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FCC’s Privacy Rules in Jeopardy – Sen. Jeff Flake of Arizona introduced a bill this week that would permanently overturn the FCC’s privacy rules created under the Obama administration which prevented ISPs from selling personal information, including browsing history of their customers. The previous rule moved ownership over privacy regulations for ISPs from the FTC to the FCC because the later has much more power in enforcing its regulations than the former. Because the law is making use of the rarely-before-used Congressional Review Act, new similar rules could not ever be enacted by the agency. The move is aimed to permanently dictate privacy law to the FCC and grant much greater power to the ISPs.

Read More: GOP Senators’ New Bill Would Let ISPs Sell Your Web Browsing Data
Read More: GOP Senator Offers Measure to Undo FCC Internet Privacy Rules
Read More: Republicans Introduce Resolution to Kill FCC’s Internet Privacy Rules

H1B Visa Program Moves Will Hurt Foreign Workers and American Companies – Moves to suspend H1B Visa premium processing and to limit the ability of spouses of holders of H1B visas to work in the US will roll out next month. Both moves will have significant impact on the tech sector, as the largest holder of the special type of work permits designed to bring talent into the US to fill jobs for which existing workers with specialized skills do not exist. The biggest beneficiary from a foreign worker standpoint has been India and its growing workforce of technical graduates and young professionals. The country has had premium status due to the significant shortage of technical workers and high availability of quality, English-speaking talent.

Read More: Trump’s Administration Will Be Making It Harder to Get H-1B Visas Starting in April
Read More: Slowly and Surely, the Trump Government has Begun Dismantling the H-1B Visa
Read More: Trump May Stop Spouses of H-1B Visa Holders from Working
Read More: US May See Talent Shortage if Trump Stops Jobs Under H4 Visa: Analysts

Human Error at Amazon Takes Down the East Coast’s Internet – Several post mortem evaluations are out from Amazon and analysts as to what happened last week at S3 that took down a significant portion of the internet for the Eastern US. It turns out a mistaken command prompt by an Amazon employee debugging the storage solution’s servers was to blame for the outage. Because of the long uptime of the S3 system a reboot took much longer than anticipated, leaving many services and websites offline. Human error will always be a part of managed services and systems, but the larger question is how companies like AWS can perform system restarts more regularly to avoid lengthy downtimes during an outage. And what those outages mean for customers that have been promised and come to expect almost universal uptime on their cloud services.

Read More: How a Typo Took Down S3, the Backbone of the Internet
Read More: Amazon S3 Problem Caused by Command Line Mistake During Maintenance
Read More: Amazon Web Services S3 Outage Due to Human Error
Read More: Summary of the Amazon S3 Service Disruption in the Northern Virginia (US-EAST-1) Region

Amazon Continues Expansion into Physical Retail – The world’s largest online retailer continued its development of brick and mortar stores with revelations that it would soon open its 10th retail store in Bellevue, Washington. The company sees the stores as a great way to showcase and sells its digital products, like the Fire and Kindle devices, as well as drive more customers to its Prime service which offers lower costs and free delivery, among other advantages. The stores are rumored to be headed in the same direction as Amazon Go concept stores with minimal staff and no physical checkout process in the future. Amazon has never been afraid of disrupting the existing retail model, so it really shouldn’t be a surprise they are keeping up that trend and experimenting with physical retail.

Read More: Amazon Just Confirmed Its 10th Book Store, Signaling this Is Way More than an Experiment
Read More: Amazon Is About to Open Bookstore Number 10
Read More: Why Amazon Is Opening More Brick-and-Mortar Bookstores

YouTube Gets in on the OTT Market – Google’s YouTube division announced a new streaming service, YouTube TV, that will enter the busy market with Sling TV, DirecTV Now and others vying for viewership of cord cutters. With so many providers streaming television and movie content over the internet and net neutrality rules going away, the power of ISPs to extract surcharges and drive up costs is a likely reaction from Comcast, Verizon and other large ISPs.

Read More: How YouTube TV Stacks Up Against DirecTV Now, PlayStation Vue, and Sling TV
Read More: Wolverton: With Addition of YouTube, Pay TV Market Thriving — For Now
Read More: YouTube TV Improves Outlook For AT&T-Time Warner Merger

Featured CXOTalk Video of the Week: Machine Learning and AI: An Investment Perspective 

Software systems that learn are on the cutting edge of practical A.I. But what’s the market for these mysterious technologies, and how will they transform the business economy? James Cham, a partner in the investment firm Bloomberg Beta, explains the machine learning market and how these technologies will change our world.

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