Apple and Epic Games are currently engaged in an intense legal battle related to App Store fees and Apple’s ban on third-party payment processors. The arguments each company plan to present in court are becoming clearer as their showdown in court approaches.
According to recently released legal documents, a senior Apple engineer compared the company’s App Store defenses against malicious actors to be like “bringing a plastic butter knight to a gunfight.” The senior employee also described the company’s review process for new apps as “more like the pretty lady who greets you… at the Hawaiian airport than the drug-sniffing dog.”
Social media giant Twitter reportedly held talks in recent months to acquire the popular startup app Clubhouse for $4 billion, which is touted as an audio-based social media network and has received significant attention for its chat sessions featuring the leading lights of Silicon Valley.
According to a recent report, merchant groups representing thousands of small businesses are forming a national coalition called “Small Business Rising” to campaign for stricter antitrust laws in an effort to force e-commerce giant Amazon to spin off some of its business lines and stop selling its own products in competition with other brands and sellers.
According to analysts, Apple’s search engine deal with fellow tech giant Google is expected to be a primary source of service revenue growth for the company.
Republican senators are trying to remove MLB’s antitrust status in response to the league’s decision to pull its All-Star Game from Atlanta.
Facebook’s acquisition of the popular site Giphy will face an in-depth investigation from UK antitrust regulators, according to recent reports.
The Chinese Communist Party (CCP), having humbled billionaire Jack Ma and cut his Alibaba e-commerce empire down to size with anti-trust regulations, turned its attention to another tech billionaire and his corporation, Pony Ma and the social media/videogame titan Tencent Holdings. Pony Ma was reportedly called in for an unpublicized meeting with antitrust officials on Thursday.
The UK’s Competition and Markets Authority has been asked to investigate allegations that Google and Apple, which together control over 99 percent of the global market in smartphone operating systems, secretly colluded to stifle smartphone search engine competitors.
According to a recent report, tech giant Microsoft is in talks to acquire video-game chat community app Discord for more than $10 billion.
App developer Kosta Eleftheriou, who previously called attention to the problem of scam apps on Apple’s iOS app store, has filed a lawsuit against Apple in California accusing the company of exploiting its monopoly power over apps made available for iPhone users.
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton is expanding the scope of his multi-state antitrust lawsuit against Google to include the tech giant’s planned overhaul of its use of website usage tracking technology known as “cookies.”
Unreleased internal memos from the FTC dating from the Obama years suggest the agency dismissed substantial evidence that Google was attaining monopoly power, at a time when the company’s rise to dominance could have been stopped. The decision came at a time when former Google employees were deeply embedded within the Obama White House.
In its latest exposé, the investigative journalism group Project Veritas has revealed footage of Facebook Global Planning Lead Benny Thomas highlighting the need for the government to break up Facebook. Thomas adds, “No king in the history of the world has been the ruler of two billion people, but Mark Zuckerberg is — and he’s 36.”
House Judiciary Committee ranking member Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) on Thursday formally demanded Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos provide to the committee all communication related to recent instances of alleged censorship of conservative viewpoints, according to a letter first obtained by Breitbart News.
Facebook asked a federal court this week to dismiss major antitrust cases filed by the FTC and almost every U.S. state, claiming that they failed to show the company has monopoly power or has harmed consumers.
Apple is facing an antitrust investigation from UK regulators over its App Store rules, according to a report by CNBC.
Amazon, the world’s dominant online retailer, quietly changed its content policy sometime after August 10 last year to include a ban on “hate speech,” according to reports.
In a recent article, CNN refers to tech giant Facebook as a “$770 billion clone factory,” that copies the features and ideas of other companies. CNN describes Facebook as exercising its stranglehold on social media in multiple ways, writing: “In addition to copycatting, when Facebook couldn’t beat ’em, it bought ’em.”
The CEO of travel booking site Trivago believes that the attitudes towards the world’s biggest tech firms have changed. Axel Hefer believes world governments are warming to taking on Google’s stranglehold on the internet, stating: “There is an increasing understanding that you need to set some rules that are specific to the digital world, as you’ve done in the offline world a long time ago.”
The Senate, now under the control of the Democrats, is escalating efforts to reform antitrust law to target anticompetitive behavior by major tech companies.
China’s State Administration for Market Regulation (SAMR) released the final version of its new antitrust rules on Sunday, evidently concluding a debate within the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) over how China’s high-flying technology titans should be reined in. The final draft of the rules places heavy new restrictions on firms like Alibaba, but the rules are not as stifling as they could have been.
In a recent article, tech site The Information outlines former Google CEO and Clinton lackey Eric Schmidt’s worries about the increasing antitrust scrutiny that the Masters of the Universe are facing. According to Schmidt, affordable smartphones are a sign that Big Tech fosters competition.
Thursday, Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) discussed her proposal of sweeping reform to U.S. antitrust laws that is aimed at reducing monopoly power.
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton said Google’s dominance of Internet advertising is the financial heart of the company’s other monopolies.
The Republican romance with Big Tech didn’t work out as planned. The Big Techsters, confident of kneejerk Republican support for low taxes and deregulation, were free to follow their bliss on avant-garde woke social issues. In other words, the GOP was safeguarding Big Tech, while the Techsters, taking Republicans for granted, acted like good Democrats.
A recent report from the Information claims that tech giant Facebook plans to take on rival Apple in an antitrust lawsuit related to its iOS 14 privacy features. A lawsuit would be a dramatic escalation to the war of words between the Masters of the Universe over user privacy.
Attorney General nominee Merrick Garland hopes to tap a former Facebook lawyer as the leader of the DOJ’s antitrust division, according to a report released Thursday.
Tech giant Google has denied recent allegations that it made a secret deal with social media giant Facebook in order to dominate the online advertising market. The two companies control the online advertising market in a duopoly that Amazon is just beginning to take market share from.
A group of “free-market and low-tax advocates” are urging House Republicans to back off plans to take antitrust action against Big Tech companies.
The New York Times recently outlined the inner workings of a secret deal between Facebook and Google that allowed the companies to jointly dominate the online advertising market.
Video platform Rumble has filed a lawsuit against Google alleging that the tech giant is “unfairly rigging its search algorithm” in favor of YouTube videos in its search results.
Journalist Glenn Greenwald blasted the Big Tech Masters of the Universe in a series of social media posts, focusing on their roles in the recent ban of social media site Parler. Greenwald linked to an article he has written describing the Parler takedown as a “show of monopolistic force.”
Tech giant Apple has added a new passage on antitrust issues to its annual proxy statement to investors as Silicon Valley giants face further scrutiny over anti-competitive practices.
Given Big Tech’s flagrant interference in the 2020 election — a steal, out in the open, in front of everyone — it’s tempting to welcome any regulatory or legal action that might punish them.
A recent article written by a Vanderbilt University law professor explains why much of the antitrust case recently filed against Facebook relies heavily on emails from CEO Mark Zuckerberg.
In a recent article, the Wall Street Journal outlines how e-commerce giant Amazon gains an advantage over smaller competitors, “steamrolling” their business with similar products and services on its massive platform.
A recent report claims that tech giant Facebook’s lawyers told state and federal investigators that it could help a new social network launch by licensing its own code to another firm to avoid antitrust lawsuits.
In a recent article, the Washington Post has provided an insight into Facebook’s secretive campaign to battle recent antitrust lawsuits.
According to a recent lawsuit filed by ten state attorneys general, tech giants Facebook and Google agreed to “cooperate and assist one another” if they faced an investigation into their deal to work together in the online advertising market. Google and Facebook have turned the online advertising business into a duopoly that Amazon has only begun to work its way into. Internal documents included in a draft of the lawsuit use terms from the Star Wars films to describe the deal struck between the Masters of the Universe, including the term “Jedi Blue.”