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The Supreme Court has struck down President Donald Trumps far-reaching global tariffs, handing him a significant loss on an issue crucial to his economic agenda. The decision on Friday centers on tariffs imposed under an emergency powers law, including the sweeping reciprocal tariffs he levied on nearly every other country. Its the first major piece of Trumps broad agenda to come squarely before the nations highest court, which he helped shape with the appointments of three conservative jurists in his first term. The Republican president has been vocal about the case, calling it one of the most important in U.S. history and saying a ruling against him would be an economic body blow to the country. But legal opposition crossed the political spectrum, including libertarian and pro-business groups that are typically aligned with the GOP. Polling has found tariffs arent broadly popular with the public, amid wider voter concern about affordability.
Category:
E-Commerce
In a rapidly evolving financial landscape, technology is transforming how money movesmaking payments of tomorrow faster, smarter, and easier than ever before. Consider this snapshot of the near future: Youre in a taxi on the other side of the world. You pay your driver with the same digital wallet you use at home, and he receives the money in his wallet linked to the local instant payments network. Hes set a rule in his bank appsend 30% of every payout to my family back homeand funds are converted immediately to a third currency and delivered to relatives in a country thousands of miles away. Nobody needs to download a new app or think about payment methods. AI-powered agents handle currency conversion and smart routing automatically and invisiblyat a fraction of yesterdays international payment costs. Here’s another scenario: A global marketplace pays out to 10,000 sellers daily. Instead of selecting a payout route, the finance department sets a rulepay as efficiently as possible, in line with terms and conditions. The platform dynamically routes each payment based on geography, cost, and liquiditychoosing from rails that might include account-to-account, tokenized card networks, or stablecoins on public blockchains. In each of these examples, the user experience is simplicity itself, yet it relies on a complex, underlying technical, regulatory and strategic architecture. In recent years the introduction of new payment rails, infrastructure and digital currencies has created choice but has yet to deliver seamless interoperability. Thats why efforts are increasingly focused on convergencestitching together todays patchwork of innovation into an intelligent network of networks. Were not there yet, but were closer than you might think. AN EXPLOSION OF CHOICE In recent years, theres been a diversification in digital currencies. Stablecoins are moving into mainstream use, combining the stability of traditional money with the advantages of blockchainspeed, programmability, and global reach. Tokenized deposits bring those same benefits while retaining the full regulatory and trust framework of the banking system. Meanwhile, central bank digital currencies (CBDCs) are pivoting from retail-focused ambitions to wholesale use cases like interbank settlements, cross-border payments, and securities transactions. New payment rails are proliferating as well. Some, like PIX in Brazil and UPI in India, are public infrastructures, embodying the principle that payments should function as a public good, like highways or utilities. Others, such as the permissioned ledgers deployed by banks like JPMorgan Chase, represent commercial bank money as digital tokens on private blockchains, enabling clients to move funds 24/7 with near-instant finality, rich data, and full regulatory compliance. Card networks are essentialparticularly for consumer payments that require strong identity assurance and dispute protection. Features like tokenization, push-to-account transfers, and established chargeback procedures make them a trust-and-compliance layer that enables connectivity across the payments landscape. THE IMPERATIVE OF INTEROPERABILITY Convergence is the process by which this expanding array of currencies and rails can coalesce into a global system for value transfer. Importantly, this isnt a zero-sum competition among players. The diverse systems need to connect to a layered, interoperable framework that fulfills a long-standing aspiration: seamless value movement across borders and platforms. Ease, security, and cost-efficiency will define this new system. Consumers and businesses will increasingly move money across networks with settlement and reconciliation handled invisibly in the background. They will expect security to be end-to-end, traveling with the payment throughout the ecosystem. Benchmark standards for resolving disputes and assigning liabilitypioneered by card networkswill extend to other rails, from instant payments to blockchain and beyond. Agentic payment routing will minimize fees by selecting the most efficient path, whether thats a domestic instant scheme, a cross-border blockchain transfer, or a card network. Many players are driving this convergence. For example, Project Nexus, an initiative of the Bank for International Settlements, aims to connect instant payment systems across multiple countries through a single interface. Bridges like Circles Cross-Chain Transfer Protocol (CCTP) are being built to link disparate blockchain networks, while PayPal is expanding its cross-border capabilities via wallets. Card networks like Mastercard are enabling interoperability across rails. And much more is underway. Crucially, agentic AI will increasingly serve as the connective tissue of this systemorchestrating real-time operations and knitting together the constellation of networks. THE RACE TO CONNECT The next two to five years will be a critical transition period. During this time, legacy infrastructure and digital-native systems will operate in parallel as regulations evolve, pilots mature into production, and new instruments move from experimentation to everyday use. Adoption will unfold in stages as technologies mature at different speeds and market incentives align. As foundational rails converge, the focus will shift from connectivity to orchestration. AI, rather than human choice, will increasingly route and optimize payments. Once that tipping point arrives, the acceleration will be dramatic. There are interoperability challenges. As nations seek greater financial autonomy, some are building parallel payment infrastructures or accelerating the development of sovereign digital currencies to reduce reliance on dominant currenciesparticularly the U.S. dollaras crypto and tokenized value scales. This risks the creation of new silos just as technology is making interoperability more achievable. Instead of a unified global framework, the world could see fragmented networks defined by strategic alliances and competing standards, complicating crossborder settlement and slowing the very convergence that would enable money to move seamlessly. FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS Its important to consider the kind of financial world we want to build. Are we creating a system that provides choice and empowers individuals, businesses, and communities, or one that puts control in the hands of a few key players? How do we ensure that innovation fosters trust, transparency, and opportunity, instead of creating more complexity and uncertainty? While the road ahead is under construction, its destination should be clear: a world where money moves as effortlessly as information, making life simpler, easier, and more rewarding for all. Ken Moore is the chief innovation officer at Mastercard.
Category:
E-Commerce
For years, social media companies have disputed allegations that they harm children’s mental health through deliberate design choices that addict kids to their platforms and fail to protect them from sexual predators and dangerous content. Now, these tech giants are getting a chance to make their case in courtrooms around the country, including before a jury for the first time.Some of the biggest players from Meta to TikTok are facing federal and state trials that seek to hold them responsible for harming children’s mental health. The lawsuits have come from school districts, local, state and the federal government as well as thousands of families.Two trials are now underway in Los Angeles and in New Mexico, with more to come. The courtroom showdowns are the culmination of years of scrutiny of the platforms over child safety, and whether deliberate design choices make them addictive and serve up content that leads to depression, eating disorders or suicide.Experts see the reckoning as reminiscent of cases against tobacco and opioid markets, and the plaintiffs hope that social media platforms will see similar outcomes as cigarette makers and drug companies, pharmacies and distributors.The outcomes could challenge the companies’ First Amendment shield and Section 230 of the 1996 Communications Decency Act, which protects tech companies from liability for material posted on their platforms. They could also be costly in the form of legal fees and settlements. And they could force the companies to change how they operate, potentially losing users and advertising dollars.Here’s a look at the major social media harms cases in the United States. The Los Angeles case centers on addiction Jurors in a landmark social media case that seeks to hold tech companies responsible for harms to children got their first glimpse into what will be a lengthy trial characterized by dueling narratives from the plaintiffs and the two remaining defendants, Meta and YouTube.At the core of the Los Angeles case is a 20-year-old identified only by the initials “KGM,” whose case could determine how thousands of similar lawsuits will play out. KGM and the cases of two other plaintiffs have been selected to be bellwether trials essentially test cases for both sides to see how their arguments play out before a jury.“This is a monumental inflection point in social media,” said Matthew Bergman of the Seattle-based Social Media Victims Law Center, which represents more than 1,000 plaintiffs in lawsuits against social media companies. “When we started doing this four years ago no one said we’d ever get to trial. And here we are trying our case in front of a fair and impartial jury.”On Wednesday Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg testified, mostly sticking to past talking points, including a lengthy back-and-forth about age verification where he said “I don’t see why this is so complicated,” reiterating that the company’s policy restricts users under the age of 13 and that it works to detect users who have lied about their ages to bypass restrictions.At one point, the plaintiff’s attorney, Mark Lanier, asked Zuckerberg if people tend to use something more if it’s addictive.“I’m not sure what to say to that,” Zuckerberg said. “I don’t think that applies here.” New Mexico goes after Meta over sexual exploitation A team led by New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez, who sued Meta in 2023, built their case by posing as children on social media, then documenting sexual solicitations they received as well as Meta’s response.Torrez wants Meta to implement more effective age verification and do more to remove bad actors from its platform.He also is seeking changes to algorithms that can serve up harmful material, and has criticized the end-to-end encryption that can prevent the monitoring of communications with children for safety. Meta has noted that encrypted messaging is encouraged in general as a privacy and security measure by some state and federal authorities.The trial kicked off in early February. In his opening statement, prosecuting attorney Donald Migliori said Meta has misrepresented the safety of its platforms, choosing to engineer its algorithms to keep young people online while knowing that children are at risk of sexual exploitation.“Meta clearly knew that youth safety was not its corporate priority that youth safety was less important than growth and engagement,” Migliori told the jury.Meta attorney Kevin Huff pushed back on those assertions in his opening statement, highlighting an array of efforts by the company to weed out harmful content from its platforms while warning users that some dangerous content still gets past its safety net. School districts head to trial A trial scheduled for this summer pits school districts against social media companies before U.S. District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers in Oakland, California. Called a multidistrict litigation, it names six public school districts from around the country as the bellwethers.Jayne Conroy, a lawyer on plaintiffs’ trial team, was also an attorney for plaintiffs seeking to hold pharmaceutical companies responsible for the opioid epidemic. She said the cornerstone of both cases is the same: addiction.“With the social media case, we’re focused primarily on children and their developing brains and how addiction is such a threat to their well-being and the harms that are caused to children how much they’re watching and what kind of targeting is being done,” she said.The medical science, she added, “is not really all that different, surprisingly, from an opioid or a heroin addiction. We are all talking about the dopamine reaction.”Both the social media and the opioid cases claim negligence on the part of the defendants.“What we were able to prove in the opioid cases is the manufacturers, the distributors, the pharmacies, they knew about the risks, they downplayed them, they oversupplied, and people died,” Conroy said. “Here, it is very much the same thing. These companies knew about the risks, they have disregarded the risks, they doubled down to get profits from advertisers over the safety of kids. And kids were harmed and kids died.” Resolution could take years amid dueling narratives Social media companies have disputed that their products are addictive. During questioning Wednesday by the plaintiff’s lawyer during the Los Angeles trial, Zuckerberg said he still agrees with a previous statement he made that the existing body of scientific work has not proven that social media causes mental health harms.Some researchers do indeed question whether addiction is the appropriate term to describe heavy use of social media. Socil media addiction is not recognized as an official disorder in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, the authority within the psychiatric community.But the companies face increasing pushback on the issue of social media’s effects on children’s mental health, not only among academics but also parents, schools and lawmakers.“While Meta has doubled down in this area to address mounting concerns by rolling out safety features, several recent reports suggest that the company continues to aggressively prioritize teens as a user base and doesn’t always adhere to its own rules,” said Emarketer analyst Minda Smiley.With appeals and any settlement discussions, the cases against social media companies could take years to resolve. And unlike in Europe and Australia, tech regulation in the U.S. is moving at a glacial pace.“Parents, education, and other stakeholders are increasingly hoping lawmakers will do more,” Smiley said. “While there is momentum at the state and federal level, Big Tech lobbying, enforcement challenges, and lawmaker disagreements over how to best regular social media have slowed meaningful progress.”AP Technology Writer Kaitlyn Huamani contributed to this story. Barbara Ortutay, AP Technology Writer
Category:
E-Commerce
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