In the latest sign of AI silly season, Allbirds, the shoe company, told the world it was now an AI company and briefly managed to septuple its stock price. The Newbird AI story is really just one of a bunch of things this week that made us wonder: have we reached the peak of AI, […]
Yet another inflation shock is knocking at the door amid the war in Iran. OECD data shows that U.S. inflation is already higher than that of Western European peers.
Connie Ballmer, wife of former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer and cofounder of the Ballmer Group, has given $80 million to NPR. That’s roughly seven years’ worth of government funding ($11.2m) after Trump and Congress cut funds for public media, but only a fraction of NPR’s full annual budget of $300 million. NPR may still cut […]
After a jury found that Live Nation-Ticketmaster violated antitrust law on several counts, the company warns in a blog post that the verdict “is not the last word on this matter.” The company plans to renew a motion for the judge to issue a ruling against the states, claiming that they did not prove their […]
In the span of a few years, age verification went from an idea to standard practice on large parts of the internet. Seeking to prevent kids from accessing porn, other inappropriate content, or social media altogether, laws mandating age-gating have spread rapidly across the globe, reaching the UK, the US, Australia, France, Brazil, and many […]
Spotify and the three major labels have won a $322 million default judgement against Anna’s Archive, the open-source library and pirate activist group that planned to publicly release millions of music files scraped from Spotify’s platform. The judgment comes after the unknown operator of Anna’s Archive failed to respond to a lawsuit filed by Spotify, […]
Hello and welcome to Regulator, a newsletter for Verge subscribers about Big Tech power plays in Washington and beyond. (And when I say beyond, I mean the great beyond, like Heaven, maybe.) If you’ve found your way to this newsletter from the wild, annual subscriptions are currently 50 percent off. That’s $30 a year for […]
Live Nation-Ticketmaster is an illegal monopolist, a Manhattan jury found, according to Bloomberg. The jury found the company liable on three counts: illegally monopolizing the market for live event ticketing, amphitheaters, and tying its concert promotions business with the use of its venues, Bloomberg reported. The verdict, reached after several days of deliberation, leaves the […]
The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and a group of eight states have announced a proposed settlement with big ad agencies that will prevent them from working together to avoid certain platforms like X based on their political viewpoints. In a complaint, the FTC argues that ad agencies violated antitrust rules by agreeing to a common […]
The Senate is getting ready to vote on a bill to resurrect IRS Direct File, the free tax filing service axed by the Trump administration in 2025. On Wednesday, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) will seek unanimous consent to pass the Direct File Act, where it will either get fast-tracked to the House of Representatives or […]