Following an investigation into its Sold By Amazon program, Amazon has agreed to pay the office of Washington State’s attorney general office $2.25 million and provide annual updates on its compliance with antitrust laws. Available between 2018 and June 2020, the program set a pricing floor for certain products, which the Attorney General's office says "constituted unlawful price-fixing."

Amazon enrolled a small number of third-party sellers into the program while it was available. The retailer promised sellers they would earn a guaranteed minimum on their products, provided they agreed not to compete with the company. What’s more, merchants could earn additional revenue if Amazon’s algorithm determined consumers were willing to pay extra for their product, with the company splitting the difference between them. "For example, if a seller and Amazon agreed to a $20 minimum payment and the item sold for $25, the seller would receive the $20 minimum price and share the $5 additional profit with Amazon, in addition to any fees," Attorney General Bob Ferguson wrote. 

According to Ferguson, the problem with the system was that it set the minimum price of a product as the floor of what Amazon would offer to consumers. When the price of their goods increased, some sellers saw a “drastic” decrease in sales, in part because some consumers would opt to buy similar but more affordable products from Amazon and its various private labels. The program, according to the AG, was in violation of antitrust laws.

The state opened its probe into Sold By Amazon in March 2020. The program was discontinued in June of that same year but, according to an Amazon spokesperson, for reasons unrelated to the attorney general’s investigation. As part of its agreement with the state, the company won’t offer the Sold By Amazon program again.

“This was a small program to provide another tool to help sellers offer lower prices, much like similar programs common among other retailers, that has since been discontinued,” the company said. “While we strongly believe the program was legal, we’re glad to have this matter resolved.” When pressed, Amazon declined to say why it did not challenge the resolution.

In recent years, Amazon has faced intense scrutiny related to how it operates its online marketplace. In 2020, The Wall Street Journal published a report claiming the company had been using proprietary seller data to help design and price its in-house products. In a Senate hearing, former Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos said he couldn’t “guarantee” the company had not misused data from third-party merchants on its platform. Last week, the Senate Judiciary Committee advanced the American Innovation and Choice Online Act, legislation that would prevent companies like Amazon from favoring their own products over that of their rivals. Like Apple and Google, the company has aggressively lobbied to prevent the bill from passing.

Following a profitable — and, ahem, notable — 2021, Tesla remains at the forefront of EV production in America as we enter the new year. With deliveries up nearly 90 percent over 2020’s figures, Tesla achieved “the highest quarterly operating margin among all volume OEMs,” during that time frame, according to the company’s Q4 figures released Wednesday The company not only hit $5.5 billion in net income despite a $6.5 billion outlay for new production facilities in Berlin and Austin, Texas, it also exceeded its own revenue goals by a cool billion dollars.

In Q4, 2021, Tesla produced 930,000 electric vehicles (99 percent of which were Xs and Ys) and delivered 936,000 of them to customers around the world. At the same time, the company expanded its proprietary Supercharger network by a third, now totalling 3,476 stations.

Despite widespread supply chain issues impacting the entire automotive industry, Tesla maintained its production capabilities better than virtually any other automaker. The Fremont factory churned out around 600,000 vehicles last year with plans to increase that figure even after the Austin and Berlin plants come online later this year. Production in the Shanghai plant continues to ramp up as well. According to Tesla, it has managed to lower the per unit cost of producing its vehicles to around $36,000 (and did so in both Q3 and Q4, 2021).

Tesla's Q4 investor call happens at 5:30pm ET today, stay tuned for live updates and comment from Tesla executives.

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Spotify already has an answer to Neil Young's ultimatum following outrage over allegations Joe Rogan is spreading COVID-19 vaccine misinformation. As The Wall Street Journalreports, Spotify is in the midst of removing Young's music from the streaming service worldwide. His (very large) catalog was still available as of this writing, but we'd suggest listening to Harvest one more time just in case.

Young has reportedly been in talks with Spotify and his label Warner Records since posting an open letter threatening to pull his albums. The artist made the formal request on Wednesday (January 26th), and the music is apparently poised to disappear within "several hours."

In a statement to Engadget, Spotify said it "regret[ted]" Young's decision and hoped to have him back "soon." It also defended its anti-misinformation practices, claiming it accepted a "great responsibility" in juggling both listener safety and creator freedom. The company added it had pulled over 20,000 podcast COVID-related episodes since the pandemic began. It didn't say why it was still hosting Joe Rogan Experience episodes that contained misinformation, though, including unsupported claims from Dr. Robert Malone that "psychosis" led people to believe vaccines were effective.

Spotify also didn't offer reasons for its decision. However, the company is believed to have paid over $100 million to land a multi-year distribution deal with Rogan. While the exact terms of the agreement aren't clear, Spotify might suffer financial and legal consequences if it pulls Rogan's episodes.

You can read Spotify's full statement below:

We want all the world’s music and audio content to be available to Spotify users. With that comes great responsibility in balancing both safety for listeners and freedom for creators. We have detailed content policies in place and we’ve removed over 20,000 podcast episodes related to COVID-19 since the start of the pandemic. We regret Neil’s decision to remove his music from Spotify, but hope to welcome him back soon.

Disney+ will come to more parts of the world this summer. On Wednesday, Disney announced the streaming service will expand to 42 additional countries and 11 new territories in the second half of the year. The full list is below, but some of the more notable places where the platform will arrive include South Africa and Poland. Disney didn’t say exactly when it plans to launch the service in each country and territory, nor did it share details on regional pricing. Expect those to come at a later date. 

Disney+ is currently available in 64 countries globally, including the US, UK and Canada. The announcement of an imminent expansion comes after Disney added fewer than expected subscribers during its final fiscal quarter of 2021. Some analysts had predicted the company would add as many as 9.4 million new paying users before the end of the year, but the company instead managed to attract a more modest 2.1 million subscribers. Despite missing Wall Street estimates, Disney said at the time it was still confident it could secure 230 million users before the end of 2024. At the end of 2021, the service had 118 million subscribers globally. 

Here's the full list of countries where the service is expanding to this summer: Albania, Algeria, Andorra, Bahrain, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, Czech Republic, Egypt, Estonia, Greece, Hungary, Iraq, Israel, Jordan, Kosovo, Kuwait, Latvia, Lebanon, Libya, Liechtenstein, Lithuania, Malta, Montenegro, Morocco, North Macedonia, Oman, Palestine, Poland, Qatar, Romania, San Marino, Saudi Arabia, Serbia, Slovakia, Slovenia, South Africa, Tunisia, Turkey, United Arab Emirates, Vatican City and Yemen.

As for territories, the list is as follows: Faroe Islands, French Polynesia, French Southern Territories, St. Pierre and Miquelon Overseas Collective, Åland Islands, Sint Maarten, Svalbard & Jan Mayen, British Indian Ocean Territory, Gibraltar, Pitcairn Islands and St. Helena.

Fox News host Dan Bongino is no longer welcome on YouTube. The company confirmed to The Hillthat Bongino is now permanently banned from its video platform, after he attempted to evade a prior suspension related to COVID-19 misinformation. The conservative commentator apparently published a video on his main channel while another channel was suspended, thereby violating YouTube's Terms of Service. Bongino's two channels have been removed from the service, and he won't be able to make any future channels, YouTube representatives told The Hill.

Last September, YouTube announced that it would ban all content related to vaccine misinformation, which was an expansion on its previous ban against COVID-19 misinformation. At the time, YouTube also banned prominent anti-vax proponents like Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Joseph Mercola.

Bongino, and many other conservative commentators, have moved over to the alternative video platform Rumble. He currently has over 2 million subscribers there, whereas his primary channel had 900,000 subscribers on YouTube. 

The CEO of ID.me, a service used by dozens of states to verify unemployment benefits claimants as well as several federal agencies, has walked back previous claims that the company does not use a more powerful method of facial recognition.

"ID.me uses a specific '1 to Many' check on selfies tied to government programs targeted by organized crime to prevent prolific identity thieves and members of organized crime from stealing the identities of innocent victims en masse," Blake Hall said in a statement. "This step is internal to ID.me and does not involve any external or government database."

That contrasts with comments Hall made earlier this week. "Our 1:1 face match is comparable to taking a selfie to unlock a smartphone," he said. "ID.me does not use 1:many facial recognition, which is more complex and problematic."

The 1:many approach involves matching images against those in a database, whereas 1:1 is a case of ensuring someone matches their own photo. For 1:1 matching, ID.me compares a user's selfie against a piece of government ID that they upload.

Privacy advocates have criticized both approaches. Research has indicated that some facial recognition systems struggle to identify people with darker skin tones, and concerns have been raised about the security risks of storing biometric data.

Hall said ID.me's 1:many check "occurs once during enrollment, and exists to make sure a single attacker is not registering multiple identities. This step is not tied to identity verification. It does not block legitimate users from verifying their identity, nor is it used for any other purpose other than to prevent identity theft."

He claimed data shows that dropping the 1:many check "would immediately lead to significant identity theft and organized crime. The 1:1 Face Match step is the only step used to verify identity as explained in our earlier reports."

According to Cyberscoop, some ID.me workers expressed concern that the company's public statements didn't align with what it was actually doing. "We could disable the 1:many face search, but then lose a valuable fraud fighting tool. Or we could change our public stance on using 1:many face search,” an engineer is said to have posted to an ID.me Slack channel this week. “But it seems we can’t keep doing one thing and saying another as that’s bound to land us in hot water.”

“If companies and the government have to lie about facial recognition in an effort to avoid public scrutiny, they shouldn’t be using it,” Fight for the Future campaign director Caitlin Seeley George said in a statement. “We already know this company is willing to say anything in order to get more government contracts. The CEO of ID.me has been peddling erroneous numbers about unemployment benefit fraud, but the fact that the IRS knew about this discrepancy is a big problem. The only responsible thing for the IRS and any other state or federal agency using ID.me to do is to stop these contracts immediately.”

ID.me came back under the spotlight recently after cybersecurity reporter Brian Krebs tried to set up an account, which will be required to log into the Internal Revenue Service's online portal by this summer. Krebs ran into difficulties during the verification process, and ID.me placed him in a queue to join a video call with a live agent. The system gave Krebs an estimated wait time of three hours and 27 minutes.

Hall said ID.me works with 10 federal agencies, 30 states and 540 companies. Last year, some users reported having to wait months to receive their benefits after the system failed to verify their identity. In some cases, folks said they had no success with the video chat system either.

A recent and "widespread" API outage had left Discord unusable for some people for part of the day. After reports of the problem started to surface online, Discord began investigating at approximately 2:49PM ET. Minutes later, it said it had identified the underlying issue causing the outage, but noted it was also dealing with a secondary problem related to one of its database clusters. "We have our entire on-call response team online and responding to the issue," the company said at the time. 

At 3:07PM ET, the company implemented a login limit to manage its traffic load, a measure it's now slowly easing as things return to normal. If you can't access your Discord account yet, wait a bit and try again in the next 30 minutes to an hour. 

If you loved/hated Twitter's new NFT user profile pictures, get ready to feel excited/ambivalent about Reddit's offering. TechCrunch reports that Reddit is now testing an NFT profile picture implementation, though it's unclear how it'll actually look to end users. Twitter's hexagonal icons separate NFT owners from lowly round-icon proles, so we'd wager Reddit would also want some way to make crypto fans feel special.

“We’re always exploring ways to provide value for users and communities on Reddit. At the moment we’re testing the ability to use NFTs as profile pictures (avatars) and verify ownership,” Reddit spokesperson Tim Rathschmidt told TechCrunch. “It’s a small, internal test and no decisions have been made about expanding or rolling out the capability.”

Notably, TechCrunch also says Reddit isn't limiting its exclusive profile pics to owners of its own NFT project, CryptoSnoos. If the feature actually gets implemented (and given the current wave of crypto-hype, why wouldn't it?), you'll be able to display whatever NFT you'd like as you browse r/gonewild.

It's a big day for security updates in Apple-land. The company has rolled out software fixes for just about all of its platforms, including iOS 15.3 and macOS 12.2, 9to5Mac reports. Notably, they fix the Safari vulnerability that could potentially leak your browser history, as well as your Google account information. WatchOS 8.4 and tvOS 15.2, meanwhile, add some performance improvements. And even though the company isn't paying as much attention to its smart speakers these days, it launched HomePod 15.3, which adds Siri support for up to six users speaking English in India, or Italian in Italy. (That's a feature Apple started offering in the US back in 2019.)

While we normally wouldn't stress minor software updates much, iOS and macOS users should deal with that Safari vulnerability as soon as they can. Sure, there aren't any major threats taking advantage of that now, but who knows what malware could pop up in the next month or two. 

Transporation startup Boom is one step closer to bringing back supersonic passenger flight. On Wednesday, the company announced plans to build a manufacturing facility at Piedmont Triad International Airport in North Carolina. Once complete, the plant will employ approximately 1,700 workers and produce the company’s upcoming Overture supersonic jet, which Boom hopes will start flying passengers in 2029. Construction on the facility is expected to start later this year.

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