Regulation

This time from the Department of Justice, after the Federal Trade Commission said it was referring a complaint to the agency based on an investigation involving a children’s privacy law. The FTC said it doesn’t usually make this kind of referral public, but believed it in the public interest. TikTok said it “strongly disagree[s]” with the allegations and said many of them are outdated.

Days after the Financial Times said that Apple would be found guilty of not complying with obligations under the DMA to allow app developers to “steer” users to offers outside its App Store, the bloc’s competition chief Margrethe Vestager had this to say:

We have a number of Apple issues, I find them very serious. I was very surprised that we would have such suspicions of Apple being non-compliant.

In a new interview with The Financial Times, Jonathan Kanter says regulators may need to act urgently to keep AI from being controlled by already-dominant tech companies. Kanter has been leading the antitrust charge against tech intermediaries that are “more powerful than the products and services or the entities they intermediate.”

The EU’s Digital Markets Act (DMA) came into force in March, resulting in the launch of the following new third-party iOS app marketplaces:

• AltStore Pal (hands-on)

• SetApp Mobile (hands-on)

• Aptoide game store (hands-on)

• Mobivention (hands-on)

Each has its own pros and cons but none has been able to upset the balance of power in Europe.

It’s a police-operated drone. WIRED took a deep look into how one California city is using the aerial devices to collect information before responding in-person to some incidents. After analyzing 10,000 flight records over a two-year period, WIRED found poorer residents had more contact with the drones. But most Chula Vista residents interviewed said they supported the program.

The state legislature is expected to vote this week on a bill preventing social media companies from using the recommendation tools to serve kids content, unless parents give the OK, according to The Wall Street Journal. States across the country have implemented a range of safeguards from limiting data collection to imposing age verification requirements.

The former President, who once attempted to ban the platform, posted his first video to it yesterday under his usual handle of @realdonaldtrump.

As Politico notes, Trump reversed his stance earlier this year after momentum behind the ban abruptly rekindled and President Biden signed it into law.

“It is time to break up Live Nation-Ticketmaster,” said US Attorney General Merrick Garland, in a statement announcing the DOJ antitrust lawsuit.

The feds have filed an antitrust lawsuit seeking to break up Live Nation, the parent company of event ticketing giant Ticketmaster, and we’re about to hear more details from the government’s side in this press conference.

Update, May 27th: Replaced live stream link with archive copy from YouTube.

The announcement could come as soon as Thursday. Live Nation, which owns Ticketmaster, calls itself “the largest producer of live music concerts in the world.” It’s one of many agents of consolidation that drastically reshaped music.

The iPhone maker has filed a suit at the EU’s General Court, according to Bloomberg, after arguing that the investigation into the App Store’s music-streaming app distribution had failed “to uncover any credible evidence of consumer harm.”

The probe, sparked by an antitrust complaint Spotify raised in 2019, also ordered Apple to stop preventing music-streaming apps from advertising cheaper deals available outside the App Store.

European ministers have unanimously adopted the bloc’s AI Act, which is now set to be published in the EU’s Official Journal in the coming days.

The law will take effect 20 days after publication, where compliance deadlines will be staggered — starting at six months for AI systems that pose “unacceptable risk,” up to the end of 2030 for AI components of large-scale IT systems.

The National Telecommunications and Information Administration is seeking comment on how the US can support the development of the next generation wireless network. Although it’s a super early procedural step and it feels like we just got 5G, we could be at the halfway mark to a new generation — they tend to launch every decade, and it’s been about five years since 5G began rolling out.

The European Commission has given Microsoft until May 27th to hand over the information it needs to assess Bing’s generative AI features, or else face fines of up to six percent of the company’s global annual income.

The EU suspects that tools like “Copilot in Bing” and “Image Creator by Designer” may have violated its DSA rules regarding deepfakes, voter manipulation, and ‘hallucinations.’

The European consumer organization BEUC and 17 of its member groups, has accused the e-commerce platform of violating Digital Services Act (DSA) rules, urging the EU to designate Temu as a “very large online platform” (VLOP) to make it comply, as it did with Shein last month.

The complaint says:

“Temu does not guarantee its users a safe, predictable, and trustworthy online environment as the law requires.”

Concerns include Temu’s gamification features, misleading products, and overall lack of transparency regarding its business operations.

Karl Bode, writing for The Verge in 2019 about the propect of higher prices and inevitable post-merger layoffs:

But if you’ve seen telecom mergers go through this process before, there’s plenty of reason to be skeptical. Consolidation tends to make prices higher, connectivity worse, and customer service even more terrible. Pre-merger promises to do better are usually hollow, as consumer advocates, unions, and many antitrust experts all agree.