Politics

Earlier this year, I wrote about the difficult work of repairing subsea cables and their increasing geopolitical importance.

Today, The Wall Street Journal reports investigators believe a Chinese freighter deliberately dragged its anchor for 100 miles along the Baltic seabed last week, severing two cables: one between Sweden and Lithuania and another linking Finland and Germany. They are looking into whether it is linked to Russia, which has denied involvement.

The repair ship Cable Vigilance has already begun work on the Germany-Finland cable, according to Finnish broadcaster YLE. 

Bluesky spokesperson Emily Liu confirmed in an email to The Verge that the platform is “actively working” with its lawyers to ensure Bluesky’s compliance with the EU’s Digital Services Act’s information disclosure rules, as Bloomberg reports.

Yesterday, the European Commission called out that Bluesky has no page listing “how many users they have in the EU and where they are legally established,” as required by the DSA.

Update November 26th: Updated with confirmation from Bluesky spokesperson Emily Liu.

Brazilian antitrust regulator Cade said it will fine Apple 250,000 real (about $43,000 USD) per day if it doesn’t meet the 20-day deadline, reports Reuters. The company must let developers link to outside payments and offer alternative in-app payment options to comply.

The ruling follows a 2022 complaint by Latin American e-commerce firm MercadoLibre, Reuters writes.

Hotel-related search results in Germany, Belgium, and Estonia are temporarily stripping out the map, property info and other clutter as shown in the gallery below. After the test, Google will look at how the change impacted “both the user experience and traffic to websites.”

It’s part of a series of changes meant to appease the EU’s DMA police and travel sites that have lost traffic as Google’s search results became worse, according to users, but more helpful, according to the advertising giant.

Update, November 26th: Added before and after images.

Filed in 2020, the FTC’s antitrust case against Meta accuses the social networking giant of stifling competition through its acquisition of WhatsApp and Instagram. The trial will take place on April 14th — just days before a judge will hear the proposed remedies in Google’s antitrust case.

A US Chamber of Commerce email to members sent on Thursday indicated that the government is preparing to announce the new export restrictions “prior to the Thanksgiving break,” reports Reuters.

That’s not all, the outlet writes:

Another set of rules curbing shipments of high-bandwidth memory chips to China is expected to be unveiled next month as part of a broader artificial intelligence package, the email continues.

A federal judge said Friday that sanctioning Musk was unnecessary “because he already agreed to reimburse the SEC $2,923 to cover airfare for the trio of agency lawyers he stood up in Los Angeles in September,” Bloomberg writes.

The agency sought to sanction him after he ditched a testimony over his Twitter acquisition to watch a SpaceX launch.

A Tesla Cybertruck was spotted joining President-elect Donald Trump’s motorcade in Texas while traveling to the SpaceX Starship launch.

The Secret Service wouldn’t answer Road & Track’s questions about who was driving the Cybertruck, but come on, we all know who it was. A better question is whether the Cybertruck will officially join once Trump takes office. I mean, he’s already got one, gifted by streamer Adin Ross. And it is bulletproof — sort of.

Alphabet’s top lawyer says the agency’s proposed remedies, which include selling off Chrome, are part of “a radical interventionist agenda that would harm Americans and America’s global technology leadership.”

If adopted, Kent Walker says the security and privacy “of millions of Americans” would be endangered, trade secrets would be sent to foreign companies, AI progress and innovation would be stymied, and the world as we know it would basically end.

Rumble, the YouTube rival popular with the right for its anti-”cancel culture” approach, is “very interested in acquiring Google Chrome,” CEO Chris Pavlovski says. He was responding to a Bloomberg report that the government is planning to ask a court to require Google to sell the browser as part of the antitrust case against its search business. Rumble notably brought its own antitrust suit against Google years ago.

The former congressman selected as Trump’s attorney general has come up in connection to a defamation lawsuit filed by one of his friends, as the New York Times reports a hacker has obtained evidence shared among lawyers on the case:

The file of 24 exhibits is said to include sworn testimony by a woman who said that she had sex with Mr. Gaetz in 2017 when she was 17, as well as corroborating testimony by a second woman who said that she witnessed the encounter.

Pew Research Center released a report on news influencers who people are increasingly getting their information from.

The report couldn’t have come at a better time, following an election where the role of influencers and podcasters was especially notable. Of today’s news influencers:

- 77 percent have no background with news orgs

- 65 percent are men

- More identify as Republican or conservative than Democratic or liberal

- Far more have a presence on X than on any other platform

A new tidbit about the prediction markets startup from last week’s issue of Command Line:

Coplan recently raised, but has yet to announce, a $30 million round of funding at a $350 million valuation. And in recent conversations with investors (a surprising number of whom passed on the round, which was less than Coplan hoped to raise), I’m told he was noncommittal about whether the company would work to get the Commodity Futures Trading Commission license it needs to operate in the US.

And apparently, it’s not hurting them too much, reports The Cut:

As someone who has proven, time and again, to be impervious to traditional shaming tactics, Trump has ultimately given legions of his supporters license to finally go public about their support for him, one prominent New York–based communications consultant told me. And though there has been some backlash to posts like Javed’s in the form of angry comments or Reddit threads documenting influencers who are also Trump supporters, the outcry has been relatively minimal.

In the waning months of Democratic control, the Federal Trade Commission is getting ready to probe Microsoft for alleged anticompetitive behavior, The Financial Times reports.

It plans to demand documents from Microsoft related to allegations that it makes it unduly difficult for customers to move from the Azure cloud by imposing sharp exit fees and other tactics. The FTC declined to comment.

Unsurprisingly, President-elect Donald Trump plans to end the federal incentive, which encouraged Americans to buy EVs like Teslas for years. Now, Reuters is reporting Tesla is for it:

representatives of Tesla - by far the nation’s largest EV seller - have told a Trump-transition committee they support ending the subsidy

Meanwhile, Trump has tasked Tesla CEO Elon Musk with cutting “wasteful expenditures” in the new administration.