The announcement could come as soon as Thursday. Live Nation, which owns Ticketmaster, calls itself “the largest producer of live music concerts in the world.” It’s one of many agents of consolidation that drastically reshaped music.
[The Washington Post]
Perhaps of note: their Binance accounts and their Deltec accounts; Deltec was allegedly key in giving FTX secret money to buy Tether. Criminal complaint here.
And though the charges are for laundering at least $73 million, the wallet in question received $341 million between April 2021 and the date of the indictment. Hm!
On today’s episode of Decoder, Verge editors Alex Heath and Sarah Jeong join me to discuss the lawsuit TikTok filed last week against the US government in response to the divest-or-ban bill.
One reason I wanted to have both Alex and Sarah on here is that there’s a lot of back and forth between the facts and the law; some of TikTok’s arguments are contradicted by the simple facts of what the company has already promised to do around the world, and some of the legal claims are complex and sit in tension with a long history of attempts to regulate speech and the internet.
TikTok averted a ban once before under the Trump administration. But this time around, the bill is on far more solid footing, and TikTok is arguing that divesting its US business is not possible “commercially, technologically, or legally.” So we walked through each of those arguments one by one.
The EU’s DMA rules have resulted in the launch of two third-party app stores for iPhone owners: AltStore PAL last month and Setapp Mobile today.
With the release of iOS 17.5, companies like Spotify and Epic now have the option of distributing apps directly from their own websites as well, assuming Apple’s rules aren’t too onerous.
A subscription-based alternative offering nag-free software.
After placing iPadOS under its Digital Markets Act (DMA) rules last month, the European Commission has now designated Booking as a Gatekeeper, finding its online intermediation service Booking.com “meets the relevant thresholds” to be a core platform service.
That’s two additional services (and one new Gatekeeper) now on the list since the first 22 were named in September.
Epic argues that the 27 percent fee Apple charges third-party developers violates a 2021 court order to allow outside payment links. The judge, according to Bloomberg, seems skeptical of Apple, too:
“You’re telling me a thousand people were involved and not one of them said maybe we should consider the cost” to the developers? the judge said. “Not a single person raised that issue of the thousand that were involved?”
