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Apple pulls the plug on Epic

Good morning! This Tuesday, Apple's fighting Epic, Google's fighting Australia, and Democrats are fighting to keep a livestream going.
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At first it looked like Apple was playing checkers while Epic was playing chess. By marshaling millions of Fortnite players, Epic was going to topple the App Store monopoly! But actually, Apple's out there playing Risk, and it just moved all its armies into Epic's territory.
One advantage Epic had in its fight with Apple was that it could survive without Fortnite on the App Store. Now the stakes are different. Epic's main product is the Unreal Engine — in fact, Fortnite was originally just a tech demo for Unreal — and now that business has been threatened by the largest company in the world.
It's a particularly bad time for this to happen to Epic. It's been showing off Unreal Engine 5, the next generation of the software, and one of its big selling points is its cross-platform abilities. Epic was setting it up as the cross-platform, cross-device entertainment platform of the future. That sales pitch doesn't really work without iPads, iPhones and Macs.
Apple's been told to respond by Wednesday, and a hearing is scheduled for Aug. 24. Mark your calendar and bring popcorn, because things are about to get wild.
Shakeel Hashim writes: The third season of "Succession" has been delayed, but no matter: On Monday, Google took aim at Logan Roy Rupert Murdoch, with a giant warning message on the Australian Google home page. "The way Aussies use Google is at risk," the message read, directing users to an open letter from Google's Australia and New Zealand Managing Director Mel Silva about proposed legislation that Google claims will ruin search for everyone.
This is the latest step in a protracted dispute between Big Tech and Australian media companies — most notably Murdoch's News Corp. and Nine Entertainment Co. The financially struggling media companies blame Google and Facebook for their travails and want the tech platforms to pay them for their content. The tech platforms … don't want to.
But, partly thanks to Murdoch's hefty political influence in Australia, the Australian competition authority proposed a code that would allow publishers to bargain for payment, with compulsory arbitration if they can't agree on terms.
The draft code is under consultation until the end of this month, and Google's clearly not going down without a fight. In the open letter, Silva said the code would make Google and YouTube "dramatically worse" by having to prioritize publishers' content and would put users at risk by giving their data to publishers. The competition authority hit back: It said the letter "contains misinformation" and argued that Google will not be required to share data with publishers.
Australia isn't the only country to be doing this: France is pursuing a similar avenue. On a call with investors earlier this month, News Corp. CEO Robert Thomson said "there are obviously more deals to come … I suspect in some ways, influenced by Australian regulatory thinking." Google had better start working on its rap song for Round 2.
Issie Lapowsky writes: Monday night, as the first ever virtual Democratic National Convention kicked off on a screen near you, Democrats began their attempt to pull off an unprecedented act of political showmanship. It required, they said, perhaps the most complex event in the history of livestreaming.
Democrats will host 11 hours of programming between Monday and Thursday of this week, including hundreds of different video feeds. Some of it will be live, some prerecorded. It'll be on multiple channels, set-top boxes, even Spotify and Alexa.
Then, there's the official party business — you know, like voting on a nominee and a platform — that the DNCC also had to figure out how to handle remotely. Throughout the month of July, the platform committee met on Zoom and broadcast their meetings on YouTube. In early August, delegates received individualized ballots by email, which they were to fill out and return to their state Democratic Party last week.
Meanwhile, outside of the party apparatus, tech giants are on the lookout for new threats and disinformation campaigns that could coincide with the convention.
During the 2020 national political conventions, Protocol will host a two-event series on the tech and policy needed to enable a diverse future workforce and a strong economy. Join us at noon ET tomorrow for the first event in the series, hosted in partnership with ITI.
Old Hollywood is dying, Barry Diller said, but one company's going to stick around:
President Trump said, again, that the Post Office's problems are all Amazon's fault:
Request for product, courtesy of Kanye:
American Express bought Kabbage, as the fintech landgrab continues. But this one wasn't a repeat of the blockbusters we've seen before: Bloomberg reported that the deal valued Kabbage somewhere just below $1 billion, less than when SoftBank invested in it in 2017.
DJI is undergoing big layoffs. The company told Reuters its structure "was becoming unwieldy to manage," and that it has been steadily laying off staff around the company since March.
Amazon is hiring 3,500 new corporate employees across the U.S., including 2,000 people in NYC. VP of workforce development Ardine Williams said the company's still an office-based one, despite allowing WFH until January.
Panos Panay is joining the board at Sonos. Microsoft's chief product officer is a sensible addition — like Sonos, he likes building and selling slightly-too-expensive gadgets — but it's also a bit awkward, given Microsoft's newly close relationship with Google and Sonos' increasingly heated legal battle with Google.
Rishi Dave is MongoDB's new CMO. He comes from Dun & Bradstreet, and has a long history in tech. He'll run MongoDB's whole marketing org.
So you might not be going into the office anytime soon, but you're desperate to look at something other than your kitchen table all day, right? Well here's the future: a new Starbucks concept in Japan that has private phone booths for video conferencing, tables and couches for meetings, and a thing called a "ThinkLab" that you can book for 15 minutes at a time and I'm not even going to try and figure that one out. It's basically a WeWork, except the coffee's not free. And the company that runs it actually makes money.
During the 2020 national political conventions, Protocol will host a two-event series on the tech and policy needed to enable a diverse future workforce and a strong economy. Join us at noon ET tomorrow for the first event in the series, hosted in partnership with ITI.
Today's Source Code was written by David Pierce, with help from Shakeel Hashim. Thoughts, questions, tips? Send them to david@protocol.com, or our tips line, tips@protocol.com. Enjoy your day, see you tomorrow.
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