Eurobites: Apple set for $500M EU antitrust fine – report

The European Commission is set to fine Apple around $500 million for alleged antitrust offenses related to how it treats rival music services featured on its App Store, according to the Financial Times (paywall applies), which cites five anonymous sources involved with the case. The details of the fine, says the FT, are expected to be announced early next month. At the heart of the issue is how Apple is seen to prevent rival streaming services from informing potential users how they might be able to access their services more cheaply outside the "walled garden" confines of the App Store. (See Eurobites: Spotify wants UK to stop Apple's 'outrageous' transaction charges.)

Nokia is claiming to have made a breakthrough on a technology it calls multi-access edge slicing which it plans to showcase through a joint demonstration with UAE operator e& at Barcelona's forthcoming Mobile World Congress. Using multi-access edge slicing, says Nokia, operators can enable a 4G/5G smartphone user to send sensitive information using a secure network slice while also simultaneously participating in a video call using another slice. With a multi-sliced fixed wireless or fixed access network, a family could use one slice to access services such as HDTV streaming while another slice could be used for home working on a laptop.

Liberty Global is to spin off 100% of Swiss subsidiary Sunrise to its shareholders in a move that, claims the parent company, "aims to maximize shareholder value by crystallizing the value of Sunrise." The listing of Sunrise on the SIX Swiss Exchange is planned for the second half of 2024. (See Eurobites: Switzerland's Sunrise plans job cuts in new year.)

Edinburgh-based Commsworld has landed a public sector connectivity contract in Dundee. The ten-year deal – the value of which has not been disclosed – will see Commsworld bring 1Gbit/s, fiber-based broadband to 42 schools in and around the city. In time, says Commsworld, speeds could reach 10 Gbit/s.

The EU's Digital Services Act, which forces larger online platforms operating inside the bloc to implement a number of user-protecting measures, has officially come into force for all online intermediaries. Such measures include providing users with a means to flag up illegal content and a ban on targeting children with ads based on personal profiling.

UK altnet CityFibre has begun work to connect almost 45,000 hard-to-reach premises in the eastern English county of Cambridgeshire. The project, which benefits from £69 million (US$87 million) of state investment, forms part of the government's £5 billion ($6.3 billion) Project Gigabit program.

Deutsche Telekom's IT services unit, T-Systems, has established a new private cloud region in Barcelona, with twin data centers opened in Sant Boi and Cerdanyola in Catalonia. The new region represents an expansion of T-Systems' Future Cloud Infrastructure (FCI) platform, which already has data centers in Germany, Switzerland, Austria, the Netherlands and the US.

Good old Elon, he'll never let you down. A mere year and three months after being unceremoniously sacked by what was then Twitter, former staff at the Ghanaian office of what we're now supposed to call "X" have received the redundancy money to which they were entitled, the BBC reports.