Techmeme
August 15, 2020, 2:00 AM

Top News

Kurt Wagner / Bloomberg:
Facebook launches paid online events in 20 countries with waived fees during COVID-19, says Apple is hurting SMBs by refusing to waive its 30% cut on iOS  —  Facebook Inc. joined a growing list of developers to publicly criticize Apple Inc. over its revenue-sharing policy for in-app purchases …
Tom Warren / The Verge:
By weaponizing Fortnite and with Apple as its primary target, Epic Games is well positioned to lead the fight for a change in app store policies  —  Epic Games executed its most ambitious Fortnite live event yesterday, leading both Apple and Google to remove one of the world's most popular games from their app stores.
Nick Statt / The Verge:
Nick Statt / The Verge:
Wall Street Journal:
Sources: Facebook didn't apply hate speech rules to at least four flagged individuals and groups in India, showing a pattern of favoritism to Modi's party  —  Company executive in vital market opposed move to ban controversial politician; some employees allege favoritism to ruling party
BuzzFeed News:
Lora Kolodny / CNBC:
Trump issues EO forcing ByteDance to sell or spin off its US TikTok business within 90 days and destroy all copies of TikTok data attached to US users  —  - President Donald Trump issued an executive order Friday that will force China's ByteDance to sell or spin off its U.S. TikTok business within 90 days.
New York Times:
Bloomberg:
VC firm Initialized raises $230M for its fifth fund and says the fund was “heavily oversubscribed” despite the departure of co-founder Alexis Ohanian  —  - Existing portfolio includes unicorns Instacart, Coinbase, Ro  — Fifth fund “heavily oversubscribed” despite co-founder exit
Abner Li / 9to5Google:
Sources: Google is planning to eventually replace Duo with Meet, after placing its consumer communication services under G Suite head Javier Soltero  —  With classic Hangouts on the way out, Google today has two video calling apps.  However, that is one too many for the company …
Richard Waters / Financial Times:
Ripple, sitting on $16B in XRP, says it plans to expand beyond its original cross-border payments system by becoming the “Amazon of payments”  —  The start-up is still trying to find compelling uses for the blockchain technology underpinning its XRP currency
Jason Schreier / Bloomberg:
Ubisoft fires Ashraf Ismail, the creative director of its newest Assassin's Creed game, following an investigation into misconduct allegations  —  Ubisoft Entertainment SA has dismissed the creative director of the newest Assassin's Creed game, the latest result of a MeToo reckoning …
Kim Lyons / The Verge:
ICE signed a contract with facial recognition company Clearview AI this week for “mission support”, government contracting records show  —  The contract comes after months of scrutiny of Clearview's privacy practices  —  Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) …
John Gruber / Daring Fireball:
The rumored Apple One subscription bundle looks like a frustrating jumble of à la carte offerings that is no different than the current situation  —  A few big scoops from Mark Gurman yesterday that got lost in the shuffle a bit after Epic went to war against the App Store:
Katyanna Quach / The Register:
Mozilla confirms a deal to keep Google as the default search provider in Firefox; source says the deal is worth $400M to $450M a year between now and 2023  —  $2.5m-a-year CEO set to take a pay cut, so that's all right, then  —  Mozilla has renewed its lucrative nine-figure deal with Google …

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Tom Simonite / Wired:
Eva Xiao / Wall Street Journal:
Aaron Mak / Slate: