• U.S. District Judge Lucy Koh in San Jose ruled that Qualcomm Inc. abused its market dominance to charge unreasonable prices for its patents and suppress competition in the chip market, in a decision that sided with the Federal Trade Commission. The judge ordered Qualcomm to strip out any unfair tactics from its agreements with its partners and barred the company from signing exclusive supply agreements with smartphone makers, like Apple Inc. (The Wall Street Journal)

• The United States is considering a ban on sales of American technology to Hangzhou Hikvision Digital Technology Co., Dahua Technology Co. and three other unidentified Chinese companies, according to people familiar with the matter, due to the Trump administration’s concerns about each company’s role in creating a repressive regime for minority Uighurs in western China. Officials are also concerned that products from Hikvision and Dahua, which both specialize in facial recognition, could be used for spying, sources said. (Bloomberg)

• Starting last year, the United States has been slowing approvals for Chinese workers for advanced engineering jobs, including some at Intel Corp., Qualcomm and Globalfoundries Inc., according to industry insiders. Before beginning work on sensitive technologies, companies must obtain licenses for foreign workers, an approval process that can now take up to six to eight months, rather than the former wait time of a few weeks, a person familiar with the matter said. (The Wall Street Journal)

House Appropriators Take Aim at Some of the Pentagon’s Most Ambitious Tech Ideas
Patrick Tucker, Defense One

A $10 billion data cloud, giant ray guns in space, a sixth-generation fighter jet — these are just some of the biggest ideas out of the Pentagon in the last several years. But they’ve failed to impress the House Appropriations Committee, which released its version of the 2020 defense spending bill report yesterday.

Fake news changes shape as EU heads into elections
Kelvin Chan et al., The Associated Press

Fake news has evolved beyond the playbook used by Russian trolls in the U.S. election. As the European Union gears up for a crucial election, it is mostly homegrown groups rather than foreign powers that are taking to social media to push false information and extremist messages, experts say.

Comcast is working on an in-home device to track people’s health
Christina Farr, CNBC

Comcast is working on an in-home device to monitor people’s health, and aims to begin pilot-testing it later this year. A team under Sumit Nagpal, a senior vice president and general manager of health innovation at Comcast who previously worked at the consulting firm Accenture, has been working on the device for more than a year, according to two people with direct knowledge.

‘MissionRacer’: How Amazon turned the tedium of warehouse work into a game
Greg Bensinger, The Washington Post

Inside several of Amazon’s cavernous warehouses, hundreds of employees spend hours a day playing video games. Some compete by racing virtual dragons or sports cars around a track, while others collaborate to build castles piece by piece.

Mary Meeker Makes First Investment Out of Bond Capital
Polina Marinova, Fortune

Mary Meeker has made her first investment out of Bond Capital, the new firm she launched after spinning out of Kleiner Perkins last year. Bond, which has raised $1.25 billion, participated in the $70 million funding round of online design platform Canva.

How San Francisco broke America’s heart
Karen Heller, The Washington Post

A Tuesday afternoon in the Mission District of America’s tech wonderland. Michael Feno stands outside Lucca Ravioli, his beloved pasta emporium on Valencia, a vestige of old San Francisco, puffing on a cigar while posing for pictures, his customers in tears.

U.S. Stock Futures Edge Down as Tech Tensions Grow: Markets Wrap
Todd White, Bloomberg

U.S. equity futures dipped and European stocks fluctuated after a mixed session in Asia as investors digested the latest in the Sino-American confrontation over technology. Oil declined while the dollar and Treasuries were steady before the latest Fed minutes.

GOP senators split over antitrust remedies for big tech
Emily Birnbaum, The Hill

GOP senators on Tuesday signaled they are divided over whether to pursue antitrust enforcement against the country’s largest tech companies. At a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing about data privacy and competition policy on Tuesday, some Republican lawmakers slammed the enormous market power of companies like Facebook and Google, while others questioned whether “breaking them up” would be useful.

EU regulators to decide on IBM’s $34 billion Red Hat bid by June 27
Foo Yun Chee, Reuters

EU antitrust regulators will decide by June 27 whether to clear U.S. tech giant International Business Machines Corp’s $34 billion bid for software company Red Hat. The deal, IBM’s biggest, will help the company expand into subscription-based software offerings.

India Antitrust Watchdog Sniffs Around E-Commerce Players
Newley Purnell and Rajesh Roy, The Wall Street Journal

India’s antitrust watchdog is assessing the domestic e-commerce sector, a step that could have consequences for Amazon.com Inc. and Walmart Inc.’s Flipkart, which dominate online sales in the country.

Google pauses decision to cut ties with Huawei, as US grants 90-day extension
Chris Mills Rodrigo, The Hill

Google on Tuesday announced that it is pausing plans to sever ties with Chinese telecommunications giant Huawei after the U.S. temporarily eased some trade restrictions on the company. On Sunday, Google said it would cut ties with Huawei to comply with the Trump administration’s decision to put Huawei on the so-called Entity List.

FCC Poised to OK T-Mobile-Sprint Merger
John Eggerton, Multichannel News

The reconfigured T-Mobile-Sprint deal appears to have the three votes needed to secure approval by the five-member FCC. That came after the companies volunteered a revised list of conditions that included divesting Boost Mobile, the low-cost prepaid wireless subsidiary; building out high-speed 5G wireless service to most of the nation, including rural areas, on a timetable acceptable to the FCC; and maintaining the same or better prices for three years.

Huawei Considers Rivals to Google’s Android After U.S. Ban
Natalia Drozdiak, Bloomberg

Huawei Technologies Co. said it’s working on its own operating system for its mobile handsets and will consider rivals to Google’s Android, after the U.S. blacklisted the company, threatening its partnerships with chip, component and software suppliers.

Mark Zuckerberg should hire Microsoft’s Brad Smith as CEO, says former Facebook security chief
Salvador Rodriguez, CNBC

Former Facebook security chief Alex Stamos said on Tuesday that Mark Zuckerberg should hire a new CEO and turn his focus to building products.

Google cracks down on misleading anti-abortion ads in policy update
Jessica Campisi, The Hill

Google is changing its health care and medicine advertising policy after it came under fire for reportedly providing $150,000 in free ads to an anti-abortion group. Starting in June, any advertiser in the United States, United Kingdom or Ireland that wants to run ads using “keywords related to getting an abortion” will have to get certified as one that “either provides abortions or doesn’t provide abortions,” according to a policy update posted this week.

Exclusive: Behind Grindr’s doomed hookup in China, a data misstep and scramble to make up
Echo Wang and Carl O’Donnell, Reuters

Early last year, Grindr LLC’s Chinese owner gave some Beijing-based engineers access to personal information of millions of Americans such as private messages and HIV status, according to eight former employees, prompting U.S. officials to ask it to sell the dating app for the gay community.

New Twitter ‘Experiment’ Shows Some Users Many More Ads
Kurt Wagner, Bloomberg

If you feel like you’ve been seeing more Twitter ads lately, it’s not just your imagination. A Twitter Inc. spokeswoman said Tuesday that the company is experimenting with ad load, the industry term used to describe the frequency that users see advertisements.

Hulu, Spotify Competing for Bigger Share of Political Ad Spending
Christopher Stern and Jessica Toonkel, The Information

As the 2020 election cycle shifts into high gear, streaming video and audio companies such as Hulu and Spotify are looking to capture a bigger part of the expanding digital political advertising market, which Facebook and Google dominate.

Google says some G Suite user passwords were stored in plaintext since 2005
Zack Whittaker, TechCrunch

Google says a small number of its enterprise customers mistakenly had their passwords stored on its systems in plaintext. The search giant disclosed the exposure Tuesday but declined to say exactly how many enterprise customers were affected.

How Silicon Valley gamed Europe’s privacy rules
Mark Scott et al., Politico

When Europe’s tough privacy rules came into force on May 25, 2018, policymakers and industry executives expected a series of dominoes would soon start to fall. Global technology giants like Facebook would feel the heat of fines of up to 4 percent of their total yearly revenue.

ICE Seeks Tech To Track Electronic Devices—Even Through Time
Aaron Boyd, Nextgov

Immigration and Customs Enforcement is looking for a cloud-based subscription service that can pinpoint the exact locations of cellphones, laptops and other connected devices—even going back in time. ICE is searching for geolocation services technology that can give an accurate location—either pinpoint or a designated polygonal area—for connected devices within a specific time window.

Momentum grows to create ‘Do Not Track’ registry
Emily Birnbaum, The Hill

Legislation to stop tech companies from tracking users online is finding new momentum as Congress seeks to crack down on big tech’s privacy practices. On Tuesday, Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) unveiled a “Do Not Track” bill with tough penalties for companies who break its protections, reviving a debate over whether users should be allowed to opt out of the tracking and data collection that comprise the core of many top tech companies’ business models.

WannaCry? Hundreds of US schools still haven’t patched servers
Sean Gallagher, Ars Technica

If you’re wondering why ransomware continues to be such a problem for state and local governments and other public institutions, all you have to do to get an answer is poke around the Internet a little.

AT&T Homepage Mistakenly Warns Users of a Non-Existent Data Breach
Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai, Motherboard

On late Monday, AT&T warned visitors on its website of a “data incident” with an ominous banner at the top of the company’s homepage, according to people who visited the page at the time.

Amazon Needs an Intervention
Robert B. Engel, Morning Consult

Amazon has earned record profits in recent years and created a bottomless piggy bank for investing in automation, pouring billions into developing robots and artificial intelligence. But investing in the human workers who have helped make Amazon’s growth possible seems to have been put on the back burner.

T-Mobile’s merger promises are meaningless
Karl Bode, The Verge

For the last year, T-Mobile and Sprint have been telling anyone who’ll listen that their planned $26 billion merger will bring some incredible benefits to American consumers. To hear the companies tell it, the industry’s latest super-union will result in faster speeds, broader broadband deployment, and a dramatic boost in well-paying American jobs.

The Year That Big Tech Hubs Got Some Competition
Conor Sen, Bloomberg

It had to happen, but why is it happening now? Secondary tech hubs – outside the orbit of Silicon Valley and New York – are showing undeniable momentum this year.

Facebook’s Face Recognition Privacy Setting Missing for Some Users
Thomas Germain, Consumer Reports

Facebook users don’t all have access to an important privacy setting for controlling whether the company can collect facial recognition data, Consumer Reports has found.