Facebook owner Meta Platforms must face trial in a US Federal Trade Commission lawsuit seeking its break-up over claims that it bought Instagram and WhatsApp to crush emerging competition in social media, a judge in Washington ruled on Wednesday.

Judge James Boasberg largely denied Meta’s motion to end the case filed against Facebook in 2020, during the Trump administration, alleging that the company acted illegally to maintain its social network monopoly.

Meta, then known as Facebook, overpaid for Instagram in 2012 and WhatsApp in 2014 to eliminate nascent threats instead of competing on its own in the mobile ecosystem, the FTC claims.

Boasberg let that claim stand, but dismissed the FTC’s allegation that Facebook bolstered its dominance by restricting third-party app developers’ access to the platform unless they agreed not to compete with its core services.

“We are confident that the evidence at trial will show that the acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp have been good for competition and consumers,” a Meta spokesperson said on Wednesday.

FTC spokesperson Douglas Farrar said that the case filed during the Trump administration and refined under Biden “represents a bipartisan effort to curtail Meta’s monopoly power and restore competition to ensure freedom and innovation in the social media ecosystem.”

At trial, Meta will not be allowed to argue the WhatsApp acquisition boosted competition by strengthening its position against Apple and Google, Boasberg ruled.

The judge said he would release a detailed order later on Wednesday after the FTC and Meta have had a chance to redact any sensitive commercial information.

A trial date in the case has not been set.

Meta had urged the judge to dismiss the entire case, saying it depended on an overly narrow view of social media markets, and did not take into account competition from ByteDance’s TikTok, Google’s YouTube, X, and Microsoft’s LinkedIn.

The case is one of five blockbuster lawsuits where antitrust regulators at the FTC and US Department of Justice are going after Big Tech.

Amazon.com Inc and Apple are both being sued, and Alphabet’s Google is facing two lawsuits, including one where a judge recently found it unlawfully thwarted competition among online search engines.

© Thomson Reuters 2024

(This story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)

Microsoft was hit with an EU antitrust complaint by German rival Alfaview on Thursday, the second so far over its bundling of video app Teams into its Office product, as the bloc’s regulator prepares to investigate the US tech giant.

The US software company has been on the EU competition enforcer’s radar since 2020 when Salesforce-owned workspace messaging app Slack complained about the tying of Teams with Office.

Alfaview, based in Karlsruhe in south-western Germany and with a 500-strong workforce, said it had filed a similar complaint to the European Commission.

Bundling both products together gives Teams a unique competitive advantage that is not justified by performance and which rivals cannot match, it said.

This has a significant and permanent impact on competition in the communication software market, Alfaview continued.

“Tying Teams with the other applications in the Microsoft 365 suite creates a multipolar distribution advantage for the US group,” its managing director and founder, Niko Fostiropoulos, said in a statement.

Microsoft declined to comment on Alfaview’s complaint. The Commission confirmed receipt of the complaint, saying it would assess it based on its standard procedures.

Microsoft added Teams to Office 365 in 2017 for free, with the app eventually replacing Skype for Business.

The Commission is set to launch an investigation into the move after Microsoft’s remedies fell short, people familiar with the matter told Reuters earlier this month.

Microsoft, which has been fined a total of 2.2 billion euros ($2.5 billion or roughly Rs. 20,505 crore) in the previous decade for practices in breach of EU competition rules, has offered to cut the price of its Office product without Teams, but regulators want a bigger reduction, the people said.

No formal investigation has been opened yet, but Microsoft is subject to an informal probe.

“We continue to engage cooperatively with the Commission in its investigation and are open to pragmatic solutions that address its concerns and serve customers well,” a Microsoft spokesperson said.

Alfaview urged the EU antitrust watchdog to open a formal investigation, saying remedies offered by its US rival to the Commission were insufficient. 

© Thomson Reuters 2023 

A federal judge in California has granted Google’s request to temporarily pause his order directing the Alphabet unit to overhaul its Android app store Play by Nov. 1 to give consumers more choice over how they download software.

San Francisco-based U.S. District Judge James Donato made the decision on Friday as part of an antitrust lawsuit against Google by “Fortnite” maker Epic Games. Google argued that Donato’s Oct. 7 injunction would harm the company and introduce “serious safety, security and privacy risks into the Android ecosystem.”

Donato delayed the injunction to allow the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals to consider Google’s separate request to pause the judge’s order.

Donato denied Google’s separate request to pause the order for the duration of its broader appeal in the case.

“We’re pleased with the District Court’s decision to temporarily pause the implementation of dangerous remedies demanded by Epic, as the Court of Appeal considers our request to further pause the remedies while we appeal,” Google said in a statement.

Epic in a statement called Donato’s ruling a procedural step, and said the court “made it clear that Google’s appeal is meritless and rejected their request to delay opening up Android devices to competition while the appeal is ongoing.”

Epic accused Google of using “fearmongering and unsubstantiated security threats to protect their control over Android devices and continue extracting exorbitant fees.”

In the Epic Games lawsuit, a jury last year found that Google illegally monopolized how consumers download apps on Android devices and how they pay for in-app transactions. The judge, in his order, embraced many of the steps recommended by Epic in light of the jury’s decision.

The order required Google to allow users to download competing third-party Android app platforms or stores in Play and to allow the use of competing in-app payment methods. It also barred Google from making payments to device makers to preinstall its app store and from sharing revenue generated from the Play store with other app distributors.

Google has already appealed the jury’s antitrust findings to the 9th Circuit.

Google has not presented its antitrust arguments to the appeals court. It previously has said that it cannot be considered a monopolist because Play and Apple’s App Store are direct competitors, and that Donato’s injunction would unlawfully force Google to do business with rivals.

© Thomson Reuters 2024

(This story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)

Apple Music, Apple TV, and Apple Devices have officially been launched on Windows. These standalone apps were first previewed by the company in January 2023. After remaining in the testing phase for a year, the Cupertino-based tech giant has now removed the Preview tags from these apps and is letting users download them for their PCs. This move was reportedly made to reduce the reliance of users on iTunes, which previously acted as a one-stop shop for the combined functionalities of these apps, bar the streaming services.

A Support page of Apple now highlights that users with Windows 10 or later can now access these dedicated apps. Apple Music allows users to listen to and manage their iTunes library, access iTunes purchases, and get access to Apple’s streaming service. Similarly, Apple TV enables people to watch movies, documentaries, and TV series from their iTunes library, as well as offers the Apple TV+ streaming service. Apple Devices, on the other hand, helps update, back up, restore, and manage their iPhone and iPad devices, as well as let them sync content from PC.

The Apple apps for Windows support x86-based PCs running on Windows 10 or Windows 11. However, if users do not have the required operating system, they can continue to use iTunes. Further, those downloading the dedicated apps must download all three of them, as downloading just one or two will prompt a message to download the remaining apps first. Once all the apps have been downloaded, iTunes will only offer access to audiobooks and podcasts. The iPhone maker has also urged users to not delete their iTunes app as both Apple Music and Apple TV apps read the content of the iTunes library.

As per reports, Apple decided to split iTunes to mirror how the apps work on Mac. The dedicated apps also offer a more streamlined interface and recently added features that might be missing in the older app. Further, this also allows the tech giant to expand its streaming services to Windows users.

Separately, Apple researchers recently released an artificial intelligence (AI)-powered image editing tool called MGIE (MLLM Guided Image Editing), which is capable of editing images using simple text prompts. As per the preprint paper, it is capable of making Photoshop-style edits, global optimisation, and local edits.