The Internet · 06 Jul 2026

THE INTERNET | Jul 6, 2026

Highlights

PAYMENTSThe CFPB has resumed active supervision under Russ Vought, pressing community lenders, tightening mortgage-access guidance and curbing debanking after signals it was retreating.

REGULATORYUSUPDATEAlibaba: A federal judge ordered the Pentagon to grant Alibaba Group Holding a reprieve from a law that had caused all of the company's lobbyists to drop it, while she weighs the statute's constitutionality. The case tests the US government's ability to restrict Chinese companies' activities and is tied to the Pentagon's national-security curbs on the company. [Bloomberg Business]
USAmazon: Amazon Web Services will stop accepting new customers for Mechanical Turk on July 30, 2026, closing the 2005-era crowdsourcing marketplace to newcomers. Existing customers can continue to use it, but AWS said it will keep investing only in security and availability and does not plan to add new features. Once central to debates over crowdsourced-labor ethics, the service was later billed as a data-annotation pipe for training neural networks via SageMaker. A 2023 analysis found 33% to 46% of its workers were themselves using large language models to complete tasks. [TechCrunch]

REGULATORYUSThe CFPB is expanding supervisory activity under Russ Vought. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has begun issuing supervisory requests to Community Development Financial Institutions, the government-backed small lenders the Trump administration has sought to defund. It also set new guidance making mortgages and credit cards harder for immigrants to obtain, according to POLITICO. The bureau issued guidance to curb debanking, ordered staff back to in-person work at least two days a week by Sept. 6, and overhauled its website to remove past enforcement records against large corporations. Spokesperson Cauley said the prior "Biden-Harris-Chopra regime was weaponized against political enemies and disfavored industries." [POLITICO]
AI Takeaway: The bureau's selective reactivation, pressing small community lenders while stripping records of enforcement against large corporations, signals a US payments-supervisory architecture that narrows on some actors and eases on others, diverging from the uniform tightening under the EU's PSR/PSD3 and the UK FCA. For payment-app and BNPL supervisors, the operative variable is now which institutions the bureau chooses to examine, not whether it examines at all.

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