Meta wins major US antitrust case and won’t have to break off WhatsApp or Instagram
Meta defeated a major challenge to its business on Tuesday when a US judge ruled that the company does not hold a monopoly in social networking.The case, brought by the US Federal Trade Commission, could have forced the tech giant to spin off Instagram and WhatsApp, with the former FTC chair accusing the company of operating a “buy or bury” scheme against nascent competitors.The tech giant bought WhatsApp for $19bn in 2014.Losing either the image-based social network, which generates an estimated half of Meta’s revenue, or the world’s most popular messaging app could have done existential damage to Meta’s empire.The US district judge James Boasberg issued his ruling on Tuesday after the historic antitrust trial wrapped up in late May.
“The landscape that existed only five years ago when the Federal Trade Commission brought this antitrust suit has changed markedly,” Boasberg wrote, citing the rise of TikTok in particular as evidence of competition in the social networking market.Boasberg also chided the FTC, which brought the case against the tech giant, for failing to account for the YouTube video platform as meaningful competition.“Even if YouTube is out, including TikTok alone defeats the FTC’s case,” he wrote.Jennifer Newstead, Meta’s chief legal officer, wrote at the start of the trial: “It’s absurd that the FTC is trying to break up a great American company at the same time the administration is trying to save Chinese-owned TikTok.”The judge’s decision follows two separate rulings that branded Google an illegal monopoly in both search and online advertising, dealing a regulatory blow to the tech giant that for years enjoyed nearly unbridled growth.
In contrast to the victory over Google, the ruling in Meta’s favor dampens the regulatory crackdown initiated by the US government to rein in tech giants, some of the largest and most powerful corporations in the world.The FTC has also sued Amazon for anticompetitive practices.The US justice department has filed suit against Apple, accusing it of operating a “broad, sustained and illegal smartphone monopoly”.Sign up to TechScapeA weekly dive in to how technology is shaping our livesafter newsletter promotionThe FTC “continues to insist that Meta competes with the same old rivals it has for the last decade, that the company holds a monopoly among that small set, and that it maintained that monopoly through anticompetitive acquisitions”, Boasberg wrote in his ruling.“Whether or not Meta enjoyed monopoly power in the past, though, the agency must show that it continues to hold such power now.
The court’s verdict today determines that the FTC has not done so.”
TikTok to give users power to reduce amount of AI content on their feeds
TikTok is giving users the power to reduce the amount of artificial intelligence-made content on their feeds, as it revealed the platform hosts more than 1bn AI videos.The change, which is being tested over the next few weeks before a global rollout, comes as new video-generating tools such as OpenAI’s Sora and Google’s Veo 3 have spurred a surge in AI content online.The Guardian revealed in August that nearly one in 10 of the fastest-growing YouTube channels globally only show AI-generated videos. Many qualify as “AI slop”, the term for low-quality, mass-produced content that is often nonsensical or surreal.Jade Nester, TikTok’s European director of public policy for safety and privacy, said: “We know from our community that many people enjoy content made with AI tools, from digital art to science explainers, and we want to give people the power to see more or less of that, based on their own preferences
Meta wins major US antitrust case and won’t have to break off WhatsApp or Instagram
Meta defeated a major challenge to its business on Tuesday when a US judge ruled that the company does not hold a monopoly in social networking.The case, brought by the US Federal Trade Commission, could have forced the tech giant to spin off Instagram and WhatsApp, with the former FTC chair accusing the company of operating a “buy or bury” scheme against nascent competitors. The tech giant bought WhatsApp for $19bn in 2014. Losing either the image-based social network, which generates an estimated half of Meta’s revenue, or the world’s most popular messaging app could have done existential damage to Meta’s empire.The US district judge James Boasberg issued his ruling on Tuesday after the historic antitrust trial wrapped up in late May
What is Cloudflare – and why did its outage take down so many websites?
The internet infrastructure provider Cloudflare suffered an outage on Tuesday, making many websites inaccessible for about three hours.Cloudflare is a global cloud services and cybersecurity firm. It provides datacentres, website and email security, protection from data loss and defences against cyber threats, among other things. It describes itself as providing an “immune system for the internet”, with technology that sits between its clients and the wider world that blocks billions of cyber threats daily. It also uses its global infrastructure to speed up internet traffic
Cloudflare says ‘incident now resolved’ after outage causes error messages across the internet – as it happened
The firm has just issued an update saying it believes the incident over.A fix has been implemented and we believe the incident is now resolved. We are continuing to monitor for errors to ensure all services are back to normal.I’ve just quickly tested several key sites which are loading again.Key sites around the world went down, some for a few hours, after a widely relied-upon Internet infrastructure company suffered an unknown issueThe outages took place in the early hours of US morning and during UK business hoursIt affected users of everything from Spotify, ChatGPT, X, Zoom, Microsoft Teams and Canva to retail websites of Visa, Vodafone and Vinted and UK grocery chains Asda and M&S
Cloudflare outage causes error messages across the internet
A key piece of the internet’s usually hidden infrastructure suffered a global outage on Tuesday, causing error messages to flash up across websites.Cloudflare, a US company whose services include defending millions of websites against malicious attacks, experienced an unidentified problem that meant internet users could not access some of its customers’ websites.Some site owners could not access their performance dashboards. Sites including X and OpenAI suffered increased outages at the same time as Cloudflare’s problems, according to Downdetector.The outage was reported at 11
Amazon vs Perplexity: the AI agent war has arrived
Hello, and welcome to TechScape. I’m your host, Blake Montgomery.A tech titan and a startup are fighting over who controls the next phase of artificial intelligence.Amazon has sued Perplexity AI, a prominent artificial intelligence startup, over a shopping feature in that company’s browser that allows it to automate placing orders for users. Amazon accused Perplexity AI of covertly accessing customer accounts and disguising AI activity as human browsing
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