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The US Department of Justice has issued a wish list of reform laws aimed directly at the big Internet media giants.

Heartland’s Donald Kendal, and Justin Haskins are joined by Jim Lakely, director of communications at The Heartland Institute, in episode #184 of the In The Tank Podcast. Today’s episode features work from the Manhattan Institute and The Heartland Institute.

The European Commission has charged Alphabet-Google with abusing its dominance in the market for “general Internet search services,” by implementing an Android “strategy of mobile devices to preserve and strengthen its dominance in general Internet search.” The EU objects to a variety of secret Google contract conditions to manufacturer licenses to leverage the dominant (>90% share) Android OS to secretly restrict and foreclose competition in ways that ultimately harm consumer choice and innovation. The EU effectively charged that Google has already anticompetitively extended its >90% dominance in search to dominance in the >90% share of the “licensable smart mobile operating system,” and to dominance in the >90% share of the “app stores for the Android” market.

In the next several weeks, expect the EC’s Competition Directorate to decide that Google is in fact dominant with >90% share of Internet search in Europe and that Google has abused its search dominance by biasing its own Shopping service over competitors. It also could formally charge Google for abuse of its search dominance in contractually tying Google Search and other search-driven apps like Maps, YouTube, etc. to Android to extend its search dominance to mobile search and to the operating system market where Android now owns >80% share.

Ostensibly proposed to protect people from Internet fraud, a bill proposed by Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-UT) would instead criminalize online gambling for millions of Americans and dramatically expand what was intended to be a narrowly focused law.

A little-noticed article in the Wall Street Journal over Labor Day Weekend concerning the proposed Comcast-Time Warner Cable merger caught my eye, not only because the article obviously concerns an important matter of communications policy, but also because it raises questions regarding a matter of proper administrative agency process.

The Federal Communications Commission’s upcoming “incentive” auction of TV airwaves is already at war with itself.

Somehow the FCC imagines it can maximize the revenue necessary to incent TV broadcasters to sell their 600 MHz spectrum by minimizing actual revenue collection via dis-incenting, and even banning some wireless company bids.

You have to be extremely stupid to send a couple of hundred armed government agents to confiscate some bullheaded rancher’s cattle without contemplating how the rest of the nation will interpret your actions.

What was obvious to voters who rejected Barack Obama’s run for the presidency the first and second time was the fact that he lacked any record of competency to be President. The rest voted for him because they wanted to say they helped elect the first black President of the United States and because they believed what this pathological liar said then and since.

With due credit to “Ripley’s Believe it or Not!,”® so much odd and bizarre is happening in Washington in the “name” of “U.S. wireless competition criticism” that the topic calls for its own collection of: “Believe it or Not!”® oddities.

The continuing scandal regarding National Security Agency monitoring of U.S. citizens’ and residents’ electronic communications makes one thing perfectly clear: If anyone is going to protect the public from unwanted snooping, the government isn’t it.

No longer being able to skirt most EU tax liability also could have a significant effect on Google’s EU profitability long term.

Senators McCain and Blumenthal are co-sponsoring a misnamed piece of legislation, the Television Consumer Freedom Act of 2013, which aims to curb expensive cable bundles.

Three new Google antitrust developments in just the last few weeks warrant an update to Google’s ominously-growing Antitrust Rap Sheet.