Victoria Fox's Blog, page 117

Orange will achieve nearly 200 million more from the merger

The French group and MásMóvil plan to definitively close their integration tomorrow. The headquarters of the new group will be in Orange, since it is larger.

Orange and MásMóvil, the second and fourth telecom operators in the Spanish market, plan to close their merger tomorrow, March 26, both from a legal and financial point of view, as sources familiar with the operation have told EXPANSIÓN.

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Parlem increases capital by 4 million to make purchases and reduce debt

The operator’s shareholders support an operation designed to carry out acquisitions in full concentration of the sector, strengthen the balance sheet and restructure banking liabilities.

The board of directors of Parlem has approved to launch a capital increase of four million with the aim of continuing the acquisition policy of the operator, very active in this regard in recent years, and to re

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Commcenter increases revenue by 4% and improves profitability

The Telefónica distribution group with independent capital and listed on the BME Growth earns 864,000 euros, compared to 43,000 in 2022.

Commcenter has closed 2023 with more profitability, recovering its working capital and reducing debt. All this, he says, with a growth and “reconfiguration” plan in agreement with Telefónica. This is how it has consolidated its leadership position in Spain

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Digital Markets Act: EU Commission opens proceedings against Apple, Meta and Google

The EU Commission has opened competition proceedings against Google parent company Alphabet, iPhone manufacturer Apple and Facebook parent company Meta. The EU Commission said the three US technology companies had not met the requirements.

Specifically, it concerns requirements from the new law for digital markets, the Digital Markets Act. With the law, the EU wants to limit the market power of digital companies – if they violate it, they face fines worth billions.

Since the law came into force at the beginning of March, companies have already announced changes, said EU Digital Commissioner Thierry Breton. “However, we are not convinced that the solutions proposed by Alphabet, Apple and Meta meet their commitments,” Breton said. The Commission has been in discussions with companies “for months” to help them adapt to the new rules.

Market power should also be restricted in app stores

Among other things, it is being investigated whether Alphabet is gaining an unfair competitive advantage in the Google search engine results list through its own services such as Google Maps or Google Shopping. In the case of Apple, the Commission raised concerns because iPhone users sometimes cannot delete pre-installed apps and cannot change some default settings on their cell phones.

Alphabet and Apple are also accused of indirectly forcing app developers to use their in-house app stores. On cell phones with the Alphabet operating system Android this is the Google Play Store; on iPhones, Apple’s App Store is preinstalled. According to the allegations, the companies prevent other providers from providing information about prices or concluding contracts without using the respective app store.

The investigation into the Meta Group is about a much-criticized payment model for the Facebook and Instagram platforms. Users can pay a monthly fee of at least 9.99 euros if they no longer want to see advertising. Only those who accept personalized ads can continue to use the platforms for free. The EU Commission suspects that users are indirectly forced to pass on their data.

The EU Commission wants to complete the process within a year

With the Digital Markets Act, the European Union wants to limit the market power of so-called gatekeepers of the Internet. The basic assumption is that some of the large platform operators have become so powerful that they can cement their market position. The new rules have been in effect since the beginning of March for Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, TikTok parent company ByteDance, Meta and Microsoft.

The commission wants to complete the proceedings it has opened within a year. Depending on the outcome, the affected companies must take measures to address the authority’s concerns. Anyone who does not comply with the law can be punished with a fine of up to ten percent of their total worldwide turnover. For repeat offenders, 20 percent is possible.

The EU Commission has opened competition proceedings against Google parent company Alphabet, iPhone manufacturer Apple and Facebook parent company Meta. The EU Commission said the three US technology companies had not met the requirements.

Specifically, it concerns requirements from the new law for digital markets, the Digital Markets Act. With the law, the EU wants to limit the market power of digital companies – if they violate it, they face fines worth billions.

Since the law came into force at the beginning of March, companies have already announced changes, said EU Digital Commissioner Thierry Breton. “However, we are not convinced that the solutions proposed by Alphabet, Apple and Meta meet their commitments,” Breton said. The Commission has been in discussions with companies “for months” to help them adapt to the new rules.

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Diversity at Google AI: Is that the Pope?

If you were to paint a Pope, what would he look like? Maybe you’re thinking of a gold-embroidered, pointed headpiece or a simple, circular skullcap. But almost certainly both would be sitting on the head of an older white gentleman. If you were to draw a young black woman instead, it would be quite unusual. You could say: a mistake.

But that’s exactly what an artificial intelligence from Google recently did. When asked to generate images of popes, the system showed a black woman and a black man. An astonishing reaction – especially because AI systems have so far been known to behave in the opposite way: they reproduce social prejudices. Successful managers are portrayed as white men, drug dealers as black men.

The AI called Gemini, on the other hand, even generated Wehrmacht soldiers with non-white skin color.

All of this caused significantly more excitement than previous creations that perpetuated racist prejudices. Eventually, Google decided to temporarily turn off the ability to generate images of people. The company apologized and promised: “We will do better.”

But how? And anyway: Why can’t Google and Co. get their AIs under control?

It is not the first time since the AI hype broke out a year and a half ago that such a system has caused problems. Microsoft, for example, is also currently having trouble with its image generator because the program creates violent and sexualized images. And when chatbots suddenly talk about falling in love with the user, that might be cute. Other mistakes, on the other hand, are a threat to democracy, such as that of Microsoft’s AI search engine Bing. When scientists examined how accurately Bing can provide information about upcoming state elections, the AI answered a third of the questions incorrectly. For example, survey results were incorrect.

There is a separate division in the AI industry that is dedicated to bringing AI into line. This discipline is called alignment, and it is apparently still in its infancy. Or so John Schulman argued. He is one of the founders of OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT , and is responsible for exactly this alignment. When Google was criticized for its absurd images, Schulman jumped to the competition’s defense in a post on Platform X. Alignment is a fairly young discipline, and “hyper-wokeness” is simply a bug, that’s what software developers call errors.

Jakob Foerster may know how to fix this. He has already worked on artificial intelligence for Google, OpenAI and Meta, and is now a professor at the University of Oxford and researches how AI and humans can work together. Foerster is not one for long preambles; in the video call he sits in front of a whiteboard scrawled with graphs, ties his hair in a braid and initially gets upset. “The methods used are obviously relatively stupid,” he says.

In fact, during the Gemini debate, it emerged that Google was conducting some kind of unannounced experiment with users of its chatbot. In the background, each of the entries, so-called prompts, was apparently supplemented with an invisible note. Google didn’t comment on the exact methods, but some users used tricks to get the secret addition out of the bot. The request “Show me a Pope” was therefore passed on to the system with the request to “explicitly include different genders and ethnicities”.

If you were to paint a Pope, what would he look like? Maybe you’re thinking of a gold-embroidered, pointed headpiece or a simple, circular skull cap. But almost certainly both would be sitting on the head of an older white gentleman. If you were to draw a young black woman instead, it would be quite unusual. You could say: a mistake.

But that’s exactly what an artificial intelligence from Google recently did. When asked to generate images of popes, the system showed a black woman and a black man. An astonishing reaction – especially because AI systems have so far been known to behave in the opposite way: they reproduce social prejudices. Successful managers are portrayed as white men, drug dealers as black men.

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TikTok in the US: Ticktack, TikTok

The dilemma with TikTok can be clearly illustrated by Joe Biden: The President of the United States is not allowed to install the app on his smartphone. He signed the corresponding law himself in 2022, and since then it has applied to all employees in the White House, to members of the Senate, and also to federal authorities. There is great concern that the Chinese Communist Party could use the app as a spying tool. TikTok belongs to the Chinese company ByteDance, based in Beijing.

The same Joe Biden has had an official TikTok account since the beginning of February. Which device does he use to operate it? Good question! In any case, Biden now wants to reach the young voters there that he so urgently needs in order to remain president. He already has 264,794 followers.

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Messenger service: Telegram block suspended in Spain

The temporary blocking of the Telegram messenger service ordered by a judge in Spain on Sunday will not initially come into force. Judge Santiago Pedraz of the National Court of Justice in Madrid overruled his own order, the court announced. Pedraz therefore first wants to wait for a report that he has commissioned the Commissioner General for Intelligence to prepare.

Pedraz ordered the blocking of the messenger service after several media companies filed a lawsuit against Telegram . They accuse Telegram of violating copyright protection regulations.

According to his own statements, the judge ordered the blocking after he had repeatedly unsuccessfully requested administrative assistance from the authorities in the British Virgin Islands, where Telegram is registered. They did not cooperate in clarifying the identities of the owners of Telegram accounts from which copyrighted content was distributed.

Telegram remained accessible despite the ordered blocking

Despite the order, Telegram was always available in Spain. Spanish consumer advocates criticized the measure as disproportionate. However, country blocks like the one ordered by Pedraz can be easily bypassed with protected network connections (VPN).

According to a report in the Spanish newspaper El País, Telegram regularly refuses to provide information to authorities. The service is popular, among other things, because it protects the identity of its users more than larger competitors such as Messenger from Facebook or WhatsApp, which is also owned by the US group. Telegram has several million users in Spain.

Because of the way it works, Telegram is a preferred service for dissidents in dictatorships and authoritarian countries. For the same reason, there are also channels with extremist and criminal content on Telegram. According to its own information, the service has more than 700 million monthly active users worldwide.

The temporary blocking of the Telegram messenger service ordered by a judge in Spain on Sunday will not initially come into force. Judge Santiago Pedraz of the National Court of Justice in Madrid overruled his own order, the court announced. Pedraz therefore first wants to wait for a report that he has commissioned the Commissioner General for Intelligence to prepare.

Pedraz ordered the blocking of the messenger service after several media companies filed a lawsuit against Telegram . They accuse Telegram of violating copyright protection regulations.

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Orange's headquarters in Pozuelo will be that of the new group after the merger with MásMóvil

The decision to locate the ‘headquarters’ in the Orange facilities is mainly due to the fact that MásMóvil’s facilities in Alcobendas do not have the capacity to accommodate the volume of workers of the new company after the merger.

In that sense, Orange’s workforce in Spain is around 6,600 employees , while MásMóvil has around 1,800 employees , although only workers from the offices in Madrid will move to Pozuelo de Alarcón.

“Logic says that those who are less (MásMóvil) will have to move to the facilities of those who are more (Orange),” said the sources consulted by Europa Press, who have also pointed out that the transfer of MásMóvil workers to the new headquarters will occur “in a phased manner over the coming months.”

Both Orange and MásMóvil have refused to comment on the location of the headquarters of the new telecom company resulting from the merger of both companies.

However, in a statement sent by CCOO to the Orange staff on March 15, the union pointed out that “in the absence of official confirmation (although it is an open secret), the MásMóvil offices in Alcobendas will be closed before the summer and its employees will be located in Orange work centers.”

However, the sources consulted have not specified whether the closure of the MásMóvil offices in Alcobendas will occur before the summer – as the union points out – and have simply indicated that it will be “in the coming months.”

“The closure of the MásMóvil work centers in Madrid as a result of the ‘joint venture’ and the move of its workers to the Orange offices will likely begin in April, will intensify in May and, in principle, will be completed before the start of the intensive summer session , scheduled for June 14,” CCOO said in another statement this past Friday.

In this sense, the union has expressed its concern about the possibility that the transfers will lead to a lack of jobs and meeting rooms, as well as parking spaces and shuttles, places to eat or vending machines. .

The two companies have indicated on several occasions that their intention is to close the last pending aspects of the merger in the first quarter of this year and, in that sense, it is expected that next week, before Holy Thursday, it will be definitively concluded. the operation, which will give rise to the main telecommunications company in Spain by customer volume (around 30 million).

Once all the procedures have been completed, Orange and MásMóvil will begin to operate as a single company in Spain , although the commercial name of the new telecom is still unknown , something that is expected to be revealed in April.

Regarding the direction of the joint venture, the CEO of MásMóvil, Meinrad Spenger , will be the CEO of the new operator, while his counterpart at Orange Spain, Ludovic Pech , will be the financial director and Jean Fraçois Fallacher , non-executive president of Orange in Spain, will be the president of the new telecom.

On March 12, the Government authorized the merger of the companies and in the press conference after the Council of Ministers, the head of Digital Transformation, José Luis Escrivá, explained that the approval of the operation is accompanied by a “very ambitious” industrial plan. ” and with a “very powerful” investment policy for the coming years in fixed and mobile digital infrastructures.

Although he did not go into too many details due to the confidentiality of the agreed industrial plan, Escrivá pointed out that it also contains commitments to “sufficient job maintenance.”

In that sense, regarding the impact of the merger on employment, in mid-February Ludovic Pech limited himself to pointing out that the announced synergies “are based mainly on industrial synergies and not on employment issues.”

On the other hand, the approval of the merger between Orange and MásMóvil by Brussels – announced on February 20 – was subject to certain conditions (‘remedies’), which were already agreed with Digi last December.

The Romanian operator closed a 120 million euro agreement with MásMóvil for the acquisition of a total of 60 megahertz (MHz) of radio space in different frequency bands.

As indicated by Digi in a statement, the company signed a spectrum transfer contract related to the transmission by Xfera Móviles (MásMóvil) of the spectrum licenses for two 10 MHz blocks in the 1,800 MHz band, another two MHz in the 2,100 MHz band and 20 MHz in the 3,500 MHz band.

Likewise, Digi closed another agreement with Orange by which the latter grants the Romanian operator the option to enter into a “national roaming service agreement” in the future for the provision by Orange to Digi of a wholesale service.

In this sense, the Ministry for Digital Transformation and Public Service has authorized the new company resulting from the merger to take control over the radio spectrum concessions held by Orange and MásMóvil.

“Given that the merger between equals exceeds the frequency limits to be used by the same operator or business group, the so-called ‘spectrum caps’, the procedure provided for in article 88.6 of the regulations on the use of public radio domain is applied, which gives a period of five months from the closing of the transaction, with the possibility of extension, to the new entity to reverse this situation and adapt the frequency limits ,” detailed the portfolio led by Escrivá.

Thus, the Ministry of Digital Transformation clarified that “any transfer of this surplus spectrum”, including the 60 MHz destined for Digi, “will have to be previously approved” by Digital Transformation.

Following the approval of the operation by the European Commission and the Government, the joint activities of the two companies will be formalized in a ‘joint venture’ controlled 50% by Orange and MásMóvil “with the same governance rights in the combined entity “.

However, in the presentation of Orange’s results in Spain that took place in mid-February, Pech stressed that the operator is considering taking a controlling stake after the merger with MásMóvil and acquiring an additional 1% of the joint venture. , until reaching 51% , a possibility that is included in the agreement signed between the parties in March 2022.

The manager recalled that this option of taking a control position would be executed between 24 and 42 months after the closing of the operation.

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Messenger service Telegram: Spanish court orders blocking of Telegram

The highest court in Madrid has ordered the temporary blocking of Telegram in Spain. The judiciary said the reason was the lawsuit filed by several media companies against Telegram for copyright infringement. The companies accuse the messenger service of allowing users to upload their content without permission.

Judge Santiago Pedraz has decided to block Telegram services in Spain from next Monday while the allegations are investigated. Consumer advocates in Spain, where there are several million Telegram users, criticized the measure as disproportionate. However, country restrictions can be relatively easily circumvented using protected network connections (VPN).

Telegram is registered in the British Virgin Islands in the Caribbean. The court also said authorities there had not cooperated in clarifying the identities of the owners of Telegram accounts from which copyrighted content was distributed. According to the court, the temporary blocking of the entire Telegram service is “necessary, appropriate and proportionate” from the judge’s point of view.

Opponents of the regime prefer Telegram

The newspaper El País wrote that Telegram regularly refuses to provide information to the authorities. Since the service protects the identity of its users more than the messaging service WhatsApp, the app is preferred by opponents of the regime in dictatorships such as Russia or Iran. But there are also channels on Telegram with criminal or extremist content. In addition to protecting copyrights, the ordered blockade is also about balancing anonymity and impunity on the Internet.

According to the competition authority CNMC, Telegram is the fourth most used short message service in Spain. According to its own information, the company had more than 700 million monthly active users worldwide in 2023.

The highest court in Madrid has ordered the temporary blocking of Telegram in Spain. The judiciary said the reason was the lawsuit filed by several media companies against Telegram for copyright infringement. The companies accuse the messenger service of allowing users to upload their content without permission.

Judge Santiago Pedraz has decided to block Telegram services in Spain from next Monday while the allegations are investigated. Consumer advocates in Spain, where there are several million Telegram users, criticized the measure as disproportionate. However, country restrictions can be relatively easily circumvented using protected network connections (VPN).

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Markus Beckedahl: "I still believe that a better digital world is possible"

Markus Beckedahl was often against it: against state trojans with which the state can monitor people, against data retention, i.e. the storage of data without a reason, against upload filters that check posts on the Internet before they are published. As the founder of “Netzpolitik.org”, he has played a key role in shaping internet policy debates over the past 20 years – after writing around 11,000 texts, he is now leaving there.

ZEIT ONLINE : Markus Beckedahl, there is hardly anyone in this country who has followed the development of the Internet in Germany as critically as you. Are there any other things online that make you say, “Oh, that’s cool!”?

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