Some makers of smart speakers, video doorbells and other hardware hit roadblocks buying key ads in search results on Amazon; gadgets made by e-commerce giant get edge. From a report: Amazon.com is limiting the ability of some competitors to promote their rival smart speakers, video doorbells and other devices on its dominant e-commerce platform, according to Amazon employees and executives at rival companies and advertising firms. The strategy gives an edge to Amazon’s own devices, which the company regards as central to building consumer loyalty. It puts at a disadvantage an array of gadget makers such as Arlo that rely on Amazon’s site for a significant share of their sales. The e-commerce giant routinely lets companies buy ads that appear inside search results, including searches for competing products. Indeed, search advertising is a lucrative part of the company’s business.

But Amazon won’t let some of its own large competitors buy sponsored-product ads tied to searches for Amazon’s own devices, such as Fire TV, Echo Show and Ring Doorbell, according to some Amazon employees and others familiar with the policy. Roku which makes devices that stream content to TVs, can’t even buy such Amazon ads tied to its own products, some of these people said. In some cases, Amazon has barred competitors from selling certain devices on its site entirely. The policies show the conflicts between Amazon’s large e-commerce platform for sellers and its role as a product manufacturer in its own right. While traditional retailers buy inventory from manufacturers and resell it to consumers, limiting the number of vendors they can work with, Amazon’s platform has more than a million businesses and entrepreneurs selling directly to Amazon’s shoppers. Amazon accounts for 38% of online shopping in the U.S. and roughly half of all online shopping searches in the U.S. start on Amazon.com.

“News flash: retailers promote their own products and often don’t sell products of competitors,” said Amazon spokesman Drew Herdener in a written statement. “Walmart refuses to sell [Amazon brands] Kindle, Fire TV, and Echo. Shocker. In the Journal’s next story they will uncover gambling in Las Vegas.”

Source: Amazon Restricts How Rival Device Makers Buy Ads on Its Site – Slashdot

Which is another reason why marketplaces should not be allowed to sell products at all and another show of how monopoly dominance undercuts and destroys competition – which is bad for the consumer.

This is something I have been talking about since the beginning of last year and is now gaining traction

Google has decided to shut down the Chrome Web Store payments API permanently after what was supposed to be a temporary closure at the start of the year.

In January, the internet advertising biz halted the publication of Chrome apps, extensions, and themes in the Chrome Web Store that were either paid-for or took in-app payments, following a flood of fraudulent transactions.

By February, developers could again submit paid items to be reviewed for inclusion in the Chrome Web Store. But the following month, Google again disabled Chrome Web Store payments, citing the challenges presented by the emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic.

“We understand that these changes may cause inconvenience, and we apologize for any interruption of service,” the Silicon Valley giant’s Chrome Web Store (CWS) team said in its email to developers in March.

It was also in January that Google announced plans to phase out Chrome apps, only to revise its schedule in August. Chrome apps, also known as Chrome packaged apps, are web apps tied to Chrome that were intended to behave like native apps by being launchable from the desktop, outside of the browser window.

On Monday, another email went out to registered extension developers informing them that Chrome Web Store payments will stop functioning in February next year.

“When we launched the Chrome Web Store 11 years ago, there weren’t a lot of ways for our developers to take payment from users,” the message to extension developers stated. “Today, there is a thriving ecosystem of payment providers offering a far more diverse set of features than a single provider could hope to. Now that our developers have so many great options to choose from, we can comfortably sunset our own payments integration.”

As of this week, the inability to create new paid extensions and to implement in-app purchases using the CWS payment API, ongoing since March, became permanent. On December 1, 2020, free trials will be disabled and the “Try Now” button in the CWS will vanish. On February 1, 2021 active CWS items and in-purchases will no longer be able to make transactions, though querying license information for previously paid-for purchases and subscriptions will still be allowed.

And at some indeterminate time after that, the licensing API will no longer function. The payments deprecation schedule is explained on the Chrome developer website.

Most developers do not charge directly for their extensions. Among the roughly 190,000 extensions in the Chrome Web Store, about nine per cent are either paid or implement in-app purchasing, according to Extension Monitor. These account for about 2.6 per cent of some 1.2bn installs.

Google doesn’t make data available to discern how many of paid CWS items use the CWS payment system and how many use third-party services such as Stripe or Braintree. Unlike Apple’s iOS App Store, Google does not require developers to use its payment system for their apps or extensions.

[…]

 

Source: Another body for the Google graveyard: Chrome Web Store payments. Bad news if you wanted to bank some income from these apps • The Register

Leaked documents involving about $2tn of transactions have revealed how some of the world’s biggest banks have allowed criminals to move dirty money around the world.

They also show how Russian oligarchs have used banks to avoid sanctions that were supposed to stop them getting their money into the West.

It’s the latest in a string of leaks over the past five years that have exposed secret deals, money laundering and financial crime.

What are the FinCEN files?

The FinCEN files are more than 2,500 documents, most of which were files that banks sent to the US authorities between 2000 and 2017. They raise concerns about what their clients might be doing.

These documents are some of the international banking system’s most closely guarded secrets.

Banks use them to report suspicious behaviour but they are not proof of wrongdoing or crime.

They were leaked to Buzzfeed News and shared with a group that brings together investigative journalists from around the world, which distributed them to 108 news organisations in 88 countries, including the BBC’s Panorama programme.

Hundreds of journalists have been sifting through the dense, technical documentation, uncovering some of the activities that banks would prefer the public not to know about.

Getty

FinCEN Files

• 2,657documents including
• 2,121 Suspicious Activity Reports

Source: ICIJ

Two acronyms you need to know

FinCEN is the US Financial Crimes Investigation Network. These are the people at the US Treasury who combat financial crime. Concerns about transactions made in US dollars need to be sent to FinCEN, even if they took place outside the US.

Suspicious activity reports, or SARs, are an example of how those concerns are recorded. A bank must fill in one of these reports if it is worried one of its clients might be up to no good. The report is sent to the authorities.

Why does this matter?

If you are planning to profit from a criminal enterprise, one of the most important things to have in place is a way of laundering the money.

Laundering money is the process of taking dirty money – the proceeds of crimes such as drug dealing or corruption – and getting it into an account at a respected bank where it will not be linked with the crime.

The same process is needed if you are a Russian oligarch whom Western countries have taken sanctions against to stop you getting your money into the West.

Banks are supposed to make sure they don’t help clients to launder money or move it around in ways that break the rules.

By law, they have to know who their clients are – it’s not enough to file SARs and keep taking dirty money from clients while expecting the authorities to deal with the problem. If they have evidence of criminal activity they should stop moving the cash.

Fergus Shiel from the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) said the leaked files were an “insight into what banks know about the vast flows of dirty money across the globe”.

He said the documents also highlighted the extraordinarily large amounts of money involved. The documents in the FinCEN files cover about $2tn of transactions and they are only a tiny proportion of the SARs submitted over the period.

What has been revealed?

• HSBC allowed fraudsters to move millions of dollars of stolen money around the world, even after it learned from US investigators the scheme was a scam.
• JP Morgan allowed a company to move more than $1bn through a London account without knowing who owned it. The bank later discovered the company might be owned by a mobster on the FBI’s 10 Most Wanted list.
• Evidence that one of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s closest associates used Barclays Bank in London to avoid sanctions which were meant to stop him using financial services in the West. Some of the cash was used to buy works of art.
• The UK is called a “higher risk jurisdiction” like Cyprus, according to the intelligence division of FinCEN. That’s because of the number of UK registered companies that appear in the SARs. Over 3,000 UK companies are named in the FinCEN files – more than any other country.
• The United Arab Emirates’ central bank failed to act on warnings about a local firm which was helping Iran evade sanctions.
• Deutsche Bank moved money launderers’ dirty money for organised crime, terrorists and drug traffickers. More details (BuzzFeed News)
• Standard Chartered moved cash for Arab Bank for more than a decade after clients’ accounts at the Jordanian bank had been used in funding terrorism.

Image copyright EPA

Why is this leak different?

There have been a number of big leaks of financial information in recent years, including:

• 2017 Paradise Papers – A huge batch of leaked documents from an offshore legal service provider Appleby and corporate services provider Estera. The two operated together under the Appleby name until Estera became independent in 2016. They revealed the offshore financial dealings of politicians, celebrities and business leaders
• 2016 Panama Papers – Leaked documents from the law firm Mossack Fonseca showed more about how wealthy people were using offshore tax regimes to their benefit
• 2015 Swiss Leaks – Documents from HSBC’s Swiss private bank showed how it was using the country’s banking secrecy laws to help clients avoid paying tax
• 2014 LuxLeaks contained documents from the accountancy firm PricewaterhouseCoopers showing that big companies were using tax deals in Luxembourg to reduce the amount they were having to pay

The FinCEN papers are different because they are not just documents from one or two companies – they come from a number of banks.

They highlight a range of potentially suspicious activity involving companies and individuals and also raise questions about why the banks which had noticed this activity did not always act on their concerns.

FinCEN said the leak could impact on US national security, compromise investigations, and threaten the safety of institutions and individuals who file the reports.

But last week it announced proposals to overhaul its anti-money laundering programmes.

The UK has also unveiled plans to reform its register of company information to clamp down on fraud and money laundering.

Source: All you need to know about FinCEN documents leak

Europe’s top court has decided that the continent’s network neutrality rules will stand, rejecting challenges from the telecoms industry.

In a ruling [PDF] on Tuesday, the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) decided that “the requirements to protect internet users’ rights and to treat traffic in a non-discriminatory manner preclude an internet access provider from favouring certain applications and services.”

Or, in other words, people come before telco business models. And that includes the edge case of “zero tariff” arrangements where data caps don’t apply to specific apps or services that the ISP or telco designates. Picture a broadband provider allowing, say, Netflix streams to not count toward subscribers’ monthly download limits, which squeezes Netflix’s competitors out of the market. Blocking access to, traffic slowdowns of, and “fast lanes” for specific applications are also out.

The decision was welcomed by consumer-rights groups and internet companies, though ISPs and telcos are disappointed: they feel the net neutrality rules are too restrictive, and prevent them from bringing in new revenue to replace falling income from traditional telephone lines.

The judgment came after a Hungarian court asked for guidance when one of its telcos, Telenor Magyarorszag, offered a zero-tariff option to subscribers. The country’s technology regulator said that approach broke Europe’s net neutrality rules, which were passed back in 2015, and the telco challenged its decision.

It is, to the best of our knowledge, the first time the CJEU has weighed in on the open internet. Interest in the case was made clear by the number of comments from countries’ governments that were submitted to the court for review: Austria, the Czech Republic, Finland, Germany, the Netherlands, Romania, and Slovenia all weighed in.

[…]

The court said its interpretation of the relevant regulations was that no company had the right to limit people’s right to an open internet and that people exercised those rights “via their internet access service.”

[…]

And, just to stick the knife in, it argued that any “measures blocking or slowing down traffic are based not on objectively different technical quality of service requirements for specific categories of traffic, but on commercial considerations, those measures must in themselves be regarded as incompatible with Article 3(3).”

In essence, Europe’s top court decided that money does not come before people’s rights. In the United States, meanwhile, the issue of net neutrality has everything to do with money.

[…]

Source: Net neutrality lives… in Europe, anyway: Top court supports open internet rules, snubs telcos and ISPs • The Register

In late 2016, Nikola Motor Company founder Trevor Milton unveiled a prototype of the Nikola One truck, claiming it “fully functions and works, which is really incredible.” A couple years later, in January 2018, the company showed the Nikola One truck moving rapidly along a two-lane desert highway. But last week, the short-selling investment firm Hindenburg Research published a bombshell report, accusing Nikola Motors of massive fraud, having no proprietary technology and vastly overstating the capabilities of their prototypes to investors.

Incredibly, “Hindenburg reported that the truck in the ‘Nikola One in motion’ video wasn’t moving under its own power,” reports Ars Technica. “Rather, Nikola had towed the truck to the top of a shallow hill and let it roll down. The company allegedly tilted the camera to make it look like the truck was traveling under its own power on a level roadway.” From the report: On Monday morning, Nikola sent out a lengthy press release titled “Nikola Sets the Record Straight on False and Misleading Short Seller Report.” While the statement nitpicks a number of claims in the Hindenburg report, it tacitly concedes Hindenburg’s main claim about the Nikola One. Nikola now admits that the Nikola One prototype wasn’t functional in December 2016 and still wasn’t functional when the company released the “in motion” video 13 months later. Nikola claims that the gearbox, batteries, inverters, power steering, and some other components of the truck were functional at the time of the December 2016 show. But Nikola doesn’t claim that the truck had a working hydrogen fuel cell or motors to drive the wheels — the two key components Hindenburg stated were missing from the truck in December 2016.

And Nikola now admits that it never got the truck to fully function. “As Nikola pivoted to the next generation of trucks, it ultimately decided not to invest additional resources into completing the process to make the Nikola One drive on its own propulsion,” Nikola wrote in its Monday statement. Instead, Nikola pivoted to working on its next vehicle, the Nikola Two. So what about that video of the Nikola One driving across the desert? “Nikola never stated its truck was driving under its own propulsion in the video,” Nikola wrote. “Nikola described this third-party video on the Company’s social media as ‘In Motion.’ It was never described as ‘under its own propulsion’ or ‘powertrain driven.’ Nikola investors who invested during this period, in which the Company was privately held, knew the technical capability of the Nikola One at the time of their investment.”

Source: Nikola Admits Prototype Was Rolling Downhill In Promo Video – Slashdot

Alphabet Inc.’s Google faces a multibillion-dollar lawsuit in the U.K. over claims that YouTube routinely breaks privacy laws by tracking children online.

The suit, filed on behalf of more than 5 million British children under 13 and their parents, is being brought by privacy campaigner Duncan McCann and being supported by Foxglove, a tech justice group. The claimants estimate that if they’re successful, there would be as much as 2.5 billion pounds ($3.2 billion) in compensation, worth between 100 to 500 pounds per child.

The filing alleges that YouTube’s methods of targeting underage audiences constitute “major breaches” of U.K. and European privacy and data rules designed to protect citizens’ control over their own private information. YouTube has “systematically broken these laws by harvesting children’s data without obtaining prior parental consent,” it alleges.

A spokesperson for YouTube declined to comment on the lawsuit Monday but added that the video streaming service isn’t designed for users under the age of 13.

“We launched the YouTube Kids app as a dedicated destination for kids and are always working to better protect kids and families on YouTube,” the company said in an emailed statement.

Source: Google Faces $3 Billion U.K. Suit Over Use of Children’s Data – Bloomberg

A new report by the consumer watchdog group Public Citizen accuses Amazon of price gouging during the pandemic. According to the group, Amazon increased the prices of essential items like masks, hand sanitizer, disinfectant spray, paper towels and toilet paper.

According to the report, the cost of a 50-pack of disposable face masks jumped from about $4 on April 1st to $39.99 on August 16th. That’s a 900 percent increase. Toilet paper sold by other retailers for $6.89 sold on Amazon for nearly $37, Public Citizen says. In August, the cost of disinfectant spray reportedly increased from about $7 to $13, a jump of more than 80 percent. Even the prices of flour, sugar and cornstarch varied widely.

[…]

Source: Watchdog accuses Amazon of price gouging during the pandemic | Engadget

Step 1: Forget what you think you know

If you want to commit significant financial crime, therefore, you need a bank account, because electronic cash weighs nothing, no matter how much of it there is. But that causes a new problem: the bank account will have your name on it, which will alert the authorities to your identity if they come looking.

This is where shell companies come in. Without a company, you have to act in person, which means your involvement is obvious and overt: the bank account is in your name. But using a company to own that bank account is like robbing a house with gloves on – it leaves no fingerprints, as long as the company’s ownership information is hidden from the authorities. This is why all sensible crooks do it.

[…]

Here is the secret you need to know to get started in the shell company game: the British company registration system contains a giant loophole – the kind of loophole you can drive a billion euros through without touching the sides.

[…]

. The true image associated with “shell companies” these days should not be an exotic island redolent of the sound of the sea and the smell of rum cocktails, but a damp-stained office block in an unfashionable London suburb, or a nondescript street in a northern city. If you want to set up in the money-laundering business, you don’t need to move to the Caribbean: you’d be far better off doing it from the comfort of your own home.

Step 2: Set up a company

The second step is easy, and involves creating a company on the Companies House website. Companies House maintains the UK’s registry of corporate structures and publishes information on shareholders, directors, accounts, partners and so on, so anyone can check up on their bona fides.

Setting up a company costs £12 and takes less than 24 hours. According to the World Bank’s annual Doing Business report, the UK is one of the easiest places anywhere to create a company, so you’ll find the process pretty straightforward.

[…]

While it has bullied the tax havens into checking up on their customers, Britain itself doesn’t bother with all those tiresome and expensive “due diligence” formalities. It is true that, while registering your company on the Companies House website, you will find that it asks for information such as your name and address.

[…]

Step 3: Make stuff up

This third step may be the hardest to really take in, because it seems too simple. Since 2016, the UK government has made it compulsory for anyone setting up a company to name the individual who actually owns it: “the person with significant control”, or PSC.

[…]

Here is the secret: no one checks the accuracy of the information you provide when you register with Companies House. You can say pretty much anything and Companies House will accept it.

[…]

Suspicious typos are everywhere once you start delving into the Companies House database.

[…]

Recently, while messing about on the Companies House website, I came across a PSC named Mr Xxx Stalin, who is apparently a Frenchman resident in east London.

[…]

Xxx Stalin led me to a PSC of a different company, who was named Mr Kwan Xxx, a Kazakh citizen, resident in Germany; then to Xxx Raven; to Miss Tracy Dean Xxx; to Jet Xxx; and finally to (their distant cousin?) Mr Xxxx Xxx. These rabbitholes are curiously engrossing, and before long I’d found Mr Mmmmmmm Yyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy, and Mr Mmmmmm Xxxxxxxxxxx (correspondence address: Mmmmmmm, Mmmmmm, Mmm, MMM), at which point I decided to stop.

As trolling goes, it is quite funny, but the implications are also very serious, if you think about what companies are supposed to be for. Limited companies and partnerships have their liability for debts limited, which means that if they go bust, their investors are not personally bankrupted. It’s a form of insurance – society as a whole is accepting responsibility for entrepreneurs’ debts, because we want to encourage entrepreneurial behaviour. In return, entrepreneurs agree to publish details about their companies so we can all check what they are up to, and to make sure they’re not abusing our trust.

[…]

The anti-corruption campaign group Global Witness looked into PSCs last year, and found 4,000 of them were under the age of two. One hadn’t even been born yet. At the opposite end of the spectrum, its researchers found five individuals who each controlled more than 6,000 companies. There are more than 4m companies at Companies House, which is a very large haystack to hide needles in.

You don’t actually even need to list a person as your company’s PSC. It’s permissible to say that your company doesn’t know who owns it (no, you’re not misunderstanding; that just doesn’t make sense), or simply to tie the system up in knots by listing multiple companies in multiple jurisdictions that no investigator without the time and resources of the FBI could ever properly check.

This is why step three is such an important one in the five-step pathway to creating a British shell company. If you can invent enough information when filing company accounts, then the calculation that underpins the whole idea of a company goes out of the window: you gain the protection from legal action, without giving up anything in return. It’s brilliant.

[…]

Step 4: Lie – but do so cleverly

Most of the daft examples earlier (Mmmmmmm, Mmmmmm, Mmm, MMM) would not be useful for committing fraud, since anyone looking at them can tell they’re not serious. Cumberland Capital Ltd, however, was a different matter. It looked completely legitimate.

[…]

When US police came looking for the people behind Cumberland Capital Ltd, they searched the Companies House website and found that its director was an Australian citizen called Manford Martin Mponda. Anyone researching binary-options fraud might quickly conclude that Mponda was a kingpin. He was a serial company director, with some 80 directorships in UK-registered companies to his name, and features in dozens of complaints.

It already looked like a major scandal that British regulation was so lax that Mponda could have been allowed to conduct a global fraud epidemic behind the screen of UK-registered companies, but the reality was even more remarkable: Mponda had nothing to do with it. He was a victim, too.

Police officers suspect that, after Mponda submitted his details to join a binary-options website, his identity was stolen so it could be used to register him as a director of dozens of UK companies. The scheme was only exposed after complaints to consumer protection bodies were passed onto the City of London police, who then asked their Australian colleagues to investigate.

[…]

So here is step four: don’t just lie, lie cleverly. British companies look legitimate, so look legitimate yourself. Steal a real person’s name, and put that on the company documents. Don’t put your own address on the documents, rent a serviced office to take your post: Paul Manafort used one in Finchley, the binary options fraudsters went to Liverpool, and Lantana Trade was based in the London suburb of Harrow.

[…]

Step 5: Don’t worry about it

I know what you’re thinking: it cannot be this easy. Surely you’ll be arrested, tried and jailed if you try to follow this five-step process. But if you look at what British officials do, rather than at what they say, you’ll begin to feel a lot more secure. The Business Department has repeatedly been warned that the UK is facilitating this kind of financial crime for the best part of a decade, and is yet to take any substantive action to stop it. (Though, to be fair, it did recently launch a “consultation”.)

[…]

In 2011, then-business secretary and Liberal Democrat MP Vince Cable decided to open up Companies House, and everything changed. After Cable’s reform, anyone with an internet connection, anywhere in the world, could create a UK company in about as much time as it takes to order a couple of pizzas, and for approximately the same amount of money. The checks were gone; there was no longer any connection to a verifiably existing person; it was as easy to create a UK company as it was to set up a Twitter account. The rationale was that this would unleash the latent entrepreneurship within the British nation by making it easy to turn business ideas into thriving concerns.

Instead of unchaining a new generation of British businesspeople, however, Cable let slip the dogs of fraud. At first, this rather technical modification to an obscure corner of the British machinery of state did not garner much attention, but for people who understood what it meant it was alarming.

[…]

There is, it turns out, a simple explanation for why successive governments have failed to do anything about it. Last year, when challenged in the House of Commons, Treasury minister John Glen stated that Companies House simply couldn’t afford to check the information filed with it, since that would cost the UK economy hundreds of millions of pounds a year. This is almost certainly an exaggeration. Anti-corruption activists who have looked at the data say the cost would in fact be far less than that, but the key point is that the reform would pay for itself. As Brewer has pointed out, “the burden of cost is one thing. But the cost of fraud is far greater.”

VAT fraud alone costs the UK more than £1bn a year, while the National Crime Agency estimates the cost of all fraud to the UK economy to be £190bn. The cost to the rest of the world of the money laundering enabled by UK corporate entities is almost certainly far higher.

[…]

lesson number five: don’t worry about it. Commit as much fraud as you like, fill your boots, the only reason anyone would care is if you kick up a fuss. And what sensible fraudster is going to do that?

Source: How Britain can help you get away with stealing millions: a five-step guide | World news | The Guardian

Blogger/science fiction writer Cory Doctorow (also a former EFF staffer and activist) has just published How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism — a new book which he’s publishing free online.

In a world swamped with misinformation and monopolies, Doctorow says he’s knows what’s missing from our proposed solutions: If we’re going to break Big Tech’s death grip on our digital lives, we’re going to have to fight monopolies. That may sound pretty mundane and old-fashioned, something out of the New Deal era, while ending the use of automated behavioral modification feels like the plotline of a really cool cyberpunk novel… But trustbusters once strode the nation, brandishing law books, terrorizing robber barons, and shattering the illusion of monopolies’ all-powerful grip on our society. The trustbusting era could not begin until we found the political will — until the people convinced politicians they’d have their backs when they went up against the richest, most powerful men in the world. Could we find that political will again…?

That’s the good news: With a little bit of work and a little bit of coalition building, we have more than enough political will to break up Big Tech and every other concentrated industry besides. First we take Facebook, then we take AT&T/WarnerMedia. But here’s the bad news: Much of what we’re doing to tame Big Tech instead of breaking up the big companies also forecloses on the possibility of breaking them up later… Allowing the platforms to grow to their present size has given them a dominance that is nearly insurmountable — deputizing them with public duties to redress the pathologies created by their size makes it virtually impossible to reduce that size. Lather, rinse, repeat: If the platforms don’t get smaller, they will get larger, and as they get larger, they will create more problems, which will give rise to more public duties for the companies, which will make them bigger still.

We can work to fix the internet by breaking up Big Tech and depriving them of monopoly profits, or we can work to fix Big Tech by making them spend their monopoly profits on governance. But we can’t do both. We have to choose between a vibrant, open internet or a dominated, monopolized internet commanded by Big Tech giants that we struggle with constantly to get them to behave themselves…

Big Tech wired together a planetary, species-wide nervous system that, with the proper reforms and course corrections, is capable of seeing us through the existential challenge of our species and planet. Now it’s up to us to seize the means of computation, putting that electronic nervous system under democratic, accountable control.
With “free, fair, and open tech” we could then tackle our other urgent problems “from climate change to social change” — all with collective action, Doctorow argues. And “The internet is how we will recruit people to fight those fights, and how we will coordinate their labor.

“Tech is not a substitute for democratic accountability, the rule of law, fairness, or stability — but it’s a means to achieve these things.”

Source: Cory Doctorow’s New Book Explains ‘How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism’ – Slashdot

Powell’s Books says it won’t sell on Amazon anymore, declaring that the online retail giant undermines communities by siphoning business from the real world and replacing it with internet commerce.

“For too long, we have watched the detrimental impact of Amazon’s business on our communities and the independent bookselling world,” CEO Emily Powell wrote in a note to customers Wednesday.

“The vitality of our neighbors and neighborhoods depends on the ability of local businesses to thrive,” Powell wrote. “We will not participate in undermining that vitality.”

Portland-based Powell’s is among the world’s largest bookstores and is the city’s signature retailer. But it’s dwarfed by the inventory available through Amazon’s website.

So Powell’s, like many other retailers, supplements its business by listing its products on Amazon’s own site – and giving Amazon a share of each sale.

That puts smaller retailers at an obvious disadvantage, given that they’re depending on a much larger competitor for an important share of their sales. But many feel they have no choice but to list on Amazon given that company’s dominant market position online.

Seattle-based Amazon did not respond to a request for comment and Powell’s declined to elaborate on Wednesday’s statement. However, Emily Powell told CNBC that Amazon had been a “big sales generator” for the Portland bookstore.

“It was hard to give up, sort of like smoking,” she said. “We knew we shouldn’t be doing it, but, you know, we sort of needed it from a sales perspective to keep going. We couldn’t face the possibility of not having that sales channel.”

The pandemic changed the landscape, Powell said, with Amazon prioritizing cleaning supplies and other essential goods — slowing the shipment of books. Powell said its Amazon sales slowed so she decided to focus on the bookstore’s own website.

“We just decided to make that a permanent business choice,” Powell said.

Source: Powell’s says it won’t sell books on Amazon anymore: ‘We must take a stand’ – oregonlive.com

Intel, HP, Tesla and a host of other tech giants have written to America’s Federal Trade Commission (FTC) urging it to appeal Qualcomm’s legal win against the watchdog in a row over patent fees.

The FTC had successfully sued Qualcomm, arguing the corporation rode roughshod over antitrust laws, only for that victory to be overturned earlier this month on appeal. Now the technology world’s big names want the regulator to fight that latest ruling.

The appeals court decision “undermines longstanding US law and policy and wrongly applies competition law,” the letter from 21 organizations argued. “If it becomes precedent, this decision would endanger domestic competitiveness, as well as weaken the ability of the FTC to protect consumers through future enforcement actions.”

Often derided as a toothless watchdog, the FTC found some courage in 2017 and took Qualcomm to court for abusing its its numerous critical patents to force companies to pay it inflated licensing fees before they were allowed to buy its chips.

The case put a spotlight on the double-dealing and backstabbing world of chips and mobile phones with claims of arrogant and bullying Qualcomm execs hassing big customers and that Apple top brass who agreed to undermine a rival technology in return for lower licensing rates.

The FTC won the case, with a strong decision from federal district Judge Lucy Koh accusing Qualcomm of having “strangled competition… and harmed rivals, OEMs and end consumers in the process.” But Qualcomm appealed and, to many people’s surprise, won.

Abusive or hypercompetitive?

Where the district court found that Qualcomm had abused its position and issued a permanent injunction against the company, the appeals court decided instead that Qualcomm had engaged in “hypercompetitive behavior.”

“Our job is not to condone or punish Qualcomm for its success, but rather to assess whether the FTC has met its burden under the rule of reason to show that Qualcomm’s practices have crossed the line to ‘conduct which unfairly tends to destroy competition itself’,” the appeals court decided.

The panel also found that if Qualcomm did breach obligations to license its SEPs [standard-essential patent] on fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory terms, it would be a breach of contract issue, not an antitrust problem. And it found that the company’s “no license, no chips” policy did not impose a surcharge on the sales of chips by rivals, contradicting the lower court’s finding.

The 21 letter signatories, which also include Ford, Honda, Daimler and several industry associations, take issue with that decision and argue that the Ninth Circuit panel decision “misapplies competition law to the facts of the case, was particularly misguided in asserting that Qualcomm’s breach of its FRAND commitments did not impair rivals, controverts existing Ninth Circuit precedent, and undermines the critical role standards play in facilitating competition and innovation.”

They argue that the FTC should ask for an en banc meeting of the Ninth Circuit where 11 judges, rather than three, hear the case. Without that larger appeal, the FTC can only go to the Supreme Court and it’s far from certain it would hear the case, leaving the current decision to stand.

Stable genius

The letter warns that if that happens, it “could destabilize the standards ecosystem by encouraging the abuse of market power acquired through collaborative standard-setting” as well as “embolden foreign entities to refuse to license their standard essential patents (SEPs) to competitors in the United States.”

They also pointedly tells the FTC that if it doesn’t ,the agency would be undermining its own authority: “Because of the key role the FTC plays in protecting American consumers and competition, we urge you to consider how the panel’s decision impacts the FTC’s ability to carry out its mission, whether as to SEP issues or otherwise.

[…]

Source: Intel, HP, Tesla, etc protest to US monopoly watchdog: Are you just gonna let Qualcomm patent-tax us to death? • The Register

Apple has clarified the situation with the WordPress iOS app, apologizing for the mistake of blocking developer updates to the app until they added in-app purchases, despite the app not including any functionality involving payments.

On Friday, it was reported the lack of app updates for the WordPress app were due to it being “locked” on the App Store. After three weeks of absence, developers of the app had agreed to implement some form of in-app purchase to the app to enable updates to go through again, among other possible solutions.

In a statement provided to AppleInsider on Saturday, Apple claims the issue with the app has been “resolved” overnight.

“Since the developer removed the display of their service payment options from the app, it is now a free stand-alone app and does not have to offer in-app purchases,” states Apple. “We have informed the developer and apologize for any confusion that we have caused.”

At the time the block came to light, it was suggested the app was blocked because it was possible for users to see a page within the app’s Help Center discussing upgrades to paid plans. This is in reference to WordPress.com’s paid hosting offerings, which are managed from the website, not the app.

While the app itself doesn’t offer any monetary transaction capabilities at all, it is believed the mention in the support page for the website version was a violation of App Store review guidelines

Source: Apple didn’t force in-app purchases on WordPress | Appleinsider

How Appleinsider managed to turn the above content into the above headline is a mystery to me.

A Federal US judge questioned why Apple takes a 30 per cent slice of developer revenues as she ruled that while Apple cannot cut off Epic’s access to iOS Unreal Engine development tools, she would not order the company to allow Fortnite to return to the App Store.

In the eight-page order [PDF], Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers, the Northern California district judge yesterday said that Unreal – used by hundreds of third-party devs for both console and mobile games inside and out of Apple’s App Store and dubbed by Microsoft at the weekend as a “critical technology” – was governed by a separate contract between the parties, the “Xcode and Apple [software development kits] Agreement”.

Epic Games and Apple are at liberty to litigate against each other, but their dispute should not create havoc to bystanders

She said it was “relevant” that this was distinct from “Apple’s agreements with developers and the App Store guidelines”, which do not generally permit third-party developers to circumvent the IAP [in-app purchases] system”.

The move on 13 August that kicked this all off – the activation of “allegedly hidden code in Fortnite allowing Epic Games to collect in-app purchases directly” via its “Fortnite Mega Drop” – was described as “calculated” by the Northern California court judge.

Making that move, as we’ve previosuly mentioned, precluded Apple from taking its traditional 30 per cent cut and saw the developer booted out of the store, prompting it to fling an almost certainly pre-prepared sueball at Cupertino as the boot hit its face.

Epic’s original complaint alleged Apple is abusing its dominant position by seeking to “control markets, block competition, and stifle innovation”.

The split order was handed down late last night after some oral wrangling with Apple’s counsel over Zoom – dodging an authentication issue on the platform earlier that day.

The judge reportedly asked Apple lawyer Richard Doren at the Zoom hearing yesterday: “The question is, without competition: where does the 30 per cent (App Store commission) come from? Why isn’t it 10? 20? How is the consumer benefiting?”

To the last question, Doren, a partner at LA law firm Gibson Dunn & Crutcher LLP, replied that consumers could choose when deciding to buy an Android device or an iPhone.

In the written order filed late yesterday, the judge noted:

While the Court anticipates experts will opine that Apple’s 30 percent take is anti-competitive, the Court doubts that an expert would suggest a zero per cent alternative. Not even Epic Games gives away its products for free.

The order will be a relief to Epic in that it won’t be cut off from Unreal Engine development on Apple’s operating systems; the judge noted the court had to weigh up whether an “injunction is in the public interest”.

She spoke of the “potential significant damage to both the Unreal Engine platform itself, and to the gaming industry generally, including on both third-party developers and gamers”, adding that “not only has the underlying [SDK] agreement not been breached, but the economy is in dire need of increasing avenues for creativity and innovation, not eliminating them. Epic Games and Apple are at liberty to litigate against each other, but their dispute should not create havoc to bystanders.”

Source: Epic move: Judge says Apple can’t revoke Unreal Engine dev tools, asks ‘Where does the 30 per cent come from?’ • The Register

Microsoft’s Kevin Gammill, general manager of Gaming Developer Experiences, called Epic’s Unreal Engine “critical technology” in a filing at the weekend [PDF] in support of Epic’s motion for a temporary restraining order to prevent Apple from terminating its developer account.

Referring to the statement, Xbox supremo Phil Spencer tweeted yesterday to say “ensuring that Epic has access to the latest Apple technology is the right thing for gamer developers and gamers.”

Gammill’s argument is that Unreal Engine, a cross-platform runtime and development environment, is “critical technology for numerous game creators including Microsoft”, and that “there are few other options available for creators to license with as many features and as much functionality as Unreal Engine.”

“If Unreal Engine cannot support games for iOS or macOS, Microsoft would be required to choose between abandoning its customers and potential customers on the iOS and macOS platforms or choosing a different game engine when preparing to develop new games,” said Gammill in the filing. He added that it would also harm those with games in “later stages of development” using Unreal Engine, and already-launched games for which Unreal Engine could no longer be updated or receive security patches.

[…]

Source: Microsoft sides with Epic over Apple developer ban, supports motion for temporary restraining order • The Register

As PC Gamer’s Fortnite guy, I’ve written many a guide to Epic’s various tournaments, cash cups, and special events, but few have ever been as weird as this one. On Thursday evening, Epic announced the #FreeFortnite Cup, a new tournament seemingly designed to continue Epic’s campaign against Apple and Google. Barring a legal miracle, it’s effectively your last chance to cross-play with friends on iOS and Android devices for a long while.

“All of your friends. Awesome prizes. And one bad apple,” Epic writes.

The prizes available? Well, that’s where things get a little… silly.

Participants who score ten or more points during the tournament (details below) will earn the ‘Tart Tycoon’ skin. You’ll recognize it as the apple man from Epic’s parody of Apple’s famous 1984 ad that made the rounds last week. Here he is in all his subtle glory.

It’s pretty much a guarantee that anyone who plays a couple matches during the tournament window will earn the skin, as you get points just for surviving every minute.

Epic could have stopped there and called it a day, but no. For some reason, they’re offering the top 20,000 players a #FreeFortnite hat. A dad hat. A dad hat with the Fortnite llama colored like Apple’s old rainbow logo.

God have mercy on us all.

Epic is also giving 1,200 players (of undetermined criteria) some free gaming gear, like Alienware gaming laptops, Samsung Galaxy Tabs, and some good old-fashioned consoles. Not sure if that’s going to stem the tide of millions of mobile players from calling up customer support, but it’s a start?

Either way, Epic is clearly rolling full steam ahead with its campaign against Apple and Google. Whether or not they can win against the tech giants in a court of law remains to be seen, but Epic is certainly investing in the court of public opinion.

Source: Epic Games Free Fortnite cup time: How to get the Fortnite apple skin | PC Gamer

WordPress, the iOS app, lets you build and manage a website right from your iPhone or iPad, for free.

Separately, WordPress.com also happens to sell domain names and fancier website packages.

Now, WordPress founding developer Matt Mullenweg is accusing Apple of cutting off the ability to update that app — until or unless he adds in-app purchases so the most valuable company in the world can extract its 30 percent cut of the money.

Heads up on why @WordPressiOS updates have been absent… we were locked by App Store. To be able to ship updates and bug fixes again we had to commit to support in-app purchases for .com plans. I know why this is problematic, open to suggestions. Allow others IAP? New name?

— Matt Mullenweg (@photomatt) August 21, 2020

Here’s the thing: the WordPress app on iOS doesn’t sell anything. I just checked, and so did Stratechery’s Ben Thompson. The app simply lets you make a website for free. There isn’t even an option to buy a unique dot-com or even dot-blog domain name from the iPhone and iPad app — it simply assigns you a free WordPress domain name and 3GB of space.

To be clear, the app doesn’t sell anything, and why would it? It’s an open source project. Apple is requiring the addition of functionality that has no plausible reason to exist.

— Ben Thompson (@benthompson) August 21, 2020

Apple admitted to The Verge that it’s involved, reminding us that in-app purchases are required whenever apps “allow users to access content, subscriptions, or features they have acquired in your app on other platforms or your web site.” But again, the WordPress app doesn’t sell anything itself, and it sounds like you can’t do anything special with anything you’ve purchased from WordPress.com (beyond uploading additional files or selecting website themes) from the app, either.

While Mullenweg says there technically was a roundabout way for an iOS to find out that WordPress has paid tiers (they could find it buried in support pages, or by navigating to WordPress’s site from a preview of their own webpage), he says that Apple rejected his offer to block iOS users from seeing the offending pages.

Mullenweg tells The Verge he’s not going to fight it anymore, though — he will add brand-new in-app purchases for WordPress.com’s paid tiers, which include domain names, within 30 days. Apple has agreed to allow Automattic to update the app while it waits. (The last update was issued yesterday.)

In other words, Apple won: the richest company in the world just successfully forced an app developer to monetize an app so it could make more money. It’s just the latest example of Apple’s fervent attempts to guard its cash cow resulting in a decision that doesn’t make much sense and doesn’t live up to Apple’s ethos (real or imagined) of putting the customer experience ahead of all else.

Source: WordPress claims Apple cut off updates to its completely free app because it wants 30 percent – The Verge

Major news organizations are joining Epic Games in the push for Apple to rethink its app store terms following Fortnite’s high-profile ban this month.

Digital Content Next, a trade organization representing the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, and dozens of other media outlets and publishers (including yours truly, G/O Media), sent a letter to Apple CEO Tim Cook on Thursday asking if it was possible to renegotiate a better deal with the tech giant regarding its notoriously high commission rates for app developers. AKA what’s infamously known as “the Apple tax.”

As it stands, news outlets fork over 30% of all revenue from first-time subscriptions made through iOS apps, with Apple’s cut falling to 15% after the first year should the reader continue their subscription, per the Wall Street Journal. A 30% tax on an app’s revenue is standard across the board on both Google and Apple’s app stores, though the latter gets significantly more heat for this because of its walled garden (whereas Android’s open ecosystem allows for multiple stores if app developers would rather not pay the toll).

“The terms of Apple’s unique marketplace greatly impact the ability to continue to invest in high-quality, trusted news and entertainment particularly in competition with other larger firms,” said the letter, which is signed by Digital Content Next’s CEO, Jason Kint.

In the letter, Kint argues that Apple has previously made an exception to its usual 30% rate for one preeminent customer in particular: Amazon. Emails between top Apple exec Eddy Cue and Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos that were revealed in an antitrust hearing last month showed that Amazon agreed to pay Apple just 15% of its revenue from Amazon Prime Video subscriptions during its first year on the app store. Given this, Kint contends that Digital Content Next’s news outlets and publishers should qualify for the same kind of modified terms Amazon was offered. At the very least, Apple needs to outline what conditions Amazon met to receive such a discount and afford other app developers the same opportunity.

“The monopolistic behavior of big tech puts a wide range of industries—not the least of which is the news industry—at a distinct disadvantage,” the group’s SVP of government affairs, Chris Pedigo, wrote in a blog post Thursday. “It is laudable that EU and American regulatory bodies are digging in and uncovering these anti-competitive behaviors. Talking trust is not enough. We need to level the playing field and transparency is a critical first step.”

[…]

Source: News outlets join Epic in challenging Apple’s app store terms