antitrust - Page 4

The American Choice and Innovation Online Act and the Augmenting Compatibility and Competition by Enabling Service Switching (ACCESS) Act passed the committee stage yesterday night, with a vote of 24 to 20 in the House Judiciary Committee. The Big Tech bills are now cleared to proceed to a floor vote.

A key point of contention for Apple in recent months has been pressure on the company to allow users to “sideload” apps onto their iOS devices, a process that completely avoids the Apple App Store, which the company continues to argue is both unsafe and unfair to users. Incredibly, the company claims that the freedom to choose different methods of loading apps “eliminates choice” for the consumer.

The new Chairwoman of the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), an agency with the power to threaten corporations with costly antitrust fines among other regulatory burdens, once co-authored a paper with a progressive scholar who advocates the use of antitrust law to solve “structural racism.”

The European Commission has opened a formal investigation into Google over whether the search giant unfairly favors its own online advertising technology over competitors.

Anonymous sources told Bloomberg on Friday that the Chinese Communist Party ordered billionaire Wang Xing, CEO of the country’s third-largest tech company Meituan, to stay out of the public eye after losing over $2.5 billion in a single month.

During a recent conference, Apple CEO Tim Cook criticized a proposed European law that would allow users to install software from outside of the Apple App Store, stating that he believes it would not be “in the best interest of users.”

The antitrust subcommittee of the House Judiciary Committee recently released five highly anticipated bills aimed at curbing the power of the Big Tech companies. The House is currently under the control of the Democrats, but these bills have been pitched as a bipartisan effort, led by subcommittee chairman Rep. David Cicilline (D-RI) and ranking member Rep. Ken Buck (R-CO).

The House Judiciary Committee’s subcommittee on antitrust has introduced five new bills aimed to curb anticompetitive practices in the tech industry. Although none of them directly address the tech issue of greatest concern to Republicans, censorship, the bills have been presented as a bipartisan effort to rein in the power of dominant Silicon Valley companies.

Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost has filed a lawsuit asking the court to declare Google a public utility, which would subject the Masters of the Universe to government regulation.

The French Competition Authority recently announced that it has fined Google 220 million euros ($267 million) for abusing its market power in the online advertising industry.

The European Commission and Britain’s Competition and Markets Authority have both launched investigations focused on Facebook Marketplace to determine if Mark Zuckerberg’s company uses data from advertisers to compete with them.

Facebook Vice President of Global Affairs Nick Clegg stated in a recent op-ed that Facebook shouldn’t be hampered by regulation so that it can be free to spread its technology worldwide but also American values such as “free expression.”

E-commerce giant Amazon’s ad revenue is now more than twice as big as Snapchat, Twitter, Roku, and Pinterest combined.

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.

The judge overseeing the trial between Epic Games and Apple has reportedly hinted at a compromise that could satisfy at least some of the game developer’s concerns with Apple’s monopoly over in-app purchases made with iPhones and other iOS devices.

Rep. Mo Brooks (R-AL) told Breitbart News on Tuesday that too few elected officials view Big Tech’s left-wing censorship as a problem.

Big Tech companies need to be broken up to end monopoly control and protect free markets, Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) said.

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.

The European Commission stated this week that Apple has abused its power in the distribution of music streaming apps through its App Store following a complaint from Spotify.

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.

At a recent hearing before the Senate Judiciary subcommittee on antitrust, app developers stated that they fear tech giants Apple and Google due to their reliance on the Masters of the Universe to reach smartphone users through their respective app stores.

Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) told Breitbart News in an exclusive interview Wednesday that Apple is “awfully cozy” with the Chinese Communist Party.

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.

Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) will today introduce a bill targeting Big Tech monopolies, in particular the practice of favoring their own products and services in online marketplaces and search engines that they own, a practice that Amazon and Google are often accused of.

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.

Rep. Jeff Duncan (R-SC) and Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) filed legislation on Wednesday to strip Major League Baseball (MLB) of its immunity from antitrust law after commissioner Rob Manfred’s decision to remove the All-Star Game from Atlanta over a new election integrity law.

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.

Chinese regulators hit e-commerce giant Alibaba with a staggering $2.78 billion fine for alleged antitrust violations Saturday, seizing about four percent of the company’s annual revenue with the largest corporate penalty the Chinese government has ever assessed.

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.