Happy Tuesday! Here’s your Tuesday Tech Drop, the past week’s top stories from the intersection of politics and technology.
Amazon’s alleged price-fixing exposed
California’s attorney general says newly released emails prove that Amazon has colluded with other companies to raise prices on various products. Attorney General Rob Bonta announced Monday that he had released the previously redacted emails, which were originally included in a court filing from his office’s antitrust lawsuit against the company.
The filing alleges that the online retailer “insulates itself from competition by strong-arming its vendors into raising prices offered by its competitors.” In Monday’s news release, Bonta is quoted as saying, “The evidence we’ve uncovered is clear as day: Amazon is working to make your life more unaffordable.”
Amazon denied the claims, saying in a statement:
The Attorney General’s motion is a transparent attempt to distract from the weakness of its case, coming more than three years after filing its complaint and based on supposedly ‘new’ evidence it has had for years. Amazon is consistently identified as America’s lowest-priced online retailer, and we’re proud of the low prices customers find when shopping in our store. Amazon looks forward to responding in court at the appropriate time.
Read more at CNBC.
Military pettiness
Army Secretary Daniel Driscoll ordered the shutdown of all social media accounts associated with the Army’s Soldier for Life unit after a post that praised Sen. Tammy Duckworth, D-Ill., a war veteran.
Read more at The Hill.
Uber issues
A federal jury in North Carolina found Uber liable in civil court for the actions of a driver who grabbed a passenger by her inner thigh and asked if he could “keep her” with him.
Read more at The Associated Press.
Sketchy Starlink connection
The potential danger of the federal government’s widespread reliance on Elon Musk’s Starlink internet service was exposed last summer when several unmanned vessels were left bobbing in the Pacific Ocean due to Starlink failures. A new report from Reuters says the incident highlights “the challenges of the U.S. military’s growing reliance on SpaceX,” the Musk-led company that owns Starlink, “and the risks it brings to the Pentagon.”
Read more at Reuters.
DOJ spurns France
The Justice Department has told France that it has no plans to assist with the country’s probe of Musk and his social platform, X, related to incidents in which X’s artificial intelligence tools promoted Holocaust denial and nonconsensual sexually explicit imagery, including apparent child porn. The Trump administration basically accused France of picking on a U.S. company, and I wrote about the administration’s stonewalling.
Read more at MS NOW.
Pro-Trump trickery
A new report from The New York Times highlights a deceptive trend involving hundreds of fake, AI-generated avatars that look like real people as they promote President Donald Trump across various social media platforms.
Read more at The New York Times.
Roblox settlements
Alabama has reached a settlement with Roblox to avoid a lawsuit over allegations that the gaming platform left children vulnerable to abuse. The deal follows a similar settlement Roblox just reached with Nevada.
Recommended
Read more at NBC News.
Palantir’s dystopian dreams laid bare
Palantir, the tech firm that has become synonymous with Trump’s surveillance dreams, issued a dystopian manifesto outlining its worldview — and I wrote about how it has garnered bipartisan backlash, including allegations of fascism.
Read more at MS NOW.
So long, Tim Cook
Apple CEO Tim Cook is stepping down this fall and will be replaced by the company’s head of hardware engineering, John Ternus. Cook was one of several Big Tech CEOs to publicly bend the knee to Trump in rather cringeworthy ways, including showering him with gushing praise and gifts.
In a social media post, Trump praised Cook’s leadership but portrayed him as a suck-up who supposedly asked Trump for favors:“I was very impressed with myself to have the head of Apple calling to ‘kiss my ass.’”
Cook certainly established a legacy for himself.
Read more at CNBC.
Tesla settles crash lawsuit
Tesla has settled a wrongful death lawsuit involving a 2018 crash in Florida that killed two teenagers. The parents of one of the victims accused a Tesla technician of disabling the vehicle’s speed-limiting feature without their knowledge, while Tesla denied the claims.
Read more at CBS News.
Portal for tariff refunds
The federal government has officially launched the online portal it is using to issue its court-mandated refunds of losses incurred due to the Trump administration’s illegal tariffs.
My colleague Sydney Carruth reported on what businesses and consumers can expect moving forward.
Read more at MS NOW.
Ja’han Jones is an MS NOW opinion blogger. He previously wrote The ReidOut Blog.