Member Spotlight: Bridge The Gaps
The digital technologies created within the app economy span across nearly every industry in the global economy and transform the way society functions daily. And that is not an exaggeration - in 2019, 77 percent of the European population reported daily internet use. Fast forward to 2021, and we can safely assume this number increased with the reliance on technology to live, work, and play almost exclusively through apps and technology during the COVID-19 pandemic. Despite our current reliance on [...]
ACT | The App Association Shares Perspectives on Legislative Proposals to Modernize the FTC
Recently, Graham Dufault, senior director of public policy, shared perspectives from ACT | The App Association and its members in a U.S. House of Representatives hearing before the Energy and Commerce Committee’s Consumer Protection and Commerce Subcommittee on Federal Trade Commission (FTC) oversight. The Subcommittee held this hearing to discuss legislative proposals for modernizing the FTC’s oversight and any resources needed by the agency. While many recent FTC actions focused on social media giants or other high profile tech companies, [...]
App Makers Tour of Europe – Spain
On 13 October ACT | The App Association continued its virtual App Makers Tour of Europe. After Romania, Germany, France, and Italy, we arrived in Spain! During the event we had an open conversation with local app developers and policymakers about the functioning of today’s app ecosystem and our members shared their on-the-ground experience and their perspectives on the regulation of online platforms. The discussion did also dive into the ongoing digital policy efforts of the European Union (EU), including [...]
Member Spotlight: TelemetryDeck
Every day, app developers around the world are creating new apps to help you monitor your health, learn something new, communicate with your loved ones, or manage your connected appliances at home. As large parts of our lives shifted online, so has our personal data. To keep improving their apps over time, companies often use and analyse that data to learn how users interact with the app, and that’s great. What isn’t great is when some data analytics tools become [...]
Proliferation of Ad Piracy Means Platform Protections are More Important than Ever
The latest numbers for online ad fraud are in— 2020 was a great year for ad pirates. Ad fraud, or ad piracy, occurs when bad actors divert ad revenue intended for legitimate websites (or in some cases, the original content is paid and is not supposed to include ads) to pirated and illicit content. Over the past few years, we have pointed out that “free is not cheap enough” to prevent copyright theft, and ad piracy is a major reason [...]
404 Error: How Legislation Intended to Grow the App Economy Could End Up Hurting It— Part 2
Over the last several years, regulators, Congress, and most recently state legislatures, have been taking a hard look at “big tech” companies, the relationship they have with small businesses, like our members, and have raised concerns about competition in the digital market. We also have concerns. Real-life concerns that transcend political donations or complicated, misleading language found in legislation in statehouses across the United States. When we look at legislation like Rhode Island’s HB6055, we see through what seems to be [...]