Big Tech, Sanctions & Justice

Business of sanctions

Elizaveta Peskova is the daughter of Vladimir Putin's spokesperson Dmitry Peskov. On March 11, the US Treasury Department announced it was imposing sanctions against Peskova and her brother. Their father had been sanctioned a last week. Elizaveta told Insider that she supports “peace,” but would not comment on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Polina Kovaleva, is the 26-year-old daughter of the Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov’s “informal wife” Svetlana Polyakova. She’s had her assets including a 4 million Central London house frozen, as the U.K.'s sanctions list grows amid the invasion of Ukraine and ongoing conflict. She was added to the sanctions list this week. Educated in England, with a Masters from Imperial College, she has worked for Gazprom and Glencore and described her now-private Instagram feed as a “non-stop holiday.”

Business of U.S. justice

KBJ & The Supreme Court

This picture of Ketanji Brown Jackson’s confirmation hearings as the first black female U.S. supreme court justice really touched me. A daughter looking proudly at all her mother has achieved, despite the odds.

These hearings should have been a celebration of the strides being made in American society. Instead they were ugly and toxic, only serving to highlight to the rest of the world — just how racially divided the United States continues to be. But KBJ is also turning out to be the most popular Scotus nominee ever, according to an average of polls by Gallup, Fox, Monmouth University, Quinnipiac University and the Pew Research Center. Turns out approximately 53% of Americans supported her confirmation, with only 26% of Americans opposed.

No Chinese Wall for this couple

When U.S. Supreme court judge Clarence Thomas was released from hospital this week, and he’d probably hoped the noise around his wife’s influence on the Court’s judgements would have died out. It hadn’t. What’s the noise about? Ethical conflict-of-interest rules. Turns out Ginni Thomas, Clarence Thomas’s wife, was pushing Donald Trump’s White House chief of staff (COS) to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election. Basically, she attempted to subvert the entire democratic process itself. Here’s a quick brief on who exactly is Ginni Thomas!

The Washington Post reported that it had obtained a stash of 29 text messages between Ginni and Mark Meadows (who was Trump’s COS at the time) exchanged in the days after the November 2020 election. Judge Thomas, the longest serving and second black justice on the land’s highest court and a conservative appointment has had quite a bit of controversy swirling around him. His dissent in the supreme court’s ruling over disclosure of those same texts to Congress takes the conflict of interest issue to a new level.

Business of Tech

Europe's antitrust chief Margrethe Vestager has finally done it! She’s almost at the finish line of her long race to rein in big tech.

Negotiators from the European Parliament and the Council this week reached a political agreement on the Digital Markets Act (click for details), long in the making. Why is it critical? It’s the harbinger of rules that will potentially be established in other geographies, as GDPR did when the EU enacted it.

The DMA (which Donald Trump and the Silicon Valley really didn’t like) establishes a series of rules and regulations for companies including Google, Meta, Apple and Amazon,and a number of smaller platforms. Also covered will be tech companies with a market cap of €75 billion or turnover in the European Economic Area around €7.5 billion. It’s about to get really interesting for Big Tech which have roamed the planet relatively unchallenged till now.

See you next week!

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