Technology

The online dating landscape has evolved significantly since the launch of Tinder in 2012.

Over a decade later, the dating app industry reached a market size of over $6 billion in 2024, marking a 15.7% increase from the previous year, according to data from Business of Apps. iOS users accounted for approximately 80% of mobile revenue generated within the sector.

A federal judge ruled on Thursday Google violated antitrust laws to hold a monopoly over online advertising technology, a major loss for the company in its latest antitrust case as Google may soon be forced to sell its Chrome browser and other assets.

Google has been branded an abusive monopolist by a federal judge for the second time in less than a year, this time for illegally exploiting some of its online marketing technology to boost the profits fueling an internet empire currently worth $1.8 trillion.

The ruling issued Thursday by U.S. District Judge Leonie Brinkema in Virginia comes on the heels of a separate decision in August that concluded Google’s namesake search engine has been illegally leveraging its dominance to stifle competition and innovation.

Google operates illegal monopolies over two separate markets related to digital advertising technology, a federal judge ruled on Thursday – dealing the Big Tech giant another historic antitrust loss that could result in a breakup of its online empire.

The bombshell ruling by US Judge Leonie Brinkema in the Eastern District of Virginia determined that Google violated the Sherman Act by dominating the online publisher ad server market and the ad-exchange market that connects ad buyers to sellers.

In a colorful commentary for the Los Angeles Times, Matt K. Lewis argued that callousness is a central feature of the second Trump administration, particularly its policies of deportation and bureaucratic cutbacks. “Once you normalize cruelty,” Lewis concluded in the piece, “the hammer eventually swings for everyone. Even the ones who thought they were swinging it.”

Alphabet's (GOOGL.O), Google illegally dominated two markets for online advertising technology, a judge ruled on Thursday, dealing another blow to the tech giant and paving the way for U.S. antitrust prosecutors to seek a breakup of its advertising products.

Things are about to get uncomfortable in Washington for Google.

Top Republicans in Congress are leaning hard on the tech giant to make its content policies friendlier to the GOP, after winning that fight with social media companies Meta and X.

Senate Commerce Chair Ted Cruz of Texas and House Judiciary Chair Jim Jordan of Ohio are now putting pressure on Google and its parent company Alphabet, which owns both the internet’s dominant search engine and the popular YouTube video platform.

Technology stocks declined Wednesday, led by a 6% drop in Nvidia, as the chipmaking sector signaled that President Donald Trump's sweeping tariff plans could hamper demand and growth.

Nvidia revealed in a filing Tuesday that it will take a $5.5 billion charge tied to exporting its H20 graphics processing units to China and other countries and said that the government will require a license to ship the chips there and other destinations.

4chan appears to be down following a major hack that reportedly exposed its source code. A user on a competing messaging board claimed responsibility for the attack on Monday night and claimed to have reopened the site’s /qa/ board.

Notorious internet forum 4chan was hacked on Tuesday. 

At the time of writing, 4chan’s website was not loading, and users on social media reported the site being intermittently down for hours. 

Messages on a rival message board, which TechCrunch has seen, celebrated the hack, with one person claiming that the hacker responsible for the breach was inside 4chan’s system “for over a year.”