John Ruich

An online petition has been signed by employees at Google, Apple, Meta, OpenAI, and many other companies.

It references President Trump's October decision not to send immigration forces into San Francisco.

Trump said at the time he got, quote, "...a great call from some incredible people who persuaded him to hold off from surging federal agents into the city."

Among them were NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang and Mark Benioff, the CEO of Salesforce.

The online petition calls on tech leaders to pick up the phone to the White House again to demand that ICE withdraw from U.S.

cities.

John Rewich, NPR News.

The FTC filed the lawsuit in 2020, and last November, a federal court ruled in Meta's favor.

The court said Meta does not currently have a monopoly and faces competition, particularly from TikTok and YouTube.

The FTC maintains that Meta has held a dominant position and reaped record profits for over a decade, quote, not through legitimate competition, but by buying its most significant competitive threats.

Those threats, the FTC says, were Instagram and WhatsApp, which Meta bought in 2012 and 2014, respectively.

The district court rejected the argument.

The case is one of several launched by the government to try to curb the power of dominant tech platforms over everything from Internet search to social networking.

John Ruich, NPR News.

The new rules will be in place for the 2027 fiscal year.

The big change is that they do away with the lottery system that has for years determined who gets H-1B visas.

Instead, there will be a weighted selection process that favors people with higher skills and higher salaries.

The idea is to prevent employers from using the program to import low-wage foreign labor and to protect wages and job opportunities for U.S.

workers.

The cap on the number of H-1B visas will stay at 65,000, with an additional 20,000 for foreigners with advanced U.S.