This week every U.S. agency was ordered to appoint a "chief AI officer".

But that wasn't the only AI policy announced. According to CNN, "By the end of the year, travelers should be able to refuse facial recognition scans at airport security screenings without fear it could delay or jeopardize their travel plans." That's just one of the concrete safeguards governing artificial intelligence that the Biden administration says it's rolling out across the U.S. government, in a key first step toward preventing government abuse of AI. The move could also indirectly regulate the AI industry using the government's own substantial purchasing power... The mandates aim to cover situations ranging from screenings by the Transportation Security Administration to decisions by other agencies affecting Americans' health care, employment and housing. Under the requirements taking effect on December 1, agencies using AI tools will have to verify they do not endanger the rights and safety of the American people. In addition, each agency will have to publish online a complete list of the AI systems it uses and their reasons for using them, along with a risk assessment of those systems...

[B]ecause the government is such a large purchaser of commercial technology, its policies around procurement and use of AI are expected to have a powerful influence on the private sector.
CNN notes that Vice President Harris told reporters that the administration intends for the policies to serve as a global model. "Meanwhile, the European Union this month gave final approval to a first-of-its-kind artificial intelligence law, once again leapfrogging the United States on regulating a critical and disruptive technology."

CNN adds that last year, "the White House announced voluntary commitments by leading AI companies to subject their models to outside safety testing."

America's Department of Homeland Security "is expected to stop buying access to data showing the movement of phones," reports the U.S. news site NOTUS.

They call the purchasers "a controversial practice that has allowed it to warrantlessly track hundreds of millions of people for years." Since 2018, agencies within the department — including Immigration and Customs Enforcement, U.S. Customs and Border Protection and the U.S. Secret Service — have been buying access to commercially available data that revealed the movement patterns of devices, many inside the United States. Commercially available phone data can be bought and searched without judicial oversight.

Three people familiar with the matter said the Department of Homeland Security isn't expected to buy access to more of this data, nor will the agency make any additional funding available to buy access to this data. The agency "paused" this practice after a 2023 DHS watchdog report [which had recommended they draw up better privacy controls and policies]. However, the department instead appears to be winding down the use of the data...

"The information that is available commercially would kind of knock your socks off," said former top CIA official Michael Morell on a podcast last year. "If we collected it using traditional intelligence methods, it would be top-secret sensitive. And you wouldn't put it in a database, you'd keep it in a safe...." DHS' internal watchdog opened an investigation after a bipartisan outcry from lawmakers and civil society groups about warrantless tracking...
"Meanwhile, U.S. spy agencies are fighting to preserve the same capability as part of the renewal of surveillance authorities," the article adds.

"A bipartisan coalition of lawmakers, led by Democratic Sen. Ron Wyden in the Senate and Republican Rep. Warren Davidson in the House, is pushing to ban U.S. government agencies from buying data on Americans."

"If you want to see what the cutting edge of next-gen clean energy innovation looks like, it'd be hard to find a place better than Texas," Bill Gates wrote recently on his blog," saying "amazing companies" are breaking ground across the state. "Each one represents a huge boon for the local economy, America's energy security, and the fight against climate change." The world is undergoing an energy transition right now, fueled by the development and deployment of new clean energy technologies. The pace of innovation at the heart of this transition is happening faster than many people (including me!) dared hope. The progress makes me optimistic about the future — and excited about the role that American communities will play, especially in places like Texas.

Breakthrough Energy and I have invested more than $130 million into Texas-based entrepreneurs, institutions, and projects. It's a big bet, but it's one I'm confident in. Why? Because of the people. Nearly half a million Texans work in the oil and gas industry, and their skills are directly transferrable to next-generation industries. This workforce will help form the backbone of the world's new clean energy economy, and it will cement Texas's energy leadership for generations to come.

Many of the companies I'm seeing on this trip already employ or plan to employ oil and gas workers. One of those companies is Infinium, which is working on next-generation clean fuels for trucks, ships, and even planes. I'm visiting their first demonstration plant in Corpus Christi, where they're turning waste CO2 and renewable energy into electrofuels — or eFuels — for trucks. They've already signed a deal with Amazon, and sometime soon, if you live in the area, you might get a delivery supported by Infinium eDiesel. The key to Infinium's approach is that their fuels can be dropped into existing engines... I'm especially excited about the work they're doing on sustainable aviation fuel, or SAF — which could reduce emissions from air travel by as much as 90 percent, according to company estimates. Infinium is in the process of converting an old gas-to-liquid plant in West Texas into a new facility that will increase the company's capacity for producing eFuels ten-fold. Breakthrough Energy's Catalyst program has invested in this first-of-its-kind plant, and I can't wait to see it when it's done.

Another company I'll see is Mars Materials. They're a Breakthrough Energy Fellows project working on a different way to reuse CO2. The company is developing a clever technique for turning captured carbon into one of the key components in carbon fiber, an ultra-light, ultra-strong material that is used in everything from clothing to car frames... The Mars Materials team relocated from California to Texas in part because of the skilled oil and gas talent that they could access in the state, and they aren't the first Breakthrough Energy company to do that. I'm going to check out their lab, where their scientists are hard at work optimizing the conversion process.
Both companies assume abundant CO2, Gates writes, but "fortunately for them, Texas is also in the process of becoming a capital for direct air capture... A recent study found that Texas has the greatest DAC deployment potential in the country and could create as many as 400,000 jobs by 2050." Already a direct air capture "hub" in Kingsville, Texas is expected to create 2,500 jobs over the next five years, while Houston has been selected as the site for one of America's seven Regional Clean Hydrogen Hubs.

"If you want to catch a glimpse of our country's clean energy future," Gates writes, "you should head on down to the Lone Star State."

In November of 2021 America passed a "Bipartisan Infrastructure Law" which included $7.5 billion for up to 20,000 EV charging spots, or around 5,000 stations, notes the Washington Post (citing an analysis from the EV policy analyst group Atlas Public Policy).

And new stations are now already open in Hawaii, New York, Ohio and Pennsylvania, "and under construction in four other states. Twelve additional states have awarded contracts for constructing the charging stations." A White House spokesperson said America should reach its goal of 500,000 charging stations by 2026.

So why is it that right now — more than two years after the bill's passage — why does the Federal Highway System say the program has so far only delivered seven open charging stations with a total of 38 charging spots? Nick Nigro, founder of Atlas Public Policy, said that some of the delays are to be expected. "State transportation agencies are the recipients of the money," he said. "Nearly all of them had no experience deploying electric vehicle charging stations before this law was enacted." Nigro says that the process — states have to submit plans to the Biden administration for approval, solicit bids on the work, and then award funds — has taken much of the first two years since the funding was approved. "I expect it to go much faster in 2024," he added.

"We are building a national EV charging network from scratch, and we want to get it right," a spokesperson for the Federal Highway Administration said in an email. "After developing program guidance and partnering with states to guide implementation plans, we are hitting our stride as states move quickly to bring National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure stations online...."

Part of the slow rollout is that the new chargers are expected to be held to much higher standards than previous generations of fast chargers. The United States currently has close to 10,000 "fast" charging stations in the country, of which over 2,000 are Tesla Superchargers, according to the Department of Energy. Tesla Superchargers — some of which have been opened to drivers of other vehicles — are the most reliable fast-charging systems in the country. But many non-Tesla fast chargers have a reputation for poor performance and sketchy reliability. EV advocates have criticized Electrify America, the company created by Volkswagen after the company's "Dieselgate" emissions scandal, for spending hundreds of millions of dollars on chargers that don't work well. The company has said they are working to improve reliability. The data analytics company J.D. Power has estimated that only 80 percent of all charging attempts in the country are successful.

Biden administration guidance requires the new publicly funded chargers to be operational 97% of the time, provide 150kW of power at each charger, and be no more than one mile from the interstate, among many other requirements.EV policy experts say those requirements are critical to building a good nationwide charging program — but also slow down the build-out of the chargers. "This funding comes with dozens of rules and requirements," Laska said. "That is the nature of what we're trying to accomplish....

"States are just not operating with the same urgency that some of the rest of us are."
The article notes that private companies are also building charging stations — but the publicly-funded spots would increase America's car-charging capacity by around 50 percent, "a crucial step to alleviating 'range anxiety' and helping Americans shift into battery electric cars.

"States just have to build them first."

The U.S. House has set a strict ban on congressional staffers' use of Microsoft Copilot, the company's AI-based chatbot, Axios reported Friday. From the report: The House last June restricted staffers' use of ChatGPT, allowing limited use of the paid subscription version while banning the free version. The House's Chief Administrative Officer Catherine Szpindor, in guidance to congressional offices obtained by Axios, said Microsoft Copilot is "unauthorized for House use."

"The Microsoft Copilot application has been deemed by the Office of Cybersecurity to be a risk to users due to the threat of leaking House data to non-House approved cloud services," it said. The guidance added that Copilot "will be removed from and blocked on all House Windows devices."

Algorithms might help hotels illegally collude on prices, even if no humans from those businesses actually talk to each other about them, according to US antitrust enforcers. From a report: The Department of Justice and Federal Trade Commission jointly submitted a statement of interest in Cornish-Adebiyi v. Caesars Entertainment, a case brought before the US District Court of New Jersey. The class action case was brought by New Jersey residents who rented rooms in Atlantic City hotels and alleged that several of those hotels engaged in an illegal price-fixing conspiracy through the use of a common pricing algorithm.

The plaintiffs are trying to show that the hotels violated Section 1 of the Sherman Act, which prohibits "conspiracy in restraint of trade" and is used to prosecute illegal price-fixing. They say that the hotels allegedly used a pricing algorithm platform called Rainmaker, knowing that their competitors were also using the platform and choosing it for that reason. The agencies really care about how this issue is handled. "Judicial treatment of the use of algorithms in price fixing has tremendous practical importance," the DOJ and FTC write in their statement.

Hillary Clinton and U.S. election officials said they are concerned disinformation generated and spread by AI could threaten the 2024 presidential election [non-paywalled link]. WSJ: Clinton, a former secretary of state and 2016 presidential candidate, said she thinks foreign actors like Russian President Vladimir Putin could use AI to interfere in elections in the U.S. and elsewhere. Dozens of countries are running elections this year. "Anybody who's not worried is not paying attention," Clinton said Thursday at Columbia University, where election officials and tech executives discussed how AI could impact global elections.

She added: "It could only be a very small handful of people in St. Petersburg or Moldova or wherever they are right now who are lighting the fire, but because of the algorithms everyone gets burned." Clinton said Putin tried to undermine her before the 2016 election by spreading disinformation on Facebook, Twitter and Snapchat about "all these terrible things" she purportedly did. "I don't think any of us understood it," she said. "I did not understand it. I can tell you my campaign did not understand it. The so-called dark web was filled with these kinds of memes and stories and videos of all sorts portraying me in all kinds of less than flattering ways." Clinton added: "What they did to me was primitive and what we're talking about now is the leap in technology."

The US has seen a significant increase in student absenteeism since the pandemic closed schools four years ago, with an estimated 26% of public school students considered chronically absent in the last school year, up from 15% before the pandemic, according to data from 40 states and Washington, D.C. A report adds: The increases have occurred in districts big and small, and across income and race. For districts in wealthier areas, chronic absenteeism rates have about doubled, to 19 percent in the 2022-23 school year from 10 percent before the pandemic, a New York Times analysis of the data found. Poor communities, which started with elevated rates of student absenteeism, are facing an even bigger crisis: Around 32 percent of students in the poorest districts were chronically absent in the 2022-23 school year, up from 19 percent before the pandemic. Even districts that reopened quickly during the pandemic, in fall 2020, have seen vast increases.

The Palisades Nuclear Plant in Michigan has won a $1.5 billion conditional federal loan to reopen after being closed for decommissioning in 2022. Canary Media reports: If the loan is granted (subject to Holtec meeting closing conditions) and the 800-megawatt reactor located on Lake Michigan is repowered, it would be the first nuclear plant in the U.S. to reopen after being closed for decommissioning. Surprisingly, it would be just the second or third reactor to restart in the history of global civil nuclear power, according to Mycle Schneider, lead author of the World Nuclear Industry Status Report 2023, in an interview with Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.

Holtec purchased Palisades a month after it shut down with plans to mothball the site, but plans changed. Now the firm, which specializes in nuclear waste management and decommissioning (as opposed to rebuilding and operating nuclear plants), intends to revive the plant instead. Holtec plans to get the power plant restarted by the end of 2025, a breathtakingly aspirational target given nuclear's history of missing construction and cost targets. The Palisades plant was closed by utility Entergy in May 2022 due to financial issues after operating for more than a half-century. And while the plant had a strong operational performance record in recent years, it also has a sobering history of shutdowns due to failures of critical equipment, as well as broken fuel rods and fuel-spill incidents. The site was shut down for the final time a few days ahead of schedule due to concerns about the reliability of a key piece of equipment.

When it was operating at its peak, the plant provided more than 600 high-paying jobs, many unionized. If restarted, the plant could drive up to $363 million in regional economic impact, according to Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, a Democrat. That's why Whitmer and a bipartisan coalition of lawmakers back resurrecting the retired reactor. Local business owners and residents are "largely supportive" of the plan as well, according to local news site MLive. The state's 2024 budget devotes $150 million to the project. Still, the revival of the dormant Palisades faces its share of headwinds.

An anonymous reader shares a report: New York City announced a new permitting system for companies interested in testing autonomous vehicles on its roads, including a requirement that a human safety driver sit behind the steering wheel at all times. As cities like San Francisco continue to grapple with the problems posed by fully driverless for-hire vehicles, New York City is trying to get ahead of the problem by outlining what it calls "a rigorous permitting program" that it claims will ensure applicants are "ready to test their technology in the country's most challenging urban environment safely and proficiently."

"This technology is coming whether we like it or not," Mayor Eric Adams said in a statement to The Verge, "so we're going to make sure that we get it right." The requirements would exclude companies without previous autonomous vehicle testing experience in other cities. Applicants would need to submit information from previous tests, including details on any crashes that occurred and how often safety drivers have to take control of the vehicle (also known in California as "disengagements"). And in what is sure to be the most controversial provision, fully driverless vehicles won't be permitted to test on the city's public roads; only vehicles with safety drivers will be allowed.

Neil Irwin reports via Axios: The dearth of productivity growth over the last couple of decades has held back incomes in the U.S. and other rich countries, according to a report out Wednesday from the McKinsey Global Institute, the research arm of the global consultancy. Productivity growth has been weak in the U.S. and Western Europe since the 2008 global financial crisis, but things looked better among many emerging markets. The McKinsey report finds that global labor productivity growth was 2.3% a year from 1997 to 2022, a rapid rate that has increased incomes and quality of life in large parts of the world. China and India account for the largest portion of that surge -- half of overall global productivity improvement, with other emerging markets accounting for another 25%, led by Central and Eastern Europe and emerging Asian economies.

In the U.S., the report finds that the decline in capital investment following the 2008 financial crisis has resulted in a $4,500 lower per-capita GDP in 2022 than it would have if pre-crisis trends had continued. Rapid advances in manufacturing technology, especially for electronics, petered out in the same time period, subtracting another $5,000 from per-capita GDP. "Digitization was much discussed as the main candidate to rev up productivity again, but its impact failed to spread beyond" the tech sector, the authors write. The authors are optimistic that a confluence of factors will make the years ahead different.

The rise in global interest rates and inflation are evidence of stronger global demand. Many countries are experiencing labor shortages that may incentivize more productivity-enhancing investment. And artificial intelligence and related technologies create big opportunities. "Inflationary pressure and rising interest rates could be signs that we are leaving behind secular stagnation and entering an era of higher demand and investment," the report finds. "In corporate boardrooms around the world right now, there's a tremendous amount of conversation associated with [generative] AI, and I think there's a broad acknowledgment that this could very much transform productivity at the company level," Olivia White, a McKinsey senior partner and co-author of the report, tells Axios. "Another thing that's happening right now is the conversation about labor. Labor markets in all advanced economies, and the U.S. is really sort of top of the heap, are very, very tight right now. So there's a lot of conversation around what do we do to make the people that we have as productive as they can be?"

The U.S. State Department has offered up to $10 million for information on the "Blackcat" ransomware gang who hit the UnitedHealth Group's tech unit and snarled insurance payments across America. From a report: "The ALPHV Blackcat ransomware-as-a-service group compromised computer networks of critical infrastructure sectors in the United States and worldwide," the department said in a statement announcing the reward offer.

UnitedHealth said last week it was beginning to clear a medical claims backlog of more than $14 billion as it brought its services back online following the cyberattack, which caused wide-ranging disruption starting in late February. UnitedHealth's tech unit, Change Healthcare, plays a critical role in processing payments from insurance companies to practitioners, and the outage caused by the cyberattack has in some cases left patients and doctors out of pocket. The toll on the community health centers that serve more than 30 million poor and uninsured patients has been especially harsh.

The amount of hydropower generated in the Western US last year was the lowest it's been in more than two decades -- and 2024 isn't looking much better. From a report: Hydropower generation in the region fell by 11 percent during the 2022-2023 water year compared to the year prior, according to preliminary data from the Energy Information Administration's Electricity Data Browser -- its lowest point since 2001. That includes states west of the Dakotas and Texas, where 60 percent of the nation's hydropower was generated. These also happen to be the states -- including California, Nevada, Arizona, and New Mexico -- that climate change is increasingly sucking dry. And in a reversal of fortunes, typically wetter states in the Northeast -- normally powerhouses for hydropower generation -- were the hardest hit. You can blame extreme heat and drought for the drop in hydropower last year. This creates a vicious cycle: drought reduces the amount of clean energy available from hydroelectric dams. To avoid energy shortfalls, utilities wind up relying on fossil fuels to make up the difference. That leads to more of the greenhouse gas emissions causing climate change, which makes droughts worse.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Register: It's sanctions central at the US Treasury this week as a further 15 are slapped on organizations and individuals in Russia. The Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) designated 13 organizations and two individuals -- all concerning financial services organizations, including cryptocurrency exchanges that offered services to already-sanctioned dark web marketplaces in Russia, and those who helped run them. Five of the 13 freshly designated entities were also controlled by individuals who were already sanctioned. The latest round of trade restrictions were placed on those who are believed to have helped evade existing US sanctions.

"Many of the individuals and entities designated today facilitated transactions or offered other services that helped OFAC-designated entities evade sanctions," an OFAC statement read. "These designations build upon OFAC's February 23, 2024 action to target companies servicing Russia's core financial infrastructure and curtail Russia's use of the international financial system to further its war against Ukraine." They follow the initial seven sanctions announced on Monday, all relating to Chinese nationals and members of Beijing's APT31 offensive cyber outfit.

Earlier today, the U.S. and U.K. accused hackers linked to the Chinese state of being behind "malicious" cyber campaigns targeting political figures. The U.K. government also blamed China for a 2021 cyberattack that compromised the personal information of millions of U.K. voters. In response, PBS reports that the U.S. and British government announced sanctions against a company and two people linked to the Chinese government. From the report: Officials said those sanctioned are responsible for a hack that may have gained access to information on tens of millions of U.K. voters held by the Electoral Commission, as well as for cyberespionage targeting lawmakers who have been outspoken about the China threat. The Foreign Office said the hack of the election registers "has not had an impact on electoral processes, has not affected the rights or access to the democratic process of any individual, nor has it affected electoral registration." The Electoral Commission said in August that it identified a breach of its system in October 2022, though it added that "hostile actors" had first been able to access its servers since 2021. At the time, the watchdog said the data included the names and addresses of registered voters. But it said that much of the information was already in the public domain.

In Washington, the Treasury Department said it sanctioned Wuhan Xiaoruizhi Science and Technology Company Ltd., which it calls a Chinese Ministry of State Security front company that has "served as cover for multiple malicious cyberoperations." It named two Chinese nationals, Zhao Guangzong and Ni Gaobin, affiliated with the Wuhan company, for cyberoperations that targeted U.S. critical infrastructure sectors, "directly endangering U.S. national security." Separately, British cybersecurity officials said that Chinese government-affiliated hackers "conducted reconnaissance activity" against British parliamentarians who are critical of Beijing in 2021. They said no parliamentary accounts were successfully compromised.

Three lawmakers, including former Conservative Party leader Iain Duncan Smith, told reporters Monday they have been "subjected to harassment, impersonation and attempted hacking from China for some time." Duncan Smith said in one example, hackers impersonating him used fake email addresses to write to his contacts. The politicians are members of the Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China, an international pressure group focused on countering Beijing's growing influence and calling out alleged rights abuses by the Chinese government.

Jessica Lyons reports via The Register: Vulnerabilities in common Electronic Logging Devices (ELDs) required in US commercial trucks could be present in over 14 million medium- and heavy-duty rigs, according to boffins at Colorado State University. In a paper presented at the 2024 Network and Distributed System Security Symposium, associate professor Jeremy Daily and systems engineering graduate students Jake Jepson and Rik Chatterjee demonstrated how ELDs can be accessed over Bluetooth or Wi-Fi connections to take control of a truck, manipulate data, and spread malware between vehicles. "These findings highlight an urgent need to improve the security posture in ELD systems," the trio wrote [PDF].

The authors did not specify brands or models of ELDs that are vulnerable to the security flaws they highlight in the paper. But they do note there's not too much diversity of products on the market. While there are some 880 devices registered, "only a few tens of distinct ELD models" have hit the road in commercial trucks. A federal mandate requires most heavy-duty trucks to be equipped with ELDs, which track driving hours. These systems also log data on engine operation, vehicle movement and distances driven -- but they aren't required to have tested safety controls built in. And according to the researchers, they can be wirelessly manipulated by another car on the road to, for example, force a truck to pull over.

The academics pointed out three vulnerabilities in ELDs. They used bench level testing systems for the demo, as well as additional testing on a moving 2014 Kenworth T270 Class 6 research truck equipped with a vulnerable ELD. [...] For one of the attacks, the boffins showed how anyone within wireless range could use the device's Wi-Fi and Bluetooth radios to send an arbitrary CAN message that could disrupt of some of the vehicle's systems. A second attack scenario, which also required the attacker to be within wireless range, involved connecting to the device and uploading malicious firmware to manipulate data and vehicle operations. Finally, in what the authors described as the "most concerning" scenario, they uploaded a truck-to-truck worm. The worm uses the compromised device's Wi-Fi capabilities to search for other vulnerable ELDs nearby. After finding the right ELDs, the worm uses default credentials to establish a connection, drops its malicious code on the next ELD, overwrites existing firmware, and then starts the process over again, scanning for additional devices. "Such an attack could lead to widespread disruptions in commercial fleets, with severe safety and operational implications," the researchers warned.

The U.S. Department of Transportation has announced it will conduct a review of the data practices of the country's ten largest airlines, amid concerns over potential misuse of customer information for upselling, overcharging, targeted advertising, and third-party data sales, as well as the security of systems handling sensitive data such as passport numbers. From a report: The probe will look at air carriers' policies and procedures to determine if they are safeguarding personal info properly, unfairly or deceptively monetizing it, or sharing it with third parties, the agency said yesterday. If they're indeed doing anything "problematic," they can look forward to scrutiny, fines, and new rules, says the DOT. "Airline passengers should have confidence that their personal information is not being shared improperly with third parties or mishandled by employees," said US Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg.

"This review of airline practices is the beginning of a new initiative by DOT to ensure airlines are being good stewards of sensitive passenger data." The ten airlines going under the magnifying glass are Delta, United, American, Southwest, Alaska, JetBlue, Spirit, Frontier, Hawaiian and Allegiant.

An anonymous reader shares a report: On Monday, the Biden administration announced that six new countries had joined an international coalition to fight the proliferation of commercial spyware, sold by companies such as NSO Group or Intellexa. Now, some investors have announced that they too are committed to fighting spyware. But at least one of those investors, Paladin Capital Group, has previously invested in a company that developed malware, according to a leaked 2021-dated slide deck obtained by TechCrunch, although the firm tells TechCrunch it "got out" of the firm some time ago.

In the last couple of years, the U.S. government has led an effort to limit or at least restrain the use of spyware across the world by putting surveillance tech makers like NSO Group, Candiru, and Intellexa on blocklists, as well as imposing export controls on those companies and visa restrictions on people involved in the industry. More recently, the government has imposed economic sanctions not only on companies, but also directly on the executive who founded Intellexa. These actions have put others in the spyware industry on alert. In a call with reporters on Monday that TechCrunch attended, a senior Biden administration official said that a representative from Paladin participated in meetings at the White House on March 7, as well as this week in Seoul, where governments gathered for the Summit for Democracy to discuss spyware.

Paladin, one of the biggest investors in cybersecurity startups, and several other venture firms published a set of voluntary investment principles, noting that they would invest in companies that "enhance the defense, national security, and foreign policy interests of free and open societies." "For us, it was an important first step in having an investor outline both recognition that investments should not be going towards companies that are undertaking selling products, and selling to clients that can undermine free and fair societies," the senior administration official said in the call, where journalists agreed not to quote the officials by name.

The Coalition for App Fairness, an industry body that represents Epic, Spotify, Match Group and Proton among others, issued the following statement following the U.S. announcing it had sued Apple: "With today's announcement, the Department of Justice is taking a strong stand against Apple's stranglehold over the mobile app ecosystem, which stifles competition and hurts American consumers and developers alike. The DOJ complaint details Apple's long history of illegal conduct -- abusing their App Store guidelines and developer agreements to increase prices, extract exorbitant fees, degrade user experiences, and choke off competition. The DOJ joins regulators around the world, who have recognized the many harms of Apple's abusive behavior and are working to address it. As this case unfolds in the coming years more must be done now to end the anticompetitive practices of all mobile app gatekeepers. It remains imperative that Congress pass bipartisan legislation, like the Open App Markets Act, to create a free and open mobile app marketplace." Further reading: Apple Loses $115 Billion in Market Value as Regulators Close In.

The Justice Department sued Apple on Thursday, alleging the tech giant blocked software developers and mobile gaming companies from offering better options on the iPhone, resulting in higher prices for consumers. WSJ: The government's antitrust complaint, filed in a New Jersey federal court, alleges Apple used its control of the iPhone to prevent competitors from offering innovative services such as digital wallets and limited the functionality of hardware products that compete with Apple's own devices. The suit also claims that Apple makes it difficult for users to switch to devices that don't use Apple's operating system, such as Android smartphones.

"Consumers should not have to pay higher prices because companies violate the antitrust laws," Attorney General Merrick Garland said in a statement. Apple said it plans to vigorously defend against the lawsuit. "This lawsuit threatens who we are and the principles that set Apple products apart in fiercely competitive markets," an Apple spokesman said in a statement. "If successful, it would hinder our ability to create the kind of technology people expect from Apple -- where hardware, software, and services intersect." The case against Apple is the last shoe to drop on the big four tech giants by U.S. antitrust officials.