Welcome to the TechMe right home for Thursday, November 14th, 2024. I'm Brian McCullough

today. Buckle up because it's going to be a regulation heavy day. Meta is served up its first big

EU fine. The FBI is investigating Polly Market. The CFPB might require regular inspections of Google,

a new AI agent from OpenAI in about a month,

and forget the streaming wars. Are we entering the age of the puzzle wars? Here's what you miss today in the world of tech.

The EU has fined meta 797.72 million euro for tying Facebook marketplace to Facebook and, quote,

imposing unfair trading conditions on rival websites, the first such fine for META.

Quoting the FT, META said it would appeal against the fine levied by regulators. We built marketplace

in response to consumer demand. This decision ignores the market realities and will only serve

to protect incumbent marketplaces from competition. It added, the European Commission's decision

provides no evidence of competitive harm to rivals or any harm to consumers, end quote.

The EU's long-running antitrust probe in the meta was launched in 2019 following

accusations from rivals that the tech giant was abusing its dominant position by offering

free services while profiting from data it collects on the platform.

In December 2020, the European Commission issued initial charges against Facebook for allegedly

using the data

it gathered for free, mostly from businesses, to then sell ads to users. The EU Commission

on Thursday said meta is, quote, dominant in the market for personal social networks, as well as in

the national markets for online display advertising on social media. Facebook Marketplace launched in

2016 is a popular platform to buy and

sell secondhand goods, especially household items such as furniture. Meta has argued that it operates

in a highly competitive environment in a post published on Thursday. The tech giants said marketplaces

...