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U.S. President Joe Biden delivers remarks prior to signing an executive order on “promoting competition in the American economy” during an event in the State Dining Room at the White House in Washington U.S., July 9, 2021.

Evelyn Hockstein | Reuters

Joe Biden has positioned himself as a pro-competition president, delighting progressives by installing their wish list of liberal antitrust enforcers early in his administration.

But this fall, his digital competition agenda will truly be put to the test, as the first of the government’s tech anti-monopoly cases is finally argued in federal court.

Tuesday marked a convergence of several long-awaited actions in competition policy and enforcement. First, the Federal Trade Commission announced its long-awaited antitrust suit against Amazon. Shortly after that, the Federal Communications Commission chair announced a proposal to reinstate net neutrality rules, which prohibit internet service providers from favoring certain websites over others.

At the same time, the Department of Justice has been litigating its own monopolization suit against Google in Washington, D.C. District Court, three years after the initial complaint was filed during the last administration. The Justice Department’s second antitrust challenge against Google is set to go to trial early next year.

During Biden’s presidency, plenty of ink has been spilled over his antitrust enforcers’ boundary-pushing approaches, particularly as they eyed deals and potential misconduct in the tech industry. But until this month, none of the federal tech monopoly trials had kicked off.

Before the swearing in of Democrat Anna Gomez this week, the FCC had been deadlocked, unable to move forward with any measures that couldn’t gain the support of at least one of its Republican commissioners.

Antitrust cases and government rulemaking are famous for their often long timelines. But with all of these actions now set in motion, Americans are one step closer to seeing how the Biden administration’s competition vision plays out.

Tim Wu, who previously served in the White House as a key architect of the Biden administration’s competition agenda, said in an interview that many of the seeds planted early in the administration, if not yet bearing fruit, are at least “sprouting.”

Wu said that in the early days of his time at the White House, the administration came up with what was called the “grand unified theory of antitrust revival.” It included appointing strong enforcers and starting the White House Competition Council.

Biden laid out his competition goals in an executive order issued in 2021, which urged the FCC to restore net neutrality rules and for the FTC to “challenge prior bad mergers,” among other things.

Since the time of the executive order, Hannah Garden-Monheit, director of Competition Council policy at the White House, said those principles have “built up a lot of momentum” and have “become embedded and institutionalized in the work of the government.”

Even as several prongs of competition policy take shape, the Biden administration is up against the clock. As the 2024 presidential election approaches, the administration faces the possibility of losing its chance to follow through on some of the actions it has spearheaded.

That timeline may be particularly concerning for the ability to implement and uphold net neutrality rules, given that the FCC didn’t have a Democratic majority able to advance the rulemaking until just this week. Wu and other net neutrality advocates have blamed the telecom industry for opposing Biden’s initial FCC nominee, Gigi Sohn, holding up her nomination for well over a year until she ultimately withdrew. (CNBC parent company NBCUniversal is owned by internet service provider Comcast.)

Gigi Sohn testifies during a Senate Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee confirmation hearing examining her nomination to be appointed Commissioner of the Federal Communications Commission on February 9, 2022 in Washington, DC.

Peter Marovich | Getty Images

Biden’s unwillingness to pivot to another candidate earlier also meant the FCC remained deadlocked for the first half of his term as president.

Still, Wu said that backing down from a qualified candidate is “not Biden’s style.”

No matter when the administration changes hands, Wu said he’s confident that net neutrality can prevail. He called the repeal of the rules under Trump’s FCC an “outlier” and believes Republicans have nothing to gain at this point in pushing for repeal.

“I think about Republicans — they don’t like Google, Facebook doing censorship — and they really don’t like their cable company doing it either,” Wu said. “There’s no constituency right now for the repeal of net neutrality.”

At the FTC, Chair Lina Khan finally moved ahead in filing the agency’s antitrust suit against Amazon, accusing it of illegally maintaining a monopoly by punishing sellers that offer lower prices elsewhere and “effectively” requiring them to use Amazon’s fulfillment services. Amazon’s general counsel has called the suit “wrong on the facts and the law.”

Federal Trade Commission Chair Lina Khan testifies before a House Judiciary Committee hearing on Oversight of the Federal Trade Commission, on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C., July 13, 2023.

Kevin Wurm | Reuters

“This complaint focused on behaviors that courts have in the past found clearly to be violations of the antitrust laws,” Bill Baer, who has served as the top antitrust official at both the FTC and DOJ in different Democratic administrations, said. “She didn’t need to include theories where the courts either haven’t reached or about which they’ve been more skeptical in the past.”

Wu said the more narrow approach didn’t surprise him, in part because Khan is “more restrained than people think she is.”

“Frankly, it’s not exotic at all,” Wu said of the Amazon complaint. “It’s plain vanilla, Main Street, what we would call a consumer welfare case.”

While Khan and Jonathan Kanter, her counterpart at the DOJ, have said they aim to bring cases that they can win, they have indicated they’re also willing to bring riskier complaints to push the boundaries of the law.

“They’re adopting more of a baseball approach than a perfectionist approach,” Wu said. “And if you have someone who’s batting .500, .700, that’s a pretty good hitter, especially if they’re swinging for home runs.”

“It is a critical moment in the courts deciding how the antitrust laws apply to Big Tech,” Baer said. “The results of these pending and future cases will tell us a lot about what the rules of the road are going forward.”

Advocates of reforming antitrust laws have said that it’s important for Congress to clarify the law, but antitrust reform has stalled in Congress after a major push last year fizzled out.

Wu said a key “uncompleted part” of the grand master plan in the White House was appointing more antitrust enforcement-minded judges.

In 10 years, Garden-Monheit said she thinks Americans will look back at this moment “as a real inflection point” where the president opted to turn the page on “40 years of laissez-faire, trickle-down economics, lax enforcement of antitrust laws.”

“I hope that’s the direction that we’ll continue to see for decades going forward, just like we’ve turned the page on decades of past failed approach,” Garden-Monheit said.

“Win or lose, we don’t know what will happen in any of these cases,” Wu said. “But I think we’ll look back at this and say that non-enforcement was just a blip.”

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Uber raises in-office requirement to 3 days, claws back remote workers

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Uber raises in-office requirement to 3 days, claws back remote workers

Uber on Monday informed employees, including some who had been previously approved for remote work, that it will require them to come to the office three days a week, CNBC has learned. 

“Even as the external environment remains dynamic, we’re on solid footing, with a clear strategy and big plans,” CEO Dara Khosrowshahi told employees in the memo, which was viewed by CNBC. “As we head into this next chapter, I want to emphasize that ‘good’ is not going to be good enough — we need to be great.”

Khosrowshahi goes on to say employees need to push themselves so the company “can move faster and take smarter risks” and outlined several changes to Uber’s work policy.

Uber in 2022 established Tuesdays and Thursdays as “anchor days” where most employees must spend at least half of their work time in the company’s office. Starting in June, employees will be required in the office Tuesday through Thursday, according to the memo.

That includes some employees who were previously approved to work remotely. The company said it had already informed impacted remote employees.

“After a thorough review of our existing remote approvals, we’re asking many remote employees to come into an office,” Khosrowshahi wrote. “In addition, we’ll hire new remote roles only very sparingly.”

The company also changed its one-month paid sabbatical program, according to the memo. Previously, employees were eligible for the sabbatical after five years at the company. That’s now been raised to eight years, according to the memo. 

“This program was created when Uber was a much younger company, and when reaching 5 years of tenure was a rare feat,” Khosrowshahi wrote. “Back then, we were in the office five (sometimes more!) days of a week and hadn’t instituted our Work from Anywhere benefit.”

Khosrowshahi said the changes will help Uber move faster. 

“Our collective view as a leadership team is that while remote work has some benefits, being in the office fuels collaboration, sparks creativity, and increases velocity,” Khosrowshahi wrote.

The changes come as more companies in the tech industry cut costs to appease investors after over-hiring during the Covid-19 pandemic. Google recently began demanding that employees who were previously-approved for remote work also return to the office if they want to keep their jobs, CNBC reported last week.  

Last year, Khosrowshahi blamed remote work for the loss of its most loyal customers, who would take ride-sharing as their commute to work. 

“Going forward, we’re further raising this bar,” Khosrowshahi’s Monday memo said. “After a thorough review of our existing remote approvals, we’re asking many remote employees to come into an office. In addition, we’ll hire new remote roles only very sparingly.”

Uber’s leadership team will monitor attendance “at both team and individual levels to ensure expectations are being met,” Khosrowshahi wrote. 

Following the memo, Uber employees immediately swarmed the company’s internal question-and-answer forum, according to correspondence viewed by CNBC. Khosrowshahi said he and Nikki Krishnamurthy, the company’s chief people officer, will hold an all-hands meeting on Tuesday to discuss the changes.

Many employees asked leadership to reconsider the sabbatical change, arguing that the company should honor the original eligibility policy.

“This isn’t ‘doing the right thing’ for your employees,” one employee commented.

Uber did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

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Amazon launches first Kuiper internet satellites in bid to take on Elon Musk’s Starlink

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Amazon launches first Kuiper internet satellites in bid to take on Elon Musk's Starlink

A United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket is on the launch pad carrying Amazon’s Project Kuiper internet network satellites, which are expected to eventually rival Elon Musk’s Starlink system, at the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Cape Canaveral, Florida, U.S., April 9, 2025. 

Steve Nesius | Reuters

Amazon on Monday launched the first batch of its Kuiper internet satellites into space after an earlier attempt was scrubbed due to inclement weather.

A United Launch Alliance rocket carrying 27 Kuiper satellites lifted off from a launchpad at the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida shortly after 7 p.m. eastern, according to a livestream.

“We had a nice smooth countdown, beautiful weather, beautiful liftoff, and Atlas V is on its way to orbit to take those 27 Kuiper satellites, put them on their way and really start this new era in internet connectivity,” Caleb Weiss, a systems engineer at ULA, said on the livestream following the launch.

The satellites are expected to separate from the rocket roughly 280 miles above Earth’s surface, at which point Amazon will look to confirm the satellites can independently maneuver and communicate with its employees on the ground.

Six years ago Amazon unveiled its plans to build a constellation of internet-beaming satellites in low Earth orbit, called Project Kuiper. The service will compete directly with Elon Musk’s Starlink, which currently dominates the market and has 8,000 satellites in orbit.

The first Kuiper mission kicks off what will need to become a steady cadence of launches in order for Amazon to meet a deadline set by the Federal Communications Commission. The agency expects the company to have half of its total constellation, or 1,618 satellites, up in the air by July 2026.

Amazon has booked more than 80 launches to deploy dozens of satellites at a time. In addition to ULA, its launch partners include Musk’s SpaceX (parent company of Starlink), European company Arianespace and Jeff Bezos’ space exploration startup Blue Origin.

Amazon is spending as much as $10 billion to build the Kuiper network. It hopes to begin commercial service for consumers, enterprises and government later this year.

In his shareholder letter earlier this month, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said Kuiper will require upfront investment at first, but eventually the company expects it to be “a meaningful operating income and ROIC business for us.” ROIC stands for return on invested capital.

Investors will be listening for any commentary around further capex spend on Kuiper when Amazon reports first-quarter earnings after the bell on Thursday.

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Oracle engineers caused days-long software outage at U.S. hospitals

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Oracle engineers caused days-long software outage at U.S. hospitals

Larry Ellison, co-founder and executive chairman of Oracle Corp., speaks during the Oracle OpenWorld 2018 conference in San Francisco, California, U.S., on Monday, Oct. 22, 2018.

David Paul Morris | Bloomberg | Getty Images

Oracle engineers mistakenly triggered a five-day software outage at a number of Community Health Systems hospitals, causing the facilities to temporarily return to paper-based patient records.

CHS told CNBC that the outage involving Oracle Health, the company’s electronic health record (EHR) system, affected “several” hospitals, leading them to activate “downtime procedures.” Trade publication Becker’s Hospital Review reported that 45 hospitals were hit.

The outage began on April 23, after engineers conducting maintenance work mistakenly deleted critical storage connected to a key database, a CHS spokesperson said in a statement. The outage was resolved on Monday, and was not related to a cyberattack or other security incident.

CHS is based in Tennessee and includes 72 hospitals in 14 states, according to the medical system’s website.

“Despite this being a major outage, our hospitals were able to maintain services with no material impact,” the spokesperson said. “We are proud of our clinical and support teams who worked through the multi-day outage with professionalism and a commitment to delivering high-quality, safe care for patients.” 

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Oracle didn’t immediately respond to CNBC’s request for comment.

An EHR is a digital version of a patient’s medical history that’s updated by doctors and nurses. It’s crucial software within the U.S. health-care system, and outages can cause serious disruptions to patient care. Oracle acquired EHR vendor Cerner in 2022 for $28.3 billion, becoming the second-biggest player in the market, behind Epic Systems.

Now that Oracle’s systems are back online, CHS said that the impacted hospitals are working to “re-establish full functionality and return to normal operations and procedures.”

Oracle’s CHS error comes weeks after the company’s federal electronic health record experienced a nationwide outage. Oracle has struggled with a thorny, years-long EHR rollout with the Department of Veterans Affairs, marred by patient safety concerns. The agency launched a strategic review of Cerner in 2021, before Oracle’s acquisition, and it temporarily paused deployment of the software in 2023.

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