Month: November 2024

NEW DELHI (Reuters) -India’s antitrust body has turned down a request from Apple to put a hold on an investigation report which found the company breached competition laws, allowing the case to continue, an internal order from the regulator seen by Reuters showed.

The Competition Commission of India (CCI) in August ordered a recall of investigation reports after Apple said the watchdog had disclosed commercial secrets to competitors in the case dating back to 2021, including Tinder-owner Match. These elements should have been redacted.

The CCI had asked parties to return the reports and destroy any copies. The regulator then issued new reports.

The CCI internal order showed that Apple in November alleged that the main complainant in the antitrust investigation – Indian non-profit Together We Fight Society (TWFS) – had not complied with the directives to give an assurance that the old investigation reports had been destroyed.

Apple asked the CCI “to take action against TWFS for non-compliance with its order” and “to withhold the revised” report, the CCI order, dated Nov. 13, seen by Reuters showed.

“Apple’s request to hold the investigation report in abeyance was deemed untenable,” the CCI said in the order.

Apple did not respond to Reuters queries.

The CCI did not respond outside regular business hours on Sunday. Calls to representatives of TWFS went unanswered.

A CCI investigation had found that Apple exploited its dominant position in the market for app stores on its iOS operating system to the detriment of app developers, users and other payment processors.

Apple has denied wrongdoing and said it is a small player in India where phones that use Google’s Android system are dominant.

The CCI internal order also showed that Apple has been asked to submit its audited financial statements for fiscal years 2021-22, 2022-23 and 2023-24 under regulatory guidelines aimed at determining possible monetary penalties in the case.

The CCI’s senior officials will review the investigation report and make a final ruling on the case.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The United Parcel Service will pay up to a $45 million penalty for improperly valuing a business unit, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) said on Friday.

The SEC said UPS misrepresented “its earnings because it failed to follow generally accepted accounting principles (GAAP) in valuing one of its worst performing businesses.”

(Reuters) -A federal judge on Friday rejected the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission’s request to sanction Elon Musk after he failed to appear for court-ordered testimony for the regulator’s probe into his $44 billion takeover of Twitter.

U.S. District Judge Jacqueline Scott Corley in San Francisco said sanctions over Musk’s Sept. 10 absence were unnecessary, after the world’s richest person testified on Oct. 3 and agreed to pay the SEC’s $2,923 of travel costs.

“Because the present circumstances forestall any occasion for meaningful relief that the court could grant, the SEC’s request is moot,” Corley wrote.

The SEC had sought a declaration that Musk violated a May 31 court order to provide testimony.

It said having only to repay travel costs would not deter many other people from ignoring court orders, “much less someone of Musk’s extraordinary means.”

Musk said he complied with the order by testifying on Oct. 3. He is worth $321.7 billion according to Forbes magazine.

The SEC did not immediately respond to a request for comment after business hours. Lawyers for Musk did not immediately respond to similar requests.

Musk, whose businesses include electric car maker Tesla and rocket company SpaceX and who is the world’s richest person, went to Florida’s Cape Canaveral on Sept. 10 to oversee the launch of SpaceX’s Polaris Dawn mission.

The SEC is investigating whether Musk violated securities laws in early 2022 by waiting at least 10 days too long to disclose he had begun accumulating Twitter stock.

Critics and some investors have said this let him buy shares cheaply before he eventually disclosed a 9.2% Twitter stake, and shortly thereafter offered to buy the whole company.

In July, Musk said he misunderstood SEC disclosure rules and that “all indications” suggested he made a “mistake.”

The SEC also sued Musk in 2018 over his Twitter posts about taking Tesla private. He settled that lawsuit by paying a $20 million fine, agreeing to let Tesla lawyers review some posts in advance and stepping down as Tesla’s chairman.

(Reuters) -The U.S. Department of Justice made its final argument on Monday that Google illegally dominated online advertising technology, seeking a second antitrust win against the company.

The closing arguments in Alexandria, Virginia, cap a 15-day trial held in September where prosecutors sought to show Google monopolized markets for publisher ad servers and advertiser ad networks, and tried to dominate the market for ad exchanges which sit between buyers and sellers.

“Google rigged the rules of the road,” said DOJ lawyer Aaron Teitelbaum, who asked the judge to hold Google accountable for anticompetitive conduct.

Google has argued prosecutors are bending U.S. antitrust law to force it to accommodate competitors’ services, and that the case is focused on incidents from years past when Google was still building and improving its offerings.

Publishers testified at trial that they could not switch away from Google, even when it rolled out features they disliked, since there was no other way to access the huge advertising demand within Google’s ad network.

News Corp in 2017 estimated losing at least $9 million in ad revenue that year if it had switched away, one witness said.

If U.S. District Judge Leonie Brinkema finds that Google broke the law, she would consider prosecutors’ request to make Google at least sell off Google Ad Manager, a platform that includes the company’s publisher ad server and its ad exchange.

Google offered to sell the ad exchange this year to end an EU antitrust investigation but European publishers rejected the proposal as insufficient, Reuters first reported in September.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) -A group representing major electric vehicle and battery manufacturers on Friday urged President-elect Donald Trump not to kill tax credits for electric vehicle sales and production, citing the impact on key states that voted for the Republican.

The Zero Emission Transportation Association – whose members include Rivian LG, Tesla, Uber, Lucid and Panasonic – said production tax credits have driven enormous job gains in states like Ohio, Kentucky, Michigan and Georgia, and warned killing those production and consumer tax credits would undercut those investments and hurt American job growth.

ZETA Executive Director Albert Gore said the tax credits are critical to “actually compete to win against China.”

Reuters reported on Thursday the Trump transition team wants to kill the $7,500 consumer tax credit for electric-vehicle purchases, citing sources. EV and battery maker stocks fell on the Reuters report.

Automakers have been making the case to the Trump transition team and lawmakers that they face stringent regulations and need tax incentives to meet them.

The Alliance for Automotive Innovation urged Congress in an Oct. 15 letter to retain the EV tax credits, calling them “critical to cementing the U.S. as a global leader” in future auto manufacturing.

Representatives of biggest EV maker Tesla told a Trump-transition committee they support ending the subsidy, Reuters reported.

Trump has said he plans to begin the process of undoing the Biden administration’s stringent emissions regulations finalized earlier this year. The rules cut tailpipe emissions limits by 50% from 2026 levels by 2032.

Trump told Reuters in August he would consider ending the $7,500 tax credit for electric vehicle purchases. “Tax credits and tax incentives are not generally a very good thing,” he said.

Trump could take steps to reverse Treasury Department rules that have made it easier for automakers to take advantage of the $7,500 credit or could ask Congress to repeal it entirely. During his first four-year term, Trump sought to repeal the EV tax credit, which was later expanded by President Joe Biden in 2022.

(Reuters) -Goldman Sachs said on Monday it is looking to spin out a blockchain-based technology platform designed to streamline institutional trading and reduce settlement times.

The Wall Street titan said the platform, called GS DAP, will ultimately become “industry-owned.” It has partnered with rates and credit trading platform Tradeweb Markets to expand its commercial use cases. 

Banks have long expressed interest in using blockchain to trade assets such as cash and bonds, but to do so on a large scale would require a major overhaul of the technology infrastructure underpinning financial markets.

Yet, institutions often hesitate to adopt a platform controlled by a rival. 

“Establishing a new, standalone company independent of Goldman Sachs and its Digital Assets business will help to provide the future runway for digital financial services by ensuring a fit-for-purpose, long-term solution,” the bank said in a statement. 

It aims to execute the spin-out within the next 12 to 18 months, Mathew McDermott, the bank’s global head of digital assets, said in an interview with Bloomberg News, which first reported the move.

While GS DAP will be spun out, the bank will continue to build out its digital assets business. 

Institutional interest in the crypto has soared after the industry secured some major wins this year, with the approval of spot bitcoin exchange-traded funds and the election of Donald Trump, who has promised to make the country the “crypto capital of the planet.”

NEW YORK (Reuters Breakingviews) -Nvidia is making so much money that founder Jensen Huang doesn’t know what to do with it all. The $3.6 trillion chip designer is spending more on dividends and buybacks, but its cash pile is still growing, doubling over the past year to $35 billion amid a frenzy for the company’s artificial-intelligence chip designs. Combined with Huang’s prodigious ambition and a more lenient antitrust stance under President-elect Donald Trump, M&A may be back on the menu.

Nvidia has grown from a startup to the most valuable company on earth in the three decades since its founding. Huang’s 3.8% stake is worth more than the entire market value of fading $107 billion giant Intel. Nvidia’s big insight was to see how the industry could keep increasing computing power even as traditional processor speeds topped out in the early 2000s. It does this by providing chips and software that break the work into pieces so it can be done simultaneously, known as parallel computing. The hardware that the company designs is so in-demand that specialist manufacturers like Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing have little incentive to spend time supplying possible Nvidia rivals. Huang’s kit and the associated software have become standard among AI developers and in superfast data centers, which act as giant hubs of computing power for large language models like OpenAI’s ChatGPT.

As a result, Huang is coining it. Nvidia’s cash has quintupled since 2020 thanks to an eight-fold revenue boost. It will probably keep piling up. Free cash flow, or how much the company’s operations throw off after subtracting capital expenditures, will be $200 billion or more over the next two years, Bank of America analysts expect. Two years of dividends and share buybacks at their current rate would consume about $60 billion of that sum, meaning that in net terms the company’s pot of money would swell by about $140 billion. Add that to the existing pile of money, and Huang would start 2027 with about $175 billion of idle liquidity, which is more even than current cash king Apple. Along with the company’s richly valued shares, that affords ample M&A firepower.

Nvidia last attempted a big deal in 2020, when it agreed to pay $40 billion in cash and stock for chip architecture specialist Arm. Huang wanted to use the UK company’s basic semiconductor designs to help make data centers more power efficient. That deal failed after two years of scrutiny by governments and competition watchdogs in the United States, China and Britain. Nvidia could probably expect an easier ride under a more laissez-faire and nationalist Trump administration, particularly if it presented any deal as strengthening a U.S. AI champion. But buying another chipmaker is probably still verboten. For example, Huang might in theory like to snap up $78 billion Marvell Technology for its data-center networking technology and ability to design custom chips for AI developers. The semiconductor sector is global, though, and China and Europe would probably object again if Nvidia tries to buy players with scarce technology, like Marvell or Arm.

Other areas are probably open. Nvidia’s last successful acquisition, the purchase of Mellanox Technologies for $6.9 billion in 2019, provides some clues about Huang’s possible thinking. He bought the networking firm because he could see that computing was moving from working in parallel on a single processor to splitting the work even more widely among different chips. All these different bits of kit must talk to each other, and Mellanox provides the gear that facilitates those interactions. The trend is increasing given the massive workload of training and using AI models. To use a stylized example, a group of 100 servers all talking to each other will have almost 5,000 distinct connections between the different points, while a group of 1,000 would have nearly 500,000. This puts a greater emphasis on sending signals around the network extremely quickly, which is why Nvidia could in theory buy an optical networking firm like $16 billion Coherent, whose technology can connect data-center servers together at lightning speeds.

Huang, who has displayed an uncanny ability to foresee major technological shifts, could also go in more unusual directions. As Nvidia’s chips improve, the cost of doing computational work on them has halved roughly every two and a half years. That trend will probably remain on track for some time, making the hardware cheaper and more ubiquitous, and allowing more AI chips to show up outside the data center. That’s why Huang has repeatedly talked about new markets like robotics, autonomous driving and drug development. The company’s growing venture capital operation, which owns $1.8 billion of equity in smaller firms compared with essentially nothing a few years ago, provides a possible glimpse into the future. Huang has built up stakes in analytics company Databricks, which is mulling an initial public offering, robotics companies Serve Robotics and Figure, and drug discovery firm Charm Therapeutics.

Of course, analysts’ rosy forecasts for Nvidia could turn out to be too optimistic. AI has advanced rapidly in the past few years, in large part because the major companies have thrown more data and computing power at the problem. One risk for Nvidia is that this method of improvement may be offering diminishing returns, some researchers are increasingly warning, which would lead to slower growth and less demand for AI-ready chips. Another danger is that tech giants like Microsoft and Amazon.com could redirect spending towards specialized in-house designs as part of an attempt to ease Huang’s grip on the industry. If any of those risks materialize, Nvidia’s cash hoard might grow more slowly than current estimates suggest.

On the other hand, a less sunny outlook may even add impetus to any M&A hunt for Huang, who has a track record of turning the business on a dime. Even Nvidia’s current cash pile exceeds the market value of almost half of the companies in the S&P 500 Index. It would be a surprise if Huang simply sat on it.

(Reuteres) The U.S. Department of Justice will ask a judge to force Alphabet’s Google to sell off its Chrome internet browser, Bloomberg News reported on Monday (November 18), citing people familiar with the plans. Gabe Singer reports.

The U.S. Department of Justice will ask a judge to force Google to sell off its Chrome internet browser.

That’s according to a report Monday by Bloomberg News, citing people familiar with the plans.

The same judge ruled in August that Google illegally monopolized the search market, helped by the dominance of Chrome, which is estimated to control around two-thirds of the market for internet browsers.

Bloomberg says the DOJ will also ask the judge to require measures covering artificial intelligence products and Google’s Android smartphone operating system.

The report said the government has the option to decide whether a Chrome sale is necessary at a later date if some of the other aspects of the remedy create a more competitive market.

The DOJ declined to comment, while Google said the department is pushing a “radical agenda that goes far beyond the legal issues in this case.”

It plans to appeal after the judge’s final ruling, which will likely come before August.

The move would be one of the most aggressive attempts by the Biden administration to curb what it alleges are Big Tech monopolies.

(Reuters) – Law firms enjoyed near-record profits in the third quarter of 2024 with an 11.2% increase compared with the same time last year, a new analysis of firm financial data has found.

Higher lawyer productivity, strong billing rates and relatively modest increases in direct and overhead expenses suggest that 2024 will be a highly profitable year for firms, according to the Thomson Reuters Institute’s Law Firm Financial Index, released on Monday. The Thomson Reuters Institute and Reuters share the same parent company.

This year’s expected robust results are in contrast to the slump in demand law firms saw in 2022 and 2023 on the heels of a blockbuster 2021.

The Law Firm Financial Index compiles financial quarterly metrics from 195 large and midsized law firms and assigns an overall score based upon key factors such as demand, productivity, billing rates and expenses.

The third-quarter score of 71 is the second highest since the index was founded more than 15 years ago. The highest score—84—came in the second quarter of 2021, when demand for corporate practices such as mergers and acquisitions surged amid a spike in IPOs during the COVID-19 pandemic recovery, before falling off dramatically in subsequent years.

The gains in 2024 look to be more stable and long-lasting because the increased demand is spread across a wide array of practices, the index notes.

Litigation demand was up 4% compared with the third quarter of 2023; corporate practices were up 2.6%; real estate was up 3.7%; labor and employment was up 2.9%; and bankruptcy was up 1.7%, according to the index. Only intellectual property was down compared with a year ago, at less than 1%.

“The tale of the tape for any given quarter is how you do from a profitability standpoint—11.2% is an outstanding profit number,” said William Josten, manager for enterprise legal content at the Thomson Reuters Institute. “For the time being, it’s absolutely a rosy picture.”

Earlier predictions about sustained inflation, an uneven labor market, and slow national economic growth have not come to pass, the index notes, further buoying law firms’ financial prospects.

The election of Donald Trump to the U.S. presidency is also widely expected to generate more law firm work around regulation and compliance, as well as in antitrust and energy practices.

“Any times of change tend to be good for lawyers because people need advice,” Josten said. “We’re set up for a [first quarter of 2025] where a lot is going to change.”

However, waning inflation may decrease law firms’ ability to push up billing rates in 2025—a key driver of profitability over the past year, according to the index.

(WESTLAW)  A domain investor who paid $10,000 for the lambo.com domain name is appealing a federal judge’s decision to recognize the maker of Lamborghini luxury cars as its rightful holder.

Blair v. Automobili Lamborghini SpA, No. 22-cv-1439, notice of appeal filed (D. Ariz. Nov. 8, 2024).

Richard Blair filed a notice of appeal Nov. 8 in hopes the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals will allow him to keep the domain after he was ordered twice to forfeit his investment.

He claimed that he bought lambo.com to add to his collection of over 100 domain names because it is only five letters long and can apply to a variety of goods and services.

Steve Levy, a seasoned trademark attorney and domain name dispute arbitrator who is not involved in the case, said Blair faces an “uphill battle,” in part because a Lamborghini car is commonly referred to as a “Lambo.”

“When putting on a defense, you’d better have a lot of solid documentation to back it up since hard evidence, and not just offering a good story, carry the day in domain name disputes,” Levy added.

Split decision

While lambo.com was first registered in 2000 by someone else, Blair purchased the domain in 2018 and registered it with Phoenix-based domain registrar NameSilo LLC, according to court records.

Automobili Lamborghini SpA filed a complaint with the World Intellectual Property Organization in April 2022, offering its 2008 European Union registration of a “Lambo” trademark as proof that the domain should belong to the company.

The WIPO Arbitration and Mediation Center ordered Blair to transfer the domain to the automaker. Automobili Lamborghini SpA v. Domain Adm’r, See privacyguardian.org/Blair, No. D2022-1570, 2022 WL 3359186 (WIPO Arb. Aug. 3, 2022).

Three WIPO panelists authored the decision, with one dissenter saying that Lamborghini did not appear to have any exclusive rights to the word “lambo.”

“Although some internet users may think [lambo.com] invokes the Lamborghini name, the domain could and in numerous cases already does, invoke a wide range of goods and services other than Lamborghini,” the dissent said.

The other panelists found that Blair had failed to offer a credible explanation for registering the domain other than to sell it to Lamborghini.

Blair, a British citizen living in California, then filed a complaint in the U.S. District Court for the District of Arizona, seeking a judicial declaration that he did not violate the Anticybersquatting Consumer Protection Act, 15 U.S.C.A. § 1125(d).

‘Indirectly extortionate’

In response to Blair’s complaint, Lamborghini argued that the high prices he was seeking for the domain indicated he was using it in bad faith.

U.S. District Judge Roslyn O. Silver on Oct. 17 agreed and dismissed the suit. Blair v. Automobili Lamborghini SpA, No. 22-cv-1439, 2024 WL 4528164 (D. Ariz. Oct. 17, 2024).

She noted the increase in the sale price Blair was offering, from $1.1 million in 2020 to the current price of $75 million, and discounted Blair’s plans to develop a website, saying he had plenty of time to create a site since the 2018 purchase.

Blair said he never approached Lamborghini and raised the price “to discourage people from making offers.”

But the judge said Blair provided no explanation as to how listing a domain for any price discourages offers.

Furthermore, approaching Lamborghini directly was not required for a finding of bad faith, she said.

“As an experienced domain name investor, Blair would know better than to directly extort Lamborghini,” the judge said. “His conduct is indirectly extortionate because Lamborghini would have no other way to acquire the disputed domain besides forking over $75 million — or whatever ludicrous amount Blair decided on at any given day.”

Brett E. Lewis of Lewis & Lin LLC filed the appeal on Blair’s behalf.

Lauren Watt and Nicholas J. Nowak of Sterne Kessler Goldstein & Fox PLLC represent Lamborghini.