Unfair. A cheap money grab. No basis in fact or in law. That was some of the invective coming out of Cupertino and Washington in response to an EU ruling that Apple benefited from a sweetheart tax deal with Ireland and must pay $14.5 billion in back taxes and penalties. The appeals process will run for years, but the ruling could signal more immediate consequences for multinational companies like Alphabet, Amazon, Netflix and Facebook, and could reboot long-stalled efforts at corporate tax reform in the U.S.
[David Morgan and Jason Lange | Reuters]
Back in May, Google started a limited test of a ride-sharing service based on Waze, its crowdsourced mapping and navigation app. Now it's expanding the carpool-oriented service to all Waze users in San Francisco. So, does this mean Google is going up against Uber head on? Not just yet.
[Johana Bhuiyan | Recode]
The integration of Nest, maker of smart thermostats and smoke alarms, first into Google and then Alphabet has not been smooth, marked by disappointing performance and leadership changes. Now there's some more reshuffling: Several dozen Nest platform engineers are being moved into the Google team working on its "living room" initiatives, like Google Home, the company's answer to Amazon's Echo speaker.
[Nick Statt | The Verge]
As a destination for viewing videos, Twitter trails far behind YouTube. To try to close the gap, Twitter is finally going to do something YouTube has done for a while: Share ad revenue with its top video creators — and it's offering a more generous split.
[Kurt Wagner | Recode]
PayPal is looking for a cloud computing provider, and right now Google is the front-runner, ahead of market leaders Amazon and Microsoft, in what would be a big win for Google cloud chief Diane Greene.
[Ari Levy | CNBC]
