The Federal Trade Commission is opening a dedicated technology office that will place Silicon Valley under more scrutiny and help it stay on top of emerging tech and trends in a fast-moving market. Commissioners voted 4-0 on Thursday to create the office.
Amid ongoing unionization efforts at the company, Activision will soon require Blizzard employees to spend the majority of their week working out of the company’s offices. An Activision spokesperson told Engadget employees with the company’s publishing unit will be required to work from the office at least three days per week starting April 10th. On July 10th, the same policy goes into effect for Blizzard Entertainment employees. At the company's King mobile division, team leaders can set the office schedule for their units.
Facebook parent company Meta reportedly plans to further reduce its headcount in the coming weeks. According to the Financial Times, work at the tech giant has slowed to a crawl while it plots a new round of job cuts. Meta is likely to announce the restructuring after it has completed staff performance reviews sometime in March.
The UK's competition authority has found that Microsoft's proposed $69 billion acquisition of Activision Blizzard could result in a "substantial lessening of competition in gaming consoles" and "could harm UK gamers." In a provisional finding, the Competition Markets Authority (CMA) said that Activision may need to be split up into separate businesses for the merger to proceed.
PC shipments are plunging due to a tough economy and the pandemic recovery, and that's proving to be especially painful for Dell. The company is laying off about five percent of its workforce, or roughly 6,650 employees, to cope with a "challenging global economic environment." Earlier cost reduction measures like an external hiring freeze weren't enough, according to operations chief Jeff Clarke.
Activision Blizzard will pay $35 million to settle charges from the Securities and Exchange Commission that it “failed to maintain disclosure controls and procedures to ensure that the company could assess whether its disclosures pertaining to its workforce were adequate.” The settlement also resolves charges that Activision Blizzard violated whistleblower protection regulations. The company is settling the charges without admitting to or denying them.
The Federal Trade Commission has slapped prescription drug discount app GoodRx with a $1.5 million fine for the unauthorized disclosure of customers' identifiable health information with third parties, such as Facebook and Google.
The National Labor Relation Board (NLRB) has determined that Apple's rules around leaks violate workers' rights, Bloomberg has reported. Apple's actions and statements from executives "tend to interfere with, restrain or coerce employees" from exercising their rights, a spokesperson said in a statement.
Considering the steady stream of layoffs coursing through the tech industry, it’s understandable that some CEOs want to take extra care when informing employees that their company will also be cutting jobs. However, calling layoffs “refinements” and quoting Martin Luther King Jr. is not the way to go.