Free Republic

As the US government weighs its options following a landmark “monopolist” ruling against Google last week, online publications increasingly face a bleak future. (And this time, it’s not just because of severely diminished ad revenue.) Bloomberg reports that their choice now boils down to allowing Google to use their published content to produce inline AI-generated search “answers” or losing visibility in the company’s search engine. The crux of the problem lies in the Googlebot, the crawler that scours and indexes the live web to produce the results you see when you enter search terms. If publishers block Google from using...

LONGBOAT KEY, Fla., Aug. 06, 2024 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — Rumble (NASDAQ:RUM), the video-sharing platform and cloud services provider, announced that it has joined the social media platform X to file antitrust lawsuits alleging a conspiracy to withhold advertising revenue from Rumble and other digital media platforms. In its filing in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas, Rumble named as defendants the World Federation of Advertisers (WFA), as well as the advertising agency WPP and its subsidiary GroupM Worldwide.

X on Tuesday filed a lawsuit against the Global Alliance for Responsible Media, a coalition of major advertisers, claiming that it had violated antitrust laws by coordinating with brands to dissuade them from spending money on the social media platform. The suit, filed in federal court in Texas, claims that the coalition, known as GARM, “conspired” with leading brands, including CVS, Unilever and the Danish energy company Ørsted to “collectively withhold billions of dollars in advertising revenue” that were owed to X, then known as Twitter, in the wake of Elon Musk’s takeover of the social media company in 2022....

To put it simply, people are hurt when the marketplace of ideas is undermined and some viewpoints are not funded over others as part of an illegal boycott. This behavior is a stain on a great industry, and cannot be allowed to continue. That is why, today, X has filed an antitrust lawsuit against the Global Alliance for Responsible Media (GARM), the World Federation of Advertisers (WFA), and GARM members CVS Health, Mars, Orsted and Unilever. This is not a decision we took lightly, but it is a direct consequence of their actions.

"Google is a monopolist, and it has acted as one to maintain its monopoly," Judge Amit P. Mehta of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia said in his 277-page ruling. The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) and several dozen state attorneys general had sued Google, accusing the company of paying billions of dollars to Apple, Samsung and other companies to make Google the default search provider on smartphones and web browsers. "This victory against Google is an historic win for the American people," Attorney General Merrick Garland said in a statement. "No company—no matter how large or...

A judge on Monday ruled that Google’s ubiquitous search engine has been illegally exploiting its dominance to squash competition and stifle innovation in a seismic decision that could shake up the internet and hobble one of the world’s best-known companies. The highly anticipated decision issued by U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta comes nearly a year after the start of a trial pitting the U.S. Justice Department against Google in the country’s biggest antitrust showdown in a quarter century. After reviewing reams of evidence that included testimony from top executives at Google, Microsoft and Apple during last year’s 10-week trial, Mehta...

Google has violated US antitrust law with its search business, a federal judge ruled Monday, handing the tech giant a staggering court defeat with the potential to reshape how millions of Americans get information online and to upend decades of dominance. “After having carefully considered and weighed the witness testimony and evidence, the court reaches the following conclusion: Google is a monopolist, and it has acted as one to maintain its monopoly,” US District Judge Amit Mehta Mehta wrote in Monday’s opinion. “It has violated Section 2 of the Sherman Act.” The decision by the US District Court for the...

Washington, Arizona, Colorado, California, and Oregon would see the biggest number of stores flipped to C&S.. Kroger and Albertsons have released a list of hundreds of stores that would be divested to C&S Wholesale Grocers if federal regulators approve its proposed $24.6 billion merger deal, and the states with the largest numbers include Washington, Arizona, and Colorado. Under the proposal, Kroger and Albertsons would divest stores in Washington (124), Arizona (101), Colorado (91), California (63), Oregon (62), Illinois (35), Texas (28), Nevada (16), and Alaska (18). Several states would see 10 or fewer stores divested, including: Idaho (10), New Mexico...

WASHINGTON – If you rent a house when you would rather own, pin some of the blame on corporate landlords. The 10 biggest institutional investors owned more than 430,000 single-family rental homes at the end of 2023, and they continue to acquire houses to rent out to middle-class families. Corporate landlords seek to dominate the neighborhoods they target, simultaneously reducing the inventory of houses to buy while expanding the stock of houses to rent. Members of Congress have introduced bills to force the largest institutional investors to dramatically cut their holdings. The United States suffers from a housing shortage of...

The Justice Department sued Ticketmaster and its parent company Thursday, accusing them of running an illegal monopoly over live events in America and asking a court to break up the system that squelches competition and drives up prices for fans. Filed in federal court in Manhattan, the sweeping antitrust lawsuit was brought with 30 state and district attorneys general and seeks to dismantle the monopoly they say is squeezing out smaller promoters, hurting artists and drowning ticket buyers in fees. Ticketmaster and its owner, Live Nation Entertainment, have a long history of clashes with major artists and their fans, including...

Theme Players take the part of land owners, attempting to buy and then develop their land. Income is gained by other players visiting their properties and money is spent when they visit properties belonging to other players. When times get tough, players may have to mortgage their properties to raise cash for fines, taxes and other misfortunes

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Justice Department on Thursday announced a sweeping antitrust lawsuit against Apple, accusing the tech giant of engineering an illegal monopoly in smartphones that boxes out competitors and stifles innovation. The lawsuit, filed in federal court in New Jersey, alleges that Apple has monopoly power in the smartphone market and uses its control over the iPhone to “engage in a broad, sustained, and illegal course of conduct.” The lawsuit — which was also filed with 16 state attorneys general — is the latest example of the Justice Department’s approach to aggressive enforcement of federal antitrust law that...

Jack Poso 🇺🇸 @JackPosobiec What was Donald’s favorite game as a child? Mrs Trump: Monopoly…and he was always building with blocks 9:57 PM · Mar 1, 2024

Your PC without this CPU feature won’t boot Windows 11 24H2 KEY TAKEAWAYS Windows 11 24H2 update requires the POPCNT CPU feature, making it impossible to run on super-old PCs. Modern CPUs support POPCNT, so if you recently bought a new PC, you won't have any issues. PCs older than fifteen years will be affected by this change and won't be able to boot Windows 11 without POPCNT support. Windows 11 24H2 is the next big update that Microsoft will roll out later this year, and it might finally put an end to the practice of running Windows unofficially on...

San Francisco jury finds that Google ‘maintained monopoly power by engaging in anticompetitive conduct’.. Google lost an antitrust case over the market power of its app store on Monday, a blow to the search giant as it faces other legal challenges to its search dominance and ad tech business.. Videogame maker Epic Games sued the search giant in 2020, alleging it used its dominant position to squeeze excess profits from app developers. The San Francisco jury reached a unanimous verdict after deliberating for less than four hours. The loss comes as Google battles more antitrust challenges, including a landmark trial...

Imagine a world in which two asset managers call the shots, in which their wealth exceeds current U.S. GDP and where almost every hedge fund, government and retiree is a customer. It’s closer than you think. BlackRock Inc. and Vanguard Group — already the world’s largest money managers — are less than a decade from managing a total of US$20 trillion, according to Bloomberg News calculations. Amassing that sum will likely upend the asset management industry, intensify their ownership of the largest U.S. companies and test the twin pillars of market efficiency and corporate governance. None other than Vanguard founder...

Not the way to slash property prices in the game. A Monopoly match in Belgium turned into a bloodbath — and not in the figurative board game sense — after a perturbed neighbor confronted the players with a samurai sword. The fracas occurred around 5 a.m. April 2 while a group of four gamers was playing the classic strategy game outside on the sidewalk in Forest, Brussels, per local outlet La Libre. The noise reportedly awoke the neighbors, who came outside brandishing a stick at the rowdy players, who may have been homeless, according to France’s Midi Libre. This resulted...

Over the past few months, we’ve asked Colorado Springs Utilities (CSU) questions about how they spend ratepayer dollars on advertising and sponsorships. Stay tuned for a future Springs Taxpayers United article about sponsorships. Right now, we’ll focus exclusively on the CSU advertising budget. We wondered why a monopoly utility needs to advertise at all. No one in their service area has a choice on which utility to use. The local advertising company Vladmir Jones handles the advertising account for CSU. Through a Colorado Open Records Act (CORA) request, we asked for all of the 2022 advertising expenditures. Vladmir Jones invoices...

The cost of a dozen eggs has now surpassed the price of a pound of beef, marking the first time that’s happened since the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics began keeping data in 1980. The average price of a dozen large Grade A eggs ran at $4.82 in January 2023, while a pound of ground beef was $4.64. In January 2022, eggs were $1.93, and beef was $4.77, but egg prices have soared by 70% in the last year alone. Farm Action, a farmer-led advocacy group, says the “real culprit” behind sky-high prices is a “collusive scheme” among top U.S....

Spotify's (SPOT.N) CEO Daniel Ek renewed his attack on Apple (AAPL.O) on Wednesday in a series of tweets alleging the iPhone maker "gives itself every advantage while at the same time stifling innovation and hurting consumers". Ek tagged a number of sympathetic business leaders in his 21-tweet thread, including Musk, Microsoft president Brad Smith, and Proton founder Andy Yen. On Monday, the world's richest person Elon Musk criticized the fee Apple charges software developers - including his Twitter business - for in-app purchases, and posted a meme suggesting he was willing to "go to war" rather than pay it.