Techmeme
December 10, 2020, 10:35 AM

Top News

Federal Trade Commission:
FTC, in coalition with 46 state AGs, plus Guam and DC, sues Facebook, alleging Instagram and WhatsApp acquisitions were used to stifle competition  —  Agency challenges Facebook's multi-year course of unlawful conduct  —  The Federal Trade Commission today sued Facebook …
More: Federal Trade Commission, AVC, Washington Post, The Guardian, NBC News, Slate, CNBC, XDA Developers, Ars Technica, Wall Street Journal, BuzzFeed News, Los Angeles Times, Financial Times, Protocol, news.com.au, CNN, Cointelegraph, Axios, ABC News, Bloomberg, Tubefilter, MakeUseOf, Washington Post, Forrester, Washington Post, SiliconANGLE, Reclaim The Net, Platformer, The Register, and ZDNet
Jennifer Newstead / About Facebook:
Facebook responds to the FTC and state AGs, saying the lawsuits they've brought forth are “revisionist history” and their antitrust case is unprecedented  —  Billions of people use Facebook's products every day.  To earn their time and attention, we compete fiercely against many other services across the world.
NY State Attorney General:
New York AG Letitia James leads a coalition of 48 AGs in suing Facebook, alleging the company uses a “buy or bury” approach toward its competitors  —  AG James Leads Bipartisan Coalition of 48 Attorneys General Charging Anticompetitive Conduct  —  Facebook Thwarted Competition, Reduced Consumer Privacy for Profits
The Verge:
Kurt Wagner / Bloomberg:
Catalin Cimpanu / ZDNet:
Adobe has released its final scheduled Flash Player update for all regions outside of mainland China, says it will block Flash content from January 12  —  Adobe releases final Flash update with stronger language asking users to uninstall the app before its EOL.
Dan Primack / Axios:
Airbnb raises $3.5B in its IPO at $68 per share, up from a previous $56-$60 range, giving it a fully diluted valuation of $47.3B  —  Airbnb on Wednesday raised $3.5 billion in its IPO at a fully diluted valuation of around $47.3 billion, and will begin trading Thursday on the New York Stock Exchange under ticker symbol ABNB.
Ina Fried / Axios:
Internal memo: Sundar Pichai apologizes over the handling of AI ethics researcher Timnit Gebru's departure and says he will investigate  —  Google CEO Sundar Pichai apologized Wednesday for the company's handling of the departure of AI ethics researcher Timnit Gebru and said he would investigate …
Sarah Perez / TechCrunch:
Facebook launches Shopping in Instagram Reels, rolling out globally starting today, letting businesses and creators tag products when they create Reels  —  Instagram today is launching Shopping in Reels, its TikTok competitor.  The new feature was announced in October as something the company …
More: The Verge
D. M. Moore / Polygon:
AT&T has agreed to sell Japanese anime streaming service Crunchyroll to Sony's Funimation Global Group for $1.18B  —  The move consolidates the anime industry in a major way  —  On Wednesday, Sony Pictures Entertainment Inc. announced that AT&T and WarnerMedia agreed to sell Crunchyroll to Funimation.
Kaitlyn Tiffany / The Atlantic:
Inside Ovarit, an invite-only Reddit-like site founded by members of the “trans-exclusionary radical feminists” subreddit r/GenderCritical that Reddit banned  —  Mary Kate Fain, a 27-year-old engineer and writer living in Houston, has always considered herself a feminist.
Washington Post:
National Weather Service says it has an Internet bandwidth problem and proposes limiting users to 60 connections/minute, which could hurt weather apps and sites  —  Agency floats a solution to problems that could hobble private companies and affect popular weather apps.
Mike Butcher / TechCrunch:
Solactive, which provides tailor-made indexing services for ETFs and other index-linked investments, raise €50M from Summit Partners  —  German fintech Solactive, a technology-enabled provider of indices and index solutions to the global financial services industry …
Ingrid Lunden / TechCrunch:
Hibob, which provides cloud-based HR management software, raises $70M Series B led by Seek and Israel Growth Partners, sources say at a ~$500M valuation  —  Productivity software has been getting a major re-examination this year, and human resources platforms — used for hiring, firing …
More: VentureBeat and Tech.euThanks:@ingridlunden
Byron Tau / Wall Street Journal:
Apple and Google to ban mobile apps that use location trackers from data broker X-Mode, after it was revealed X-Mode provided data to US government contractors  —  After the data broker came under scrutiny for national-security work, tech giants tell app developers to remove trackers or lose access to their operating systems
Natasha Lomas / TechCrunch:
French data protection agency CNIL fines Google $120M and Amazon $42M for placing tracking cookies without consent  —  France's data protection agency, the CNIL, has slapped Google and Amazon with fines for dropping tracking cookies without consent.  —  Google has been hit with a total …

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Jessica Bursztynsky / CNBC:
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