Day: September 10, 2024

LONDON — Google lost its last bid to overturn a European Union antitrust penalty, after the bloc’s top court ruled against it Tuesday in a case that came with a whopping fine and helped jumpstart an era of intensifying scrutiny for Big Tech companies.

The European Union’s top court rejected Google’s appeal against the $2.7 billion penalty from the European Commission, the 27-nation bloc’s top antitrust enforcer, for violating antitrust rules with its comparison shopping service.

Also Tuesday, Apple lost its challenge against an order to repay $14.34 billion in back taxes to Ireland, after the European Court of Justice issued a separate decision siding with the commission in a case targeting unlawful state aid for global corporations.

Both companies have now exhausted their appeals in the cases that date to the previous decade. Together, the court decisions are a victory for European Commissioner Margrethe Vestager, who is expected to step down next month after 10 years as the commission’s top official overseeing competition.

Experts said the rulings illustrate how watchdogs have been emboldened in the years since the cases were first opened.

One of the takeaways from the Apple decision “is the sense that, again, the EU authorities and courts are prepared to flex their [collective] muscles to bring Big Tech to heel where necessary,” Alex Haffner, a competition partner at law firm Fladgate, said by email.

The shopping fine was one of three huge antitrust penalties for Google from the commission, which punished the Silicon Valley giant in 2017 for unfairly directing visitors to its own Google Shopping service over competitors.

“We are disappointed with the decision of the Court, which relates to a very specific set of facts,” Google said in a brief statement.

The company said it made changes to comply with the commission’s decision requiring it to treat competitors equally. It started holding auctions for shopping search listings that it would bid for alongside other comparison shopping services.

“Our approach has worked successfully for more than seven years, generating billions of clicks for more than 800 comparison shopping services,” Google said.

European consumer group BEUC hailed the court’s decision, saying it shows how the bloc’s competition law “remains highly relevant” in digital markets.

“It is a good outcome for all European consumers at the end of the day,” Director General Agustín Reyna said in an interview. “It means that many smaller companies or rivals will be able to go to different comparison shopping sites. They don’t need to depend on Google to reach out to customers.”

Google is still appealing its two other EU antitrust cases: a 2018 fine of $4.55 billion involving its Android operating system and a 2019 penalty of $1.64 billion over its AdSense advertising platform.

Despite the amounts of money involved, the adverse rulings will leave a small financial dent in one of the world’s richest and most profitable companies. The combined bill of $17 billion facing Apple and Alphabet, Google’s parent company, represents 0.3% of their combined market value of $5.2 trillion.

Those three cases foreshadowed expanded efforts by regulators worldwide to crack down on the tech industry. The EU has since opened more investigations into Big Tech companies and drew up a new law to prevent them from cornering online markets, known as the Digital Markets Act.

Google is also now facing pressure over its lucrative digital advertising business from the EU and Britain, which are carrying out separate investigations, and the United States, where the Department of Justice is taking the company to federal court over its alleged dominance in ad tech.

Apple failed in its last bid to avoid repaying its Irish taxes Tuesday after the Court of Justice upheld a lower court ruling against the company, in the dispute that dates back to 2016.

The case drew outrage from Apple, with CEO Tim Cook calling it “total political crap.”
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Harare, Zimbabwe — Zimbabwe’s government has introduced hefty fines of up to $5,000 for poor service in the country’s telecommunications industry.

In a statement Tuesday, Zimbabwe’s ICT Minister Tatenda Mavetera said the government will levy fines of between $200 and $5,000 per infringement for telecommunications companies and internet providers who fail to give reliable service.

Willard Shoko, an independent high-speed internet consultant, said the new fines could result in a solid telecom industry that can compete in the entire southern African region.

“The motive behind that is to improve internet for the end user. But I think they should also consider improving the infrastructure sharing and also collaboration to improve internet, not only for the region but also for Zimbabwe, because this is the foundation of the digital economy,” Shoko said. “I think they should also think about how the internet can be improved and the partnership that can help improve the internet.”

Fungai Mandiveyi, media and corporate affairs executive at Econet Wireless, Zimbabwe’s biggest telecommunications company, said the new regulations will be easier to comply with than those that existed before.

“The new provisions introduce a new model of penalties, unlike the blanket penalty that existed in the previous statutory instrument,” Mandiveyi said. “The new penalties are now linked to specific quality of service breaches, that have also been clearly spelled out. There is now more clarity in what constitutes a service breach, and what penalty goes with a specific breach of the quality of service.”

However, Christopher Musodza, an independent digital policy consultant, said the pressure to maintain internet service during Zimbabwe’s frequent power outages may present challenges for telecom companies.

“For the telecoms provider, it’s going to be tough,” he said. “The economy is not performing as anyone would want. We have got issues to do with long hours of load shedding, so service providers have to power their base stations for long hours to ensure that they meet the key performance indicators. So, imagine running generators for most of the day to ensure that you avoid a fine. (I’m) not sure what will cost more; trying to keep up with these economic factors or just paying the fine.”

Zimbabweans have long complained about poor and expensive telecommunication service. Shoko said that is the reason they are welcoming the government’s decision this month to approve Starlink’s license to operate in Zimbabwe.

The U.S.-based satellite company, owned by Elon Musk, has established a presence in several other African countries, including Botswana, Kenya, Mozambique, Nigeria, Rwanda, and Zambia.

“They can now easily get internet anywhere in Zimbabwe at an affordable price, thereby bridging the digital divide. That’s one major thing for the end user,” Shoko said of Starlink’s presence.

“For the local ISPs [internet service providers], there is massive opportunity that Zimbabwe can take advantage of — investment in ground infrastructure,” he added. “Currently in Africa, Nigeria has only two ground stations that are servicing the whole of Africa. If the Zimbabwe government and local ISPs can work together with Starlink to provide ground stations in Zimbabwe, this will allow local ISPs to provide internet to Starlink, and provide better latencies in the region. So this will improve Starlink internet for local Zimbabweans, as well as the region.”
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KINSHASA, Democratic Republic of Congo — Authorities in the Democratic Republic of Congo said that 50,000 doses of mpox vaccine from the United States arrived in the country on Tuesday, a week after the first batch arrived from the European Union.

Adults in Equateur, South Kivu and Sankuru, the three most-affected provinces, will be vaccinated first, starting on October 2, said Cris Kacita Osako, coordinator of the DRC’s Monkeypox Response Committee.

Last week, the first batch of mpox vaccines arrived in the capital, Kinshasa, the center of the outbreak. The 100,000 doses of the JYNNEOS vaccine, manufactured by the Danish company Bavarian Nordic, were donated by the EU through HERA, the bloc’s agency for health emergencies. Another 100,000 were delivered over the weekend.

The 50,000 doses from the U.S. will be of the same JYNNEOS vaccine.

The 250,000 doses are just a fraction of the 3 million doses authorities have said are needed to end the mpox outbreaks in the DRC, the epicenter of the global health emergency. EU countries pledged to donate more than 500,000 others, but the timeline for their delivery remained unclear.

Since the start of 2024, there have been 5,549 confirmed mpox cases across the continent, with 643 associated deaths, representing a sharp escalation in infections and fatalities compared with previous years. The cases in the DRC constituted 91% of the total number. Most mpox infections in the DRC and Burundi, the second-most-affected country, are in children under age 15.

Last week, the Africa Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the World Health Organization launched a continentwide response plan to the outbreak of mpox, three weeks after the World Health Organization declared outbreaks in 12 African countries a global emergency.

The DRC issued an emergency approval of the vaccine, which has already been used in Europe and the United States in adults. For the moment, the rollout will be reserved for adults, with priority groups being those who have been in close contact with infected people and sex workers, Africa CDC Director-General Dr. Jean Kaseya told reporters last week.

The European Medicines Agency is examining additional data to be able to administer it to children ranging in age from 12 to 17, which could happen at the end of the month, HERA Director-General Laurent Muschel said.

The next batch of mpox vaccines will come from Japan and could arrive as early as this weekend, Kacita Osako told the AP, without specifying how many doses.
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SYDNEY — Australia will ban children from using social media with a minimum age limit as high as 16, the prime minister said Tuesday, vowing to get kids off their devices and “onto the footy fields.”

Federal legislation to keep children off social media will be introduced this year, Anthony Albanese said, describing the impact of the sites on young people as a “scourge.”

The minimum age for children to log into sites such as Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok has not been decided but is expected to be between 14 and 16 years, Albanese said.

The prime minister said his own preference would be a block on users aged below 16.

Age verification trials are being held over the coming months, the center-left leader said, though analysts said they doubted it was technically possible to enforce an online age limit.

“I want to see kids off their devices and onto the footy fields and the swimming pools and the tennis courts,” Albanese said.

“We want them to have real experiences with real people because we know that social media is causing social harm,” he told national broadcaster ABC.

“This is a scourge. We know that there is mental health consequences for what many of the young people have had to deal with,” he said.

Australia’s conservative opposition leader Peter Dutton said he would support an age limit.

“Every day of delay leaves young kids vulnerable to the harms of social media and the time for relying on tech companies to enforce age limits,” he said.

‘Easy to circumvent’

But it is not clear that the technology exists to reliably enforce such bans, said the University of Melbourne’s associate professor in computing and information technology, Toby Murray.

“We already know that present age verification methods are unreliable, too easy to circumvent, or risk user privacy,” he said. 

Analysts warned that an age limit may not in any case help troubled children.

It “threatens to create serious harm by excluding young people from meaningful, healthy participation in the digital world,” said Daniel Angus, who leads the digital media research centre at Queensland University of Technology.

“There is logic in establishing boundaries that limit young people’s access,” said Samantha Schulz, senior sociologist of education at the University of Adelaide.

“However, young people are not the problem and regulating youth misses the more urgent task of regulating irresponsible social media platforms. Social media is an unavoidable part of young people’s lives.”

The prime minister said parents expected a response to online bullying and harmful material present on social media.

“These social media companies think they’re above everyone,” he told a radio interviewer.

“Well, they have a social responsibility and at the moment, they’re not exercising it. And we’re determined to make sure that they do,” he said.

Australia has been at the forefront of global efforts to regulate social media platforms, with its online safety watchdog bumping heads notably with Elon Musk’s X over the content it carries.

 
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