FCC chair Jessica Rosenworcel just announced plans to restore net neutrality rules previously reversed during the Trump administration.
If approved, the net neutrality rules would place providers under the same classification as phone companies, allowing the FCC to treat the internet as an essential service subject to greater regulation.
Members of SAG-AFTRA, the union representing Hollywood actors, television and radio artists, voted overwhelmingly on Monday to authorize a strike against 10 of the nation's biggest video game companies.
Why it matters: Video game voice actors have been pushing to renegotiate a contract with big gaming studios for over a year. Their previous contract expired last November.
The fight to be an AI global superpower is still anyone's game, but the United Arab Emirates is poised to disrupt.
What's happening: The country's Technology Innovation Institute surprised many when it released one of the top performing generative AI models in May — the first in the open source Falcon series. But that's just one pay-off from two decades of planning, according to Omar Sultan Al Olama, AI minister for the United Arab Emirates.
Tweets (or X messages) about the Microsoft-Activision deal from one of the topic's most vocal online commentators are themselves becoming part of a legal fight around the deal.
Driving the news: On Friday, a lawyer representing a group of gamers who are part of a suit in federal court to block the deal, pressed federal District Judge Jacqueline Scott Corley to compel Microsoft to produce any communication it has had with tech pundit and occasional consultant Florian Mueller.
Final Fantasy maker Square Enix is right to bring more of its games to Microsoft's Xbox andkeep taking risks on new games, a former senior executive at the company tells Axios. However, he said itshould not heed critics who say the company is too dependent on star game producers.
Why it matters: Square Enix is one of the most iconic and successful game companies in history, but it's been going through a rough patch.
The game sold 3 million copies at launch, solid if not spectacular for one of gaming's most famous franchises.
But Square Enix has also released a string of bombs since 2022, including PC and PS5 game Forspoken in January and Babylon's Fall, an online game that was shut down less than a year after launch.
What they're saying:Final Fantasy XVI's exclusivity to Sony's PS5 was a key limiting factor to its current situation, says Jacob Navok, currently CEO at Genvid and former head of Square's Shinra Technologies.
"The issue that I see is an issue that all of the industry should be cognizant of, which is the risk of console exclusives when you have a principal-agent problem," he says.
Navok says Final Fantasy XVI had good enough reviews — in line with or better than prior entries — to have helped the company, but says Square's exclusivity put it in a position to need Sony to sell the game.
"When you're the publisher relying on first party for success, you're always at a disadvantage, because your individual title matters less to the platform holder than it does to you."
State of play: In July, only his second month in the role, SquareEnix's new CEO Takashi Kiryu announced the company would bring more of its biggest releases to Xbox alongside other platforms.
That deal, Navok suspects, came about "not because they expect that there will be more Xbox sales than PS5, but because he identified the same problem."
Between the lines: Navok disagrees with analysts who've criticized Square Enix for releasing too many new games, such as Forspoken and The DioField Chronicle, that got middling reviews and sold poorly.
"This is what diversification of IP looks like. You need to take multiple swings to see what hits."
"There is no fan out there who saw Babylon's Fall (and I say "saw" because very few actually played it) and decided against playing FF16. This is not how brand loyalty works"
As for criticism of Square's big-name producers, who were blamed in a recent Bloomberg report for haphazard direction, Navok said that "Square Enix's producers are key to their product's success."
The Bloomberg article didn't single out any specific producers for criticism, but Navok hailed several as examples of success: "Ryutaro Ichimura was producer of the Dragon Quest franchise for 20 years, Naoki Yoshida is the reason Final Fantasy 14 is so successful, Hajime Tabata saved Final Fantasy 15, and Yoshinori Kitase and Tetsuya Nomura are the reason Final Fantasy 7 Remake exists," he said.
Be smart: In early August, Kiryu told investors his goal as CEO is to improve the profitability of the company's high-end PC and console releases, it's so-called HD games: "I see ample room for improvement in our operating profit margin and would like to start by working primarily on our HD games."
He said XVI's launch sales were "in line with our expectations."
Bloomberg reported that Kiryu also said that the sales were lower than the company's highest end expectations, but that part of Kiryu's commentary did not make it into the English version presented on Square's website, which often omits part of what is originally said in Japanese.
Vista Equity Partners has quietly topped $100 billion in assets under management, reflecting continued institutional investor interest in big tech takeovers, Axios has learned from a confidential investor letter sent last Friday.
By the numbers: This includes around $17 billion in commitments to the firm's eighth flagship buyout fund, which is slated to close next month.
Tapping into yields from U.S. Treasurys will be key to keeping crypto's biggest decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) operational until the industry gets busy again.
Why it matters: In theory, decentralized finance projects can build through the downturn and come out better when the market comes back, but only if they steward resources well.
Getty Images debuted a generative AI tool Monday that, in contrast to rival text-to-image engines, was trained only on licensed content from Getty's own vast creative collection.
Why it matters: Getty has sued Stability AI for infringing on its copyrighted works, but says its own new image engine is safe for commercial use. Getty will also indemnify customers buying images, meaning that Getty is on the hook for any legal problems that arise from images created by the tool.
Opening a major new front in the AI arms race, Amazon announced early Monday morning that it'll invest up to $4 billion in Anthropic, a top competitor to OpenAI — the group behind ChatGPT.
Why it matters: This gives Amazon a close relationship with a big AI startup, akin to Microsoft's alliance with OpenAI, the Financial Times notes.
ChatGPT is moving beyond text — letting some users include images as part of a query and give spoken rather than typed instructions to the chatbot, which can also speak its answers.
Why it matters: The new features give the chatbot more utility right now and point to a future where AI tools understand the world around them, not just the online data on which they've been trained.
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