If the BBC is to survive, should it embrace a subscription model like Netflix and seek international viewers? CC-licensed photo by Yukiko Matsuoka on Flickr.
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A selection of 9 links for you. Tuned in. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.
Trump administration and Anthropic have not discussed the government taking a stake in it, source says • Reuters
Karen Freifeld and Alexandra Alper:
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The Trump administration and AI giant Anthropic have not discussed the government taking stakes in the firm, a source familiar with the matter said on Thursday.
The White House and the Commerce Department did not immediately respond to requests for comment. Anthropic declined to comment.
The comment comes after the Financial Times reported earlier on Thursday that OpenAI has discussed giving the U.S. government a 5% stake, raising questions about whether other AI firms are having such discussions.
The companies are facing scrutiny in Washington over the likely misuse of advanced models and whether Americans would benefit from the industry’s massive valuations.
The Commerce Department in June lifted export controls on two of Anthropic’s most advanced models imposed weeks earlier amid concerns the powerful AI tools did not have adequate safeguards to prevent misuse.
Washington has stepped up oversight of new model releases to identify potential threats amid concerns that advanced AI models could be misused by military intelligence in China, Russia or other countries of concern. Still, submission of new models for review is voluntary.
Last month, President Donald Trump said he was exploring options to give the public a stake in leading AI companies, in response to concerns that individual Americans will not share in the sector’s expected profits.
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Peculiar that Anthropic can’t say this itself, isn’t it? If they haven’t discussed it, what’s stopping Anthropic or the government, or both, just saying so? Also, the idea that the government should have part ownership of private companies seems like a slippery slope towards, oh, socialism or communism or something, which surely the Republican party in the US would repudiate.
Let’s wait a few days or weeks and see if non-discussion turns out to be a non-non-discussion.
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Google hit with $2bn antitrust judgment for skewing shopping searches in Sweden • Los Angeles Times
Karin Matussek and Christopher Jungstedt:
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Alphabet Inc.’s Google was ordered to pay almost $2bn to Klarna Group Plc’s Pricerunner unit in a dispute over the search-engine giant’s abuse of power in the market for comparison shopping services.
The Patent and Market Court in Stockholm, which issued the judgment on Wednesday, dismissed most parts of the claim in which Pricerunner sought 80 billion Swedish kronor, or roughly $8.2bn, in the wake of a European Union antitrust crackdown.
Still, Judge Linda Kullberg said this is “without a doubt the largest claim that has been ordered in a Swedish competition case.”
Klarna shares rose 5.3% in premarket trading after the ruling.
The ruling can be appealed. The Swedish price-comparison website argued that Google has been abusing its dominant position as a search engine by favoring its own comparison shopping service over competing portals for more than a decade.
Wednesday’s award compensates for lost revenue caused by Google’s preferential treatment of its own comparison-shopping service over independent price-comparison services, conduct that also drives up costs for consumers, Klarna said in a statement after the judgment.
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And meanwhile, separately: Google loses long-running appeal of record EU fine, will have to cough up $4.7bn, by Ryan Whitwam at Ars Technica:
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Back in 2018, Google was handed a record-setting €4.34bn ($4.9bn) fine in Europe for abusing its monopoly on Android. The company has spent the intervening years challenging that decision, but the continent’s highest court has put a stop to that. The Court of Justice of the European Union has affirmed the penalty, meaning Google is out of options.
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And also meaning that Google has been found guilty of abusing two different monopolies – search and Android.
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Microsoft commits $2.5bn and 6,000 employees to AI implementation unit • CNBC
Jordan Novet:
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Microsoft is investing $2.5bn into a new group focused on assisting clients with AI implementations, becoming the latest tech company to commit hefty resources to helping businesses understand and adopt emerging artificial intelligence technologies.
With the new venture, called Microsoft Frontier Co., the software vendor said Thursday that 6,000 employees will be embedded with clients, in a practice that’s become known as forward deployed engineering. The division will contain existing Microsoft FDEs, technical consultants, support staffers and salespeople with experience in specific industries. Rodrigo Kede Lima, who’s been leading Microsoft’s Asia business, will be its president.
The announcement comes two days after cloud rival Amazon said it was putting $1bn behind an FDE initiative to support fast-paced AI engagements. Leading AI labs Anthropic and OpenAI both established FDE groups in May, partnering with private equity firms, banks and consulting firms.
Alongside its technology peers, Microsoft has sunk tens of billions of dollars into building data centers that run generative AI models. Microsoft has also released a variety of AI services, with mixed results.
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Perhaps all the people in the Xbox division getting canned in the next few days can apply for jobs there?
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Nigel Farage reported to standards watchdog over ‘crypto lobbying’ • The Guardian
Rowena Mason and Tom Burgis:
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The standards watchdog has been urged to investigate whether Nigel Farage lobbied the Bank of England to drop a cryptocurrency plan that could be costly for the billionaire bankrolling his party, potentially in breach of parliamentary rules.
The Reform UK leader has said his party’s major donor, Christopher Harborne, wanted nothing in exchange for the £15m he donated to the party and the undeclared £5m gift to Farage the Guardian revealed in April.
But Farage used a private meeting at the Bank to urge its governor, Andrew Bailey, to drop plans for a state-run alternative to the digital currency that has made Harborne, his Thailand-based benefactor, one of the richest people in the world.
As reported by the Guardian last month, Farage told October’s Zebu Live event in London he regarded the Bank’s plans for a digital pound with “total and utter horror”. He recounted the meeting at Threadneedle Street with Bailey. “I asked him straight: ‘Are you still progressing your plans for a British central bank digital currency?’ And the answer was: ‘Yes.’”
His opposition to the “Britcoin” proposal was so strong that, after the meeting last September, he told the Zebu audience of crypto enthusiasts he would be “prepared to go to prison” to stop it.
The Labour MP Phil Brickell, chair of the parliamentary group on anti-corruption and responsible tax, has now reported Farage’s actions to the standards commissioner, asking him to look into the Reform leader’s interactions with the Bank of England.
The standards commissioner, Daniel Greenberg, is already investigating whether Farage should have declared the £5m gift from Harborne, which he received in the months before he returned to parliament.
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Crypto is always bad news for someone, somewhere. Fingers crossed.
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US home battery installations hit record high on rising electricity costs • Ars Technica
Jeremy Hsu:
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US homeowners have embraced home batteries in record-breaking numbers in early 2026, spurred on by state incentives while seeking to offset rising residential electricity costs. The trend could even unlock a more flexible energy supply for power grid operators and even AI data centers.
New home battery installations reached a record 673 megawatt hours of energy storage in the first quarter of 2026, according to the US Energy Information Administration. That trend was driven by states with high electricity prices that have implemented policies to incentivize home battery installation, Bloomberg News reported.
This residential battery trend stands out as a natural next step for states that have already successfully boosted rooftop solar adoption among homeowners, given how batteries enable homeowners to use stored solar energy at night. California and Hawaii accounted for the majority of new residential battery storage, while Texas and Arizona also saw significantly higher numbers of installations.
California incentivizes homeowners with solar panels to also install batteries by offering better pricing for residential electricity exported to the grid after sunset, Bloomberg reported. Hawaii offers a one-time payment of $400 for every kilowatt hour of battery storage that homeowners install.
However, the record-breaking home battery installations coincided with a slowdown in residential installations of solar panels—the result of the Trump administration and Republican-driven One Big Beautiful Bill having eliminated a 30% federal solar tax credit for homeowners. Nonetheless, US electricity generation from solar power continues to rise and even surpassed coal-fired generation in April.
The battery installation spree also coincides with rising electricity costs for US residential customers.
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It would be good if Ars Technica’s writers knew the difference between a kilowatt (a measure of instantaneous power) and a kilowatt hour (a measure of energy), as the original of this story omitted the “hour” from its measurements.
Anyway, more microgeneration and microstorage all works in everyone’s favour.
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Bye bye, Beeb? • The Critic Magazine
Christopher Snowdon:
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The BBC is no longer a public good as an economist understands the term. Public goods are non-excludable: you cannot prevent people from using them. When all you needed was a TV aerial, the BBC could only make you pay to watch its programmes by sending you threatening letters. By switching to a Netflix-style subscription model, the BBC could exclude those who do not pay.
This is the obvious solution and it needs to be done soon because the threatening letters are no longer working. Since 2014, the TV licence fee “evasion rate” has risen from 5% to 12.5% and revenue from the licence fee has fallen by 28% in real terms; hence another round of cuts.
As David Elstein noted in last month’s issue of The Critic, prosecutions for licence fee evasion have fallen from 150,000 a year to around 25,000 and the average fine is barely more than the cost of a licence. It is an extremely low risk crime and the BBC wastes £160m a year trying to tackle it. As the word spreads that paying the licence fee is essentially optional, more and more people will become “evaders”.
Some of these people genuinely never watch live broadcasts and never use the iPlayer, but it is safe to assume that most of them are simply saving money. How many of them would cough up £180 if it was the only way they could access BBC content is the big question and it will become more pressing if licence fee evasion spirals, as seems likely.
As Elstein says, the BBC’s fierce opposition to moving to a subscription model “borders on the irrational”. The corporation fears that if people were given a choice between paying for the BBC and not watching the BBC, millions will decide to stop paying for the BBC. If so, that is not our problem. The BBC is not the army. It is not the police. It provides entertainment, and no one should be compelled to pay for entertainment they do not consume.
…This is where the opportunity lies. There are two billion televisions in the world and only 50 million of them are in the UK. It might take a bit of trial-and-error to discover the revenue-maximising price for a global BBC subscription, but the corporation should have enough faith in itself to believe it can take a large enough sliver of the overseas market to make up for any losses in the domestic market.
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Netflix has around 325m subscribers. It might take the BBC a while to get to that level, but it would be a behemoth if it could.
Daily Mail sued over ‘systematic’ lifting of social media images • Press Gazette
Charlotte Tobitt:
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The Daily Mail is being sued over alleged “systematic” lifting of “thousands” of images from social media without permission or payment.
A photographer named Matthew Moore who said one of his own images had been taken without permission has launched a class action lawsuit in New York on behalf of himself and anyone else in the US who has been affected in the past three years.
The legal complaint calls this behaviour “standard practice” at the Daily Mail and is seeking a declaration that it violates US copyright law.
The legal complaint alleges that lawyers found 107 articles that contained at least one photo that had been taken from social media with only a credit to the platform (for example © Instagram) over the course of just nine days in June.
It claims that assuming a payment of between $2,500 and $25,000 per violation of the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act, this rate of alleged infringement would open the Daily Mail up to “more than ten million dollars per year”.
The claim argues that the Daily Mail ensures its use “stays hidden” to the copyright owners by adding a “false credit” to the social media platform the image was taken from.
This is despite the fact the platforms do not own the copyright according to their own terms and conditions, it says.
But it means that rightsholders searching for their name or using credit alerts may never see the usage.
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I certainly know of one person who threatened to sue the Daily Mail of its use of their pictures without permission, which led to an apology and a payment to charity. It’s hard to see how the Mail can successfully defend this one, and there’s then the question of what it does in future if that happens.
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Substack reveals newsletters with most paying subscribers in UK • Press Gazette
Charlotte Tobitt:
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Substack has revealed the 50 newsletters on its platform with the most UK paying subscribers for the first time.
Michael Howell’s Capital Wars is the top Substack newsletter in the UK based on number of paying subscribers. Capital Wars is currently the fifth-ranked finance newsletter across Substack overall and is written by Howell, a former research director at investment bank Salomon Brothers.
Finance is the biggest topic vertical in the top 50, accounting for 13 publications. Other topics represented multiple times include food and drink, fashion and beauty, news/politics and history.
In second place is Exponential View, an AI newsletter by tech entrepreneur Azeem Azhar which passed 100,000 free and paid subscribers two years ago after nine years of publishing (plus a further 200,000 who received it via Linkedin).
Third is Comment is Freed, which has more than 90,000 free and paid subscribers, by Institute for Government senior fellow Sam Freedman and his father Lawrence Freedman (emeritus professor of war studies at King’s College London).
Substack already published a “bestseller” list in the US, and has now started a separate list in the UK. It counts only paying subscribers, meaning major newsletters without paywalls may be overtaken by smaller brands with higher conversion rates.
Former Guardian media editor Jim Waterson’s local newsletter London Centric, which he started in September 2024 using a voluntary redundancy payment from the national newsbrand, has the eighth most paying subscribers in the UK on Substack.
Waterson said in May that London Centric had about 5,000 paying subscribers and was bringing in enough revenue to support two additional staff members.
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Excellent news about London Centric, which might get a flywheel effect going as it hires more staff. And Comment Is Freed, which charges the lowest possible amount (£35 per year), is surely generating a nice bit of income for the Freedman household(s). For all the hate aimed at Substack by some people, it has enabled new models of successful journalism that really couldn’t work before.
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Grok’s traffic heavily driven by NSFW content, report says • Forbes
Mary Whitfill Roeloffs:
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Elon Musk’s xAI is reportedly leaning into explicit content generation as a core driver of its Grok chatbot traffic and adult content now accounts for the majority of the platform’s activity, according to a Wednesday report from The Information.
The report claims xAI is actively doubling down on its explicit video and image-generation tools and that adult-content dominance extends into Grok’s coding model, which The Information reports frequently receives requests for pornographic material.
Well over half of Grok’s overall traffic is driven by pornographic images and videos, adult role-play chats or other such activity, according to the report, which Vital Knowledge analyst Adam Crisafulli called “a desperate attempt for relevancy.”
The move comes as xAI has “fallen further behind” competitor chatbots from Anthropic, OpenAI, Google and Meta, per Crisafulli, and Grok recorded the largest drop in web traffic of any single AI model this year, Similarweb data shows.
22%. That’s the drop in Grok web traffic between January and May, according to Similarweb, more than any other major chatbot. Similarweb’s data doesn’t include interactions with Grok through X, Musk’s social media site.
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Unsurprising that Musk thinks there’s better money to be had hiring the servers powering Grok out to literally anyone else who wants them.
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| • Why do social networks drive us a little mad? • Why does angry content seem to dominate what we see? • How much of a role do algorithms play in affecting what we see and do online? • What can we do about it? • Did Facebook have any inkling of what was coming in Myanmar in 2016? Read Social Warming, my latest book, and find answers – and more. |
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