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Tag Archives: Charm
FTC’s Move to Block Microsoft’s Deal for Activision Blizzard Came Despite Charm Offensive
Microsoft Corp.
MSFT -0.80%
had been working for close to a year to calm regulators’ concerns about its acquisition of videogame developer
Activision Blizzard Inc.,
ATVI 0.54%
but the Federal Trade Commission’s suit to block the deal raised doubts about the company’s pledge not to shut out rivals.
The FTC this week took one of its biggest swings ever against a big technology company and sued to stop the planned $75 billion acquisition, setting the stage for a court challenge over a deal the antitrust agency said would harm competition.
The commission’s complaint said the deal is illegal because it would give Microsoft the ability to control how consumers beyond users of its own Xbox consoles and subscription services access Activision’s games. Microsoft has repeatedly said it wouldn’t engage in such actions. The FTC’s complaint accused Microsoft of reneging on a similar pledge to a European regulator in the past, a criticism the company disputes.
Earlier this week, as the possibility of a lawsuit grew, Microsoft touted the deal’s benefits to gamers through an op-ed article in The Wall Street Journal and announced an agreement to give a competitor access to one of Activision’s most popular games. The FTC filed its lawsuit on Thursday.
“The Proposed Acquisition, if consummated, may lessen competition substantially or tend to create a monopoly,” the FTC said in its complaint against Microsoft.
Executives at the Redmond, Wash., company have said it would take a long time to get all the approvals needed from regulators around the world, and it had given itself close to 18 months for the process. The deal could now miss Microsoft’s mid-2023 deadline, and some analysts said Microsoft might want to drop the acquisition.
Microsoft should “take the hint and give up the deal that, if completed, might end up a Pyrrhic victory of executive distraction and expensive regulatory concessions,” John Freeman, vice president at investment-research firm CFRA Research, wrote in a note to investors.
Competitors had expressed concerns the deal would block them from access to Activision games such as the popular ‘Call of Duty’ franchise.
Photo:
Allison Dinner/Associated Press
At stake is Microsoft’s big ambitions for its videogaming business, which had revenue of $16 billion in the company’s last fiscal year. That total represents less than 10% of Microsoft’s overall revenue. The business is a crucial part of Microsoft’s plans to diversify to attract more noncorporate customers.
The FTC’s move came after the company had avoided the brunt of the anti-tech backlash of recent years.
The suit represents a “somewhat meaningful setback” for Microsoft because of the company’s longtime lobbying efforts, said Stifel Nicolaus analyst Brad Reback. “They’ve worked very hard to stay on the right side of government agencies.”
Microsoft’s representative in Washington—its vice chairman and president,
Brad Smith
—has been building relationships in the capital for decades. He had helped cultivate an image of the software giant as one of the friendly technology leaders, an enviable position in a regulatory environment that has been increasingly hostile toward tech titans.
One of the longest-serving leaders inside Microsoft, Mr. Smith joined the company in 1993 and was a legal adviser through its bitter antitrust disputes with regulators worldwide in the 1990s.
“We have been committed since Day One to addressing competition concerns, including by offering earlier this week proposed concessions to the FTC,” Mr. Smith said after the lawsuit was filed. “While we believed in giving peace a chance, we have complete confidence in our case and welcome the opportunity to present our case in court.”
In its complaint, the FTC accused Microsoft of previously suppressing competition from rivals through its 2021 acquisition of ZeniMax Media Inc., parent of “Doom” developer Bethesda Softworks, despite giving assurances to European antitrust authorities that it would do otherwise. Microsoft said the FTC’s ZeniMax allegation is misinformed.
Brad Smith, Microsoft’s vice chairman and president, has been building relationships in Washington for decades.
Photo:
Zed Jameson/Bloomberg News
Microsoft officials have expressed confidence in closing the Activision deal, which it has valued at $68.7 billion after adjusting for Activision’s net cash. Lawmakers and industry representatives have said it would be hard for any of the biggest U.S. tech companies—including
Apple Inc.,
Amazon.com Inc.,
Google parent
Alphabet Inc.
or
owner Meta Platforms Inc.—to win approval for a large acquisition in the current political environment.
In recent years, as government scrutiny and competition between the biggest tech companies have been increasing, Microsoft has tried to appease regulators.
For example, in May, Microsoft announced a set of principles it would abide by when dealing with cloud-service providers in Europe, hoping to assuage concerns its cloud business was hurting European cloud companies. The principles included pledges to work with European cloud providers and support the success of software vendors running on Microsoft’s cloud.
Amid concern the deal could hurt attempts to unionize at Activision or elsewhere in the gaming industry, Microsoft in June said it was open to working with any labor unions that want to organize.
As PlayStation maker
Sony Group Corp.
and others said they were concerned the acquisition could leave competitors locked out of Activision’s popular “Call of Duty” franchise, Microsoft this week said it would make it available for the first time on Nintendo Co.’s Switch gaming consoles for at least 10 years.
Microsoft this week also made its case to the public. “Blocking our acquisition would make the gaming industry less competitive and gamers worse off,” Mr. Smith, wrote in the Monday op-ed article in the Journal. “Think about how much better it is to stream a movie from your couch than drive to Blockbuster. We want to bring the same sort of innovation to the videogame industry.”
It is too soon to tell whether the FTC can succeed in blocking the acquisition. The agency likely will have to go before a federal judge, a process that could take months to unfold, said Eric Talley, a professor at Columbia Law School.
The case could be difficult for the regulator to win because courts have traditionally not seen deals among companies that specialize in different phases of the same industry’s production process—so-called vertical mergers—as competitive dangers, he said.
“It may require the commission to convince a judge to change the law somewhat,” he said. “That makes it a difficult case for the FTC to win, though they presumably knew this going in.”
Write to Sarah E. Needleman at Sarah.Needleman@wsj.com
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Large Hadron Collider Finds Evidence of 3 Never-Before-Seen Particles
Physicists say they’ve found evidence in data from Europe’s Large Hadron Collider for three never-before-seen combinations of quarks, just as the world’s largest particle-smasher is beginning a new round of high-energy experiments.
The three exotic types of particles – which include two four-quark combinations, known as tetraquarks, plus a five-quark unit called a pentaquark – are totally consistent with the Standard Model, the decades-old theory that describes the structure of atoms.
In contrast, scientists hope that the LHC’s current run will turn up evidence of physics that goes beyond the Standard Model to explain the nature of mysterious phenomena such as dark matter. Such evidence could point to new arrays of subatomic particles, or even extra dimensions in our Universe.
The LHC had been shut down for three years to upgrade its systems to handle unprecedented energy levels. That shutdown ended in April, and since then, scientists and engineers at the CERN research center on the French-Swiss border have been getting ready for today’s resumption of scientific operations.
CERN’s control center was abuzz as the LHC began its third run of data collection and analysis.
“It’s a magic moment now,” CERN Director-General Fabiola Gianotti said during today’s webcast. “We just had collisions at an unprecedented energy, 13.6 tera-electronvolts, and this opens a new era of exploration at CERN.”
Gianotti said the LHC’s scientists expect to collect as much data during this third run as they collected over the course of 13 years during the collider’s previous two runs. “This, of course, will increase our opportunities for discovery or for understanding the fundamental laws of the Universe,” she said.
The 27-kilometer-round (17-mile-round) ring of superconducting magnets and its particle detectors are due to be in operation around the clock for nearly four years during Run 3.
Today’s start of the run comes 10 years and a day after LHC physicists announced their biggest discovery to date: evidence for the existence of the Higgs boson, a subatomic particle that helps explain the phenomenon of mass.
The three new types of subatomic particles, described today during a CERN seminar, aren’t quite Higgs-level revelations. But they do suggest that the LHC is hot on the trail to discover still more previously unseen building blocks of the Universe.
The Large Hadron Collider smashes protons together at velocities close to the speed of light to study combinations of quarks that are known as hadrons.
“The more analyses we perform, the more kinds of exotic hadrons we find,” Niels Tuning, physics coordinator for the collider’s LHCb detector, said in a news release.
“We’re witnessing a period of discovery similar to the 1950s, when a ‘Particle Zoo’ of hadrons started being discovered and ultimately led to the quark model of conventional hadrons in the 1960s. We’re creating ‘Particle Zoo 2.0’.”
LHCb spokesperson Chris Parkes said studying new combinations of quarks “will help theorists develop a unified model of exotic hadrons, the exact nature of which is largely unknown”.
Most hadrons aren’t so exotic. Protons and neutrons, for instance, are made up of three quarks bound together. (In fact, the origin of the word “quark” goes back to a line from Finnegan’s Wake by James Joyce: “Three quarks for Muster Mark!”) Pions are two-quark combinations.
Four-quark and five-quark combinations are much rarer, and are thought to exist for only an instant before decaying into different types of particles.
Quarks come in six different “flavors”: up and down, top and bottom, charm and strange.
The LHCb team analyzed the decays of negatively charged B mesons and saw evidence for the existence of a pentaquark consisting of a charm quark and a charm antiquark, plus an up, down and strange quark. It’s the first pentaquark known to include a strange quark.
The two newly identified tetraquarks include a “doubly electrically charged” combination of four quarks: a charm quark, a strange antiquark, an up quark, and a down antiquark.
That tetraquark was spotted in combination with its neutral counterpart, which has a charm quark, a strange antiquark, an up antiquark, and a down quark. CERN says this is the first time a pair of tetraquarks has been observed together.
Some theoretical models visualize exotic hadrons as single units of tightly bound quarks. Others see them as pairs of standard hadrons that are loosely bound together, similar to the way that atoms are bound together to form molecules.
“Only time and more studies of exotic hadrons will tell if these particles are one, the other or both,” CERN says.
This article was originally published by Universe Today. Read the original article.
Big Ten adding USC, UCLA further ruining charm we love about college football: Vannini
We need to stop calling it conference “realignment” or “expansion.” The more accurate word would be “consolidation” — at least for the people who actually control what we currently know as college sports.
It’s coming. Maybe in a few years. Maybe in a decade or two. But there’s no stopping it now. With USC and UCLA moving to the Big Ten, one year after Texas and Oklahoma accepted invitations to the SEC, the college Super League(s) is on its way. College football as we knew it is on its last legs. It will eventually be replaced by an NFL Jr.-type sport, and the TV executives who have long dreamed about this will finally get their wish for a simpler product to package. The people at the right schools will make a lot of money, and the fans at the wrong schools will be left behind.
College administrators spent a year-plus telling the public that they worried name, image and likeness would ruin the purity of college football and turn off fans. Many did so while chasing any extra dollar they could find, even when that meant ending century-old rivalries and conference affiliations. Concern about the uncertainty in college athletics? Who do you think caused all that? Look in the mirror. Don’t let it be lost that this is coming from “non-profit” organizations, either.
It was never going to be NIL and a handful of million-dollar deals for players that turned off fans. It was, rather, slowly taking away everything that gave this sport its charm and moving toward a national corporate model, changes fueled primarily by money, especially television dollars. It’s like any other business now.
ESPN and Fox will never say they had a hand in these moves, but you’d have to be oblivious not to see the role they play. In 2011, then-Boston College athletic director Gene DeFilippo said ESPN told the ACC what to do in realignment, before later walking it back and issuing an apology, saying it was a misunderstanding. Last year, Big 12 commissioner Bob Bowlsby alleged ESPN (his conference’s own media partner) was working to destabilize the Big 12 by nudging teams to the SEC and AAC and released a cease-and-desist. (ESPN denied the claim.)
ESPN will soon have all of the SEC’s media rights. Fox owns 61 percent of the Big Ten Network and reportedly locked up half of the Big Ten’s next media rights deal and is sitting in on the league’s conversations with other potential media rights partners. The Big Ten and SEC had already been projected to perhaps double the other Power 5 conferences in TV revenue by the end of the decade. That’s why this is all happening.
Even if ESPN and Fox don’t directly say “Add this team,” they make it clear who they’ll pay more money for and who they won’t. Those conversations happen all the time. It’s basic business.
“I think they are quietly behind the scenes,” one FBS athletic director told The Athletic. “They really don’t like to be known as deciding who is in what league, but don’t think there aren’t conversations of, ‘If we take this property, how much value are they going to bring?’ We’re not picking random schools. … They just don’t want the optics of them deciding, but the money is coming from them. They have to tell the league or someone (the TV value of schools).”
It’s why we lost the Backyard Brawl between Pitt and West Virginia. It’s why we lost the Border War between Kansas and Missouri. It’s why we lost Nebraska-Oklahoma. It’s why we lost Duke-Maryland. It’s why we’ll lose so many more rivalries. (And, yes, now it’s why we’ll get Texas-Texas A&M back.)
We’re going to get Big Ten games from noon ET Saturday until Sunday morning. ESPN will have the SEC in everything but the 10 p.m. kickoff window. Even without the money, the other conferences are going to be squeezed out of the main TV windows on the biggest channels.
It may feel like we’re heading toward an ESPN conference and a Fox conference, though Big Ten commissioner Kevin Warren has been a proponent of having multiple media partners. Competition is needed to drive up the price, after all. Maybe it’s CBS, NBC, ESPN and/or Apple. But Fox still wields the power. Ultimately, it’s two television organizations going all-in on the most valuable thing left on TV — live football — and leaving all kinds of change in the wake.
That’s all in the short term, but let’s step back for a broader look. What are the long-term effects? Some generations grew up with the Southwest Conference. My generation grew up with Big East football. Neither exists anymore. Change in college football has been constant. So it’s not hard now to imagine younger generations growing up with just two major conferences.
This move is not only about this generation of fans, even though the immediate television money will be enormous. It’s also about the next generation. How do you explain this move to Washington State fans? Or Oregon State fans? Or Iowa State fans? Or Kansas State fans? You can’t. You hope they still watch and wait for the next generation to grow up.
When college football reaches the inevitable end of this road with 30 to 40 teams left at the highest level, the powers that be won’t want you to hand down your Washington State fandom to your children. They’ll want your kids to latch on to USC or Texas or Alabama, much like the Golden State Warriors or the Kansas City Chiefs have fans all over the world. It’s about brands now, because brands can be sold to anyone.
That’s the ultimate endgame of realignment, and why it’s not actually realignment. After it gets big, it’ll shrink. Whether the superconferences kick out members or the biggest brands go off on their own, they’ll eventually drop the dead weight that hurts the TV value, even if they’re in the Big Ten or SEC today. It may not even be a decision made by anyone currently in a position of power, but when you’ve started down the road of corporate reorganization, you always reach that stage, and the real charm of the sport will be gone. It’s already happened in baseball with the shrinking of the minor leagues.
What is college football at that point? If the SEC and Big Ten have their own playoff(s), will Texas Tech or Oregon State fans care? Will NFL fans watch more college football if it’s organized into a cleaner and more accessible version of the NBA G-League?
I don’t know. It’s not hard to see swaths of hardcore fans bailing if their team is left out of the top tier. Maybe not all at once, but slowly over time. Or maybe there’s enough casual college football fandom for an NFL Jr. to survive and thrive. That’s the bet being made now through TV.
In the end, the SEC and the Big Ten have the largest quantities of passionate fans. That’s what this comes down to. No amount of commissioner maneuvering could change that. Eventually, the schools with their own large fan bases outside those leagues were going to join the others.
Maybe there was no way to stop this. Maybe the biggest schools were always going to be pulled together in the end and a century-plus of regional college football was always going to die and be replaced by a national sport. It’s become a television product first and foremost. That’s become evident for more than 20 years now, from late kickoffs to last-minute start time announcements to endless TV timeouts. It runs the sport.
The question now is if fans will still care, if this big-money play will keep enough of them around.
I grew up in Big Ten country. I rooted for Michigan as a kid and then attended Michigan State. As far as I can tell from my Big Ten circles and what I’ve seen elsewhere, after the initial shock, the general reaction among those fans to the USC/UCLA news was mostly apathy. Sure, some are excited. Some hate it, too. Most felt powerless to do anything about it, a grim acceptance that the sport they grew up with is changing no matter how they feel. And these are fans of the winners in this game of musical chairs.
This sport had always been unique. It’s why we fell in love with it. The huge pool of teams to follow. The regional flair. The small towns. The states that don’t have professional sports teams. The intensity of the rivalries. The generational upsets. The connections to a school as alumni. The messiness and nonsense was the charm of it all. The biggest stadiums in this country host college games, not professional. Few NFL fans care about the league’s history before the Super Bowl. College football fans can tell you a story about a game from 1917.
It’s clear now that a lot of the charm that draw us to college football is on its way out. All in the name of finding every last dollar. So pour one out for the 2007 season. For Boise State-Oklahoma. For split national titles. For Appalachian State-Michigan. For the Rose Bowl.
I’ll still be watching. So will millions of others. The sport isn’t going to die. It just won’t be what so many of us fell in love with in the first place, and a lot of fans will be left behind.
(Photo: Richard Mackson / USA Today)
Amazon’s Best-Selling Window Air Conditioner Cools ‘Like a Charm’ and Is Just $172
Amazon
Bringing down the temperature in your home can be challenging, especially during a heat wave. While tower fans are great for knocking a few degrees off your thermostat, a window air conditioner is the heavy-duty appliance you need to drastically cool your space. This luxury can come at a price, unless you go with the Amazon Basics Window-Mounted Air Conditioner — which is just $172.
Ideal for small rooms and apartments, the Amazon Basics window air conditioner blasts cold air with up to 5,000 BTU of power. Amazon shoppers say that, with the turn of the dial, their space is chilly in as little as 10 minutes. The air conditioner is designed with seven temperature settings that customize your cooling experience with limited noise, a plus that’s confirmed by reviewers.
Amazon
Buy It! Amazon Basics Window-Mounted Air Conditioner, $172; amazon.com
The “small, but mighty” AC unit effectively lowers the temperature in spaces up to 150 square feet thanks to its dual AC and fan settings. Tip: Use the fan modes during the fall and spring when the weather is in a hot/cold limbo. Reviewers also love that the air conditioner’s top portion has an adjustable air direction feature which allows you to choose where the cool air goes, either directly nearby or throughout the entire room, which “works like a charm!”
In order to set this Amazon best-seller up, use the included mounting kit that turns your window into a portal that transforms the heat from inside into icy cool air, making your space a safe haven from the heat. It also filters out pollutants while it cools so you can keep a healthy home status. It’s no wonder Amazon reviewers say this window air conditioner is “well worth the price.”
RELATED: Shoppers Call This Portable Air Conditioner a ‘Life-Changing Miracle’ — and It’s on Sale Right Now
“Can’t beat it for the price,” writes one New York City apartment dweller. “It’s a substantial window unit. I thought it would be super small and it wasn’t. [It] cools my room quickly, even the areas around my room. Buying more for other rooms.”
“This AC is awesome!” writes another. “We had a major heat wave, and this sucker kept our room 70 and cooler the entire time. We didn’t even have it cranked all the way up! I’ve told so many people about it.”
Don’t sweat about finding an effective and affordable air conditioner — this window-mounted unit from Amazon Basics is it. Get it while it’s still in stock.
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