Tech Roundup: Google Antitrust Probe, Quibi Shutdown & More

[A recurring feature on the latest in Science & Technology.]

• The European Union enables cross-border interoperability between contact tracing apps from Germany, Ireland, and Italy, with plans to add at least 18 others in the coming weeks.
• Facebook, with approval from CEO Mark Zuckerberg, retooled its News Feed algorithm to throttle traffic to high-value progressive news organizations such as Mother Jones, according to a new investigation by The Wall Street Journal.
• Ireland's Data Protection Commission begins investigating Facebook-owned Instagram over its handling of children's personal data on the platform; to assess if the company "employs adequate protections and or restrictions on the Instagram platform" for children and adheres to the "requirements in the GDPR in respect to Data Protection by Design and Default and specifically in relation to Facebook's responsibility to protect the data protection rights of children as vulnerable persons."
• Japan's Fair Trade Commission to join antitrust authorities in the U.S. and Europe in challenging market abuses by Google, Apple, Facebook, and Amazon in a bid to regulate Big Tech companies and digital platform operators and tackle competition.
• The U.S. Department of Justice (DoJ) files its long-expected antitrust lawsuit against Google alleging the company of unlawfully maintaining a monopoly in search and ads market by cutting off rivals "through exclusionary practices" that makes its search engine the default on web browsers and mobile devices (including Apple and mobile carriers); Google calls the lawsuit "deeply flawed," adding "people use Google because they choose to, not because they're forced to, or because they can't find alternatives [and that] it would artificially prop up lower-quality search alternatives, raise phone prices, and make it harder for people to get the search services they want to use."
• China revises laws (effective June 1, 2021) that aim to ban internet products and services which "induce addiction" in children under 18 years; to mandate providers of online services including gaming, live streaming, audio and video, and social media must set up "corresponding functions" such as time and consumption limits for minors.

• Google officially discontinues Play Music for Android, iOS and desktop web; updates Assistant for Smart Displays with support for switching between multiple accounts, dark mode, and a new tabbed home screen interface comprising separate sections for "Your morning," "Home control," "Media," "Communicate," and "Discover."
• Apple launches Apple Music TV, a free 24-hour curated livestream of popular music videos, on Apple's Music and TV apps for U.S. users.
• Pakistan lifts ban on ByteDance-owned TikTok following assurances from the video-sharing platform that it will "block all accounts repeatedly involved in spreading obscenity and immorality."
• Facebook expands its Messenger API to Instagram, letting developers and businesses integrate messaging from Instagram into other apps; officially begins reviewing cases related to content moderation through an independent body called Facebook Oversight Board.
• Google continues expansion of RCS messaging to more countries, as it turns on support for rich messages in Australia, Japan, Lebanon, Bulgaria, Kenya, Uganda, Indonesia, Latvia, and Ukraine; to fix a bug in Chrome browser that fails to clear cookies from first-party Google websites such as Google despite turning on a setting to delete all cookies and site data upon quitting the browser.
• Video streaming platform Netflix adds 2.2 million subscribers, mostly in the Asia Pacific region, during the three month period ending in September; plans two-day "StreamFest" on December 4 that will allow non-subscribers in India to stream the company's entire library for free without a subscription plan.
• Snapchat user growth climbs 4% to 249 million daily active users, up from the 238 million the company reported at the end of last quarter, as it beats expectations with US$ 679 million in revenues, an increase of more than 50% from last year; adds new feature that allows the app's in-app camera to scan packaged food and wine labels to surface nutritional info and tasting notes.
• Microsoft releases Chromium-based Edge browser preview for Linux devices with support for Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora, and openSUSE distributions; debuts an open framework called Adversarial ML Threat Matrix to help security analysts detect, counter, and remediate adversarial attacks against machine learning systems.
• Sweden becomes the latest country to ban Huawei and ZTE from 5G networks over security concerns; gives telecoms operators until 2025 to remove equipment made by the companies from their existing infrastructure.

• Amazon launches a new program called Amazon Shopper Panel that directly pays consumers for information about their purchases outside of Amazon.com and for responding to short surveys; says the collected data will be used to help the company build models about which groups of customers are likely to be interested in certain products. (Given that Amazon has spent years surveilling the purchases earned by the platform's third-party sellers to create its own competing products under the Amazon private label, the latest move is an attempt to aggregate buyers' offline purchases from brick-and-mortar stores that Amazon competes with.)
• PayPal to beging allowing users to buy and sell cryptocurrency using its online wallets in the coming weeks and shop at merchants on its network starting in early 2021.
• Short-form video streaming service Quibi to wind down its operations in December merely six months after its launch following lower-than-expected viewership, and disappointing download numbers; says "our failure was not for lack of trying; we've considered and exhausted every option available to us," while blaming the timing of Quibi's launch and the possibility that the idea wasn't viable enough to justify a standalone streaming service.
• The Coalition for App Fairness (CAF), a newly formed advocacy group pushing for increased regulation over app stores, doubles in size with the addition of 20 new partners — includin Schibsted, Qobuz, and YARXI — just one month after its launch.
• Facebook begins testing a new feature called Neighborhoods that allows users to connect with users in their community and form miniature social networks (just like Nextdoor, but ripping off features from its competition is not new for Facebook); calls it a "dedicated space within Facebook for people to connect with their neighbors"; to start charging for WhatsApp for Business and adds hosting services for businesses' online assets and shopping features to the service.
• Researchers from visual threat intelligence firm Sensity discover a "deepfake ecosystem" on Telegram centered around bots that generate fake nudes on request; finds that users interact with these bots to create nudes of women they know using images taken from social media, which are then shared and traded with one another in various Telegram channels.
• A New study finds that companies are increasingly tailoring their financial statements to cater to algorithms parsing text and speech and avoid phrases perceived as negative.