Report from Korea JoongAng Daily In Brief – The Chairman of the Korea Fair Trade Commission (KFTC), South Korea’s antitrust regulator, has said that the government would maintain close dialogue with their US counterparts regarding its proposals to police giant digital...
Apple Pulls Strong iCloud Encryption from the UK Market
Report from the BBC In Brief – Apple has begun blocking users in the UK from using the company’s highest level of encryption to protect the security and privacy of photos, documents, and other content stored on the company’s iCloud backup system. The move is likely in...
Trump Tariff Threats Against Digital Taxes Expanded to All Big Tech Penalties
Report from Reuters In Brief – Following up on two executive orders from the first day of his second term that signaled he will again aggressively challenge foreign governments that institute a digital services tax (DST), President Donald Trump has ordered his top...
DeepSeek Downloads Suspended in South Korea Due to Data Practices
Report from the New York Times In Brief – South Korea’s data protection authority, the Personal Information Protection Commission (PIPC), has suspended downloads of the DeepSeek app after investigating the data policies and practices of the Chinese AI startup and...
EU Commission to Announce DMA Decisions for Apple and Meta in March
Report from Reuters In Brief – European Commissioner Teresa Ribera of Spain, the Executive Vice-President leading key economic priorities including competition policy, has said that decisions are expected to be announced in March in the Digital Markets Act (DMA)...
Mexico Threatens to Sue Google Over How Maps Names the Gulf
Report from the Washington Post In Brief – Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum continues to call on Google to reverse changes it has made to its Maps service following the executive order from US President Donald Trump changing the name of the Gulf of Mexico to the...
iPhone Dictation Temporarily Displays “Trump” When User Says “Racist”
Report from the New York Times In Brief – Apple has acknowledged a bug with the iPhone’s dictation feature that sometimes surfaces when a user says the word “racist”, with the phone briefly displaying “Trump” before landing on the correct word. The company claimed...
Amazon Must Face Price-Parity Antitrust Lawsuit from Zulily
Report from Bloomberg In Brief – US District Judge John Chun, who is overseeing a collection of federal antitrust cases targeting Amazon’s marketplace practices, has rejected the company’s bid to have a lawsuit from now-defunct online apparel marketplace Zulily fully...
Polish Comparison-Shopping Site Sues Google for Years of Damages
Report from Reuters In Brief – Google has been sued by Ceneo, a Poland-based comparison-shopping unit of European ecommerce platform Allegro, seeking 2.33 billion zlotys (about $568 million) for damages suffered at the hands of the digital giant from 2013 through...
Mexico Enacts Gig Worker Legislation Classifying Top Earners as Employees
Report from Mexico News Daily In Brief – Mexico has enacted “Gig Worker” legislation that aims to provide hundreds of thousands of platform-enabled workers with traditional employment benefits and protections. The new law, which goes into effect in June, establishes...
Teen Social Media Class Action Suits Advancing in CA State Court
Report from Deadline In Brief – Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Carolyn Kuhl has rejected the motion for summary judgement filed by Google, Meta, ByteDance and Snap asking the judge to rule that they are not responsible for mental health problems experienced by teen...
EU Commission Opening DMA Investigations of Largest Cloud Services Providers
Report from Reuters In Brief – The European Commission has announced three Digital Markets Act (DMA) market investigations into cloud services and its market leaders. Two of the probes will assess if the cloud services business of either or both Amazon and Microsoft...
TikTok to Face Class Action Suit Alleging Underage Privacy Violations
Report from MediaPost In Brief – Federal District Judge George Wu has rejected TikTok’s bid to dismiss a class-action lawsuit brought by young people alleging that the company violated various laws and privacy standards in their home states. The plaintiffs, all under...
Nvidia’s Massive Investment in OpenAI Raises Antitrust Concerns
Report from Reuters In Brief – Nvidia’s giant business deal with OpenAI, with the market-leading AI chipmaker investing up to $100 billion in OpenAI, allowing the market-leading AI chatbot developer to buy millions of chips from Nvidia that will be housed in new...
EU Talking Google AdTech Breakup with US Remedies Trial Underway
Report from Euractiv In Brief – When the European Commission hit Google with a $3.45 billion fine for a range of anti-competitive practices in its vast AdTech business, the regulator ordered Google to end self-preferencing practices and implement measures to cease its...
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