requests for waivers banning certain foods and drinks or, in some cases, expanding access to hot foods for participants, according to the USDA.

The push to ban sugary drinks, candy and more from the SNAP program has been a key focus of Rollins and Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

Rollins called Monday's move "a historic step to Make America Healthy again."

MAKE AMERICA HEALTHY AGAIN: TIMELINE OF THE MAHA MOVEMENT

Details of Nebraska's waiver, which takes effect Jan. 1, weren't immediately available. Anti-hunger advocates criticized it, saying it adds costs, boosts administrative burdens and increases stigma for people already facing food insecurity.

The waiver "ignores decades of evidence showing that incentive-based approaches — not punitive restrictions — are the most effective, dignified path to improving nutrition and reducing hunger," said Gina Plata-Nino, a deputy director at the Food Research & Action Center, a nonprofit advocacy group.

SNAP is a roughly $100 billion program that serves about 42 million Americans and is run by the U.S. Agriculture Department and administered through states.

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The program is authorized by the federal Food and Nutrition Act of 2008, which says SNAP benefits can be used "for any food or food product intended for human consumption," except alcohol, tobacco and hot foods, including those prepared for immediate consumption.

Over the past 20 years, lawmakers in several states have proposed stopping SNAP from paying for everything from bottled water and soda to chips, ice cream and "luxury meats" like steak.

Until now, USDA rejected the waivers, saying there were no clear standards to define certain foods as good or bad. In addition, the agency had said restrictions would be difficult to implement, complicated and costly, and would not necessarily change recipients' food purchases or reduce health problems such as obesity.

• Trump's bill could lead to rampant AI abuse, organizations warn in a letter to Congress.
• A provision in the bill would prevent states from regulating AI for a decade.
• The critics argue it risks civil rights, privacy, and accountability.

A group of high-profile unions, advocacy groups, non-profits, and academic institutions are warning that a provision in President Donald Trump's "Big Beautiful Bill" could lead to the "unfettered abuse" of AI.

In a letter to Congress on Monday, 141 organizations called out a provision in Trump's signature bill that would prohibit states from regulating artificial intelligence for a decade. The provision, which Republicans placed into the sweeping tax, immigration, and defense legislation, would be a huge victory for regulation-wary AI companies.

But it would be a nightmare for Americans' civil rights, the groups argued in their letter, which was addressed to Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson and Democratic House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries.

"Protections for civil rights and children's privacy, transparency in consumer-facing chatbots to prevent fraud, and other safeguards would be invalidated, even those that are uncontroversial," the letter reads.

"The resulting unfettered abuses of AI or automated decision systems could run the gamut from pocketbook harms to working families like decisions on rental prices, to serious violations of ordinary Americans' civil rights, and even to large-scale threats like aiding in cyber attacks on critical infrastructure or the production of biological weapons," it continues.

And, the letter added, without state-level regulations on emerging technologies, companies wouldn't be held accountable.

"This moratorium would mean that even if a company deliberately designs an algorithm that causes foreseeable harm — regardless of how intentional or egregious the misconduct or how devastating the consequences — the company making that bad tech would be unaccountable to lawmakers and the public," the letter reads.

The letter's signatories include Georgetown Law's Center on Privacy and Technology, the Southern Poverty Law Center, the Economic Policy Institute, Amazon Employees for Climate Justice, the Alphabet Workers Union, and many others.

The provision would invalidate critical state laws — like those already in effect in New Jersey and Colorado — designed to protect people from the harms created by AI, like algorithmic discrimination, which can affect everything from housing, policing, healthcare, and financial services, the letter argues.

Those harms include "many documented cases of AI having highly sexualized conversations with minors and even encouraging minors to commit harm to themselves and others; AI programs making healthcare decisions that have led to adverse and biased outcomes; and AI enabling thousands of women and girls to be victimized by nonconsensual deepfakes," the letter says.

Trump's signature bill, which the House Budget Committee moved forward on Sunday, still has to clear a series of votes in the House before going to the Senate, and the bill's AI provision has to meet a high bar to remain in the larger bill.

The White House and a representative for Speaker Mike Johnson did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.

Meta has filed a motion for judgment on the antitrust case it’s currently fighting in court. The motion argues that the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has failed to produce any evidence that Meta unlawfully monopolized part of the social networking market, something the government argues it did through its acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp.

The filing was submitted this evening, shortly after the FTC rested its case in a protracted trial before DC District Court Judge James Boasberg. “After five weeks of trial, it is clear that the FTC has failed to meet the legal standard required under antitrust law,” said Meta spokesperson Christopher Sgro. “Regardless, we will present our case to show what every 17-year-old in the world knows: Instagram competes with TikTok (and YouTube and X and many other apps). The FTC spent tens of millions of taxpayer dollars bringing a weak case with a market definition that ignores reality.”

A judgment on partial findings asks a judge to consider a case’s merits before it has been fully argued in court, attempting to speed its resolution. The trial is still currently scheduled to proceed, with Meta launching into its defense against the FTC’s allegations, but the filing offers a preview of its case.

As Meta’s lawyers have done in cross-examination, it takes aim at the agency’s description of Meta monopolizing a “personal social networking services” market that people use to share information with family and friends. It argues that the FTC has failed to demonstrate Meta reduced the quality of its services (a key sign that a company lacks competition) or that it bought Instagram to neutralize a potential rival.

The FTC has made its case with testimony from several high-profile players in Meta’s businesses, including Instagram’s co-founder Kevin Systrom — who aired complaints about Meta’s handling of his company — and its current head, Adam Mosseri, who offered a more optimistic take. Meta has countered by emphasizing the company’s persistent struggles against social networks that the FTC doesn’t consider full competitors, particularly TikTok, which, in the war for those aforementioned 17-year-olds’ attention, Meta portrays as a constant scourge.

• Palantir CEO Alex Karp praised Saudi engineers at Riyadh's investment forum and criticized Europe.
• European organizations are slower in AI adoption compared to their US counterparts, a report said.
• Europe has more stringent AI regulations, and many ways of utilizing AI are categorized as high-risk.

At an investment forum in Riyadh, Alex Karp, CEO of defense tech company Palantir Technologies, praised Saudi engineers for meritocracy and patriotism — and took a swipe at Europe over its slow AI adoption.

"You're seeing a receptivity in this region, especially in the kingdom," Karp said at the Saudi-US Investment Forum on Tuesday. "But the receptivity is on the back of people who have a deep tradition in engineering excellence and, quite frankly, believe in their own future."

Karp was addressing a request from panel host and CNBC anchor Sara Eisen to expand upon a previous comment that the countries and regions that are best utilizing AI right now are the US and the Middle East.

"Obviously, the great contradistinction here is Europe, where, you know, it's like people have given up, and we — I really hope that turns around in Europe," he added.

The talk came as President Donald Trump received a royal welcome with golden chairs and Arabian horses in Riyadh on Tuesday as he kicked off his Gulf tour. Flanked by executives from Google, Nvidia, BlackRock, and others to discuss AI, defense, and energy with Saudi officials, Trump said he aims to secure $1 trillion in deals.

Based on an October 2024 report published by QuantumBlack, AI by McKinsey, European organizations lag behind their US counterparts by 45 to 70% in terms of AI adoption. And while Europe leads in producing AI semiconductor equipment — machinery and tools used to make semiconductors — the report said that Europe has below 5% market share in areas like raw materials, cloud infrastructure, and supercomputers.

"Opportunity remains wide open, but Europe is starting from a disadvantage," the report QuantumBlack wrote.

Europe is also known for much more stringent AI regulations. On August 1, 2024, Europe enacted the AI Act, the first-ever legal framework on AI, and established an AI office to oversee the implementation of these regulations.

The AI Act is just one part of a wider package of measures that the EU said ensures "trustworthy AI," which explicitly banned practices such as AI-based manipulation and deception, real-time remote biometric identification for law enforcement purposes in public spaces, and individual criminal offense risk assessment.

According to the AI Act, ways of using AI, such as robot-assisted surgery and credit scoring, are also categorized as "high-risk" and subjected to strict scrutiny.

The best-known European AI company that raised the most amount of funds is French AI startup Mistral, which is backed by over €1 billion in funding. Dubbed as Europe's answer to OpenAI, the company has recently ruled out acquisition and is eyeing an IPO while pushing its open-source AI models and generative chatbot "Le Chat" into new markets.

Long-simmering tension between Silicon Valley and the press that covers it is surfacing during the Federal Trade Commission's antitrust trial against Meta.

During a heated cross-examination of the FTC's key economic expert, Scott Hemphill, Meta's lead attorney, Mark Hansen, noted that Hemphill joined Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes and former Biden official Tim Wu in pitching regulators on an antitrust probe of the company back in 2019. The pitch deck for the probe that was shown in court included "public recognition" of the company's aggressive acquisition strategy from two reporters: Kara Swisher, who currently hosts two podcasts for The Verge's parent company, Vox Media, and Om Malik, the founder of the early tech blog GigaOm who is now a venture capitalist.

In an attempt to undercut Hemphill's credibility, Hansen caught Swisher and Malik in the crossfire. He called Malik a "failed blogger" with an axe to grind against Meta. He then suggested that Swisher, whom he referred to as a Vanity Fair columnist (she last wrote for the site in 2015), was similarly biased against the company. In court, he projected a headline about her recently calling Mark Zuckerberg a "small little …

Read the full story at The Verge.

Republicans want to stop states from regulating AI. On Sunday, a Republican-led House committee submitted a budget reconciliation bill that proposes blocking states from enforcing “any law or regulation” targeting an exceptionally broad range of automated computing systems for 10 years after the law is enacted — a move that would stall efforts to regulate everything from AI chatbots to online search results. 

Democrats are calling the new provision a “giant gift” to Big Tech, and organizations that promote AI oversight, like Americans for Responsible Innovation (ARI), say it could have “catastrophic consequences” for the public. It’s a gift companies like OpenAI have recently been seeking in Washington, aiming to avoid a slew of pending and active state laws. The budget reconciliation process allows lawmakers to fast-track bills related to government spending by requiring only a majority in the Senate rather than 60 votes to pass. 

This bill, introduced by House Committee on Energy and Commerce Chairman Brett Guthrie (R-KY), would prevent states from imposing “legal impediments” — or restrictions to design, performance, civil liability, and documentation — on AI models and “automated decision” systems. It defines the latter category as “any computational process derived from machine learning, statistical modeling, data analytics, or artificial intelligence that issues a simplified output, including a score, classification, or recommendation, to materially influence or replace human decision making.”

That means the 10-year moratorium could extend well beyond AI. Travis Hall, the director for state engagement at the Center for Democracy & Technology, tells The Verge that the automated decision systems described in the bill “permeate digital services, from search results and mapping directions, to health diagnoses and risk analyses for sentencing decisions.”

During the 2025 legislative session, states have proposed over 500 laws that Hall says this bill could “unequivocally block.” They focus on everything from chatbot safety for minors to deepfake restrictions and disclosures for the use of AI in political ads. If the bill passes, the handful of states that have successfully passed AI laws may also see their efforts go to waste. 

Last year, California Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a law preventing companies from using a performer’s AI-generated likeness without permission. Tennessee also adopted legislation with similar protections, while Utah has enacted a rule requiring certain businesses to disclose when customers are interacting with AI. Colorado’s AI law, which goes into effect next year, will require companies developing “high-risk” AI systems to protect customers from “algorithmic discrimination.”

California also came close to enacting the landmark AI safety law SB 1047, which would have imposed security restrictions and legal liability on AI companies based in the state, like OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and Meta. OpenAI opposed the bill, saying AI regulation should take place at the federal level instead of having a “patchwork” of state laws that could make it more difficult to comply. Gov. Newsom vetoed the bill last September, and OpenAI has made it clear it wants to avoid having state laws “bogging down innovation” in the future.

With so little AI regulation at the federal level, it’s been left up to the states to decide how to deal with AI. Even before the rise of generative AI, state legislators were grappling with how to fight algorithmic discrimination — including machine learning-based systems that display race or gender bias — in areas like housing and criminal justice. Efforts to combat this, too, would likely be hampered by the Republicans’ proposal.

Democrats have slammed the provision’s inclusion in the reconciliation bill, with Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-IL) saying the 10-year ban will “allow AI companies to ignore consumer privacy protections, let deepfakes spread, and allow companies to profile and deceive consumers using AI.” In a statement published to X, Sen. Ed Markey (D-MA) said the proposal “will lead to a Dark Age for the environment, our children, and marginalized communities.”

The nonprofit organization Americans for Responsible Innovation (ARI) compared the potential ban to the government’s failure to properly regulate social media. “Lawmakers stalled on social media safeguards for a decade and we are still dealing with the fallout,” ARI president Brad Carson said in a statement. “Now apply those same harms to technology moving as fast as AI… Ultimately, the move to ban AI safeguards is a giveaway to Big Tech that will come back to bite us.”

This provision could hit a roadblock in the Senate, as ARI notes that the Byrd rule says reconciliation bills can only focus on fiscal issues. Still, it’s troubling to see Republican lawmakers push to block oversight of a new technology that’s being integrated into almost everything.

German iPhone users are starting to report that they’re now able to use PayPal’s tap-to-pay feature at in-store payment terminals, according to German tech site iPhone Ticker. The new capability, which PayPal announced earlier this month, is a result of the EU forcing Apple to open iPhone NFC chips up for third-party contactless payments under the Digital Markets Act. 

PayPal’s contactless wallet works with terminals that support Mastercard payments and is iPhone-only for now, so it won’t work on an Apple Watch, iPhone Ticker reports (via a machine translation). In December, a Norwegian payment app called Vipps became the first to take advantage of Apple’s changing ecosystem, nearly a year after Apple first announced it was opening up its NFC hardware to third-party wallet apps for EU users last year. 

Apple hasn’t only opened iPhone tap-to-pay to the EU. It announced in August that it would let developers offer in-app NFC-based payments in the US and other regions, too. The company also allows businesses to use iPhone NFC readers to accept contactless payments in third-party apps, which is a capability PayPal started offering in Venmo and PayPal Zettle in March last year.

On Sunday night, House Republicans added language to the Budget Reconciliation bill that would block all state and local governments from regulating AI for 10 years, 404 Media reports. The provision, introduced by Representative Brett Guthrie of Kentucky, states that "no State or political subdivision thereof may enforce any law or regulation regulating artificial intelligence models, artificial intelligence systems, or automated decision systems during the 10 year period beginning on the date of the enactment of this Act."

The broad wording of the proposal would prevent states from enforcing both existing and proposed laws designed to protect citizens from AI systems. For example, California's recent law requiring health care providers to disclose when they use generative AI to communicate with patients would potentially become unenforceable. New York's 2021 law mandating bias audits for AI tools used in hiring decisions would also be affected, 404 Media notes. The measure would also halt legislation set to take effect in 2026 in California that requires AI developers to publicly document the data used to train their models.

The ban could also restrict how states allocate federal funding for AI programs. States currently control how they use federal dollars and can direct funding toward AI initiatives that may conflict with the administration's technology priorities. The Education Department's AI programs represent one example where states might pursue different approaches than those favored by the White House and its tech industry allies.

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If the question, "Who is Meta's biggest rival?" were on a Family Feud survey, TikTok would likely be the winning answer. In the Federal Trade Commission's antitrust case against the Facebook and Instagram owner, the government's response probably wouldn't even make the top 10: a small blockchain-based platform called MeWe.

MeWe looks a fair amount like Facebook at first glance, except that you make an account using the Frequency blockchain - which the company explains is a decentralized protocol that lets you move your social connections to other (mostly hypothetical at this point) apps that support Frequency. The company says 20 million users have joined, but when I make a MeWe account and log in, I scroll through my autopopulated feed and think, "Who are these people?" I search for a few of my Verge colleagues, figuring if anyone has tried this obscure app, it might be one of them, but I come up short. I try some public figures: Tim Cook? Jeff Bezos? Mark Zuckerberg? There are some accounts with these names, but it seems unlikely they're the ones I have in mind.

The claim that MeWe is a closer competitor to Facebook and Instagram than TikTok might be baffling if you're not st …

Read the full story at The Verge.

Ticketmaster will now show how much you’ll pay for tickets — fees included — before checkout. The company announced the “All In Prices” initiative on Monday as part of its efforts to comply with the Federal Trade Commission’s ban on junk fees, which goes into effect on May 12th.

Now, when you’re shopping for tickets, Ticketmaster will display a ticket’s full price, alongside a dropdown menu that you can select to see how much you’re paying for the “Face Value” of a ticket and the service fee. You still won’t see local taxes or delivery fees until checkout.

Following the Taylor Swift ticketing catastrophe in 2022, lawmakers and regulatory agencies have begun paying closer attention to Ticketmaster. Last year, the Department of Justice sued Ticketmaster and its parent company, Live Nation, accusing them of driving up prices as a result of their alleged monopoly. 

The House also passed the TICKET Act in 2024, a law that would force ticket sellers to show full prices upfront. It’s now headed to the Senate.

Ticketmaster says it has made some improvements to its queue as well, by offering real-time updates about ticket availability and when wait times are expected to last more than 30 minutes. It also allows customers to see exactly how many people are ahead of them in the queue.

We’re doing something a little different on today’s episode of Decoder. I asked my friend John Gruber, of the website Daring Fireball, to come on the show and talk about the future of Apple — and, importantly, the App Store.

Gruber and I have been friends for over a decade now. Daring Fireball was one of the first and most influential Apple blogs around, and he has more insight into Apple, its culture, and how it does things than anyone else. Everyone at Apple and in the Apple developer community reads Daring Fireball religiously.

In 2010, Steve Jobs himself emailed Gruber’s analysis of an early App Store rule change to an unhappy developer and called it “very insightful.” Personally, I will always remember a moment early in my career when a very excited Apple PR staffer pointed Gruber out to me at an event like a celebrity sighting, which was funny and also deeply humbling.

I wanted to have him on the show to talk about the most recent ruling in the Epic v. Apple legal saga. This is the lawsuit about Fortnite on the iPhone and whether developers like Epic can circumvent the App Store’s payment system to avoid paying those 30 percent fees on in-app purchases.

Well, late last month, Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers, who has presided over that case for the past five years, effectively banned Apple from collecting fees on web transactions. She also harshly accused of the company of purposefully disobeying her original 2021 ruling by creating a series of restrictions and hoops to jump through that would basically make it impossible for developers to send people to the web to buy things. The judge’s extreme frustration with Apple is obvious in almost every line of her ruling; she even referred an Apple executive for criminal proceedings, saying this executive had lied under oath on the stand.

There’s a lot of tactical stuff you might talk about in the aftermath of this ruling — about what Apple might do next, how it might impact revenue, and how developers might respond. But I really wanted Gruber to talk about Apple’s big picture and how a company that so often prides itself on doing the right thing ended up so fully on the wrong side of the courts.

One theme you’ll hear throughout this conversation is that Apple often presents itself as small, but the company is actually huge in every way — Apple now sells nearly as many phones in a single quarter as it did in the entire first three years of the iPhone’s existence combined. It now operates in a geopolitical context that binds the United States, China, and Taiwan in ways you would have never imagined 15 years ago. And perhaps most importantly, Apple has control over applications on the iPhone, which means it has control over what kinds of businesses can and cannot exist on its mobile phones.

That’s the context for the other major theme here that you’ll pick up on in this conversation: Apple’s major shift toward digital services and whether that’s fundamentally changed the company’s culture. You see, as Apple kept selling newer and better iPhones, it simply ran out of people to sell them to. So, in order to keep growing revenue and keep Wall Street happy, it started squeezing more money from its existing customer base, including the very developers that put apps on the App Store. 

That made some of the most important developers, the companies that make mobile games and stream media, very upset. But they had no other choice so they kept their apps in the App Store and continued to pay the fees — except for some major exceptions like Amazon and Spotify, which simply refused to sell you ebooks or music subscriptions on iOS at all. (After this most recent ruling, Amazon updated its Kindle app to sell ebooks via the web, while Spotify is working to update its iOS app to do the same for its subscriptions.)

All of that combined with Apple’s scale created a kind of hubris and, as you’ll hear Gruber say, a major blind spot for Apple that has pushed it toward these high-profile and public legal defeats that could reshape its business. If all of that weren’t enough to put the heat on Apple, there’s also Trump’s tariffs to deal with and a Google antitrust trial that could see Google barred from striking an exclusivity deal for its search engine that currently pays Apple north of $20 billion a year.

Apple also has to compete in AI with Apple Intelligence and Siri, products that are currently a total mess. Gruber and I got into all that at the end here, and I wanted to know if there was a connection between the corporate culture that produced the App Store debacle and the recent news of Siri delays and dysfunction around AI inside Apple.

There’s a whole lot going on in this conversation, and there’s really nobody better to talk about all of this than Gruber. I hope you like this one; as you’ll soon hear, Gruber and I really enjoy talking to each other.

If you’d like to read more on what we talked about in this episode, check out the links below:

• Judge rules, in excoriating decision, that Apple violated 2021 order | Daring Fireball
• Steve Jobs’ response on Section 3.3.1 | Tao Effect Blog
• Epic submitted Fortnite to Apple | Verge
• Eddy Cue is fighting to save Apple’s $20 billion paycheck from Google | Verge
• Epic is offering developers an alternative to Apple’s in-app purchases | Verge
• Epic says Fortnite is coming back to iOS in the US | Verge
• Apple files appeal to wrest back control of its App Store | Verge
• ‘Cook chose poorly’: how Apple blew up its control over the App Store | Verge
• Apple changes App Store rules to allow external purchases | Verge
• Existential thoughts about Apple’s reliance on Services revenue | Six Colors

_{Questions or comments about this episode? Hit us up at [email protected]. We really do read every email!}

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) was set to start enforcing the remaining provisions of its “click-to-cancel” rule on May 14th, requiring that subscriptions be as easy to cancel as to start. Now, the agency says it won’t enforce the rule until July 14th, as TechCrunch reports.

Also known as the Negative Option Rule, the big component of click-to-cancel is that it forbids companies from making customers jump through hoops that differ from the process to sign up for an account. If you can sign up online, you must be able to cancel online, too. As the FTC points out, the original May 14th deadline was already a deferral for that and related provisions.

The agency says it chose to push enforcement back even further after “a fresh assessment of the burdens that forcing compliance by this date would impose.” The FTC voted 3-0 for the delay, but as TechCrunch notes, two of a typical five commissioners were absent from the vote. That’s because they were illegally fired by Donald Trump in March.

Perhaps on the bright side for consumers, the FTC says that starting on the new deadline, “regulated entities must be in compliance with the whole of the Rule because the Commission will begin enforcing it.” However, it doesn’t rule out changing any of the regulation’s provisions, writing that it’s “open to amending the Rule” if enforcing it “exposes any problems.”

Donald Trump signed a presidential memorandum Friday afternoon directing the Department of Energy to “consider using all lawful authority to rescind” or weaken regulations for water and energy efficiency for dishwashers and washing machines. The action also includes water use standards for showers, faucets, toilets, and urinals.

It closes out a week of attacks on policies meant to save Americans money by incentivizing manufacturers to make products that save water and energy. Earlier in the week, CNN and E&E News reported that the Trump administration would shutter the Energy Star program as part of a “reorganization” planned at the Environmental Protection Agency.

Energy Star certifies products for energy efficiency, allowing consumers to choose the most energy-efficient home appliances by spotting the recognizable blue Energy Star label. The rules President Trump is targeting now are actually consumer protections, meant to ensure that any customer can purchase something that meets reasonable efficiency standards.

A White House fact sheet says the Secretary of Energy should work with the Office of Legislative Affairs to make recommendations to Congress on any water pressure “or related energy efficiency laws” that ought to change or be repealed altogether.

It also says the Secretary of Energy should pause enforcement of the rules mentioned in the memorandum until they’re rescinded or revised. “The Federal Government should not impose or enforce regulations that make taxpayers’ lives worse,” the presidential memorandum says.

“It’ll only raise costs for consumers to get rid of these standards, if they get rid of these standards,” says Andrew deLaski, executive director of the Appliance Standards Awareness Project. “Congress enacted these laws, the president can’t just decide that they’re going to go away.” deLaski also notes that while the White House says it wants to get rid of “useless water pressure standards,” the rules mentioned in the memorandum actually target efficiency standards since water pressure depends on the plumbing system connected to the device. 

Trump also signed four bills approved through the Congressional Review Act undoing Biden-era efficiency standards for water heaters, refrigerators, walk-in coolers, and more. In April, the president signed an executive order to purportedly make “America’s showers great again” by rescinding an Obama-era definition of showerheads that raised efficiency standards.  

Update, May 10th: This story has been updated with more information about water pressure from Andrew deLaski.

When Adam Mosseri took over Meta-owned Instagram as CEO in 2018, the app was experiencing what he'd later call "concerning" drops and plateaus in user engagement, thanks partly to fierce competition from a new app: TikTok. Instagram estimated in 2019 that 23 percent of the decline in time spent on Instagram in the US was due to TikTok. ByteDance's video app kept expanding through the onset of the covid-19 pandemic. "We can't explain it all, but what's clear at this point is that we need to adapt, and do so quickly," Mosseri wrote to his team in March 2020. Instagram needed to recover, he testified Thursday in a DC courtroom, because "you're either growing, or you're slowly dying."

Mosseri described the dire situation while testifying in the Federal Trade Commission's antitrust trial against Meta, where the government alleges the company illegally monopolized the market for personal social networking services, a category that it says includes Snapchat but not more entertainment-focused apps like YouTube or TikTok. Mosseri's testimony highlighted how much Instagram sees itself as in competition with TikTok, but it also showed that even as entertainment content becomes a larger port …

Read the full story at The Verge.

If you’ve been harboring complaints about Ticketmaster, now’s the time to let it all out. The Department of Justice and the Federal Trade Commission are inviting the public to submit comments about harmful practices in live ticketing as part of efforts to “identify unfair and anticompetitive” behavior in the industry.

In March, President Donald Trump issued an executive order to address unfair practices in the ticketing industry, such as scalpers using bots to buy up massive amounts of tickets. He directed the FTC and DOJ to enforce competition laws, as well as file a report about their progress within six months. The agencies plan to use the public comments to inform their recommendations.

Ticketmaster has been under closer regulatory scrutiny after its site crashed when Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour tickets went on sale in November 2022, sparking outrage among fans and even Swift herself. The DOJ filed an antitrust lawsuit against Ticketmaster and its parent company, LiveNation, last year, claiming their illegal monopoly results in higher ticket prices for consumers.

You can submit your comments about the live ticketing industry on the Regulations.gov website from now until July 7th.

“We will continue to closely examine this market and look for opportunities where vigorous enforcement of the antitrust laws can lead to increased competition that makes tickets more affordable for fans while offering fairer compensation for artists,” Abigail Slater, the assistant attorney general of the DOJ’s antitrust division, said in the press release.

The non-profit Wikimedia Foundation is challenging the United Kingdom’s online safety rules in court over concerns they may enable “vandalism, disinformation, or abuse” to go unchecked on its Wikipedia platform. 

Wikimedia announced on Thursday that its legal challenge specifically targets the Online Safety Act’s (OSA) categorization regulations, which the foundation says are written broadly enough to hold Wikipedia to the strictest duties that websites can be subject to. OSA is a set of safety regulations passed in 2023 that aim to protect both children and adults from harmful online content. While it was largely created to hold social media platforms, video sharing platforms, and online communications platforms accountable for user safety, the bill is so broad that services like Wikipedia can also fall under its requirements.

Platforms designated as a “category 1 service” — which the OSA defines as a platform that attracts over seven million monthly UK users, uses content recommendation algorithms, and allows users to share user-generated content with other users on the service — are required to provide tools that allow users to verify their identity and block other users. Some obvious examples of a category 1 service would be platforms like Facebook, TikTok, and Discord.

“As a Category 1 service, Wikipedia could face the most burdensome compliance obligations, which were designed to tackle some of the UK’s riskiest websites,” said Wikimedia senior advocacy manager Franziska Putz. “Someone reading an online encyclopaedia article about a historical figure or cultural landmark is not exposed to the same level of risk as someone scrolling on social media.”

Wikimedia says that even content forwarding Wikipedia features, like allowing users to choose the daily “Picture of the day,” places it at risk of being designated as a category 1 service. While not every Wikipedia user would be required to verify their identity under these rules, Wikimedia says the regulations could enable malicious users to prevent unverified volunteers from fixing or removing any harmful content or disinformation they publish.

In a larger post on Medium, the Wikimedia Foundation’s lead counsel, Phil Bradley-Schmieg, said enforcing category 1 duties would undermine the privacy and safety of Wikipedia volunteers, and could “expose users to data breaches, stalking, vexatious lawsuits or even imprisonment by authoritarian regimes.”

Companies can be fined up to £18 million (around $24 million) or ten percent of their global turnover for breaching OSA rules, and risk their services being blocked in the UK in extreme cases. OSA regulations for categorized services are expected to be in effect by 2026. Wikimedia says it has requested to expedite its legal challenge, and that UK communications regulator Ofcom is already demanding the information required to make a preliminary category 1 assessment for Wikipedia.

“We regret that circumstances have forced us to seek judicial review of the OSA’s Categorisation Regulations,” said Bradley-Schmieg. “Given that the OSA intends to make the UK a safer place to be online, it is particularly unfortunate that we must now defend the privacy and safety of Wikipedia’s volunteer editors from flawed legislation.”

On Wednesday, the Trump administration announced plans to rescind and replace a Biden-era rule regulating the export of high-end AI accelerator chips worldwide, Bloomberg and Reuters reported.

A Department of Commerce spokeswoman told Reuters that officials found the previous framework "overly complex, overly bureaucratic, and would stymie American innovation" and pledged to create "a much simpler rule that unleashes American innovation and ensures American AI dominance."

The Biden administration issued the Framework for Artificial Intelligence Diffusion in January during its final week in office. The regulation represented the last salvo of a four-year effort to control global access to so-called "advanced" AI chips (such as GPUs made by Nvidia), with a focus on restricting China's ability to obtain tech that could enhance its military capabilities.

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