TOKYO (Reuters) - Japanese regulators on Wednesday said Apple Inc (AAPL.O) may have breached antitrust rules by forcing mobile service providers to sell its iPhones cheaply and charge higher monthly fees, denying consumers a fair choice.
FILE PHOTO: A member of Apple staff takes pictures as new iPhone X begins to sell at an Apple Store in Beijing, China November 3, 2017. REUTERS/Damir Sagolj/File Photo
The Fair Trade Commission (FTC) said that Apple had forced NTT Docomo Inc (9437.T) , KDDI Corp (9433.T) and SoftBank Group Corp (9984.T) to offer subsidies and sell iPhones at a discount.
The FTC, which began looking into Apple’s sales practices in 2016, did not punish Apple as the U.S. company had agreed to revise its contracts with the carriers, it said.
Reporting by Makiko Yamazaki and Yoshiyasu Shida; Editing by Ritsuko Ando
BEIJING/SHANGHAI (Reuters) - In China, a platform for risqué jokes is no laughing matter.
FILE PHOTO - The logo of Bytedance"s news feed platform Toutiao is seen as its building in Beijing, China October 21, 2017. Picture taken October 21, 2017. REUTERS/Stringer
Toutiao, a hugely popular news and online content portal that is luring investors, was forced to pull its joke sharing “Neihan Duanzi” app, literally meaning “implied jokes”, after a watchdog said it included “vulgar and improper content”.
The move comes amid a broader clamp-down targeting online content from livestreams and blogs to mobile gaming, as the country’s leaders look to tighten their grip over a huge and diverse cultural scene online popular with China’s youth.
China’s State Administration of Radio and Television ordered the app to be taken down permanently in a post on Tuesday for low values that had “caused strong disgust amongst netizens”. It urged Toutiao to regulate similar content on its other sites.
Toutiao, one of the country’s fastest-growing tech start-ups which was valued at around $ 20 billion last year, has been in hot water with regulators lately. Earlier this week, its main mobile app was also removed from a number of Chinese smartphone app stores following reports of increased censorship.
In a public letter titled “Apology and Introspection”, Toutiao founder Zhang Yiming pledged to raise the number of in-house censors - referred to as content auditors - to 10,000 people from 6,000 currently to keep its content wholesome.
“This product walked the wrong path and had content in deviation of socialist core values,” he wrote in the letter posted on his official microblog account on Wednesday.
Reporting by Pei Li and Adam Jourdan; Editing by Michael Perry
