In a blow to Google and the rest of Big Tech, an EU appeals court has refused to “overturn a landmark antitrust ruling by European regulators” from 2017 over Google’s alleged “preferential treatment to its own price-comparison shopping service over rival services.” Google has one more appeal left—to the European Court of Justice—but appears to face an uphill battle in its bid to fight the EU’s antitrust enforcement and the accompanying $2.8 billion fine - NYTimes and Law360 and WSJ and Bloomberg
Oklahoma’s Supreme Court “threw out a 2019 ruling that required Johnson & Johnson to pay the state $465 million for its role in the opioid epidemic,” rejecting the state’s arguments that “the company violated ‘public nuisance’ laws by aggressively overstating the benefits of its prescription opioid painkillers and downplaying the dangers.” The ruling comes on the heels of a “similar opinion” by a California judge just over a week ago, though it’s unclear how damaging the rulings are nationally to opioid plaintiffs, as “most public nuisance laws are state-specific” - NYTimes and WSJ and Law360
China’s Evergrande, the troubled property developer, has been dominating recent headlines over its deep debt load and the will-it or won’t-it drama around recent payments on “multimillion-dollar bonds.” But, importantly, Evergrande’s not an island; it’s one of scores of property companies in the country facing staggering debt and the threat of default, though the true scope of the underlying problem is hard to measure thanks to the “veil of secrecy” under which the companies and Beijing are managing the struggles - NYTimes
Zillow may have blown its house-flipping effort, but best not to sleep on the power that tech companies harnessing all kinds of data—from crowd-counting to consumer behavior—and applying it to reshape the real estate market - NYTimes
Meta announced plans on Tuesday to “eliminate advertisers’ ability to target people with promotions based on their interactions with content related to health, race and ethnicity, political affiliation, religion, sexual orientation and thousands of other topics.” The change, effective mid-January 2022 across Meta’s various platforms, is aimed at limiting the way that Facebook’s “targeting tools can be abused” - NYTimes and WSJ and Bloomberg and TechCrunch
Meanwhile, back at the ‘book, the Journal’s not done trawling through the whistleblower docs, and its latest effort reveals that Facebook “has allowed plagiarized and recycled content to flourish on its platform despite having policies against it” - WSJ
DoorDash is buying Wolt, a Finnish food-delivery startup, in a deal valued north of $8 billion. The agreement “marks the latest merger in the highly competitive food-delivery space, where revenue has skyrocketed during the coronavirus pandemic but profit has been elusive” - WSJ and Bloomberg and TechCrunch
Elon’s stock-sale polling over the weekend caused another day of disruption for Tesla, with the company’s shares down more than 16%in the first two days of the trading week—“nearly erasing the series of gains it had seen in the two weeks after Tesla’s market value exceeded $1 trillion for the first time” - NYTimes and WSJ and Bloomberg
New York’s Department of Financial Services has fined the Dubai-based Mashreqbank PSC $100 million as part of a settlement with the bank over its alleged illegal processing of “more than $4 billion in payments for Sudanese entities between 2005 and 2009” in contravention of U.S. sanctions – Law360
In the midst of a massive tech crackdown by Beijing, this certainly won’t be the Singles Day of yore - NYTimes
Panera Bread is preparing a return to the public markets via a traditional IPO that will include “an unconventional investment from Danny Meyer’s special-purpose acquisition company.” JAB Holdings, which purchased the company and took it private in 2017, plans to remain a significant stakeholder - WSJ
A tragically belated remembrance of Louise Blanchard Bethune, widely considered the first American woman to become a certified architect, whose 1908 Denton, Cottier & Daniels store in Buffalo “was among the first buildings in the country to utilize steel frame construction and poured concrete slabs” - NYTimes
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