Apple Inc. has been warned by the European Union to open up its highly guarded iPhone and iPad operating systems to rival technologies, or eventually risk significant fines under its flagship digital antitrust rules.
EU watchdogs announced under the bloc’s Digital Markets Act that Apple must step into line with strict new laws on making operating systems fully functional with other technologies. The Brussels-based authority gave the company six months to comply, or face the threat of future penalties.
While the announcement is a step shy of being a formal investigation, the EU aims to compel Apple to re-engineer its services to allow rival companies to access the iPhone’s and iPad operating systems.
“Today is the first time we use specification proceedings under the DMA to guide Apple towards effective compliance with its interoperability obligations,” EU competition chief Margrethe Vestager said in a statement. “Effective interoperability, for example with smartphones and their operating systems, plays an important role in this.”
Cupertino, California-based Apple said it’s created ways for developers to request additional interoperability with iPhone and iPad operating systems, while protecting users’ security. Undermining protections built into its systems over time would put European consumers at risk, the company added.
Apple shares rose 1.6% to $224.25 in premarket trading of 164,801 shares. The EU announcement confirms an earlier report by Bloomberg.
One of the aims of the DMA is to ensure that other developers can gain access to key Apple features, such as its Siri voice commands and its payments chip.
The EU may later decide to launch a formal probe if Apple doesn’t step into line with the DMA, which could eventually lead to hefty fines of up to 10% of global annual sales. It is already facing a parallel investigation into its App Store rules for developers, which could also lead to hefty penalties.
Earlier this month, Apple announced the latest version of its flagship device, the iPhone 16, betting it can entice consumers with modest hardware upgrades and AI technology that’s still on the horizon.
But in June, the U.S. giant said that certain features—including Apple Intelligence, iPhone Mirroring and SharePlay Screen Sharing—would be held back from the EU, due to the DMA’s requirements on operating systems to work with third-party apps.
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Small sastrugi on Thwaites Glacier. Credit: Unsplash/CC0 Public Domain
Tidal action on the underside of the Thwaites Glacier in the Antarctic will “inexorably” accelerate melting this century, according to new research by British and American scientists. The researchers warn the faster melting could destabilize the entire West Antarctic Ice sheet, leading to its eventual collapse.
The massive glacier—which is roughly the size of Florida—is of particular interest to scientists because of the rapid speed at which it is changing and the impact its loss would have on sea levels (the reason for its “Doomsday” moniker). It also acts as an anchor holding back the West Antarctic ice sheet.
More than 2 kilometers (1.2 miles) thick in places, Thwaites has been likened to a cork in a bottle. Were it to collapse, sea levels would rise by 65 centimeters (26 inches). That’s already a significant amount, given oceans are currently rising 4.6 millimeters a year. But if it led to the eventual loss of the entire ice sheet, sea levels would rise 3.3 meters.
While some computer models suggest reductions in greenhouse gas emissions under the 2015 Paris Agreement may mitigate the glacier’s retreat, the outlook for the glacier remains “grim,” according to a report by the International Thwaites Glacier Collaboration, or ITGC, a project that includes researchers from the British Antarctic Survey, the U.S. National Science Foundation and the UK’s Natural Environment Research Council.
Thwaites has been retreating for more than 80 years but that process has accelerated in the past 30, Rob Larter, a marine geophysicist who contributed to the research, said in a news release. “Our findings indicate it is set to retreat further and faster.” Other dynamics that aren’t currently incorporated into large-scale models could speed up its demise, the new research shows.
Using a torpedo-shaped robot, scientists determined that the underside of Thwaites is insulated by a thin layer of cold water. However, in areas where the parts of the glacier lift off the seabed and the ice begins to float, tidal action is pumping warmer sea water, at high pressure, as far as 10 kilometers (6 miles) under the ice.
The process is disrupting that insulating layer and will likely significantly speed up how fast the grounding zone—the area where the glacier sits on the seabed—retreats.
A similar process has been observed on glaciers in Greenland.
The group also flagged a worst-case scenario in which 100-meter-or-higher ice cliffs at the front of Thwaites are formed and then rapidly calve off icebergs, causing runaway glacial retreat that could raise sea levels by tens of centimeters in this century. However, the researchers said it’s too early to know if such scenarios are likely.
A key unanswered question is whether the loss of Thwaites Glacier is already irreversible. Heavy snowfalls, for example, regularly occur in the Antarctic and help replenish ice loss, Michelle Maclennan, a climate scientist with the University of Colorado at Boulder, explained during a news briefing. “The problem though is that we have this imbalance: There is more ice loss occurring than snowfall can compensate for,” she said.
Increased moisture in the planet’s atmosphere, caused by global warming evaporating ocean waters, could result in more Antarctic snow—at least for a while. At a certain point, though, that’s expected to switch over to rain and surface melting on the ice, creating a situation where the glacier is melting from above and below. How fast that happens depends in part on nations’ progress to slow climate change.
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‘Doomsday’ glacier set to melt faster and swell seas as world heats up, say scientists (2024, September 23)
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by Michelle F. Davis, Dinesh Nair, Ryan Gould, Bloomberg News
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Qualcomm Inc. has approached Intel Corp. to discuss a potential acquisition of the struggling chipmaker, people with knowledge of the matter said, raising the prospect of one of the biggest-ever M&A deals.
California-based Qualcomm proposed a friendly takeover for Intel in recent days, according to the people, who asked not to be identified discussing confidential information. The approach is for all of the chipmaker, though Qualcomm hasn’t ruled out buying or selling parts of Intel in a combination.
It’s uncertain whether the initial approach will lead to an agreement and any deal is likely to come under close antitrust scrutiny and take time to complete, the people said. Qualcomm has been speaking with U.S. regulators and believes an all-American combination could allay any concerns, they said.
Qualcomm is looking at Intel at a time when its smaller rival is in the midst of the most difficult period in its 56-year history. Under Chief Executive Officer Pat Gelsinger, Intel is working on a plan to reshape the company and revive its flagging share price.
While Gelsinger still believes the turnaround plan could be sufficient for Intel to remain an independent company, he is open to considering the merits of different transactions, the people said. Both companies will now assess various options with advisers, they said.
Intel’s shares have fallen about 37% over the past 12 months, giving it a market value of about $93 billion. Qualcomm’s stock has risen more than 50% over the same period for a market capitalization of about $188 billion. At such values, any deal between Qualcomm and all of Intel would rank among the largest on record, Bloomberg-compiled data show.
The Wall Street Journal reported Qualcomm’s interest on Friday, driving Intel’s shares up by more than 3%. Representatives for Qualcomm and Intel declined to comment.
While Qualcomm’s approach raises the prospect of others entering the fray, at least one large rival is opting to sit on the sidelines for now.
Broadcom Inc. isn’t currently evaluating an offer for Intel, people familiar with the matter said. The company had previously been assessing whether to pursue a deal, the people added.
Advisers continue to pitch ideas to Broadcom, the people said. A representative for Broadcom declined to comment.
Intel is headed toward its third consecutive year of shrinking sales, estimated to make $52 billion in revenue in 2024, just 70% of what it brought back in 2021. The stock did receive a bounce this week after the company made a raft of announcements that spurred optimism in Gelsinger’s turnaround plan.
In the most notable move, Intel struck a multibillion-dollar deal with Amazon.com Inc.’s Amazon Web Services cloud unit to coinvest in a custom AI semiconductor and outlined a plan to turn its ailing manufacturing business, or foundry, into a wholly owned subsidiary.
The decision to separate Intel’s foundry operations from the rest of the company is aimed in part at convincing prospective customers — some of whom compete with Intel—that they are dealing with an independent supplier. Bloomberg had previously reported that the company was weighing this option.
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Google has monopolized the technology used to buy and sell online display ads by restricting or eliminating the choices of its customers—both website publishers and advertisers—the U.S. Justice Department alleged at a federal antitrust trial.
Antitrust enforcers have sought to illustrate how the Alphabet Inc. unit’s complex ad ecosystem works and the ways in which the company allegedly manipulated the features of its products and the rules of its auctions to its own benefit. Over the last two weeks at the Virginia trial, they accused Google of abusing its market power in three areas: sell-side tools used by websites, called ad servers; advertising exchanges; and buy-side tools used by advertisers known as ad networks.
Website publishers use an ad server to manage space available for sale. The ad server acts as the brain for the website, keeping track of the minimum bids a publisher is willing to accept, what has been sold and for how much. The Justice Department estimates that Google’s ad server controls 87% of the U.S. market and 91% of the market globally.
Ad exchanges control the auctions that match website publishers with advertisers. Google operates the largest exchange, known as AdX, later rebranded as Google Ad Manager. The Justice Department estimates that Google’s ad exchange controls 47% of the U.S. market and 56% globally. Other popular ad exchanges include Pubmatic Inc., Index Exchange, and Magnite Inc.
Sophisticated advertisers use software known as a demand-side platform to manage their ads and help determine which ad exchanges to bid on and for how much. Google operates a demand-side platform that can bid on an ad exchange.
Advertisers also use ad networks, which take over most of the decision-making process like where to place ads and what to bid, and are most often used by smaller companies. The Justice Department alleges that Google’s network, Google Ads, controls 88% of the U.S. market and 87% globally.
Antitrust enforcers alleged that Google gave special access and privileges to its own ad products to encourage both advertisers and websites to spend only through its services.
Google has argued that the Justice Department’s case misunderstands the dynamics, pace of innovation and competitive landscape within the online advertising market. Advertisers have multiple choices for where to buy ads, the company said, including Amazon.com Inc., Meta Platforms Inc.’s Facebook and Instagram, as well as Amazon.com Inc. and ByteDance Ltd.’s TikTok.
The company also said that many of the Justice Department’s contentions mischaracterize how the technology operates. Changes to the ad tech platform were intended to improve the product, Google said. The limitations on rivals’ access were in place to reduce spam and ad fraud or help advertisers have better control over where ads appeared, the company said.
Tying products
As one advertising executive wrote in a 2017 email to her boss: “The value in Google’s ad tech stack is less in each individual product but in the connections across all of them.”
Advertisers using the Google Ads network are only permitted to place bids through Google’s own exchange, AdX, with a few limited exceptions. That gives AdX a significant volume of ads. In 2020, for example, Google Ads sent in bids for 18 million ads sold through AdX, but only about 3 million to 4 million to third-party exchanges. The tight connection between the products requires any websites that want Google Ads advertising to use AdX.
Similarly, certain functions of Google’s ad exchange, such as real-time bidding, are only available to publishers that use its ad server, DFP, according to the Justice Department.
“Customers are essentially forced to use DFP to get access to AdX,” said Rosa Abrantes-Metz, the Justice Department’s economic expert. Likewise, “AdX is the only channel to reach Google Ads in full.”
Popular websites testified that they felt compelled to use Google’s ad server product because of its exclusive access to Google Ads.
“I felt like they were holding us hostage,” said Stephanie Layser, formerly a top executive at News Corp. in charge of the media company’s use of advertising technology. Google’s ad server technology, developed decades ago, was “slow and clunky,” she said, but News Corp. estimated it might lose as much as $9 million a year if it moved to a different server because it would lose access to Google Ads.
Companies that work with advertisers said they had to use Google’s ad exchange, even though it charges higher fees than others, to ensure they had enough access to website inventory.
Google has argued that it has no obligation under the law to make its products work with those offered by rivals. The requirement that Google Ads bid almost exclusively through AdX helps the company better manage spam and ad fraud, company employees testified.
In 2015, Google launched a program called AdWords Bidding that allowed more exchanges to bid on Google’s inventory. But it was limited to ad retargeting campaigns, by which marketers reach out to users who have visited their website in the past.
Opening up the platform to allow more exchanges to bid on Google’s inventory required a huge lift from the company’s internal engineering teams to work through others’ problems with quality, testified Nirmal Jayaram, a Google engineer who worked on the company’s advertising tools for marketers.
First look
Before 2015, online display ads were sold using a “waterfall” method. A website’s ad server would ask each advertising exchange for bids sequentially. If the first exchange had an advertiser willing to pay a website’s minimum bid, the process ended. Subsequent exchanges only got to bid if the first one didn’t want a particular ad impression, even if they would have been willing to pay more.
The majority of websites used Google’s ad server, which would automatically call on Google’s ad exchange to bid first, according to the Justice Department. That advantage allowed Google to win most often. Even websites that used a different ad server tended to seek out Google’s exchange first because of its exclusive access to advertisers using Google Ads.
Facebook’s Brian Boland, who helmed the social network’s ad tech tools for a decade, likened this to Google getting to pick the best apples out of a crate before any other exchange.
Google was aware of its advantage. “It’s strategic for us to have the AdServer being the decision maker to ensure” Google’s advertiser product “has first look access,” Eisar Lipkovitz, who headed the company’s display ad business from 2014 to 2019, wrote in an email exchange with other Google colleagues.
Gabriel Weintraub, an expert who testified for the Justice Department, estimated that Google’s first look decreased the share of bids that rival exchanges saw by about 25%.
Google said the DOJ’s descriptions of how the ad server worked mischaracterize the technology and that it was technically possible for websites to move another exchange in front of Google’s AdX in the waterfall. Few publishers used this technique, the company said, because they wanted to seek bids from the advertisers who had already chosen to work with Google.
AdMeld acquisition
In 2010, Google became worried about competitors known as yield management systems, which helped websites analyze historical ad performance and determine what order to seek bids from the different ad exchanges. In an internal presentation, Google employees said that the rival tools prevented Google’s advertising exchange from seeing all of the available publisher inventory.
At the time, some publishers were more comfortable with these tools because they still hadn’t wrapped their heads around some of the new features Google was offering, including real-time bidding, according to Neal Mohan, a leader in Google’s display advertising business who later became chief executive officer at YouTube. Mohan likened yield managers to DVDs in a world with modern-day video streaming, framing the tools as outdated tech.
But because publishers still used them, Google was interested in acquiring a company that made them. According to documents shown in court, in 2008, Mohan suggested “picking up the one with the most traction and parking it somewhere.”
Google eventually decided to buy a leading yield manager, AdMeld, for more than $400 million in 2011. The search giant incorporated some of AdMeld’s technology into its own ad exchange, and then shut down the service in 2013.
Last look
DOJ expert Abrantes-Metz said Google’s purchase of AdMeld was a classic “killer acquisition”—buying a potential rival and deprecating the features that threatened its own product.
By 2015, websites had become frustrated with Google and started using an alternate technology, known as header bidding, which moved the bidding process outside of the ad server. With header bidding, a publisher would add code to the website so that an auction would take place within the browser as a page was loading. This allowed websites to simultaneously seek bids from all exchanges and pick the one that would pay the most.
After the auction had ended, the website would send the information to the ad server. Because Google’s ad server is tied into its exchange, though, the company had an opportunity to decide whether it wanted to preempt the winner and take the ad for itself. Lawyers for the Justice Department argued that this allowed Google to win ads without having to directly compete against other exchanges.
The informational advantage also allowed Google to adjust its own bids downward since it had more data on the highest bids coming from other exchanges, the DOJ said.
Abrantes-Metz, the Justice Department expert, likened it to having other exchanges take part in a sealed bid auction, but letting Google open the envelope at the end.
Google acknowledged this advantage in its internal documents. Google’s tools “have visibility in to remnant price before they submit bids (commonly referred to in the market as ‘last look’),” one presentation said. But the company’s lawyers also argued that rival ad exchanges could have built integrations with its ad server that they chose not to do because it was costly.
“Both publishers and exchanges have very strongly complained about the fairness of” last look, another Google employee wrote in a 2016 email.
Weintraub estimated that Google’s last look advantage increased the amount of ad spend on its platform by $473 million a year.
Google argues that websites could avoid giving its exchange a last look, but that most publishers opted to allow it to bid because of the greater demand in Google Ads. The company also said that when Google’s exchange gained a “last look,” that led to higher revenue for publishers.
Revenue share
Google’s advertising exchange, AdX, charges a 20% fee on winning bids. But in 2014, Google introduced a mechanism, called Dynamic Revenue Share, that would allow AdX to vary the fee if that would help an advertiser to win. The system would keep track of when it had given an advertiser a discounted fee on a particular bid and make up the difference in a later auction.
The search giant was only able to implement DRS because of its last look advantage, Weintraub said, since Google knew what price it needed to beat in order to win. He estimated that it increased ad spending on Google’s exchange by about $162 million a year.
“Because they could see all the bids, they could adjust the rev share at the end,” Brian O’Kelley, the former CEO of AppNexus, a rival ad exchange that was later purchased by AT&T and then Microsoft Corp. “Because they were at the end of the process, because they owned the ad server, they could win that impression.”
Google argues that the mechanism helped publishers because they made more money from their ad inventory. In one 2019 experiment the company conducted internally, it found that the DRS led to an increase of as much as 4% in publisher revenue.
Pricing rules
After the introduction of header bidding, Google discovered that websites would often give AdX a higher minimum price to compensate for its last look advantage.
In 2019, Google introduced Unified Pricing Rules, which eliminated the ability of websites to give Google’s exchange a higher minimum price than other exchanges.
Website publishers were very unhappy with the change. At an April 2019 meeting with top publishers where Google announced the new rules, several websites expressed concern that Google was eliminating a key tool they used to control how exchanges bid on ads.
The new rules “stopped our ability to set floors as we would like,” Michael Wheatland, an executive with the UK’s Daily Mail newspaper, testified. After the rules were adopted, the newspaper saw three times as much of its ad inventory sold through AdX, he said.
The new rules hurt publishers by limiting their ability to distinguish between different exchanges, DOJ expert Weintraub said. He estimated the rules pushed as much as $221 million in advertising spend each year to AdX.
Google disputes Weintraub’s assessment of the impact of the rules, attributing them to a separate change in bidding order.
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How Google allegedly monopolized the ad technology market (2024, September 23)
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Alaska Airlines said it grounded its flights in Seattle briefly on Sunday night due to “significant disruptions” from an unspecified technology problem that was resolved by about 10 p.m. local time.
In comments from its account on X to customers complaining of delays and problems with the airline’s app and website, the carrier apologized for the delays. It later reported that the problem had been resolved. The exact reason for the disruptions was unclear.
“If you are traveling today, please check your flight status before leaving for the airport. If your schedule allows, please change or cancel your flight,” the airline said in a statement on its home page. “We apologize for the inconvenience and are working quickly to resolve the issue.”
It has been a rough few weeks for people traveling through Seattle, a busy hub for Alaska Airlines and other major carriers.
Last week, the operator of Seattle-Tacoma International Airport, the main hub for Alaska Airlines, said hackers were demanding $6 million in bitcoin for documents they stole during a cyberattack in August and then posted on the dark web. The Port of Seattle, which owns and runs the airport, said it had decided not to pay.
The airport has been recovering from the attack, which began Aug. 24, a busy time days before the Labor Day holiday weekend.
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