A bipartisan group of state attorneys general announced an investigation Wednesday into the harms TikTok might have on young users and the company’s efforts to boost user engagement. AGs from California, Florida, Kentucky, Massachusetts, Nebraska, New Jersey, Tennessee and Vermont joined the probe. President Joe Biden targeted youth mental health issues and links to social media during his State of the Union address Tuesday evening (see 2203010072). Texas AG Ken Paxton (R) is investigating TikTok separately (see 2202180034) for “potential facilitation of human trafficking and child privacy violations.” The probe will “look into the harms using TikTok can cause to young users and what TikTok knew about those harms,” said California AG Rob Bonta, D-Calif. AGs are interested in “strategies or efforts to increase the duration of time spent on the platform and frequency of engagement with the platform.” TikTok cares "deeply about building an experience that helps to protect and support the well-being of our community, and appreciate that the state attorneys general are focusing on the safety of younger users," the company said.

Differences in chips funding legislation in the House and Senate aren’t “irreconcilable” and are “worthy of discussion,” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., said Friday during a news conference at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California. She was referencing the House-passed America Creating Opportunities for Manufacturing, Pre-Eminence in Technology and Economic Strength Act (HR-4521) (see 2202040054). Pelosi's office didn’t comment about timing and participants for the conference committee. “We are almost there,” said Rep. Doris Matsui, D-Calif. “We know what we already agree on, which is the majority of it, and there’s some little tweaks” and other differences. “There’s nothing there that’s going to be a deal stopper at all. ... This is going to get done.” The U.S. in 1990 had a 37% global share of semiconductor manufacturing capacity, which has fallen to 12% today, she noted. Since the bill was introduced, similar legislation has passed in Korea, Taiwan, Japan, India and Europe, said Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger: “They want the fabs built on their own soil.”

When CEO Nikesh Arora joined Palo Alto Networks in June 2018, its “mean time” to respond to cyberattacks was measured in days, he told an earnings call Tuesday for fiscal Q2 ended Jan. 31. “For someone who did not work in the security industry, I found that a little flabbergasting,” said Arora, who earlier had worked at SoftBank and Google. “We challenged our team internally” to convert Palo Alto’s response time to seconds or minutes “because that's the only way we're going to have a chance” to protect customers, he said. The company still sees “an evolving and complicated threat landscape,” said Arora. “We have highlighted in the past that cybersecurity is at the front and center of all conversations around risks and threats,” he said. “We believe cybersecurity will continue to become more and more relevant and important. With increased reliance on technology in the prevalence of cyberattacks, there is an ability to disrupt businesses and critical systems, making cybersecurity an area that will need continued focused investment.”

Communications Decency Act Section 230 doesn’t allow platforms to engage in “arbitrary discrimination” like banning users for political speech, attorneys for ex-President Donald Trump argued Tuesday in a lawsuit against YouTube in U.S. District Court in Oakland in docket 4:21-cv8009. Trump sued Facebook, Google, Twitter and their CEOs in July, claiming his suspensions after the Jan. 6 insurrection amount to illegal censorship (see 2107070065). Congress intended for Section 230 to benefit all Americans, and a First Amendment principle is that “all persons have access to places where they can speak and listen,” Trump’s team filed in response to DOJ’s brief on the constitutionality of Section 230. Trump argued the social media platforms violated the First Amendment. Platforms like YouTube act as common carriers when they “solicit and host third-party content,” they argued: That means any applications of Section 230 that “protect acts of arbitrary discrimination by Defendants would be unconstitutional.”

President Joe Biden should demand changes to the EU’s Digital Markets Act (DMA), which discriminates against U.S. tech companies, Reps. Suzan DelBene, D-Wash., and Darin LaHood, R-Ill., wrote Wednesday in a letter with some 30 other members of Congress. The group noted the administration has recently engaged with the EU to revise its proposed DMA ahead of potential adoption next month. Originally announced in 2020, the DMA regulates self-preferencing and other competition issues associated with Big Tech. It establishes a "set of narrowly defined objective criteria for qualifying a large online platform" as a gatekeeper. As drafted, the DMA would “single out” American companies by restricting their activity in Europe while favoring European companies, the lawmakers wrote in their letter. The EU’s approach “unfairly targets American workers by deeming certain U.S. technology companies as ‘gatekeepers’ based on deliberately discriminatory and subjective thresholds,” they wrote. The DMA’s discriminatory aspects violate “fundamental principles” of the World Trade Organization, they argued. Reps. Zoe Lofgren, D-Calif.; Adam Kinzinger, R-Ill.; and Doris Matsui, D-Calif., signed. The White House didn’t comment.

Texas is investigating TikTok’s “potential facilitation of human trafficking and child privacy violations,” Attorney General Ken Paxton (R) announced Friday. He issued two civil investigative demands. TikTok “may be complicit in child exploitation, sex trafficking, human trafficking, drug smuggling and other unimaginable horrors,” he said. The CIDs seek information on TikTok’s content moderation policies and practices, its handling of law enforcement requests and user reporting procedures for illegal activity. The company didn’t comment Friday.

New York state will make available $1.5 million in federal funding to expand telehealth for addiction treatment, Gov. Kathy Hochul (D) said Friday. Providers can apply for up to $15,000 each from the Substance Abuse Prevention and Treatment Block Grant to upgrade telehealth infrastructure and buy software, tablets and phones, the govenor’s office said. “Like too many New Yorkers, I know what it's like to lose a loved one to addiction. There's an empty chair at our family table where my nephew, Michael, should be," Hochul said. “New Yorkers struggling with addiction should have access to telehealth services that will provide the treatment they need.”

The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency is preparing to release guidance on how to identify and mitigate risks of misinformation and malware attacks, given rising tensions between Russia and Ukraine, CISA Director Jen Easterly said Friday. CISA hasn’t identified specific, credible threats to the “U.S. homeland,” but agencies and entities need to be ready for digital risk, she said during an Aspen Institute livestream. Private entities are more likely to experience threats first, so it’s important for businesses to report incidents to CISA, she said. That way the government can assess “seemingly disparate events,” she said.

Eun Young Choi will be DOJ’s first National Cryptocurrency Enforcement Team director, the department announced Thursday. Choi has been a DOJ prosecutor for about 10 years and recently was senior counsel to the deputy attorney general. Assistant Attorney General Kenneth Polite cited the “rapid innovation of digital assets and distributed ledger technologies” and its connection to cyberattacks, narcotics trafficking and money laundering. Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco on Thursday called on crypto companies to “root out abuses. To those who do not, we will hold you accountable where we can.” The FBI’s new unit will combine crypto experts, blockchain analysis and virtual asset seizure, she said.

Amazon Web Services completed its first 16 AWS Local Zones in the U.S. and plans to launch in 32 new metropolitan areas in 26 countries, it said Wednesday. Local Zones are an “infrastructure deployment” putting compute, storage, database and other services at the edge of the cloud near large population, industry and information technology centers. They allow customers to use AWS services locally while connecting to the rest of their workloads running in AWS regions with “the same elasticity, pay-as-you-go model, application programming interfaces and toolsets," it said. Customers with applications that require ultra-low latency, such as remote real-time gaming, media and entertainment content creation, live video streaming, engineering simulations, augmented and virtual reality and machine learning inference at the edge want AWS infrastructure “closer to their end users to support a seamless experience,” it said. Customers in Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Dallas, Denver, Houston, Kansas City, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, Miami, Minneapolis, New York, Philadelphia, Phoenix, Portland, Ore., and Seattle can use Local Zones to deliver applications requiring “single-digit millisecond latency,” AWS said. The company is rolling it out to metro areas in other parts of the world over the next two years so that customers can meet data residency requirements in regulated sectors like health care and life sciences, financial services and government, it said. AWS manages and supports Local Zones; customers won’t have to incur the expense and effort of procuring, operating, and maintaining infrastructure to support low-latency applications, it said.