Author: Kelly Fiveash

Enlarge (credit: Kazuhiro Nogi/AFP/Getty Images)

While Japan's government began the week nosily making big demands about trade and investment deals with the UK and European Union in light of Brexit, SoftBank was quietly tying the knot with British smartphone chip designer ARM.

On Monday, the two companies said that the £24 billion ($32 billion) takeover deal—which was struck in mid-July, just weeks after Britain voted for Brexit—had been completed.

ARM added that its chairman Stuart Chambers had quit immediately following the merger, alongside a number of resignations from non-exec directors. The chip designer said it was also in the process of severing ARM from listings on the London Stock Exchange and Nasdaq, as well as killing registration with the US Securities and Exchange Commission now that it's part of SoftBank.

Enlarge / Japanese PM Shinzo Abe arrives in China for the G20 summit... just as his country's awkward Brexit memo lands. (credit: Etienne Oliveau/Getty Images)

Prime minister Theresa May said at the weekend that she wanted to take her time to secure the best trade deals for a post-Brexit Britain, and reiterated—in her trademark vague terms—that the so-called Article 50 won't be triggered this year. But political pressure from governments as far away as Japan continues to mount.

On Sunday, in a bold move, the Japanese government published a 15-page memo (PDF) setting out a number of demands it wants the UK to adhere to, once it leaves the European Union.

It underscored that Britain faces a torrid time of negotiations—not just with member states in the EU, but further afield, too.

(credit: Spencer E Holtaway)

Facebook faces more pressure from lawmakers in Europe, after Germany's interior minister called on the company to quickly remove hateful and illegal posts—on the same day that its chief Mark Zuckerberg reiterated that the free content ad network wouldn't morph into a media empire.

The call from Thomas de Maiziere comes less than a week since a committee of MPs in the UK concluded that Twitter, Google, and Facebook were "consciously failing" to police extremism on their services.

"Facebook should take down racist content or calls for violence from its pages on its own initiative even if it hasn't yet received a complaint," said de Maiziere on Monday. "Facebook has an immensely important economic position and just like every other large enterprise it has a immensely important social responsibility."

(credit: Clever Cupcakes)

Verizon has confirmed earlier reports that it will buy ailing Internet pioneer Yahoo in an all-cash deal with a price tag of nearly £3.7 billion (~$4.8 billion).

The sale doesn't include Yahoo's shares in Alibaba, Verizon said. Yahoo's Japan shares, its non-core patents, and minority investments are also set to be cut loose from the planned takeover.

Those assets will form part of a new publicly traded company that will be spun out of Yahoo as a separate business. It's unclear who will head up that firm, however.

UK chip designer ARM has agreed to a whopping buyout offer from Japanese telecoms giant SoftBank for £24.3 billion (~$32 billion)—the deal comes just weeks after Brits voted to exit the European Union.

SoftBank said it would retain ARM's senior management team, brand, and lucrative partnership-based business model.

ARM will remain headquartered in Cambridge, and SoftBank has vowed to double the staff headcount in the UK over the next five years. The smartphone chip designer currently has 4,064 employees on its books worldwide.

Google has been hit with a brace of fresh charges in the European Commission's long-running antitrust case against the search and ad giant.

Brussels' competition chief Margrethe Vestager confirmed that her office would "reinforce the first Google case on search" relating to price comparison, by issuing—as rumoured earlier this week—a supplementary statement of objections against the company.

Google also faces another round of charges against its dominant business practices in Europe relating to its ad placements on its own sites, and that of third party websites. The commission said, in a preliminary decision, that Google's AdSense had breached EU antitrust rules in relation to its exclusivity contract with a limited number of the largest third party websites—so-called direct partners.

Adobe Systems took a kick to the shins from a German privacy regulator, after the software maker was found to be using the defunct Safe Harbour deal to transfer data from the European Union to the US.

A piddling fine of just €8,000 was dished out to Adobe by the Hamburg Data Protection Supervisor—a watchdog known for its tough stance on outfits said to be breaching privacy laws.

The supervisor's office said (PDF) it carried out tests on 35 international companies to find out if they were lawfully transferring data across the pond from the EU, following a Court of Justice ruling in October that deemed the Safe Harbour pact to be invalid.

If you've ever wondered how Google defines the term "backrub," then look no further than its search engine for the answer, where we're told that it's "a brief massage of a person's back and shoulders." For many of the complainants in the long-running European Commission competition case against Google's alleged Web search monopoly abuse, that pithy definition goes a long way to explaining their experience of the multinational's vast online estate.

For those among you who don't know your Google history, the search engine started out with the curious name of BackRub at Stanford 20 years ago, until, that is, its servers greedily gobbled their way through the university's bandwidth, and it was time for the cofounders to shift up a gear. A year earlier, in 1995, the planets had aligned when Larry met Sergey at the famous Californian university for the first time.

The two men eventually created an algorithm—dubbed PageRank after Larry Page—that recognised links from important sources, while penalising links that were less relevant. Their BackRub search tool sorted results by relevance, and only looked for words in page titles. The end result was a search engine that appeared to be far superior to the competition of the time, such as Alta Vista.

Google could be hit with a fine as high as $3 billion (~£2.09 billion) in the European Commission's long-running antitrust case against the ad giant's alleged abuse of dominance in the search market.

The Telegraph reported the potential record-breaking multi-billion penalty on Sunday, but noted that the figure hadn't been decided yet.

Sources have similarly told Ars that Google could be whacked with a fine in June, after it was formally charged in April 2015 with favouring its own shopping comparison products over those of its rivals in the European Union.

Dell has followed in the footsteps of its rival HP by hitting the reboot button on its various brands.

Chief Michael Dell confirmed in a letter to employees that Dell—which turned 32 years of age on Tuesday—had a new name: "our family of businesses will officially be known as Dell Technologies," he said. The announcement will be made formally at the EMC World trade show, which kicks off today in Las Vegas.

Dell's family of affected brands includes Dell itself, EMC, VMware, Pivotal, SecureWorks, RSA, and Virtustream—all of which now fall under the "Dell Technologies" banner.