monopoly - Page 5

Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO), one of the most vocal critics of Big Tech in the Senate, is being targeted with political attack ads on Facebook — by a Facebook-backed dark money group.

According to recently released court documents, the tech giant Apple considered taking “punitive measures” against Netflix after the streaming service disabled in-app purchases in its iOS app.

Facebook is reportedly taking on the hyperlocal social media platform Nextdoor with its new “Neighborhoods” feature. This latest move adds to Facebook’s long history of copying features from other platforms to apply its incredible market power to smaller competitors.

According to a recent report, Apple executive Phil Schiller suggested that the company reduce its app store fees a decade ago when the store reached $1 billion in profits. The iPhone giant didn’t take Schiller’s advice, keeping its 30 percent app store fee in place to the present day.

Roku, the manufacturer of popular home entertainment devices, is warning its customers with YouTube TV subscriptions that they could lose access to the service in the coming days due to Google’s “predatory” and “monopoly” behavior.

The Daily Mail, which operates one of the most popular news websites in the world and the third-largest print newspaper by circulation in the UK, is suing Google over allegations that it discriminates against certain news companies in its search results.

Facebook has reportedly used legal pressure and other means to force two popular third-party Android apps off the Google Play store. In at least one case, the Masters of the Universe blacklisted the personal accounts of a developer in an apparent act of intimidation.

In a recent article, the Wall Street Journal outlines how tech giant Amazon uses its immense monopoly power to convince vendors in one market to interact with Amazon services in others.

Microsoft has announced that it will buy Nuance Communications in a deal worth $19 billion including debt. Nuance’s AI speech recognition technology is expected to be used to boost the software giant’s healthcare cloud products.

Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) has revealed legislation that would strengthen United States antitrust laws, in what the populist senator calls a return to the Republican party’s history of trust-busting.

A recent Texas antitrust lawsuit has reportedly revealed that for years, Google operated a secret program called “Project Bernanke” that used data from past bids in the company’s digital advertising exchange to allegedly give its own ad-buying business an advantage over competitors.

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.

Facebook’s acquisition of the popular site Giphy will face an in-depth investigation from UK antitrust regulators, according to recent reports.

According to a recent report, tech giant Microsoft is in talks to acquire video-game chat community app Discord for more than $10 billion.

For the first time in over 85 years, Monopoly’s 16 Community Chest Cards are about to get a “long overdue” refresh, Hasbro announced Thursday.

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.”

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.

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 tweet thread, iOS App Developer Kosta Eleftheriou claims that Apple is doing little to combat a growing number of scam apps in its App Store, with some of these apps generating as much as $5 million a year from unsuspecting users. According to Eleftheriou, “they’ve had many chances now and for years to right this wrong — but they’re now willfully neglecting to do so, in an alarming pattern of behavior.”

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.

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.

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.

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.”