Amid the hodgepodge of Verizon Media assets that Apollo Global Management is buying from Verizon -- Yahoo Finance, TechCrunch, advertising technology, Yahoo Fantasy -- there's one cash flow stream that will not die: AOL. From a report: The famed internet company that once bought Time Warner for $182 billion and used to make billions of dollars annually selling dial-up modem access, still has a monthly subscription service called AOL Advantage. In 2015, 2.1 million people were still using AOL's dial-up service. That revenue stream has dried up. The number of dial-up users is now "in the low thousands," according to a person familiar with the matter.

But AOL still has a fairly lucrative base of customers who pay for technical support and identity theft services each month. There are about 1.5 million monthly customers paying $9.99 or $14.99 per month for AOL Advantage, said another person, who asked not to be named because the information is private. If average revenue per user is $10 per month, conservatively, that's $180 million of annual revenue.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Vox: The company plans to start selling subscriptions to podcasts and keeping a slice of each transaction for itself. Apple CEO Tim Cook briefly mentioned plans to roll out a subscription feature during the company's keynote event Tuesday, without offering more details. But a person familiar with Apple's plans has spelled it out to Recode:

- Starting next month, Apple will let podcast publishers sell subscriptions to individual shows or groups of shows, and set their own pricing, starting at 49 cents a month in the US.
- Apple won't require podcasters to create Apple-only exclusive shows, but it does want them to distinguish between stuff they're already distributing via Apple and stuff going up on other platforms: That could mean ad-free shows or shows with extra content or brand-new shows that only exist on Apple.
- Apple will keep 30 percent of any subscription revenue creators generate in their first year on the platform. After that, Apple's cut will drop to 15 percent. That's the same pricing scheme Apple already uses for other subscription services, like TV streamers.

A U.S. advocacy group called The Repair Association is urging Americans to demand protections for their right to repair from the country's consumer protection agency.

"Tell the FTC: People just want to fix their stuff!" argues a page urging concerned U.S. citizens to sign an online petition (shared by long-time Slashdot reader Z00L00K).

The petition asks the FTC to...

• Enforce the law against companies who use illegal tying arrangements to force consumers to purchase connected repair services.

• Enforce the law against companies who violate the Magnuson Moss Warranty Act by voiding warranties when a consumer fixes something themselves or uses third-party parts or repair services.

• Enforce the law against companies who refuse to sell replacement parts, diagnostic and repair tools, or service information to independent repair providers.

• Publish new guidance on unfair, deceptive, and abusive terms in end user license agreements (EULAs) that: restrict independent or self repair; restrict access to parts and software; prohibit the transfer of user licenses; that and that purport to void warranties for independent or self repair.

• Issue new rules prohibiting exclusivity arrangements with suppliers, customers, and repair providers that exclude independent repair providers and suppress competition in the market for repair services.

• Issue new rules prohibiting companies from deceiving customers by selling products which cannot be repaired without destroying the device or cannot be repaired outside of the company's own service network, without disclosing that fact at the point of sale.

A grand jury has indicted a California resident accused of stealing Shopify customer data on over a hundred merchants, TechCrunch reported Monday. From the report: The indictment charges Tassilo Heinrich with aggravated identity theft and conspiracy to commit wire fraud by allegedly working with two Shopify customer support agents to steal merchant and customer data from Shopify customers to gain a competitive edge and "take business away from those merchants," the indictment reads. The indictment also accuses Heinrich, believed to be around 18-years-old at the time of the alleged scheme, of selling the data to other co-conspirators to commit fraud. A person with direct knowledge of the security breach confirmed Shopify was the unnamed victim company referenced in the indictment.

Last September, Shopify, an online e-commerce platform for small businesses, revealed a data breach in which two "rogue members" of its third-party customer support team of "less than 200 merchants." Shopify said it fired the two contractors for engaging "in a scheme to obtain customer transactional records of certain merchants." Shopify said the contractors stole customer data, including names, postal addresses and order details, like which products and services were purchased. One merchant who received the data breach notice from Shopify said the last four digits of affected customers' payment cards were also taken, which the indictment confirms. Another one of the victims was Kylie Jenner's cosmetics and make-up company, Kylie Cosmetics, the BBC reported.

The Verge writes: If you've ever struggled through a maze of online customer service to cancel a subscription or delete an account, you've likely encountered "dark patterns" — user interfaces that are designed to trick and frustrate users. The concept was coined in 2010 but is slowly being addressed in U.S. legislation, with California this week announcing that it is banning the use of dark patterns that stop users from opting out of the sale of their personal data.

The updated regulation strengthens enforcement of the 2018 California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA), one of the toughest consumer privacy laws in the US. The CCPA gives Californians the right "to say no to the sale of personal information," but the state government is evidently worried that these options will be buried under byzantine menus. By banning dark patterns, California will "ensure that consumers will not be confused or misled when seeking to exercise their data privacy rights," said the state's Attorney General Xavier Becerra in a press statement.

The newly-approved regulation does not ban all uses of dark patterns, only those that have "the substantial effect of subverting or impairing a consumer's choice to opt-out" of schemes where their personal data is being sold...

Businesses found not to be in compliance with the CCPA are sent a "notice to cure," giving them a 30-day window to amend their services.

Telegram is riding high, adding tens of million of users this year. Now the bill is coming due. WSJ: The messaging service and social-media platform owes creditors roughly $700 million by the end of April, according to people briefed on the company's plans and loan documents viewed by The Wall Street Journal. At the same time, Telegram Group must cover rising equipment and bandwidth expenses because of its rapid growth, despite going years without attempting to generate revenue. Telegram is one of the few significant social-media challengers to Facebook on a trajectory toward one billion users active each month by the end of 2022, up from roughly 550 million today. But first Pavel Durov, the Dubai-based Russian emigre who owns Telegram, needs to figure out how to convert his app's momentum into a self-sustaining business. [...] To pay the bills, Mr. Durov is issuing investors $1 billion to $1.5 billion of company debt, with the promise of discounted equity if the company eventually goes public, the people briefed on the plans said. He has also announced plans to start selling ads in public Telegram channels as soon as later this year, as well as offering other premium services for businesses and users.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: /e/ OS, the "open-source, pro-privacy, and fully degoogled" fork of Android, is coming to Canada and the USA. Of course, you've always been able to download the software in any region, but now (as first spotted by It's Foss News) the e Foundation will start selling preloaded phones in North America. Previously, /e/ only did business in Europe. Like normal, the e Foundation's smartphone strategy is to sell refurbished Samsung devices with /e/ preloaded. In the US, there are only two phones right now: the Galaxy S9 for $379.99 or a Galaxy S9+ for $429.99. North Americans still have reason to be jealous of Europe, where you can get /e/ preloaded on a Fairphone, which is also Europe-exclusive. These Samsung phones are used devices, but the site says the devices have "been checked and reconditioned to be fully working at our partner's facilities." The phones have a one-year warranty and are described as "Good-as-New" with "no surprises." An /e/ device means you'll be getting a fork of Android 10, and for ongoing support, the e Foundation says, "We aim to support with at least 3 years of software updates and security patches."

/e/ OS was founded by Gael Duval, the creator of Mandrake Linux, and the project describes itself as a "non-profit project in the public interest." /e/ is built a lot like a Linux distribution, in that it takes a curated collection of other open source projects, merges them into a single product, and does its best to fill in the remaining gaps. In this case, /e/ is based on LineageOS, the Android community's open source, device-ready version of Google's Android source code. The primary contribution of /e/ is filling in all the gaps left by the lack of Google apps, so there's an /e/ app store, an /e/ cloud storage and account system, and various Google-replacement apps like a Chromium-based browser, a fork of K-9 Mail for email, contacts, search, photos, etc. The company is even trying to build a Google Assistant replacement. Actually getting regular Android apps to run on a forked version of Android is a challenge. Google Play Services is built into many apps for things like push notifications, and there's a good chance that functionality won't work on /e/ OS. These apps will at least run on /e/ OS instead of exiting outright, thanks to the inclusion of MicroG, an open source project that hijacks Google API calls.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Have you ever bought a movie or TV show through the PlayStation Store? Me neither. As a result, Sony announced today it will remove them, starting August 31, 2021. "We've seen tremendous growth from PlayStation fans using subscription-based and ad-based entertainment streaming services on our consoles," Sony wrote in a post over on the PlayStation Blog. "With this shift in customer behavior, we have decided to no longer offer movie and TV purchases and rentals through PlayStation Store." As a multimedia company producing movies and TV alongside music and games, it made sense for Sony to sell all of it through various iterations of the PlayStation's digital storefront, in theory at least. In practice, it seems like console owners were mostly just interested in buying games, especially following the rise of Netflix and Amazon Prime.

Fake reviews for products sold on Amazon's Marketplace are being sold online "in bulk", according to Which? The consumer group found 10 websites selling fake reviews from $7 each and incentivising positive reviews in exchange for payment or free products. From a report: It suggested the firm was facing an "uphill struggle" against a "widespread fake reviews industry". An Amazon spokesman said: "We remove fake reviews and take action against anyone involved in abuse." The retail giant's Marketplace allows other retailers to sell their goods via the Amazon website. Which? identified websites offering review services for goods for sale on Amazon Marketplace that violated the firm's terms and conditions. These included "packages" of fake reviews available for sellers to buy for about $21 individually, as well as bulk packages starting at $862 for 50 reviews and going up to $11,130 for 1,000. The group also suggested that five of the businesses it looked at had more than 702,000 "product reviewers" on their books. Product reviewers are offered small payments ranging from a few pounds up to more than $14, alongside free or discounted products. They can even take part in "loyalty schemes" and earn themselves premium goods, from children's toys to exercise equipment.

According to CEO Tim Cook, there are now more than 1 billion iPhones being used by customers around the world. The new milestone comes as the company earned over $100 billion in a single quarter for the first time in the company's history. 9to5Mac reports: Cook shared the new milestone in an earnings-focused interview with Reuters. The new metric is part of an overall increase of active devices around the world, reaching 1.65 billion compared to 1.5 billion this time last year: "Apple Chief Executive Officer Tim Cook told Reuters in an interview that the company now has an active installed base of 1.65 billion devices, compared with 1.5 billion devices a year ago. Cook also said Apple now has an installed base of more than 1 billion iPhones, an increase over the 900 million the company most recently disclosed in 2019."

In the interview, he cites Apple's growth opportunity in China as a source of the company's success: "'We had two of the top three selling smartphones in urban China,' Cook told Reuters in an interview, adding that many of the company's other products and services also sold well. Cook said that Apple gained iPhone sales in China both from customers switching from rival Android devices as well as existing customers upgrading devices, but said 'upgraders in particular set an all-time record in China.'"

Spurred by big demand for top-of-the-line iPhones, the average selling price in the U.S. hit $873 last quarter, up from $809 a year ago, according to a report from Chicago-based Consumer Intelligence Research Partners. From a report: Apple still makes a huge chunk of its revenue and profits from iPhone sales, though services are an increasing source of both as well. "For the full quarter, the new iPhone 12 models, and in particular the most expensive ones, garnered a significant share of sales," said CIRP partner and co-founder Josh Lowitz.

Facebook was going to compete with Google for some advertising sales but backed away from the plan after the companies cut a preferential deal, according to court documents. From a report: In 2017, Facebook said it was testing a new way of selling online advertising that would threaten Google's control of the digital ad market. But less than two years later, Facebook did an about-face and said it was joining an alliance of companies backing a similar effort by Google. Facebook never said why it pulled back from its project, but evidence presented in an antitrust lawsuit filed by 10 state attorneys general last month indicates that Google had extended to Facebook, its closest rival for digital advertising dollars, a sweetheart deal to be a partner. Details of the agreement, based on documents the Texas attorney general's office said it had uncovered as part of the multistate suit, were redacted in the complaint filed in federal court in Texas last month. But they were not hidden in a draft version of the complaint reviewed by The New York Times. Executives at six of the more than 20 partners in the alliance told The Times that their agreements with Google did not include many of the same generous terms that Facebook received and that the search giant had handed Facebook a significant advantage over the rest of them.

The executives, all of whom spoke on condition of anonymity to avoid jeopardizing their business relationships with Google, also said they had not known that Google had afforded such advantages to Facebook. The clear disparity in how their companies were treated by Google when compared to Facebook has not been previously reported. The disclosure of the deal between the tech giants has renewed concerns about how the biggest technology companies band together to close off competition. The deals are often consequential, defining the winners and losers in various markets for technology services and products. They are agreed upon in private with the crucial deal terms hidden through confidentiality clauses. Google and Facebook said that such deals were common in the digital advertising industry and that they were not thwarting competition. Julie Tarallo McAlister, a Google spokeswoman, said the complaint "misrepresents this agreement, as it does many other aspects of our ad tech business." She added that Facebook is one of many companies that participate in the Google-led program and that Facebook is a partner in similar alliances with other companies.

The maker of a defunct cloud photo storage app that pivoted to selling facial recognition services has been ordered to delete user data and any algorithms trained on it, under the terms of an FTC settlement. TechCrunch reports: The regulator investigated complaints the Ever app -- which gained earlier notoriety for using dark patterns to spam users' contacts -- had applied facial recognition to users' photographs without properly informing them what it was doing with their selfies. Under the proposed settlement, Ever must delete photos and videos of users who deactivated their accounts and also delete all face embeddings (i.e. data related to facial features which can be used for facial recognition purposes) that it derived from photos of users who did not give express consent to such a use. Moreover, it must delete any facial recognition models or algorithms developed with users' photos or videos.

This full suite of deletion requirements -- not just data but anything derived from it and trained off of it -- is causing great excitement in legal and tech policy circles, with experts suggesting it could have implications for other facial recognition software trained on data that wasn't lawfully processed. Or, to put it another way, tech giants that surreptitiously harvest data to train AIs could find their algorithms in hot water with the US regulator.

As part of its "Year in Review" series, the EFF shares their dramatic behind-the-scenes details about 2020's fight over the future of .org domains. It begins when the Internet Society (ISOC) announced plans to sell the Public Interest Registry — which manages the .org top-level domain (TLD) — to private equity firm Ethos Capital.

"If you come at the nonprofit sector, you'd best not miss." EFF and other leaders in the NGO community sprung to action, writing a letter to ISOC urging it to stop the sale. What follows was possibly the most dramatic show of solidarity from the nonprofit sector of all time. And we won.

Prior to the announcement, EFF had spent six months voicing our concerns to the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) about the 2019 .ORG Registry Agreement, which gave the owner of .ORG new powers to censor nonprofits' websites (the agreement also lifted a longstanding price cap on .ORG registrations and renewals)... Throughout that six-month process of navigating ICANN's labyrinthine decision-making structure, none of us knew that ISOC would soon be selling PIR. With .ORG in the hands of a private equity firm, those fears of censorship and price gouging became a lot more tangible for nonprofits and NGOs. The power to take advantage of .ORG users was being handed to a for-profit company whose primary obligation was to make money for its investors....

More NGOs began to take notice of the .ORG sale and the danger it posed to nonprofits' freedom of expression online. Over 500 organizations and 18,000 individuals had signed our letter by the end of 2019, including big-name organizations like Greenpeace, Consumer Reports, Oxfam, and the YMCA of the USA. At the same time, questions began to emerge (PDF) about whether Ethos Capital could possibly make a profit without some drastic changes in policy for .ORG. By the beginning of 2020, the financial picture had become a lot clearer: Ethos Capital was paying $1.135 billion for .ORG, nearly a third of which was financed by a loan. No matter how well-meaning Ethos was, the pressure to sell "censorship as a service" would align with Ethos' obligation to produce returns for its investors...

Six members of Congress wrote a letter to ICANN in January urging it to scrutinize the sale more carefully. A few days later, EFF, nonprofit advocacy group NTEN, and digital rights groups Fight for the Future and Demand Progress participated in a rally outside of the ICANN headquarters in Los Angeles. Our message was simple: stop the sale and create protections for nonprofits. Before the protest, ICANN staff reached out to the organizers offering to meet with us in person, but on the day of the protest, ICANN canceled on us. That same week, Amnesty International, Access Now, the Sierra Club, and other global NGOs held a press conference at the World Economic Forum to tell world leaders that selling .ORG threatens civil society. All of the noise caught the attention of California Attorney General Xavier Becerra, who wrote to ICANN (PDF) asking it for key information about its review of the sale...
Click through to read the conclusion...

The Wall Street Journal: To keep customers happy, which Mr. Bezos has long said is Amazon's fixation and growth strategy, executives behind the scenes have methodically waged targeted campaigns against rivals and partners alike -- an approach that has changed little through the years, from diapers to footwear. No competitor is too small to draw Amazon's sights. It cloned a line of camera tripods that a small outside company sold on Amazon's site, hurting the vendor's sales so badly it is now a fraction of its original size, the little firm's owner said. Amazon said it didn't violate the company's intellectual-property rights. When Amazon decided to compete with furniture retailer Wayfair, Mr. Bezos's deputies created what they called the Wayfair Parity Team, which studied how Wayfair procured, sold and delivered bulky furniture, eventually replicating a majority of its offerings, said people who worked on the team. Amazon and Wayfair declined to comment on the matter.

Amazon set its sights on Allbirds, the maker of popular shoes using natural and recycled materials, and last year launched a shoe called Galen that looks nearly identical to Allbirds' bestseller -- without the environmentally friendly materials and selling for less than half the price. "You can't help but look at a trillion-dollar company putting their muscle and their pockets and their machinations of their algorithms and reviewers and private-label machine all behind something that you've put your career against," said Allbirds Co-CEO Joey Zwillinger. "You have this giant machine creating all these headwinds for us." This year, Amazon has zeroed in on Shopify, a fast-growing Canadian company that helps small merchants create online shops. Amazon has established a secret team, "Project Santos," to replicate parts of Shopify's business model, said people familiar with the project. Amazon executives often initiated efforts like these on their own, though in some cases examined by The Wall Street Journal, Mr. Bezos himself was involved, according to former Amazon executives and internal emails.

From its start as an online bookstore 26 years ago, Amazon has expanded into an online retailer with a presence in nearly every major category. It is also the leading provider of cloud-computing services, a gadget maker, a major entertainment player and a rival to United Parcel Service and FedEx. Mr. Bezos is the world's richest man, with a net worth Forbes estimates at $187 billion. He still exhorts employees to consider Amazon a startup. "It is always day one," he likes to say. Day two is "stasis, followed by irrelevance, followed by excruciating, painful decline, followed by death." Mr. Bezos originally considered calling his company Relentless, and www.relentless.com still redirects to Amazon's site.

Slashdot reader Charlotte Web quote The Street: Tesla CEO Elon Musk says that he has "fully" recovered from his bout with a mild fever or cold about a week after he took to Twitter to say he tested positive for coronavirus... [T]his week, Musk took a more reliable PCR test that he said showed "unequivocal" evidence that he had Covid...

On Wednesday, Morgan Stanley raised Tesla to overweight for the first time in more than three years, predicting that the electric carmaker is on the verge of a "profound model shift" from selling cars to generating high-margin software and services revenue. "To only value Tesla on car sales alone ignores the multiple businesses embedded within the company," Adam Jones said in a research note to clients as he upgraded the shares from equal-weight and raised his price target by 50% to $540 from $360, suggesting 22% additional upside for the stock.
The analyst believes Tesla's electric vehicle business is Tesla's "entry ticket" for "unlocking much larger" potential markets, according to an earlier article in The Street: To better gauge Tesla's future earnings potential, Jones said his team was now including software/connected vehicle services revenue in their earnings and valuation forecasts. With the total number of Tesla's out in the world expected to reach 2.1 million next year, "a more in-depth understanding of the revenue streams derived from each car is warranted right now," he wrote.

New webcam-based anti-cheating monitoring is so stressful, it's made some students cry, the Washington Post reports: "Online proctoring" companies saw in coronavirus shutdowns a chance to capitalize on a major reshaping of education, selling schools a high-tech blend of webcam-watching workers and eye-tracking software designed to catch students cheating on their exams. They've taken in millions of dollars, some of it public money, from thousands of colleges in recent months. But they've also sparked a nationwide school-surveillance revolt, with students staging protests and adopting creative tactics to push campus administrators to reconsider the deals. Students argue that the testing systems have made them afraid to click too much or rest their eyes for fear they'll be branded as cheats...

One system, Proctorio, uses gaze-detection, face-detection and computer-monitoring software to flag students for any "abnormal" head movement, mouse movement, eye wandering, computer window resizing, tab opening, scrolling, clicking, typing, and copies and pastes. A student can be flagged for finishing the test too quickly, or too slowly, clicking too much, or not enough. If the camera sees someone else in the background, a student can be flagged for having "multiple faces detected." If someone else takes the test on the same network — say, in a dorm building — it's potential "exam collusion." Room too noisy, Internet too spotty, camera on the fritz? Flag, flag, flag.

As an unusually disrupted fall semester churns toward finals, this student rebellion has erupted into online war, with lawsuits, takedowns and viral brawls further shaking the anxiety-inducing backdrop of college exams. Some students have even tried to take the software down from the inside, digging through the code for details on how it monitors millions of high-stakes exams... Some students said the experience of having strangers and algorithms silently judge their movements was deeply unnerving, and many worried that even being accused of cheating could endanger their chances at good grades, scholarships, internships and post-graduation careers. Several students said they had hoped for freeing, friend-filled college years but were now resigned to hours of monitored video exams in their childhood bedrooms, with no clear end in sight....

[T]he systems' technical demands have made just taking the tests almost comically complicated. One student at Wilfrid Laurier University in Ontario shared the instructions for his online Introduction to Linear Algebra midterm: five pages, totaling more than 2,000 words, requiring students to use a special activity-monitoring Web browser and keep their face, hands and desk in view of their camera at all times...

Students who break the rules or face technical difficulties can be investigated for academic misconduct. "The instructions," the student said, "are giving me more anxiety than the test itself."
Company executives "say a semester without proctors would turn online testing into a lawless wasteland" according to the article. But one long-time teacher counters that "the most clear value conveyed to students is 'We don't trust you.'"

Yet the education tech nonprofit Educause reported that 54% of higher education institutions they'd surveyed "are currently using online or remote proctoring services.

"And another 23% are planning or considering using them."

European Union regulators have filed antitrust charges against Amazon, accusing the e-commerce giant of using data to gain an unfair advantage over merchants using its platform. From a report: The EU's executive commission, the bloc's top antitrust enforcer, said Tuesday that the charges have been sent to the company. The commission said it takes issue with Amazon's systematic use of non-public business data to avoid "the normal risks of competition and to leverage its dominance" for e-commerce services in France and Germany, the company's two biggest markets in the EU. The EU started looking into Amazon in 2018 and has been focusing on its dual role as a marketplace and retailer. In addition to selling its own products, the U.S. company allows third-party retailers to sell their own goods through its site. Last year, more than half of the items sold on Amazon worldwide were from these outside merchants. Executive Vice President Margrethe Vestager, the EU commissioner in charge of competition, said it's not a problem that Amazon is a successful business but "our concern is very specific business conduct which appears to distort genuine competition." Amazon faces a possible fine of up to 10% of its annual worldwide revenue, which could amount to billions of dollars. The company rejected the accusations.

The UK's mobile networks are to be forbidden from selling phones locked to their services from December 2021. From a report: Regulator Ofcom said unlocking handsets could often be a complicated process, and this was discouraging owners from switching providers at the end of their contracts. The networks have previously suggested that locking devices helps deter theft and fraud. But the watchdog noted some companies had already abandoned the practice. Among those companies affected are: BT and its EE mobile division, Vodafone, Tesco Mobile, O2, Sky, Three and Virgin already only sell unlocked handsets. "[It] will save people time, money and effort -- and help them unlock better deals," said Ofcom's connectivity director Selina Chadha. Vodafone has already responded: "We stand ready to implement these changes when they come into force." EE added: "We'll work with Ofcom to comply with its guidelines."

Apple, Netflix and other streaming services explored the possibility of acquiring "No Time to Die," the upcoming James Bond movie that was originally slated to debut last April. From a report: The film's release has been postponed multiple times, with the Daniel Craig vehicle moving back to November before being pushed into 2021 as the number of coronavirus cases kept growing. MGM, the studio behind the film, reportedly lost between $30 million to $50 million due to the delays, insiders said. Bloomberg first reported the discussions, which have been the topic du jour in Hollywood this week. Other studios, such as Paramount and Sony, have raked in tens of millions by selling movies like "Greyhound," "Coming 2 America" and "Without Remorse" to streaming services while the exhibition sector continues to struggle during the pandemic.

However, multiple insiders at rival studios and companies said that a possible Bond sale was explored overtly, and believe that MGM was at least open to the possibility of unloading their crown jewel for a princely sum. The studio was said to be looking for a deal of roughly $600 million -- a price tag that was deemed too rich for two of the free-spending streaming services. A sale of this magnitude would be led exclusively by Kevin Ulrich, the chairman and CEO of MGM's majority owner Anchorage Capital Group, insiders said.