The U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and the U.S. Department of Justice (DoJ) are divvying up who is responsible for antitrust issues for which tech giant. The FTC is taking Facebook and Amazon, while the DoJ will take Apple and Google. Though no formal investigations have been announced yet, this type of agreement is usually a leading indicator of more pointed investigations. The stocks of all the companies fell on the news. Facebook lost 7.51 per cent; Apple lost 1.01 per cent; Amazon fell 4.64 per cent; and Alphabet, Google’s parent company, lost 6.12 per cent. The Nasdaq fell over one per cent on the news, entering correction territory. (Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, CNBC)

Talking point: Past government investigations have focused on privacy and the handling of user data, such as the FTC’s investigation into the Cambridge Analytica breach; if these investigations go ahead, they would be the U.S. government’s first major antitrust probes into Big Tech in nearly 30 years. Canada has also been questioning tech companies through groups like the International Grand Committee on Big Data, Privacy and Democracy, which had its second meeting in Ottawa last week. But the federal government has yet to make any similar moves into regulating Big Tech—Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said last week that doing so would threaten free speech, and that it’d only be a last resort.