obuaki Kobayashi, the trustee for the Mt. Gox bankruptcy, has announced that the deadline for repayment selection and registration of payee information for its creditors has been moved from Jan. 10 to Mar. 10.

According to Kobayashi, the change was made due to “various circumstances such as the progress by rehabilitation creditors in respect of the Selection and Registration.”

Mt. Gox was one of the leading Bitcoin exchanges in the early days of crypto but was forced to declare bankruptcy in 2014 after a supposed hack that led to the theft of 850,000 Bitcoin. Roughly 200,000 BTC has been recovered since the hack, and the repayment of Mt. Gox creditors has been a slow-motion development since the Civil Rehabilitation Plan was accepted by 99% of them on Oct. 20, 2021. As of July 6, 2022, the Mt. Gox trustee held close to 142,000 Bitcoins.

This latest announcement from Kobayashi means that the repayment to creditors will take even more time as the trustee looks to ensure that everyone who is owed funds can properly submit their claims.

Those who have yet to complete the necessary registration were encouraged to do so as soon as possible as rehabilitation creditors who do not complete their selection and registration by the new deadline will not be able to receive their repayment, the announcement said.

Some creditors may be required to bring the required documents to the head office of MtGox or a location designated by the Rehabilitation Trustee to receive repayment in Japanese yen.

According to the announcement, “The Rehabilitation Trustee will begin confirming the contents of your Selection and Registration, etc., after this point in time in order to make repayment as promptly as possible after March 10, 2023 (Japan time).”Creditors have the choice of receiving an early lump sum repayment, repayment for a portion of cryptocurrency rehabilitation claims in cryptocurrency, repayment by bank remittance, or repayment by remittance through a fund transfer service provider.

The new deadline is meant for those who have yet to complete the process while those that have already done so do not need to do anything further at this time. The update also requested that those who already completed the process abstain from making any revisions to their registration unless absolutely necessary to help make the confirmation process go as smoothly as possible.

The change in registration date also means that the repayment dates have been moved from their originally scheduled deadline of July 31 to Sept. 30 of this year. The release of the Mt. Gox Bitcoin remains a primary concern for many crypto traders, as some fear the release of a large number of tokens into the market will lead to a collapse in the price of Bitcoin.

Source: Mt. Gox creditors now have until March to register for payouts | Kitco News

The vast majority of companies taking part in the world’s largest trial of a four-day week have opted to continue with the new working pattern, in a result hailed as evidence that it could work across the UK economy.

Of the 61 companies that entered the six-month trial, 56 have extended the four-day week, including 18 who have made it permanent.

The findings will be presented to MPs on Tuesday as part of a push urging politicians to give all workers in Britain a 32-hour week.

[…]

The UK pilot, which kicked off last June, has been promoted by 4 Day Week Global, a not-for-profit organisation founded in New Zealand, and overseen by the thinktank Autonomy and a team of academics.

Companies taking part were offered workshops and mentoring to help them rethink working practices. Staff were given the opportunity to remain on their existing salary, working across four days instead of five.

[…]

In total, about 2,900 employees across the UK have taken part in the pilot. Surveys of staff taken before and after found that 39% said they were less stressed, 40% were sleeping better and 54% said it was easier to balance work and home responsibilities.

The number of sick days taken during the trial fell by about two-thirds and 57% fewer staff left the firms taking part compared with the same period a year earlier.

[…]

Ryle, of the campaign, said: “The economy doesn’t need us to be working five days a week any more. It was 100 years ago, the shift to a five-day week, and the economy’s transformed since then.”

Source: Four-day week: ‘major breakthrough’ as most UK firms in trial extend changes | Work-life balance | The Guardian

Merchants on Amazon Marketplace are paying the company a commission fee of more than 50% of each sale. A new report by Marketplace Pulse revealed Amazon raised the total cost sellers are required to pay out toward storage fees at company warehouses, packaging and delivery, and advertising on the site.

The commission fee has gradually risen since 2016 according to the report, but sellers were not heavily impacted because of an influx of customers and a substantial increase in sales during the covid-19 pandemic. But the report said that sales plummeted when the lockdowns lifted and buyers turned to things like travel and dining out rather than online shopping. The residual effects meant that Amazon suffered its slowest sales growth since its inception.

Marketplace Pulse reported that Amazon receives a 15% transaction, or referral fee, from the sellers who also pay between 25% and 35% in Fulfillment fees and 15% toward advertising and promoting on the site.

The average fees Amazon collected last year rose to 51.8% from 35.2% in 2016

[…]

Source: Amazon Is Pocketing Half of Retailers’ Sales

Now that Microsoft has launched its Teams Premium service, it’s shaking up the free offering for work — and not everyone will be happy. The company is retiring the existing Teams Free version for small business in favor of the similarly-titled Teams (free) on April 12th, and legacy data won’t carry over. Your office will have to pay for at least the Teams Essentials plan ($4 per user per month) to preserve chats, meetings, channels and other key info.

As Windows Central explains, the new Teams (free) tier will require a new account. Data in the old app, now rebadged as Teams Free (classic), will be deleted. Anything you haven’t saved by then will be gone, including shared files you haven’t downloaded.

We’ve asked Microsoft for comment. This won’t affect personal use, but it could prove to be a headache for small firms that previously relied on the free Teams to coordinate. They’ll either have to start paying or they’ll lose access to past discussions, not to mention deal with the headache of recreating their channel setups.

[…]

Source: Microsoft will wipe free Teams business users’ data if they don’t upgrade to a paid tier | Engadget

This freemium to paid business model hasn’t been seen in a little while…

We recently wrote about Cory Doctorow’s great article on how the “enshittification” of social media (mainly Facebook and Twitter) was helping to lower the “switching costs” for people to try something new. In something of a follow up-piece on his Pluralistic site, Doctorow explores the process through which basically all large companies eventually hit the “enshittification” stage, and it’s (1) super insightful (2) really useful to think about, and (3) fit with a bunch of other ideas I’ve been thinking about of late. The opening paragraph is one for the ages:

Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.

He provides a lot more details about this process. In the beginning, companies need users and become successful by catering to their needs:

When a platform starts, it needs users, so it makes itself valuable to users. Think of Amazon: for many years, it operated at a loss, using its access to the capital markets to subsidize everything you bought. It sold goods below cost and shipped them below cost. It operated a clean and useful search. If you searched for a product, Amazon tried its damndest to put it at the top of the search results.

And, especially in the venture-backed world, this is often easier to do, because there isn’t much of a demand for profits (sometimes even for revenue), as the focus is on user growth. So, companies take all that VC cash and use it to subsidize things, and… that’s often really great for consumers.

But, eventually, these companies have to pay back the VCs in the form of selling out to a bigger company or, preferably, through a big IPO, taking the company public, giving it access to the public equity markets, and… then being at the whims of Wall Street. This is the part that Cory doesn’t mention in his piece, but which I’ve been thinking quite a lot about lately, and I do think is an important piece to the puzzle.

Once you go public, and you have that quarterly drumbeat from Wall Street where pretty much all that matters is revenue and profit growth. Indeed, it’s long forgotten now, but Jeff Bezos and Amazon actually were a rare company that kind of bucked that trend, and for a while at least, told Wall Street not to expect such things, as it was going to invest more and more deeply in serving its customers, and Wall Street punished Bezos for it. It’s long forgotten now, but Wall Street absolutely hated Amazon Prime, which locked in customer loyalty, but which they thought was a huge waste of money. The same was true of Amazon Web Services, which has become a huge revenue driver for the company.

But Wall Street is not visionary. Wall Street does not believe in long term strategy. It believes in hitting your short term ever increasing numbers every three months. Or it will punish you.

And this, quite frequently, leads to the process that Cory lays out in his enshittification gravity well. Because once you’ve gone public, even if you have executives who still want to focus on pleasing users and customers, eventually any public company is also going to have other executives, often with Wall Street experience, who talk about the importance of keeping Wall Street happy. They’ll often quote Milton Friedman’s dumbest idea: that the only fiduciary duty company executives have is to increase their profits for shareholders.

But one of the major problems with this that I’ve discussed for years is that even if you believe (ridiculously) that your only goal is to increase profits for shareholders, that leaves out one very important variable: over what time frame?

This goes back to something I wrote more than 15 years ago, talking about Craigslist. At the time, Craigslist was almost certainly the most successful company in the world in terms of profits per employee. It was making boatloads of cash with like a dozen employees. But the company’s CEO (who was not Craig, by the way) had mentioned that the company wasn’t focused on “maximizing revenue.” After all, most of Craigslist is actually free. There are only a few categories that charge, and they tend to be the most commercial ones (job postings). And this resulted in some arguing that the company lacked a capitalist instinct, and somehow this was horrible.

But, as I wrote at the time, this left out the variable of time. Because maximizing revenue in the short term (i.e., in the 3 month window that Wall Street requires) often means sacrificing long term sustainability and long term profits. That’s because if you’re only looking at the next quarter (or, perhaps, the next two to four quarters if we’re being generous) then you’re going to be tempted to squeeze more of the value out of your customers, to “maximize revenue” or “maximize profits for shareholders.”

In Cory’s formulation, then, this takes us to stage two of the enshittification process: abusing your users to make things better for your business customers. That’s because “Wall Street” and the whole “fiduciary duty to your shareholders” argues that if you’re not squeezing your customers for more value — or more “average revenue per user” (ARPU) — then you’re somehow not living up to your fiduciary duty. But that ignores that doing so often sucks for your customers, and it opens a window for them to look elsewhere and go there. If that’s a realistic option, of course.

Of course, many companies hang on through this stage, partly through inertia, but also frequently through the lack of as comprehensive a competitive ecosystem. And, eventually, they’ve reached a kind of limit in how much they’ve abused their users to please their business customers which, in turn, allows them to please Wall Street and its short-term focus.

So that brings us to Cory’s stage three of the enshittification. In which they start seeking to capture all of the value.

For years, Tim O’Reilly has (correctly) argued that good companies should “create more value than they capture.” The idea here is pretty straightforward: if you have a surplus, and you share more of it with others (users and partners) that’s actually better for your long term viability, as there’s more and more of a reason for those users, partners, customers, etc. to keep doing business with you. Indeed, in that link above (from a decade ago), O’Reilly provides an example that could have come straight out of Cory’s enshittification essay:

“Consider Microsoft,” O’Reilly told MIT researcher Andrew McAfee during an interview at SXSWi, “whose vision of a computer on every desk and in every home changed the world of computing forever and created a rich ecosystem for developers. As Microsoft’s growth stalled, they gradually consumed more and more of the opportunity for them- selves, and innovators moved elsewhere, to the Internet.”

And this is what happens. At some point, after abusing your users to please your business goals, you hit some fairly natural limits.

But Wall Street and the Friedman doctrine never stop screaming for more. You must “maximize” your profits for shareholders in that short term window, even if it means you’re going to destroy your shareholders in the long term. And thus, you see any excess value as “money left on the table,” or money that you need to take.

The legacy copyright industry is the classic example of this. We’ve provided plenty of examples over they years, but back when the record labels were struggling to figure out how to adapt to the internet, every few years some new solution came along, like music-based video games (e.g., Guitar Hero), and they’d be crazy successful, and make everyone lots of money… and then the old record label execs would come in and scream about how they should be getting all that money, eventually killing the golden goose that was suddenly giving them all this free money for doing nothing.

And, thus, that last leg of the enshittification curve tends to be when these legacy industries refuse to play nice with the wider ecosystem (often the ones enabling your overall business to grow) and seek to capture all the value for themselves, without realizing that this is how companies die.

Of course, one recent example of this is Elon killing off third party Twitter apps. While no one has officially admitted to it, basically everyone is saying it’s because those apps didn’t show ads to users, and Elon is so desperate for ad revenue, he figured he should kill off those apps to “force” users onto his enshittified apps instead.

But, of course, all it’s really doing is driving not just many of the Twitter power users away, but also shutting down the developers who were actually doing more to make Twitter even more useful. In trying to grab more of the pie, Elon is closing off the ability to grow the pie much bigger.

This is one of the reasons that both Cory and I keep talking about the importance of interoperability. It not only allows users to break out of silos where this is happening, but it helps combat the enshittification process. It forces companies to remain focused on providing value and surplus, to their users, rather than chasing Wall Street’s latest demands.

The temptation to enshittify is magnified by the blocks on interoperability: when Twitter bans interoperable clients, nerfs its APIs, and periodically terrorizes its users by suspending them for including their Mastodon handles in their bios, it makes it harder to leave Twitter, and thus increases the amount of enshittification users can be force-fed without risking their departure.

But, as he notes, this strategy only works for so long:

An enshittification strategy only succeeds if it is pursued in measured amounts. Even the most locked-in user eventually reaches a breaking-point and walks away. The villagers of Anatevka in Fiddler on the Roof tolerated the cossacks’ violent raids and pogroms for years, until they didn’t, and fled to Krakow, New York and Chicago…

There are ways around this, but it’s not easy. Cory and I push for interoperability (including adversarial interoperability) because we know in the long run it actually makes things better for users, and creates incentives for companies and services not to treat their users as an endless piggybank that can be abused at will. Cory frames it as a “freedom to exit.”

And policymakers should focus on freedom of exit – the right to leave a sinking platform while continuing to stay connected to the communities that you left behind, enjoying the media and apps you bought, and preserving the data you created

But, there’s more that can be done as well, and it should start with pushing back on the Friedman Doctrine of maximizing shareholder profits as the only fiduciary duty. We’ve seen some movement against that view with things like B corps., that allow companies to explicitly state that they have more stakeholders than shareholders and will act accordingly. Or experiments like the Long Term Stock Exchange, which (at the very least) try to offer an alternative for a company to be public, but not tied to quarterly reporting results.

All of these things matter, but I do think keeping the idea of time horizons in there matters as well. It’s one thing to say “maximize profits,” but any time you hear that you should ask “over what time frame.” Because a company can squeeze a ton of extra money in the short term in a way that guarantees to lessen the future prospects for the companies. That’s what happens in the enshittification process, and it really doesn’t need to be an inevitable law for all companies.

Source: How The Friedman Doctrine Leads To The Enshittification Of All Things | Techdirt

[…]

Customers have been reporting steep price increases across a number of items from Royal Canin – with one saying her food had increased by £15 for a 10kg bag in less than a year.

Zooplus, an online pet food seller that stocks Royal Canin – among other brands – said it did not want to pass these price increases on to its customers, branding them “excessive”, and saying “value for money is important to us”.

The German retailer explained that people may find it difficult to buy Royal Canin products from its site and it has limited the number of items each household can purchase.

[…]

 

Source: Pet food retailer Zooplus hits out at Royal Canin’s ‘excessive’ price increases – and offers customers 10% off its competitors | UK News | Sky News

Moderna is considering raising the price of its COVID-19 vaccine by over 400 percent—from $26 per dose to between $110 and $130 per dose—according to a report by The Wall Street Journal.

Ars has reached out to Moderna for comment but has not yet received a response. The plan, if realized, would match the previously announced price hike for Pfizer-BioNTech’s rival COVID-19 vaccine.

The Journal spoke with Moderna CEO Stephane Bancel at the JP Morgan Healthcare Conference in San Francisco Monday, who said of the 400 percent price hike: “I would think this type of pricing is consistent with the value.”

Until now, the mRNA-based COVID-19 vaccines from Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech have been purchased by the government and offered to Americans for free. In the latest federal contract from July, Moderna’s updated booster shot cost the government $26 per dose, up from $15–$16 per dose in earlier supply contracts, the Journal notes. Similarly, the government paid a little over $30 per dose for Pfizer-BioNTech’s vaccine this past summer, up from $19.50 per dose in contracts from 2020.

But now that the federal government is backing away from distributing the vaccines, their makers are moving to the commercial market—with price adjustments. Financial analysts had previously anticipated Pfizer would set the commercial price for its vaccine at just $50 per dose but were taken aback in October when Pfizer announced plans of a price between $110 and $130. Analysts then anticipated that Pfizer’s price would push Moderna and other vaccine makers to follow suit, which appears to be happening now.

Lawmakers have already lambasted Pfizer for the steep increase. In a letter sent last month to Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla, Senators Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and Peter Welch (D-Vt.) called the price hike “pure and deadly greed” and accused the company of “unseemly profiteering.”

“We urge you to back off from your proposed price increases and ensure COVID-19 vaccines are reasonably priced and accessible to people across the United States,” they wrote.

The revelation that Moderna may match Pfizer’s price increase comes just a day after Moderna announced that its COVID-19 vaccine sales in 2022 totaled approximately $18.4 billion.

[…]

Source: Moderna CEO: 400% price hike on COVID vaccine “consistent with the value” | Ars Technica

In a far-reaching move that could raise wages and increase competition among businesses, the Federal Trade Commission on Thursday unveiled a rule that would block companies from limiting their employees’ ability to work for a rival. From a report: The proposed rule would ban provisions of labor contracts known as noncompete agreements, which prevent workers from leaving for a competitor or starting a competing business for months or years after their employment, often within a certain geographic area. The agreements have applied to workers as varied as sandwich makers, hair stylists, doctors and software engineers.

Studies show that noncompetes, which appear to directly affect roughly 20 percent to 45 percent of private-sector U.S. workers, hold down pay because job switching is one of the more reliable ways of securing a raise. Many economists believe they help explain why pay for middle-income workers has stagnated in recent decades. Other studies show that noncompetes protect established companies from start-ups, reducing competition within industries. The arrangements may also harm productivity by making it hard for companies to hire workers who best fit their needs.

The F.T.C. proposal is the latest in a series of aggressive and sometimes unorthodox moves to rein in the power of large companies under the agency’s chair, Lina Khan. “Noncompetes block workers from freely switching jobs, depriving them of higher wages and better working conditions, and depriving businesses of a talent pool that they need to build and expand,” Ms. Khan said in a statement announcing the proposal. “By ending this practice, the F.T.C.’s proposed rule would promote greater dynamism, innovation and healthy competition.”

Source: US Moves To Bar Noncompete Agreements in Labor Contracts – Slashdot

The law affects every company with more than 15 employees looking to fill a job that could be performed from the state of California. It covers hourly and temporary work, all the way up to openings for highly paid technology executives.

That means it’s now possible to know the salaries top tech companies pay their workers. For example:

• A program manager in Apple
• ’s augmented reality group will receive base pay between $121,000 and $230,000 per year, according to an Apple posting Wednesday.
• A midcareer software engineer at Google
• Health can expect to make between $126,000 and $190,000 per year.
• A director of software engineering at Meta

• leading teams building network infrastructure will make at least $253,000 and as much as $327,000 in salary per year.

Notably, these salary listings do not include any bonuses or equity grants, which many tech companies use to attract and retain employees.

[…]

In the U.S., there are now 13 cities and states that require employers to share salary information, covering about 1 in 4 workers, according to Payscale, a software firm focusing on salary comparison.

California’s pay transparency law is intended to reduce gender and race pay gaps and help minorities and women better compete in the labor market. For example, people can compare their current pay with job listings with the same job title and see if they’re being underpaid.

Women earn about 83 cents for every dollar a man earns, according to the U.S. Census.

[…]

There are two primary components to California Senate Bill No. 1162, which was passed in September and went into effect Jan. 1.

First is the pay transparency component on job listings, which applies to any company with more than 15 employees if the job could be done in California.

The second part requires companies with more than 100 employees to submit a pay data report to the state of California with detailed salary information broken down by race, sex and job category. Companies have to provide a similar report on the federal level, but California now requires more details.

Employers are required to maintain detailed records of each job title and its wage history, and California’s labor commissioner can inspect those records. California can enforce the law through fines and can investigate violations. The reports won’t be published publicly under the new law.

[…]

The new law doesn’t require employers to post total compensation, meaning that companies can leave out information about stock grants and bonuses, offering an incomplete picture for some highly paid jobs.

For high-paying jobs in the technology industry, equity compensation in the form of restricted stock units can make up a large percentage of an employee’s take-home pay. In industries such as finance, bonuses make up a big portion of annual pay.

[…]

The new law also allows companies to provide wide ranges for pay, sometimes ranging over $100,000 or more between the lowest salary and the highest salary for a position. That seemingly violates the spirit of the law, but companies say the ranges are realistic because base pay can vary widely depending on skills, qualifications, experience and location.

[…]

Some California companies are not listing salaries for jobs clearly intended to be performed in other states, but advocates hope California’s new law could spark more salary disclosures around the country. After all, a job listing with an explicit starting salary or range is likely to attract more candidates than one with unclear pay.

[…]

Source: Here’s how much top tech jobs in California pay, according to job ads

[…]

Months of reporting tied to lawsuits filed by Hertz renters falsely accused of theft should now come to a halt. Maybe.

Here’s the company’s statement on the multi-million dollar settlement, which doesn’t say much about Hertz’s culpability, nor any plans it has in place to prevent something that has only occurred with this rental company from happening again.

Hertz Global Holdings, Inc. (NASDAQ: HTZ) today announced the settlement of 364 pending claims relating to vehicle theft reporting, bringing resolution to more than 95% of its pending theft reporting claims. The company will pay an aggregate amount of approximately $168 million by year-end to resolve these disputes. The company believes it will recover a meaningful portion of the settlement amount from its insurance carriers.  

[…]

First, it’s only “95%” of pending theft reporting claims, which means the company is still somewhat tied up in litigation.

Second, while it may hurt Hertz a bit to cough up roughly a half-million per bogus theft claim, it appears it won’t hurt much. Apparently, its insurance carrier will be footing the bill, which means as long as its insurers are willing to cover costs related to horrendous inventory control practices, there’s really no deterrent in place to prevent this sort of thing (a sort of thing extremely particular to Hertz) from happening again.

Third, the CEO’s statement portrays the false arrest of people as a commonplace customer service failure, rather than the potentially deadly, life disrupting experience it is.

Fourth, the plans for “moving forward” do not address the underlying issues. Instead, the CEO touts a future full of app usage and electric vehicles, something that’s apparently meant to make us forgive its recent past full of sloppy inventory control, outsourcing of repo work to local cops, and a reputation for converting honest renters into criminals.

The statement also says nothing about the company’s unwillingness to drop bogus prosecutions of renters despite being sued multiple times.

[…]

The CEO promised to clean this mess up, but he’s the same person who hasn’t explained why his company has allowed prosecutions over bogus theft reports to proceed even though Hertz was aware the reports were false.

[…]

Source: Hertz Shells Out $168 Million To Settle 364 False Theft Reports | Techdirt

U.S. prosecutors on Wednesday said they have charged eight individuals in a securities fraud scheme, alleging they reaped about $114 million from by using Twitter and Discord to manipulate stocks.

The eight men allegedly purported to be successful traders on the social media platforms and then engaged in a so-called “pump and dump” scheme by hyping particular stocks to their followers with the intent to dump them once prices had risen, according to prosecutors in the Southern District of Texas.

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) said it has filed related civil charges against the defendants in the scheme, claiming that seven of the defendants used Twitter and Discord to boost stocks. It said the eighth was charged with aiding and abetting the scheme with his podcast.

[…]

The individuals charged were Texas residents Edward Constantinescu, Perry Matlock, John Rybarczyk and Dan Knight, along with California residents Gary Deel and Tom Cooperman, Stefan Hrvatin of Miami and Mitchell Hennessey of Hoboken, New Jersey.

[…]

Source: U.S. authorities charge 8 social media influencers in securities fraud scheme | Reuters

Only 8? How about the ones on CNBC?

Polestar is delivering a not-so-subtle snub to Mercedes’ subscription performance upgrade. The automaker has released an update that gives the Polestar 2’s long range dual motor variant a 68HP power boost (plus 15lb. ft. of torque) in the US and Canada for a one-time $1,195 fee. That’s far from a trivial expense, but it’s a decidedly better value than Merc’s $1,200 annual fee for EQS and EQE acceleration improvements.

The software tuning gives the Polestar 2 a total 476HP with 502lb. ft. of torque. That’s enough to cut the 0-60MPH time to 4.2 seconds (normally 4.5), and it shaves half a second off the 50-70MPH dash (now 2.2 seconds). Polestar says you’ll mainly notice the added grunt in the 44MPH to 80MPH range, so this update may be most helpful when you’re overtaking someone on the highway.

You can buy the update through the Polestar web shop, and it will apply over the air. It’s included with a new vehicle if you opt for the $5,000 Performance pack. You won’t have to visit a store, then. There’s no word of a comparable upgrade for the single motor Polestar 2 variant, or availability in other regions.

[…]

Source: Polestar 2 gets a 68HP power boost through a paid update, no subscription required | Engadget

It’s incredible that people (BMW, Mercedes, now Polestar) are getting away with charging you twice for something you bought.

Why is the EU not doing something about this?

It’s a lesson that apparently keeps needing to be re-learned over and over again: for far too many types of digital purchases, you simply don’t own the thing you bought. The arena for this perma-lesson are varied: movies, books, music. And, of course, video games. The earliest lesson in that space may have been when Sony removed a useful feature on its PlayStation 3 console after the public had already begun buying it, which is downright insane. But while that was an entire console being impacted, the lesson has been repeated in instances where games and mobile apps simply stop working when the maker decides to shut their servers down, or purchased DLC disappearing for the same reason.

And here we are again, with the announcement that Onoma, previously Square Enix Montreal, is going to be shuttering some of its mobile games. The end result is not that new purchases won’t be available. Instead, the game will just not be a thing anymore. Anywhere.

Arena Battle Champions, Deus Ex GO, Hitman Sniper: The Shadows and Space Invaders: Hidden Heroes will be shutting down on January 4th. The games will be removed from the App Store/Google Play Store on December 1st, and current players will not be able to access the games past January 4th.

Effective immediately, in-game purchases are stopped. We encourage prior in-game purchases to be used before January 4th, as they will not be refunded. On behalf of the development team, we would like to thank you for playing our games.

Deus Ex Go costs $6 on the Google Play Store. You can go buy it right damned now if you wanted to. But why would you, given that the game will simply brick and no longer function in five weeks? And, more importantly, did any of the 500k-plus people who downloaded the game over the years know that it disappearing was a possibility? I mean, I’m sure that buried in the ToS is the standard “you’re just licensing this for as long as we let you” language exists, but I’m also sure that the vast majority of the people who paid for the game didn’t realize this would be a possibility.

[…]

Source: ‘Deus Ex Go’ To Be Completely Disappeared With Studio Shutdown | Techdirt

Ticketmaster’s chaotic handling of Taylor Swift’s tour ticket sales has brought the company under increased scrutiny, including from lawmakers. Sens. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) and Mike Lee (R-UT), the chair and ranking member of the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Competition Policy, Antitrust and Consumer Rights, have announced a hearing to gather evidence on competition in the ticketing industry. They have yet to confirm when the hearing will take place or the witnesses that the committee will call upon.

Swift’s fans overwhelmed Ticketmaster’s systems in the gold rush for tickets to her first tour in five years. Ticketmaster says presale codes went out to 1.5 million people, but 14 million (including “a staggering number” of bots) tried to buy tickets. The company said it was slammed with 3.5 billion total system requests, four times its previous peak. When fans were able to make it to the seat selection screen, many effectively had tickets snatched out of their hands as tried to put them in their carts.

There was supposed to be a general sale for the remaining tickets last Friday, but Ticketmaster canceled that, citing “extraordinarily high demands on ticketing systems and insufficient remaining ticket inventory to meet that demand.” Even though the level of interest in Swift’s stadium shows was evidently through the roof, Ticketmaster’s management of the process has raised a lot of questions. Swift said Ticketmaster assured her and her team that it could handle the demand. However, she said the mayhem “pissed me off.”

[…]

“Last week, the competition problem in ticketing markets was made painfully obvious when Ticketmaster’s website failed hundreds of thousands of fans hoping to purchase concert tickets. The high fees, site disruptions and cancellations that customers experienced shows how Ticketmaster’s dominant market position means the company does not face any pressure to continually innovate and improve,” Klobuchar said in a statement. “That’s why we will hold a hearing on how consolidation in the live entertainment and ticketing industry harms customers and artists alike. When there is no competition to incentivize better services and fair prices, we all suffer the consequences.”

Source: Ticketmaster’s Taylor Swift fiasco sparks Senate antitrust hearing | Engadget

The problems with monopolies / duopolies are wide and varied and not only limited to big tech or aircraft builders

Nepali workers hired to pick fruit on British farms say they have been left thousands of pounds in debt after being sent home only weeks after they arrived.

The fruit pickers were recruited under the government’s seasonal worker scheme and say they were offered work for six months. But less than two months after arriving, they were told they were no longer needed and instructed to book flights home.

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Even those workers who did not seek the services of recruitment agents paid about £1,500 each for plane tickets and visa fees before setting foot in the UK. One said that while he had just about managed to pay off his debts, he could not afford the airline charges, which could be as high as £200, to change his return flight,

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The findings will fuel concerns about the treatment of migrant workers under the UK’s seasonal worker scheme [which] allows people to work on UK farms for a maximum of six months. Under the scheme, they cannot stay long-term, claim benefits or bring their families.

The number of seasonal work visas issued by the Home Office each year has surged since their launch in 2019, from 2,500 in the first year to an estimated 40,000 in 2022, including many from outside Europe. But the scheme has been blighted by claims of exploitation, with reports earlier this year alleging some workers from Nepal and Indonesia were being charged steep recruitment fees by third-party job brokers, placing them at risk of debt bondage.

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Documents seen by the Observer show the workers were initially told they would be coming to the UK to work on a farm for six months. But about 10 days before they set out, they were informed that this placement had been cancelled and that they would now go to a different farm.

The workers, who had already bought flights and visas, were told the new placement would be for two months rather than six, but say they believed that, after it ended, they would be transferred to another farm. Emails from AG show they were assured there would be “a lot of work” and the chance to earn “good money”.

The workers subsequently travelled to the UK and began work at a farm run by Gaskains in Faversham, Kent. But when those shifts ended less than two months later, they were told by AG that there was nowhere else for them to go.

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Workers questioned why they were recruited near the end of the season and say they would not have come had they known there would only be two months’ work.

“They must know the season is about to end. We didn’t realise that as [it was] the first time we were coming here,” said Kamal*, who is planning to sell off some family land to cover the debts he accrued to come to work in the UK. “Why did they hire us during the end of the season? It would have been better if they hadn’t hired us at all.”

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he early termination of the workers’ jobs would have left them in “complete shock”. “If they manage to buy new flights in time to avoid eviction, that wipes out most of what they earned. But if they can’t, they risk sleeping rough and working illegally on the black market, where they are completely vulnerable,” she said.

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the company said workers were required to “maintain communication with their sponsor as per immigration rules” and could be blacklisted from future work with AG if they did not. It added that it was not responsible for costs incurred by workers for changing their return tickets.

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Source: Seasonal fruit pickers left thousands in debt after being sent home early from UK farms | Immigration and asylum | The Guardian

The Federal Trade Commission issued a statement today that restores the agency’s policy of rigorously enforcing the federal ban on unfair methods of competition. Congress gave the FTC the unique authority to identify and police against these practices, beyond what the other antitrust statutes cover. But in recent years the agency has not always carried out that responsibility consistently. The FTC’s previous policy restricted its oversight to a narrower set of circumstances, making it harder for the agency to challenge the full array of anticompetitive behavior in the market. Today’s statement removes this restriction and declares the agency’s intent to exercise its full statutory authority against companies that use unfair tactics to gain an advantage instead of competing on the merits.

“When Congress created the FTC, it clearly commanded us to crack down on unfair methods of competition,” said FTC Chair Lina M. Khan. “Enforcers have to use discretion, but that doesn’t give us the right to ignore a central part of our mandate. Today’s policy statement reactivates Section 5 and puts us on track to faithfully enforce the law as Congress designed.”

Congress passed the Federal Trade Commission Act in 1914 because it was unhappy with the enforcement of the Sherman Act, the original antitrust statute. Section 5 of the FTC Act bans “unfair methods of competition” and instructs the Commission to enforce that prohibition.

In 2015, however, the Commission issued a statement declaring that it would apply Section 5 using the Sherman Act “rule of reason” test, which asks whether a given restraint of trade is “reasonable” in economic terms. The new statement replaces that policy and explains that limiting Section 5 to the rule of reason contradicted the text of the statute and Congress’s clear desire for it to go beyond the Sherman Act. And it shows how the Commission will police the boundary between fair and unfair competition through both enforcement and rulemaking. The statement makes clear that the agency is committed to protecting markets and keeping up with the evolving nature of anticompetitive behavior.

Unfair methods of competition, the policy statement explains, are tactics that seek to gain an advantage while avoiding competing on the merits, and that tend to reduce competition in the market. The Policy Statement lays out the Commission’s approach to policing them. It is the result of many months of work across agency departments. Staff researched the legislative history of Section 5 and its interpretation across hundreds of Commission decisions, consent orders, and court decisions—including more than a dozen Supreme Court opinions. This rich case history will guide the agency as it implements Section 5. Through enforcement and rulemaking, the Commission will put businesses on notice about how to compete fairly and legally. This is in contrast with the rule of reason, which requires judges to make difficult case-by-case economic predictions.

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Source: FTC Restores Rigorous Enforcement of Law Banning Unfair Methods of Competition | Federal Trade Commission

After years of complaining about the monopolies in big tech and China actually championing business competition with the EU lagging behind, will the US finally get into the game? Better late than never.

A new antitrust class-action lawsuit accuses Apple Inc. and Amazon.com of colluding to raise the price of iPhones and iPads,

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The lawsuit, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Washington accuses Apple and Amazon of seeking to eliminate third-party Apple resellers on Amazon Marketplace in a scheme to stifle competition, and maintain premium pricing for Apple products.

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The lawsuit says the parties’ illegal agreement brought the number of third-party sellers of Apple products on Amazon Marketplace from roughly 600 to just seven sellers – a loss of 98%, and by doing so, Amazon, which was formerly a marginal seller of Apple products, became the dominant seller of Apple products on Amazon Marketplace.

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The lawsuit centers around an agreement made between Apple and Amazon that took effect at the beginning of 2019, the existence of which neither defendant denies. The agreement permitted Apple to limit the number of resellers operating on Amazon’s marketplace, and it offered Amazon in return a discounted wholesale price for a steady stream of iPhones and iPads, allowing it to reap the benefits of limited competition on its own reseller arena.

“From the outset of these discussions, the parties discussed ‘gating’ third-party resellers,” the lawsuit states. “Ultimately Apple proposed, and Amazon agreed, to limit the number of resellers in each country to no more than 20. This arbitrary and purely quantitative threshold excluded even Authorized Resellers of Apple products.”

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According to the lawsuit, available data indicate that there were at least 100 unique resellers offering iPhones and at least 500 resellers of iPads on Amazon’s platform before the agreement, and after, no more than seven remained, a decrease of 98% of third-party Apple product resellers. The lawsuit references that Amazon admitted to Congress that it entered an agreement with Apple that permits only “seven resellers of new Apple products” on its platform.

[…]

 

Source: Antitrust Lawsuit Says Apple and Amazon Colluded to Raise iPhone, iPad Prices | Hagens Berman

A former Apple employee has pled guilty to defrauding the company out of over $17 million. Dhirendra Prasad, who spent most of his decade at Apple working as a buyer in the Global Service Supply Chain department, admitted to “taking kickbacks, inflating invoices, stealing parts and causing Apple to pay for items and services never received,” according to the US Attorney’s Office for the Northern District of California. Prasad started these schemes in 2011 and continued them until 2018.

In one scam, Prasad shipped motherboards from Apple’s inventory to CTrends, a company run by a co-conspirator, Don M. Baker (who previously admitted to taking part in the fraudulent schemes). Baker harvested components from the motherboards, then Prasad organized purchase orders for those parts. After Baker shipped the components back to Apple, CTrends filed invoices for which Prasad arranged payment. In the end, the pair got Apple to pay for its own components and they split the proceeds of the scam.

In addition to fleecing Apple, Prasad confessed to engaging in tax fraud. He directed payments from Robert Gary Hansen (another co-conspirator who has admitted to taking part in the schemes) straight to his creditors. In addition, Prasad arranged for a shell company to send sham invoices to CTrends with the aim of covering up illicit payments Baker made to him. This enabled Baker “to claim hundreds of thousands of dollars of unjustified tax deductions,” the US Attorney’s Office said. All told, prosecutors claim that the scams resulted in the IRS losing over $1.8 million.

Prasad will be sentenced in March. He pled guilty to one count of conspiracy to commit mail fraud and wire fraud, which carries a maximum prison sentence of 20 years. Prasad also pled guilty to one count of conspiracy to defraud the United States, which has a maximum sentence of five years’ imprisonment. Moreover, Prasad agreed to forfeit around $5 million worth of assets he accrued as a result of his criminal actions, including real estate properties.

Source: Former Apple employee admits to defrauding the company out of $17 million | Engadget