A federal judge said Apple engaged in anti-competitive conduct without violating federal antitrust laws in Epic v. Apple (see 2010090015). Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers ruled Friday Apple can’t block developers from directing users away from Apple in-app purchases. “While this decision includes some relief for consumers, app developers, startups, and other innovators, it is clear that courts continue to narrowly interpret the antitrust laws in favor of monopolies and against consumers, workers, and small businesses,” wrote Reps. Jerry Nadler, D-N.Y., and David Cicilline, D-R.I. “This ruling reaffirms what we heard in our Senate hearing last spring: app stores raise serious competition concerns,” said Senate Antitrust Subcommittee Chair Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn. The ruling increases the likelihood of related legislation passing Congress, Cowen emailed investors. Apple may seek “a quick injunction against the enforcement” of Gonzalez Rogers’ “revisions to the App Store,” wrote analyst Paul Gallant. The company “has decent shot at near-term injunction,” if it seeks one, with a ruling on that in “perhaps 1-2 months,” he added. The judge "affirmed what we’ve known all along: the App Store is not in violation of antitrust law," an Apple spokesperson emailed. "As the Court recognized ‘success is not illegal.’ Apple faces rigorous competition in every segment in which we do business." The company didn't answer our question about plans for an injunction request.

U.S. interest remains high in using 5G networks for enterprise IoT applications, but deployment questions and uncertainties abound, reported the Information Services Group Thursday. Many companies rolling out IoT remain concerned about cybersecurity, “and they’re turning to service providers to help them protect the data flowing over IoT systems,” said ISG. There’s “rampant” hype about 5G, “and not all spectrum types are available in a particular country or on a particular mobile network,” said analyst Ron Exler. “Enterprises need to work with their network and IoT providers to manage the selection of replacement technologies in advance of shuttering events, preferably in conjunction with 5G deployment.”

A new Motorola AI-enabled in-car video system for law enforcement has an in-car camera that begins recording when an individual enters the back of a police car, said the company Wednesday. The technology is designed to ensure that the presence of a person in a police vehicle is securely recorded and that video evidence is automatically tagged and saved to an incident record, it said. The system is also equipped with advanced license plate recognition, which uses AI to raise critical alerts, such as identifying a vehicle that may be associated with a person.

Whole Foods Market will begin testing its Just Walk Out as a checkout option in stores in Washington’s Glover Park and in Sherman Oaks, California, next year, blogged Dilip Kumar, vice president-physical retail and technology. The Amazon company will evaluate how customers like being able to skip the checkout line in stores, he wrote Wednesday.

Rules protecting the principle of the open internet should be reviewed in light of new technologies, 5G, the move to the cloud and increased consumer and enterprise broadband demand, said the U.K. Office of Communications Tuesday. It wants input on how existing net neutrality rules on access, traffic management and specialized services are working, and whether updated guidance is needed. Comments are due Nov. 2, with initial findings expected next spring.

Apple is seeking the dismissal of a May 17 complaint asking class-action status that alleged the iPhone maker harms developers through anti-competitive behavior and monopolistic practices in running the App Store in violation of the 1890 Sherman Antitrust Act, said a motion (in Pacer) Thursday in U.S. District Court in San Francisco. Plaintiff Primary Productions was “unhappy that a cryptocurrency app it had some role in developing was allegedly rejected from the App Store,” and alleges a series of “sweeping” antitrust and contract claims against Apple, said the motion. “But Apple has no obligation, under the antitrust laws or otherwise, to approve and distribute on its own platform apps that it has determined are inconsistent with Apple’s Guidelines.” It called the claims “meritless,” saying the plaintiff “has plausibly pleaded neither relevant antitrust markets nor cognizable antitrust injuries” to support its allegations. Apple asked for an Oct. 14 hearing before Judge Jacqueline Scott Corley. Lawyers for the plaintiff didn’t respond Friday to requests for comment.

The Irish Data Protection Commission should strengthen its draft decision on WhatsApp privacy breaches, said the European Data Protection Board (EDPB) Thursday. It adopted a dispute resolution decision in July to address objections from several other data protection authorities to Ireland's proposed ruling on WhatsApp Ireland. The board decision recommended the DPC add another privacy infringement finding, and found that in this case, "in light of the gravity and the overarching nature and impact of the infringements, there has been an infringement of the transparency principle enshrined" in the general data protection regulation. When using WhatsApp's contact feature, data of non-users isn't anonymized. The EDPB urged the DPC to rethink how it calculated the social media site's fine, and asked that the time for WhatsApp to comply be cut from six to three months.

The cyberthreat environment “remains fierce,” as “inherent vulnerabilities” in widely used operating systems “leave companies of all sizes open to attack and provide a rich feeding ground for sophisticated and novice e-criminals alike,” said CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz on a call Tuesday for fiscal Q2 ended July 31. “The lessons learned from recent attacks emphasize that a breach involves more than just malware.” Companies “overly relying” on malware prevention have the biggest vulnerabilities, he said. More than half of recent threat detections “were not malware-based,” evidence that attackers are “exploiting the proliferation of vulnerabilities and abusing systemic weaknesses,” he said. The early July ransomware attack on Kaseya servers should serve as a “reminder to the far-reaching impact of a supply chain breach and the importance of a zero-trust architecture,” said Kurtz. “Most ransomware outbreaks have a compromised identity component. Shoring up this threat vector is critical to stopping breaches.” A new strategic alliance with Verizon positions the CrowdStrike Falcon cybersecurity platform as part of Verizon's business security portfolio “to provide comprehensive endpoint and workload protection that spans prevention, detection and response capabilities,” he said.

Zoom fiscal Q2 revenue grew 54% year over year to $1.02 billion, in its first “billion-dollar-plus” quarter, said Chief Financial Officer Kelly Steckelberg on a Monday call. “As we’ve just lapped our first full quarter year-over-year compare since the start of the pandemic, we have seen customers return to more thoughtful, measured buying patterns.” Revenue and profitability were strong in the quarter ended July 31, but “other metrics have begun to normalize, especially when compared to the unprecedented year-over-year comps,” she said. Zoom expects its online business “will be a headwind in the coming quarters,” she said. The online sector consists “primarily” of small-business people and individual consumers, many of whom are “socializing in person now,” doing fewer Zoom calls, “and that's where we are starting to see some of the challenges,” she said. Zoom had expected the “slowdown” toward the end of the year, but it “just happened a little bit more quickly than we expected,” she said. The stock closed down 17% Tuesday at $289.50.

A judge sought to push along discovery in DOJ and states' antitrust case against Google. At a livestreamed status conference Tuesday, Judge Amit Mehta of U.S. District Court in Washington directed parties to file a joint statement by 2 p.m. Friday on where things stand on parties’ disagreement over the scope of a DOJ deposition notice about market share. Google attorney John Schmidtlein and DOJ Civil Division trial attorney Kenneth Dintzer said they’re meeting Wednesday. Mehta ordered Google to provide “dates certain” by close-of-business Friday for a deposition witness to appear on states’ request about how Google analyzes session logs showing consumers’ journey through the search engine. Mehta also sought updates by then on Google disputes with Yelp and Microsoft about the scope of Google’s document requests. Google complained Microsoft production remains sluggish, in a Tuesday filing. Microsoft objected to using “Bing” and other Google-requested search strings for the document production. Mehta said they don’t “strike me as out of bounds.” He urged Google to look harder at adjusting proximity connectors, which measure how closely words appear in a document, as a possible way to reduce burdens on Microsoft. Parties should reach agreement on technology-assisted review to increase efficiencies, he said. Mehta wants to see Microsoft’s pace increase through September, with a goal of finishing by mid-October. The judge last month set Sept. 30 for Apple to produce about 1.5 million documents DOJ requested (see 2108190041). Mehta said he won’t order Google to turn over to DOJ certain information, including privileged logs and materials produced for past investigations. The jurist said the request was too broad and maybe not entirely relevant. Mehta resolved another disagreement over sharing Google documents about employees’ self-assessments and performance reviews. DOJ asked the court to reject Google’s request to limit distribution of such documents to eight people because it didn’t account for IT professionals, experts and others. Mehta said such tight protections could apply to entire documents, but snippets relevant to deposition could be more widely shared. The next three status hearings are Sept. 28 at 11 a.m., Oct. 29 at 3 p.m. and Nov. 30 at 11 a.m., Mehta said.