Six months have passed since New York City all but banned short-term rentals like those offered via Airbnb. The policy was intended to free up apartments in America’s most congested city to become homes for long-term New Yorkers, instead of housing rotating out-of-town guests that bring noise, trash, and worse. …
Read More »Apple Fined $2 Billion as Europe Sides With Spotify
Apple has a Spotify problem—and it just cost the iPhone maker a $2 billion fine from the European Commission. For years, the two companies have been at war as the streaming service lured users away from Apple’s iTunes and accused the tech giant of exploiting its dominance to stifle innovation. …
Read More »Amazon Just Got Banned From the EU Parliament
Amazon has become the second company ever to have its lobbyists banned from the European Parliament, amid accusations that the company does not take the institution seriously. The ban, which means the 14 Amazon employees who had access to the European Parliament can no longer enter the building without an …
Read More »Google Tweaked Search to Comply With EU Rules. Yelp Says It Makes Results Even More Unfair
To comply with looming rules that ban tech giants from favoring their own services, Google has been testing new look search results for flights, trains, hotels, restaurants, and products in Europe. The EU’s Digital Markets Act is supposed to help smaller companies get more traffic from Google, but reviews service …
Read More »Apple Isn’t Ready to Release Its Grip on the App Store
Politicians in Brussels have for years debated how best to loosen Big Tech companies’ grip over their closely guarded marketplaces. But it was only this week that Apple announced sweeping and drastic changes for its European users. For the first time, new EU rules have forced the company to entertain …
Read More »Apple’s Tight Grip on iMessage Spurs Fresh Calls for an Antitrust Probe
The US Department of Justice has got mail: A coalition of more than a dozen tech advocacy groups wrote to the agency today calling on it to launch an investigation into allegedly anticompetitive behavior by Apple. The letter says that Apple’s recent blocking of Beeper, which reverse engineered iMessage to …
Read More »The Obscure Google Deal That Defines America’s Broken Privacy Protections
Before Google’s disastrous social network Google+ came the less remembered Google Buzz. Launched in 2010, Buzz survived less than two years. But its mishandling of people’s personal data motivated the first in a series of legal settlements that, though imperfect, are to this day the closest the US has come …
Read More »Innovation-Killing Noncompete Agreements Are Finally Dying
One of the most stunning twists in the recent five-day crisis at ChatGPT creator OpenAI came when some 95 percent of the company’s hundreds of employees threatened to quit. The staff planned to follow CEO Sam Altman to develop successors to ChatGPT at Microsoft instead. The threat appeared to mark …
Read More »Norway’s Privacy Battle With Meta Is Just Getting Started
Norway is doubling down in its long-running fight against Meta over users’ data. The country’s privacy watchdog, Datatilsynet, says it is already investigating the company’s new ad-free subscription model, less than a week after the service was launched across Europe. Meta started rolling out its new model last week, giving …
Read More »The UK’s Controversial Online Safety Act Is Now Law
Jeremy Wright was the first of five UK ministers charged with pushing through the British government’s landmark legislation on regulating the internet, the Online Safety Bill. The current UK government likes to brand its initiatives as “world-beating,” but for a brief period in 2019 that might have been right. Back …
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