Welcome to Digital-Business-News.com!

Google, Amazon and the like are showing record profits despite protests, boycotts and, especially in the case of Google, being taken to task by the EU for abusing their power as market leader, a situation which manifested itself in a record-breaking penalty. Andrea Nahles (SPD) is backing a law that, if it can gain support and be put into effect, could strip the Californians of their place in digital capitalism.

Dutch online department store Bol.com is expanding its Select premium subscription model. Bol.com Select subscribers can now order all of the over 16 million products from the website with free delivery. Up until this point, free delivery was only available for 300,000 products. The company has continuously expanded its premium membership and is imitating Amazon’s prime program to a greater extent with the latest perk.

Alibaba has invested a lot of money in the Shanghai-based company, Focus Media, a company that operates outdoor digital advertising screens across China, Singapore and Hong Kong. The deal is quite complicated and cost a whopping $2.23 billion, which bought the Chinese e-commerce giant a sizeable share of Focus Media.

Swedish hypermarket Eko has opened its first online platform to sell products. But the company is not offering what people might expect: The online store is called E by Night and sells sex toys and related products. For Eko, the decision to venture into this market came naturally, when they recognized the increased interest in these products in Sweden. Eko wants to change how people think about and percieve adult toys.

European antitrust regulators have fined Google a record breaking €4.34 billion for abusing the Android mobile operating system’s dominance. This fine comes from the fact that Google has imposed three types of restrictions on Android device manufacturers and network operators to ensure that traffic on Android devices goes to the Google search engine. These practises deny rivals the chance to innovate and compete. European consumers are thusly denied the benefits of effective competition in the mobile sphere. Under EU antitrust rules, this is illegal.

Amazon kicked off its 2018 Prime Day on 16 August amidst protests, boycotts, strikes and outages, showing that not everyone is smiling on the Seattle-based giant of online retail. Prime Day is one of Amazon’s largest promotions of the year, one on which they offer deals to subscribers of their Prime service. Proposed cuts to wages and health benefits caused some European Amazon employees to strike on Prime Day, hoping to draw more attention to Amazon’s lacklustre understanding of European workers’ conditions – which are very different when compared to the US.

The pharmaceutical business is one of the most lucrative sectors around with over $300 billion being spent on prescription drugs in the U.S. alone. Amazon is vying for this huge market, buying PillPack. DocMorris, the Dutch mail-order pharmacy, is winning ground in the German market, buying up companies there. What does this mean for the pharmaceutical industry?