We've known for a while that Sennheiser had a less expensive version of its Ambeo soundbar in the works, and the company took the opportunity at IFA 2022 to reveal the device. The Ambeo Soundbar Plus will run you $1,500, which is $1,000 less than the original Ambeo soundbar but it retains much of the same tech. That should help Sennheiser compete with soundbars from the likes of Sony.

Sennheiser claims its latest offering is the first 7.1.4. standalone soundbar, noting that it's more compact than the previous model (now called the Ambeo Soundbar Max). It has the same 3D sound as the first version, along with a self-calibration mode. Sennheiser says the Soundbar Plus will be able to analyze a room's acoustics to position several virtual speakers.

Sennheiser

The device supports several 3D audio standards, such as Dolby Atmos, DTS:X, Sony's 360 Reality Audio and MPEG-H Audio. Sennheiser says it's possible to upmix stereo and 5.1 content to deliver 3D audio experiences. Ambeo Soundbar Plus supports several music streaming platforms and protocols, including Apple AirPlay 2, Spotify Connect and Tidal Connect. The device is compatible with Siri, Alexa and Google Assistant too.

In addition, Sennheiser announced the Ambeo Sub, which also uses virtualization and self-calibration tech. It says the speaker's deep bass stays at audiophile-grade down to 27Hz. The sub has an eight-inch proprietary woofer and a 350W class-D amplifier. You'll be able to connect as many as four subwoofers wirelessly and calibrate them individually.

Pre-orders for the Ambeo Soundbar Plus open today. It will ship on September 22nd. The same timeline applies to the Ambeo Sub, which costs $700.​

Sennheiser

Climbr’s at-home climbing machine offers a Peloton-esque experience for those folks wanting to practice going up and down, instead of forward. The company is today unveiling its new model, the Climbr O2, with a number of hardware refinements for greater stability. But it’s the new service, Climbr Vision, that’ll be the most interesting to explore when it makes it debut. The company says that Vision will offer “live, dynamic coaching and feedback while [users] exercise.”

Sadly Vision isn’t coming until the start of 2023, but users can enjoy many of the tweaks the new-and-improved O2 will offer. That includes a simplified center console that improves the machine’s overall strength, and new gears and brakes that provide a broader range of resistance options. These changes will also, it’s promised, improve the lifespan of the machine (key, given how much time you’ll spend thrashing around on it). Not to mention an improved display, which is thinner and offers “crisper graphics” and more responsiveness, as well as the tech needed to offer Vision.

Unfortunately, there’s no word on when users can benefit from the new live coaching, but the price isn’t changing. The O2 will set you back $2,799, much as the current model does (except, like now, when it’s on sale). Early birds who put their cash down between September 1st and October 31st, however, will be able to snag the machine for $2,295, with shipping expected to start in December. 

The legislative arm of the European Union has proposed new rules for mobile phone and tablet reparability. It says manufacturers should make at least 15 components available for at least five years after they release a new phone in the EU. Within that timespan, consumers would be able to replace parts such as batteries, displays, chargers, back covers and SIM and memory card trays, as The Verge notes.

The European Commission is also eyeing improvements to battery durability. It says that phone and tablet batteries should be able to endure at least 500 full charges before dropping below 83 percent of their capacity. Under the proposed regulations, phones would need to have a label detailing information like battery endurance, as well as drop and water resistance ratings.

The idea, as the Financial Times points out, is to reduce e-waste and the environmental impacts of phones and tables. According to a study, increasing smartphone life cycles by five years would equate to taking around 5 million cars off of roads in terms of emissions. The proposal suggests that making phones and tablets more recyclable and repairable would reduce energy consumption costs associated with their manufacture and use by a third.

Smartphone makers have hit back against some elements of the rules by claiming that greater availability of parts will increase plastic consumption. "A potential overproduction, subsequent warehousing and destruction of spare parts will naturally result in wasted resources, reduced material efficiency and negative economic value ultimately resulting in higher costs for the consumer,” Digital Europe, an organization that represents tech companies and trade groups, said.

Nevertheless, some phone manufacturers are attempting to get ahead of such regulations by offering consumers components and tools to self-repair their devices. Apple, Google and Samsung have all started selling parts for phones and other products.

The proposed rules would also impact software updates. Manufacturers would need to keep providing security updates for five years after they stop selling a device and provide functionality updates for at least three years.

Back in June, the EC announced a directive for USB-C to become the charging standard for most electronic devices, including all phones, by fall 2024. Some tech companies had long opposed such a move, particularly Apple, which uses the proprietary Lightning charger for many of its portable devices.

Twitter now has a whistleblower problem of its own. Last week, the company’s former head of security, Pieter “Mudge” Zatko, went public with an extensive whistleblower complaint detailing numerous security lapses and other issues he experienced during his tenure.

Much of the complaint details specific security problems he encountered. It also repeatedly blasts Twitter’s executives for putting user and revenue growth ahead of platform safety, and claims that in some cases executives lied to both twitter’s board and the public about these issues.

But some of the most striking claims in the documents published byThe Washington Post, which include the 84-page whistleblower complaint, as well as a report on the company’s misinformation policies, are about much more than a culture of growth at all costs. They detail significant lapses in the company’s security, and executives who were either absent or unconcerned by the risk presented by these practices. They also help shed light on the company’s at times chaotic approach to countering misinformation and other safety issues.

Notably, Twitter has said little about most of these claims. The company has said the whistleblower complaint is “riddled with inaccuracies,” but hasn’t elaborated. In fact, the company has largely declined to publicly address the specific issues raised by Zatko in any way in the week since the complaint became public

But while many have focused on Zatko’s allegations that Twitter lied to Musk about the prevalence of bots, there are several other claims that merit scrutiny — none of which have been addressed by Twitter in any detail. The company didn't respond to questions about the substance of Zatko's claims.

Twitter might have foreign agents on its payroll

Some of the most explosive claims made by Zatko are those that talk about how Twitter’s interactions with foreign governments and organizations could be endangering national security. Among the issues he raises: Twitter could have people working for foreign governments on staff.

He states that at least one agent of the Indian government was on the company’s payroll, and claims that a U.S. government source separately warned that there was at least one employee “working on behalf of another particular foreign intelligence agency.” It’s unclear what country the source was referring to but, crucially, it wouldn’t be the first instance of a Twitter worker spying for another country.

He also raises concerns about Twitter’s ongoing financial relationship — presumably via advertising — with “Chinese entities” and how they may be able to use the company’s tools to identify people using VPNs to circumvent the country's ban on the service. “Mr. Zatko was told that Twitter was too dependent on the revenue stream to do anything other than attempt to increase it,” the complaint says.

Jack Dorsey was ‘disengaged,’ Parag Agrawal allowed problems to ‘fester’

Throughout the complaint, Zatko describes interactions with Jack Dorsey and current CEO Parag Agrawal (Agrawal was Chief Technology Officer when Zatko first joined the company). Neither executive comes off particularly well.

The complaint notes that Dorsey personally recruited Zatko for the job as head of security, yet once he started, Zatko says Dorsey was either absent or bizarrely silent. According to the complaint, the two executives had “no more than six” one-on-one phone calls — during which Dorsey ”cumulatively spoke perhaps fifty words” — in the entire time they worked together. (Dorsey later tweeted that this was “completely false.”) Zatko, perhaps charitably, describes Dorsey’s demeanor as “disengaged,” and says the CEO was “experiencing a drastic loss of focus” in 2021. Zatko’s experience was apparently not unique either.

From the complaint:

In some meetings-even after he was briefed on complex corporate issues Dorsey did not speak a word. Mudge heard from his colleagues that Dorsey would remain silent for days or weeks. Worried about Dorsey's health, the senior team mostly tried to cover up for him, but even mid- and lower-level staff could tell that the ship was rudderless.

Zatko also describes a strained relationship with Agrawal, both while he was CTO and later when he took over the CEO role after Dorsey stepped down. The complaint at one point notes that some of Twitter’s biggest problems “had developed under Agrawal's watch.” He claims Agrawal was well aware of the company’s security issues, but did little to address them because “Agrawal had caused them, or allowed them to fester, in his role as CTO.” In one incident described by the former security chief, Agrawal was notified of a “huge red flag” but made no effort to look into it further.

In or around August 2021, Mudge notified then-CTO Agrawal and others that the login system for Twitter's engineers was registering, on average, between 1500 and 3000 failed logins every day, a huge red flag. Agrawal acknowledged that no one knew that, and never assigned anyone to diagnose why this was happening or how to fix it.

More worryingly, he claims that Agrawal told him to lie to Twitter’s board of directors about how bad Twitter’s security problems were. And he says he was ultimately fired when he attempted to correct the misleading information they had been provided. (Agrawal told Twitter staffers that Zatko was fired for “ineffective leadership and poor performance.” Zatko, via his lawyers, has disputed the claim.)

Twitter’s internal security practices were shockingly lax

Zatko joined Twitter at the end of 2020 to shore up the company’s systems and practices following a high profile and extremely embarrassing hack in which teenage Bitcoin scammers were able to take over some of accounts of some of Twitter’s most influential users. So it’s not surprising that he identified several security issues soon after joining. But the complaint describes a number of “egregious deficiencies” that were clearly worse than anything Zatko had anticipated.

For example, he repeatedly points out that employee devices were poorly managed. Unlike many companies of Twitter’s size, it had no MDM (mobile device management) policy “leaving the company with no visibility or control over thousands of devices used to access core company systems.” Likewise, Zatko claims that many employee computers were also not properly maintained. According to him, more than 30 percent of employee devices had software updates disabled.

Twitter, he says, “did not actively monitor what employees were doing” on their devices. To the point that Twitter repeatedly caught employees “intentionally installing spyware on their work computers at the request of external organizations,” and that their actions often came to light merely “by accident.”

The fact that Twitter did so little to monitor employee devices was even more concerning because, according to Zatko, roughly half of the company’s 10,000 employees were “given access to sensitive live production systems and user data in order to do their jobs.” He also claims Agrawal “misrepresented the truth” when he claimed the company had tightened access following the 2020 hack.

The company told The Washington Post it had improved its security practices since 2020, but hasn’t elaborated.

Twitter’s data centers were at risk of a “company ending” failure

According to Zatko, Twitter’s data centers were in such a sorry state that there was a nonzero risk that Twitter could lose service — permanently.

From the complaint:

Mudge was shocked to learn that even a temporary but overlapping outage of a small number of datacenters would likely result in the service going offline for weeks, months, or permanently. … On top of this all engineers had some form of access to the data centers, the majority of the systems in the data centers were running out of date software no longer supported by vendors, and there was minimal visibility due to extremely poor logging.

According to Zatko, these issues were so serious they could have potentially triggered “an existential company ending event.” Later, he says that just such a scenario almost occurred in the Spring of 2021, when “Twitter engineers working around the clock were narrowly able to stabilize the problem before the whole platform shut down.”

New features like Fleets, Spaces and Birdwatch had safety issues

Twitter has been racing to create new features over the last year and a half as it’s faced pressure to grow its user base and revenue. But according to the whistleblower documents, major new features sometimes launched without adequately accounting for safety.

For example, Zatko claims that Fleets, the company’s now defunct disappearing tweets feature, “avoided undergoing security and privacy reviews before launch.” The complaint notes that Twitter engineers had to race to address privacy issues that cropped up soon after its launch. A separate report on misinformation at Twitter also raised issues with Fleets. It states that the feature was originally slated to launch prior to the 2020 election, but that the company’s safety team had to “beg” to get the launch pushed to back until after the election

Multiple interviewees reported that they had to "beg" the product team not to launch before the election because they did not have the resources or capabilities to [take] action on disinformation or misinformation on a new product during such a busy, critical time.

Zatko also alleges that another high profile new feature, Spaces, had significant issues with content moderation.

“In December 2021, an executive incorrectly told staff and Board members that Twitter's "Spaces" product was being appropriately moderated. But Mudge researched and discovered that about half of "Spaces" content flagged for review was in a language that the moderators did not speak, and that there was little to no moderation happening.”

Smaller experiments also ran into issues. Birdwatch, the company’s collaborative fact checking feature, also a “pain point” for Twitter’s safety team, who worried QAnon-supporting accounts may join. That concern was apparently well-founded as one was discovered the night before the experiment went public.

In launching Twitter's Birdwatch program, members of the SI [Site Integrity] team said that they were involved in the process throughout, and made suggestions as to how the product could be more secure, including specifically warning that users aligned with QAnon would likely attempt to join. However, feedback was not incorporated in an attempt to keep the product open, leading to a last-minute scramble to secure the product launch. On the evening before Birdwatch launched, Twitter realized that an overt QAnon account had been accepted into the Birdwatch program.

Twitter lacks adequate resources for addressing misinformation

These issues are further detailed in a separate document, also published by The Washington Post, addressing Twitter’s misinformation policies. The report, prepared at Mudge’s request by an outside firm, found that the company is “consistently behind the curve in actioning against disinformation and misinformation threats.” It concluded that “a lack of investment in critical resources, and reactive policies and processes have driven Twitter to operate in a constant state of crisis that does not support the company's broader mission of protecting authentic conversation.”

The report details just how understaffed these teams are at Twitter, noting that the company relied on internal “volunteers” to staff up its misinformation efforts during the 2020 presidential election, It also repeatedly points out that the company lacks the staff or resources to effectively monitor misinformation and other threats in languages other than English. “Despite having a global mission, persistent gaps in resources, tools, and capabilities we identified means Twitter does not have the capabilities to operate globally — including in priority markets – when it comes to misinformation and disinformation,” the report’s authors write.

Zatko claims other Twitter executives attempted to “hide the findings” of the “damning independent report.”

Twitter’s internal support was at times nonexistent and ‘inappropriate’

Tracking misinformation and dealing with content moderation wasn’t the only area where Zatko says Twitter at times struggled to keep up. He reports that the @TwitterSupport account was “historically unmanned.” And that when he started there was a backlog of more than 1 million support cases including “items such as harassment, violations of various rules, and reported accounts and tweets, problems with accounts.”

While he says he oversaw improvements that substantially cut down the number of cases in the backlog. “it was historically the norm that cases in backlogs would eventually become so old that they would be silently closed, which most would agree is inappropriate support.”

What’s next

Much of what happens next will be up to the government agencies investigating the claims — details were sent to the Justice Department, SEC and FTC — but it will also make things a lot more complicated for the company in the short term.

Twitter was already in the midst of a high-stakes legal battle with Elon Musk over his $44 billion acquisition, and Musk is already using the complaint to try to delay the trial and fuel his arguments for reneging on the deal. (In a statement, Zatko’s lawyers said his compliance with a subpoena from Musk was “involuntary,” and that “he did not make his whistleblower disclosures to the appropriate governmental bodies to benefit Musk or to harm Twitter, but rather to protect the American public and Twitter shareholders.”)

The disclosures have also caught the attention of Congress, and Zatko is scheduled to testify to the Senate Judiciary Committee on September 13th. “Mr. Zatko’s allegations of widespread security failures and foreign state actor interference at Twitter raise serious concerns,” committee chair Sen. Dick Durbin said in a statement. “If these claims are accurate, they may show dangerous data privacy and security risks for Twitter users around the world.”

Twitter, naturally, hasn’t commented on the upcoming Senate hearing, Musk’s subpoena or potential investigations by the FTC or SEC.

Withings is today announcing yet another in its range of class-leading smart scales, Body Comp. The device is pitched as a “complete body assessment scale” which can look at the sort of facets of our bodies normally reserved for clinical settings. That includes weight, muscle mass, fat mass, water percentage, bone mass, BMI and visceral fat counts. You’ll also get information on your standing heart rate and your vascular health (based on PulseWave Velocity), as well as analyzing your nerve health. And, of course, it’s the first Withings product that will be sold to be compatible with Health+, the company’s other new announcement.

Health+ is Withings’ new subscription platform, since recurring revenue is now the one way that most hardware businesses make money these days. It promises to “unlock additional features in the Health Mate app,” offering insights on how to strive for a better body. These include six week habit-forming modules, all of which is contextualized with the data offered by your Withings devices. They will also be offered meal plans and suggested workouts to help them achieve their goals faster. (Health+ will set you back $79.95 after the first year of use, and is only compatible so far with this and any future Withings' products.)

Now, this is actually a different product to Body Scan, the scale that Withings announced back in January which came with its own electrode handle. That, much like other high-end body composition scales, asks you to hold the handle at waist height in order to better read your vital statistics. Armed with the data, it’ll tell you the fat and water ratios in your arms, legs and torso, as well as monitoring your nerve activity. That product hasn’t actually hit stores yet, but it’s already clear that Body Comp will offer the bulk of the same features with a little less fine grain data.

There is now a significant number of devices that have Withings and Body in the name and you’d be forgiven for struggling to keep them all straight in your head. The existing flagship is the Body Cardio, which has all of the current bells and whistles, including weight, BMI, body composition, heart rate and vascular age. Below that, the Body+ offers weight, BMI and body comp, while the vanilla Body just offers weight and BMI.

In 2021, Jabra updated its true wireless lineup with a redesigned, feature-packed budget option and a premium set with both powerful active noise cancellation (ANC) and enhanced call features. Back in January, the company tacked on an affordable fitness-focused model with ANC. At IFA 2022, Jabra has new mid-range earbuds that don't cut a lot of corners to save you money. The Elite 5 are equipped to handle your voice chats, help reduce distractions and offer a list of other handy tools — all for $150. 

The Elite 5 has a similar design to Jabra's other recent earbuds. They're so similar, I'll forgive you for mistaking one model for another. However, the common aesthetic isn't a bad thing since the company opted for a smaller overall size when it began overhauling its buds last year. This compact stature means each option offers a more comfy fit, and that's true of the Elite 5 too. The water resistance is the same as the cheaper Elite 3 at IP55, but the case for the Elite 5 supports wireless charging like the pricier Elite 7 Pro. It too has a familiar look. 

Inside, 6mm driver power the sound and you can customize the EQ via Jabra's app. Qualcomm's QCC3050 chip handles the hybrid active noise cancellation setup, monitoring sound from both outside and inside of the ear to battle unwanted noise. Six total microphones are onboard for calls, up from four on the Elite 3, and they're able to combat wind noise. There's support for Google Fast Pair and Microsoft Swift Pair, plus the ability to summon Alexa or Google Assistant hands free. And for Android users, there's one-touch access to Spotify via the Spotify Tap feature. Jabra doesn't mention ambient sound, or HearThrough as the company calls it, but it's available on the Elite 3, so it would be an odd omission here. 

The Elite 5 has the same battery life stats as the Elite 3: up to seven hours on the buds and up to 28 hours total when you factor in the case. The difference here is that those figures are with ANC on, so if you disable that feature, you're likely to get more listening time than with the more affordable model since it doesn't have ANC. Lastly, multipoint connectivity is available on the Elite 5, so you can link up to multiple devices simultaneously. 

As you make your way up Jabra's Elite line, the features get better with each model. The Elite 5 sits squarely in the middle, with slightly more than the Elite 3 and slightly less than the Elite 7 Pro. Currently though, this newest set of earbuds might be a tough sell. Jabra is offering the Elite 7 Pro for $130 for a limited time, which matches the lowest price we've seen. But if you prefer the Elite 5, they're available starting today in black and gold/beige color options. 

The second-gen Razer Kishi mobile gaming controller is now available for iPhone. As with the Android version Razer revealed a few months ago, the gamepad costs $100. You can order it from Razer's website.

The biggest change from the first Kishi is to the mechanism that holds the two sides together and keeps your phone in place. Razer has ditched the flexible bridge in favor of a sturdier sliding version (similar to the setup used by its rival, Backbone). This makes Kishi V2 compatible with all modern iPhones —namely iPhone 6S and later handsets, as well as both iPhone SE generations. What's more, if you remove the rubber inserts, you may be able to keep your phone's case on when you slot it into place.

Additionally, Razer has swapped out the switches, replacing the V1's membranes with the microswitches from its Wolverine V2 console controllers. "This delivers advantages in actuation responsiveness, comfort and tactile feedback," Razer claims. Meanwhile, there's now a Share button on the front and two additional programmable buttons next to the triggers.

Users can set up those buttons in the Razer Nexus app. You'll also need that app to share your gameplay on YouTube or Facebook when you hit the Share button. Moreover, you'll be able to find supported games through the app, which you can launch with a dedicated gamepad button.

The Kishi V2 works with cloud gaming devices (including Xbox Cloud Gaming and Google Stadia), remote play apps for consoles and PC and iPhone games that support MFi controllers. There's a Lightning port for passthrough charging but, sadly, no 3.5mm headphone jack.

ARM has filed a lawsuit against Qualcomm and subsidiary Nuvia over alleged trademark infringement and a breach of some license agreements. It wants certain Nuvia CPU designs to be destroyed, as well as "fair compensation."

Qualcomm bought Nuvia last year to leverage the latter's custom processor cores for its chips. According to the filing (which was obtained by The Register), Nuvia used licensed ARM tech to build the cores. ARM claims Qualcomm did not obtain the necessary permission to transfer and use the licenses it granted to Nuvia.

ARM asserts that Qualcomm's acquisition of the company resulted in Nuvia breaching its licenses. As such, ARM terminated those licenses earlier this year. It added that, as a result, Qualcomm and Nuvia are obliged to stop using and destroy any ARM-based technology that was developed under the licenses. Additionally, ARM argues that Qualcomm plans to continue using its trademarks to market and sell products containing Nuvia cores without having permission to do so. 

"Because Qualcomm attempted to transfer Nuvia licenses without ARM’s consent, which is a standard restriction under ARM’s license agreements, Nuvia’s licenses terminated in March 2022," ARM said in a statement. "Before and after that date, ARM made multiple good faith efforts to seek a resolution. In contrast, Qualcomm has breached the terms of the ARM license agreement by continuing development under the terminated licenses. ARM was left with no choice other than to bring this claim against Qualcomm and Nuvia to protect our IP, our business, and to ensure customers are able to access valid ARM-based products.”

This is a significant development as Qualcomm is one of its key customers. Qualcomm built its name on ARM-based processors, after all. And adding to the confusion, Qualcomm still has its own license with ARM, under which it can build custom cores with the latter's architecture. It's not clear what overlap, if any, might exist between the licensing agreements made to Qualcomm and Nuvia.

"ARM's lawsuit marks an unfortunate departure from its longstanding, successful relationship with Qualcomm. ARM has no right, contractual or otherwise, to attempt to interfere with Qualcomm's or Nuvia's innovations," Qualcomm told The Register in a statement. "ARM's complaint ignores the fact that Qualcomm has broad, well-established license rights covering its custom-designed CPUs, and we are confident those rights will be affirmed."

If there was ever a fundamental divide between Twitter’s leadership and its users, it was about the existence, or lack, of an edit button. The company has for most of its life been against the ability for users to amend tweets after they were published. That changes, more or less, from today, since Twitter has announced that it will indeed be rolling out an edit button to its users. As The New York Times reports, it marks the most fundamental shift in how the platform works since 2017, when it doubled the character limit of a message from 140 to 280 characters.

In a statement, Twitter said that it was hoping that the presence of an edit button would make the act of tweeting a little less stressful. Unfortunately, the button isn’t yet ready to roll out to the platform’s several hundred million users just yet, and is currently still in testing by employees. Later this month, access will be granted to Twitter Blue users, who pay $5 per month to remove in-feed ads and undo a tweet that you might want to change before it’s seen by everyone. The company added that the test will be localized to a single country, and will expand worldwide slowly so that the company can make sure the feature is being used as intended.

One of the reasons that Twitter resisted an edit button for so long was the risk of bad actors abusing the system. For instance, you could amend a tweet that was widely retweeted or embedded in other sites, changing the meaning for something its boosters did not intend. That’s why there will be guardrails put in place — like the fact that edits can only be made 30 minutes after the initial publication. And edits will be labelled as such to ensure people know you’ve been tweaking your text — with the revision history also available for everyone to view. Still, it's one way to at least spare some of your blushes when you send a Tweet that's got on3 or twoo annoyeeng typizos. 

The United Kingdom’s antitrust regulator is concerned that Microsoft’s blockbuster purchase of Activision Blizzard could create a monopoly in the nascent cloud gaming space. The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA), which began investigating the deal back in July, says that it’s not yet reassured by the promises Microsoft has made to get the deal done. It feels that, once Activision is a part of Microsoft, the Xbox maker could use its “control over popular games like Call of Duty and World of Warcraft” to “harm rivals” by boxing them out of access to popular titles. Microsoft has already publicly committed not to hoard exclusives, (and said that Actiblizz's library isn't all that anyway) but sweet words haven’t appeased the officials.

In a statement, it said that it was giving Microsoft and Activision five days to submit proposals that would address its concerns. If those did not pass muster, however, then the office will open a lengthy “Phase 2” investigation involving an independent panel to scrutinize the deal in greater depth. That will likely delay any completion of the deal, which would then only be rubber-stamped if regulators were convinced that the deal would not cause a “substantial lessening of competition.” It’s likely that, whatever happens, Microsoft will need to commit to not using its growing clout to hurt other companies in the space by depriving them of key franchises.

Microsoft’s gaming chief Phil Spencer has already responded to the announcement, affirming the previous pledge not to pull Call of Duty from PlayStation, for instance. Spencer pointed to the cross-platform appeal of Minecraft, a title Microsoft purchased in 2014, as evidence of the company’s good faith. Activision CEO Bobby Kotick published an open letter to employees, saying that the company will “fully cooperate” with regulators, which are taking “appropriate” steps to ensure that there are no risks to competition.