Biden Administration Nominates Head of DOJ’s Antitrust Division

Jonathan Kanter was nominated by President Joe Biden for the Chief of the Justice Department’s antitrust division this month, following the signing of sweeping executive orders to promote competition across industries. The executive orders include the lifting of non-compete agreements between workers and employers and allowing prescription drug imports from Canada.

Kanter is a long-time opponent of Google and its parent company Alphabet Inc. He is an expert antitrust lawyer who started a private practice, leaving one of the country’s biggest law firms to continue representing companies that have pushed antitrust enforcers to sue the search giant. Kanter is a favorite among lawmakers, and he feels that the US economy is plagued by monopoly powers and that the DOJ and FTC should more aggressively police anticompetitive conduct and company mergers.

This nomination is another indicator of the Biden administration’s stance against alleged US monopolies. In May, President Joe Biden nominated Lina Kahn to the head of the Federal Trade Commission, another notable candidate with strong opposition to Big Tech companies. Stay tuned, as there are likely to be more policies of this kind coming down from the Biden administration in the future.

How Facebook's News Feed Algorithm Works

In an explainer video released earlier this month, Facebook outlines how the News Feed algorithm works and how it determines content to be shown in the feed. Facebook’s goal is to ensure that users see the posts that are most valuable to them at the top of their feed every time they open the app, and since there is so much content published daily, the algorithm helps prioritize which posts are deemed most important to the user.

The algorithm evaluates and ranks content using four key elements:

• inventory
• signals
• predictions, and
• score.

Inventory encompasses the posts published by pages, groups, and people you actively follow. Signals are the interactions and engagements with content in the past, which indicate if a specific creator’s post or content is of importance to you. Predictions are new content that the algorithm is evaluating for likely relevance, and the fourth element refers to the relevance score assigned to each content piece that determines the order of posts that appear in your feed.

Clubhouse’s Exclusive Content Deal with TED Talks

On July 12, TED hosted its first series of rooms on the Clubhouse app as the two companies announced their exclusive content-sharing partnership. This is the first of moves by the Clubhouse app to keep users coming back to the platform and engaging with a pool of thought leaders and experts from the TED roster. The addition could give the burgeoning app the recognition it needs to hold its own as a social platform. But is this effort sustainable?

Downloads of the Clubhouse app have slowed since its initial buzz. Although there was an uptick after the Android app launched in May (much of it in the Brazil and India markets), the odds of sustaining this growth diminished when Twitter and Facebook recently launched audio-centric features in direct competition with the Clubhouse app.