Amazon Web Services has filed against the Pentagon's decision to award Microsoft the $10 billion JEDI (Joint Enterprise Defence Infrastructure) contract.
Labour made an election pledge to provide free broadband for all British consumers and businesses by nationalising Openreach, a subsection of British Telecom (BT), claiming it will boost productivity by £59bn. But would nationalising broadband really help productivity?
Towards the end of November political shockwaves rocked Hong Kong: from district council elections turning the city from blue to yellow, the emergency mask ban ruled ‘unconstitutional’ and Beijing and Washington firing shots at each other in the form of a US Bill and returning sanctions.
On the eve of European Space Agency (ESA) summit, the Prime Minister agreed to increase funding to the ESA by more than 15%, in order to contribute to international space initiatives including addressing climate change, high speed mobile technology, and returning samples from Mars.
Royal Mail believes that its employees were forced into voting for a strike due to take place during the period of the general election. As a result, Royal mail sought an injunction at the High Court.
The fatal crash in August 2019 that killed British teenager, Harry Dunn, involving US citizen, Anne Sacoolas, has escalated to a row about diplomatic immunity, after Sacoolas flew back to the US in a US Air Force plane.
Since early June there have been protests in Hong Kong in response to a proposed bill which would allow extradition to China for crimes such as murder and rape. Extradition is the act of sending an individual back to the country or state in which a crime was committed. This is especially controversial due to the “special status” of Hong Kong which is a result of the “One Country, Two Systems” framework; a framework which gives Hong Kong an element of autonomy from China. Whilst the bill has now been formally withdrawn, it is unlikely to quell the anger of the protesters.
Facebook and YouTube have recently affirmed that they will not change how they police political content on their platforms. In fact, both organisations have hinted at relaxing censorship by raising the threshold on what politicians can say before they will be found in violation of user codes.
In 2018 Facebook only paid £28.5m in corporation tax despite huge sales amounting to £1.6bn.
In March, US Democratic Presidential hopeful, Senator Elizabeth Warren, proposed her two-pronged plan to break up Big Tech companies: unwind pre-existing mergers deemed anticompetitive, and spin out (separate into a new independent corporation) services of large platforms that are designated as “Platform Utilities”; services with over US $25bn in revenue.