The 2023 movie season kicks into high gear this week with the start of the 2023 Sundance Film Festival. Each year, Sundance is where many of the big, buzzy, independent films start their journeys to either box office success or critical glory—and, with the festival now being both digital and in-person, audiences…
Epic Games and Match Group now have a court date for their antitrust case against Google. A Northern District of California judge has set the start of a jury trial for November 6th. Both Epic and Match accuse Google of abusing its control of Android app distribution through the Play Store by establishing unfair fees and requirements for in-app purchases. This comes alongside a lawsuit from 39 attorneys general as well as a customer class action suit demanding $4.7 billion in damages.
Epic sued Google in 2020 after the Android creator kicked Fortnite out of the Play Store for letting customers use an alternative in-app payment system. Match sued Google last year over the “exorbitant” store fee. Epic and Match consolidated their case and a filed motion last fall to expand their allegations, accusing Google of further antitrust violations by paying major developers hundreds of millions of dollars to keep their apps in the Play Store.
Unlike Epic’s partially successful lawsuit against Apple, this case has to acknowledge that customers do have a choice. Where Apple requires that all regular app downloads go through the App Store, Android’s sideloading option lets customers install software without downloading it from Google. The issue, as you might imagine, is that those apps are both harder to install and less likely to be noticed when the Play Store is included by default on many Android phones.
Google denies misusing its power, and argues that the fees are necessary to maintain and invest in the Play Store. It maintains that the incentive program doesn’t forbid developers from launching third-party stores, and that its portal competes fairly. In December, Google called on the court to deny the expanded requests over timing and other issues.
Google has made some concessions, including a test program for Play Store billing alternatives. That pilot still gives Google a cut of each transaction, though, and it remains to be seen if moves like that will satisfy the court and regulators. As it is, the internet pioneer is facing a raft of other antitrust cases that include a Justice Department lawsuit from 2020. Even if Google prevails against Epic and Match, it may not escape unscathed.
Florida’s ultraconservative Gov. Ron DeSantis has waged a battle against what he calls “woke” teaching.
Fighting for humanity’s survival against a monstrous, existential threat is often a noble cause in apocalyptic fiction—heroes raging against the dying of the light to ensure some facet of our civilization lives on in the face of doom. But what happens when it’s just a contract job that pays like shit?
When Snow White bit the poisoned apple, she fell into a deep coma. The folks who bought into the promise of the failed crypto exchange FTX were much like our young Ms. White. They were all assured that putting their digital currencies on the crypto exchange would make their dreams come true. Now all those customers…
The leader of one of Washington, DC’s most influential foreign policy think tanks got caught shilling for an oil CEO on a major news site—by a right-wing publication that runs hit pieces on renewable energy. This sounds like a Mad Lib, but it’s 2023, and anything is possible!
Samsung announced an upcoming update to SmartThings that lets you peek in on a security camera feed directly from your smartwatch. The update will roll out to Galaxy Watch devices, including the Galaxy Watch 4, Watch 4 Classic, Galaxy Watch 5, and Watch 5 Pro.
Elon Musk’s Twitter era feels like an absolute fever dream, especially now that an auction of the San Francisco office’s furniture has completed. Items across the board went for thousands of dollars, with a statue of Twitter’s iconic logo selling for $100,000.
Reed Hastings, Netflix co-CEO and one of the company’s co-founders, is stepping down. In his place, the streaming service’s board has appointed two executives to lead the company together: Ted Sarandos, who has been a chief executive officer alongside Hastings since 2020, and Greg Peters, previously Netflix’s chief…
A team of researchers investigating tens of thousands of citizen science observations of the night sky found that stars in the night sky are rapidly becoming harder to see due to human light pollution.
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