Brussels completed the transatlantic pincer: eighteen days after the DMA took effect, the European Commission opened non-compliance investigations into Apple, Alphabet, and Meta — testing steering rules, self-preferencing, and the legality of 'pay or consent.' Amazon answered the AI alliance question with its wallet, completing a $4 billion investment in Anthropic, its largest venture bet ever. And the week closed with a Saturday bombshell: AT&T confirmed that a dataset covering 73 million current and former customers — Social Security numbers included — was circulating on the dark web, opening the year's defining carrier-security saga.
Europe drew first blood in its year of platform enforcement: the European Commission fined Apple more than €1.8 billion for suppressing music-streaming rivals — the company's first EU antitrust penalty — three days before the Digital Markets Act's compliance deadline forced open the iPhone's walled garden across the bloc. Anthropic escalated the frontier-model race with Claude 3, claiming benchmark parity with GPT-4. And on Super Tuesday of all days, Meta's platforms went dark worldwide for hours — logging out Facebook's billions and reminding everyone how much civic infrastructure now runs on one company's login system.