What they're saying: Delrahim acknowledged that data collection is not necessarily anticompetitive, but made it clear that he views it as an antitrust concern.

• He said areas up for consideration include whether the scale of data collection has increased by "several magnitudes," the type of data collected and what it means when companies collect both user data and usage data, which cannot be easily replicated.
• "Most notably, enforcers must confront the reality that data insights in the digital economy are combined across the ecosystem of the internet sometimes in ways that transcend product improvement and impact consumer choice altogether," Delrahim said, according to prepared remarks for a speech at an antitrust conference at Harvard Law School.

Driving the news: The FCC granted AT&T's complaint in an order, finding that the TV station owners refused to negotiate, caused an unreasonable delay in negotiations and failed to respond to AT&T's proposals in violation of the requirement that they negotiate retransmission consent in good faith.

• "This is the most egregious example of delay that we have encountered since the good faith rules were adopted," the order said.
• The FCC also noted that it could take enforcement action by proposing a fine, although it does not do so in the order.

Backstory: AT&T filed a complaint with the FCC in June against nine broadcast station owners alleging they refused to negotiate terms for the company to carry their channels.

• The feud led to a blackout in 20 cities when the station owners pulled their signals from DirecTV and U-verse homes (though AT&T has since reached agreement with three of the nine station owners).
• AT&T noted in its complaint that the stations are connected to Sinclair Broadcast Group through services agreements.

What they're saying: An AT&T spokesperson said the dispute shows that the process for negotiating terms is broken and in need of reform.

• "This was clearly one of the more egregious examples of how broadcasters routinely hold consumers hostage into paying higher and higher retrans fees, rather than being stewards of the public airwaves," the spokesperson said in an emailed statement.

Big picture: The disputes between broadcasters and cable and satellite operators come as Congress considers legislation renewing a law that allows for importing distant signals.

• The law has been viewed as a vehicle for broader changes to media regulations, but Senate Commerce Committee Chairman Roger Wicker recently introduced legislation to simply extend it for five years.
• That includes keeping the requirement that broadcasters and pay-TV companies negotiate in good faith.
• AT&T warned that if Congress fails to renew the law this year, "(T)hese broadcaster TV blackouts will increase in frequency, as the FCC will no longer be a backstop against such bad faith conduct from broadcasters. "

What they're saying: “We have been working hard to point out that there is no techlash. There is a substantial backlash against the business model where purportedly ‘free services’ are offered in exchange for massive and unconstrained collection of consumer data untethered to the underlying service, " said Ken Glueck, Oracle's executive vice president and top Washington lobbyist. "Winter is here for that business model.”

Driving the news: Over the last two years, Oracle has turned is sights on Amazon, a competitor in the cloud-computing business.

• Amazon recently lost the fight for a major Defense Department cloud contract worth up to $10 billion after the White House instructed the department to re-examine awarding the contract, according to The Washington Post.
• While Oracle didn’t win the contract, either — the Defense Department chose Microsoft — Oracle has a better relationship with Microsoft and prefers this outcome to an Amazon win.
• Oracle CEO Safra Catz reportedly discussed the contract issue with Trump during a dinner at the White House in April 2018.
• Glueck created a flow chart detailing the connections between Amazon executives and former Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, per the Post.
• Oracle was also among the funders of the Free and Fair Markets Initiative, an anti-Amazon group, according to a Wall Street Journal report.

The backstory: Catz developed ties with the Trump administration early on.

• Catz and other technology executives met with President Trump at Trump Tower in New York in Dec. 2016 before the inauguration, and Catz joined the transition team.
• Her name was floated for administration positions, including national security adviser.
• “Safra Catz in particular would have very good access, and different from the rest of the tech industry,” said a former administration official. “She was for Trump before a lot of other people, and a lot of the tech industry is still not for Trump. She gets meetings, she gets access.”

The big picture: Oracle grew rich and strong as a corporate database provider in the '90s and expanded into an array of business software markets from retail to HR via acquisition.

• It has held onto a big chunk of the business software market amid a shift from onsite servers to the cloud.
• Its market cap remains significantly smaller than that of Big Tech giants such as Apple, Microsoft, Amazon and Google.
• It has staked out positions on net neutrality and online platforms' legal immunity for user-posted content that set it apart from competitors.

Details: Oracle has successfully supported law and policy changes that may not directly benefit the company, but could cause problems for its rivals.

• The company weighed in with the FCC to support the repeal of Obama-era net neutrality rules that were favored by Google and other tech companies. Catz met with FCC Chairman Ajit Pai ahead of the commission’s Dec. 2017 vote to back the repeal.
• Oracle publicly supported a legislative carve-out to the law that protects online platforms from liability over user-generated content. The Internet Association, whose members include Google and Facebook, fought the change before reaching a compromise with lawmakers.
• Glueck said the liability shield, Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, would never be signed into law today if proposed again. "There is no longer any justification for Section 230 in an era of artificial intelligence, machine learning, and advanced analytics," he said, adding, "If there are concerns for small businesses and small innovators, then 230 should be modified to protect those kinds of contributors."

What's next: Google is facing antitrust probes from the Justice Department, a bevy of state attorneys general and Congress. That has opened up a new front for Oracle.

• Oracle confirmed it received information requests relating to Google from states and congressional investigators, per Reuters, as well as regulators in Australia.
• Oracle and Google have also fought a decade-long copyright battle over code in the Android operating system that could end up at the Supreme Court.
• Google declined comment for this story.