US officials threaten Google break-up, Netflix posts records UK revenues
US officials have confirmed they are considering breaking up Google’s “illegal monopoly” of internet searches. The tech giant could face restrictions on its own products – including its Chrome browser, Play Store and Android operating system, the US Justice Department said. It comes after a judge found in August the company had broken anti-trust laws to ensure its dominance of online searches. Officials have now outlined a series of proposals to dismantle the company’s monopoly in a court filing. Sky News
EBay will clamp down on the sale of e-bikes and e-bike batteries in the UK from 31 October, the BBC has learned. The firm says that only “eligible business sellers” will be allowed to list them after this date. It did not explain what the necessary criteria would be. E-bikes, which have electrically-assisted pedals and are battery-powered, have soared in popularity, but incidents involving battery fires have also risen. The London Fire Brigade recently said it recorded 155 e-bike fires in 2023, up by 78% from the previous year.BBC
Netflix has posted record UK revenues after its crackdown on password sharing boosted subscriber numbers. The US streaming giant recorded revenues of almost £1.7bn in the UK in 2023, its biggest annual total to date and up from £1.5bn the previous year. Pre-tax profits also surged by almost 80pc to £61m, according to newly-filed accounts. Netflix pinned the record performance on growth in subscriber numbers after the streaming company began cracking down on password sharing last year. Telegraph
“One for the history books” is how Tesla CEO Elon Musk has described the rescheduled Robotaxi reveal day on Thursday 10 October. Dubbed ‘We, Robot’, in apparent reference to the 2004 sci-fi film starring Will Smith and the Isaac Asimov book that inspired it, the event is going to be staged at the Warner Bros studio lot in Hollywood, California. Investors, however, will be hoping that the technology displayed will transcend its fictional backdrop and appear tangible enough to give a clear vision of both short- and medium-term cash-generating reality. Autocar
Today, after a month-long suspension, X is now live again in Brazil. The platform had been suspended since late August after a showdown with the country’s Supreme Court, in which X refused a court order to remove certain right-wing accounts and content that the court said violated Brazilian law. After weeks of not complying, it seems Elon Musk has caved. Brazilian Supreme Court justice Alexandre de Moraes authorized X’s return after the company blocked profiles accused of disseminating false information, reappointed a legal representative in the country, and paid fines that amounted to 28.6 million reais ($5.1 million). Wired
The advertising watchdog has ruled against six of the UK’s biggest broadband providers after they all failed to make mid-contract price increases clear to consumers. The Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) said that BT, EE, Plusnet, TalkTalk, O2 and Virgin Media Broadband misled consumers by placing important information about price rises separately to headline prices and in areas of less prominence on their websites. The ASA ruled the ads must not appear again and told all six providers to ensure they make sufficiently clear that their broadband contracts would be subject to mid-contract price increases. STV
Two scientists at Google DeepMind and an American biochemist have been awarded the 2024 Nobel prize in chemistry for breakthroughs in predicting and designing the structure of proteins. Demis Hassabis, DeepMind’s British founder, and John Jumper, who led the development of the company’s AI model AlphaFold– which predicts the structure of proteins based on their chemical sequence – share half of the prize. The other half was awarded to Prof David Baker, of the University of Washington, whose computational research has led to the creation of entirely new kinds of proteins. The Guardian
