The Verge: A secret Google deal let Spotify completely bypass Android’s app store fees. “On the stand, Google head of global partnerships Don Harrison confirmed Spotify paid a 0 percent commission when users chose to buy subscriptions through Spotify’s own system. If the users picked Google as their payment processor, Spotify handed over 4 percent — dramatically less than Google’s more common 15 percent fee.”
The Hindu: All of Google’s eyes, now on Madras High Court. “The court will decide the fate of civil suits filed against service fees levied on owners of mobile apps featured on Google Play. The litigants have accused Google of abusing its dominant position in the market to impose ‘unconscionable and arbitrary’ conditions.”
iNews: Twitter is making researchers delete data it gave them unless they pay $42,000. “Academic researchers have been set a deadline of the end of the month to delete data they obtained under historic contracts to study Twitter, unless the pay a new $42,000-a-month contract – a demand one called ‘the big data equivalent of book burning’.”
Spectrum: Imaging journal editors resign over ‘extreme’ open-access fees. “The entire editorial boards of two leading neuroscience journals, NeuroImage and NeuroImage:Reports, resigned en masse on Monday over what they say are exorbitant article fees from their publisher, Elsevier. The group intends to launch a new nonprofit open-access journal called Imaging Neuroscience, ‘to replace NeuroImage as the top journal in our field,’ according to a statement posted 17 April to Twitter by an account called Imaging Neuroscience EiC.”
California Genealogical Society: USCIS (again) proposes enormous fee hikes: Public comment deadline is March 6. “The U.S. Citizenship & Immigration Services (USCIS) has once again proposed substantial increases to the fees required to access historical records held by the USCIS Genealogy Program. This would raise the cost for access to millions of historic immigration records by hundreds of dollars, providing further barriers to researchers.”
Chemistry World: Access to chemical database Reaxys under threat in UK as fees spiral . “Multiple Jisc member universities – including University College London and the University of Cambridge – are understood to be holding off on renewing their access to Reaxys while Jisc is negotiating subscription fees. Four years ago, the annual cost of institutional access to the database in the UK was about £13,500, but Elsevier is now charging £38,000, according to an organic chemist at a major UK research university who is familiar with the negotiations and spoke to Chemistry World on condition of anonymity.”
Law & Crime: House Judiciary Committee Will Vote on Bill to Make All Federal Court Records Free for Public to Access. “A committee in the U.S. House of Representatives is set to discuss whether publicly-funded information should be made available to the public for free. On Tuesday, the House Judiciary Committee will mark up a bill aimed at revamping the decades-old Public Access to Court Electronic Records (PACER) system which charges user fees for access to the 500 million-plus documents currently under its administration.”
Reuters: Russian lawmaker tries to curb mobile app payouts for Apple and Google . “A Russian lawmaker submitted draft legislation on Tuesday that would cut and cap the commission on the sale of mobile applications by tech giants Apple and Google. The bill, submitted to Russia’s lower house of parliament by lawmaker Fedot Tumusov, stipulates that commissions on the sale of applications be capped at 20%. Apple currently collects a 30% commission on sales in its App Store.”
Reuters: Exclusive: Facebook says Apple rejected its attempt to tell users about App Store fees. “Facebook Inc on Thursday told Reuters that Apple Inc rejected its attempt to tell users the iPhone maker would take a 30% cut of sales in a new online events feature, forcing Facebook to remove the message to get the tool to users.”
California Genealogical Society: Update: USCIS comment period extended to February 10. “You may have heard that U.S. Customs and Immigration Services (USCIS) is proposing to exponentially increase fees for retrieval of their genealogy records. In some cases this would mean raising costs as much as 500 percent. We wrote about this previously in our blog. USCIS is the repository for most immigration and naturalization records from the late 19th to the mid-20th century. The proposal has drawn protests from historians and genealogists and even from some Congressional members, most notably Senator Mitt Romney.”
New York Times: Have a Search Warrant for Data? Google Wants You to Pay. “Facing an increasing number of requests for its users’ information, Google began charging law enforcement and other government agencies this month for legal demands seeking data such as emails, location tracking information and search queries.”
Salt Lake Institute of Genealogy: UGA Statement on USCIS Proposed Fee Increase. “The Utah Genealogical Association (UGA) strongly opposes the proposed fee increase for the Genealogy Program under the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) as reported in the Federal Register on November 14, 2019. The current proposal is to increase the search fee from $65 to $240 and then the cost of a paper file from $65 to $385. This means the overall charge for genealogists to obtain A-Files, Visa Files, Registry Files, and some C-Files would be $625 per record provided the file number is unknown ($240 file index search plus $385 for the record itself). This is unaffordable to many genealogists, which means the records would be inaccessible to them.”
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