Enlarge / Some current Arm licensees view the proposed acquisition as highly toxic. (credit: Aurich Lawson / Nvidia)

In September 2020, Nvidia announced its intention to buy Arm, the license holder for the CPU technology that powers the vast majority of mobile and high-powered embedded systems around the world.

Nvidia's proposed deal would acquire Arm from Japanese conglomerate SoftBank for $40 billion—a number which is difficult to put into perspective. Forty billion dollars would represent one of the largest tech acquisitions of all time, but 40 Instagrams or so doesn't seem like that much to pay for control of the architecture supporting every well-known smartphone in the world, plus a staggering array of embedded controllers, network routers, automobiles, and other devices.

Today’s Arm doesn’t sell hardware

Arm's business model is fairly unusual in the hardware space, particularly from a consumer or small business perspective. Arm's customers—including hardware giants such as Apple, Qualcomm, and Samsung—aren't buying CPUs the way you'd buy an Intel Xeon or AMD Ryzen. Instead, they're purchasing the license to design and/or manufacture CPUs based on Arm's intellectual property. This typically means selecting one or more reference core designs, putting several of them in one system on chip (SoC), and tying them all together with the necessary cache and other peripherals.

Enlarge / Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN), during a Senate Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee hearing on Jan. 21, 2021. (credit: Stefani Reynolds - pool | Getty Images )

With a new session of Congress underway and a new administration in the White House, Big Tech is once again in lawmakers' crosshairs. Not only are major firms such as Apple, Amazon, Facebook, and Google under investigation for allegedly breaking existing antitrust law, but a newly proposed bill in the Senate would make it harder for these and other firms to become so troublingly large in the first place.

The bill ( PDF ), called the Competition and Antitrust Law Enforcement Reform Act (CALERA for short, which is still awkward) would become the largest overhaul to US antitrust regulation in at least 45 years if it became law.

"While the United States once had some of the most effective antitrust laws in the world, our economy today faces a massive competition problem," said Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) when she introduced the bill on Thursday. "We can no longer sweep this issue under the rug and hope our existing laws are adequate," Klobuchar added, calling the bill "the first step to overhauling and modernizing our laws" to protect competition in the current era.

Enlarge / Signage in front of a building on the Google campus in Mountain View, California, on Wednesday, Dec. 16, 2020. (credit: David Paul Morris | Bloomberg | Getty Images )

More than three dozen state attorneys general last week filed an antitrust suit against Google , accusing the tech behemoth of a slew of anticompetitive behaviors. Among those behaviors, a new report finds, is an explicit agreement from Google to work with Facebook not only to divide the online advertising marketplace, but also to fend off antitrust investigations.

Facebook and Google agreed in a contract to "cooperate and assist each other in responding to any Antitrust Action" and "promptly and fully inform the Other Party of any Governmental Communication Related to the Agreement," according to an unredacted draft copy of the lawsuit obtained by The Wall Street Journal .

The final version of the suit made public last week ( PDF ) alleged that Google and Facebook signed a secret agreement in 2018 that "fixes prices and allocates markets between Google and Facebook as competing bidders in the auctions for publishers' Web display and in-app advertising inventory."

Enlarge (credit: Sean Gallup | Getty Images )

Two separate coalitions of states have filed massive antitrust lawsuits against Google in the past 24 hours, alleging the company abuses its extensive power to force would-be competitors out of the marketplace and harms consumers in the process.

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton spearheaded the first suit, which nine other states also signed onto. The second suit is led by Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser and Nebraska Attorney General Doug Peterson, and an additional 36 states and territories signed on.

Antitrust law isn't just about being an illegal monopoly or even about being the dominant firm in your market sector. Although being a literal monopoly, with no available competition of any kind, can put you on the fast track to investigation, the law has broader concerns. Primarily, antitrust investigations are about anticompetitive behavior —in short, how a company uses its power. If you're a big company because everyone likes your stuff best, well, you're a big company, congratulations. But if you got to be the dominant company by cheating somehow—strong-arming other firms in the supply chain; targeted anticompetitive acquisitions; colluding with other firms to manipulate market conditions, and so on—that's a problem.

The company behind Cydia, an iPhone app store that launched before Apple's own App Store, has sued Apple arguing that Apple has monopolized the market for iOS app stores, violating antitrust law in the process.

When the iPhone was introduced in 2007, it didn't have any mechanism for natively running third-party software. Instead, Steve Jobs encouraged developers to create Web apps that would run in the iPhone's Safari browser.

But people soon figured out how to jailbreak the iPhone and began making iPhone apps without Apple's help. Seeing an opportunity, software developer Jay Freeman created a program called Cydia that made it easy for users to download and install native iPhone apps—an app store before the App Store.

Enlarge / Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp are the three largest parts of Facebook's extremely sprawling empire... for now. (credit: Rafael Henrique | SOPA Images | LightRocket | Getty Images )

The Federal Trade Commission and a coalition of 47 states attorneys general today filed a pair of long-awaited antitrust suits against Facebook, alleging that the company abused its power in the marketplace to neutralize competitors through acquisitions and prevent anyone else from presenting a more privacy-friendly alternative to consumers.

"By using its vast troves of data and money, Facebook has quashed or hindered what the company perceived as potential threats," New York Attorney General Letitia James, who led the states' effort, said. "In an effort to maintain its market dominance, Facebook has employed a strategy to impede competing services."

When James initially announced the probe in September 2019, her office was joined by the attorneys general of eight other states; by October of last year, another 38 had signed on, bringing the total to 47 states and territories participating in the investigation.

Enlarge / The iPhone 11 Pro Max. (credit: Samuel Axon)

Italy has again hit Apple with a fine for what the country's regulators deem to be misleading marketing claims, though the fine is only €10 million ($12 million)—a pittance from a company like Apple.

This time around, Italy's Autorita Garante della Concorrenza e del Mercato (AGCM) claims that Apple told consumers that many iPhone models are water resistant but that the iPhones are not as resistant as Apple says. In one example, Apple claimed the iPhone 8 was rated IP67 for water and dust resistance, meaning the phone could survive for up to 30 minutes under three feet of water. But the Italian regulator says that's only true under special lab conditions with static and pure water conditions.

An announcement by the AGCM specifically names the iPhone 8, iPhone 8 Plus, iPhone XR, iPhone XS, iPhone XS Max, iPhone 11, iPhone 11 Pro and iPhone 11 Pro Max. Presumably, the claims would also apply to the iPhone 12 line, but that line was only just introduced to the market.