Big Tech News

Microsoft is being investigated in an European Union antitrust investigation over the bundling of its chat and video app Teams with its Office product. It is understood that the European Commission is seeking to fast track the case and is looking to issue formal charges against Microsoft in the autumn unless the company improves its concessions. The EU competition authority said it believed that Microsoft may be abusing and defending its market position in productivity software by restricting competition in the European communication and collaboration products market. The tech giant has previously been fined over 2.2bn euros in EU antitrust fines for practices in breach of EU competition rules, including tying or bundling 2 or more products together.

Shed a tear for the little blue bird, which Twitter has ditched for a big X. There are certainly many questions which Twitter’s owner, Elon Musk, has yet to divulge – like why do you take a good brand and start playing around with different revenue solutions without seemingly testing them in-house first, and then decide to drop the blue bird – or maybe this is just another test to see what the reaction will be? Meanwhile we are told Meta’s Thread is picking up a lot of custom – in mid-July it already had passed the 100m mark. This rapid growth has concerned privacy experts, who have pointed out that few users realize just how much information the app collects. An indication of this issue is that Meta has put the launch of Threads in the European Union (EU) on hold while the company works out how it will handle user data or share data across Meta’s different platforms – Facebook, Instagram and now Threads. Even Meta spokesperson Emil Vazquez recently admitted that Meta’s apps receive whatever information users enter – which includes sensitive data such as health and fitness information, financial information, location and browsing history. Meta has already paid millions of Euros in fines in Europe for disregarding the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) over the last few years and it looks as if Threads will quickly run afoul of these privacy regulations unless it changes its data processing system.