Apple is coming out swinging against the Department of Justice’s (DOJ) antitrust case, just announced Thursday, which accuses the iPhone maker of being a monopolist with its thumb on a mobile chokepoint of its own making.Apple is dubbing the litigation misguided and warning the DOJ risks trashing all the things its customers value about its integrated mobile ecosystem.The lawsuit threatens to undo the features that make its smartphones different vs the rest of the market, as Apple tells it — with the risk, ...

In its wide-ranging antitrust complaint against Apple and its iPhone business, the U.S. Justice Department takes specific aim against Apple’s massive financial business, specifically how it uses Apple Pay to prohibit competition and make large amounts of money in the process, to the tune of billions in annual revenues.The DOJ alleges that is not only stifling competition among payment services, but it is potentially stifling innovation, since the fees that banks and others fork out to play with Apple Pay am ...

The U.S. Department of Justice plus attorneys general from 16 states and the District of Columbia sued Apple for antitrust this morning in federal court. The suit alleges that the company has a monopoly in the premium smartphone market and uses a variety of illegal tactics to perpetuate that monopoly.Leaving aside the details of those tactics and their legality (if you’re interested, you can read the entire lawsuit here) the case has a lot of parallels to the DOJ’s antitrust suit against Microsoft in the 19 ...

The Department of Justice and seventeen state attorneys general filed a massive lawsuit against Apple on Thursday morning, accusing the company of monopolistic smartphone practices. Meanwhile, Fortnite maker Epic Games has been accusing Apple’s iOS App Store of antitrust violations for years in an ongoing, arduous legal battle.Epic is never named explicitly in the 88-page lawsuit, but the gaming company’s complaints are echoed across extensive discussion of the App Store’s anticompetitive practices.“Apple o ...

Microsoft’s latest gambit to snag much of the human talent from Inflection AI is causing waves this week. Redmond has previously invested in the company, but is now absorbing much of its staff into a new division it created for just that purpose.The subtext is clear enough: Microsoft doesn’t want to run into regulatory oversight in the form of anti-trust action. Such regulatory actions have been more common in recent years, scuppering megadeals like Visa-Plaid, and Adobe-Figma. Regardless of your perspectiv ...

Google hit with $270M fine in France as authority finds news publishers’ data was used for GeminiIn a never-ending saga between Google and France’s competition authority over copyright protections for news snippets, the Autorité de la Concurrence announced a €250 million fine against the tech giant Wednesday (around $270 million at today’s exchange rate).According to the competition watchdog, Google disregarded some of its previous commitments with news publishers. But the decision is especially notable bec ...

“I hope you realize this is not a concert,” said Nvidia president Jensen Huang to an audience so large, it filled up the SAP Center in San Jose. This is how he introduced what is perhaps the complete opposite of a concert: the company’s GTC event. “You have arrived at a developers conference. There will be a lot of science describing algorithms, computer architecture, mathematics. I sense a very heavy weight in the room; all of a sudden, you’re in the wrong place.”It may not have been a rock concert, but th ...

The Open Source Robotics Foundation (OSRF) this week announced the launch of the similarly named Open Source Robotics Alliance (OSRA). The new initiative is designed to maintain development for and maintenance of open source robotics projects, with a particular focus on the OSRF’s own robot operating system (ROS).First released in 2007 by erstwhile Bay Area incubator Willow Garage, ROS has played a foundational role in robotics development for decades. In a show of support, Nvidia and Qualcomm have both sig ...

Microsoft has hired Mustafa Suleyman and Karen Simonyan, co-founders of high-profile AI startup Inflection AI, and several of their colleagues as the Satya Nadella-led cloud giant continues its aggressive push to attract top talent.Suleyman — also a co-founder of DeepMind, which Google bought in 2014 to bolster its own AI efforts — will run Microsoft’s newly formed unit called Microsoft AI, whereas Simonyan is joining the company as a chief scientist in the same new group. Mustafa, whose official title at M ...

India will lower import taxes on certain electric vehicles for companies committing to invest at least $500 million and setting up a local manufacturing facility within three years, a move that could potentially bolster Tesla’s plans to enter the South Asian market.Companies must invest a minimum of $500 million in the country and will have three years to establish local manufacturing for EVs with at least 25% of components sourced domestically, according to a government press release on Friday. Firms meeti ...