Google loses appeal over app store reforms in Epic Games case
(Reuters) -Alphabet's Google on Thursday failed to persuade a U.S. appeals panel to overturn a jury verdict and federal court order requiring the technology giant to revamp its app store Play.
The San Francisco-based 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals rejected claims from Google that the trial judge made legal errors in the antitrust case that unfairly benefited "Fortnite" maker Epic Games, which filed the lawsuit in 2020.
Epic accused Google of monopolizing how consumers access apps on Android devices and pay for transactions within apps. The Cary, North Carolina-based company convinced a San Francisco jury in 2023 that Google illegally stifled competition.
U.S. District Judge James Donato in San Francisco ordered Google in October to restore competition by allowing users to download rival app stores within its Play store and by making Play's app catalog available to those competitors, among other reforms.
Donato's order was on hold pending the outcome of the 9th Circuit appeal. The court's decision can be appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court.
Google told the appeals court that the tech company's Play store competes with Apple's App Store, and that Donato unfairly barred Google from making that point to contest Epic's antitrust claims.
The tech giant also argued that a jury should never have heard Epic's lawsuit because it sought to enjoin Google's conduct — a request normally decided by a judge — and not collect damages.
Epic has defended the verdict and court injunction, telling the 9th Circuit judges that the Android app market has been "suffering under anti-competitive behavior for the better part of a decade."
In the trial court and in the appeal, Epic disputed arguments by Google that changes to its app business ordered by the court would harm user privacy and security.
Microsoft filed a brief backing Epic, as did the U.S. Justice Department and Federal Trade Commission.
Epic separately is battling Apple over a U.S. judge's order requiring the iPhone maker to give developers greater freedom to steer consumers to make purchases outside its App Store.
Apple has appealed a ruling that said it violated a prior injunction in a lawsuit that Epic filed in 2020.
(Reporting by Mike Scarcella; Editing by David Bario and Jan Harvey)
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
The Star
13 hours ago
- The Star
This robot uses Japanese tradition and AI for sashimi that lasts longer and is more humane
A Los Angeles-area startup is using artificial intelligence and robotics in an unlikely way: making sashimi and other fish dishes taste better, last longer and more humane. El Segundo, California-based Shinkei Systems wants to bring a traditional Japanese method of handling fish to fine dining in America, using technology to replace the labour-intensive process historically handled by practitioners on board ships. Investors have just bet millions that it will succeed. The company's AI-driven robot – called Poseidon – has been designed to do a traditional form of fish handling called ikejime in Japanese. It is a method of killing fish that enthusiasts say enhances flavour, texture and shelf life. Although fish processed in this way is found in some of the best restaurants in Japan, it hasn't been promoted in the US because it is generally too expensive. Automating the process will make it more readily available to Americans, said Saif Khawaja, the company's chief executive. "My end goal is that you're walking into your local grocery store and can buy fish that lasts three times as long, tastes better and is handled humanely," he said. The company raised US$22mil (RM 94.10mil) in a funding round last month, co-led by Founders Fund and Interlagos, bringing total funding to US$30mil (RM 128.32mil) since its inception. It has four Poseidons working on ships in the Pacific and Atlantic and hopes to have 10 more working in the coming year. The ikejime process involves taking live fish that has just been caught and quickly putting them out of their misery by killing them with a spike through the brain and cutting their gills. This stops the stress hormone and lactic acid buildup that can hurt flavor and texture when fish are left to asphyxiate. Although traditional practitioners sometimes add a step in which the spinal cord is destroyed, Poseidon just does the first steps of the ikejime technique. The method has remained largely artisanal even in Japan, where only some fishermen will make the effort to process batches of fish in this way to sell to specific sushi chefs who are obsessed with having the highest-quality ingredients. Even in Japan, the method "is still too labour-intensive to replicate at a high speed without damaging the fish," Khawaja said, adding that, "It's impractical and unsustainable for fishermen to adopt methods that require significant hands-on work," in the US. Shinkei says it also has a higher calling than just better-tasting fish. Khawaja said one of the motivations for developing the technology was to try to find a kinder, gentler way to kill fish than letting them die gasping for air. During childhood fishing trips with his father in the Red Sea, he remembers it being "very hard to watch" fish suffocating after they were caught. Poseidon is roughly refrigerator-sized and sits on fishing boat decks. — Courtesy Shinkei Systems/TNS While he was in graduate school at the University of Pennsylvania, Khawaja was moved by an essay that argued that fish suffer inhumane deaths because they cannot vocalise pain. He even once considered developing sensors to make fish's pain audible. Shinkei provides Poseidon machines to fishermen, who then sell fish processed through the machines back to Shinkei at a premium. Shinkei in turn sells the fish to restaurants and other retailers under its fish company Seremoni. Poseidon is roughly refrigerator-sized and sits on fishing boat decks. It processes fish within seconds of being caught. The fish is fed through an opening in the machine and into a small vinyl cavity. The machine then uses AI to identify what kind of fish it is and where exactly its brain and gills are. Fish emerge with a hole in the head and incisions near the gills before being placed in an ice slurry for blood drainage. Quickly killing the fish, bleeding it and chilling it without freezing leads to fish that is noticeably better, Khawaja said. "There's going to be a flavour profile difference and there's going to be texture profile difference," he said. The company chose Los Angeles for its headquarters and production because it has the right mix of potential employees as well as customers. It has the mechanical engineering talent as well as a major fishing fleet and lots of high-end restaurants. "The best mechanical engineering talent in the world, in my opinion, is in Southern California," said Seremoni co-founder Reed Ginsberg. The city is also a major health and consumer products hub as well as a trend setter for cutting-edge food fads. Chef Michael Cimarusti, co-owner of the Michelin starred Providence restaurant in Los Angeles, says he tries to buy local ikejime fish when he can because it preserves the quality and color. The fish preserved using ikejime look as if they "were just pulled from the water minutes ago," he said in an interview posted on YouTube by the American Fishing Tackle Co. Shinkei currently processes thousands of pounds weekly across operations in Washington, Central California and Massachusetts, with expansion to Alaska and the Gulf of Mexico planned this year. After feedback from fishermen that the bots took up too much deck space, the company developed "Block 2" robots that have roughly half the footprint while processing fish twice as fast. Currently, black cod and black sea bass processed through Poseidon are sold under Shinkei's brand Seremoni at retailers such as Happier Grocery and served at upscale restaurants including Atomix and Sushi Zo. This summer, the company plans to add salmon and red snapper to its offerings. – Los Angeles Times/Tribune News Service
The Star
15 hours ago
- The Star
AI researchers are negotiating US$250mil pay packages. Just like NBA stars
SAN FRANCISCO: Over the summer, Matt Deitke got a phone call from Mark Zuckerberg, Meta's chief executive. Zuckerberg wanted Deitke, a 24-year-old artificial intelligence researcher who had recently helped found a startup, to join Meta's research effort dedicated to 'superintelligence,' a technology that could hypothetically exceed the human brain. The company promised him around US$125mil (RM534.7mil) in stock and cash over four years if he came aboard. The offer was not enough to lure Deitke, who wanted to stick with his startup, two people with knowledge of the talks said. He turned Zuckerberg down. So Zuckerberg personally met with Deitke. Then Meta returned with a revised offer of around US$250mil (RM1bil) over four years, with potentially up to US$100mil (RM427.8mil) of that to be paid in the first year, the people said. The compensation jump was so startling that Deitke asked his peers what to do. After many discussions, some of them urged him to take the deal – which he did. Silicon Valley's AI talent wars have become so frenzied – and so outlandish – that they increasingly resemble the stratospheric market for NBA stars. Young AI researchers are being recruited as if they are Steph Curry or LeBron James, with nine-figure compensation packages structured to be paid out over several years. To navigate the froth, many of the 20-somethings have turned to unofficial agents and entourages to strategise. And they are playing hardball with the companies to get top dollar, much as basketball players shop for the best deals from teams. The difference is that unlike NBA teams, deep-pocketed AI companies like Meta, OpenAI and Google have no salary caps. (Curry's most recent four-year contract with the Golden State Warriors was US$35mil/RM150mil less than Deitke's deal with Meta.) That has made the battles for AI talent even wilder. Over the past few weeks, recruiting AI free agents has become a spectacle on social media, much like the period before a trade deadline in sports. As Meta, Microsoft, Google and OpenAI have poached employees from one another, job announcements have been posted online with graphics resembling major sports trades, made by the online streaming outlet TBPN, which hosts an ESPN-like show about the tech and business world. 'BREAKING: Microsoft has poached over 20 staff members from DeepMind over the last six months,' read one recent TBPN post about Microsoft's hiring from Google's DeepMind lab. Jordi Hays, a co-host of TBPN, said that as tech and AI have gone mainstream, more people are following the recruitment fray 'the way our friends from college obsess over sports – the personalities, the players, the leagues.' On Wednesday, Zuckerberg said Meta planned to continue throwing money at AI talent 'because we have conviction that superintelligence is going to improve every aspect of what we do.' Superintelligent AI would not just improve the company's business, he said, but would also become a personal tool that 'has the potential to begin an exciting new era of individual empowerment.' A Meta spokesperson declined to comment. Deitke did not respond to a request for comment. The job market for AI researchers has long had parallels to professional sports. In 2012, after three academics at the University at Toronto published a research paper describing a seminal AI system that could recognise objects like flowers and cars, they auctioned themselves off to the highest corporate bidder – Google – for US$44mil (RM188.21mil). That kicked off a race for talent across the tech industry. By 2014, Peter Lee, Microsoft's head of research, was likening the market to that for up-and-coming pro football players, many of whom were making about US$1mil (RM4.28mil) a year. 'Last year, the cost of a top, world-class deep learning expert was about the same as a top NFL quarterback prospect,' Lee told Bloomberg BusinessWeek at the time, referring to a type of AI specialist. 'The cost of that talent is pretty remarkable.' The leverage that AI researchers have in negotiating job terms has only increased since OpenAI released the ChatGPT chatbot in 2022, setting off a race to lead the technology. They have been aided by scarcity: Only a small pool of people have the technical know-how and experience to work on advanced artificial intelligence systems. That's because AI is built differently from traditional software. These systems learn by analysing enormous amounts of digital data. Few researchers have experience with the most advanced systems, which require giant pools of computing power available to only a handful of companies. The result has been a fresh talent war, with compensation soaring into the hundreds of millions of dollars a year, from millions of dollars a year. In April, Zuckerberg – whose company was struggling to advance its AI research – dived in by sending personal messages to potential recruits, offering them larger and larger sums. His approach was similar to that of sports franchise owners, two Meta employees said. Even if the offers seemed absurd, if the new hires could help increase revenue by even half a percent – especially for a company that is closing in on a US$2 trillion (RM8.56 trillion) market capitalisation – it would be worth it, the people said. 'If I'm Zuck and I'm spending US$80bil (RM342.20bil) in one year on capital expenditures alone, is it worth kicking in another US$5bil (RM22.4bil) or more to acquire a truly world-class team to bring the company to the next level?' Hays said. 'The answer is obviously yes.' Meta's initial offers to engineers varied but hovered in the mid-tens of millions of dollars, three people familiar with the process said. The company also offered recruits something that was arguably more attractive than money: computing power. Some potential hires were told they would be allotted 30,000 graphical processing units, or GPUs, for their AI research, one of the people said. GPUs, which are powerful chips ideal for running the calculations that fuel AI, are highly coveted. Zuckerberg has hired with the help of the List, a document with the names of the top minds in AI, two people familiar with the effort said. Many on the List have three main qualifications: a doctorate in an AI-related field, experience at a top lab and contributions to AI research breakthroughs, one of the people said. The Wall Street Journal previously reported some details of the List. Some researchers on the List have created chat groups on Slack and Discord to discuss offers, two people in the groups said. When someone lands an offer, they can drop the details in the group chats and ask peers to weigh in. (AI is a tight-knit field where people often know one another.) They trade information about which companies to approach for another offer so they can build up their price, the people said. Working with friends can be just as important as the money. After a researcher joins a new lab, the first thing that person often does is try to recruit friends, two people familiar with the process said. The talent wars have started causing pain. OpenAI has changed its compensation structure to account for the shift in the market, employees at the company said, and is asking those approached by competitors to consult executives before immediately accepting offers. 'Are we countering? Yes,' Mark Chen, OpenAI's chief research officer, said at a company meeting this month, according to a recording reviewed by The New York Times. But he added that OpenAI had not matched Meta's offers because 'I personally think that in order to work here, you have to believe in the upside of OpenAI.' OpenAI declined to comment. (The Times has sued OpenAI and Microsoft, claiming copyright infringement in relation to news content related to AI systems. The two companies have denied the claims.) Not all of Meta's overtures have succeeded. The company has been rebuffed by some researchers, two people said, partly because Zuckerberg's vision for artificial intelligence was unclear compared to those at other companies. Still, the frenzy has allowed even little-known researchers like Deitke to chart their own destinies. Deitke, who recently dropped out of a computer science PhD program at the University of Washington, had moonlighted at a Seattle AI lab called the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence. There, he led the development of a project called Molmo, an AI chatbot that juggles images, sounds and text – the kind of system that Meta is trying to build. In November, Deitke and several Allen Institute colleagues founded Vercept, a startup that is trying to build AI agents, which can use other software on the Internet to autonomously perform tasks. With about 10 employees, Vercept has raised US$16.5mil (RM70.6mil) from investors such as former Google chief executive Eric Schmidt. Then came Deitke's back-and-forth with Zuckerberg. After Deitke accepted Meta's roughly US$250mil four-year offer, Vercept's CEO posted on social media, 'We look forward to joining Matt on his private island next year.' – © 2025 The New York Times Company This article originally appeared in The New York Times
The Star
16 hours ago
- The Star
How to put your phone in vacation mode
Ready to get away for that late-summer vacation and want fewer interruptions from your phone or tablet while you're gone? Consider setting up a custom Vacation mode that sends most callers to voicemail and mutes notifications from unimportant apps – but still allows calls and messages from specific people to get through, as well as alerts from designated apps. You just have to set up the Vacation mode once, and then turn it on whenever you're off. Here's how. Using Apple devices Apple's Focus feature is meant to help limit distractions on an iPhone, an iPad, a Mac, an Apple Watch or a Vision Pro headset so you can, well, focus. Along with the Do Not Disturb setting, which blocks most disruptions with a tap, Focus has other preset modes – or you can make your own. On an iPhone or iPad, tap the Settings icon, scroll down and select Focus from the menu. On the Focus screen, tap the + button in the upper-right corner and select Custom from the menu. On the next screen, you can give your custom creation a label (like Vacation) and select an icon and color for it. When you tap the Next button at the bottom of the screen, you'll see a list of options you can choose for your new mode. Tap the Customize button to continue. On the next screen, select the people who can contact you and the apps allowed to send notifications when your phone is in Vacation mode. If you want relatives, the cat-sitter and your landlord to be able to reach you, add them to the list. Likewise, select the apps that can send you notifications – perhaps your weather and sports favourites. (Tap the Options menu for the settings on how the silenced notifications are displayed.) You can choose a more muted look for your phone's display and set a schedule to automatically activate your Vacation mode – at a specific time or a location, like your rented beach house. The Vacation mode can be enabled manually in the Control Center or by telling Siri, the phone's assistant, to turn it on or off. On the main Focus menu, there's an option to use your active Focus mode across all your Apple gear that is logged in with the same Apple ID. And turn on Focus Status to display a note saying you have notifications silenced when people try to text you. Using Android devices Android's Modes work in a similar way, and you can easily customise them. Open the Settings icon and select Modes from the menu. From the list on-screen, tap Create Your Own Mode. (Android also has a default Do Not Disturb mode and a few other activity-specific configurations, like Driving and Bedtime.) On the next screen, give your mode a name and icon. Tap the Done button to go to the next screen. In the Notification Filters area, select the people, apps and alarms permitted to interrupt you. The Display Settings section offers options for showing filtered notifications and the screen's appearance while the mode is active. After you have configured Vacation mode, you can give it an automatic schedule to activate itself. Alternatively, you can enable it manually from the mode's settings page, by swiping down from the top of the screen and choosing it from the Modes menu in Android's Quick Settings, or by telling the Gemini assistant to handle it. Controlling notifications If setting up a Vacation mode doesn't appeal and you simply want fewer app alerts popping up, just modify how and when notifications can pester you. For example, you can confine them to a daily summary. On an iOS device, open the Settings icon and select Notifications from the menu. Here, you can choose how the alerts should be displayed on the lock screen, if they appear in daily summaries and how each app on your phone can notify you (or not). In iOS 18.4 on an iPhone 15 Pro model or later, you can have Apple Intelligence screen your notifications and prioritize time-sensitive alerts and those deemed 'important' based on your contacts and app use. On most recent Android phones, open the Settings icon and select Notifications to get to the controls. Getting emergency alerts Certain situations – like dangerous weather – call for immediate interruption even if you are on vacation. Your phone is probably equipped to receive emergency public-safety alerts from national, state and local authorities. When enabled, these notifications override any focus or mode settings. To check these controls on an iPhone, go to Settings, then Notifications, and scroll down to the Government Alerts section. On an Android phone, open Settings, go to Notifications and tap Wireless Emergency Alerts. – © 2025 The New York Times Company This article originally appeared in The New York Times
