The Week That Was: IT & Media major news checklist
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EU’s general court agreed with Amazon and the company avoided Euro 250 million in back-tax in a case that was a major set-back for the EU Commission.
A survey by marketing and research firm Gartner showed that 60% of CEOs expect economy boom when the pandemic finally gets under control.
WhatsApp started another attempt to make users accept new terms of condition. When the Facebook-owned company tried early this year, hoards fled to competitors Signal, Telegram, Viber etc.
- Amazon won the case about back taxes of Euro 250 million against EU Commissioner Margrethe Vestager at EU General Court in a case that refers to how big companies register operations in countries with low corporate taxation. The court said the EU had failed to show that Luxembourg had given Amazon special treatment violating state-aid rules. “All companies should pay their fair share of tax. Tax advantages given only to selected multinational companies harm fair competition in the EU. They also deprive the public purse and European citizens of funds for much needed investments to recover from the coronavirus crisis and seize the twin transitions”, Vestager said in a statement.
- Facebook-owned WhatsApp started another attempt to get users to accept its earlier controversial new terms of service. Company said it will from May 15 begin turn off features until users accept the terms. When the company earlier tried to make users accept the terms, competitors were flooded by WhatsApp users wanting to change for another app. Basically the new terms means the app will share more data with Facebook for business-specific actions to better enable e-commerce.
- The interest in podcasts means podcast advertising will grow as much in the next two years as it did in the past decade, a US study by IAB and PwC showed. “The big takeaway from consumer behaviour pre, during, and post pandemic is that podcasting has tremendous growth ahead”, said Eric John, Vice President, IAB Media Center.
- Stressing the dominance of the big players’ app stores, Italian competition authority fined Google Euro 102 million saying the company has abused the dominant position of its Android mobile operating system and the app store Google Play. Google has blocked an electric vehicle services app by company Enel X from the app store and the authority said this is compromising Enel X’s efforts to build up a user base.
- Facebook’s shrinking plans for a digital currency was down-scaled again when digital currency group Diem Association, earlier known as the Libra project, announced it will focus on a blockchain currency for the US and not for the world which was the original idea. Main operations are re-located from Switzerland to the US.
- 60% of CEOs anticipate an economic boom for 2021 and 2022 while 40% think the period will be dominated by stagnation. 35% expect returning to, or exceeding, 2019 revenue levels as early as 2021, according to a survey of CEOs and in North America, EMEA and APAC made by marketing and consultancy Gartner. Over 80% of CEOs expect enduring societal behaviour change from the pandemic, such as a permanent shift to hybrid work.
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