Tech Roundup: China Big Tech Fines, Uber Files & More

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

• Google to purportedly spin off part of advertising business into a separate company under the Alphabet umbrella in a bid to stave off antitrust lawsuits aimed at its massive ad-tech business and weaken its end-to-end ownership.
• The Chinese government announces plans to implement strict new cross-border data transfer rules effective September 2022 that require "important" and massive data transfers from China to destinations outside its borders to be subject to security review for firms that handle the personal data of more than one million citizens; approvals post reviews to be valid for a period of two years, mandating companies to apply for another review 60 working days before its expiry.
• A trove of over 124,000 internal documents from 2013 to 2017 shared by Mark MacGann, who led Uber's lobbying in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa, reveals management discussions and lobbying efforts during the firm's aggressive global expansion, with the company attempting to "shore up support by discreetly courting prime ministers, presidents, billionaires, oligarchs and media barons" and its use of a "kill switch" to shut off its computer systems "to prevent authorities from successfully investigating the company's business practices as it disrupted the global taxi industry"; Uber says it "will not make excuses for past behavior that is clearly not in line with our present values."
• China's antitrust watchdog, the State Administration for Market Regulation (SAMR), fines Tencent, Alibaba, Didi, Bilibili, Weibo, and others about US$ 74,600 for failing to report 28 past merger deals for anti-monopoly reviews, some of which date back to 2011.
• Twitter debuts new feature called Unmentioning that's designed to allow users to remove themselves from conversations they do not want to participate in or be notified about.
• U.S. Amazon Prime subscriber count plateaus at 172 million as of June 30, the same as six months earlier, after Amazon raised prices of its annual Prime membership by US$ 20 to $139 in February 2022.
• Google's YouTube begins rolling out picture-in-picture support for all U.S. iOS users, but says it will not be available for music videos without a premium subscription.
• Twitter calls Tesla CEO Elon Musk's move to scuttle and pull the plug on the $44 billion acquisition "invalid and wrongful" and says it "breached none of its obligations under the agreement."
• Meta-owned WhatsApp adds the ability for users to react to messages with any emoji, after adding options to react with its chosen six emoji in May; Instagram tests a ‘Live Producer’ tool that lets users go live from a desktop using streaming software, such as OBS, Streamyard and Streamlabs.
• launches Sphere, an open source AI knowledge tool based on 134 million public webpages, with Wikipedia using it to verify articles' citations.
• Russian-born social media influencers living outside the country are reportedly being targeted by government officials for discussing or posting about the Russian invasion of Ukraine as part of a recently passed fake news law prohibiting criticism of the country's so-called "special military operation."
• Chinese smartphone maker Oppo loses legal battle in a patent dispute with Nokia over the use of 4G and 5G telecoms technologies, potentially preventing the company from selling certain OnePlus and self-branded handsets in Germany.