Leo Mirani

On the same day European regulators filed formal antitrust charges against Google last month, they also announced a new investigation into Google’s Android operating system. Meanwhile, the company faces fines in several European countries for its 2012 privacy policy change. It is confronting a web of new, harsher data-protection laws, grappling with a European Court of Justice ruling on the right to be forgotten, and awaiting a decision on another case that will decide whether European data-sharing exemptions for American firms should be stopped.

Warmduscher, in German, refers to a Goldilocks-like person who only takes warm showers, implying that he is a bit of wimp. Gurfa, in Arabic, is the amount of water than can be held in one hand. Nunchi, in Korean, is the art of listening and gauging another’s mood.

Over the weekend, on April 25, Ferdinand Piëch resigned as chairman of Volkswagen following a boardroom battle that saw him lose the confidence of the board. It was an abrupt end to a spectacular career.

It’s hard enough for adults to navigate the internet’s maze of content—editorial, “advertorial,” sponsored, or native. So it’s perhaps unsurprising that children have an even harder time telling the difference between journalism and advertising.

If anyone thought European Union digital commissioner Günther Oettinger was bluffing when he recently suggested (paywall) the EU might rein in big internet companies like Google, Facebook, and Yahoo, they may not think so now. According to leaked documents from Oettinger’s office, the EU has been mulling the idea of establishing a new regulator to aggressively go after dominant (and mainly US-based) web platforms, essentially clearing the way for European competitors.

One year ago yesterday, Margrethe Vestager went to Horsens, a tiny Danish town of just over 50,000 people, on a trip to a care home to understand the nutritional requirements of its elderly residents.

For a decade, it seemed like the technology industry was going to usher in a newer, friendlier form of capitalism. The CEOs wore t-shirts and hoodies. Their staff had spare time to improve the world. They said they wouldn’t be evil. For a while, web users believed them.

Before the advent of mobile, this is roughly what the state of communication looked like in some of Africa’s biggest countries, compared to the US.

The European Union has formally charged Google with favoring its own services over those of its rivals—adding its mobile operating system, Android, to the list of things the authorities are deeply unhappy about.

For weeks there has been speculation, both private and public, that the European Commission’s competition commissioner, Margrethe Vestager, will tomorrow make some sort of announcement regarding its investigation into Google. Vestager is scheduled to fly to America for a meeting of competition officials at the American Bar Association in Washington DC tomorrow. And the belief is that saying something publicly would allow her to comment on the case beyond mere homilies.

Why do companies and institutions get hacked? Sometimes it is because of outside attacks and malicious software. Sometimes insiders go rogue. But most often, it’s just a mistake. For the second year in a row, the single biggest cause of data breaches, as classified by the Verizon Data Breach Investigations Report (pdf), an authoritative annual study, is “miscellaneous error.”

Mobile has turned the tech industry upside down, destroying old businesses and creating new ones. But there is one corner of the tech industry that is strangely unaffected by the rise of the smartphone: hacking.

This would seem a bad time to be in the ATM business. Every week brings pronouncements of some new digital payments system. Apple, most notably, launched Apple Pay late last year. Samsung debuted its own payments systems in March. Google is rolling out Google Wallet (again) and is supposedly also releasing Android Pay for mobile. Facebook will soon allow Americans to send each other money. And a newfangled service called Venmo is popular with young Americans these days (who appear to use it primarily to pay for beer and pizza, and the occasional drug deal).

Johannesburg is a long way from Tehran. But celebrations in the Iranian capital after an historic nuclear agreement framework last week were echoed in the Joburg headquarters of MTN, a mobile operator that commands the biggest market share in Africa.

For Google and Europe, it is only the end of beginning. After five years of wrangling, three attempts at some sort of settlement, and a change of guard at the top of European bureaucracy, Europe is getting ready to file formal antitrust charges against Google, according to reports from both the Wall Street Journal and the Financial Times (paywalls).

The idea that new internet users will come online on smartphones rather than computers is now well established. But it is often assumed that this population is composed entirely of people from the world’s poor countries. A new report from Pew punctures that assumption: It turns out that one in five American adults access the internet primarily from their smartphones.

Mercedes-Benz, best known for luxury cars, now wants to make pickup trucks.

Between December 2013 and December 2014, the one-time Facebook competitor MySpace grew 469%. Yes, yes, the pioneering social network, started in 2003, grew only from a ludicrously low base in 2013. But even in absolute numbers, MySpace is now bigger, in the US, than the fast-growing upstart Snapchat, media darling Vice, content farm elitedaily.com, viral factory imgur.com, as well as Vine, SoundCloud, and the NYPost network of sites.

Everybody needs to calm down about Facebook.

It can sometimes feel like smartphones have been ubiquitous for years. But even as recently as five years ago, only 300 million smartphones were shipped—just one in five of all mobile phone shipments globally.  In 2014, device makers shipped 1.3 billion smartphones, accounting for two of every three new phones.

The Facebook page of Andreas Lubitz, the co-pilot of Germanwings flight 9525 who French prosecutors say ”deliberately” crashed the aircraft, is back online after being taken down.

We are updating this breaking news post as more information becomes available.

This piece is being updated as news comes in.

The internet, it has long been argued by development agencies, financial institutions, tech companies, and the press, is good for countries. According to research conducted by the World Bank in 2009, for every 10% increase in high-speed internet penetration, there is a corresponding 1.3% increase in GDP growth. In the five years to 2009, the internet contributed at least a tenth of the total GDP growth in China, India, and Brazil, according to McKinsey research.