Federal Trade Commission Chair Lina Khan had a bad week, with a federal judge in California rejecting the FTC’s request to block Microsoft Corp.’s pending $68.7 billion acquisition of gaming giant Activision Blizzard Inc.

The FTC filed an appeal on Wednesday, which could be the last chance for the agency to put the brakes on the deal.

The European Union was initially the one that blocked the deal, noted theCUBE industry analyst Dave Vellante, but its was able to work things out with Microsoft.

“Microsoft said, look, the concern you have over Call of Duty and us restricting access to Call of Duty, we’ll agree to make Call of Duty available to anybody who wants it — doesn’t have to come to our platform to get it,” Vellante said on the latest episode of “theCUBE Podcast.”

He continued: “The EU said, ‘Alright, cool, boom, that’s the consent decree. You abide by that, you violate that, we’re going to come after you. But if you can play by the rules, no problem.’”

That might lead one to figure that if it’s good enough for the EU, it must be good enough for the United States, Vellante added. But problems followed from the FTC and Khan.

“In my opinion, she’s going outside her swim lane. I don’t even know if she has congressional authority to do some of this stuff,” he said. “She rejects that outright: ‘I’m taking that to court.’ She’s even appealing the ruling just to bust balls. It’s not right.”

Khan is on a “crusade” and possesses a worldview that is “warped from reality,” according to theCUBE industry analyst John Furrier. Although Furrier could understand her point of view, he did not agree with it.

“Sometimes, you’ve got to let the free market do its thing,” he said. “I’m not saying don’t have oversight. If anything, I think tech needs to have more oversight. Or not oversight — more understanding, holistically, as it hits all aspects of our lives.”

Supercloud 3

The role of cloud security and generative artificial intelligence in supercloud’s development will be two key areas of focus during theCUBE’s exclusive event July 18-19 — “Supercloud 3: Security, AI and the Supercloud” event. The event will also tackle the challenges of cross-cloud security in the cloud, hybrid cloud and supercloud.

TheCUBE analysts will talk with a dozens of expert guests, including Jay Chaudhry, founder, chairman and CEO of Zscaler Inc.; Phil Venables, vice president of Google LLC and chief information security officer of Google Cloud; George Kurtz, founder, president and chief executive officer of CrowdStrike Inc.; and Tom Gillis, senior vice president and general manager of security at Cisco, among many others.

“I learned a lot. It’s all in my head. And I can’t wait to actually do the live program, and then summarize and synthesize two days of content,” Vellante said.

During the event, participants will explore what’s happening now and what comes next as new generative AI models continue to offer promise and peril for the enterprise.

AI and the SAG strike

Meanwhile this week, Screen Actors Guild actors joined writers on the picket lines, with concerns being voiced around working conditions, pay and the possible use of AI in productions in the years to come. SAG accused studios of wanting to scan the faces of background extras to then use their images in perpetuity.

“They’re worried that they’re saying, OK, they can just take that facial image, pay them once, and then replicate it wherever else they need it, and can dramatically cut the pay of the extra, of the actors,” Vellante said. “So they’re saying, ‘Wait a minute, no. We have to renegotiate this and lock in our rights, our IP rights.’”

The problem in all of this is that the studios have the money and the control, according to Furrier. So, what ultimately breaks this? It’s a new vendor, and a new way, according to Furrier.

“I think what will solve this is new talent will say, ‘Screw that, the middleman. Go direct,’” he said. “The YouTubers, like you know, the MrBeast, he makes most of his money, not so much from YouTube. He makes it from the brand deals he does.”

Hollywood is its “own little racket,” but the studios are there, according to Furrier. So, it’s interesting how a creator culture is emerging, which is all about democratization.

“If you told me 25 years ago that people can go on YouTube and get billions of views being no name, I’d be like, what? YouTube’s just upload videos of my kid’s Little League game,” he said. “But now it’s like the new TV.”

Watch the full ‘theCUBE Podcast’ below to find out why these industry pros were also mentioned:

Lina Khan, chair of the Federal Trade Commission
Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta Platforms
Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla Motors
Taylor Lorenz, journalist
Jennifer Rie, senior litigation analyst – Antitrust at Bloomberg LP
Elia Zaitsev, CTO at CrowdStrike
John Walls, theCUBE analyst
Gary Kasparov, chess grandmaster
Gary Gensler, chairperson of the Securities and Exchange Commission
Mike Olson, former CSO of Cloudera
Michael Dell, chairman and CEO of Dell Technologies
Merritt Baer, field chief information security officer of Lacework
Jeff Jonas, CEO of founder and chief scientist at Senzing
Bob Iger, CEO of The Walt Disney Company
MrBeast, YouTuber and philanthropist
Sarah Silverman, comedian, actress and writer
Andy Jassy, president and CEO of Amazon
Matthew Prince, co-founder and CEO of Cloudflare
George Kurtz, CEO of CrowdStrike

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Photo: SiliconANGLE