Salesforce has completed its $27.7 billion acquisition — its biggest one to date — of business messaging app Slack. When the companies first announced the purchase back in December 2020, they said Slack founder and CEO Stewart Butterfield will continue to lead the messaging service as a unit within its new parent organization. They also said that Slack will become the new interface of Customer 360, which is a Salesforce tool where you can add and access the company's apps.

In Salesforce's announcement about the acquisition's completion, it confirmed both points and said the purchase will allow them to deliver a "Slack-first Customer 360." It will give clients "a single source of truth for their business, and a single platform for connecting employees, customers, and partners with each other and the apps they use every day."

While Slack has become synonymous with messaging service for businesses following its launch in 2019, it suffered from losses last year after Microsoft positioned its Teams app as a competing product in the middle of the pandemic. Slack even filed an antitrust complaint against the tech giant with the European Commission for bundling Teams with the Office suite. Salesforce announced Slack's acquisition half a year after the EU complaint was filed.

Salesforce President and COO Bret Taylor and Slack CEO and Co-Founder Stewart Butterfield will be hosting an event next month to share more details about the messaging app's integration. It will happen on August 17th at 1PM ET and will be streamed on the Salesforce website.

Last month, Instagram held its first-ever Creator Week, a virtual event the company described as “a life-changing three days with new feature news and celeb drop-ins.” One of those drop-ins was CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who made a brief appearance to share a message with creators.

“I think that any good vision of the future has to involve a lot more people being able to make a living by expressing their creativity and by doing things they want to do, rather than things they have to — and having the tools and the economy around them to support their work is critical,” he said. “Our goal is to be the best platform for creators like you to make a living.”

This week, Zuckerberg went even farther, announcing that Facebook plans to invest $1 billion in creators by the end of 2022. The investment will fund bonus programs, creator funds and other monetization programs to boost all stripes of creators on its platform.

That Facebook is funneling so much money and resources toward creators is indicative of not just the opportunity the company sees, but how much ground it has to make up.

For years, Facebook simply didn’t do much for creators. While Instagram has long had its own influencer community, the company has at times tried to limit their reach. Instagram’s founders were reportedly uncomfortable with the rise of influencers, and introduced an algorithmic feed to ensure users would see more posts from friends and family than brands and businesses.

While YouTube has offered monetization features for more than a decade, Instagram didn’t offer any kind of revenue sharing feature until last year. And many creators often felt at odds with Instagram. The company’s ever-changing algorithm fueled suspicions that it “shadowbans” or otherwise penalizes users who post too much or about the “wrong” topics.

“Facebook has been late to the game in terms of supporting the creative community in a meaningful way,” says Qianna Smith Bruneteau, founder of the American Influencer Council, a trade group representing the creator industry.

But Facebook is now trying to reverse those perceptions. For the past year, the company has been steadily churning out new tools for creators to make money. Since last May alone, the company has introduced a dizzying number of money-making features.

On Instagram, creators can now make money from commercials in IGTV or open their own shops. They can sell badges and products in live streams. On Facebook, they can host paid virtual events, promote fan subscriptions, or sell in-app gifts in live streams or audio rooms. Soon, they’ll be able to start paid newsletters, earn affiliate commission from products their followers buy and participate in a branded content marketplace. The company is also launching several new bonus programs that will pay creators for signing up for IGTV ads, creating Reels or meeting live-streaming milestones.

Facebook

Zuckerberg and other top executives now regularly speak about creators and the opportunity they represent. The company is so eager to win over the creator community it’s promised it won’t take a cut of their earnings until 2023.

Li Jin, founder of Atelier Ventures, a venture capital firm that invests in the creator economy, says surging interest in creators is because the industry has gotten so big it’s no longer something platforms can afford to ignore.

“I think for a long time there was no need to separately think of creators as a distinct segment that was in need of specialized features or funds,” Jin says. “I think what changed is the realization that … these creators’ content is driving a disproportionate amount of activity and engagement on the platforms.”

That Facebook is late to the creator economy also means the company is facing an incredible amount of competition. TikTok, which has a reputation for a creator-friendly algorithm, just passed 3 billion downloads, the first non-Facebook owned app to do so, according to analytics company Sensor Tower. Users of TikTok, and its Chinese counterpart Duoyin, together spent more than a half billion dollars in the app during the second quarter of 2021, alone. In the United States in 2020, TikTok was significantly ahead of Facebook and Instagram in user engagement, according to App Annie.

App Annie

Meanwhile Twitter, Snapchat, Pinterest and other platforms are also pouring money into new initiatives for creators. “There's a limited number of creators and everyone is in competition for them,” Jin says.

Facebook has offered various explanations for its sudden interest in creators. Zuckerberg has said he wants to help more people “make a living” off Facebook’s services. Instagram chief Adam Mosseri recently said the company was responding to “the shift in power from institutions to individuals across industries.”

It’s also a major opportunity to shift Facebook’s business away from ads. Though Facebook has promised it won’t take a cut of creators’ earnings for more than a year, that will eventually change (the company hasn’t said what its cut will be, only that it will be “less” than Apple’s 30-percent commission).

Creators could also provide a massive boost to the company’s push into shopping. Commerce has also been a major focus for the social network, which has already crammed shopping features into nearly every corner of Instagram, and Zuckerberg has said he intends to create “a full-featured commerce platform” across Facebook’s services.

What’s less clear is just how much creators will be willing to buy-in to Facebook’s vision. While a $1 billion investment will almost certainly fuel more interest in the platform, it’s not clear if it will prompt the kind of content Facebook might be hoping for. Instagram’s Reels, for example, was meant to be the company’s chief TikTok competitor. Yet the company has at times had to push creators to post original content there.

And concerns about Facebook’s algorithms remain, says Bruneteau. “The algorithm should be favorable to creators like it is on TikTok,” she says. “You have these instant influencers on TikTok, who have been able to grow million-plus followings in less than a year. However those same instant influencers who have those accounts have a tendency to have less followers on Instagram.”

There are signs that Facebook might be willing to address these concerns. Mosseri recently raised eyebrows when he said that Instagram is no longer a photo-sharing app, and that the company was working one ways to insert more recommended content in users’ feeds in order to compete with TikTok.

But even with a kinder algorithm, both Bruneteau and Jin caution that creators should be cautious in throwing too many resources into Facebook or any one platform.

“When creators are building their processes on top of these like centralized platforms, they're actually creating more value for the underlying platform than they're able to create for themselves,” Jin says. “At the end of the day you're strengthening Facebook's dominance because the more content you put there, the more it attracts consumer users and the more that translates into Facebook revenue and Facebook's network effects.”

A Delta pilot has sued the airline for $1 billion, accusing it of trade secrets theft over a communications app he developed a few years ago. According to Bloomberg, Captain Craig Alexander pitched the QrewLive app, which he reportedly developed with $100,000 of his own money, to the company as a way for crew to easily communicate in case of disrupted flights. However, Delta turned him down and then launched what he says is an identical tool a few years later.

Alexander apparently contacted Delta CEO Ed Bastian back in 2016 after a computer system meltdown put all flights on hold and cost the company over $150 million. He told the CEO that he had a solution for issues like that, which resulted to several meetings with executives who gave him verbal assurances that they were going to acquire his app. 

According to Alexander's complaint, Delta ended up telling him that his technology didn't fit its needs and ultimately launched its own Flight Family Communications app in 2018. He called the official Delta app a "carbon copy, knock-off of the role-based text messaging component of [his] proprietary QrewLive communications platform." As for how he decided to seek $1 billion in damages, he said it's "based solely upon operational cost savings to Delta, [which] conservatively exceeds $1 billion."

The plaintiff has been with the airline for 11 years and still currently works with the company. Delta spokesperson Morgan Durrant told Bloomberg in a statement: "While we take the allegations specified in Mr. Alexander's complaint seriously, they are not an accurate or fair description of Delta's development of its internal crew messaging platform."

Mastercard and Verizon (Engadget’s parent company) say they plan to work together on “transformational” financial technologies. The companies told CNBC they hope their new partnership starts producing results by 2023. One of the main areas they plan to work on is contactless payments. Specifically, they want to push Mastercard’s Tap on Phone platform, which allows compatible mobile devices to double as point of sale terminals that can process NFC payments. Among other things the two plan to explore are technologies that will make it easier for businesses to add touchless payment systems to their stores.

Naturally, 5G will play a significant role in all the solutions Verizon and Mastercard have in mind. “5G will enable the small and medium business to handle transactions more quickly and focus on what they are really delivering to customers,” Verizon CEO Hans Vestberg told CNBC. Mastercard CEO Michael Miebach went on to tell the outlet the company expects small- and medium-sized businesses will represent the biggest area of growth for 5G contactless payments.

As for Verizon’s stake in all this, the company has a lot riding on the success of its 5G rollout. It spent $45.4 billion, more than AT&T and T-Mobile combined, in the recent Federal Communications Commission’s C-band auction to secure as mid-band spectrum as possible. Incidentally, 2023 is when the carrier expects its 5G network to provide coverage to 175 million people across the US.

France has fined Google €500 million ($590 million) in the latest antitrust ruling against the company. Authorities say Google did not reach a fair agreement with publishers to use snippets of their content on Google News, despite a 2020 order for the company to do so.

Google said last September it would not pay French publishers for search results and that it would only show basic news results ahead of the country bringing in new rules based on the European Union's copyright framework. Google and French newspaper group Alliance de la presse d'information générale agreed on a payment framework for news previews in January, and it has been in discussions with Agence France-Presse and magazine publishers. However, regulators said Google's payment offers were "negligible," as Bloomberg reports.

Isabelle de Silva, head of competition regulator Autorité de la concurrence, said Google offered to pay less for news than it does for weather data or dictionary definitions. She said the level of the fine "takes into account the exceptional seriousness of the breaches observed."

Regulators also gave Google two months to enter talks with publishers within two months of them making new requests for discussions. Otherwise, the company faces daily fines of up to €900,000 ($1.33 million). A ruling on the substance of the case, which the regulator is expected to issue later this year, may lead to further fines against Google.

The company can appeal the decision. Google believes it “acted in good faith throughout the entire process,” a spokesperson told Bloomberg.

This marks the second-largest antitrust fine that France has dished out to a single company, and it’s far from the first time the country has penalized Google. Just last month, Google said it would change its advertising rules in France and pay a €220 million ($267 million) fine amid claims the company abused its online ad power.

In 2019, Google agreed to pay nearly €1 billion ($1.10 billion) after failing to fully disclose its taxable activities in France. The same year, French regulators fined Google $167 million over allegedly unclear ad rules and $57 million following claims of General Data Protection Regulation violations.

Following last year's announcement of the Google News Showcase initiative, Google has reached deals with publishers in other countries to pay for their content, including in the UK, Canada and Australia, which required digital platforms to make such agreements. The company is facing antitrust issues in other jurisdictions, including severallawsuitsin the US.

Huawei and Verizon (Engadget’s parent company) have settled their long-standing patent dispute. The disagreement dates back to 2019 when Huawei said it approached Verizon about licensing some of its technologies. After nearly a year of negotiations, talks between the two companies broke down on January 21st, 2020, and Huawei went on to file multiple lawsuits against the telecom in courts across Texas. At the center of the feud were 12 standards-relevant patents that Huawei said Verizon was using in its infrastructure. At the time, Verizon dismissed the lawsuits, claiming they were “nothing more than a PR stunt.”

It has since changed its tune. “Verizon is happy with the settlement reached with Huawei involving patent lawsuits. While terms of the settlement are not being disclosed, our team did an outstanding job bringing this protracted matter to a close,” Verizon spokesperson Rich Young said in a statement.

For Huawei, this is precisely the type of outcome the company had hoped for when it announced at the start of 2021 that it planned to monetize its patent portfolio more aggressively. While the US and other parts of the world have barred it from their national 5G networks, the Chinese company is ideally situated to make money on licensing fees. It has among the most 5G-related standards-relevant patents of any company in the world. To that end, it estimated the licensing strategy could help it generate as much as $1.3 billion in additional revenue between 2019 and the end of 2021.

Google has yet another antitrust lawsuit on its hands. Politico reports 36 states and Washington DC have banded together to sue the company over its handling of the Play Store. They say Google's control over the marketplace violates US antitrust law.  

This latest action is the fourth antitrust lawsuit launched against Google following three similar claims in 2020. In December, a group of 38 states and territories led by Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser filed antitrust charges against the company over its search business. The company is also the subject of a Department of Justice probe.     

We've reached out to Google for comment, and we'll update this article when we hear back from the company.       

Developing...

The reports were accurate: TikTok is expanding into job recruitment. As of today, the company has launched a pilot program that allows people in the US to apply for entry, associate and senior level positions by tagging videos they upload to the platform using the #TikTokResumes hashtag. You can see a list of the approximately three dozen companies that are taking part in the pilot, as well as the jobs they're hiring for, by visiting TikTok's dedicated resumes website. Some of the more notable brands taking part include Shopify, Target and the Detroit Pistons. Applicants have until July 31st to apply for the first set of jobs posted on the platform.

In expanding in this way, the company says it "believes there's an opportunity to bring more value to people's experience with TikTok by enhancing the utility of the platform as a channel for recruitment." And while it might seem strange for TikTok to push its users to upload video resumes, it's a reflection of the fact the platform was never just about viral dance videos. You can already find creators dedicated to helping other TikTok users build their careers. And as Gen Z faces uncertain job prospects following the pandemic, it makes sense for TikTok to support the demographic that makes up a significant portion of its userbase.

A federal judge has dismissed the FTC’s initial antitrust complaint against Facebook, saying it was “legally insufficient.” While it’s an early win for Facebook, the FTC’s antitrust case against the company isn’t necessarily over. The judge noted that the FTC can file an amended complaint in the next 30 days.

But Judge James Boasberg said that the FTC would need to provide more evidence to back up its claims that Facebook is a monopoly. “The FTC has failed to plead enough facts to plausibly establish a necessary element of all of its Section 2 claims — namely, that Facebook has monopoly power in the market for Personal Social Networking (PSN) Services,” Boasberg wrote. “The Complaint contains nothing on that score save the naked allegation that the company has had and still has a ‘dominant share of th[at] market (in excess of 60%).’”

Separately, Judge Boasberg also dismissed the antitrust lawsuit against Facebook filed by attorneys general from 48 states and territories. The suits, which were announced alongside the FTC’s, said Facebook had illegally stifled competition. But the judge wrote that too much time had passed for the case to move forward.

The FTC and the states had filed antitrust charges against the company in December, saying the company had engaged in anti-competitive behavior in acquiring competitors like WhatsApp and Instagram in an effort to neutralize companies it saw as a threat. The cases also cited Facebook’s dealings with competitors like Snapchat and Vine.

The dismissals are a notable victory for Facebook, which had argued that neither the states or the FTC had a credible antitrust case. The social network had accused the FTC of seeking a “do-over” for acquisitions it had previously approved. In response to the FTC suit, the judge noted the agency “is on firmer ground in scrutinizing the acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp.”

It’s not yet clear how the FTC will respond, but it’s hardly the end of Facebook’s antitrust woes. Congress recently introduced v, including one that would target major acquisitions like Facebook’s deals for WhatsApp and Instagram. The company is also facing antitrust investigations by regulators in the UK and European Union.

Update 6/28 4:55pm ET: In a statement, Facebook said it was "pleased" with the judge's decisions. "We are pleased that today's decisions recognize the defects in the government complaints filed against Facebook. We compete fairly every day to earn people's time and attention and will continue to deliver great products for the people and businesses that use our services." 

Vape pen maker Juul has agreed to pay $40 million to settle a lawsuit in North Carolina, which alleged that the company marketed and sold its products to young people. The state will use the money to fund programs that prevent e-cigarette addition and to help people quit e-cigarettes. The cash will also finance research into e-cigarettes.

As part of the consent order, Juul denied any liability or wrongdoing. However, it agreed to a number of changes to its business practices in the state. Most social media and influencer advertising are off limits, and the company can't have ads near schools or sponsor concerts or sporting events. Juul and retailers that sell its products online will need to use an independent verification system to make sure customers are of legal age.

Juul will need to run a secret shopper program to make sure retailers aren't selling its vape pens to anyone under the age of 21. Retailers will need to keep Juul products behind their counter too. In addition, the company can't introduce new flavors or change nicotine content levels without approval from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). 

“For years, Juul targeted young people, including teens, with its highly addictive e-cigarette. It lit the spark and fanned the flames of a vaping epidemic among our children – one that you can see in any high school in North Carolina," North Carolina Attorney General Josh Stein said in a statement. “This win will go a long way in keeping Juul products out of kids’ hands, keeping its chemical vapor out of their lungs, and keeping its nicotine from poisoning and addicting their brains."

A Juul spokesperson sent the following statement to Engadget:

This settlement is consistent with our ongoing effort to reset our company and its relationship with our stakeholders, as we continue to combat underage usage and advance the opportunity for harm reduction for adult smokers. Importantly, we look forward to working with Attorney General Stein and other manufacturers on the development of potential industry-wide marketing practices based on science and evidence. In addition, we support the Attorney General’s desire to deploy funds to generate appropriate science to support North Carolina’s public health interventions to reduce underage use.

We seek to continue to earn trust through action. Over the past two years, for example, we ceased the distribution of our non-tobacco, non-menthol flavored products in advance of FDA guidance and halted all mass market product advertising. This settlement is another step in that direction.

Stein started investigating Juul in 2018 and sued the company the following year for "designing, marketing, and selling its e-cigarettes to attract young people and for misrepresenting the potency and danger of nicotine in its products." More than a dozen other states have sued Juul for similar reasons, though the North Carolina case is the first to reach a resolution. 

The Federal Trade Commission also filed a lawsuit against Juul, Marlboro owner Altria and others with the aim of undoing a 2018 investment that gave Altria a 35 percent stake in the vape pen maker. The agency argues that agreements between the two companies stifled competition and violated antitrust laws. Meanwhile, the FDA opened a criminal investigation into vaping in 2019.