The Federal Trade Commission has been unsuccessful in its last-ditch effort to pump the brakes on Microsoft completing its $68.7 billion purchase of Activision Blizzard. The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals declined to grant the agency an emergency stay of a ruling that allowed the deal to proceed in the US.

A temporary restraining order was put in place last month to prevent Microsoft and Activision from closing the acquisition until Judge Jacqueline Scott Corley ruled on the FTC's request for preliminary injunction. When Corley rejected the FTC's injunction request this week, she ruled that the agency had until 11:59PM PT on July 14th to obtain an emergency stay from the appeals court. Otherwise, Microsoft and Activision would be free to close the deal in the US after that time.

Corley determined the FTC didn't prove its arguments that the merger would harm consumers. The FTC on Wednesday filed a notice that it planned to appeal Corley's decision. On Thursday, it asked the district court that ruled on the preliminary injunction in the first place to block the merger pending a decision from the appeals court. Hours later, Corley denied that motion.

Back in December, the FTC sued to block the deal on the grounds that it would harm competition. An administrative hearing is set for early August. The agency sought a preliminary injunction to prevent the companies from closing the merger until the antitrust trial takes place. However, the merger deadline is July 18th.

Microsoft and Activision Blizzard are evidently confident of closing the deal by their Tuesday deadline. Activision’s stock will be delisted from the Nasdaq-100 index before the stock market opens on Monday, so the companies may finally seal the deal around that time. 

Microsoft and Activision have yet to resolve issues with a UK regulator, which had blocked the deal over cloud gaming concerns. The companies and the Competition and Markets Authority agreed to put their legal battle on hold to try and resolve the regulator's concerns. The CMA said Microsoft and Activision were welcome to restructure the deal but warned that move may trigger a fresh merger investigation.

This story is developing, refresh for updates.

Let’s end the week with a bit of good news for our future as a species on this floating ball of dirt. Brimstone, a major player in the industrial decarbonization field, just announced that its decarbonized cement has passed a crucial third-party strength test, bringing the dream of net-zero construction one step closer to reality.

The company’s proprietary portland cement met the American Society for Testing and Materials' (ASTM) C150 standards for building products, indicating that it can do everything traditionally-made portland cement can do with regard to construction projects. This is a big deal, as portland cement is not some niche product, as it comprises 95 percent of all cement produced in the United States. Chances are, if you are in a building made from cement, you’re surrounded by ordinary portland cement (OPC).

Brimstone says the carbon-negative cement is identical in “all respects” to OPC, including performance, safety, and overall chemical composition. The only difference is that it wasn't manufactured using the conventional, carbon-intensive methods. The company also notes that its “strength, workability, durability, and compatibility with steel and other materials” make it an ideal choice to “build structures safely and efficiently.”

There are plenty of other alternative building materials out there, but this is actual portland cement, so adopting Brimstone’s product won’t force “millions of construction workers to get retrained to use a new material,” according to CEO Cody Finke. He also touts that the product will be “equal or lower cost to other options” and will “slash carbon emissions.”

Being as this is the same industry-standard portland cement used for over 150 years, the company won’t have to jump the usual regulatory hurdles when developing a new building material, with the company boasting “the same buildings, bridges and roads being built today can be built tomorrow without carbon.”

How did it manage such a feat? Conventional cement production involves heating limestone to ultra-high temperatures, which releases large quantities of CO2 embedded in the rock. Brimstone went with carbon-free calcium silicate rock, so there’s no CO2 to release. As a matter of fact, the process generates trace magnesium compounds that absorb pre-existing CO2 from the air, making this concrete carbon-negative.

It’s no secret that traditional cement is a major contributor to the world’s climate problem, as cement production accounts for 7.5 percent of global CO2 emissions and 5.5 percent of total greenhouse gas emissions. All told, the construction and real estate industries account for 40 percent of global carbon emissions, so this step toward net-zero construction could drastically reduce that number.

Of course, this is a brand-new manufacturing process and Brimstone’s cement has yet to be widely adopted by the industry. The company hopes to scale up production so they can sell its portland cement for the same price as conventionally-made materials. Brimstone’s constructing a manufacturing plant in Reno, Nevada and has already started negotiating with construction companies, real estate companies and various corporate partners. 

Twitter — or more precisely, its parent company X Corp. — has sued four John Does who have allegedly "engaged in widespread unlawful scraping of data" from the website. They were described as "unknown persons or entities" in the lawsuit, which only mentioned their IP addresses. The lawsuit accused them of flooding Twitter with automated requests far exceeding "what any single individual could send to a server in a given period" aimed at scraping data. In a response to a tweet about the lawsuit, Elon Musk said these entities tried to scrape the entirety of Twitter in a short period of time and blamed them for the rate limits the website implemented earlier this month.

Musk announced in early July that the website was putting a strict cap on how many tweets users can read each day "to address extreme levels of data scraping [and] system manipulation." Unverified accounts were limited to 600 posts a day, while verified (and, hence, paid) accounts were allowed to see 6,000 tweets. The defendants for this lawsuit were apparently to blame for those limits. "These requests have severely taxed X Corp.’s servers and impaired the user experience for millions of X Corp.’s customers," the company wrote in its complaint. 

X Corp. also described the defendants' activities in the lawsuit as "unlawfully scraping data associated with Texas residents." But as CNBC notes, the US Ninth Circuit of Appeals ruled in 2022 that the scraping of data that's publicly available online doesn't violate the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA). It was a landmark ruling that brought a long-running lawsuit by LinkedIn to a close. The business-focused social media platform filed a complaint in an attempt to block its rival companies from scraping information visible on users' public profiles.

"Data scraping companies profit off the innovation of companies like X Corp. while harming X Corp. and compromising user data," the company also said in its lawsuit. Twitter is now seeking $1 million in damages to make up for the defendants' actions. 

A judge has rejected the Federal Trade Commission's request for a preliminary injunction to prevent Microsoft from buying Activision Blizzard for $68.7 billion. Both Microsoft and Activision said they'd abandon the blockbuster merger if Judge Jacqueline Scott Corley granted the injunction.

"Our merger will benefit consumers and workers. It will enable competition rather than allow entrenched market leaders to continue to dominate our rapidly growing industry.” Activision Blizzard CEO Bobby Kotick said in a statement.

"We're grateful to the court in San Francisco for this quick and thorough decision and hope other jurisdictions will continue working towards a timely resolution." Microsoft president and vice chair Brad Smith said. "As we've demonstrated consistently throughout this process, we are committed to working creatively and collaboratively to address regulatory concerns."

The FTC sued to block the merger last December and a hearing in its administrative proceeding is set for August 2nd. However, the merger agreement has a deadline of July 18th, so Microsoft and Activision Blizzard are eager to close the deal by then. Otherwise, Microsoft will be on the hook for a $3 billion breakup fee to Activision unless the two sides are able to renegotiate terms. As such, they wanted the court to review the FTC's injunction request swiftly.

The companies claimed that, if the preliminary injunction were granted, it would "effectively block the transaction because the FTC's process is 'glacial' and one no substantial business transaction could ever survive."

Along with the FTC, the UK's Competition and Markets Authority is the only other national antitrust regulator that has formally challenged the Activision takeover. Microsoft and Activision are appealing the CMA's decision to block the merger over cloud gaming concerns. The appeal process that can take several months. There are suggestions that the companies will lock in the deal regardless.

That prompted the FTC to request an injunction in the hopes of being able to "assess the legality of the proposed acquisition" in next month's hearing before the deal closes. "Press reports began circulating suggesting that defendants were seriously contemplating closing the proposed acquisition despite the pending administrative litigation and the CMA orders," the FTC's request read. 

Corley issued a ruling following a five-day trial in June that saw all manner of juicy gaming industry secrets and emails between industry leaders laid bare for all to see. For one thing, we learned that MachineGames' Indiana Jones project was originally going to be a multiplatform game, but after Microsoft bought ZeniMax, it made the title an Xbox console exclusive.

Microsoft and Activision Blizzard aren't entirely in the clear. Regulators in dozens of countries have cleared the deal, including in the European Union. However, the UK antitrust authority presented a significant road block (an appeal process will start with a hearing later this month). The FTC's administrative trial is pending and it can still appeal Corley's decision. However, the companies have cleared a major hurdle by winning this particular battle. 

A temporary restraining order stipulated that Microsoft and Activision are unable to close the merger "until after 11:59PM Pacific Time on the fifth business day after the court rules on the FTC’s request for a preliminary injunction or a date set by the court, whichever is later." Still, they just about have time to seal the deal before their deadline.

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Sarah Silverman is suing OpenAI. On Friday, the comedian and author, alongside novelists Christopher Golden and Richard Kadrey, filed a pair of complaints against OpenAI and Meta (via Gizmodo). The group alleges the firms trained their large language models on copyrighted materials, including works they published, without obtaining consent.

The complaints center around the datasets OpenAI and Meta allegedly used to train ChatGPT and LLaMA. In the case of OpenAI, while it's "Books1" dataset conforms approximately to the size of Project Gutenberg — a well known copyright-free book repository — lawyers for the plaintiffs argue that the “Books2” datasets is too large to have derived from anywhere other than so-called "shadow libraries" of illegally available copyrighted material, such as Library Genesis and Sci-Hub. Everyday pirates can access these materials through direct downloads, but perhaps more usefully for those generating large language models, many shadow libraries also make written material available in bulk torrent packages. One exhibit from Silverman’s lawsuit involves an exchange between the comedian’s lawyers and ChatGPT. Silverman’s legal team asked the chatbot to summarize The Bedwetter, a memoir she published in 2010. The chatbot was not only able to outline entire parts of the book, but some passages it relayed appear to have been reproduced verbatim.

Silverman, Golden and Kadrey aren’t the first authors to sue OpenAI over copyright infringement. In fact, the firm faces a host of legal challenges over how it went about training ChatGPT. In June alone, the company was served with two separate complaints. One is a sweeping class action suit that alleges OpenAI violated federal and state privacy laws by scraping data to train the large language models behind ChatGPT and DALL-E.

It's probably fair to say that when most people conjure images of the pharmaceutical industry, it's not often there's an association between the production of life-saving drugs and environmental decline. But according to one 2019 study by The Conversation, drug companies produce more tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalents per million dollars than the automotive industry. "By our calculations, the pharma market is 28 percent smaller yet 13 percent more polluting than the automotive sector," the outlet said of the state of the pharmaceutical industry in 2015. Put another way: drug companies need to reduce their carbon emissions for the health of the planet and everyone living on it.

Thankfully, a group of scientists from the University of Bath in the United Kingdom may have found a way for the industry to do exactly that. In a study published in the journal ChemSusChem, the team describes a process they created for converting β-pinene, a component found in turpentine, into pharmaceutical precursors that they then used to synthesize paracetamol and ibuprofen. Right now, most companies producing those painkillers use chemical precursors derived from crude oil. Turpentine, meanwhile, is a waste by-product the paper industry makes at a scale of more than 350,000 metric tonnes per year. The researchers say they also successfully used turpentine to synthesize 4-HAP, a precursor for beta-blockers, the asthma inhaler drug salbutamol and a range of household cleaners.

In addition to being more sustainable, the team's "bio-refinery" process could lead to more consistent drug costs for consumers since turpentine isn't subject to the same geopolitical pressures that can send energy and oil prices skyrocketing. However, a significant pitfall of the process in its current form is that it costs more to produce drugs with turpentine than crude oil. The team suggests consumers may be willing to pay slightly higher prices for more sustainable drugs, but let's be honest, when someone is sick or in pain, paying more for relief is the last thing most people want to do.

Uber, DoorDash and Grubhub are suing for an injunction to stop New York City's new $18 minimum wage law for food delivery app workers, The Washington Post has reported. The app delivery platforms are asking for a temporary restraining order against the new rules, set to be implemented on July 12th. "We will not stand by and let the harmful impacts of this earnings standard on New York City customers, merchants, and the delivery workers it was intended to support go unchecked," a DoorDash spokesperson told CNN. 

The Worker's Justice Project that backed the survey decried the new lawsuit. "This latest legal maneuver to prop up their business model comes at the expense of workers who can barely survive in a city facing a massive affordability crisis," director Ligia Guallpa told the Post.

New York became the first US city to mandate a minimum wage for food delivery workers, ordering platforms to pay workers $17.96 per hour, plus tips, by July 12th. The minimum wage in the city is $15 per hour, but the extra amount accounts for the fact that delivery workers are usually paid as contractors, so have higher taxes and must pay work-related expenses out of pocket. According to an estimate from the DCWP (NYC Department of Consumer and Worker Protection), NYC has more than 60,000 food delivery workers who earn an average of $7.09 per hour. 

However, DoorDash and GrubHub argued that the earnings estimate was based on flawed methodology. Workers surveyed were told up front that the aim was to help raise the pay of delivery workers and suggested "correct" answers, according to the lawsuit. 

Grubhub also expressed concern about the increased difficulty in monitoring workers. Uber said, in a separate lawsuit, that the higher minimum wage would inflate food order prices, in turn hurting local restaurants.

App services like Uber have fought for years against regulations against the "gig worker" economy. Earlier this year, a court ruled that Uber and Lyft could keep treating drivers as contractors, rather than reclassifying them as salaried employees. 

The Jack Dorsey-backed decentralized social network Bluesky has launched a paid domain service in partnership with Namecheap as a way for users to verify their identity. In a post discussing its plans to make Bluesky sustainable, the team said "users become the product" when a company relies on ads. Since Bluesky set out to "build a protocol where users can own their data," it chose to explore "other avenues of monetization" instead. It's worth noting that the social app started as a project funded by Twitter, but it has lost its connection to the website after Elon Musk took over. 

Since earning by ads isn't an option, the team thought of offering paid services, starting with domain names. Users can already set up custom domain names to use with Bluesky, but they have to go through a separate process with a domain registrar first. This integration will supposedly allow them to do so in under a few minutes. They can simply log into their account, search for a domain name to use as a handle and then pay for it all within Bluesky's interface. For a Twitter competitor that doesn't have a centralized verification system, using a domain name is the best way for a user to verify that they are who they say they are. US Senators, for instance, have apparently been using the senate.gov domain to verify their identities. 

Users who use the integrated service will be able to manage their domain settings and configurations within Bluesky, and they can forward emails sent to their domains to an address of their choice. They can also choose to redirect their domain to their Bluesky profile or any URL they want. And in the event they decide to leave the platform or to use another registrar, they can transfer their domain away. 

Based on Bluesky's announcement, domain integration is just the first in what could be several paid services available on the platform. It says it's exploring other services it "can bundle to users to provide a more seamless experience." That said, Bluesky is still in private beta, and those interested will have to join a waitlist before they can get in. 

Meta will have to limit the reach of its personalized ads in the European Union. The region's Court of Justice has ruled that Meta's Facebook brand will need to obtain consent before delivering at least some personalized ads in the EU. The custom ads "cannot justify" processing that volume of data without users' permission, according to the ruling.

We've asked Meta for comment. In a statement to The Wall Street Journal, a spokesperson said the social media giant was still "evaluating the court's decision" and would say more in the future.

Meta is already appealing a €390 million EU fine (now worth about $425 million) for requiring that Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp users accept personalized ads just to use those platforms. The governing body requires "freely given" consent for features, and believes Meta violated the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) by asking for ad targeting data just to use Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp on a basic level. In the new ruling, the Court of Justice said it was up to a site operator to prove that people willingly give permission.

The decision is included in a larger court finding that local competition regulators, such as Germany's Federal Cartel Office, can factor in compliance with other laws (such as the GDPR) when investigating antitrust cases. Put simply, a country could decide that rule breaking in one area is evidence of broader anti-competitive behavior.

The ruling is somewhat vague, and it's not clear just how officials will interpret the requirement in practice. Meta might have to ask permission to provide personalized ads on Facebook and other platforms. That could improve privacy for users, but affect the company's bottom line. The outfit warned of a hit to its ad revenue when iOS 14 gave users the ability to reject ad tracking in apps — this could represent another blow that affects everyone in the EU, regardless of the device they use.

Apple is initiating one last-ditch effort to maintain a cut of in-app sales, asking the Supreme Court to hear its appeal of Epic Games' anti-trust case, Reuters reports. Two lower courts ruled that Apple must drop its guidelines preventing apps from including their own payment options, a policy that helped Apple's bottom line. 

The fight began in 2020 when Epic rolled out a new Fortnite update that allowed gamers to purchase digital coins through a direct payment feature. The move violated Apple's policy that required all iOS games to use in-app purchases — and gave Apple a 30 percent cut of the profits. Apple removed Fortnite from its App Store in response, despite its regular status as one of its highest-grossing games. In retaliation, Epic sued Apple to end its "unfair and anti-competitive actions" with the goal of changing its policy versus seeking any damages. 

The lawsuit was a mixed bag for both parties involved: In 2021, US District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers ruled that Epic knowingly violated Apple's rules and the iPhone maker wasn't required to add Fortnite back to its App Store. Rogers also stated that Apple wasn't acting like a monopoly but that the company must allow apps to provide their users with third-party payment systems. The change went into effect last year, and the US Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the entire injunction this past April. 

In their filing, Apple's lawyers claim that the ruling extends beyond Epic Games and "exceeds the district court's authority under Article III, which limits federal court jurisdiction to actual cases and controversies." Basically, they argue that the court overreached and asked the Supreme Court to acknowledge that and let its App Store go back to business as usual (developers giving but cuts of sales to Apple). One way or another, Apple will at least have to adapt in some countries, with new European Union regulations requiring the company to allow third-party app stores by 2024.