Hello again! I’m back after a refreshing month off in Cape Town’s midsummer—it was my family’s last chance to enjoy a lengthy break at this time of year for the foreseeable future, as my daughter will begin school in September and Berlin’s festive school vacation is punishingly brief. If you try to take your school-age kid out of the country for longer than the allotted week without getting special permission, the cops can stop you at the airport!
Speaking of onerous rules, the European Union’s new tech antitrust law—the Digital Markets Act—will take effect in March. As I’ve repeatedly noted, the DMA comes with the threat of gargantuan fines (theoretically running as high as 20% of global revenue) and will therefore reshape the sector, ushering in a new era of third-party mobile app stores, interoperable communications services, and transparency for companies running their businesses on Big Tech’s platforms.
Some of the DMA’s effects may immediately be felt around the world, but some will (for now, at least) only apply within Europe, offering outsiders a tantalizing glimpse of what could be, if their legislators and regulators also decided to bring Big Tech to heel.
Meta provided a good example this morning, announcing what amounts to a slight loosening of the bonds between the conglomerate’s various services, but only for people within the EU (and Iceland, Liechtenstein, Norway, and Switzerland, which also participate in the European single market).
Most importantly, the company will ask users whether they want to delink their Facebook and Instagram accounts, so no information is shared between them anymore—this is already possible for users around the world who know where to find the option in their account settings, but there’s a big difference between that and active prompting. Users will now also be able to set up Facebook Messenger accounts that are completely separated from their Facebook accounts, and use Facebook Marketplace and Facebook Gaming without offering up any data from their Facebook accounts. (Side note: Isn’t it interesting to see how intertwined antitrust and data protection have become? It’s all about control.)
“The DMA seeks to promote contestability and fairness in digital markets—an ambition that Meta supports,” Meta competition and regulatory director Tim Lamb said in the post. So will Meta offer the same options in countries where it isn’t being forced to do so? Nope.
Meanwhile, in a case that pre-dates the new law but demonstrates a similar effect, Apple has proposed commitments that it hopes will settle European charges over its contactless payment restrictions for iPhones. The Commission is now consulting on the concessions, which would finally see Apple allowing other mobile wallet app developers to access the tap-to-pay functionality that only Apple Pay can currently use—but again, only in Europe. That said, the U.S. Justice Department is reportedly preparing a blockbuster antitrust suit against Apple that would target the same restrictions, among others, so perhaps Europe won’t have an exclusive on these newfound freedoms for long.
More news below.
David Meyer
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NEWSWORTHY
Another Vision Pro holdout. YouTube will, like Netflix, not release a special app for Apple’s incoming Vision Pro headset. Alphabet’s video platform told TechCrunch that users can enjoy “a great experience in Safari” instead. YouTube does have a dedicated app for Meta’s competing Quest headset. Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman points out that many developers are mad at Apple over the hefty commissions it’s demanding for app-related payments that aren’t even made through the apps themselves, which may complicate the Vision Pro launch.
Artists vs AI. British artists are planning to join a class action lawsuit in the U.S. that’s targeting AI companies such as Midjourney over alleged copyright violations, according to the Guardian. The suit has turned up a list of 16,000 artists whose work was allegedly used as Midjourney training material, including U.K. luminaries like Damien Hirst, Rachel Whiteread, and David Hockney. In related news, University of Chicago researchers have released Nightshade, a data-poisoning tool that visual content creators can use to exact revenge on AI companies who use their images for training without permission.
Terraform bankruptcy. Terraform Labs, the operation whose collapsed TerraUSD and Luna tokens contributed to 2022’s big “cryptocrash,” has filed for bankruptcy. As the BBC notes, Terraform’s Chapter 11 filing will allow it to continue offering its ongoing blockchain and Web3 services.
ON OUR FEED
“Anyone who builds with our tools must follow our usage policies”
—OpenAI spokeswoman Lindsey Held, commenting to the Washington Post on the company’s first banning of a developer over potential misuse in a political campaign. Dean.Bot was a ChatGPT-powered simulacrum of Democratic presidential hopeful Dean Phillips, developed for a Phillips-supporting SuperPAC in Silicon Valley. OpenAI does not allow the use of its tech in political campaigns.
IN CASE YOU MISSED IT
Microsoft says senior leadership team emails accessed in ‘nation-state’ hack tied to Russia, by Kylie Robison
Europe faces ‘decades’ trying to rid itself of its global semiconductor chip dependency, major tech consulting chief says, by Ryan Hogg
Davos might have been the ‘World AI Forum’ this year, but 90% of execs are waiting for the AI hype to die down so they can figure out how to start using it, by Paolo Confino
ChatGPT has revived interest in ethics. The irony is that we haven’t been holding humans to the same standard, by Ann Skeet (Commentary)
Elon Musk’s X claims are about to be tested in a major way: YouTube’s biggest star MrBeast pledges to share revenue numbers after posting his first video on the site, by Eleanor Pringle
A British inventor chasing Apple for $18 billion over alleged iTunes theft says the case has left him in a ‘deep depression’, by Ryan Hogg
BEFORE YOU GO
Japan’s ray of light. The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) said today that it’s still holding out hope for its Smart Lander for Investigating Moon (SLIM) craft, which made a successful soft lunar landing on Friday—Japan’s first, giving it membership of a five-country club—but apparently without functioning solar cells.
JAXA turned SLIM off after a few hours of data retrieval, to conserve its last morsel of power in case a recovery was possible. “If sunlight hits the Moon from the west in the future, we believe there’s a possibility of power generation, and we’re currently preparing for restoration,” the agency said this morning.
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