Eddy Cue deserves a raise. As the executive overseeing Apple’s services division, he’s highly incentivized to protect the tens of billions of dollars a year that Google pays to be the default search engine in Safari. “I’ve lost a lot of sleep thinking about it,” he said from the witness stand during Google’s antitrust trial…
Around six years ago, a new rallying cry rippled through Washington: “Break Up Big Tech.” It was a slogan emblazoned on campaign posters, uttered at congressional hearings, and beginning, it seemed, to echo through the halls of the nation’s antitrust enforcers. Momentum in the legislatures eventually petered out, but the enforcers at the Justice Department…
Long-simmering tension between Silicon Valley and the press that covers it is surfacing during the Federal Trade Commission’s antitrust trial against Meta. During a heated cross-examination of the FTC’s key economic expert, Scott Hemphill, Meta’s lead attorney, Mark Hansen, noted that Hemphill joined Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes and former Biden official Tim Wu in pitching…
Near the beginning of his opening arguments, David Dahlquist, a lawyer for the US Department of Justice, showed a slide that he described as Google’s “vicious cycle.” It goes like this: Google pays billions of dollars to be the default search engine practically everywhere, thus it gets more search queries, thus it gets better data,…
Making Instagram a separate company. Buying Snapchat. Wiping everyone’s Facebook friends. Creating a feed of only ads. These were some of the ideas that Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg considered over the years as he built his social media empire. Over the past two days, he talked about them from the witness stand at a federal…
“Your honor, the FTC calls Mark Zuckerberg.” Flanked by two bodyguards, Meta’s CEO solemnly strode into a Washington, DC courtroom. Despite his last-ditch efforts to avoid a trial, he was there, jaw clenched, to defend his company from being broken up by the US government. Shortly after he was sworn in, the Federal Trade Commission’s…
Microsoft is asking the inspector general at the Federal Trade Commission to investigate whether agency management improperly leaked news of its antitrust investigation into the company, and make their findings public. Bloomberg first reported that the probe was underway last week, which The Verge later confirmed. The investigation covers Microsoft’s cloud and software licensing businesses,…
The Alphabet Workers Union filed a charge against Google with the National Labor Relations Board after Google management asked workers to “refrain” from talking about its ongoing Search antitrust case. The union charges that Google issued an “overly broad directive” on discussing the case to employees, according to a copy of the charge filed in…
A federal judge gave the Federal Trade Commission the green light to pursue antitrust claims against Amazon, a newly unsealed order reveals, though some claims under state laws won’t move forward. Amazon filed a motion to dismiss the 2023 lawsuit, which alleges the company illegally maintains a monopoly by punishing sellers who discount products outside…
The U.K.s’ antitrust authority has concluded that Amazon’s partnership and equity investment in AI startup Anthropic can’t be investigated under current merger rules due to the size and scope of the deal. The U.K. Competition and Markets Authority’s (CMA) announcement comes six months to the day after news emerged that Amazon had completed a $4…