Sarah Needleman

Fortnite maker Epic Games says it is suing Google and Samsung, alleging that the companies secretly colluded and imposed “onerous” restrictions on new third-party app stores. Epic alleges that Google and Samsung made it too difficult for consumers to download app stores made by outside software developers, a new possibility after Google lost a previous antitrust lawsuit brought by the videogame company. The tech giants conspired to make a feature called Auto Blocker active by default on Samsung’s newest smartphones, according to Epic.

Apple's new App Store payment policies are stirring outrage among software developers who say the iPhone maker is skirting the intention of a court ruling. Apple will require developers to pay it a 27% commission if they use an alternative payment method, much like the company did in the Netherlands and South Korea in response to legal rulings over related issues in those countries. With this change, Apple is effectively saying “we refuse to back down,” said Fiona Scott Morton, a former antitrust official in the Obama administration.

Microsoft can close its $75 billion acquisition of Activision Blizzard, a federal judge ruled, delivering a major setback to the Federal Trade Commission’s attempt to rein in big mergers. The deal would combine Microsoft’s Xbox videogaming business with the publisher of popular franchises such as Call of Duty, World of Warcraft, and Candy Crush.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said the company would change its name to Meta to reflect growth opportunities beyond its namesake social-media platform in online digital realms known as the metaverse. “Over time I hope our company will be seen as a metaverse company,” Zuckerberg said. “We’ve gone from desktop to web to phones, from text to photos to video, but this isn’t the end of the line.

President Biden’s attack on Facebook followed months of mounting private frustration inside his administration over the social-media giant’s handling of vaccine misinformation, according to US officials, bringing into public view tensions that could complicate efforts to stop the spread of Covid-19. The false narratives that Covid-19 vaccines result in widespread death and that the U.S.

A host of companies, are challenging the way Apple runs its App Store. The App Store generates at least $15 billion in annual sales for the tech giant. Critics say Apple takes too big a cut of app makers’ sales and wields monopoly power over the gateway that connects hundreds of millions of users to mobile apps. Apple disputes that characterization, saying that it collects only a portion of sales from a small percentage of the almost 2 million apps available on the App Store and that its practices are in line with competitors’ app marketplaces.

Privacy experts from Facebook and Apple defended the security and use of consumer data on their platforms, though they said greater protections and public education are needed, especially as technology evolves and new laws around it take shape.

Twitter reported its first consecutive quarterly drop in users, losing more than it had expected and signaling further declines to come as it continues to purge fake accounts. Even so, Twitter said it boosted revenue and swung to a profit in the third quarter as it extracted more advertising revenue out of its existing users.