Facebook Hires Biden Transition, Obama-Era Official as VP of Civil Rights
Facebook has hired Roy Austin, an Obama administration veteran and a member of President Joe Biden’s transition team, as the social media company’s vice president of civil rights and deputy general counsel.
Austin had been a civil rights prosecutor and served as a Department of Justice (DOJ) supervisor before becoming a deputy assistant to President Barack Obama in the Office of Urban Affairs, Justice, and Opportunity in 2014. In 2017, he went into private practice as a criminal defense and civil rights attorney at Harris, Wiltshire & Grannis.
In November, Biden named him as one of the volunteers on the Agency Review Team for the DOJ in his transition.
Washington takes Facebook to court
The original social network
Facebook could find itself dismantled just like US telecommunications company AT&T was in the early 1980s, North Carolina Attorney General Josh Stein, one of the attorneys-general involved in the investigation, said in a statement.
Founded in the late 19th century, AT&T (American Telephone & Telegraph Company) flourished during the 20th century into a network of subsidiary communication companies scattered around North America . A telecommunications monopoly known as the Bell System emerged, named after the company s founder, the man credited with inventing the telephone, Alexander Graham Bell.
Antitrust regulators repeatedly went after the company for abusing its monopoly status. Finally, in 1982, facing the prospect of finally losing in court, AT&T agreed to break into seven smaller companies, many of which still operate today.
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Summary:
(Pixabay )
In Europe this morning, Facebook, Instagram and Messenger were down. I’m tempted to believe they were having a fit of the vapors over the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) finally taking action to tame the Zuckerberg-spawned monster. “We are working to get things back to normal,” was the party line on the outage, but it might well have applied to the mood in the room at Facebook HQ today..
To summarise, the FTC plus Attorneys General from 48 states - the others were busy? - have filed lawsuits accusing Facebook of illegal monopolistic behavior, abusing its market power to squash smaller competitors and looking for restitution that could well include an enforced breakup of Instagram and WhatsApp messaging services.