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April 17, 2025, 7:10 PM
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David McCabe / New York Times:
A US judge says Google acted illegally to maintain a monopoly in some online advertising tech, the second time in a year a court found Google acted illegally  —  The ruling was the second time in a year that a federal court had found that Google had acted illegally to maintain its dominance.
More: United States District Court E.D. Va., Reuters, Washington Post, MacRumors, TechCrunch, Vox, OSnews, AppleInsider, Wired, CNN, Reuters, PYMNTS.com, KQED, Tubefilter, Skift, Wall Street Journal, MediaPost, TechRepublic, Gizmodo, Search Engine Roundtable, Euractiv, PhoneArena, Yahoo Finance, Hindustan Times, The Boston Globe, ABA Journal, Wall Street Pit, Barron's Online, The Independent, Newser, Engadget, Patently Apple, SammyGuru, Watcher Guru, 9to5Google, Shacknews, Deadline, Common Dreams, Silicon UK, Nairametrics, MarTech, State of California, The Hill, UPI, Search Engine Journal, The Western Journal, SFist, New York Post, Los Angeles Times, The Information, and Variety
Bluesky: @klobuchar.senate.gov, @robpegoraro.com, @reckless, @robin.berjon.com, and @caseynewton.  Threads: @wongmjane
X: @senmikelee, @linamkhan, @repjerrynadler, @jason_kint, @benremaly, @_annalanglois, @aripap, @agrobbonta, @adamkovac, @capitolkvd, @timsweeneyepic, @lutherlowe, @jason_kint, @tylerbishop, @mikeisaac, @lukewgoldstein, @sayreevan, @adamkovac, @jkbustertruster, @balancecrafting, @benbrodydc, @adamkovac, @stockmarketnerd, @zamaan_qureshi, @future_of_music, @matthewstoller, @lukewgoldstein, @hadas_gold, @_annalanglois, @loudmouthjulia, @jkbustertruster, @moreperfectus, @khushitavasant, @matthewstoller, @aripap, @meadorftc, @khushitavasant, @moreperfectus, @benremaly, @aripap, @adamkovac, @stockmarketnerd, @matthewstoller, @loudmouthjulia, @ggreenwald, @benremaly, @adamkovac, @timsweeneyepic, @lewis_crofts, @econliberties, @mrddmia, @jason_kint, @chronotope, @allthecitizens, @jimcramer, and @wadhwa
LinkedIn: Evelyn Mitchell-Wolf, Erin Dougherty, and Jonathan Kanter
Forums: Hacker News, r/Economics, r/degoogle, r/google, r/privacy, r/programmatic, r/news, Beehaw, and Slashdot
See also Mediagazer
Axios:
The DOJ and 17 US states that brought the antitrust case seek to force Google to sell off its “network” ad business, which is ~12% of Alphabet's total revenue  —  Google's dominance of the online advertising and ad-tech markets violates U.S. antitrust laws, a federal court ruled Thursday …
Bloomberg:
In her ruling, Judge Brinkema says Google did not meet the monopoly definition for tools used to buy display ads, but did for ad exchanges and website ad tools  —  Google illegally monopolized some online advertising technology markets, according to a federal judge, whose ruling marked …
Todd Spangler / Variety:
Netflix reports Q1 revenue up 12.5% YoY to $10.54B, vs. $10.51B est., net income of $2.89B, and stops reporting subscriber numbers on a quarterly basis  —  Netflix is no longer reporting number of subscribers on a quarterly basis.  But it's still motoring on a hot growth engine …
Makena Kelly / Wired:
Sources: the CFPB terminated more than 1,400 workers, leaving about 200 employees and effectively gutting the agency that Elon Musk previously said to “delete”  —  The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau terminated the positions of 1,400 of the agency's 1,700 employees …
Financial Times:
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang arrived in China on April 16 and visited Beijing on April 17, a source says to meet officials to discuss Trump's new chip export rules  —  Meetings with Chinese vice-premier and DeepSeek founder come after US clamps down on chipmaker's sales to China
Washington Post:
Sources: Tim Cook spoke to the US Commerce Secretary last week about how tariffs could affect iPhone prices before Trump exempted products from Apple and others  —  Administration officials insist that no companies received special exemptions.  Trump said he “helped Tim Cook recently.”
MacKenzie Sigalos / CNBC:
Global Payments shares plunge 15%+ and FIS shares jump 9%+ after Global Payments said it's buying Worldpay from FIS and GTCR and selling Issuer Solutions to FIS  —  Global Payments shares tumbled 17% on Thursday after the company said it is buying Worldpay for more than $24 billion …
Steve Dickson / Bloomberg:
Global Payments agrees to acquire Worldpay from FIS and PE firm GTCR for $24.3B and to sell Issuer Solutions to FIS for $13.5B in deals set to close in H1 2026
Jess Weatherbed / The Verge:
Google is offering its Google One AI Premium plan for free to US college students until spring 2026; students have until June 30, 2025, to sign up  —  That's more than a year of free access to Gemini tools.  —  Google is the latest AI service provider to court users in higher education.
Justin Ling / Wired:
New Jersey's AG sues Discord, alleging the platform's features to keep children under 13 safe from sexual predators and harmful content are inadequate  —  The New Jersey attorney general claims Discord's features to keep children under 13 safe from sexual predators and harmful content are inadequate.
Ryan Whitwam / Ars Technica:
Google rolls out Gemini 2.5 Flash in preview, with support for Canvas for working on text or code; developers can disable thinking or set a token limit for it  —  Google's Gemini AI may have had a slow start, but it has been anything but in 2025.  Barely a week goes by that another model …
Jane Lanhee Lee / Bloomberg:
TSMC reports Q1 net income up 60.3% YoY to $11.1B, beating estimates, as customers stockpiled chips anticipating global trade disruptions spurred by US tariffs  —  And it stuck with a capital spending projection of $38 billion to $42 billion for 2025.  TSMC's US stock rose 4.7% …
Aisha Malik / TechCrunch:
Instagram launches Blend, an invite-only, personalized Reels feed for users and their friends in a group chat with new content every day  —  Instagram on Thursday announced that it's rolling out Blend, a new feature that lets you create a custom, personalized reels feed for you and your friends.
Jess Weatherbed / The Verge:
The Wikimedia Foundation partners with Kaggle to release a dataset of “structured Wikipedia content in English and French” optimized for AI model training  —  Data science platform Kaggle is hosting a Wikipedia dataset that's specifically optimized for machine learning applications.
Rachel Metz / Bloomberg:
LMArena says it's starting a company, whose corporate name will be Arena Intelligence, with plans to raise money, and releases a new beta version of its website  —  Chatbot Arena, an academic research project whose website has become a popular place for visitors to try out new artificial intelligence models, is turning into a company.
Jakob McWhinney / Voice of San Diego:
US community colleges are battling a flood of fake, or bot, students who bilk financial aid by enrolling in online classes and submitting AI-generated work  —  Community colleges have been dealing with an unprecedented phenomenon: fake students bent on stealing financial aid funds.

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UiPath:
UiPath Unveils 10 Innovations that Will Shape the Agentic Future  —  Orchestration engine, API workflows and agentic testing among key features of new UiPath Platform™ for agentic automation, launched at UiPath DevCon 2025
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From Mediagazer

The Bookseller:
Boundless, which bought crowdfunding publisher Unbound in March, tells authors that royalties accrued before March won't be paid until Boundless is cash stable

Max Tani / Semafor:
The California State Senate launches an inquiry into whether Paramount's proposed $15M settlement with Trump violated bribery and unfair competition laws

Chris Willman / Variety:
Taylor Swift acquires the rights to her first six albums from Shamrock Capital; sources say the deal was in the mid-$300M range

More News

Earlier Picks

Kyle Wiggers / TechCrunch:
xAI announces a memory feature for Grok in beta that enables the AI chatbot to remember details from past conversations and give more personalized responses
Dan Shipper / Every:
OpenAI o3 review: “deep research-lite”, giving thorough answers quickly, free from some old ChatGPT limitations, and powerful thanks to ChatGPT integration
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