Just look at the reports on AI. When I asked one expert last week how many of these documents are out there, she said at least 120. The von der Leyen Commission's much anticipated White Paper dropped on February 19th. It follows the statement on AI in her own political guidelines, and the previous Commission's Communication on Artificial Intelligence for Europe from last spring. And it's accompanied by the Commission's Report on the safety and liability implications of Artificial Intelligence, the Internet of Things and robotics.

Cyber Monday was the biggest shopping day in Amazon's history. Turns out it was also a day for Amazon to promote its own brands over all others. On Monday, asking an Amazon Echo for the "best Cyber Monday deals" returned five straight responses from smart assistant Alexa that promoted products owned by Amazon: Amazon acquired Blink, a maker of security cameras, in 2017; it purchased Ring, the maker of video doorbells, in 2018. An Amazon spokesperson told Recode that after those first five deals, Amazon did promote items made by other companies, and that Alexa-enabled non-Echo devices returned deals in their first five responses that included non-Amazon-owned items. But the initial Alexa responses are just another sign of Amazon's aggressiveness in promoting its own brands, whether they are gadgets like the Echo family of smart speaker products and Ring doorbells or apparel lines like Goodthreads.