Google Faces Potential $3.3 Billion Antitrust Lawsuit in Italy
Italy's price comparison site operator Moltiply Group MOL 2.93%increase; green up pointing triangle is suing Alphabet's GOOGL 1.92%increase; green up pointing triangle Google for 2.97 billion euros ($3.33 billion) in damages over what it called anti-competitive behaviour.
The lawsuit, which leans on a key European Commission ruling, alleges that the tech giant abused its market dominance to suppress competition from Trovaprezzi.it, a comparison platform operated by Moltiply subsidiary 7Pixel.
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Yahoo
an hour ago
- Yahoo
£200k-a-week contract offer will seal SENSATIONAL striker deal
Liverpool have got plans to move on from Darwin Nunez this summer. The Uruguayan striker only managed five Premier League goals during their title-winning campaign and has largely fallen out of favour with head coach Arne Slot. Speculation has been rife over the last few weeks that the 25-year-old will be sold - as long as Richard Hughes' demands are met. It appears £70m will do the trick for potential suitors although Nunez is being selective about his next destination. Shop the LFC Store The new LFC x Air Max range 🔥 Nike x Air Max LFC x Nike Air Max Advertisement Buy Now LFC Retro Shirts LFC Retro Shirts Buy Now Home Jersey LFC Kits Buy Now LFC Nike Training LFC Nike Training Buy Now Al-Hilal have been knocked back by the No9 - with Nunez holding out for a club in one of Europe's top leagues. It could be AC Milan or Napoli in Italy - and Atletico Madrid have also been reported as suitors. And if Darwin leaves, it would leave a gap up top for a new forward. Top of the list is reportedly Victor Osimhen. Transfer talk has increased in recent weeks over the Nigerian - who is coming off a sensational season in the Turkish Super Lig with Galatasaray. Liverpool like Victor Osimhen The 26-year-old scored 37 times in 41 games overall for Cimbom - helping fire them to the league and Turkish Cup double. Napoli still own Osimhen's playing rights - with the player having spent the season on loan in Turkey. Advertisement He is only under contract until 2026 - meaning Osimhen is available for a fraction of his true transfer value this summer. That sum is reported to be €75m - not a million miles off what the Reds are seeking for Nunez. But the sticking point has always been Osimhen's salary. Indeed it's been previously reported that the Super Eagles sensation was seeking £400k per week from his next club. However, there appears to be a thaw in that stance as Osimhen makes sacrifices to land a Premier League move. © IMAGO Osimhen salary demands SLASHED In an item discussing Manchester United's interest in the former Lille frontman, Foot Mercato claims that Osimhen's salary requests now stand at €12m per year. Advertisement 'Talks have resumed very recently under the conditions discussed a few weeks ago, namely a salary of €12 million for the player and compensation of €75 million including bonuses for Napoli, the club that owns the player,' writes Sebastien Denis. That equates to around £200k per week - HALF of what was previously out there. So if Liverpool can conduct an outbound deal for Nunez - who earns around £140k per week - it means a deal for Osimhen won't break the bank. Indeed there is a tantalising prospect that Hughes could SWAP Osimhen for Nunez in a sensational deal with Napoli. Nonetheless this latest update suggests that Osimhen is no longer out of reach due to his pay packet.
Forbes
an hour ago
- Forbes
Friction Is The Point: What AI Will Never Understand About Being Human
The machine doesn't care what it's making—only that it's making it fast. Frictionless systems ... More optimize output. But meaning, memory, and margin live in the mess it leaves behind. The great smoothing is here. But what if friction isn't failure? What if it's the only thing left that still feels real? This piece continues my article 'Meta's Plans For AI Ads: How Automation Dismantles Culture,' where I explored how automation threatens creative labor. Now, I'm going deeper: not just into what we're losing, but what we must protect—friction, consent, and the human capacity for meaning. These aren't just headlines. They're coordinates on a map of erasure. This isn't a pivot. It's a continuation. Meta, Amazon, and Google have a long, calculated history of dismantling everything that came before them under the guise of reducing 'friction.' Meta siphoned audience from publishers, then crushed their business model. Google devoured classifieds and local journalism. Amazon disintermediated independent retailers and built a commerce monopoly masked as convenience. Each of these shifts promised efficiency and delivered consolidation. Now they're moving upstream. With AI as their engine, they're coming for the creative layer. And if we think their pursuit of frictionlessness won't extend into brand, storytelling, and identity, we've already lost the plot. This isn't theoretical. It's already happened. Each was presented as innovation. Each led to mass devaluation. Now those same companies are moving up the funnel—with AI as the scalpel—to extract the last remaining margin in human-led work: branding, storytelling, identity, and desire. If we pretend this pursuit of frictionlessness will stop short of the emotional, we haven't been paying attention. The result won't just be sameness. It'll be compression—of differentiation, of perceived value, of margin. And when there's no friction left to make someone stop and feel? There's no reason left to pay more. For anything. That's not just a creative loss. That's a threat to profitability. We've taught machines to move faster than us, smoother than us, and now speak for us. But the one thing we haven't taught them? How to care about what happens next. I've sat in rooms where the best ideas weren't obvious. They were uncomfortable. They got laughed at, challenged, rewritten. And those are the ones we still remember. We've been told that friction is inefficiency. That anything slow, messy, or nonlinear is wasteful. But friction isn't failure. It's architecture. It gives shape to ideas. It makes meaning take root. Remove the friction and you remove the form. What's left is output. Not authorship. Not intentionality. Not risk. Not anything that ever made a thing matter. Even video—the medium that once required light, timing, pacing, and emotion—is now generated by Amazon in under five minutes. With AI handling production, creation, and deployment, the very texture of storytelling is being erased. And when the message is frictionless, so is the memory. The human brain doesn't grow easily. It rewires itself through difficulty, uncertainty, and contradiction. Neuroscientists call it neuroplasticity—the process by which new neural pathways are formed when we encounter resistance and complexity. Think about learning to ride a bike. You didn't master balance through reading. You did it by wobbling. Falling. Adjusting. That struggle is what encoded the learning. In creative work, the same principle holds. A campaign brief that sparks debate, a draft that undergoes fundamental revision—these are signs that the brain is actively restructuring perception and sharpening understanding. No amount of generative content can do this for you. The brain doesn't just tolerate friction; it grows because of it. Psychologists, such as Robert Bjork, have demonstrated that introducing intentional obstacles to learning—what he refers to as "desirable difficulty"—enhances retention and depth of understanding. Try recalling a concept before you're shown the answer. It's harder. Slower. But you remember it longer. That's friction in action. In advertising, we've spent years sanding down every edge in the name of clarity. But clarity without tension isn't clarity. It's blandness. Great creativity requires effort. It catches you off guard. That friction forces engagement. And that engagement makes it stick. If it's too smooth, it slides right off. This is a form of attentional bias—a cognitive reality that explains why we create and activate narrative in the first place. When words are grouped in a way that's fresh, specific, and strategically intentional, they interrupt expectation. That's friction. It forces a pause, processing, and reflection. And in a sea of sameness, that pause is power. Narratives slow the brain just enough to invite meaning in. They cause us to contemplate, validate, and value. And in a race-to-the-bottom world, friction becomes the difference between something you scroll past and something you feel compelled to pay for. Strip away that language-level friction and you get optimization without identity—cheap content, cheaper attention, and eventually, commodities no one desires enough to buy at a margin. That's not just a creative crisis. It's a business model collapse in slow motion. This is echoed by the work of Mihály Csíkszentmihályi, a Hungarian-American psychologist best known for introducing the concept of flow—the mental state of deep immersion in meaningful, challenging work. Csíkszentmihályi spent decades studying why some experiences make us feel alive, focused, and fulfilled. His research showed that the most rewarding activities are often preceded by resistance. Friction, in other words, is the entry fee to flow. It's not an obstacle to transcendence—it's the condition for it. The most powerful learning signal in your brain? When something violates your expectations. My friend calls this 'anticappointment,' a favorite neologism of his. Neuroscience refers to this prediction error as the moment your brain stops coasting and starts recalibrating. It's why punchlines land. Why plot twists thrill. Why disruptive creative works. When AI delivers content perfectly calibrated to what it knows we like, it flattens novelty, we get what we expect—and that's the problem. Nothing stretches. Nothing stirs. Friction is what creates those jolts of surprise. And surprise is what teaches. Without friction, the brain stays asleep. Berkeley anthropologist Alexei Yurchak, in his book Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More, coined the term hypernormalization. He describes a society where systems are so optimized and hollow that people continue to believe in them, even though they know they no longer hold meaning. Yurchak studied late-Soviet life, where official narratives felt eternal and artificial at once. Citizens went through the motions—work, slogans, routine—long after anyone believed the story. The result wasn't a revolution. It was a slow, soul-deep detachment from reality. Today's version? You scroll through infinite, polished content with the faint sense that none of it was made for you. Brand messages, influencer posts, AI-generated ads—all optimized to fit your feed, not your mind. It functions. But it doesn't stick. You know this feeling. It's nostalgia for something you didn't quite live. Familiarity with nothing specific. The eerie sense that even the intimate has become templated. That's the danger of a frictionless world: it erodes not just creativity, but belief, connection, and identity, not through rupture, but through rehearsal. We're not witnessing liberation. We're watching reality bleed out by degrees. Friction is what interrupts the loop. It's the glitch that reminds you something is off, and makes you care enough to ask why. Friction is the last honest metric. It's what reveals taste. It's what reveals care. It's the difference between something you scroll past and something that stops you. In a world where every brand has access to the same generative tools, the only real differentiator left is discernment, and discernment doesn't scale. It struggles. It questions. It hesitates before hitting publish. This is not about resisting AI. It's about resisting amnesia. It's about building systems—and stories—that let humans stay in the loop long enough to feel what they're making. Friction doesn't just slow us down. It reminds us we still have a choice. When content is optimized to our past behavior, when ads are generated before we know we need them, when every message is invisible in its targeting but intimate in its tone—are we still consenting to what we consume? Consent isn't a checkbox. It's the ability to pause, to question, to say yes with awareness—or no with clarity. But in a frictionless system, consent erodes, not by force, but by design. We don't opt in—we drift in. We don't choose—we scroll. We don't author—we adapt. Friction is what lets us feel that drift. It's the tug that says, this wasn't mine until I made it mine. Without it, influence becomes indistinguishable from control. This isn't just a philosophical distinction. It's an economic one. It's a forecast. Everything on the left can be automated. Everything on the right can't be faked. And that's the opportunity. If you're in marketing, brand, or creative work, this isn't the time to panic. It's time to get precise. Here's how to make yourself irreplaceable inside systems designed to erase you: These aren't productivity hacks. They're AI survival strategies for authorship in an age of automation.
Yahoo
an hour ago
- Yahoo
Announcement regarding the governance of Renault Group
PRESS RELEASEJune 15, 2025 Announcement regarding the governance of Renault Group Boulogne-Billancourt, June 15,2025 – After 5 years at the head of Renault Group, Luca de Meo has announced his decision to step down and pursue new challenges outside the automotive sector. The Board of Directors, convened by its Chairman Jean-Dominique Senard, expressed their gratitude to Luca de Meo for the turnaround and transformation of Renault Group and accepted that his departure would be effective from July 15, 2025. Luca de Meo will continue to perform his duties until that date. The Board of Directors has initiated the process of appointing a new Chief Executive Officer based on the already defined succession plan. The Board of Directors has expressed its confidence in the quality and experience of the management team to continue and accelerate Renault Group's transformation strategy into this new phase. "For five years, Luca de Meo has worked to restore Renault Group to its rightful place. Under his leadership, our company has returned to a healthy foundation, boasts an impressive range of products and has resumed growth. Besides being an exceptional captain of industry, Luca de Meo is also a creative, committed, passionate and inspiring individual. Today, the entire company joins me in thanking him for all these years and all the collective challenges successfully met. On a personal level, I will always remember the quality of our relations during this unforgettable journey. This also gives me the opportunity to warmly thank the Group's employees who have worked alongside us for the recovery of this emblematic company that we are all so proud of.' highlighted Jean-Dominique Senard. "There comes a time in one's life when one knows the job is done. At Renault Group, we have faced immense challenges in less than five years! We have achieved what many thought impossible. Today, the results speak for themselves: they are the best in our history. We have a strong team and an agile organization. We also have a strategic plan ready for the next generation of products. That is why I have decided it is time for me to hand over the baton. I am leaving a transformed company, poised for the future, to apply my experience to other sectors and embark on new adventures.' shared Luca de Meo. 'Leading Renault Group has been a privilege. It has been a human and industrial adventure that only happens once in a lifetime. For this, I will always be grateful to the women and men of this company - the 'Renaulutionnaires' - for their passion, their commitment and their conviction. They are the true driving engines. Moreover, I would like to thank Jean-Dominique Senard for choosing me several years ago, for his support and trust, as well as the Board of Directors, for believing in our projects. And the best is yet to come...". RENAULT GROUPMEDIA RELATIONS Valérie GILLOT +33 6 83 92 92 Rie Yamane +33 6 03 16 35 20 RENAULT GROUPINVESTORS RELATIONS Philippine de 6 13 45 68 39 About Renault Group Renault Group is at the forefront of a mobility that is reinventing itself. The Group relies on the complementarity of its 4 brands - Renault - Dacia - Alpine and Mobilize - and offers sustainable and innovative mobility solutions to its customers. Established in 114 countries, Renault Group sold 2.265 million vehicles in 2024. It employs more than 98,000 people who embody its Purpose every day, so that mobility brings people closer. Ready to pursue challenges both on the road and in competition, the Group is committed to an ambitious and value generating transformation focused on the development of new technologies and services, and a new range of even more competitive, balanced, and electrified vehicles. In line with environmental challenges, the Group's ambition is to achieve carbon neutrality in Europe by 2040. More information: Attachment 20250615_ EN_Renault Group_Press ReleaseError in retrieving data Sign in to access your portfolio Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data
