The biggest acquisition in gaming history and one of the largest in the tech industry is in the books. Twenty months after the deal was announced, Microsoft has bought Activision Blizzard for $68.7 billion, the largest acquisition in the company's history. CEO of Microsoft Gaming Phil Spencer has asked Activision CEO Bobby Kotick to stay on until the end of 2023, at which point he'll be leaving the company. It's been a long road filled with plenty of twists and turns to get to this point.

The UK's Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) initially blocked the deal in April, though it and the companies agreed to pause Microsoft's appeal to try and resolve the regulator's reservations over the merger's impact on the cloud gaming industry. An appeal tribunal approved a request to delay the proceedings. 

In an attempt to win over the UK regulator, Microsoft agreed to sell the cloud gaming rights for Activision Blizzard titles to Ubisoft. That means that not only should Activision Blizzard's games be on Xbox Game Pass, but they'll land on Ubisoft+ and any other game-streaming service Ubisoft decides to work with. Concerns about competition in the cloud gaming market was the CMA's reasoning for initially blocking Microsoft's takeover of Activision, but the watchdog said in September that the Ubisoft concession "opens the door to the deal being cleared." A few weeks later, the CMA has rubberstamped the merger.

Microsoft also signed 10-year agreements with Nintendo and several cloud-gaming companies to offer its titles on their platforms. Those moves led to the European Union giving the merger the green light. The bloc's competition officials reportedly didn't see anything in the amended merger agreement (with the Ubisoft plan factored in) that would prompt a fresh antitrust investigation. 

The Federal Trade Commission's attempts to stop the deal over competition concerns haven't panned out. The agency sued to block it in December and an evidentiary hearing in that case was slated to take place on August 2nd. The FTC tried to temporarily block the merger with a preliminary injunction ahead of its administrative trial, but a judge denied that effort. 

The FTC still plans to challenge the merger. If that effort is successful, Microsoft could be forced to divest some or all of Activision Blizzard.

But for now, the deal is done. It means, among other things, that Activision Blizzard titles will be available on cloud gaming platforms for the first time since the publisher pulled its titles from GeForce Now in early 2020. Its games will surely join Game Pass in the very near future, including on Xbox Cloud Gaming, and they'll pop up on Ubisoft+ and other platforms Ubisoft works with.

Those waiting for Activision Blizzard's two biggest games of 2023 to hit Game Pass will certainly need to remain patient, though. The publisher has said Call of Duty: Modern Warfare III and Diablo IV won't hit the service until next year.

Meanwhile, Blizzard games are already coming to Steam rather than being siloed on the Battle.net launcher. We'll probably see them appearing on Xbox's PC app too. For what it's worth, in court filings, Microsoft called Activision's strategy of releasing PC versions of Call of Duty titles exclusively on Battle.net in a bid to grow the platform a "resounding failure."

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One of the key reasons Microsoft gave for pursuing the deal was to accelerate its aim of becoming a major player in the mobile gaming market. With Activision Blizzard pulling in $1.9 billion in mobile revenue in the first six months of 2023 alone, it will achieve that goal practically overnight. 

King, which is behind the hugely successful Candy Crush franchise, generated more revenue ($1.49 billion) than Activision ($1.15 billion) in the first half of this year. Thanks largely to the massive success of Diablo IV, Blizzard brought in the most of the three units during that period with a hair over $1.5 billion. Still, King had 238 million monthly active users as of June 30th, just over twice as many as Activision and Blizzard combined. It recently emerged that Candy Crush Saga has generated over $20 billion in lifetime revenue.

Blizzard has also been making a push into mobile gaming with the likes of Diablo Immortal. Activision, meanwhile, has Call of Duty Mobile in its portfolio and Call of Duty: Warzone Mobile is on the way. The company said in its most recent earnings report Call of Duty has around 90 million monthly players, "with over half of all engagement on the mobile platform."

As for exclusivity of future projects, Microsoft Gaming CEO Phil Spencer has promised to "do whatever it takes" to keep shipping Call of Duty games on PlayStation. After months of refusing to do so, Sony eventually signed a 10-year pact just before the initial merger deadline of July 18th to keep that particular franchise on PlayStation, conceding defeat in its efforts to halt the acquisition. However, Microsoft will likely opt to keep other Activision Blizzard games off of PlayStation platforms, as it has done with ZeniMax/Bethesda titles Redfall and Starfield, as well as MachineGames' upcoming Indiana Jones project.

Meanwhile, many observers hope that Microsoft will help stamp out the alleged toxic workplace culture at Activision Blizzard. Earlier this year, Activision Blizzard paid $35 million to settle SEC charges related to how it handled employees' workplace misconduct complaints.

In 2021, the California Civil Rights Department (formerly the Department of Fair Employment and Housing) sued the company and accused it of fostering a "frat boy" culture in which female employees were harassed and discriminated against. Activision Blizzard countersued the CRD in December. The case hasn't been resolved. In fact, the CRD's lawsuit (which, along with other events, sent Activision's stock tumbling) set the ball rolling on Microsoft's acquisition of the company in the first place.

The California Institute of Technology (Caltech) has reached a settlement with Apple and Broadcom over Wi-Fi chips, ending a billion-dollar patent dispute that started in 2016, Reuters has reported. In a filing, Caltech said that it's dismissing the case with prejudice, meaning it can't be filed again.

The saga has taken several turns. Caltech initially alleged that millions of iPhones, iPads, Watches and other Apple devices with Broadcom chips infringed its Wi-Fi based patents. The institute initially won a $1.1 billion jury award, with Apple ordered to pay Caltech $837.8 million and Broadcom to pay an additional $270.2 million. 

However, Apple appealed, and a federal appeals court overturned the decision, calling the award "legally unsupportable." Specifically, the judge rejected Caltech's argument that it could have negotiated licenses with both Broadcom and Apple for the same chips.

The jury then ordered a new trial — though it also upheld the original jury's findings that Apple and Broadcom infringed two Caltech patents. That trial was supposed to take place this June, but was postponed indefinitely. The parties told the court last August that they had reached a "potential settlement," but didn't disclose any other information. 

The technology is vital to the 802.11n and 802.11ac WiFi standards, though its inventor said that the patents (related to data transmission tech), weren't originally designed for WiFi. Broadcom remains a major Apple supplier, having recently signed a $15 billion agreement to furnish chips for upcoming iPhones and other products. Caltech recently settled a similar lawsuit against Samsung, and still has Wi-Fi patent cases pending with Microsoft, Dell and HP. 

Qualcomm has just notified the California Employment Development Department that it's eliminating 1,258 positions within the state, according to Bloomberg. That's around 2.5 percent of the company's entire workforce, which is approximately 50,000 strong, but the job cuts will only affect workers from Qualcomm's San Diego and Santa Clara, California offices. Based on Bloomberg's report, no position is safe: More than 750 of the affected employees will reportedly come from the chipmaker's engineering team, including director-level personnel. The remaining affected roles will come from across different departments and will include internal technical and accounting staff. 

The chipmaker is required by law to notify the California agency of impending job cuts. But since many other places don't have the same rule, it's unclear if Qualcomm is planning to eliminate positions in other offices within and outside the US. It's worth noting that these job cuts, while unfortunate, don't come as a surprise: The company announced in its quarterly earnings report (PDF) released in August that it was going to take "additional restructuring actions."

Back then, the chipmaker had admitted that it expects these "restructuring actions" to consist "largely of workforce reductions." It said that the move will enable it to make "continued investments in key growth and diversification opportunities" in the face of "continued uncertainty in the macroeconomic and demand environment." As Bloomberg notes, Qualcomm still makes most of its money from smartphone sales, and market performance continues to decline. In fact, analysts said global smartphone shipments for the year are on track to be the worst in a decade. Qualcomm itself could see its revenue shrink by roughly 19 percent in the current fiscal year.

The company will start removing personnel sometime in mid-December, and it expects to be done with the restructuring changes it has to make in the first half of fiscal year 2024.

Microsoft owes the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) $28.9 billion in back taxes, not including penalties and interest, at least according to the tax authority. The tech giant has revealed in a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission that it received a series of Notices of Proposed Adjustment (NOPAs) from the IRS for the tax years 2004 to 2013. In its filing, it said that it's been working with the IRS for nearly a decade to address the authority's questions about how it distributed its profits among countries and jurisdictions, and this is the agency's decision after a lengthy investigation. 

To be exact, the IRS audit centered around a practice known as "transfer pricing," which legally allowed companies to allocate profits and expenses between their operations in different regions. Microsoft explained that a lot of large multinational corporations practice this cost-sharing scheme to reflect "the global nature of their business." In its case, its subsidiaries shared in the costs of developing some IPs, which means that they're also entitled to the related profits. As AP notes, though, critics of the regulation argue that companies frequently use it to minimize the taxes they have to pay by reporting lower profits in high tax countries, and vice versa. 

Microsoft explained that the issues raised by the IRS are only relevant to those aforementioned years, because it has since changed its corporate structure and practices. Nevertheless, the IRS believes Microsoft owes $28.9 billion in back taxes. The tech giant disagrees, as expected, and said that newer tax laws could reduce the back taxes it owes from this particular audit by $10 billion. Based on its plan of action shared with the SEC, the company intends to contest the decision to the best of its ability: Microsoft said that it will pursue an appeal within the IRS, which typically takes years to complete, and will even "contest any unresolved issues through the courts" if needed. 

Utah has sued TikTok over child safety issues and the company's China-based ownership, CNBC has reported. In the complaint, attorney general Sean Reyes called the app "an addictive product" and accused it of misleading users about its relationship with China-based parent company ByteDance. The state recently enacted some of the strictest social media laws in the country, requiring parental permission for teens to use social media. 

The lawsuit compares TikTok to a slot machine that provides "dopamine manipulation" trigged by swiping up on videos. That addictive nature is particularly harmful for the "not-yet-fully-developed" brain of young users and can create a dependence on the app, the state claims. It noted that the US Surgeon General has warned about mental health harms around social media, and cited excessive TikTok usage based around the company's own (redacted) figures. 

"What these children (and their parents) do not know is that TikTok is lying to them about the safety of its app and exploiting them into checking and watching the app compulsively, no matter the terrible effects it has on their mental health, their physical development, their family, and their social life," the complaint states. 

The lawsuit also delves into TikTok's links to China. "To avoid scrutiny from its users (and regulators), TikTok has also misled Utah consumers about the degree to which TikTok remains enmeshed with and under the control of ByteDance, it's China-based parent company." 

TikTok previously said that it has dedicated more than $1.5 billion on data security, and has rejected allegations that it's spying for the Chinese government. The company also recently opened a Transparency and Accountability Center in an effort to fend off regulators and potential bans.

The federal government has yet to take any concrete action against social media platforms, but states have been more active. Utah recently passed a law requiring parents to get permission before teens can create accounts on TikTok, Snap and other platforms. It also mandates curfew, parental controls and age verification features. The state didn't go as far as Montana, however, which outright banned the use of TikTok. Tomorrow, a judge will hear arguments in TikTok's lawsuit seeking to overturn that ban — a case that could open the company up to more scrutiny and set precedent around the US.

If you have several Google Nest speakers, Chromecast and smart displays, you can add each of them to several different groups in the Google Home app again. The company implemented changes last month, which would allow certain devices to be added to only one speaker group at a time in response to Sonos' patent lawsuit. This development, announced by the Nest team, undoes that change. If you'll recall, Sonos sued the company back in 2020, accusing it of infringing on several patents it holds, including ones related to managing groups of speakers.

In May, a California federal jury determined that Google had infringed on Sonos' intellectual property and ordered the tech giant to pay a $32.5 million fine. However, US District Judge William Alsup has just tossed out the verdict after finding that Sonos' patents were unenforceable. Alsup ruled that Sonos had improperly linked its multi-room audio patents to a 2006 patent application, which didn't disclose the actual invention. He also concluded that Sonos didn't file applications for the patents involved in the lawsuit until 2019, years after Google presented it with a plan to use multi-room audio technology while exploring a collaboration.

Sonos told Reuters that the judge's ruling was "wrong on both the facts and law" and that it intends to lodge an appeal. Google has decided to roll back its previous changes despite Sonos' plan, though, which means you "will no longer run into an error when trying to add a device to additional groups." The update has already started rolling out and is currently making its way to the Home app on Android. Google says the change is also "coming soon" to the Home app on iOS devices.

Google has successfully convinced a California federal judge that it did not infringe on Sonos' multi-room audio patents. As Reuters reports, US District Judge William Alsup has thrown out a previous verdict that slapped the tech giant with a $32.5 million fine for infringing on patents held by Sonos related to managing groups of speakers. 

The judge explained that Sonos' patents for the lawsuit "ostensibly descended from [a] 2006 provisional application." However, the company apparently didn't file the applications for the patents in question until 2019, and it didn't roll out the technology to its own products until 2020. That's years after Google, in 2014, presented Sonos with a plan to use multi-room audio technology while exploring a collaboration. 

Since Sonos connected its patents to a 2006 provisional application, they appeared to have predated Google's products. But Judge Alsup said that the early application failed to disclose the actual invention, and that in 2019, Sonos amended the specification of its patent application to insert new matter. "This was not a case of an inventor leading the industry to something new," Alsup wrote in his decision. "This was a case of the industry leading with something new and, only then, an inventor coming out of the woodwork to say that he had come up with the idea first — wringing fresh claims to read on a competitor’s products from an ancient application."

Sonos sued Google in federal court in early 2020, accusing it of violating five of its speaker patents. Patrick Spence, the company's CEO, said back then that Google had been "blatantly and knowingly" duping Sonos tech and refusing to cooperate on a "mutually beneficial solution." Earlier this year, a California federal jury had ruled that Google did infringe on a patent Sonos holds and ordered the tech giant to pay $32.5 million in penalty. Alsup also served as the judge for those proceedings, but in his newer decision, he said "trial brought to light what happened here."

In a statement, a Sonos spokesperson told Reuters that the new ruling was "wrong on both the facts and the law." Based on that, Sonos is clearly not going to accept the newer verdict: The spokesperson said that the company is planning to appeal the decision. 

Elon Musk is once again in the crosshairs of the Securities and Exchange Commision (SEC). The regulator, which has been investigating Musk’s Twitter takeover, is now suing the owner of X after he failed to appear for previously-scheduled testimony, The Wall Street Journal reports.

The SEC’s investigation dates back to 2022, when it opened a probe into Musk’s delayed disclosure of his stake in Twitter, which was at the time a publicly-traded company. Musk was 10 days late in filing paperwork, required under US securities law, disclosing his investment in Twitter. The delay may have earned him as much as $156 million, and also made him the target of a class-action lawsuit from former Twitter shareholders.

Musk had been scheduled to testify in the SEC investigation into the matter last month, The Wall Street Journal reports. But Musk failed to appear at a scheduled meeting in San Francisco, and later gave a “blanket refusal to appear for testimony” when the SEC tried to reschedule. The regulator is now asking a San Francisco federal court to force Musk to comply with its subpoena.

It’s hardly the first time Musk has found himself on the wrong side of the SEC, which he has repeatedly ridiculed over the years. The Tesla CEO was charged with securities fraud over a now-infamous 2018 tweet claiming he had “funding secured” to take the electric car maker private. Musk eventually settled with the SEC, paying a $20 million fine and giving up his position as chairman of Tesla’s board. Musk is, however, still fighting a provision of that SEC settlement requiring a so-called “Twitter-sitter” to sign-off on some of Musk’s Tesla-related tweets.

X didn’t respond to a request for comment.

Microsoft and Amazon are facing more antitrust scrutiny. The UK’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) says it will investigate the cloud services market in the country to determine if companies are engaging in anti-competitive practices.

Amazon (through Amazon Web Services) and Microsoft are by far the biggest players in that field in the UK. Between them, they had a market share of between 70 and 80 percent last year, according to a report from media regulator Ofcom, which asked the CMA to investigate the market. Google is in third place with a relatively paltry share of between five and 10 percent.

Ofcom believes that competition in the market is constrained by a number of factors that make it hard for customers to switch suppliers or use more than one at the same time. A key issue is egress fees, which customers often have to pay to transfer their data to another service. "The cost of transferring data between rival providers can discourage customers from using more than one cloud provider and in some cases make switching more costly," Ofcom said in its report.

A lack of interoperability and portability can make it overly laborious for customers to configure their data and apps to work on different services, the regulator said. Discounts can also dissuade customers from using more than one provider.

Those factors give Microsoft and Amazon a leg up over the competition, Ofcom suggests. "Limits on the ability of customers to credibly threaten to switch away can reduce the competitive pressure on the market leaders, giving them a degree of market power," the report states. "If customers have difficulty switching and using multiple providers, it could make it harder for competitors to gain scale and challenge AWS and Microsoft effectively for the business of new and existing customers."

In addition, Ofcom notes that some cloud service providers have raised concerns over the business software licensing practices of some cloud players, especially Microsoft. "We have received submissions that say Microsoft engages in several practices that make it less attractive for customers to use Microsoft’s licensed software products on the cloud infrastructure of rival providers compared to Microsoft Azure," the report states. "The submissions allege that this limits their ability to compete for customers." The products in question include Windows and Microsoft 365. Ofcom says that Microsoft has disputed the veracity of these claims.

"We welcome Ofcom’s referral of public cloud infrastructure services to us for in-depth scrutiny," CMA CEO Sarah Cardell said in a statement. "This is a £7.5 billion [$9.1 billion] market that underpins a whole host of online services — from social media to AI foundation models. Many businesses now completely rely on cloud services, making effective competition in this market essential." The CMA plans to conclude its investigation by April 2025.

Microsoft and Amazon both say they'll work constructively with the CMA. Amazon took issue with Ofcom's claims, telling Reuters that the watchdog's conclusions were rooted in "a fundamental misconception of how the IT sector functions, and the services and discounts on offer."

The cloud has been a sticking point in another Microsoft-CMA tussle. The watchdog initially blocked the company's proposed $68.7 billion takeover of Activision Blizzard due to concerns that Microsoft would hold too much power in the cloud gaming market. Microsoft later pledged to sell cloud game streaming rights to Activision Blizzard titles to Ubisoft if the deal goes through. That concession, made as part of Microsoft's revised agreement, "opens the door to the deal being cleared," the CMA said in September. The regulator will make its final decision on the merger this month.

Meta may charge Instagram users in Europe a $14 per month subscription fee unless they opt in to targeted ads, according to The Wall Street Journal. In addition, it may impose a combined monthly fee of $17 for ad-free access to Facebook and Instagram on desktop. 

Last month, rumors surfaced that Meta would start forcing subscriptions on users who opted out of targeted ads, but the potential fees were unknown. Users willing to pay would see no advertising on Facebook and Instagram, while those who want to stick to the free version would have to consent to be targeted by ads based on their personal data. The company has reportedly discussed the plans with regulators in Brussels and Ireland.

The move comes in response to a court ruling in July finding that Facebook must gain the consent of users to access their personal data. That court said that site operators have to prove that users willingly gave permission, possibly by allowing them to reject ad tracking. That's exactly what Apple did with iOS 14, and with very few users opting in, Meta predicted a significant hit to its revenue. In its ruling, the EU court also said companies should explore subscription models for users. 

If accurate, the numbers revealed by the WSJ are just a bit less than Netflix charges in the EU for it's regular monthly plan. With only power social media users or companies likely willing to pay that, Meta could effectively force regular users to accept targeted ads or stop using its social media sites altogether.

Earlier this year, the EU hit Facebook with a record €1.2 billion ($1.3 billion) fine for transferring EU user data to the US, in violation of the bloc's key digital privacy rules. And the rules are about to tighten more, as Europe's Digital Markets Act (DMA) regulations come into force starting in March 2024. 

At the same time, Meta makes nearly a quarter of its revenue in Europe, with the bloc accounting for $7.2 billion of its $32 billion total in the second quarter this year.