Welcome back. The autonomous vehicle is among the biggest and most dramatic tests of AI and machine learning. The refinement of the technology and engineering poses plenty of hurdles. And so does the creation of clear and workable safety standards and guidelines, experts say. On Tuesday, U.S. lawmakers held a hearing in an effort to revive self-driving vehicle legislation that stalled in the Senate in 2018. Jared Council has the story for WSJ Pro.  

House Hearing Revives Push for Self-Driving-Car Legislation. "We must get this over the line in 2020," Rep. Debbie Dingell (D., Mich.) said Tuesday at a House hearing in Washington. “We've worked hard to find consensus over the last year, but now is the time for action.”

Stalled in traffic. The hearing was part of an effort to revive legislation that would usher in clear federal safety guidelines and standards for autonomous vehicles and help companies bring the technology to market, Jared Council reports for WSJ Pro. The House in 2017 passed bipartisan legislation that would exempt autonomous vehicles under testing from existing safety regulations and would effectively void state and local rules that began cropping up in the absence of federal rules. The effort stalled in the Senate.

At Tuesday's hearing of the Subcommittee on Consumer Protection and Commerce, legislators disagreed over how to balance the need for safety and speedy adoption, but voiced consensus that something needed to be done.

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The risk of human error behind the wheel. Human factors were linked to 94% of auto crashes, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. Advocates of self-driving vehicles argue that removing humans from the equation will result in fewer accidents.

A hopeful but cautious view of technology. Cathy Chase, president of Advocates for Highway and Auto Safety, said the group believes advances in technology can substantially reduce auto accidents, but she called for minimum standards to be established for autonomous vehicles. "We need only look at recent disastrous outcomes of rushing to put new tech in planes, and a federal regulatory agency relinquishing important control and independent review,” referring to the Boeing 737 MAX crisis. “This mistake must not be replicated with autonomous vehicles."

FTC expands antitrust investigation into big tech companies. Federal regulators opened a new front in their investigation of big tech companies, seeking to determine whether the industry’s giants acquired smaller rivals in ways that harmed competition, hurt consumers and evaded regulatory scrutiny, The Wall Street Journal reports. The Federal Trade Commission on Tuesday ordered Amazon.com Inc., Apple Inc., Facebook Inc., Microsoft Corp. and Google owner Alphabet Inc. to provide detailed information about their acquisitions of fledgling firms over the past 10 years.

The prospect of unwinding deals. The new probe likely will involve hundreds of transactions that never drew federal scrutiny because they were under the dollar-value threshold for antitrust review, which is edging up to $94 million this year. “This initiative will enable the commission to take a closer look at acquisitions in this important sector, and also to evaluate whether the federal agencies are getting adequate notice of transactions that might harm competition,” FTC Chairman Joe Simons said. The FTC said it isn’t conducting the probes for any specific enforcement purpose, though Mr. Simons indicated they could lead regulators to seek to unwind improper acquisitions.

U.S. officials say Huawei can covertly access telecom networks. U.S. officials say Huawei Technologies Co. can covertly access mobile-phone networks around the world through “back doors” designed for use by law enforcement, as Washington tries to persuade allies to exclude the Chinese company from their networks, The Wall Street Journal reports. 

Intelligence shows Huawei has had this secret capability for more than a decade, U.S. officials said. Huawei rejected the allegations.

The U.S. kept the intelligence highly classified until late last year, when American officials provided details to allies including the U.K. and Germany, according to officials from the three countries. That was a tactical turnabout by the U.S., which in the past had argued that it didn’t need to produce hard evidence of the threat it says Huawei poses to nations’ security, the Journal says.

German fintech startup exits U.K. due to Brexit. The fintech startup N26 is leaving the U.K. following Brexit, saying it will no longer have a banking license to operate in the country following the EU withdrawal agreement, Dow Jones Newswires reports. "While we fully respect the decision that has been taken, it means that N26 will in due course be unable to serve our customers in the U.K. and will have to leave the market," the mobile bank said.

N26, which defines itself as a challenger bank and launched in the U.K. in November 2018, said that all British operations, and therefore accounts, will close on April 15, while its U.K.-based staff will move into new roles within the business.

With a valuation of $3.5 billion reached in July 2019 and operations in 27 countries including the U.S., N26 is one of Germany's most highly valued startups. The fintech giant, which currently has over 5 million customers, noted last month that it has reached 250,000 customers in the U.S.

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