Hi there, this is your daily ☕️ Techpresso.
In today's Techpresso:
⚖️ Meta wins antitrust fight over Instagram and WhatsApp
🌐 Cloudflare CEO explains exactly what caused global outage
🤝 Adobe to buy Semrush for $1.9 billion
🇳🇱 Netherlands hands back control of chipmaker Nexperia
🤖 TikTok users can now limit AI content
🇪🇺 Europe is scaling back its landmark privacy and AI laws
🎁 + 15 other news you might like
🔮 + 4 handpicked research papers and tools
⚖️ Meta wins antitrust fight over Instagram and WhatsApp LINK
US District Judge James Boasberg ruled the FTC failed to show Meta has a monopoly in "personal social networking," rejecting the argument that the company only faces two rivals, Snapchat and MeWe.
Boasberg wrote that adding TikTok alone to the relevant market defeats the claims because consumers are reallocating massive amounts of time to rivals, which means Meta is not insulated from competition.
The loss follows a determination that expert witness Scott Hemphill lacked an "open mind" because he aligned with figures calling for the breakup of Facebook, making neutral evaluation of his opinions difficult.
🌐 Cloudflare CEO explains exactly what caused global outage LINK
CEO Matthew Prince apologized for the worst network failure since 2019, which blocked access to major services like Spotify and X after an issue broke the company's Bot Management system.
A change to an underlying query made a feature file used by an AI model duplicate information, making it larger than typical and triggering an error code for users.
Although the team initially suspected a hyper-scale DDoS attack caused the outage, they confirmed it was not malicious activity and restored traffic flow by replacing the update with an earlier version.
🤝 Adobe to buy Semrush for $1.9 billion LINK
The Photoshop maker agreed to pay about $1.9 billion in cash for this search engine optimization company, offering $12 per share to buy Semrush at nearly double its closing price on Tuesday.
This deal targets a fresh market called generative engine optimization, where brands update content and webpages to remain visible to the AI chatbots, agents, and browsers that consumers now increasingly use.
Adobe Analytics data shows traffic to retail websites from generative AI chatbots increased 1,200 percent recently, driving demand for tools that track performance on engines like ChatGPT, Claude, Copilot, Grok, and Perplexity.
🇳🇱 Netherlands hands back control of chipmaker Nexperia LINK
Dutch Minister Vincent Karremans suspended the order under the Goods Availability Act regarding Nexperia, pausing a tense six-week standoff with Beijing that threatened to halt car production in multiple countries.
The Netherlands had sought supervisory control to safeguard critical industrial capacity, but China responded forcefully by blocking exports of power and logic chips needed by global automakers like Volkswagen and Honda.
Officials decided to pause the intervention after constructive meetings, though they reserve the right to act if they see new risks to crucial technological knowledge or production capacity within Europe.
🤖 TikTok users can now limit AI content LINK
You can now adjust the “Manage Topics” slider in your “Content Preferences” to control how often AIGC appears in your “For You” feed without removing that content from feeds entirely.
While Meta and OpenAI push AI-only feeds like Vibes and Sora, TikTok is adding a setting that lets you dial down realistic AI-generated videos if you prefer seeing less of them.
The company is also testing “invisible watermarking” on posts made with tools like AI Editor Pro, adding a layer of safeguards that helps it label visuals even when C2PA metadata is removed.
🇪🇺 Europe is scaling back its landmark privacy and AI laws LINK
Brussels is stripping protections from the GDPR, including simplifying its infamous cookie permission pop-ups, while choosing to relax or delay landmark AI rules in an effort to cut red tape.
This decision follows intense pressure from Donald Trump and Big Tech to weaken burdensome regulation, as the bloc attempts to revive sluggish economic growth and compete in the global AI race.
Leaked drafts have provoked outrage among civil rights groups, who accuse the Commission of bowing to the world’s biggest companies and internal political figures like Mario Draghi regarding the strategy.
Other news you might like
- OpenAI board member Larry Summers steps down amid Epstein file revelationsLINK
- Google just made its own Visual Studio CodeLINK
- Agent 365: Microsoft launches management platform for AI agentsLINK
- Tech giants pour billions into Anthropic as circular AI investments roll onLINK
- Exclusive: Crypto exchange Kraken raises $200 million from Ken Griffin’s Citadel to notch $20 billion valuationLINK
- Elon Musk's xAI could soon be worth more than $200 billionLINK
- Trump DOE gives Microsoft partner $1B loan to restart Three Mile Island reactorLINK
- TikTok will now give you badges for limiting your doomscrollingLINK
- NVIDIA's demand for LPDDR5X could double smartphone and server memory prices in 2026 — 'seismic shift' means even smartphone-class memory isn't safe from AI-induced crunchLINK
- Meta Loses Its Chief Revenue Officer as Zuckerberg Tries to Win the AI RaceLINK
- Tesla FSD and Robotaxis are making people aware how bad human drivers areLINK
- Unity games are coming to Fortnite in a historic partnership with Epic GamesLINK
- Hugging Face CEO says we’re in an ‘LLM bubble,’ not an AI bubbleLINK
- TSMC executive allegedly faked retirement to join Intel with stolen secretsLINK
- Quantum physicists have shrunk and “de-censored” DeepSeek R1LINK
Latest research and tools
Automated system handles million-step operations with perfect accuracy: researchers built an agent that successfully completed a one-million-step task without generating any errors.LINK
MMaDA-Parallel: a multimodal ai framework that synchronizes text reasoning with image generation to produce more consistent and accurate visuals.LINK
strace-macos: a utility that monitors system calls on macOS to help debug applications, functioning as a clone of the standard Linux tracing command.LINK
AI coding tool Cursor evaluated for real-world developer productivity: researchers analyzed if using Cursor improves developer productivity and code quality compared to standard editing environments.LINK
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