 | Apr 18, 2025 | | | | | | Happy Friday! A U.S. federal court finds Google violated antitrust law for selling ads on independent websites. Netflix posts strong first quarter results. And Uber tries to buy a food delivery app.
| | | | A court in Virginia ruled that Google had violated antitrust law by "wilfully acquiring and maintaining monopoly power" for the sale of ads on independent websites across the internet. In tandem with the ruling in August that Google has an illegal monopoly in search, the decision increases the likelihood that Google will be drastically reshaped by court decrees in the next year or two. Google will likely be forced, as a result of Thursday's decision, to dismantle much of its ad tech business which dominates both how advertisers buy ads on independent websites, and how web publishers sell their ad space. The government claimed in its case that Google used its power on both sides of the market to raise prices and squeeze out rivals. "We won half of this case and we will appeal the other half," said Lee-Anne Mulholland, Vice President, Regulatory Affairs at Google in a statement, noting that the ruling found that Google's acquisitions and advertising tools don't harm competition. "We disagree with the Court's decision regarding our publisher tools. Publishers have many options and they choose Google because our ad tech tools are simple, affordable and effective." | | | | Netflix generated $10.5 billion in revenue during the first quarter of 2025, with an operating margin of 31.7%. Starting with this quarter, Netflix has said it will no longer disclose quarterly subscriber data during earnings unless it passes certain milestones. It ended 2024 with more than 300 million global paid subscribers. The company did not provide any notable update to its ads business. It repeated that it remains on track to reach "sufficient scale" on its ad-supported tier this year. On April 1st, Netflix launched its in-house advertising platform in the U.S., which it aims to expand to other markets in the coming months. One notable update to Netflix's leadership: Netflix co-founder Reed Hastings has transitioned from executive chairman to chairman of the board and a non-executive director for the company, signaling that he's stepping back even more from overseeing company operations. Tim Haley, an independent director on the board for more than 27 years, will also not seek re-election, the company said. | | | | OpenAI late last year discussed acquiring Anysphere, the developer of popular coding assistant Cursor, according to a person familiar with the talks. Around that time, OpenAI was in similar discussions with a number of other coding assistant startups, the person said. Now OpenAI is in discussions to acquire Cursor rival Windsurf, formerly known as Codeium, for $3 billion. That deal, if completed, could help OpenAI gain access to new customers and more data it could use to train OpenAI's artificial intelligence for coding. Millions of software engineers already use OpenAI's ChatGPT app to automate their coding work, while assistants like Cursor and Windsurf help with more complex tasks, like making edits across multiple codebases or fixing bugs. Following the OpenAI-Anysphere deal talks, Anysphere moved forward with a funding round that valued the company at about $10 billion. OpenAI invested in Anysphere in 2023, and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman told some people that year that he had approached the startup about an acquisition, according to a person who spoke to him. An OpenAI spokesperson declined to comment, and Anysphere did not respond to a request for comment. CNBC first reported on the Anysphere discussions. | | | | The amount of time Instagram users spent on the app's feed and Stories feature in the second half of 2020 was expected to fall 5% short of projections prepared a year earlier, thanks to stiff competition from TikTok, according to an analysis prepared for Meta's board that was shown on the fourth day of the trial for the Federal Trade Commission's antitrust lawsuit against Meta Platforms. Time spent on Instagram was expected to continue falling short of the 2019 projections through 2023. By 2023, Instagram was projected to miss its 2019 forecast by 16%—translating to a revenue shortfall of $3.6 billion—according to the analysis. The projections were, however, revised in 2020, in part to account for the impact of TikTok. In 2020, Instagram's feed and Stories generated more than 90% of its revenue. The analysis offers a rare window into Instagram's finances and shows just how much of a threat the rapid rise of TikTok posed at the time. The photo-sharing app has become a core part of Meta's business, generating advertising revenue of $22 billion in 2020 and $32.4 billion in 2021, according to a legal filing. Meta had launched its short-form-video feature Reels the previous month. In the analysis, it said that success for Reels could be defined as time spent on the feature growing to half time spent on TikTok at the time. That means Meta hoped that, by 2024, Reels would at least half catch up to where TikTok was in 2020. Still, such growth would have equated to 77 minutes per daily active user and $6 billion in revenue from Reels by 2024, according to the analysis. | | | | Sheryl Sandberg, the long-time former chief operating officer of Meta Platforms, on Thursday described digital advertising as a fiercely competitive market where consumers have a lot of opportunity to engage with or skip ads, as she testified on the fourth day of an antitrust trial between the Federal Trade Commission and Meta. The FTC has accused Meta of creating a social media monopoly that illegally crushed competition by purchasing Instagram in 2012 and WhatsApp in 2014. If the government prevails in the case, Meta could be forced to sell one or both of those apps. The FTC has defined the sector of the social media market dominated by Meta as "personal social networking" and "friends and family sharing," which excludes both TikTok and YouTube—an argument that Meta is trying to undercut by pointing to the competitive nature of the ad market. "It was important to make more money for the company and do that in a way that didn't harm users," Sandberg said. "If I was engaging with more ads, that means I liked them more and I got more ads … The goal is for people to spend time that they want to spend in the apps and have that time be productive and enjoyable," she added. That led the judge overseeing the case, Judge James Boasberg, to ask Sandberg whether, when deciding how many ads to show users, Meta accounted for the idea that "because people who like friends and family sharing were more captive to the network, you could show them ads without going anywhere." Sandberg said she thought "friends and family sharing" doesn't retain users because it's easy to switch between apps on a smartphone. But the judge then clarified that "that was not the case a few years ago." The FTC on Thursday presented a document showing that Meta in 2018 considered introducing a subscription for an ad-free version of Facebook—and possibly its other apps—as the company reeled from the fallout of the Cambridge Analytica scandal. | | | | Uber is in talks to buy Trendyol Go, a Turkish food and grocery delivery platform whose parent company is majority-owned by Alibaba, according to Bloomberg. A deal has not been signed yet and talks could fall through before a final agreement is reached, the news service said. The San Francisco ride-hailing company tried to buy Delivery Hero's Food Panda business in Taiwan for $950 million last year but was blocked by Taiwanese anti-trust authorities. A key part of Uber's food and grocery international delivery business strategy has been to buy existing companies. In 2021, it bought Cornershop, a grocery delivery platform that operated in Chile, Mexico, Peru and Toronto. Uber's revenue from its delivery service overall rose 21% to $3.8 billion last year. | | | Popular articles By Stephanie Palazzolo and Amir Efrati
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