By Nadia Dreid ( April 14, 2025, 6:38 PM EDT) — From prison phone service providers to trade groups, everybody has something to say about what rules and requirements the Federal Communications Commission should be cutting as part of President Donald Trump’s directive to shed as many regulations as possible…. Law360 is on it, so you are, too. A Law360 subscription puts you at the center of fast-moving legal issues, trends and developments so you can act with speed and confidence. Over 200 articles are published daily across more than 60 topics, industries, practice areas and jurisdictions. A Law360 subscription includes features such as Daily newsletters Expert analysis Mobile app Advanced search Judge information Real-time alerts 450K+ searchable archived articles And more! Experience Law360 today with a free 7-day trial. source

The US administration is convinced that Apple, one the biggest and most valuable brands in the world, can and should move its manufacturing infrastructure to the US. The reality, however, is far murkier. Let’s dissect what puts Apple in a precarious situation and how it might hope to manage through this volatility. Apple is in the spotlight — and in a tough spot. Apple is one of the few major tech companies with a significant hardware business, making it much more exposed to the tariff situation. As a marquee brand, and one of the most valuable in the world, Apple is often referenced by the administration. What it does — or chooses not to do — is always under scrutiny. Although Apple has long been following a “de-risk China” strategy, moving production out of that country and diversifying to India and Vietnam, the bulk of its supply is still tied to China, which faces ever-escalating tariffs. Unfortunately, this is also a double whammy for Apple because, as tensions escalate with China, it jeopardizes one of its major markets for iPhones, where it’s already struggled to grow in the face of fierce competition. Apple has wiggle room. As a company with lucrative margins on its devices, Apple can absorb some of the tariff-induced cost increases without significant financial impact, at least in the short term. In addition, its services business, which is even more profitable than its devices, can provide an additional buffer to the margin impact. Apple is also uniquely positioned to pass on a reasonable chunk of the price increase because it has built a price moat around itself with exceptional brand equity and customer experience. The brand commands better loyalty than its competitors, and it is unlikely that a manageable price increase will send these customers fleeing into the arms of Android-based competitors. Apple’s best bet is to hedge. Apple has announced plans to invest $500 billion in the US over the next four years, but I predict that it will rather adopt a wait-and-watch approach, hedging bets and saying more while doing less. The primary reason for this is the extreme volatility surrounding these policies. If the tariffs prove to be merely negotiating tactics, then they could be temporary. Even if that were not true, given how far this trade policy is from historical precedent (irrespective of the party in power), it is highly likely that it will be reversed in the future. Making comprehensive changes to the manufacturing footprint is difficult, expensive, and time-consuming; undoing those changes would be just as challenging. In such a volatile environment, Apple will be loath to take drastic action that is hard to do and harder still to undo. —– To better manage your brand and business through this period of uncertainty and shifting consumer behaviors, please read our report, Consumer Marketing, CX, And Digital Leaders: How To Thrive Through Volatility (US). If you are a Forrester client, stay tuned for additional research on how CMOs can better manage uncertainty and volatility. Go to my Forrester bio and click “Follow” to be notified. Also, as a client, you can schedule time with me for an inquiry or guidance session, or talk to your account team about workshops and strategy days on planning through uncertainty. source

By Lauren Berg ( April 10, 2025, 7:10 PM EDT) — A nonprofit organization that works to curb child-targeted marketing asked the Federal Trade Commission on Thursday to look into whether Meta Platforms is violating the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act by allowing kids under the age of 13 to access its “Horizon Worlds” virtual reality platform and collecting their personal information…. Law360 is on it, so you are, too. A Law360 subscription puts you at the center of fast-moving legal issues, trends and developments so you can act with speed and confidence. Over 200 articles are published daily across more than 60 topics, industries, practice areas and jurisdictions. A Law360 subscription includes features such as Daily newsletters Expert analysis Mobile app Advanced search Judge information Real-time alerts 450K+ searchable archived articles And more! Experience Law360 today with a free 7-day trial. source

By Christopher Cole ( April 11, 2025, 7:54 PM EDT) — Dish Network parent company EchoStar Corp.’s wishlist to curb Federal Communications Commission regulations includes a proposal to drop a requirement that satellite providers keep tabs on paid political ads…. Law360 is on it, so you are, too. A Law360 subscription puts you at the center of fast-moving legal issues, trends and developments so you can act with speed and confidence. Over 200 articles are published daily across more than 60 topics, industries, practice areas and jurisdictions. A Law360 subscription includes features such as Daily newsletters Expert analysis Mobile app Advanced search Judge information Real-time alerts 450K+ searchable archived articles And more! Experience Law360 today with a free 7-day trial. source

Join our daily and weekly newsletters for the latest updates and exclusive content on industry-leading AI coverage. Learn More The sleeping giant has awoken! For a while, it seemed like Amazon was playing catchup in the race to offer its users — particularly the millions of developers building atop Amazon Web Services (AWS)’s cloud infrastructure — compelling first-party AI models and tools. But in late 2024, it debuted its own internal foundation model family, Amazon Nova, with text, image and even video generation capabilities, and last month saw a new Amazon Alexa voice assistant powered in part by Anthropic’s Claude family of models. Then, on Monday, the e-commerce and cloud giant’s artificial general intelligence division Amazon AGI has announced the release of Amazon Nova Act, an experimental developer kit for building AI agents that can navigate the web and complete tasks autonomously, powered by a custom, proprietary version of Amazon’s Nova large language model (LLM). Oh, and the standard developer kit (SDK) is open source under a permissive Apache 2.0 license, though the SDK is designed to work only with Amazon’s in-house custom Nova model, not any third-party ones. The goal is to enable third-party developers to build AI agents capable of reliably performing tasks within web browsers. But how does Amazon’s Nova Act stack up to other agent building platforms out there on the market, such as Microsoft’s AutoGen, Salesforce’s Agentforce, and of course, OpenAI’s recently released open source Agents SDK? A different, more thoughtful approach to AI agents Since the public rise of large language models (LLMs), most “agent” systems have been limited to responding in natural language or providing information by querying knowledge bases. Nova Act is part of the larger industry shift toward action-based agents—systems that can complete actual tasks across digital environments on behalf of the user. OpenAI’s new Responses API, which gives users access to its autonomous browser navigator, is one leading example of this, which developers can integrate into AI agents through the OpenAI Agents SDK. Amazon AGI emphasizes that current agent systems, while promising, struggle with reliability and often require human supervision, especially when handling multi-step or complex workflows. Nova Act is specifically designed to address these limitations by providing a set of atomic, prescriptive commands that can be chained together into reliable workflows. Deniz Birlikci, a Member of Technical Staff at Amazon, described the broader vision in a video introducing Nova Act: soon, there will be more AI agents than people browsing the web, carrying out tasks on behalf of users. David Luan, VP of Amazon’s Autonomy Team and Head of AGI SF Lab, framed the mission more directly in a recent video call interview with VentureBeat: “We’ve created this new experimental AI model that is trained to perform actions in a web browser. Fundamentally, we think that agents are the building block of computing,” he said. Luan, formerly a co-founder and CEO of Adept AI, joined Amazon in 2024 as part of an aqcui-hire. Luan said he has long been a proponent of AI agents. “With Adept, we were the first company to really start working on AI agents. At this point, everybody knows how important agents are. It was pretty cool to be a bit ahead of our time,” he added. What Nova Act offers devs The Nova Act SDK provides developers with a framework for constructing web-based automation agents using natural language prompts broken down into clear, manageable steps. Unlike typical LLM-powered agents that attempt entire workflows from a single prompt—often resulting in unreliable behavior—Nova Act is designed to incrementally execute smaller, verifiable tasks. Some of the key features of Nova Act include: Fine-Grained Task Decomposition: Developers can break down complex digital workflows into smaller act() calls, each guiding the agent to perform specific UI interactions. Direct Browser Manipulation via Playwright: Nova Act integrates with Playwright, an open-source browser automation framework developed by Microsoft. Playwright allows developers to control web browsers programmatically—clicking elements, filling forms, or navigating pages—without relying solely on AI predictions. This integration is particularly useful for handling sensitive tasks such as entering passwords or credit card details. For example, instead of sending sensitive information to the model, developers can instruct Nova Act to focus on a password field and then use Playwright APIs to securely enter the password without the model ever “seeing” it. This approach helps strengthen security and privacy when automating web interactions. Python Integration: The SDK allows developers to interleave Python code with Nova Act commands, including standard Python tools such as breakpoints, assertions, or thread pooling for parallel execution. Structured Information Extraction: The SDK supports structured data extraction through Pydantic schemas, allowing agents to convert screen content into structured formats. Parallelization and Scheduling: Developers can run multiple Nova Act instances concurrently and schedule automated workflows without the need for continuous human oversight. Luan emphasized that Nova Act is a tool for developers rather than a general-purpose chatbot. “Nova Act is built for developers. It’s not a chatbot you talk to for fun. It’s designed to let developers start building useful products,” he said. For example, one of the sample workflows demonstrated in Amazon’s documentation shows how Nova Act can automate apartment searches by scraping rental listings and calculating biking distance to train stations, then sorting the results in a structured table. Another showcased example uses Nova Act to order a specific salad from Sweetgreen every Tuesday, entirely hands-free and on a schedule, illustrating how developers can automate repeatable digital tasks in a way that feels reliable and customizable. Benchmark performance and a focus on reliability A central message in Amazon’s announcement is that reliability, not just intelligence, is the key barrier to widespread agent adoption. Current state-of-the-art models are actually quite brittle at powering AI agents, with agents typically achieving 30% to 60% success rates on browser-based multi-step tasks, according to Amazon. Nova Act, however, emphasizes a building-block approach, scoring over 90% on internal evaluations of tasks that challenge other models—such as interacting with dropdowns, date pickers, or pop-ups. Luan

By Courtney Bublé ( April 14, 2025, 8:44 PM EDT) — Top members of the Senate Judiciary Committee are urging the U.S. Department of Justice to rethink its plan to close the Antitrust Division’s field offices in Chicago and San Francisco because of their “vital” role in antitrust enforcement…. Law360 is on it, so you are, too. A Law360 subscription puts you at the center of fast-moving legal issues, trends and developments so you can act with speed and confidence. Over 200 articles are published daily across more than 60 topics, industries, practice areas and jurisdictions. A Law360 subscription includes features such as Daily newsletters Expert analysis Mobile app Advanced search Judge information Real-time alerts 450K+ searchable archived articles And more! Experience Law360 today with a free 7-day trial. source

Last year, Verizon made the curious choice to acquire once-bankrupt Frontier Communications for $20 billion. Cited as a key benefit to Verizon (beyond the landgrab) was a “high-quality customer base.” High-value customers are not difficult to find, but contact centers struggle to engage them for net-positive outcomes. Updating infrastructure wasn’t enough to turn around Frontier; contact center employees were enabled and empowered to solve customer problems and grow the relationship. When I recently spoke with Verizon Consumer Group Chief Customer Experience Officer Brian Higgins, it was clear that his company’s strategy and Frontier’s align. He similarly invested in contact center employees and attributed success to a foundation of psychological safety and a concerted effort to cocreate new tools with employees. Aside from two companies with profitable contact centers coming together, the 2026 acquisition will have the added benefit of cultural synergies, as both demonstrate value for the employee experience (EX) as a key enabler of the customer experience (CX). Psychological safety and cocreation are necessary components of your EX strategy to successfully implement your CX strategy. Many leaders claim that psychological safety exists but don’t measure it. At Forrester, we use several questions to gauge this outcome in our global Future Of Work Survey, as it is a complex outcome of multiple actions and emotions. Furthermore, cocreation must be programmed into the organization, likely as part of a broader discipline such as design thinking. With the intention to take measurable, disciplined action, firms that have an EX-to-CX strategy: Begin with a foundation of psychological safety. In the case of Verizon, employees were willing to share unmet needs so that the building of solutions started by addressing the right problems. In environments with high psychological safety, listening leads to a concerted effort to improve the employee experience — not just customer outcomes. Cocreate solutions with employees. There are many solutions on the market to help your customer-facing employees recognize a high-value customer, understand the context of the conversation, and know the appropriate products and services to offer, but none of these are “turnkey” products. Bring employees in early and often to shape solutions to their ways of working and to get buy-in for eventual adoption. No, psychological safety and cocreation are not new concepts for most leaders. But have you outlined how you will connect these two concepts between your EX strategy and your CX strategy? This connection must be made explicit in your CX vision. The goal: Align all CX stakeholders on how employees will play the most important role in the customer experience. Consistency, in everything from how change is communicated to how customer focus is recognized, builds psychological safety as well as CX quality. This is so important to your success that we’ve outlined what leaders must do (and how to do it) in a recent Forrester report, Build Your EX-To-CX Strategy Now. Not a Forrester client? You can listen to the authors of that report discuss findings in a recent CX Cast episode. And you can join me at CX Summit North America in Nashville this June, where I will be sharing more insight on the topic. Learn more and register. source

By Adam Lidgett ( April 10, 2025, 4:10 PM EDT) — The Federal Circuit on Thursday shut down an attempt by major German software company SAP SE, which is represented by former U.S. Patent and Trademark Office Director Kathi Vidal, to transfer a patent infringement suit out of the Eastern District of Texas’ Marshall division to the Sherman branch…. Law360 is on it, so you are, too. A Law360 subscription puts you at the center of fast-moving legal issues, trends and developments so you can act with speed and confidence. Over 200 articles are published daily across more than 60 topics, industries, practice areas and jurisdictions. A Law360 subscription includes features such as Daily newsletters Expert analysis Mobile app Advanced search Judge information Real-time alerts 450K+ searchable archived articles And more! Experience Law360 today with a free 7-day trial. source