On today’s Tech Bytes, our review of the week’s biggest headlines, Meta strikes a preliminary deal with Chinese videogame maker Tencent, giving the company a chance to return to China 14 years after Facebook was banned there.
We also talk about the ransomware attack on a major Chinese bank, and how the Biden administration thinks American companies should respond to cyber extortion.
But first, a look at the recent revelations on Google and Apple’s complicated relationship. Earlier in its federal antitrust trial, Google said it paid Apple $18 billion a year to be the default search engine on iPhone web browsers. The government said that’s $18 billion worth of evidence of anticompetitive behavior. This week, a witness for Google accidentally disclosed the company was sharing 36% of ad revenue it made from Safari browser searches with Apple. Whoops!
Marketplace’s Matt Levin discusses these stories with Anita Ramaswamy, columnist at Reuters Breakingviews.
“Google pays Apple 36 percent of search advertising revenues from Safari” from Engadget
“Meta’s China quest thaws thin layer of dense cube” from Reuters
“Meta Strikes Deal to Return to China After 14 Years” from The Wall Street Journal
“Meta’s ad rebound gets huge assist from China even though its services are banned there” from CNBC
“A tour of the remote-work industrial complex” from Marketplace
“Hackers are exploiting ‘CitrixBleed’ bug in the latest wave of mass cyberattacks” from TechCrunch
“Clorox resumes normal plant operations in the wake of cyberattack” from Cybersecurity Dive
“Alliance of 40 countries to vow not to pay ransom to cybercriminals, US says” from Reuters
“The chaotic and cinematic MGM casino hack, explained” from Vox