Megacorporations Watch Thread

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caltrek
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Antitrust Probe Finds Google Abused Dominant Position of Android in India
by Manish Singh
September 18, 2021

https://techcrunch.com/2021/09/18/googl ... obe-finds/

Introduction:
(TechCrunch) Google has abused the dominant position of Android in India to illegally hurt competitors in the world’s second largest internet market, a two-year antitrust probe by the nation’s watchdog has found.

The Android-maker reduced device manufacturing firms’ ability and incentive to develop — and sell — devices running alternative versions of Android (more popularly known as forks), the probe found, according to two people have have been briefed on the findings.

Additionally, the report found Google’s requirement to make it mandatory for device manufacturers to pre-install its apps to be in violation of India’s competition law.

More than five dozen firms including Amazon and Apple responded to queries from the Indian watchdog — the Competition Commission of India — during the course of the investigation, the report said.
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caltrek
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Ireland’s Status as Tax Haven for Tech Firms like Google, Facebook, and Apple is Ending
by Kim Lyons
October 7, 2021

https://www.theverge.com/2021/10/7/2271 ... book-apple

Introduction:
(The Verge) Ireland said Thursday it would join an international agreement that sets taxes on profits for multinational corporations at a minimum rate of 15 percent. This is a major shift for the country that is the European headquarters for many large US pharmaceutical companies, as well as tech firms, including Google, Apple, and Facebook.

An increase from Ireland’s current 12.5 percent to 15 percent may not seem that large by itself. The so-called Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) Inclusive Framework agreement, outlined in July, is actually a two-pillar plan aimed at helping end tax avoidance and making international tax rules fairer and more transparent. The OECD has estimated that a 15 percent tax rate would generate some $150 billion in global tax revenue annually and would help to stabilize the international tax system.

Ireland signed on to the deal ahead of a Friday meeting at the OECD among the 140 countries that have been negotiating its terms for several years. The plan calls for global companies to pay taxes in countries where their products or services are sold, even if they don’t have a physical presence there, and would apply to multinational companies with revenues above €750 million (about $867 million). For companies with revenues below €750 million, the 12.5 percent rate would remain in effect in Ireland.

Over the past several decades, Ireland has served as a tax shelter for many large tech companies, thanks to its low corporate tax rate. Companies typically create Irish subsidiaries of their companies that license their intellectual property, on which the subsidiary pays royalties. Some 800 US companies have operations in Ireland, according to the American Chamber of Commerce Ireland, employing about 180,000 people. Apple opened its first plant in Ireland in 1980 and now employs some 6,000 people on its campus in the city of Cork. Facebook established its international headquarters in Dublin in 2008, and Google announced its European headquarters would be in Ireland in 2003.

Irish finance minister Paschal Donohoe said in a statement Thursday that the agreement will “address the tax challenges of digitalisation.” Donohoe added that he believes companies will still choose to locate their headquarters in Ireland
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caltrek
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Senate Joins Big Tech Antitrust Fray
by Margaret Harding McGill
October 14, 2021

https://www.axios.com/senate-big-tech-a ... f4cf4.html

Introduction:
(Axios) A bipartisan group of lawmakers led by Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) unveiled a bill Thursday banning companies like Amazon and Google from favoring their own services.

Why it matters: The Senate legislation, which is similar to a bipartisan House bill, shows Republicans and Democrats in both chambers are eager to pass new regulations on the country's biggest technology companies.

Driving the news: Klobuchar, chairwoman of the Senate Judiciary antitrust subcommittee, and Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), ranking member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, are lead sponsors of the American Innovation and Choice Online Act.
  • The legislation would prohibit dominant online platforms from favoring their own products or services. It also bars them from discriminating against businesses on their platforms in a way that would harm competition.
  • The bill also bans specific practices the lawmakers say are harmful, including requiring a business to buy a dominant platform's goods or services for preferred placement on its platform, or misusing a business' data to compete against them.
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Facebook is planning to rebrand the company with a new name
Mark Zuckerberg wants to be known for building the metaverse

By Alex Heath
Oct 19, 2021

https://www.theverge.com/2021/10/19/227 ... -metaverse

Introduction:
Facebook is planning to change its company name next week to reflect its focus on building the metaverse, according to a source with direct knowledge of the matter.

The coming name change, which CEO Mark Zuckerberg plans to talk about at the company’s annual Connect conference on October 28th, but could unveil sooner, is meant to signal the tech giant’s ambition to be known for more than social media and all the ills that entail. The rebrand would likely position the blue Facebook app as one of many products under a parent company overseeing groups like Instagram, WhatsApp, Oculus, and more. A spokesperson for Facebook declined to comment for this story.

Facebook already has more than 10,000 employees building consumer hardware like AR glasses that Zuckerberg believes will eventually be as ubiquitous as smartphones. In July, he told The Verge that, over the next several years, “we will effectively transition from people seeing us as primarily being a social media company to being a metaverse company.”
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caltrek
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Google Loses Key Appeal Against €2.4 billion EU Shopping Antitrust Case
by James Vincent
November 10, 2021

https://www.theverge.com/2021/11/10/227 ... ses-appeal

Introduction:
(The Verge) The EU’s second-most senior court, the General Court, has upheld a 2017 ruling by the European Commission which found that Google broke antitrust law in how it used its search engine to promote its shopping comparison service and demote those of its rivals.

Google and its parent company Alphabet appealed the decision, but the General Court today dismissed that appeal and upheld a fine of €2.4 billion ($2.8 billion). Google and Alphabet now have the option to appeal the decision yet again with the EU’s highest court, the European Court of Justice (ECJ).

This outcome is significant as it strengthens antitrust arguments made by the EU’s influential competition commissioner Margrethe Vestager against US tech firms. In addition to this shopping comparison case, Google has been hit by two other major antitrust cases involving Android and AdSense in 2018 and 2019 respectively. These cases are now going through a similar appeal process to the one Google lost today with Google Shopping.

Key to Vestager’s legal argument in this and other antitrust cases is the concept of “self-preferencing” — the idea that a company like Google can break antitrust law by using a dominant position in one market (in Google’s case, search) to help it succeed in another (in this case, shopping). Self-preferencing is not itself a breach of EU antitrust law, but its potential harmful effects — like stifling better products made by rivals — are.

In its judgement today, the EU’s General Court said it had seen enough evidence that Google’s behavior in this area was harmful. The company, said the court, had broken antitrust law “by favouring its own comparison shopping service on its general results pages through more favourable display and positioning, while relegating the results from competing comparison services in those pages by means of ranking algorithms.”
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California Orders Amazon to Pay $500,000 Over Concealed COVID Cases Claim
by Shawna Chen
November 15, 2021

https://www.axios.com/amazon-california ... b1bca.html

Introduction:
(Axios) California Attorney General Rob Bonta announced Monday that the state has ordered Amazon to pay $500,000 for "concealing COVID-19 case numbers" from workers.

Why it matters: The court judgment is the first of its kind under California's new "right to know" law, which aims to bolster worker safety by requiring employers to disclose coronavirus cases to employees and local health agencies, among other provisions.

Details: Amazon "failed to adequately notify warehouse workers and local health agencies of COVID-19 case numbers, often leaving them in the dark and unable to effectively track the spread of the virus," Bonta's office said in a statement.

Amazon will modify its COVID notification systems, submit to regulatory monitoring and pay $500,000 toward further enforcement of the state's consumer protection laws.

What they're saying: "Californians have a right to know about potential exposures to the coronavirus to protect themselves, their families, and their communities," Bonta said in his statement.
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caltrek
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This (see below) is kind of a weird story in that I find myself sympathetic to the megacorporation (Apple) at the center.

Apple Sues Company Known for Hacking iPhones on Behalf of Governments
by Kif Leswing
November 23, 2021

https://www.cnbc.com/2021/11/23/apple-s ... ments.html

Introduction:
(CNBC) Apple on Tuesday sued NSO Group, an Israeli firm that sells software to government agencies and law enforcement that enables them to hack iPhones and read the data on them, including messages and other communications.

Earlier this year, Amnesty International said it discovered recent-model iPhones belonging to journalists and human rights lawyers that had been infected with NSO Group malware called Pegasus.

Apple is seeking a permanent injunction to ban NSO Group from using Apple software, services or devices. It’s also seeking damages over $75,000.

Apple considers the lawsuit to be a warning to other spyware vendors. “The steps Apple is taking today will send a clear message: in a free society, it is unacceptable to weaponize powerful state-sponsored spyware against innocent users and those who seek to make the world a better place,” Ivan Krstic, Apple’s head of security engineering and architecture, said in a tweet.

NSO Group software permits “attacks, including from sovereign governments that pay hundreds of millions of dollars to target and attack a tiny fraction of users with information of particular interest to NSO’s customers,” Apple said in the lawsuit filed in federal court in the Nort
Here is a Courthouse News article on this same issue: https://www.courthousenews.com/apple-su ... g-iphones/
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Amazon is making its own containers and bypassing supply chain chaos
For years, Amazon has been quietly chartering private cargo ships, making its own containers, and leasing planes to better control the complicated shipping journey of an online order. Now, as many retailers panic over supply chain chaos, Amazon’s costly early moves are helping it avoid the long wait times for available dock space and workers at the country’s busiest ports of Long Beach and Los Angeles.

“Amazon has produced probably 5,000 to 10,000 of these containers over the last two years I’ve been tracking it,” Ferreira said. “When they bring these containers onto U.S. soil, once they unload them, guess what? They get to be used in the domestic system and the rail system. They don’t have to return them to Asia like everyone else does.”

“By creating their own containers, they are essentially guaranteeing that equipment is going to be available for them,” said Lauren Beagen, maritime lawyer and founder of Squall Strategies. She was working at the Federal Maritime Commission when Amazon first registered with the agency in 2015, the first indication it was exploring its own ocean freight business.

Then in 2017, Amazon started quietly operating as a global freight forwarder through a Chinese subsidiary, helping move goods across the ocean for its Chinese sellers who pay to be part of the Fulfilled by Amazon program. Internally, Amazon dubbed this project “Dragon Boat.”

“They are doing over 10,000 containers per month of the small- and medium-sized Chinese exporters. Amazon’s volume as an ocean vendor — that’s right, you heard me correct, they’re considered an ocean vendor — would rank them in the top five transportation companies in the Trans Pacific,” Ferreira said.
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caltrek
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India Antitrust Watchdog Suspends Amazon's 2019 Deal with Future, Imposes Fine
Manish Singh
December 17, 2017

https://techcrunch.com/2021/12/17/india ... th-future/

Introduction:
(TechCrunch) An Indian antitrust watchdog has revoked the approval it had granted for Amazon’s 2019 investment in a Future Group unit and imposed a fine of about $26.3 million to the American e-commerce giant for concealing facts.

The Competition Commission of India (CCI) said Amazon, which invested in Future Coupons in 2019, “suppress[ed] the actual scope and purpose of the combination” and failed to notify some of its commercial arrangements.
Conclusion:
Confederation of All India Traders, a lobby group that represents millions of retailers in the South Asian market, said CCI’s Friday order is “a landmark order and Amazon stands fully exposed for its mal-practices, and bunch of lies at all levels together with continued violation of laws and the rules.”
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Oracle Snags Cerner in $28 Billion Mega Deal to Make a Big Move into Healthcare
by Ron Miller
December 20, 2021

https://techcrunch.com/2021/12/20/oracl ... ealthcare/

Introduction:
(TechCrunch) Who says the holiday week is a slow news week? Oracle was kind enough to help tech journalists weary from working on year-end stories with some big news today when the database giant announced it was buying electronic healthcare records company Cerner in a deal valued at $28.3 billion.

“Oracle Corporation and Cerner Corporation today jointly announced an agreement for Oracle to acquire Cerner through an all-cash tender offer for $95.00 per share, or approximately $28.3 billion in equity value,” the company said in a press release announcing the deal.

With this deal, Oracle moves in a big way into the healthcare vertical, a growing market, and one which should help bolster Oracle’s fledgling cloud infrastructure business, which is languishing in the single digits, according to Synergy Research.

Holger Mueller, an analyst at Constellation Research, says it’s the biggest deal in Oracle history, a company that has a long history of being acquisitive. “It’s a smart move by Oracle. It cements Oracle technology even deeper into Healthcare, and brings a lot of current and especially future work load to Oracle Cloud. Not to mention that Oracle is buying into the largest and fastest growing vertical industry,” Mueller told me.

That growth potential certainly didn’t escape Oracle CEO Safra Catz. “Cerner will be a huge additional revenue growth engine for years to come as we expand its business into many more countries throughout the world. That’s exactly the growth strategy we adopted when we bought NetSuite—except the Cerner revenue opportunity is even larger,” she said in a statement.
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