Twitter made news of its own, permanently banning conservative commentator and conspiracy theorist Alex Jones and his publication Infowars. The move followed similar decisions from YouTube, Apple and Facebook, which removed content from Jones, citing restrictions on hate speech and harassment. The reactions from tech’s most influential companies marked a potential turning point for how they dealt with public discourse. Decisions on speech comes fraught with challenges, many of which will certainly extend into 2019 and beyond.
It’s very unusual to have the fate of a $39 billion company come down to a public auction, but that’s what happened when Comcast outbid Disney to acquire Sky in a three-round event, run by the U.K. takeover panel. The auction was a byproduct of a months-long bidding war between Comcast and Disney for the majority of 21st Century Fox, which had initially agreed to a deal with Disney last December. Comcast’s higher offer for Fox in June eventually caused Disney to pay $20 billion more for the assets, but Disney ended up getting some of that money back when it agreed to sell its stake in Sky (part of the broader Fox deal) to Comcast.
Be the first to comment