TechCrunch Top 3

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🧑‍⚖️ Google's search defeat: A federal judge ruled that Google violated U.S. antitrust law with regard to its search business by "abusing its monopoly power over the search business in part by paying companies to present its search engine as the default choice on their devices and web browsers." This is a major defeat for the search giant, which was reported to have spent billions to stay ahead of competitors. Read more

🌐 Meet Mithra: When you're Amazon, competitors are always coming for you and your customers. Over the years, Amazon has developed a number of strategies, from machine learning and monitoring tools to good old-fashioned phone calling, to identify and reduce risks to their network. The latest unveiling is Mithra, an internal umbrella platform of sorts built to handle Amazon scale. Read more

🚴 Flipkart gets its quick commerce unit going: Walmart-owned Flipkart, India's largest e-commerce firm, introduced Flipkart Minutes, its quick commerce service, in parts of Bengaluru. The new service offers a wide range of items, from grocery to smartphones, delivered to customers within 10 to 15 minutes. Not many companies have been able to make 15-minute delivery work, but with Walmart behind it, this will be one to watch. Read more

Afternoon must-reads

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⚖️ ChatGPT killed the video star: David Millette, a YouTube user based in Massachusetts, filed a class action lawsuit against OpenAI alleging that OpenAI surreptitiously transcribed Millette's and other creators' videos to train the models that power the company's AI-powered chatbot platform, ChatGPT, and other generative AI tools and products. Read more

📱 TikTok dodges a penalty: The European Commission closed a Digital Services Act investigation of a rewards feature in TikTok Lite by accepting commitments from the social media giant to permanently withdraw the feature from the EU. In return, TikTok has also agreed not to circumvent its commitment, such as by launching the same feature under a different name or deploying a version that serves as an equivalent alternative. Read more

🕸️ That's distracting: Apple created a new feature for Safari called Distraction Control. It enables users to remove items they don't want from a website on a particular device, and Safari will remember to remove the elements the next time the site is visited. Read more

💵 Placer quietly adds more VC to its coffers: Location data, for better or worse, continues to be a part of the bedrock of how apps are built. Now Placer.ai, a startup developing AI market research based on that location data, raised $75 million at an expanded valuation of nearly $1.5 billion. Read more

🦄 Who's a new unicorn? Find out who is among the newly minted six U.S. unicorns in July. Read more

📣 Disrupt's AI Stage: We've added a dedicated AI Stage, presented by Google Cloud, to TechCrunch Disrupt 2024. It includes interviews with Perplexity AI, Scale AI and Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence. Read more

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Around the web

🔻 What's behind that weird tech stock sell-off? As you read in TechCrunch AM, Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway decided to divest itself of some Apple stock. Bloomberg now reports on the various facets of what caused a historic sell-off of the market that started in Tokyo. Some are pointing to Buffett, while others are blaming Japanese interest rate hikes. Of course, it wouldn't be tech without the mention of artificial intelligence. Read more

💰 Thrive Capital raises $5B: Speaking of AI, Josh Kushner's Thrive Capital is making huge bets on the technology, raising $5 billion. The Wall Street Journal is calling this its largest venture capital fund to date. Read more

☝️ Behind Illinois' new biometric privacy law: It's official: Illinois governor J.B. Pritzker signed the state's Biometric Information Privacy Act into law. The bill was passed by the legislature in May and called for reducing penalties for companies that improperly collect or use fingerprints and other biometric data from their workers and consumers. Read more