Techcrunch blog!: Google gets a $270M fine

Wednesday, March 20, 2024

Good afternoon, and welcome to TechCrunch PM. We made it to the middle of the week, and your reward is some great reporting from the TC gang. Find out why France hit Google with a $270 million fine and why there's spam in OpenAI's chatbot store, and get an update on the gaming tournament hack. For climate tech founders, Casper's co-founder wants to help you make your dream a reality, and there is a new extended warranty product for aging Teslas. Have fun!

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— Christine

Image Credits: Kenzo Tribouillard / AFP / Getty Images

TechCrunch PM Top 3

Over in the EU: France's competition watchdog says Google disregarded some of its previous commitments with news publishers and that the data was used to train its generative AI model, Gemini. Now it's slapped Google with a $270 million fine. Meanwhile, the European Union is having some doubts over the legality of Meta's privacy fee. The social media giant announced in November that it was going to ask regional users to choose between paying a monthly subscription or agree to tracking.

There's spam in my chatbot store: OpenAI CEO Sam Altman says you can build a GPT for almost anything. He wasn't kidding. Find out what we found in the chatbot store.

Hacking just for fun: Earlier this week, we reported on the Apex Legends gaming tournament that was turned upside down by a hacker. Lorenzo was able to talk to the hacker and get the inside scoop.

Image Credits: Bryce Durbin / TechCrunch

More top reads

Gotta love a good IPO pop: Astera Labs certainly did. The company priced its IPO last night at $36 per share and watched that rise to $52.56 per share, up 46% when the bell rang. Let's hope this is a positive sign for another IPO we are looking at … cough, cough, Reddit.

The latest features: GitHub launched the first beta of its code-scanning autofix feature for finding and fixing security vulnerabilities during the coding process. It promises to remediate more than two-thirds of the vulnerabilities it uncovers. Meanwhile, TV recommendation app Watchworthy has two new features around more personalized recommendations and a way to get movie suggestions from your friends.

Casper co-founder starts an incubator: Philip Krim doesn't think enough is being done to solve a lot of the climate industry's problems, so the mattress company co-founder put his money where his mouth is and started Montauk Climate, an incubator for climate tech startups.

A warranty for that aging Tesla: Owners of these electric vehicles know there isn't much in the way of options if something breaks on your Tesla after the warranty expires. Well, aftermarket warranty startup Amber is on the phone and wants to talk to you about your Tesla's extended warranty. You'll probably want to take this call.

What can AI do for you?: Or actually, what can't it do? ServiceNow is out to make sure that any enterprise that wants to have AI do something for it, can.

Money, money, money: Healthcare platform Anima grabbed $12 million in new capital to give clinics some Salesforce-like capabilities. Mermaid Chart, a tool for creating diagrams, raised $7.5 million. And AirMyne secured $6.9 million for its approach to direct carbon capture.

Around the web: Apparently Reddit's IPO is a bit unusual. So much so that Bloomberg found seven ways that show it is not a typical tech listing. The Washington Post digs into the latest EPA climate change rules that it calls "the strongest ever" for cars. And Engadget has your look at Dyson's brand-new robot vacuum.

TechCrunch Early Stage: Planning on going to Early Stage in April? Of course you are. As such, we published the first list of roundtables touching on topics venture capitalists and startups want to know. If you're keen to volunteer, you can get a free ticket.

Image Credits: Nuthawut Somsuk / Getty Images

TechCrunch Minute

Solana is ushering in a new round of memecoin mania: Blockchain is back, baby! Bitcoin is hot, the Ethereum blockchain is seeing price gains, and lots of folks are stoked about ETFs. But one less-mainstream blockchain is perhaps making the biggest waves in crypto lately: Solana. TechCrunch has reported on Solana's massive, recent price appreciation, digging into its rapid ascent and the reasons why.

Image Credits: Solana

On the pods

Wednesday's Equity focuses on startup and venture capital news that matters. Today, Alex talked about Astera Labs going public, some big venture rounds, and then some even bigger rounds. He also discusses the Inflection AI–Microsoft-saga and shares some unique stories across the website.

Listen here.