exchanges

Regulators in Europe have threatened to break-up Google. They say it could be the only way to prevent anti-competitive behavior in the ad market. While Google has been fined eye-watering sums for breaking competition laws in Europe before, they've ... proven a poor deterrent given the company's huge revenues. This time, though, the penalty may be a forcible sale of some of its ad business. The key to the legal problem is that Google is a major player in all three elements of online advertising: businesses buying ads, businesses selling ads, and the technology that brings together buyers and ... (view more)

Two Facebook millionaires want US officials to regulate an exchange for buying and selling the controversial "cryptocurrency" Bitcoin. The move follows a scandal when the largest such exchange in Japan went out of business . The Bitcoin currency ... isn't issued by any government or backed by any assets. Instead, each new unit of the currency is created when a computer successfully solves what's effectively a puzzle designed to slowly increase the amount of Bitcoins in circulation. Every time one user pays a Bitcoin to another, a publicly available ledger of transactions is ... (view more)