#Tech Antitrust

[dailyplanet-loislane]

Alphabet: A Tech Titan Undeterred by Regulator's Wrath

[reasonsforhope]

Article | Paywall Free

"A bid to break up Alphabet Inc.’s Google is one of the options being considered by the Justice Department after a landmark court ruling found that the company monopolized the online search market, according to people with knowledge of the deliberations.

The move would be Washington’s first push to dismantle a company for illegal monopolization since unsuccessful efforts to break up Microsoft Corp. two decades ago. Less severe options include forcing Google to share more data with competitors and measures to prevent it from gaining an unfair advantage in AI products, said the people, who asked not to be identified discussing private conversations.

Regardless, the government will likely seek a ban on the type of exclusive contracts that were at the center of its case against Google. If the Justice Department pushes ahead with a breakup plan, the most likely units for divestment are the Android operating system and Google’s web browser Chrome, said the people. Officials are also looking at trying to force a possible sale of AdWords, the platform the company uses to sell text advertising, one of the people said.

The Justice Department discussions have intensified in the wake of Judge Amit Mehta’s Aug. 5 ruling that Google illegally monopolized the markets of online search and search text ads. Google has said it will appeal that decision, but Mehta has ordered both sides to begin plans for the second phase of the case, which will involve the government’s proposals for restoring competition, including a possible breakup request.

The US plan will need to be accepted by Mehta, who would direct the company to comply. A forced breakup of Google would be the biggest of a US company since AT&T was dismantled in the 1980s."

-via Bloomberg, August 13, 2024

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Apple faces criminal sanctions for defying App Store antitrust order

I'm on a 20+ city book tour for my new novel PICKS AND SHOVELS. Catch me at NEW ZEALAND'S UNITY BOOKS in AUCKLAND TODAY (May 2), and in WELLINGTON TOMORROW (May 3). More tour dates (Pittsburgh, PDX, London, Manchester) here.

Epic, makers of the wildly popular Fortnite video-game, have waged a one-company war against the "app tax" – the 15-30% rake that the mobile duopoly of Apple/Google take out of every penny we spend inside of apps.

Epic's own digital practices are hardly spotless: just this year, the company was caught cheating players – many of them children – with deceptive practices and had to refund over $72m:

https://www.ftc.gov/enforcement/refunds/fortnite-refunds

But in this fight, Epic is on the side of the angels. The 30% that Apple/Google sucks out of the mobile economy is a brutal tax, and not just on app makers. Patreon performers recently raised a stink when the company announced that it would be clawing back 30% of the money pledged by their supporters – that 30% surcharge is passed straight through to Apple/Google:

https://www.theverge.com/2024/8/12/24218629/patreon-membership-ios-30-percent-apple-tax

From independent news outlets to crafters selling their work out of small storefronts, all the way up to massive entertainment services like Disney Plus and Fortnite, the mobile cartel takes 30% out of every dollar, a racket they maintain with onerous rules that ban apps from using their own payment processors, or even from encouraging users to click a link that brings them to a web-based payment screen.

30% is a gigantic markup on payment processing. It's ten times the going rate for payments in the USA, already one of the most expensive places in the world to transfer money from one party to another. In the EU, payment processing typically runs 1%…or less.

But crafters, Patreon podcasters and small-town newspapers are in no position to fight Google and Apple. Instead, we get Epic, a multi-billion-dollar company that's gone to the mattresses to fight these multi-trillion-dollar companies. Personally, I dote on billionaire-on-trillionaire violence.

Epic was wildly successful. It mopped up the floor with Google, securing an especially punitive award from a judge who was furious that Google had destroyed evidence:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/12/12/im-feeling-lucky/#hugger-mugger

Epic also won against Apple, though not as thoroughly as it had with Google, because Apple had the commonsense not to get up to the kind of shenanigans that make federal judges very, very mad. In the Google case, the court found that Google had acted as a monopolist and ordered it to open up the payment system in Google Play, a direct blow to the Android app tax.

In the Apple case, the judge did not find that Google had acted as a monopolist, but did rule that the App Store's payment processing racket violated the law, and ordered Apple to end its own app tax:

https://techcrunch.com/2025/04/30/epic-games-just-scored-a-major-win-against-apple/

That's where things get gnarly. Apple is addicted to corrupt sources of income – like the tens of billions it illegally receives every year in bribes from Google make it the default search:

https://apnews.com/article/google-antitrust-search-engine-verdict-apple-319a61f20fb11510097845a30abaefd8

And it really, really loves the app tax. When the EU ordered Apple to allow third-party app stores (as a way of killing the app tax), the company cooked up a malicious compliance plan that was comically corrupt:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/06/spoil-the-bunch/#dma

So, the mere fact that a federal judge had ordered Apple to open up its app store to competing payment processors was not going convince Apple to actually do it. Instead, Apple cooked up a set of rules for third-party payment processing that would make it more costly to use someone else's payments, piling up a mountain of junk fees and using scare screens and other deceptive warnings to discourage users from making payments through a rival system:

https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/judge-rules-apple-executive-lied

That's the kind of thing that is apt to make a federal judge angry – and, as noted, angry federal judges can make life very hard for tech monopolists, a lesson Google learned when it destroyed key evidence in its Epic case. But Apple didn't just flout the court order – they lied about it to cover it up, and Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers is furious. She held that Alex Roman, Apple's Vice-President of Finance, "outright lied under oath," and she has raised the possibility of criminal contempt penalties for Apple:

https://regmedia.co.uk/2025/05/01/pacer_epic_vs_apple_injunction_judgement.pdf

The judge further wrote:

This is an injunction, not a negotiation. There are no do-overs once a party willfully disregards a court order. Time is of the essence. The Court will not tolerate further delays. As previously ordered, Apple will not impede competition. The Court enjoins Apple from implementing its new anticompetitive acts to avoid compliance with the Injunction. Effective immediately Apple will no longer impede developers’ ability to communicate with users nor will they levy or impose a new commission on off-app purchases

In other words, any junk fees, any impediments to opening up third party payments, will be switfly and harshly dealt with. As of right now developers can start to build third-party payments into their apps and Apple cannot block them. It's the end of the app tax, a source of about $100b/year for Apple:

https://www.theregister.com/2025/05/01/apple_epic_lies_possible_crime/

The world is on fire and everything is terrible, but we are also living through the most consequential season in the history of the war on corporate tech power. Google has been convicted three times of being a monopolist and is almost certainly going to have to sell off Chrome, most of its ad-tech stack, and possibly Android. Meta just put up a pathetic showing in an equally serious antitrust case that could see it forced to sell off Instagram and Whatsapp:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/04/11/it-is-better-to-buy/#than-to-compete

Countries around the world have passed big, sweeping, muscular antitrust laws specifically aimed at smashing corporate tech power, like the EU's Digital Markets Act and Digital Services Act:

https://www.eff.org/pages/adoption-dsadma-notre-analyse

Most importantly, all of this is happening from the bottom up. There is no dark money campaign to fuck up the tech companies. The politicians and enforcers who are taking on Big Tech are being shoved from behind by billions of everyday people who are furious and refuse to take it any longer:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/04/10/solidarity-forever-2/#oligarchism

I am deeply grateful for the public servants who have championed this cause, but I also know that these people are the effect of our movement, not the cause. When Kier Starmer fires Britain's brilliant and effective top competition enforcer and replaces him with the former head of Amazon UK, that does nothing to tamp down the political outrage that Britons feel towards America's tech giants:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/01/22/autocrats-of-trade/#dingo-babysitter

All over the world, countries that passed IP laws to protect US tech interests in exchange for tariff-free access to US markets are grappling with the end of free trade with America. This represents a generational opportunity to pass laws that enable local technologists to jailbreak US tech exports and liberate their people from the extractive practices of Big Tech forever:

https://archive.is/CiBIz

There is nothing harder to stop than an idea whose time has come to pass.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/05/01/its-not-the-crime/#its-the-coverup

Image: Alex Popovkin, Bahia, Brazil from Brazil (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Annelid_worm,_Atlantic_forest,_northern_littoral_of_Bahia,_Brazil_%2816107326533%29.jpg

CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/deed.en

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CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.en

[obsidiannebula]

Fuck YES now Apple is faced with an antitrust trial

[web-three-point-ohhh]

Let's talk about why Google changed the Gulf of Mexico's name, and why all the big tech companies are bending the knee to Trump. This part is really important.

Google, Amazon, Apple, Meta, and Microsoft all hold monopolies. Each are worth trillions of dollars thanks to the anti-competitive practices the US government has allowed them to get away with for two decades.

Remember when we were young, that cool older brother of one of our friends who drank tea and let us smoke some of his weed if we let him talk about how the Egyptians invented electricity? And how he'd tell us that the US government was fifty years ahead of consumer technology? That whatever the US military is using right now, we'd get to buy at Radio Shack when we're old and gray? Was that ever true? I don't know. But it certainly isn't now.

The US has privatized our technology efforts, and in many ways, our national security. Google and Microsoft provide AI technology for killing machines. Meta routinely hands over American data to the NSA, CIA and FBI, which effectively makes all Meta platforms government surveillance tools.

The US relies heavily on these companies for war, anti-terrorism efforts, and general national security. In exchange, our politicians have allowed these companies to grow to inconceivable sizes, destroying competition in the process. Of course, our politicians enriched themselves along the way, trading stock based on insider information about upcoming government contracts and regulations.

It used to be that big tech could just bribe our politicians to keep their monopolies. Sure, our progressive wing on the left has been screaming anti-trust, but they don't hold any real power so it's not a big deal. It's been a nice equilibrium where everyone got rich and everyone was happy; everyone except the poors, of course.

Anyway, here comes Trump—a dipshit chaos agent, who, like it or not, came to power on a populous message. Most people hate big tech, if they've been paying attention, and Trump could very well decide to break these companies up on a whim. Big tech is petrified of anti-trust, and even more, Trump's erratic behavior. Bribes are required, but that's not enough. They need to cater to his ego.

So we see these companies do goofy shit like change the names of bodies of water, or go on Joe Rogan to talk about masculine energy. But it's not the goofy shit we need to worry about.

What we should worry about, what is truly scary about these trillion dollar-companies with CEOs all on edge, is the invisible shit. What are the companies doing to appease Donald Trump's ego that the general population cannot see? These companies control our communications, commerce, businesses, and effectively the infrastructure for the entire internet.

What are they willing to do for Trump behind the scenes to avoid anti-trust?

Crying and puking, Google maps made the Gulf of Mexico say Gulf of America

[blahideiasquefuncionam]

Terceiro revés de Google abre caminho para possível desmembramento da big tech; entenda

Erro ao gerar conteúdo. Tente novamente.

[dleondantes]

This is where the line between leadership and manipulation must be drawn. Real leadership isn’t about forcing behavior resets. It’s about inspiring conscious evolution. Meta tried to shift its model from personal connections to entertainment algorithms, yet it failed to evolve its philosophy.

[reasonsforhope]

More info, this time from the Washington Post! I was so excited when I heard about it this afternoon, yall.

Article

"A federal court has found that Google illegally abused its market power to quash competition in internet search. The ruling hands the Justice Department its biggest victory in more than two decades in limiting the power of Big Tech companies to control and dominate the huge markets they have created.

“Google is a monopolist, and it has acted as one to maintain its monopoly,” Judge Amit P. Mehta of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia wrote in his judgment on Monday.

Mehta ruled that the Justice Department was right in saying that Google violated antitrust law by forging restrictive contracts with Apple and other phone makers that required them to install Google as the default search engine on smartphones. He also decried other practices of the Alphabet Inc. unit that prevented its rivals from competing on an even playing field.

“This victory against Google is a historic win for the American people,” said Attorney General Merrick Garland. “No company — no matter how large or influential — is above the law. The Justice Department will continue to vigorously enforce our antitrust laws.”

White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said the ruling vindicated the belief of President Biden and Vice President Harris that the internet should be more competitive. “The Biden-Harris agenda is building an economy that ensures entrepreneurs and small businesses have a fair shot at the American Dream,” she said...

Federal antitrust law has not been invoked against a big tech company since the Justice Department sued Microsoft more than two decades ago.

The Google antitrust case has been closely watched in antitrust law circles as the first in a string of cases federal prosecutors have launched against high-tech giants. Antitrust enforcers argue that Big Tech has gotten too powerful and doesn’t serve the public interest. Lawsuits have also been filed against Amazon, Meta and Apple.

Mehta wrote that Google has maintained its revenue growth and high operating profits by hiking its search advertising prices again and again, and that there was “no evidence” that market competition has been able to limit Google’s ability to raise these prices.

The Consequences

The consequences of the ruling for Google and the broad online ecosystem are still unclear. The judge will rule on “remedies” for the case in the coming months. One potential measure would be for the court to block Google from paying to secure prime placement for its search engine on Apple’s iPhones and other devices and web browsers. But that could work out in Google’s favor, since its search engine might still be selected, and the company then wouldn’t have to pay the billions of dollars it currently does to secure that placement. Such a ruling could also end up depriving Apple of a significant source of revenue.

Other proposals from antitrust experts include requiring browsers and phone makers to directly ask consumers which search engine they would like to use when they first set up their device. This system has been tried in Europe, where Google has still largely maintained its dominance.

Others have advocated for Google’s different businesses to be broken up. The company not only controls the world’s main search engine but also owns businesses that compete at different levels of the complex industry that helps connect advertisers to people online.

“The remedy must match the court’s striking verdict,” said Lee Hepner, a lawyer at the American Economic Liberties Project. “At a minimum that means an end to Google’s exclusive default agreements and breaking up business lines that have allowed Google to extend its monopoly into every corner of the internet.”

The news of Mehta’s decision was hailed by antitrust advocates."

-via The Washington Post, August 5, 2024

(Source)

[spaceyshenanigans]

🎉🎉🎉

[seriously-mike]

Major money, like Goldman Sachs and Sequoia Capital, is worried. They went public recently with their concerns about the disconnect between the billions required to create and use large-scale AI, and the weak market fit and tepid returns where the rubber meets the AI business-model road.

So, in other words, there's a chance that we'll stop having AI shoved in our faces daily in a desperate attempt to have anyone pay the monthly fees.

There's also another reason: Big Tech pissed off the politicians by showing how irrelevant they are. Coordinated attempts at disinformation, conducted at an aggressive pace, threaten the complacent and ponderous governments of developed democratic countries who apparently forgot how to deal with things like this.

It's time to give Big Tech a good hard punt in the teeth, people.

[latestnews-now]

The US Department of Justice has proposed groundbreaking remedies in its antitrust case against Google, including selling Chrome and barring browser market re-entry. Could this end Google’s search monopoly? Learn more in this video! 🔴 Key Topics Covered: -Google’s antitrust ruling explained -DOJ’s proposed remedies -Google’s response and what’s next

[just-about-nothing]

if this site really cared about tech issues yall'd be posting things like

brb kissing johnathan kanter with tongue

but noooooo i have not seen ONE post like this. shameful really

[pebblegalaxy]

Decoding the Google vs. Epic Games Legal Showdown: Impacts on Android App Ecosystem and Digital Economy

Google and Epic Games, the maker of Fortnite, are engaged in a legal battle over the alleged monopoly of Google’s app store and payment system on Android devices. This article explores the multifaceted implications of the case. For app developers, it raises questions about payment structures, alternative options, and competition with Google’s proprietary apps and services. App users, meanwhile,…

[dailynewsreporter]

In a significant legal blow to tech giant Google, a San Francisco jury delivered a unanimous verdict in favor of videogame maker Epic Games, ruling that Google had engaged in antitrust practices through its app store. The case, which dates back to 2020, saw Epic Games accusing Google of exploiting its dominant position to extract excessive profits from app developers. This verdict sheds light on the growing scrutiny and legal challenges faced by major tech companies over their market practices. Google Faces Unanimous Defeat in Epic Games' Antitrust Lawsuit: Implications and Repercussions (globalpostheadline.com)

[mworldnews]

Exclusive-Apple offers to let rivals access tap-and-go tech in EU antitrust case, sources say

Apple has offered to let rivals access its tap-and-go mobile payments systems used for mobile wallets, three people familiar with the matter said, a move that could settle EU antitrust charges and stave off a possible hefty fine. The EU competition enforcer last year charged Apple with curbing rivals’ access to its tap-and-go technology, Near-Field Communication (NFC), making it difficult for…