The Big Tech antitrust battleground is expanding. European regulators have historically led the charge to rein in the tech industry, tackling Google’s ad and search businesses, Meta’s data privacy policies, and a tangle of Amazon issues impacting both buyers and sellers.

But the United States is gaining ground when it comes to earning its monopoly-bashing badge, and according to data from decision intelligence company Morning Consult, US consumers are on board with those efforts.

Responses collected between September 2022 and June 2023 from either 2,200 or 4,400 US adults per month indicate Big Tech is facing strong consumer headwinds, with nearly twice as many US adults supporting efforts to break up major tech companies as those that oppose them.

Big Tech regulatory headwinds, however, seem to have taken a back seat to artificial intelligence.

Keep reading here.—MA

Moore’s Law says computers will inevitably get smaller, faster, and more efficient with time—we see that with iPhones clear as day. LiquidPiston is doing the same with engines.

They’re making engines up to 80% smaller, 30% more fuel efficient, and 10x more powerful. And their engine platform can scale to meet various needs across markets like defense, aviation, drones, automotive, and more.

These engines are also cleaner since they’re capable of running on zero-carbon hydrogen. And as major car brands start building hydrogen-powered cars, there could be no better time for a hydrogen-capable engine.

Their $30m in US government contracts and 156% profit growth in 2022 are just the beginning.

Check out LiquidPiston’s limited-time investment opportunity here.

Less than a week after a long-awaited victory that would allow San Francisco robotaxis to offer fared rides 24/7, General Motors-owned Cruise is drastically cutting back its operations in Fog City.

The California Department of Motor Vehicles, one of two agencies responsible for managing autonomous driving in the state, said in an August 18 statement that it was “investigating recent concerning incidents involving Cruise vehicles in San Francisco,” and that the company had agreed to reduce its fleet by 50%.

One of those incidents involved a Cruise robotaxi and a fire truck, which collided in an intersection. The passenger in the Cruise vehicle was transported to a hospital in an ambulance for “non-severe injuries,” the company tweeted.

As to how a robotaxi ended up in the path of an emergency vehicle responding to a late-night call, Cruise said there were “several factors that added complexity” to the incident, noting that the intersection where the collision occurred is “significantly occluded by buildings, meaning that it is not possible to see objects around the corner until they are physically very close to the intersection.”

Keep reading here.—MA

Tech occupation unemployment fell to 1.8% in July, the lowest level since January—a sign of the sector’s continued strength.

That’s according to CompTIA’s analysis of the newest numbers from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. In CompTIA’s report, released August 4, the IT training and certification organization noted that the volume of hiring, low unemployment rate, and number of open jobs is making for a tight labor market in the sector. “Given the pace of tech hiring, it remains a fairly tight market for tech talent,” said Tim Herbert, chief research officer at CompTIA.

By the numbers. In July, tech companies hired 5,432 employees. Hiring was most robust for PC, semiconductor, and components manufacturing, telecommunications, and cloud infrastructure, data processing, and hosting. CompTIA also highlighted “under-the-radar” cities that are seeing tech employment growth: St. Louis, Jacksonville, Sacramento, and Las Vegas.

Total tech jobs across the economy increased by 65,000, and postings dropped to 204,400 from 236,000 in June. The jobs in highest demand? Software developers, IT project managers, support specialists, systems analysts and engineers, and data scientists—though the numbers for most of the top 10 careers were down month over month.

Keep reading here.—EH

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Stat: 41%. That’s how much more content was shared on—wait for it—LinkedIn in the spring of this year compared to the same period of 2021, Bloomberg reported, citing the networking site.

Quote: “When we first started tracking these unreliable AI-generated news websites, we found 49 in the first week of May. Now we have identified 421, and this number is growing—we’re still identifying around two dozen a week.”—McKenzie Sadeghi, a senior analyst at NewsGuard, to the Toronto Star in an article about how AI “news” sites disseminate information

Read: Fake meat is bleeding, but it’s not dead yet (Wired)

Usually, we write about the business of tech. Here, we highlight the *tech* of tech.

What? What?!: Brian X. Chen over at the New York Times did us all a solid this week and unpacked why the theme songs and battle scenes in literally all of your favorite shows are SO LOUD while the dialogue is barely audible. (We here at Tech Brew are known to keep the remote in our hands to turn the volume down during battle scenes in The Great—which is truly great—and turn it up when Velementov mumbles through his latest plans to kill Peter.) Chen offers some fixes for this maddening problem, and the whole piece is worth reading. But the TL;DR? You’re gonna need some new tech—and even then, you still might need to activate subtitles for some shows.