FTC Chair Lina Khan should recuse herself from any antitrust matters involving Amazon due to prior public statements, the company said in a filing Wednesday. Those statements “create the appearance of her having prejudged facts and/or legal issues relevant to the proceeding,” the company wrote the agency. Courts and federal ethics rules require commissioners to avoid the appearance of loss of impartiality, the company said. Amazon wrote that the chair has made numerous public statements that go beyond general policy commentary, including detailed pronouncements about market definition, conduct, theories of harm and other legal matters. “These statements convey to any reasonable observer the clear impression that she has already made up her mind about many material facts relevant to Amazon’s antitrust culpability as well as about the ultimate issue of culpability itself,” the filing said. The company cited her work with Open Markets, her academic papers and her work with the House Antitrust Subcommittee. The agency declined comment.

U.S. consumers think big tech companies “wield too much power” and want Congress and regulatory authorities to rein them in, reported Escalent Tuesday. The market analytics firm canvassed nearly 1,100 U.S. adults online April 14-20, finding nearly two-thirds across party lines believing tech companies have too much power, while more than half, 55%, think the government should regulate them more. “While consumers don’t want big tech to be too powerful, they also want big tech to be powerful enough to continue to make positive impacts on their lives through the products and services these brands provide,” said Escalent.

The FTC is second only to the GAO as the best midsized agency to work for in the federal government, the Partnership for Public Service said Tuesday with 2020 rankings. The FCC ranked 10th in that category. The Department of Commerce ranked No. 5 for large agencies.

The FTC’s antitrust complaint against Facebook is “legally insufficient and must therefore be dismissed,” U.S. District Judge James Boasberg ruled Monday in FTC v. Facebook (20-3590, in Pacer) (see 2012090062). The agency offered a defective case that could “conceivably be overcome by re-pleading,” Boasberg wrote, dismissing the complaint before the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. The agency failed to “plead enough facts to plausibly establish a necessary element of all of its Section 2 claims -- namely, that Facebook has monopoly power in the market for Personal Social Networking (PSN) Services,” he wrote. The FTC claimed in the complaint that the company has a dominant market share higher than 60%. The agency was unable to offer metrics or methods it used to “calculate Facebook’s market share,” which “renders its vague ‘60%-plus’ assertion too speculative and conclusory to go forward,” Boasberg wrote. He also dismissed New York’s case against Facebook in a separate motion (20-3589, in Pacer). Facebook is "pleased that today’s decisions recognize the defects in the government complaints filed against Facebook," said the company in a statement. "We compete fairly every day to earn people’s time and attention and will continue to deliver great products for the people and businesses that use our services.” The office for New York Attorney General Letitia James is "reviewing this decision and considering our legal options," a spokesperson said. The FTC didn’t comment. Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., called it a “deeply disappointing” decision from the court, which “acknowledged” Facebook’s “massive market power but essentially shrugged its shoulders.”

The FCC Wireless Bureau and Broadband Data Task Force granted AT&T, T-Mobile, UScellular and Verizon limited waivers on Form 477, in an order Friday. The providers “voluntarily committed” to reporting 4G LTE mobile deployment data as of May 15, the order said. They will submit this “as soon as practicable” after the filing window opens on July 1.

Cyberthreats of “brand abuse” where hackers impersonate companies online were 68% of Q1 fraud attacks, up from 21% in Q4, reported Outseer Thursday. The payment authentication vendor, which claims “visibility” into 41,000 global cyberattacks, attributes this to the increased use during the COVID-19 pandemic of social media, web publishing and cloud-based collaboration tools. Phishing-based threats were 25% of Q1 attacks. The U.S. had three-quarters of global ISPs' “hosting phishing attacks," it said. “It comes as no surprise that fraud attack volume continues to grow at a record pace, considering the pronounced shift to digital commerce throughout the pandemic,” said Outseer Chief Marketing Officer Armen Najarian.

The Pentagon should improve data collection strategies and revisit the department’s chief information officer risk ratings, GAO recommended Wednesday. DOD concurred with the suggestions, which said DOD needs to improve transparency of data sharing and collection. DOD plans to spend $12 billion FY 2019-2022 on about 30 business IT systems. GAO recommended the defense secretary “direct the Chief Information Officer to revisit program risk ratings for its next submission to the federal IT Dashboard for the programs where the DOD CIO's program risk ratings indicated less risk than GAO's assessments of program risk.” The secretary should direct the undersecretary for acquisition and sustainment “to ensure the data strategies and data collection efforts for the business system and software acquisition pathways define, collect, automate, and share, with the appropriate level of visibility,” the auditor said.

Market opportunity looms for designing security directly into IoT devices, reported ABI Research Tuesday. It forecasts growing adoption of “developer-friendly on-device security architectures, such as runtime protection and secure execution environments, at affordable prices for IoT markets.” IoT device security historically has been implemented at the network level, “mostly because security functions are either too complex, resource-intensive or costly to integrate,” but those arguments are “less convincing today,” said analyst Michela Menting. “Growth in edge native security architectures has seen significant improvements in both hardware and software, which are cost-effective, have low overheads, use less bandwidth, and can even provide local analytics for an automated response.”

Google may be favoring its own online display advertising tech services over those of rivals in violation of EU antitrust law, the European Commission said Tuesday. It launched a probe (case AT.40670) focused on whether the company distorts competition by restricting third-party access to user data for ads on websites and apps while keeping the data for its own use. EU display ads were about $24 billion in 2019, the EC said. The investigation will examine whether online display ad buyers on YouTube must use Google's Display & Video and/or Google Ads services and whether they must use Google Ad Manager to serve display ads on YouTube. It will examine the company's announced plans to bar placement of third-party cookies on Chrome and replace them with "Privacy Sandbox" tools, plus its decision to stop making the advertiser identifier available to third parties on Android smart mobile devices when a user opts out of personalized ads. Google said it will continue to engage with the EC, and its ad tech fees are lower than reported industry averages.

Hyundai completed its $1.1 billion buy of a controlling interest in mobile robotics company Boston Dynamics from SoftBank, said the companies Monday. Hyundai will own 80% of Boston Dynamics, SoftBank the rest, they said.