Meta earns 10% of revenue on a deluge of fraudulent ads, documents show

Posted on November 12, 2025 by Robin Edgar

[…]Meta internally projected late last year that it would earn about 10% of its overall annual revenue – or $16 billion – from running advertising for scams and banned goods, internal company documents show.

A cache of previously unreported documents reviewed by Reuters also shows that the social-media giant for at least three years failed to identify and stop an avalanche of ads that exposed Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp’s billions of users to fraudulent e-commerce and investment schemes, illegal online casinos, and the sale of banned medical products.

On average, one December 2024 document notes, the company shows its platforms’ users an estimated 15 billion “higher risk” scam advertisements – those that show clear signs of being fraudulent – every day. Meta earns about $7 billion in annualized revenue from this category of scam ads each year, another late 2024 document states.

Much of the fraud came from marketers acting suspiciously enough to be flagged by Meta’s internal warning systems. But the company only bans advertisers if its automated systems predict the marketers are at least 95% certain to be committing fraud, the documents show. If the company is less certain – but still believes the advertiser is a likely scammer – Meta charges higher ad rates as a penalty, according to the documents. The idea is to dissuade suspect advertisers from placing ads.

[…]

The details of Meta’s confidential self-appraisal are drawn from documents created between 2021 and this year across Meta’s finance, lobbying, engineering and safety divisions. Together, they reflect Meta’s efforts to quantify the scale of abuse on its platforms – and the company’s hesitancy to crack down in ways that could harm its business interests.

Meta’s acceptance of revenue from sources it suspects are committing fraud highlights the lack of regulatory oversight of the advertising industry, said Sandeep Abraham, a fraud examiner and former Meta safety investigator who now runs a consultancy called Risky Business Solutions.

“If regulators wouldn’t tolerate banks profiting from fraud, they shouldn’t tolerate it in tech,” he told Reuters.

In a statement, Meta spokesman Andy Stone said the documents seen by Reuters “present a selective view that distorts Meta’s approach to fraud and scams.” The company’s internal estimate that it would earn 10.1% of its 2024 revenue from scams and other prohibited ads was “rough and overly-inclusive,” Stone said. The company had later determined that the true number was lower, because the estimate included “many” legitimate ads as well, he said. He declined to provide an updated figure.

[…]

Source: Meta is earning a fortune on a deluge of fraudulent ads, documents show | Reuters

EU’s minimum wage laws may get shot down by (who else) Denmark

Posted on November 11, 2025 by Robin Edgar

The European Court of Justice (ECJ) is set to deliver a landmark ruling on Tuesday that could determine the future of the EU’s Minimum Wage Directive – and, with it, define the limits of the bloc’s authority over national social policies.

Denmark – backed by Sweden – has taken the Commission to the EU’s top court, arguing that the directive breaches EU treaties by legislating directly on pay, an area beyond the EU’s legal remit.

Adopted in 2022, the Minimum Wage Directive aims to ensure “adequate minimum wages” and stronger collective bargaining – negotiations between workers and employers over pay and conditions – across the EU.

While countries don’t have to introduce a mandatory minimum wage, the rules require those with less than 80% collective-bargaining coverage to come up with a plan to strengthen wage-setting systems.

Belgium, Portugal, Germany, Greece, Spain, France, and Luxembourg all sided with the European Commission wanting to keep the law in place.

“This a real clash here between the Nordic model – collective bargaining – and the EU’s tradition of individual rights,” said Laust Høgedahl, associate professor of employment relations at Aalborg University in Denmark.

In January, the court’s advocate general – an independent expert helping judges decide in complex cases – recommended that judges rule in favour of Denmark in a non-binding opinion.

An ‘earthquake’ under EU’s social pillar

If the court follows the advocate general’s reasoning, it would be “a political earthquake” for the EU’s social policy, said Christina Hiessl, who is a professor of labour law at Belgium’s KU Leuven.

“Up to now, the Court has always sided with the Commission,” Hiessl said.

“The EU also wants to build social rights alongside the single market,” Høgedahl said. “Those social rights will become much harder to advance if this directive falls.”

Hiessl believes Danish fears are exaggerated. “It’s a common misconception that the directive imposes statutory minimum wages,” she said. “It very clearly does not.”

Current figures put Denmark’s collective bargaining rate at 82%, slightly above the 80% threshold – the level of worker coverage below which EU countries are expected to take steps to promote collective bargaining.

According to Høgedahl, Danish resistance is a principled stance rather than one of substance.

“Wage is sacred in Denmark,” he says. “It belongs to the social partners, not to politicians – not in Copenhagen, and certainly not in Brussels.”

Source: EU’s minimum wage faces judgment day | Euractiv

Of course, the Danish, who also want to implement Chat Control (blanket espionage of all EU citizens through their smartphones) would hate to see fair wages for EU citizens as well.

Epic and Google agree to settle their lawsuit and change Android’s fate globally

Posted on November 6, 2025 by Robin Edgar

Just when we thought Epic v. Google might be over, just one Supreme Court rejection away from a complete victory for Epic, both sides have agreed to settle Tuesday evening. And if Judge James Donato, who ordered Google to crack open Android for third-party stores, agrees to the changes, it might turn Epic’s victory into a lasting global one.

Previously, Judge Donato agreed to some of Epic’s biggest demands. He issued a permanent injunction that will force Google to carry rival app stores within its own Google Play Store, and give those rival stores access to the full catalog of Google Play apps, to restore competition to the Android marketplace. The injunction also forced Google to stop requiring developers to use Google Play Billing, after a jury found the company had illegally tied its app store to its payments system.

But those changes only applied to the United States, only lasted for three years, and didn’t change how much Google would charge in app store fees.

Now, instead, Google is agreeing to reduce its standard fee to 20 percent or 9 percent, depending on the kind of transaction and when an app was first installed. It’s agreeing to create a new program in the very next version of Android where alternative app stores can register with Google and (theoretically) become first-class citizens that users can easily install. And it appears to be agreeing to offer “Registered App Stores” and lower fees around the world, not just in the US, lasting through June 2032 — six and a half years instead of just three.

[…]

The details of how, when, and where Google would charge its fees are complicated, and depend on when the app was installed. The “new service fee model would apply to new installs,” Google spokesperson Dan Jackson tells The Verge, and the proposal suggests it would only apply to apps installed after October 2025.

The details also seem to be somewhat tailored to the needs of a game developer like Epic Games. Google can charge 20 percent for an in-app purchase that provides “more than a de minimis gameplay advantage,” for example, or 9 percent if the purchase does not. And while 9 percent sounds like it’s also the cap for apps and in-app subscriptions sold through Google Play, period, the proposal notes that that amount doesn’t include Google’s cut for Play Billing if you buy it through that payment system.

That cut will be 5 percent, Jackson tells The Verge, confirming that “This new proposed model introduces a new, lower fee structure for developers in the US and separates the service fee from fees for using Google Play Billing.” (For reference, Google currently charges 15 percent for subscriptions, 15 percent of the first $1M of developer revenue each year and 30 percent after that, though it also cuts special deals with some big developers.)

If you use an alternative payment system, Google might still get a cut: “the Google Play store is free to assess service fees on transactions, including when developers elect to use alternative billing mechanisms,” the proposal reads. But it sounds like that may not happen in practice: “If the user chooses to pay through an alternative billing system, the developer pays no billing fee to Google,” Jackson tells The Verge.

According to the document, Google would theoretically even be able to get its cut when you click out to an app developer’s website and pay for the app there, as long as it happens within 24 hours.

[…]

“Starting with a version of the next major Android release through June 30, 2032, Google will modify future versions of the Android operating system so that a user can install a Registered App Store from a website by clicking on a single store install screen using neutral language. This will also grant the permission to the store to install apps,” the proposal reads.

The proposed modified injunction keeps many of Epic’s other wins in place, including ones that are already in effect today: it has to stop sharing money or perks with phonemakers, carriers, and app developers in exchange for Google Play exclusivity or preinstallation, and let developers communicate with their customers about pricing outside the Play Store.

Google and Epic say they will discuss this proposal with the judge on Thursday, November 6th.

[…]

Source: Epic and Google agree to settle their lawsuit and change Android’s fate globally | The Verge

Of course, you have no idea what Google will charge to add an appstore. Apple’s costs are in the millions of dollars.

72% of game developers say Steam is effectively a PC gaming monopoly

Posted on November 6, 2025 by Robin Edgar

Steam’s longstanding dominance in the PC gaming market often raises questions about how close it is to exercising monopoly power. Although the storefront does not meet the technical definition of a monopoly, many developers are concerned about their reliance on Valve’s platform.

In a survey of over 300 executives from large US and UK game companies, 72% either slightly or strongly agreed that Steam constitutes a monopoly over PC games. Furthermore, 88% said that at least three-quarters of their revenue came from Steam, while 37% reported that the platform accounted for 90% of their total revenue.

Steam is by far the largest PC game distribution service, having recently exceeded 41 million concurrent users. Many customers are so adamant about only purchasing games through Steam that the industry’s largest publishers, including EA, Ubisoft, and even Microsoft, have tried – and failed – to withhold their titles from the service.

Still, Steam does not technically control the entire market. The Epic Games Store and the Windows Store are attempting to compete using free game giveaways, Microsoft’s Game Pass subscription service, and lower sales commissions, but they remain far less popular than Steam. Meanwhile, alternative storefronts such as GOG and itch.io have carved out a niche by focusing on indie and retro titles. Moreover, some of the most popular PC games, such as Fortnite, Minecraft, League of Legends, and World of Warcraft, are not available on Steam.

Despite these caveats, Steam has previously drawn accusations of using its dominant market position to control pricing – a key sign of monopoly power. Last year, a class-action lawsuit started by Wolfire Games decried the store’s standard 30 percent revenue cut and alleged that Steam discouraged companies from lowering prices on stores that took smaller sales commissions.

Atomik Research conducted the recent survey on behalf of Rokky, a company that helps game publishers minimize the impact of grey market key resellers on prices. In addition to opinions on Steam, developers also answered questions about the PC market’s biggest challenges.

The increasing popularity of free-to-play games such as Fortnite, DOTA 2, Counter-Strike 2, Call of Duty: Warzone, and Roblox topped the list of concerns for 40% of respondents. Approximately a third mentioned market saturation and discoverability, echoing data that suggests there aren’t enough players for the thousands of new titles released on Steam each year. A similar portion of survey respondents also expressed concerns regarding subscription services.

Source: 72% of game developers say Steam is effectively a PC gaming monopoly | TechSpot

A monopoly is still a monopoly if there are other players in the market, especially if they are so much smaller. However should there be only a small amount of equal players in the market, the dangers are the same, due to risks of collusion and price fixing as well as only having one other competitor to watch.

Python Foundation rejects $1.5M grant with no-DEI strings

Posted on November 1, 2025 by Robin Edgar

[…]The programming non-profit’s deputy executive director Loren Crary said in a blog post today that the National Science Foundation (NSF) had offered $1.5 million to address structural vulnerabilities in Python and the Python Package Index (PyPI), but the Foundation quickly became dispirited with the terms of the grant it would have to follow.

“These terms included affirming the statement that we ‘do not, and will not during the term of this financial assistance award, operate any programs that advance or promote DEI [diversity, equity, and inclusion], or discriminatory equity ideology in violation of Federal anti-discrimination laws,'” Crary noted. “This restriction would apply not only to the security work directly funded by the grant, but to any and all activity of the PSF as a whole.”

To make matters worse, the terms included a provision that if the PSF was found to have violated that anti-DEI diktat, the NSF reserved the right to claw back any previously disbursed funds, Crary explained.

“This would create a situation where money we’d already spent could be taken back, which would be an enormous, open-ended financial risk,” the PSF director added.

The PSF’s mission statement enshrines a commitment to supporting and growing “a diverse and international community of Python programmers,” and the Foundation ultimately decided it wasn’t willing to compromise on that position, even for what would have been a solid financial boost for the organization.

“The PSF is a relatively small organization, operating with an annual budget of around $5 million per year, with a staff of just 14,” Crary added, noting that the $1.5 million would have been the largest grant the Foundation had ever received – but it wasn’t worth it if the conditions were undermining the PSF’s mission.

The PSF board voted unanimously to withdraw its grant application.

The non-profit would’ve used the funding to help prevent supply chain attacks; create a new automated, proactive review process for new PyPI packages; and make the project’s work easily transferable to other open-source package managers. […]

Source: Python Foundation rejects $1.5M grant with no-DEI strings • The Register

Apple faces £1.5B fine after losing UK App Store case

Posted on October 27, 2025 by Robin Edgar

Apple could face claims estimated at around £1.5 billion after it lost a collective case in the UK arguing that its closed systems for apps resulted in overcharging businesses and consumers.

The ruling from a Competition Appeal Tribunal responded to the case brought on behalf of 36 million UK iPhone and iPad users, both consumers and enterprise customers.

Apple said it disagreed with the ruling [PDF] and planned to appeal.

The court found Apple had imposed charges for its iOS app distribution services and its in-app payment service charged developers a headline commission rate of 30 percent.

In a unanimous judgment, the court found Apple overcharged developers as a result of its behavior in the iOS app distribution services market and the iOS in-app payment services market. There was also an overcharge resulting from the extent to which developers passed on the costs to iPhone and iPad users.

The court found those represented in the case, led by academic Dr Rachael Kent, could be eligible for 8 percent interest on damages awarded.

Speaking to the BBC, Kent said the decision was a “landmark victory, not only for App Store users, but for anyone who has ever felt powerless against a global tech giant.”

In a statement, Apple said the ruling’s view of its software marketplace was mistaken. It argued the App Store was good for UK businesses and consumers because it offered a space for developers to sell their work and somewhere users could choose from millions of software products.

“This ruling overlooks how the App Store helps developers succeed and gives consumers a safe, trusted place to discover apps and securely make payments. The App Store faces vigorous competition from many other platforms – often with far fewer privacy and security protections,” the tech giant said.

Source: Apple faces £1.5B payout after losing UK App Store case • The Register

Which is quite funny for Apple to say, because it fights tooth and nail to ensure that there is no competition for the App Store. Even when the EU tells Apple it must enable alternate app stores or payment providers, it rolls around the floor like a child in a tantrum hoping to avoid the inevitable:

Apple thinks it can argue its’ way out of EU DMA with a single comma. No it can’t and this fight will cost it billions in Europe

EU to force Apple to open up IOS for developers

Apple tries again to make EU officials happy with new fees for in-app purchases

Apple stamps feet but now to let EU developers distribute apps from the web

Apple reverses hissy fit decision to remove Home Screen web apps in EU

I can have app store? Apple: yes but NO! Give €1,000,000 + lock in to Apple ecosystem. This is how to “comply” with EU anti competition law

Irish Basic Income for Artists Scheme to become permanent

Posted on October 8, 2025 by Robin Edgar

The Government’s basic income scheme for artists is set to become a permanent fixture from next year, with 2,000 new places to be made available under Budget 2026.

Minister for Culture Patrick O’Donovan has secured agreement with other Government departments to continue and expand the initiative, which had previously operated on a pilot basis.

Participants in the scheme receive a weekly payment of €325.

A new application window will open in September 2026, with eligibility criteria broadened to include additional artistic disciplines not covered under the original pilot.

The pilot programme, launched in 2022, provided basic income support to 2,000 artists and creative arts workers across Ireland.

It aimed to support the arts sector’s recovery following the COVID-19 pandemic, during which many artists experienced significant income loss due to restrictions on live performances and events.

Minister Patrick O’Donovan

The pilot was administered by the Department of Tourism, Culture, Arts, Gaeltacht, Sport and Media.

While the permanent version of the scheme will initially mirror the pilot in terms of scale, there is provision for a potential expansion to 2,200 participants if additional funding becomes available.

The Department has also signalled its intention to increase capacity further in future years, subject to budgetary considerations.

The scheme provides unconditional, regular payments to eligible artists and creative workers, allowing them to focus on their practice without the pressure of commercial viability.

It is not means-tested and operates independently of social welfare payments.

An independent evaluation of the pilot, published earlier this year, found that recipients reported increased time spent on creative work, reduced financial stress, and improved well-being.

The move to establish the scheme on a permanent basis follows positive feedback from the sector and recommendations from the evaluation report.

Source: Budget 2026: Basic Income for Artists Scheme to become permanent

Why is the EU tech sector doing badly? EU Arduino Sells Out to US based Qualcomm

Posted on October 8, 2025 by Robin Edgar

Today we’re sharing some truly exciting news: Arduino has entered into an agreement to join the Qualcomm Technologies, Inc. family!

This is a huge step in our journey – one that allows us to keep growing, thriving, and making technology accessible to everyone, while bringing our values of openness, simplicity, and community spirit to an even bigger stage. Together, Arduino and Qualcomm Technologies will ignite developer enthusiasm across the globe. Curious about all the official details? Find the full press release here.

The closing of this transaction is subject to regulatory approval and other customary closing conditions.

Source: A new chapter for Arduino – with Qualcomm, UNO Q, and you! | Arduino Blog

So all those EU people buying US stocks are funding this kind of behavior.

The Supreme Court Tells Google To Change Play Store after Loss from Epic Games, Not to Wait for Appeal

Posted on October 7, 2025 by Robin Edgar

In August, Google had just two weeks to begin cracking open Android, and to stop forcing app developers to use its own payment systems, after Epic Games won its Google lawsuit for the second time.

Now, Google has just over two weeks once again — because the US Supreme Court has decided not to save Google ahead of its Supreme Court appeal. Today, the Court denied the company’s request for a partial stay, meaning the permanent injunction is still in effect, meaning Google must do the following things this month or be in violation:

Stop Google from forcing app developers to use Google Play Billing

Let Android developers tell users about other ways to pay from within the Play Store

Let Android developers link to ways to download their apps outside of the Play Store

Let developers set their own prices

Stop sharing money or perks with phonemakers, carriers, and app developers in exchange for Google Play exclusivity or preinstallation

Work with Epic to resolve any disputes as Google builds a system to let rival app stores into Google Play

Epic Games says the deadline for Google to comply is now October 22nd, 2025. “Starting October 22, developers will be legally entitled to steer US Google Play users to out-of-app payments without fees, scare screens, and friction – same as Apple App Store users in the US!” writes Epic CEO Tim Sweeney.

[…]

Source: The Supreme Court didn’t save Google from Epic, and now the clock is ticking | The Verge

SWIFT and 30 banks will go Blockchain and become a mainstream part of global finance

Posted on October 1, 2025 by Robin Edgar

Blockchains are still synonymous with the wild world of cryptocurrencies, but on Monday, 30 banks and SWIFT – the world’s most important cross-border payment service – made them an utterly mainstream part of the global financial system.

SWIFT – aka the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication – provides a messaging service that financial institutions use to move money around the world. The service is widely used but is slow because, as explained by ANZ Bank, SWIFT “doesn’t actually move the money.”

“This means the instruction to pay and the movement of funds happen separately, often requiring a complex network of accounts and correspondent banks to enable a payment to be processed. This disconnect can slow payments down and lead to a lack of visibility for both sender and recipient.”

It can also mean cross-border payments take a couple of days to complete.

SWIFT’s problems are well known and financial services types see the service as sound – but also sand in the gears of global trade.

Blockchain enthusiasts who saw cryptocurrency transactions rapidly rippling across distributed ledgers, therefore wondered if their preferred technology could improve the speed of cross-border cash transfers. Many startups, some with support from sensible central banks, have explored this idea, usually by proposing “stablecoins” – digital currencies pegged to the value of a fiat currency – which would be exchanged on a blockchain to provide faster settlements than SWIFT can achieve.

China has similar ideas: One application for its Digital Yuan is enabling rapid cross-border transactions in the Middle Kingdom’s currency, and not the US Dollar that is often used to move money around the world. If China could use its digital currency to control a slice of global trade, it could weaken Western institutions like SWIFT.

Almost everyone contemplating using a blockchain to move money around the world imagines either supplanting SWIFT, or stealing a lot of its business.

It’s therefore unsurprising that on Monday SWIFT announced its intention to “add a blockchain-based shared ledger to its technology infrastructure, a pivotal step for global finance that promises to make instant, always-on cross-border transactions possible at unprecedented scale.”

SWIFT will also build tools to integrate its existing payment systems, and its new blockchain.

“It is envisaged that the ledger – a secure, real-time log of transactions between financial institutions – will record, sequence and validate transactions and enforce rules through smart contracts,” SWIFT’s announcement explains. “It will be built for interoperability, both with existing and emerging networks, while maintaining the trust, resilience and compliance synonymous with Swift and critical to the secure functioning of global finance.”

34 financial institutions from 16 countries have signed up to design the ledger, with help from Ethereum outfit Consensys.

SWIFT didn’t predict when this ledger will go live, which is probably sensible as projects of this magnitude can easily go pear-shaped and previous attempts at using blockchains for high-volume mission critical systems have gone badly.

But for now, an entity that has for decades played an important role in the global economy has decided it needs to rebuild itself on blockchain.

In some ways that’s unremarkable because very few people need to care about the technology plumbing their banks employ. SWIFT adopting Blockchain, however, will likely bring tokenized assets much closer to the mainstream.

Source: Blockchain just became a mainstream part of global finance • The Register

YouTube coughs up $24.5 million to make Trump case (with no legal leg to stand on) go away. Oh, is that a bribe then?

Posted on September 30, 2025 by Robin Edgar

YouTube has agreed to pay $24.5 million to end the case brought by US president Donald Trump, who alleged the vid-streamer had infringed his freedom of speech.

The case stems from the events of January 6th, 2020, when supporters of the president stormed the US Capitol building and attempted to disrupt certification of the presidential election that Trump lost. YouTube, Meta, and Twitter all suspended Trump’s accounts after January 6th, because they felt the president might use their platforms to incite violence.

Once out of office, Trump sued all three. His case [PDF] against YouTube claimed the video outfit deprived him of the constitutional right to freedom of speech. Lawyers at the time pointed out Trump didn’t have a legal leg to stand on, because corporations are not required to guarantee or preserve free speech.

Meta and Twitter nonetheless settled their cases, and on Monday YouTube did likewise.

A court filing [PDF] states that the settlement is not “an admission of liability or fault on the part of the Defendants or their agents, servants, or employees, and is entered into by all Parties for the sole purpose of compromising disputed claims and avoiding the expenses and risks of further litigation.”

President Trump is a paper billionaire. Alphabet, YouTube’s parent company, reported annual revenue of $350 billion for its last full financial year, and net income of $100 billion. YouTube alone generates revenue close to $10 billion each quarter.

The vid-streamer can therefore afford to litigate.

The risks of litigation are another matter, as the second Trump administration has seemingly looked favorably on companies engaged in activities that might require the federal government’s approval, and which resolve matters close to the president’s heart.

Google could certainly benefit from good relations with the administration, as it faces possible appeals against a recent antitrust judgment that left its monopolies intact, and seeks approval to build new datacenters to run AI workloads.

This settlement might help because Trump has directed one $22 million payment YouTube will make to the body overseeing his pet project – construction of a ballroom at the White House. Another $2.5 million payment will go to plaintiffs who joined the case and also felt YouTube infringed their rights.

YouTube has not commented on the matter at the time of writing. ®

Source: YouTube coughs up $24.5 million to make Trump case go away • The Register

Reddit will block the Internet Archive because AI MONEY

Posted on September 16, 2025 by Robin Edgar

Reddit says that it has caught AI companies scraping its data from the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, so it’s going to start blocking the Internet Archive from indexing the vast majority of Reddit. The Wayback Machine will no longer be able to crawl post detail pages, comments, or profiles; instead, it will only be able to index the Reddit.com homepage, which effectively means Internet Archive will only be able to archive insights into which news headlines and posts were most popular on a given day.

”Internet Archive provides a service to the open web, but we’ve been made aware of instances where AI companies violate platform policies, including ours, and scrape data from the Wayback Machine,” spokesperson Tim Rathschmidt tells The Verge.

The Internet Archive’s mission is to keep a digital archive of websites on the internet and “other cultural artifacts,” and the Wayback Machine is a tool you can use to look at pages as they appeared on certain dates, but Reddit believes not all of its content should be archived that way. “Until they’re able to defend their site and comply with platform policies (e.g., respecting user privacy, re: deleting removed content) we’re limiting some of their access to Reddit data to protect redditors,” Rathschmidt says.

[…]

Source: Reddit will block the Internet Archive | The Verge

The privacy argument does not hold – the Reddit content is freely viewable to anyone with a web browser. And Reddit is making content deals with AI companies. So it looks like Reddit is a kettle calling the pot black there.

Europe must reach for the bazooka‚ or be humiliated

Posted on September 7, 2025 by Robin Edgar

Last week, Donald Trump issued a stark warning: European states that enforce EU law against American tech giants risk trade tariffs. This is not a negotiation tactic. It is an assertion of power‚ a demand that Europe surrender its legal order to foreign influence.

This is not a negotiation. It is a test.

Europe possesses a “trade bazooka” designed for this precise scenario. The Anti-Coercion Instrument is designed to respond to the kind of threats and actions that Trump now alludes to. To delay its use is to invite further encroachments.

But the current crisis is not merely economic, nor is it confined to tariffs and subsidies. It is a confrontation over the very foundations of democratic governance: the rule of law, the capacity of nations to govern themselves without foreign interference, and the protection of our children in the digital age.

The U.S. understands that power is not only measured in military might or economic output, but also in control over information and infrastructure and the conditions under which democracy can survive. By threatening sanctions for upholding European law, Washington is testing whether Europe will tolerate coercion in the name of the alliance.

We should now know the risk of inaction. A decade ago, the General Data Protection Regulation was enacted to put power over data back into the hands of citizens. But Ireland, as a jurisdiction of choice for multinationals, became a conduit for regulatory evasion. And the European Commission turned a blind eye.

Over the same period, our fragmented single market and the Commission’s narrow view of competition enforcement handed our digital market to foreign firms. The result is that we became dependent on foreign technology firms, most of them American, which are now accustomed to operating with impunity. They shape our public discourse and influence our elections.

Consequently, authoritarianism has risen again in our midst. Proxies who serve foreign interests before their own are algorithmically pushed into people’s feeds by giant American and Chinese social media companies. Those same algorithms push self-harm and suicide onto our children’s feeds. And yet we hesitate.

If we do not stand by our laws then we will not merely lose a trade dispute. We will lose the authority to govern ourselves. We will signal that democratic sovereignty can be traded for security promises that may not be kept. We will expose ourselves to unrelenting assault by algorithms directed to impose home-grown authoritarians upon our people.

President von der Leyen committed to keeping inviolate Europe’s rules on digital media and market power in an interview in April. She must now go further and actively protect those rules. Speaking last week, Chancellor Merz said Europe will not allow itself to be pressured. Those words must be backed up by action.

But the signs are not good. Take the Commission’s competition case against Google, in which the EU executive has not only backed down from its plan to break up Google’s ad business by instead issuing a mere fine, it has even dropped the fine for fear of offending Trump. The case concerns market violations that have been proven against Google in a U.S. court. Such timidity undermines the hope of a level playing field in the relationship with our American partners.

We are not blind to the risks of confrontation with Donald Trump. But if we do not stand by our laws and use the Anti-Coercion instrument to defend them, then we will not merely lose a trade dispute. We will lose the authority to govern ourselves.

Source: Europe must reach for the bazooka‚ or be humiliated – Euractiv

Google hit with $3.45 billion EU antitrust fine over adtech practices where US judge also found guilt but refused to punish

Posted on September 7, 2025 by Robin Edgar

Alphabet’s Google was hit with a 2.95-billion-euro ($3.45 billion) European Union antitrust fine on Friday for anti-competitive practices in its lucrative adtech business, a sharp sanction that riled up U.S. President Donald Trump.

The fine, the fourth penalty Google has faced in its decade-long fight with EU competition regulators, follows bubbling trade tensions between major global powers and U.S. threats of retaliation over EU scrutiny of American tech firms.

Trump said in a post on Truth Social that the action was “unfair” and “discriminatory” and later told reporters he will take the matter up with the EU directly.

“We cannot let this happen to brilliant and unprecedented American Ingenuity and, if it does, I will be forced to start a Section 301 proceeding to nullify the unfair penalties being charged to these Taxpaying American Companies,” Trump said.

Section 301 of the Trade Act of 1974 allows the United States to penalize foreign countries that engage in acts that are “unjustifiable” or “unreasonable,” or burden U.S. commerce.

The European Commission’s action was triggered by a complaint from the European Publishers Council. Trump, who has hit Europe with trade tariffs, has threatened to retaliate against the EU for any pushback against Big Tech.

“I will be speaking to the European Union,” Trump told reporters at the White House on Friday.

While Google plans to appeal, the Commission has warned of stronger remedies – including potential divestitures – if the company fails to address its conflicts of interest. The case underscores growing transatlantic friction over digital market regulation and the EU’s push to rein in dominant platforms.

The EU competition enforcer had originally planned to hand out the fine on Monday but opposition from EU trade chief Maros Sefcovic on concerns about the impact on U.S. tariffs on European cars derailed EU antitrust chief Teresa Ribera’s plan.

The Commission said Google favoured its own online display technology services that reinforced its own ad exchange AdX’s central role in the adtech supply chain and allowed Google to charge high fees for its service, to the detriment of rivals and online publishers.

Google has abused its market power since 2014 until today, the EU watchdog said.

It ordered Google to stop the self-preferencing practices and take measures to cease its inherent conflicts of interest. The company has 60 days to inform the Commission how it plans to comply with this order, and another 30 days to do so.

The Commission reiterated its preliminary view that Google should divest part of its services but said it wants to first hear and assess Google’s compliance efforts, confirming a Reuters story last year.

[…]

Source: Google hit with $3.45 billion EU antitrust fine over adtech practices

It is good to see that at least the EU has the guts to do something about these monopolistic practices.

Judge who ruled Google is a monopoly says no need for punishment.

The worst possible antitrust outcome – unless you are Google

BMW kills home assistant integration access to paid ConnectedDrive API to “protect security”

Posted on September 5, 2025 by Robin Edgar

So you pay hundreds yearly for access to the Connected Drive API. You use Home Assistant to set the charging times of your BMW depending on when the price of electricity is low. BMW shuts you down (no re-imbursement, of course) and forces you to use one of their Charge Point providers. BMW then says it’s because of security.

I guess things are going very badly for BMW when they are making deals like this one as well as charging you subscriptions to use stuff in your car that you already paid for.

AI Slop Is Great For Internet (Re-)Decentralisation

Posted on September 4, 2025 by Robin Edgar

In this article I take a look at AI Slop and how it is effecting the current internet. I also look at what exactly the internet of today looks like – it is hugely centralised. This centralisation creates a focused trashcan for the AI generated slop. This is exactly the opportunity that curated content creators need to shine and show relevant, researched, innovative and original content on smaller, decentralised content platforms.

What is AI Slop?

As GPTs swallow more and more data, it is increasingly used to make more “AI slop”. This is “low to mid quality content – “low- to mid-quality content – video, images, audio, text or a mix – created with AI tools, often with little regard for accuracy. It’s fast, easy and inexpensive to make this content. AI slop producers typically place it on social media to exploit the economics of attention on the internet, displacing higher-quality material that could be more helpful.” (Source: What is AI slop? A technologist explains this new and largely unwelcome form of online content).

Recent examples include Facebook content, Careless speech, especially in bought up abandoned news sites, Reddit posts, Fake leaked merchandise, Inaccurate Boring History videos, alongside the more damaging fake political images – well, you get the point I think.

A lot has been written about the damaging effects of AI slop, leading to reduced attention and congnitive fatigue, feelings of emptiness and detachment, commoditised homogeneous experiences, etc.

However, there may be a light point on the horizon. Bear with me for some background, though.

Centralisation of Content

It turns out that Netflix alone is responsible for 14.9% of global internet traffic. Youtube for 11.6%.

Infographic: Netflix is Responsible for 15% of Global Internet Traffic | Statista

Sandvine’s 2024 Global Internet Phenomena Report shows that 65% of all fixed internet traffic and 68% of all mobile traffic is driven through eight of the internet giants

This concentration of the internet is not something new and has been studied for some time:

A decade ago, there was a much greater variety of domains within links posted by users of Reddit, with more than 20 different domains for every 100 random links users posted. Now there are only about five different domains for every 100 links posted.

In fact, between 60-70 percent of all attention on key social media platforms is focused towards just ten popular domains.

Beyond social media platforms, we also studied linkage patterns across the web, looking at almost 20 billion links over three years. These results reinforced the “rich are getting richer” online.

The authority, influence, and visibility of the top 1,000 global websites (as measured by network centrality or PageRank) is growing every month, at the expense of all other sites.

Source: The Same Handful of Websites Are Dominating The Web And That Could Be a Problem / Evolution of diversity and dominance of companies in online activity (2021)

The online economy’s lack of diversity can be seen most clearly in technology itself, where a power disparity has grown in the last decade, leaving the web in the control of fewer and fewer. Google Search makes up 92% of all web searches worldwide. Its browser, Chrome, which defaults to Google Search, is used by nearly two thirds of users worldwide.

Source: StatCounter Global Stats – Search Engine Market Share

Media investment analysis firm Ebiquity found that nearly half of all advertising spend is now digital, with Google, Meta (formerly Facebook) and Amazon single-handedly collecting nearly three quarters of digital advertising money globally in 2021.

Source: Grandstand platforms (2022)

And of course we know that news sites have been closing as advertisers flock to Social media sites, leading to a dearth of trustworthy journalism and ethical, rules bound journalism.

Centralisation of Underlying Technologies

And it’s not just the content we consume that has been centralised: The underlying technologies of the internet have been centralised as well. The Internet Society shows that data centres, DNS, top level domains, SSL Certificates, Content Delivery Networks and Web Hosting have been significantly centralised as well.

In some of these protocols there is more variation within regions:

We highlight regional patterns that paint a richer picture of provider dependence and insularity than we can through centralization alone. For instance, the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) countries (formed following the dissolution of Soviet Union) exhibit comparatively low centralization, but depend highly on Russian providers. These patterns suggest possible political, historical, and linguistic undercurrents of provider dependence. In addition, the regional patterns we observe between layers of website infrastructure enable us to hypothesize about forces of influence driving centralization across multiple layers. For example, many countries are more insular in their choice of TLD given the limited technical implications of TLD choice. On the other extreme, certificate authority (CA) centralization is far more extreme than other layers due to popular web browsers trusting only a handful of CAs, nearly all of which are located in the United States.

Source: On the Centralization and Regionalization of the Web (2024)

Why is this? A lot of it has to do with the content providers wanting to gather as much data as possible on their users as well as being able to offer a fast, seamless experience for their users (so that they stay engaged on their platforms):

The more information you have about people, the more information you can feed your machine-learning process to build detailed profiles about your users. Understanding your users means you can predict what they will like, what they will emotionally engage with, and what will make them act. The more you can engage users, the longer they will use your service, enabling you to gather more information about them. Knowing what makes your users act allows you to convert views into purchases, increasing the provider’s economic power.

The virtuous cycle is related to the network effect. The value of a network is exponentially related to the number of people connected to the network. The value of the network increases as more people connect, because the information held within the network increases as more people connect.

Who will extract the value of those data? Those located in the center of the network can gather the most information as the network increases in size. They are able to take the most advantage of the virtuous cycle. In other words, the virtuous cycle and the network effect favor a smaller number of complex services. The virtuous cycle and network effect drive centralization.

[…]

How do content providers, such as social media services, increase user engagement when impatience increases and attention spans decrease? One way is to make their service faster. While there are many ways to make a service faster, two are of particular interest here.

First, move content closer to the user. […] Second, optimize the network path.

[…]

Moving content to the edge and optimizing the network path requires lots of resources and expertise. Like most other things, the devices, physical cabling, buildings, and talent required to build large computer networks are less expensive at scale

[…]

Over time, as the Internet has grown, new regulations and ways of doing business have been added, and new applications have been added “over the top,” the complexity of Internet systems and protocols has increased. As with any other complex ecosystem, specialization has set in. Almost no one knows how “the whole thing works” any longer.

How does this drive centralization?

Each feature—or change at large—increases complexity. The more complex a protocol is, the more “care and feeding” it requires. As a matter of course, larger organizations are more capable of hiring, training, and keeping the specialized engineering talent required to build and maintain these kinds of complex systems.

Source: The Centralization of the Internet (2021)

So what does this have to do with AI Slop?

As more and more AI Slop is generated, debates are raging in many communities. Especially in the gaming and art communities, there is a lot of militant railing against AI art. In 2023 a study showed that people were worried about AI generated content, but unable to detect it:

research employed an online survey with 100 participants to collect quantitative data on their experiences and perceptions of AI-generated content. The findings indicate a range of trust levels in AI-generated content, with a general trend towards cautious acceptance. The results also reveal a gap between the participants’ perceived and actual abilities to distinguish between AI-generated content, underlining the need for improved media literacy and awareness initiatives. The thematic analysis of the respondent’s opinions on the ethical implications of AI-generated content underscored concerns about misinformation, bias, and a perceived lack of human essence.

Source: The state of AI: Exploring the perceptions, credibility, and trustworthiness of the users towards AI-Generated Content

However, politics has caught up and in the EU and US policy has arisen that force AI content generators to also support the creation of reliable detectors for the content they generate:

In this paper, we begin by highlighting an important new development: providers of AI content generators have new obligations to support the creation of reliable detectors for the content they generate. These new obligations arise mainly from the EU’s newly finalised AI Act, but they are enhanced by the US President’s recent Executive Order on AI, and by several considerations of self-interest. These new steps towards reliable detection mechanisms are by no means a panacea—but we argue they will usher in a new adversarial landscape, in which reliable methods for identifying AI-generated content are commonly available. In this landscape, many new questions arise for policymakers. Firstly, if reliable AI-content detection mechanisms are available, who should be required to use them? And how should they be used? We argue that new duties arise for media and Web search companies arise for media companies, and for Web search companies, in the deployment of AI-content detectors. Secondly, what broader regulation of the tech ecosystem will maximise the likelihood of reliable AI-content detectors? We argue for a range of new duties, relating to provenance-authentication protocols, open-source AI generators, and support for research and enforcement. Along the way, we consider how the production of AI-generated content relates to ‘free expression’, and discuss the important case of content that is generated jointly by humans and AIs.

Source: AI content detection in the emerging information ecosystem: new obligations for media and tech companies (2024)

This means that although people may or may not get better at spotting AI generated slop for what it is, work is being done on showing it up for us.

With the main content providers being inundated with AI trash and it being shown up for what it is, people will get bored of it. This gives other parties, those with the possibility of curating their content, possibilities for growth – offering high quality content that differentiates itself from other high quality content sites and especially from the central repositories of AI filled garbage. Existing parties and smaller new parties have an incentive to create and innovate. Of course that content will be used to fill the GPTs, but that should increases the accuracy of the GPTs that are paying attention (and who should be able to filter out AI slop better than any human could), who will hopefully redirect their answers to their sources – as legally explainability is becoming more and more relevant.

So together with the rise of anti Google sentiment and opportunities to DeGoogle leading to new (and de-shittified, working, and non-US!) search engines such as Qwant and SearXNG I see this as an excellent opportunity for the (relatively) little man to rise up again to diversify and decentralise the internet.

The worst possible antitrust outcome – unless you are Google

Posted on September 4, 2025 by Robin Edgar

Last year, Google lost an antitrust case to Biden’s DoJ. The DoJ lawyers beat Google like a drum, proving beyond a shadow of a doubt that Google had deliberately sought to create and maintain a monopoly over search, and that they’d used that monopoly to make search materially worse, while locking competitors out of the market.

In other words, the company that controls 90% of search attained that control by illegal means, and, having thus illegitimately become the first port of call for the information-seeking world, had deliberately worsened its product to make more money:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/24/naming-names/#prabhakar-raghavan

That Google lost that case was a minor miracle. First, because for 40 years, the richest, most terrible people in the world have been running a literal re-education camp for judges where they get luxe rooms and fancy meals and lectures about how monopolies are good, actually:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/08/13/post-bork-era/#manne-down

But second, because Judge Amit Mehta decided that the Google case should be shrouded in mystery, suppressing the publication of key exhibits and banning phones, cameras and laptops from the courtroom, with the effect that virtually no one even noticed that the most important antitrust case in tech history, a genuine trial of the century, was underway:

https://www.promarket.org/2023/10/27/google-monopolizes-judicial-system-information-with-trial-secrecy/

This is really important. The government doesn’t have to win an antitrust trial in order to create competition. As the saying goes, “the process is the punishment.” Bill Gates was so personally humiliated by his catastrophic performance at his deposition for the Microsoft antitrust trial that he elected not to force-choke the nascent Google, lest he be put back in the deposition chair:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/09/12/whats-a-murder/#miros-tilde-1
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But Judge Mehta turned his courtroom into a Star Chamber, a black hole whence no embarrassing information about Google’s wicked deeds could emerge. That meant that the only punishment Google would have to bear from this trial would come after the government won its case, when the judge decided on a punishment (the term of art is “remedy”) for Google.

Yesterday, he handed down that remedy and it is as bad as it could be. In fact, it is likely the worst possible remedy for this case:

https://gizmodo.com/google-wont-have-to-sell-chrome-browser-after-all-but-theres-a-catch-2000652304

Let’s start with what’s not in this remedy. Google will not be forced to sell off any of its divisions – not Chrome, not Android. Despite the fact that the judge found that Google’s vertical integration with the world’s dominant mobile operating system and browser were a key factor in its monopolization, Mehta decided to leave the Google octopus with all its limbs intact:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/11/19/breaking-up-is-hard-to-do/#shiny-and-chrome

Google won’t be forced to offer users a “choice screen” when they set up their Android accounts, to give browsers other than Chrome a fair shake:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/08/12/defaults-matter/#make-up-your-mind-already

Nor will Google be prevented from bribing competitors to stay out of the search market. One of the facts established in the verdict was that Google had been slipping Apple more than $20b/year in exchange for which, Apple forbore from making a competing search engine. This exposed every Safari and iOS user to Google surveillance, while insulating Google from the threat of an Apple competitor.

And then there’s Google’s data. Google is the world’s most prolific surveiller, and the company boasts to investors about the advantage that its 24/7 spying confers on it in the search market, because Google knows so much about us and can therefore tailor our results. Even if this is true – a big if – it’s nevertheless a fucking nightmare. Google has stolen every fact about our lives, in service to propping up a monopoly that lets it steal our money, too. Any remedy worth the name would have required Google to delete (“disgorge,” in law-speak) all that data:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/08/07/revealed-preferences/#extinguish-v-improve

Some people in the antitrust world didn’t see it that way. Out of a misguided kind of privacy nihilism, they called for Google to be forced to share the data it stole from us, so that potential competitors could tune their search tools on the monopolist’s population-scale privacy violations.

And that is what the court has ordered.

As punishment for being convinced of obtaining and maintaining a monopoly, Google will be forced to share sensitive data with lots of other search engines. This will not secure competition for search, but it will certainly democratize human rights violations at scale.

Doubtless there will be loopholes in this data-sharing order. Google will have the right to hold back some of its data (that is, our data) if it is deemed “sensitive.” This isn’t so much a loophole as is a loopchasm. I’ll bet you a testicle⹋ that Google will slap a “sensitive” label on any data that might be the least bit useful to its competitors.

⹋not one of mine

This means that even if you like data-sharing as a remedy, you won’t actually get the benefit you were hoping for. Instead, Google competitors will spend the next decade in court, fighting to get Google to comply with this order.

That’s the main reason that we force monopolists to break up after they lose antitrust cases. We could put a bunch of conditions on how they operate, but figuring out whether they’re adhering to those conditions and punishing them when they don’t is expensive, labor-intensive and time consuming. This data-sharing wheeze is easy to do malicious compliance for, and hard to enforce. It is not an “administrable” policy:

https://locusmag.com/2022/03/cory-doctorow-vertically-challenged/

This is all downside. If Google complies with the order, it will constitute a privacy breach on a scale never before seen. If they don’t comply with the order, it will starve competitors of the one tiny drop of hope that Judge Mehta squeezed out of his pen. It’s a catastrophe. An utter, total catastrophe. It has zero redeeming qualities. Hope you like enshittification, folks, because Judge Mehta just handed Google an eternal licence to enshittify the entire fucking internet.

It’s impossible to overstate how fucking terrible Mehta’s reasoning in this decision is. The Economic Liberties project calls it “judicial cowardice” and compared the ruling to “finding someone guilty for bank robbery and then sentencing him to write a thank you note”:

https://www.economicliberties.us/press-release/doj-states-must-appeal-judge-mehtas-act-of-judicial-cowardice-letting-google-keep-its-monopoly-power/

Matt Stoller says it’s typical of today’s “lawlessness, incoherence and deference to big business”:

https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/a-judge-lets-google-get-away-with

David Dayen’s scorching analysis in The American Prospect calls it “embarassing”:

https://prospect.org/justice/2025-09-03-embarrassing-ruling-allows-google-search-monopoly/

Dayen points out the many ways in which Mehta ignored his own findings, ignored the Supreme Court. Mehta wrote:

This court, however, need not decide this issue, because there are independent reasons that remedies designed to eliminate the defendant’s monopoly—i.e., structural remedies—are inappropriate in this case.

Which, as Dayen points out is literally a federal judge deciding to ignore the law “because reasons.”

Dayen says that he doesn’t see why Google would even bother appealing this ruling: “since it won on almost every point.” But the DoJ could appeal. If MAGA’s promises about holding Big Tech to account mean anything at all, the DoJ would appeal.

I’ll bet you a testicle⹋ that the DoJ will not appeal. After all, Trump’s DoJ now has a cash register at the reception desk, and if you write a check for a million bucks to some random MAGA influencer, they can make all charges disappear:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/02/act-locally/#local-hero

⹋again, not one of mine

And if you’re waiting for Europe to jump in and act where America won’t, don’t hold your breath. EU Commission sources leaked to Reuters that the EU is going to drop its multi-billion euro fine against Google because they don’t want to make Trump angry:

https://www.reuters.com/legal/litigation/google-adtech-fine-hold-eu-awaits-lower-us-car-duties-sources-say-2025-09-02/

Sundar Pichai gave $1m to Donald Trump and got a seat on the dais at the inaguration. Trump just paid him back, 40,000 times over. Trump is a sadist, a facist, and a rapist – and he’s also a remarkably cheap date.

Source: Pluralistic: The worst possible antitrust outcome (03 Sep 2025) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

Judge who ruled Google is a monopoly says no need for punishment.

Posted on September 3, 2025 by Robin Edgar

So the judge says that because things changed in the search space (AI / GPT searching) that changes the advertising space (which the GPTs don’t really do much of – yet) which is what the case was about. The anti-competitive facts of the case were before GPTs came along and are not relevant to the current GPTs but all of that somehow doesn’t matter so Google doesn’t really have to change much.

Champagne will be flowing at Google HQ after US District Judge Amit Mehta decided to do very little to rein in the monopolistic web giant.

In his 230-page ruling Mehta, who last August ruled that Google broke US competition law, decided the search behemoth will not have to divest its Chrome browser or Android operating systems, and can continue to pay billions to the likes of Apple to secure a prominent place for its search engine.

“Google will not be required to divest Chrome; nor will the court include a contingent divestiture of the Android operating system in the final judgment,” he ruled. “Plaintiffs overreached in seeking forced divestiture of these key assets, which Google did not use to effect any illegal restraints.”

That decision will disappoint the US Department of Justice, because Mehta rejected the remedies it called for.

The only government proposal Mehta accepted was that Google must share access to user-side data, albeit only to “qualified competitors.” While this includes things like a search index and user-interaction data, it doesn’t have to hand over specific advertising data.

“If you think of ingredients as data, like users’ search index, recipes are what they do with that data and how they use that data to make search results more relevant,” Adam Kovacevich, CEO of technology non-profit Chamber of Progress and a former Googler, told The Register.

“What you had is Google’s rivals arguing that Google had to share its recipes’ secret sauce. And the judge rejected that. He said: ‘You only have to share their ingredient list, effectively their search and search index.'”

The ruling also includes a requirement for Google to stop entering into exclusive deals that make the search giant the default search engine on mobile devices. It also requires Google to submit to six years of regulatory oversight by a technical committee that will monitor it to ensure it’s not backsliding.

You don’t find someone guilty of robbing a bank and then sentence him to writing a thank you note for the loot

The DoJ is likely to appeal but had no comment at the time of publication. However, the ruling has infuriated antitrust groups.

“You don’t find someone guilty of robbing a bank and then sentence him to writing a thank you note for the loot,” said Nidhi Hegde, executive director of the non-profit American Economic Liberties Project.

“Similarly, you don’t find Google liable for monopolization and then write a remedy that lets it protect its monopoly. This feckless remedy to the most storied case of monopolization of the past quarter century is a complete failure of his duty and must be appealed.”

Yet another thing AI has ruined

So what was it that caused the judge – who said barely a year ago that the ad slinger was an “overbearing illegal monopoly” – to do so little to change the status quo?

Mehta found that AI has changed the competitive landscape Google faces since the DoJ first brought its case in October 2020.

“The emergence of GenAI changed the course of this case,” he wrote. “No witness at the liability trial testified that GenAI products posed a near-term threat to general search engines (GSE).

“The very first witness at the remedies hearing, by contrast, placed GenAI front and center as a nascent competitive threat. These remedies proceedings thus have been as much about promoting competition among GSEs as ensuring that Google’s dominance in search does not carry over into the GenAI space.”

Mehta argued that over the past year he has sought out multiple sources of testimony to discuss AI and the issues that surround it, and is therefore cognizant of the issues it creates. But the original case was about Google’s existing advertising practices. The judge claims he addressed that matter.

Google clearly agrees with Mehta when it comes to AI changing the antitrust situation. In a statement, it welcomed the ruling and said it will continue to dispute his initial finding that it is an illegal monopoly.

“Today’s decision recognizes how much the industry has changed through the advent of AI, which is giving people so many more ways to find information,” Google said in a canned statement. “This underlines what we’ve been saying since this case was filed in 2020: Competition is intense and people can easily choose the services they want.”

Google and Mehta do have a point. The Chamber of Progress’s Kovacevich – who attended many of the hearings – pointed out that when the case was heard generative AI was very new, and the AI search market was still in its infancy. In the nearly five years since, much has changed.

“Anybody who has been paying attention to technology in the last two years would say that generative AI does pose a competitive challenge to traditional search engines,” he opined.

Anybody who has been paying attention to technology in the last two years would say that generative AI does pose a competitive challenge to traditional search engines

“So I think what the judge was grappling with was this reality that it changes the game, and it changed the game since Google was found liable in the first phase of the trial. So I thought it was great that he was acknowledging that, and spent so many pages [of the ruling] just talking about how much that poses a competitive challenge to traditional search engines.”

And the billions will keep flowing

Google’s stock price shot up by eight percent in after-hours trading and Apple’s jumped 2.5 percent, suggesting investors like this ruling.

That sentiment may stem from the fact that during the trial it emerged that in 2021 Google paid more than $26 billion to other companies to make sure that it was the default search engine on their platforms. Apple raked in $18-20 billion in 2020 alone, around a quarter of its profit in that year [PDF]. Google wouldn’t spend that sort of money unless it paid off, so its shareholders may be pleased that a big source of revenue remains viable.

Mozilla is another beneficiary of Google’s largesse. While the amount it gets is trivial in comparison to Cook & Co, thought to be around $400 million, the foundation has very few other sources of revenue. Earlier this year Mozilla’s CFO warned that cutting the Google subsidy would “potentially start a downward spiral of usage as people defected from our browser, which … could at the end of the day put Firefox out of business,” the judge notes.

At the time of publication, Apple and Mozilla had no comment.

Mehta noted that the loss of such payments would be “crippling,” and “downstream harms to distribution partners, related markets, and consumers, which counsels against a broad payment ban.”

So what will change for consumers? In effect, almost nothing. Google will carry on as before, and the case will drag on for years.

“Users will be in much the same position as before,” Mitch Stoltz, litigation director for the EFF told The Register.

“The lack of any restructuring of Google, or even a ban on the massive revenue sharing payments to Apple and others for default search placement that were at the heart of the government’s case, mean that Google’s incentives won’t change, and the data-sharing remedies may be undermined.” ®

Source: Judge who ruled Google is a monopoly orders modest remedies • The Register

Pluralistic: Darth Android – Altering Terms After the Fact

Posted on September 2, 2025 by Robin Edgar

William Gibson famously said that “Cyberpunk was a warning, not a suggestion.” But for every tech leader fantasizing about lobotomizing their enemies with Black Ice, there are ten who wish they could be Darth Vader, force-choking you while grating out, “I’m altering the deal. Pray I don’t alter it any further.”

I call this business philosophy the “Darth Vader MBA.” The fact that tech products are permanently tethered to their manufacturers – by cloud connections backstopped by IP restrictions that stop you from disabling them – means that your devices can have features removed or altered on a corporate whim, and it’s literally a felony for you to restore the functionality you’ve had removed:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/26/hit-with-a-brick/#graceful-failure

That presents an irresistible temptation to tech bosses. It means that you can spy on your users, figure out which features they rely on most heavily, disable those features, and then charge money to restore them:

https://restofworld.org/2021/loans-that-hijack-your-phone-are-coming-to-india/

It means that you can decide to stop paying a supplier the license fee for a critical feature that your customers rely on, take that feature away, and stick your customers with a monthly charge, forever, to go on using the product they already paid for:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/28/fade-to-black/#trust-the-process

It means that you can push “security updates” to devices in the field that take away your customers’ ability to use third-party apps, so they’re forced to use your shitty, expensive apps:

https://www.404media.co/developer-unlocks-newly-enshittified-echelon-exercise-bikes-but-cant-legally-release-his-software/

Or you can take away third-party app support and force your customers to use your shitty app that’s crammed full of ads, so they have to look at an ad every time they want to open their garage-doors:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/09/lead-me-not-into-temptation/#chamberlain

Or you can break compatibility with generic consumables, like ink, and force your customers to buy the consumables you sell, at (literal) ten billion percent markups:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/11/ink-stained-wretches-battle-soul-digital-freedom-taking-place-inside-your-printer

Combine the “agreements” we must click through after we hand over our money, wherein we “consent” to having the terms altered at any time, in any way, forever, and surrender our right to sue:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/08/15/dogs-breakfast/#by-clicking-this-you-agree-on-behalf-of-your-employer-to-release-me-from-all-obligations-and-waivers-arising-from-any-and-all-NON-NEGOTIATED-agreements

With the fact that billions of digital tools can be neutered at a distance with a single mouse-click:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/19/twiddler/

With the fact that IP law makes it a literal felony to undo these changes or add legal features to your own property that the manufacturer doesn’t want you to have:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/24/record-scratch/#autoenshittification

And you’ve created the conditions for a perfect Darth Vader MBA dystopia.

Tech bosses are fundamentally at war with the idea that our digital devices contain “general purpose computers.” The general-purposeness of computers – the fact that they are all Turing-complete, universal von Neumann machines – has created tech bosses’ fortunes, but now that these fortunes have been attained, the tech sector would like to abolish that general-purposeness; specifically, they would like to make it impossible to run programs that erode their profits or frustrate their attempts at rent-seeking.

This has been a growing trend in computing since the mid-2000s, when tech bosses realized that the “digital rights management” that the entertainment industry had fallen in love with could provide even bigger dividends for tech companies themselves.

Since the Napster era, media companies have demanded that tech platforms figure out how to limit the use and copying of media files after they were delivered to our computers. They believed that there was some practical way to make a computer that would refuse to take orders from its owner, such that you could (for example) “stream” a movie to a user without that being a “download.” The truth, of course is that all streams are downloads, because the only way to cause my screen to display a video file that is on your server is for your server to send that file to my computer.

“Streaming” is a consensus hallucination, and when a company claims to be giving you a “stream” that’s not a “download,” they really mean that they believe that the program that’s rendering the file on your screen doesn’t have a “save as” button.

But of course, even if the program doesn’t have a “save as” button, someone could easily make a “save as” plugin that adds that functionality to your streaming program. So “streaming” isn’t just “a video playback program without a ‘save as’ button,” it’s also “a video playback program that no one can add a ‘save as’ button to.”

At the turn of the millennium, tech companies selling this stuff hoodwinked media companies by claiming that they used technical means to prevent someone from adding the “save as” button after the fact. But tech companies knew that there was no technical means to prevent this, because computers are general purpose, and can run every program, which means that every 10-foot fence you build around a program immediately summons up an 11-foot ladder.

When a tech company says “it’s impossible to change the programs and devices we ship to our users,” they mean, “it’s illegal to change the programs and devices we ship to our users.” That’s thanks to a cluster of laws we colloquially call “IP law”; a label we apply to any law that lets a firm exert control on the conduct of users, critics and competitors:

https://locusmag.com/2020/09/cory-doctorow-ip/

Law, not technology, is the true battlefield in the War on General Purpose Computing, a subject I’ve been raising the alarm about for decades now:

https://memex.craphound.com/2012/01/10/lockdown-the-coming-war-on-general-purpose-computing/

When I say that this is a legal fight and not a technical one, I mean that, but for the legal restrictions on reverse-engineering and “adversarial interoperability,” none of these extractive tactics would be viable. Every time a company enshittified its products, it would create an opportunity for a rival to swoop in, disenshittify the enshittification, and steal your customers out from under you.

The fact that there’s no technical way to enforce these restrictions means that the companies that benefit from them have to pitch their arguments to lawmakers, not customers. If you have something that works, you use it in your sales pitch, like Signal, whose actual, working security is a big part of its appeal to users.

If you have something that doesn’t work, you use it in your lobbying pitch, like Apple, who justify their 30% ripoff app tax – which they can only charge because it’s a felony to reverse-engineer your iPhone so you can use a different app store – by telling lawmakers that locking down their platform is essential to the security and privacy of iPhone owners:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/12/youre-holding-it-wrong/#if-dishwashers-were-iphones

Apple and Google have a duopoly over mobile computing. Both companies use legal tactics to lock users into getting their apps from the companies’ own app stores, where they take 30 cents out of every dollar you spend, and where it’s against the rules to include any payment methods other than Google/Apple’s own payment systems.

This is a massive racket. It lets the companies extract hundreds of billions of dollars in rents. This drives up costs for their users and drives down profits for their suppliers. It lets the duopoly structure the entire mobile economy, acting as de facto market regulators. For example, the fact that Apple/Google exempt Uber and Lyft from the 30% app tax means that they – and they alone – can provide competitive ride-hailing services.

But though both companies extract the 30% app tax, they use very different mechanisms to maintain their lock on their users and on app makers. Apple uses digital locks, which lets it invoke IP law to criminalize anyone who reverse-engineers its systems and provides an easy way to install a better app store.

Google, on the other hand, uses a wide variety of contractual tactics to maintain its control, arm-twisting Android device makers and carriers into bundling its app store with every device, often with a locked bootloader that prevents users from adding new app stores after they pay for their devices.

But despite this, Google has always claimed that Android is the “open” alternative to the Apple “ecosystem,” principally on the strength that you can “sideload” an app. “Sideload” is a weird euphemism that the mobile duopoly came up with; it means “installing software without our permission,” which we used to just call “installing software” (because you don’t need a manufacturer’s permission to install software on your computer).

Now, Google has pulled a Darth Vader, changing the deal after the fact. They’ve announced that henceforth, you will only be able to sideload apps that come from developers who pay to be validated by Google and certified as good eggs. This has got people really angry, and justifiably so.

Last week, the repair hero Louis Rossmann posted a scorching video excoriating Google for the change:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QBEKlIV_70E

In the video, Rossmann – who is now running an anti-enshittification group called Fulu – reminds us that our mobile devices aren’t phones, they’re computers and urges us not to use the term “sideloading,” because that’s conceding that there’s something about the fact that this computer can fit in your pocket that means that you shouldn’t be able to, you know, just install software.

Rossmann thinks that this is a cash grab, and he’s right – partially. He thinks that this is a way for Google to make money from forcing developers to join its certification program.

But that’s just small potatoes. The real cash grab is the hundreds of billions of dollars that Google stands to lose if we switch to third-party app stores and choke off the app tax.

That is an issue that is very much on Google’s mind right now, because Google lost a brutal antitrust case brought by Epic Games, makers of Fortnite:

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

Epic’s suit contended that Google had violated antitrust law by creating exclusivity deals with carriers and device makers that locked Android users into Google’s app store, which meant that Epic had to surrender 30% of its mobile earnings to Google.

Google lost that case – badly. It turns out that judges don’t like it when you deliberately destroy evidence:

https://www.legaldive.com/news/deleted-messages-google-antitrust-case-epic-games-deliberate-spoliation-donato/702306/

They say that when you find yourself in a hole, you should stop digging, but Google can’t put down the shovel. After the court ordered Google to open up its app store, the company just ignored the order, which is a thing that judges hate even more than destroying evidence:

https://www.justice.gov/atr/case/epic-games-inc-v-google-llc

So it was that last month, Google found itself with just two weeks to comply with the open app store order, or else:

https://www.theverge.com/news/717440/google-epic-open-play-store-emergency-stay

Google was ordered to make it possible to install new app stores as apps, so you could go into Google Play, search for a different app store, and, with a single click, install it on your phone, and switch to getting your apps from that store, rather than Google’s.

That’s what’s behind Google’s new ban on “sideloading”: this is a form of malicious compliance with the court orders stemming from its losses to Epic Games. In fact, it’s not even malicious compliance – it’s malicious noncompliance, a move that so obviously fails to satisfy the court order that I think it’s only a matter of time until Google gets hit with fines so large that they’ll actually affect Google’s operations.

In the meantime, Google’s story that this move is motivated by security it obviously bullshit. First of all, the argument that preventing users from installing software of their choosing is the only way to safeguard their privacy and security is bullshit when Apple uses it, and it’s bullshit when Google trots it out:

https://www.eff.org/document/letter-bruce-schneier-senate-judiciary-regarding-app-store-security

But even if you stipulate that Google is doing this to keep you safe, the story falls apart. After all, Google isn’t certifying apps, they’re certifying developers. This implies that the company can somehow predict whether a developer will do something malicious in the future.

This is obviously wrong. Indeed, Google itself is proof that this doesn’t work: the fact that a company has a “don’t be evil” motto at its outset is no guarantee that it won’t turn evil in the future.

There’s a long track record of merchants behaving in innocuous and beneficial ways to amass reputation capital, before blitzing the people who trust them with depraved criminality. This is a well-understood problem with reputation scores, dating back to the early days of eBay, when crooked sellers invented the tactic of listing and delivering a series of low-value items in order to amass a high reputation score, only to post a bunch of high-ticket scams, like dozens laptops at $1,000 each, which are never delivered, even as the seller walks away with tens of thousands of dollars.

More recently, we’ve seen this in supply chain attacks on open source software, where malicious actors spend a long time serving as helpful contributors, pushing out a string of minor, high-quality patches before one day pushing a backdoor or a ransomware package into widely used code:

https://arstechnica.com/security/2025/07/open-source-repositories-are-seeing-a-rash-of-supply-chain-attacks/

So the idea that Google can improve Android’s safety by certifying developers, rather than code, is obvious bullshit. No, this is just a pretext, a way to avoid complying with the court order in Epic and milking a few more billions of dollars in app taxes.

Google is no friend of the general purpose computer. They keep coming up with ways to invoke the law to punish people who install code that makes their Android devices serve their owners’ interests, at the expense of Google’s shareholders. It was just a couple years ago that we had to bully Google out of a plan to lock down browsers so they’d be as enshittified as apps, something Google sold as “feature parity”:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/02/self-incrimination/

Epic Games didn’t just sue Google, either. They also sued Apple – but Apple won, because it didn’t destroy evidence and make the judge angry at it. But Apple didn’t walk away unscathed – they were also ordered to loosen up control over their App Store, and they also failed to do so, with the effect that last spring, a federal judge threatened to imprison Apple executives:

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

Neither Apple nor Google would exist without the modern miracle that is the general purpose computer. Both companies want to make sure no one else ever reaps the benefit of the Turing complete, universal von Neumann machine. Both companies are capable of coming up with endless narratives about how Turing completeness is incompatible with your privacy and security.

But it’s Google and Apple that stand in the way of our security and privacy. Though they may sometimes protects us against external threats, neither Google nor Apple will ever protect us from their own predatory instincts.

Source: Pluralistic: Darth Android (01 Sep 2025) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

Apple pulls torrenting app from a third-party store (one that it should not be able to control!) in the EU

Posted on August 30, 2025 by Robin Edgar

As first reported by TorrentFreak, Apple is preventing downloads of the iTorrent app on iPhones in the EU. Developer Daniil “XITRIX” Vinogradov’s app was a popular BitTorrent client available from AltStore PAL, which is among the most popular third-party iOS app stores overseas. The company revoked the app developer’s ability to distribute apps on such third-party marketplaces. While Apple has historically banned torrent clients from iOS devices in the United States, the EU’s Digital Markets Act that went into effect last year requires Apple to allow apps from third-party stores to be installed by users.

According to TorrentFreak‘s reporting, the motivation behind the revocation of XITRIX’s alternative distribution rights is not yet certain. The publisher spoke directly with TorrentFreak and said that Apple never reached out to him about the matter. “I still have no idea if it was my fault or Apple’s, and their responses make no sense,” Vinogradov told TorrentFreak. Apple has responded to Vinogradov with a generic message about app store issues.

Shane Gill, the co-founder of AltStore PAL, told TorrentFreak that the company’s request for information from Apple has not resulted in it explaining its justification for the takedown. “I can confirm that we are in communication with Apple about this issue. We’ve told them what’s going wrong, and they said they’re looking into it, but we haven’t gotten any further information as of yet,” said Gill.

Source: Apple pulls torrenting app from a third-party store in the EU

The Threat Of Extreme Statutory Damages For Copyright Almost Certainly Made Anthropic Settle With Authors: Not the Use of Books for training, but the idiots used pirated books for training

Posted on August 29, 2025 by Robin Edgar

In what may be the least surprising news in the world of copyright and the internet, Anthropic just agreed to settle the copyright lawsuit that everyone’s been watching, but not for the reasons most people think. This isn’t about AI training being found to infringe copyright—in fact, Anthropic won on that issue. Instead, it’s about how copyright’s broken statutory damages system can turn a narrow legal loss into a company-ending threat, forcing settlements even when the core dispute goes your way.

Anthropic had done something remarkably stupid beyond just training: they downloaded unauthorized copies of works and stored them in an internal “pirate library” for future reference. Judge Alsup was crystal clear that while the training itself was fair use, building and maintaining this library of unauthorized copies was straightforward infringement. This wasn’t some edge case—it was basic copyright violation that Anthropic should have known better than to engage in.

And while there were some defenses to this, it would likely be tough to succeed at trial with the position Judge Alsup had put them in.

The question then was about liability. Because of copyright’s absolutely ridiculous statutory damages (up to $150k per work if the infringement was found to be “willful”), which need not bear any relationship to the actual damages, Anthropic could have been on the hook for trillions of dollars in damages just in this one case. That’s not something any company is going to roll the dice on, and I’m sure that the conversation was more or less: if you win and we get hit with statutory damages, the company will shut down and you will get nothing. Instead, let’s come to some sort of deal and get the lawyers (and the named author plaintiffs) paid.

While the amount of the settlement hasn’t been revealed yet, the amount authors get paid is going to come out eventually, and… I guarantee that it will not be much.

[…]

Instead what will happen—what always happens with these collective licensing deals—is that a few of the bigger names will get wealthy, but mainly the middleman will get wealthy. These kinds of schemes only tend to enrich the middlemen (often leading to corruption).

So this result is hardly surprising. Anthropic had to settle rather than face shutting down. But my guess is that authors are going to be incredibly disappointed by how much they end up getting from the settlement. Judge Alsup still has to approve the settlement, and some people may protest it, but it would be a much bigger surprise if he somehow rejects it.

Source: The Threat Of Extreme Statutory Damages For Copyright Almost Certainly Made Anthropic Settle With Authors | Techdirt

Better than greenwashing, sustainability reporting boosts financials

Posted on August 26, 2025 by Robin Edgar

As environmental responsibility and social ethics become increasingly important, a question might arise in the boardroom: does the company’s sustainability efforts materially affect the financial information on which investors rely?

Research in the International Journal of Business and Emerging Markets sets about answering that question. It does so by examining data from European firms over the course of a decade and providing empirical evidence that voluntary disclosure and strong performance in sustainability metrics improve the value relevance of financial statements.

The researchers focused on Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) criteria.

[…]

Ultimately, the research found, firms voluntarily reporting ESG information tended to present financial statements more aligned with market perceptions of their value.

Moreover, firms with higher ESG performance scores, indicating better sustainability practices, demonstrate even stronger correlations between their financial disclosures and market value. This suggests that sustainability efforts are not merely reputational or regulatory compliance exercises but contribute meaningfully to the transparency of financial reporting.

[…]

More information: Kyriakos Christofi et al, The impact of sustainability disclosure on financial statement value relevance: evidence from Europe, International Journal of Business and Emerging Markets (2025). DOI: 10.1504/IJBEM.2025.147883

Source: Better than greenwashing, sustainability reporting boosts financials

Gamblers Now Bet on AI Models Like Racehorses

Posted on August 19, 2025 by Robin Edgar

Now that AI developers are getting paid like pro athletes, it’s fitting that fans are placing big bets on how well they’re doing their jobs.

On Kalshi, Polymarket and other sites where people wager “predictions” on real-world events, gamblers lay down millions each month on their picks for AI’s top model.

The AI arms race is playing out in plain sight on social media, ranking sites and obscure corners of the internet where enthusiasts hunt for clues. The constant buzz makes the topic appealing for wagers, though not every scrap of information is meaningful.

[…]

Trading volume across AI prediction markets has surged to around $20 million this month. Kalshi, the only platform currently available in the U.S., is seeing 10 times the volume on AI trades compared with the start of the year, a spokesman says.

Each bet, or “contract,” is priced in cents to reflect the odds: McCoy bought thousands of Gemini contracts at around 40 cents, meaning it had a 40% chance of winning. If the bet had settled and Gemini won, McCoy’s 40 cents would become a dollar. If Gemini lost, McCoy would lose it all.

But much of the action happens before the final outcome. As more people piled into the Gemini bet, the contract price rose. McCoy sold when it had reached 87 cents. It’s like betting on a sports match, only with the option to cash out when the odds rise in favor of your bet.

[…]

Strategies vary. Some bet on the big industry players, others buy low on less-known or soon-to-be-updated models. Some compare odds on Kalshi and Polymarket to find arbitrage opportunities in the odds.

As volume for these AI trades continues to grow, the incentive for good information will only increase, and the squeeze on casual bettors will get tighter, says Robin Hanson, a professor of economics at George Mason University.

“When you have better information in these kinds of markets, you can make better decisions,” Hanson says. “If you know a little more, you make more money.”

[…]

Source: Gamblers Now Bet on AI Models Like Racehorses

How Age Verification Laws Targeting Online Porn Could Be (And Should Be) Viewed As A Labor Rights Issue

Posted on August 18, 2025 by Robin Edgar

[…]

While not a traditional “labor issue,” like union rights and equal pay, the government’s role in regulating and restricting forms of expression that can be produced, distributed, and monetized for entertainment media consumption is a dimension of the age-gating issue often overlooked and/or ignored.

Digital sex workers’ incomes and living conditions are dependent on platforms for content distribution. Sites like OnlyFans, Pornhub, xHamster, Chaturbate, and literally thousands more grant performers and content creators access to revenue generation opportunities that are remote, distributed, and confidential.

Due to these platforms forming the foundations of a trend-setting, technology-innovating, digitally native entertainment industry, age verification laws target digital sex workers’ means of distribution and, in a lot of cases, means of production. The overwhelming majority of adult content creators and adult performers are self-employed—classified as independent contractors and/or small business owners. Some performers have incorporated, with others adding trademarks and intellectual property protections on their branding.

Consider a few examples of adult content creators actively engaging in the activity of running a small business or self-employed enterprise. Platforms such as OnlyFans issue tax forms so that content creators can accurately report their income to the IRS and their state tax authorities. Or take the example of the performer-creator, going by the stage name Gigi Dior, duking it out with high-fashion house Christian Dior in front of the Trademark Trial and Appeal Board at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. Activities and actions like these aren’t seen by the vast majority of consumers—or, importantly, the critics of the entire online adult ecosystem.

We all hear the “think of the children” mantra from the Helen Lovejoys of the world daily. We are seeing it now with Collective Shout teaming up with Visa and Mastercard to clamp down on NSFW gaming. We are seeing it in the United Kingdom with calls from both the House of Commons and the House of Lords to ban certain types of pornography to comply with a broad interpretation of the Online Safety Act of 2023.

At least 40 percent of all United States residents live in jurisdictions with age verification laws. Millions of adult content creators are diverse and dynamic. Faced with all of these mounting regulatory pressures, adult entertainment performers and adult content creators—particularly those operating with marginalized identities—have developed a range of creative strategies to sustain their work, visibility, and autonomy in the national digital space. Inaccessibility is a legitimate issue that goes far beyond concerns of consumers.

While these laws are often framed as protecting children, the actual barrier they create is for adults — the lawful consumers who make up the legitimate market for adult entertainment. Under laws like Texas’s HB 1181, anyone wanting to access adult content must submit government-issued ID or sensitive personal data to a third-party vendor. Many adults are unwilling to do this, not because they wish to evade age restrictions, but because they don’t trust where that data will go, how it will be stored, or who might access it.

The result is that large numbers of adults — the only legal audience for these performers in the first place — stop visiting legitimate platforms altogether. That loss of audience directly translates into a loss of income for adult content creators. For an industry where the majority of workers are self-employed, often operating as small businesses, the shrinkage of the paying customer base is an existential threat.

This is why age verification mandates should also be seen as a labor rights issue. They are not simply regulating content; they are regulating the ability of consenting adults to transact with one another in a lawful marketplace.

[…]

Source: How Age Verification Laws Targeting Online Porn Could Be (And Should Be) Viewed As A Labor Rights Issue | Techdirt

$81M ‘Trade Secrets’ Verdict Against Boeing Was Overturned – and Then Reinstated

Posted on August 18, 2025 by Robin Edgar

14 months ago a jury ruled against Boeing, awarding $81 million in damages to failed electric airplane startup Zunum. “Zunum alleged that Boeing, while ostensibly investing seed money to get the startup off the ground, stole Zunum’s technology and actively undermined its attempts to build a business,” the Seattle Times reported at the time.

But two months later that verdict was overturned, Reuters reports, with U.S. District Judge James Robart deciding that Zunum “did not adequately identify its secrets or show that they derived their value from being kept secret.”

And then three days ago a U.S. appeals court reinstated the original $81 million award, reversing that district judge’s decision and “rejecting his finding that the information Boeing allegedly stole was not entitled to trade-secret protection.” [T]he district court erred in concluding that “Zunum failed to identify any of its alleged trade secrets with sufficient particularity”… Here, the court rejected Zunum’s repeated attempts to introduce comprehensive trade secret definitions into evidence and instead provided the jury with a court-created exhibit enumerating Zunum’s alleged trade secrets with a short description of each. Zunum’s witnesses identified the trade secrets by number, provided a basic explanation of each, and used exhibits and demonstratives to exemplify information comprising specific trade secrets.
“internal Boeing communications introduced at trial suggesting that Boeing intended to modify its own in-house designs, methods, and strategies to incorporate information from certain Zunum trade secrets…” according to the new ruling. “Under the parties’ agreement, Boeing was not permitted to use Zunum’s confidential information for any reason other than to manage its investment in Zunum.”

Reuters adds that “A spokesperson for Boeing declined to comment on the appeals court’s decision”

One final note: The appeals court also ordered the case to be assigned to a new judge after Robart revealed that his wife had acquired Boeing stock through a retirement savings account during the litigation.
Judge Robart had called that an “error”. (And judicial ethics experts interviewed by Business Insider in 2024 “characterized Robart’s trades and delayed disclosure to the parties as a minor issue,” they reported Thursday.)

But Thursday’s ruling notes that the delayed disclosure “taken together with the district court’s consistent rulings in Boeing’s favor during and after trial, could give an objective observer reason to question the district judge’s impartiality in further proceedings.”

Source: $81M ‘Trade Secrets’ Verdict Against Boeing Was Overturned – and Then Reinstated

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Category Archives: Economics

Meta earns 10% of revenue on a deluge of fraudulent ads, documents show

EU’s minimum wage laws may get shot down by (who else) Denmark

An ‘earthquake’ under EU’s social pillar

Epic and Google agree to settle their lawsuit and change Android’s fate globally

72% of game developers say Steam is effectively a PC gaming monopoly

Python Foundation rejects $1.5M grant with no-DEI strings

Apple faces £1.5B fine after losing UK App Store case

Irish Basic Income for Artists Scheme to become permanent

Why is the EU tech sector doing badly? EU Arduino Sells Out to US based Qualcomm

The Supreme Court Tells Google To Change Play Store after Loss from Epic Games, Not to Wait for Appeal

SWIFT and 30 banks will go Blockchain and become a mainstream part of global finance

YouTube coughs up $24.5 million to make Trump case (with no legal leg to stand on) go away. Oh, is that a bribe then?

Reddit will block the Internet Archive because AI MONEY

Europe must reach for the bazooka‚ or be humiliated

Google hit with $3.45 billion EU antitrust fine over adtech practices where US judge also found guilt but refused to punish

BMW kills home assistant integration access to paid ConnectedDrive API to “protect security”

AI Slop Is Great For Internet (Re-)Decentralisation

What is AI Slop?

Centralisation of Content

Centralisation of Underlying Technologies

So what does this have to do with AI Slop?

The worst possible antitrust outcome – unless you are Google

Judge who ruled Google is a monopoly says no need for punishment.

Yet another thing AI has ruined

And the billions will keep flowing

Pluralistic: Darth Android – Altering Terms After the Fact

Apple pulls torrenting app from a third-party store (one that it should not be able to control!) in the EU

The Threat Of Extreme Statutory Damages For Copyright Almost Certainly Made Anthropic Settle With Authors: Not the Use of Books for training, but the idiots used pirated books for training

Better than greenwashing, sustainability reporting boosts financials

Gamblers Now Bet on AI Models Like Racehorses

How Age Verification Laws Targeting Online Porn Could Be (And Should Be) Viewed As A Labor Rights Issue

$81M ‘Trade Secrets’ Verdict Against Boeing Was Overturned – and Then Reinstated