The FTC, which is the U.S. government agency responsible for protecting competition, decided to investigate five tech giants for their investments and alliances in the field of Artificial Intelligence (AI).

These are Alphabet, Amazon, Microsoft, OpenAI and Anthropic, which are the most powerful companies in the United States in this sector.

The FTC wants to know whether these companies have an unfair advantage over their competitors and whether their practices negatively affect innovation and fair competition.

The research will focus on three ongoing collaborations: Microsoft’s with OpenAI, Amazon’s with Anthropic and Google’s with Alphabet, which have involved “billions of dollars” in investments.

Companies will be required to provide the FTC with information and data about their products, investments, internal structure, markets, future plans and international presence, among other things, within 45 days.

The FTC only deals with competition, but this action adds to the growing pressure on technology companies over content issues, such as copyright, disinformation, etc., which are generating demands for more regulation of Artificial Intelligence around the world.

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Source: Bloomberg

(Reference image source: Unsplash+)

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Amazon used a secret algorithm to increase the prices of its products and that helped it improve its profits on items in all purchasing categories, thus favoring unfair competition.

This algorithm was used in what was internally known as Project Nessie and allowed the company to obtain more than a billion dollars in revenue, according to a monopoly complaint filed by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and to which Wall has had access. Street Journal.

More specifically, Amazon would have used this algorithm to test how much it could increase prices in such a way that competitors would follow this trend and reinforce the power that the company has in e-commerce, monitoring the movements of these other companies.

In this way, by making their products more expensive, competitors also increased their prices and charged customers more. The informants also clarified in this lawsuit that in cases where competitors did not raise the price of their products to Amazon’s level, this algorithm was capable of automatically changing the price to the original.

The company also employed Project Nessie, which is currently deprecated, with the goal of creating a sort of “promotional spiral,” according to Amazon employees. This indicates that once the brand matched the price of a product with the same one marketed by another website -WSJ mentions Target.com-, the other competitors would maintain that value, which limited the profit margin of these others.

Dees from Amazon highlighted that “the FTC’s accusations seriously and wrongly characterize this tool”, in the words of a spokesperson, who insisted to this newspaper that the algorithm “did not work as expected”, which is why it was discarded.

“Project Nessie had a simple purpose: to try to prevent our price matching from producing unusual results where prices became so low as to be unsustainable,” this spokesperson added.

From WSJ they said, for their part, that Project Nessie is one of several cases in which the complaint filed with the FTC maintains that Amazon’s monopoly power had a broad impact on the increase in consumer prices in retail commerce.

Source: dpa

(Referential image source: Bryan Angelo, Unsplash)

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The Federal Trade Commission of the United States (FTC) filed a notice of appeal with the courts, after a federal judge ruled last Tuesday that Microsoft can go ahead with the purchase of the video game giant Activision Blizzard, a transaction valued at 69,000 million dollars.

The petition filed with the Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit seeks to reverse the decision of Judge Jacqueline Scott Corley of the Northern District of California Court, who found that the FTC had not shown that it is probable that the combined company will surely eliminate ‘Call of Duty’ by Sony PlayStation, or that Activision’s ownership of content will materially harm competition in the cloud gaming and subscription gaming markets.

“The District Court ruling makes it very clear that this acquisition is good for both competition and consumers“, said Brad Smith, president of Microsoft, in a statement collected by ‘CNBC’. “We are disappointed that the FTC is continuing with what has become a demonstrably weak case,” he added.

For its part, Activision defended that “the facts have not changed” and expressed confidence that the United States will remain “among the 39 countries where the merger can be closed“.

The purchase of Activision Blizzard by Microsoft has divided those responsible for Competition in the main economies, since the European Commission authorized the transaction with conditions last May, while the British CMA decided to block the merger.

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Source: CNBC

(Reference image source: Alexander Cifuentes, Unsplash)

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La entrada Microsoft allowed to continue with the purchase of Activision Blizzard apareció primero en Bitfinance.

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) of the United States is preparing an order to block the purchase agreement of Microsoft and Activision Blizzard before the Administrative Court of the country.

The acquisition of the video game developer was announced in January last year, but after Sony refused, suggesting that this would lead to a monopoly, several international organizations have studied the case to find out what could happen if they finally this purchase occurs.

In December 2022, the FTC filed a lawsuit to block the developer’s purchase of titles like Call of Duty for around $61 billion. This body then argued that this purchase “would allow Microsoft to suppress competitors for its Xbox game consoles and its rapidly growing cloud gaming and subscription content business.”

The director of the FTC’s Office of Competition, Holly Vedova, also said that Microsoft had already demonstrated “that it can withhold content from its gaming rivals” and suggested that it would continue to do so if it were to buy the developer.

“We seek to prevent Microsoft from gaining control of a leading independent game studio and using it to harm competition in multiple fast-growing and dynamic gaming markets”, Vedova insisted.

Now, the FTC is asking US courts to block the Xbox maker from acquiring Activision Blizzard with a temporary restraining order (TRO), as evidenced by a document seen by The Verge.

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Source: The Verge

(Reference image source: Alexander Cifuentes, Unsplash)

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La entrada The US will block the purchase of Activision by Microsoft apareció primero en Bitfinance.

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) of the United States filed a formal lawsuit in order to block the acquisition of Activision Blizzard by Microsoft, an operation valued at 69,000 million dollars, considering that it could harm competition, since the Xbox manufacturer would gain control of video game franchises like Call of Duty or World of Warcraft.

In its lawsuit to prevent the biggest purchase in Microsoft’s history, the US regulator points to the company’s history of acquiring and using valuable game content to suppress competition from rival game consoles.

In this sense, the FTC recalls that after the acquisition of ZeniMax, parent company of Bethesda Softworks, the Redmond giant decided to make several of the titles of this video game developer exclusive to Microsoft, despite the guarantees given to the European antitrust authorities.

“Microsoft has already shown that it can and will withhold content from its gaming rivals”, said Holly Vedova, director of the FTC’s Office of Competition.

“We seek to prevent Microsoft from gaining control of a leading independent game studio and using it to harm competition in multiple fast-growing and dynamic gaming markets,” she added.

The US regulator underlines that Activision is one of the few video game developers that create and publish high-quality titles for multiple devices, including video game consoles, PCs and mobile devices, with millions of monthly active users around the world.

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Source: Vandal

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