There's a Big Tech Battle Royale brewing -- but Microsoft is avoiding scrutiny. $FB is targeting $AAPL amid its fight with Epic, and Apple is swiping at Facebook's privacy policies. High-profile names in tech, meanwhile, are questioning $GOOG and $AMZN.
“Battle royale” evokes images of professional wrestlers engaged in a free-for-all brawl in which combatants eventually turn on one another until there is an eventual winner. With apologies to Hulk Hogan and Andre the Giant, Big Tech is taking on the same trappings as companies turn on one another amid multiple antitrust investigations and issues.
Not to be excluded, Microsoft claimed Apple’s threat to revoke Epic’s developer account would have far-reaching effects harmful to the videogame industry. In another wrinkle to the Apple-Facebook standoff, Instagram CEO Adam Mosseri on Friday told CNBC that the company strongly objects to a planned change to iOS that would impact how it and other mobile advertisers track users. On Thursday, Apple said it will delay until early next year changes to its privacy policy that Facebook and others claim will eviscerate advertising sales targeting users on iPhones and iPads.
Fueling the acrimony is genuine concern from the far-right to the far-left. “Big Tech is big oil. It is a bipartisan issue,” Anurag Chandra, a partner at venture-capital firm Fort Ross Ventures, told MarketWatch. “These guys have gotten massive. We have to get involved with public policy over privacy and use of personal data.”
The Justice Department and a group of state attorneys general may file antitrust lawsuits focusing broadly on how Google leverages its dominant search business to stifle competition, according to a Wall Street Journal report. At the same time, the Justice Department and state attorneys general are also investigating the pricing and operations of Google’s Network division, a business that sells services that handle almost every step a digital ad takes, said a Bloomberg report.
“Many companies have huge components of their business reliant on mobile apps and the supporting toolsets,” Adam Landis, CEO of mobile-analytics company AdLibertas Inc., told MarketWatch. “Apple trying to block a major toolset should set anyone reliant on mobile apps on edge. Imagine waking up to find business operations halted — or your apps no longer functional. I wouldn’t be surprised if Facebook intends to lob a lawsuit of their own against Apple.
Ultimately, federal authorities were successful in changing Microsoft’s behavior toward competitors, prompting it to soften its ruthless ways and indirectly fomenting competition in the emerging fields of search, social media and e-commerce. The man leading the push acknowledged that historical record in a speech in June 2019.
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