It will be interesting to see how this develops (or flops).

https://www.pbwt.com/data-security-law-blog/was-labmd-hacked-a-key-issue-in-lawsuit-against-ftc-lawyers/

Was LabMD Hacked? A Key Issue in Lawsuit Against FTC Lawyers

Did LabMD, the now-defunct cancer testing company, expose sensitive patient information with shoddy data security practices as U.S. regulations have charged, or was the company victimized by a private forensics firm extorting it for business – raising the troubling question of whether the entire case against LabMD was built on a false premise.

That is a central question in Daugherty et al. v. Sheer et al., a case pending before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. LabMD has asked the court to reconsider its decision that two Federal Trade Commission lawyers are immune from a lawsuit filed against them by LabMD, charging that its First Amendment rights were violated when the FTC lawyers engaged in a “deliberate and successful effort to cause the Commission to authorize an enforcement action” based on misrepresenting critical facts in the case. LabMD has charged that FTC lawyers Alain Sheer and Ruth Yodaiken recommended that the commission start an enforcement action that “was laced with lies.”

… The crux of LabMD’s argument is that the D.C. Circuit suffered from a “fundamental misunderstanding of the technology at issue,” and that there is no basis to conclude that LabMD’s file with sensitive patient information “was ever publicly available.” Instead, LabMD argues, the sensitive patient file – which had been on a company computer that had LimeWire installed on it – was never publicly available but that a forensic firm trolled peer-to-peer networks in a “profit-motivated shakedown” and accessed the patient file through the LimeWire connection.

“Mail deposited in millions of U.S. mailboxes every day is ‘available’ to anyone but it is not considered ‘publicly available’ despite the ease with which mail can be taken from so many boxes,” argues LabMD.

Is the solution even in sight?

https://www.justsecurity.org/59950/lawmakers-uk-propose-sweeping-tech-policies-combat-misinformation/

Lawmakers in UK and US Propose Sweeping Changes to Tech Policies to Combat Misinformation

Two years after the twin historic events that rocked the global system–the Brexit referendum and the US Presidential election–lawmakers in Britain and the United States are heading toward similar conclusions on what to do about the problems at the intersection of technology, media and democracy that these events laid bare. This week in Britain, the House of Commons Committee on Culture, Media, and Sport released its Interim Report on Disinformation and ‘Fake News’, while in the United States Senator Mark Warner, the Ranking Democratic Member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, released a draft white paper on Potential Policy Proposals for Regulation of Social Media and Technology Firms.

… While the ideas and conclusions published in these reports are far from becoming the law of the land on either side of the Atlantic, they do represent a growing view on what such modern democracies must do to improve public discourse online. Here are five themes that are consistent in both documents:

1. Government must act urgently to make the technology companies liable

2. Data protections and privacy must be strengthened

3. The scale and monopoly power of technology platforms must be addressed

4. Democracies need to invest in digital literacy

5. Democracies must do more to deter disinformation from adversarial state actors

Are cable monopolies crumbling? Hardly. But it doesn’t pay to mess with Google.

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/08/fcc-gives-google-fiber-and-new-isps-faster-access-to-utility-poles/

FCC sides with Google Fiber over Comcast with new pro-competition rule

The Federal Communications Commission today approved new rules that could let Google Fiber and other new Internet service providers gain faster access to utility poles.

The FCC's One Touch Make Ready (OTMR) rules will let companies attach wires to utility poles without waiting for the other users of the pole to move their own wires. Google Fiber says its deployment has stalled in multiple cities because Comcast and AT&T take a long time to get poles ready for new attachers. One Touch Make Ready rules let new attachers make all of the necessary wire adjustments themselves.