Indian antitrust regulator has found that Amazon and Flipkart, owned by Walmart, violated local competition laws, according to a report. The finding presents a new challenge for the e-commerce giants in a market where online retail growth remains modest at under 15% and quick-commerce is increasingly snatching business from Amazon India and Flipkart. The Competition Commission of India (CCI) launched a probe into Flipkart and Amazon India in 2020 following claims that these companies favored specific vendor ...

Microsoft is laying off around 650 employees from its gaming division, according to an internal memo shared online by IGN. The latest cuts come eight months after the company laid off 1,900 in its gaming division, following its $68.7 billion acquisition of Activision Blizzard. In Xbox chief Phil Spencer’s memo to staff, he notes that the new cuts are also related to the acquisition.  “As part of aligning our post-acquisition team structure and managing our business, we have made the decision to eliminate a ...

In an attempt to prevent suicide and self-harm content from spreading online, the nonprofit Mental Health Coalition (MHC) today announced a new program, Thrive, aimed at encouraging online platforms to share “signals” of potentially harmful material. Thrive, which counts Meta, Snap and TikTok as founding members, will provide ways for platforms to share hashes — essentially unique fingerprints — of graphic suicide and self-harm content and content depicting or encouraging viral challenges. The hashes will o ...

Amazon has announced a new pilot package delivery service in Frankfurt, Germany, that meshes electric road and rail transport.The e-commerce giant will use vans from its delivery depot to the first tram stop on the outskirts of Frankfurt, with the city’s new Gütertram service transporting the goods to awaiting cargo bikes. Gütertram constitutes part of a research project from Frankfurt University and the local municipality and fits with a broader Amazon initiative to embrace trains. In April, the company si ...

Google has once again lost in its bid to overturn a 2017 antitrust decision by the European Commission. The bloc found its shopping comparison service had broken competition rules — hitting Alphabet, Google’s parent, with an at-the-time record-breaking €2.42 billion penalty (around $2.7 billion at current exchange rates) and ordering changes to how it operates the service.Google appealed the decision and, in November 2021, the General Court of the European Union largely dismissed the challenge. It confirmed ...

Elon Musk has denied a report that one of his companies, Tesla, has discussed sharing revenue with another of his companies, xAI, so that it can use the startup’s AI models.The Wall Street Journal wrote yesterday that under a proposed agreement described to investors, Tesla would use xAI models in its driver-assistance software (known as Full Self-Driving or FSD). The AI startup would also help develop features such as a voice assistant in Tesla vehicles and software for its humanoid robot Optimus. Writing ...

A federal judge says he will deliver a punishment in Google’s antitrust case by August 2025, according to The New York Times, after ruling earlier this month that Google had abused its monopoly power over the search industry.Judge Amit P. Mehta established a timeline for the remedies phase of Google’s antirust trial during a hearing in Washington D.C. on Friday, the outcome of which could upend how people find information on the internet. Prosecutors have until the end of the year to submit their proposals, ...

Meta on Friday published an update on how it plans to comply with the Digital Markets Act (DMA), the European law that aims to promote competition in digital marketplaces, where the law concerns the company’s messaging apps, Messenger and WhatsApp.As Meta notes in a blog post, the DMA requires that it provide an option in WhatsApp and Messenger to connect with interoperable third-party messaging services and apps. Meta says it’s building notifications into WhatsApp and Messenger to inform users about these ...

More antitrust woes for Google. The U.K’.s competition watchdog said on Friday that it suspects the company of adtech antitrust abuses. The tech giant will now have a chance to respond to the provisional findings before the regulator reaches a final decision.Confirmed violations of U.K. competition law can lead to corrective orders and fines of up to 10% of annual worldwide group turnover. So the outcome of this case is likely to be closely watched. The U.K.’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) has be ...

Salesforce has acquired Own Company, a provider of data management and protection solutions, for $1.9 billion in cash. In a press release, Salesforce GM Steve Fisher said that Own “underscores [Salesforce’s] commitment to providing secure, end-to-end solutions that protect our customers’ most valuable data.” “Data security has never been more critical, and Own’s proven expertise and products will enhance our ability to offer robust data protection and management solutions to our customers,” he continued.En ...