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Telecom Tweets of the Week: Google in hot water with the EU

by Kelly Hill
written by Kelly Hill Share
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Google and parent company Alphabet continue to earn the ire of European Union regulators, who are contemplated a second record fine for the company after recently smacking down the company for favoring results from its own shopping service over others.

This week came the news that the EU has put together a panel of experts to consult on its next Google-related anti-trust case: whether the company is holding mobile device OEMs hostage to Google search and other apps.

A couple of contexual tidbits and analysis: globally, Android absolutely dominates the smartphone operating system market, as seen below:

Other thinkpieces explore the changing dynamics of regulation in a market where one company essentially IS the market …

… but maybe this means a deterioration in customer experience?

https://twitter.com/Thefrenchflo/status/883343852580601856

Google, for its part, basically says, “Hey, what about Amazon and eBay?!?!” and might appeal the $2.7 billion fine levied by the EU in the shopping case.

https://twitter.com/NorthernBeaconS/status/883332676740165633

Elsewhere in the Twitterverse, EE achieved near-gigabit LTE speeds at Wembley Stadium in the U.K. in a demo this week using a Sony Xperia XZ Premium with Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 835 chipset.

For a little bit of blow-your-mind, Stanford University researchers (led by Andrew Ng, formerly chief scientist at Chinese tech company Baidu) found that an artificial intelligence algorithm can detect heart arrhythmia better than a panel of experts.

Meanwhile, in India, a social start-up called No Food Waste is using a mobile app to facilitate redistribution of extra food from weddings and restaurants to hungry people:

Boost Mobile has turned rapper Biz Markie into “Bizilla”, terrorizing a city while boasting about the screen size on a ZTE Max XL (with HPUE, apparently). It’s a little … biz-arre.

https://twitter.com/boostmobile/status/883035287437193216

While July 4th was the big holiday this week, apparently July 5th was National Bikini Day. T-Mobile US CEO John Legere celebrated … sort of. You cannot un-see this tweet.

After all that, you deserve some Friday fun. Here’s Big Bird starring in a mash-up of the Beastie Boy’s Sabotage.

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Kelly Hill reports on network test and measurement, AI infrastructure and regulatory issues, including spectrum, for RCR Wireless News. She began covering the wireless industry in 2005, focusing on carriers and MVNOs, then took a few years’ hiatus and returned to RCR Wireless News to write about heterogeneous networks (remember those?) and network infrastructure. Kelly is an Ohio native with a masters degree in journalism from the University of California, Berkeley, where she focused on science writing and multimedia. She has written for the San Francisco Chronicle, The Oregonian and The Canton Repository. She lives in northern Virginia, not far from Data Center Alley.