bbieron@platformeconomyinsights.com

Amazon Sanctioned for Anticompetitive Price Fixing in Germany

Report from Bloomberg In Brief – Germany’s competition authority has ordered Amazon to stop enforcing retailer price controls on its German marketplace and has penalized the company €59 million, which it argues is excess profits it earned from its anticompetitive...

EU High Court Legal Advisor Rules Publishers Not Liable for VPN Use

Report from Courthouse News In Brief – A senior EU legal adviser to Europe’s top court has issued an advisory opinion that online publishers do not violate national copyright laws simply because users can bypass geographic restrictions using tools like VPNs. Advocate...

Supreme Court to Hear Video Privacy Case Bedeviling Online Advertising

Report from MediaPost In Brief – The Supreme Court has agreed to hear a case that could clarify how a federal privacy law enacted in 1988 applies to modern online video services. The dispute centers on the Video Privacy Protection Act (VPPA), which was enacted after a...

French National Assembly Supports 15-Year-Old Social Media Age Threshold

Report from Reuters In Brief –  France’s National Assembly has approved legislation to ban children under 15 from accessing social media. Lawmakers voted 116–23 in favor of the bill, which is strongly backed by President Emmanuel Macron, and prohibits under-15s from...

Meta Proposes New Per-Message WhatsApp Fee for Chatbots in Italy

Report from TechCrunch In Brief – Meta has announced that it will charge AI companies a per message fee for running their chatbots on WhatsApp in regions where regulators force the company to allow chatbots on the platform. The policy will go into effect in Italy on...

Landmark Social Media Addiction Trial Underway in California State Court

Report from PBS In Brief – The initial “bellwether” trial testing claims that major social media platforms are liable for a wide range of mental health injuries because they intentionally designed their products to be addictive to children is underway in Los Angeles...

Paris Prosecutors Continue to Investigate X for Criminal Law Violations

Report from Reuters In Brief – French authorities have raided X’s Paris offices as part of an expanded criminal investigation into the social media platform over its handling of unlawful content. The probe, which began last year as an investigation of the platform’s...

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