With lawmaking gridlocked and pro-business judges dominant in federal courts, US tech giants have survived unscathed for years against accusations of wielding illegal monopoly power.

While Europe, Britain, India and others enforce regulations that at least try to keep big tech in check, Google, Apple, Meta and Amazon have yet to suffer a significant setback on their home turf.

But a jury of nine on Monday possibly changed that equation, setting an important precedent.

“Big tech is not above the law. This loss isn’t just the first antitrust failure for Google, it’s the first antitrust loss for any big tech firm,” said Matt Stoller, director of research at the American Economic Liberties Project.

The jury on Monday decided that Epic Games was slighted by Google’s refusal to let outside apps take payments on Android phones, other than through its app store.

After a three-year battle, Epic Games was vindicated after seeming to be on the back foot when a different judge largely decided against the video game maker in a case involving Apple.

But Epic’s chief executive, Tim Sweeney, refused to back down and when other developers settled with Google, he stuck to his guns, repeating his demand that Google open up Android smartphones to other modes of payment, and without charging a hefty commission.

John Lopatka, from Penn State University’ law school, said it was predictable that juries side with plaintiffs in monopoly cases “where the defendant will be painted as a greedy behemoth.”

Apple’s case, decided by a judge, avoided that fate — but not so for Google.

Now two questions remain: what will happen on Google’s appeal, and how will the judge order Google to fulfil the jury’s decision?

This litigation “has some distance to go before we know the final resolution,” warned Lopatka. But the remedy could very likely have a huge impact, with Apple’s behaviour regarding its own app store potentially affected.

Big tech’s longtime critics point to Google’s other major case, where the US department of justice is suing Google over its online search.

In both cases, Apple looms large — and many wonder whether the iPhone maker will be able to avoid being dragged back to court.

“Apple is next over the barrel,” said Luther Lowe, head of public policy at Y Combinator, the startup hub.

Court documents showed in both cases that Google made huge payments to smartphone makers to ensure that its products kept a predominant place on devices, crushing rivals before they can emerge.

“Google and Apple both treat developers as adversaries,” Sweeney told The Verge. “We’re going to do absolutely everything we can, as quickly as we can, to start changing the world,” he added. — AFP

The potential impact of ChatGPT on society remains complicated and unclear even as its creator Wednesday announced a paid subscription version in the United States.

Here is a closer look at what ChatGPT is (and is not):

Is this a turning point?

It is entirely possible that November’s release of ChatGPT by California company OpenAI will be remembered as a turning point in introducing a new wave of artificial intelligence to the wider public. 

What is less clear is whether ChatGPT is actually a breakthrough with some critics calling it a brilliant PR move that helped OpenAI score billions of dollars in investments from Microsoft.

Yann LeCun, Chief AI Scientist at Meta and professor at New York University, believes “ChatGPT is not a particularly interesting scientific advance,” calling the app a “flashy demo” built by talented engineers.

LeCun, speaking to the Big Technology Podcast, said ChatGPT is void of “any internal model of the world” and is merely churning “one word after another” based on inputs and patterns found on the internet.

“When working with these AI models, you have to remember that they’re slot machines, not calculators,” warned Haomiao Huang of Kleiner Perkins, the Silicon Valley venture capital firm.

“Every time you ask a question and pull the arm, you get an answer that could be marvelous… or not… The failures can be extremely unpredictable,” Huang wrote in Ars Technica, the tech news website.

Just like Google

ChatGPT is powered by an AI language model that is nearly three years old — OpenAI’s GPT-3 — and the chatbot only uses a part of its capability. 

The true revolution is the humanlike chat, said Jason Davis, research professor at Syracuse University.

“It’s familiar, it’s conversational and guess what? It’s kind of like putting in a Google search request,” he said.

ChatGPT’s rockstar-like success even shocked its creators at OpenAI, which received billions in new financing from Microsoft in January.

“Given the magnitude of the economic impact we expect here, more gradual is better,” OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said in an interview to StrictlyVC, a newsletter.

“We put GPT-3 out almost three years ago… so the incremental update from that to ChatGPT, I felt like should have been predictable and I want to do more introspection on why I was sort of miscalibrated on that,” he said.

The risk, Altman added, was startling the public and policymakers and on Tuesday his company unveiled a tool for detecting text generated by AI amid concerns from teachers that students may rely on artificial intelligence to do their homework.

What now?

From lawyers to speechwriters, from coders to journalists, everyone is waiting breathlessly to feel disruption caused by ChatGPT. OpenAI just launched a paid version of the chatbot – $20 per month for an improved and faster service.

For now, officially, the first significant application of OpenAI’s tech will be for Microsoft software products. 

Though details are scarce, most assume that ChatGPT-like capabilities will turn up on the Bing search engine and in the Office suite.

“Think about Microsoft Word. I don’t have to write an essay or an article, I just have to tell Microsoft Word what I wanted to write with a prompt,” said Davis.

He believes influencers on TikTok and Twitter will be the earliest adopters of this so-called generative AI since going viral requires huge amounts of content and ChatGPT can take care of that in no time.

This of course raises the specter of disinformation and spamming carried out at an industrial scale. 

For now, Davis said the reach of ChatGPT is very limited by computing power, but once this is ramped up, the opportunities and potential dangers will grow exponentially.

And much like the ever imminent arrival of self-driving cars that never quite happens, experts disagree on whether that is a question of months or years.

Ridicule

LeCun said Meta and Google have refrained from releasing AI as potent as ChatGPT out of fear of ridicule and backlash.

Quieter releases of language-based bots – like Meta’s Blenderbot or Microsoft’s Tay for example – were quickly shown capable of generating racist or inappropriate content.

Tech giants have to think hard before releasing something “that is going to spew nonsense” and disappoint, he said.

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The investigation of one of the world’s most iconic brands, with its “Just Do It” moniker, follows a series of other tax probes targeting the Netherlands, including into Starbucks and Ikea.

A similar investigation of Apple’s tax affairs in Ireland resulted in a order by Brussels that the iPhone maker repay Dublin an extraordinary 14.3 billion euros in back taxes.

The commission, the EU’s powerful anti-trust enforcer, “will investigate carefully the tax treatment of Nike in the Netherlands, to assess whether it is in line with EU state aid rules,” Competition Commissioner Margrethe Vestager said in a statement.

The investigation will try to determine whether a series of tax agreements over almost a decade gave Nike an “unfair advantage over competitors” in the Netherlands, she added.

The investigation will focus on two Dutch-based units of Nike that the EU suspects paid tax “that may not reflect economic reality”, a statement said.

The units — Nike European Operations Netherlands BV and Converse Netherlands BV — employ more than 1 000 workers and are involved in sales and marketing throughout Europe, the Middle East and Asia, the EU said.

As a result of five tax deals made with Dutch authorities, these companies largely skirted paying royalties in The Netherlands, significantly reducing Nike’s taxable income since 2006.

Nike firmly rejected the allegations, saying that the US-based company “is subject to and rigorously ensures that it complies with all the same tax laws as other companies operating in the Netherlands.”

“We believe the European Commission’s investigation is without merit,” a Nike spokesman added.

Revelations in 2017 against Nike were among the 13.4 million leaked documents known as the “Paradise Papers” which sparked an outcry about tax avoidance by multinationals and the world’s super rich.

The Netherlands has since tried to fight its reputation as a low tax hub for corporations, pledging in November to tighten rules on tax breaks for foreign firms after facing criticism from the EU for offering complicated schemes for multinationals.

Last year a top European Union official described several European countries including the Netherlands as being “black holes” for tax and promised to pressure them to change their ways.

Pierre Moscovici lumped the Dutch in with Ireland, Luxembourg, Malta and Cyprus as countries offering complex sweetheart tax deals to help them shift profits and avoid big bills.

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Backing the draft were traditional media, in urgent search of income at a time when web users shun newspapers and television and advertising revenue is siphoned away by online platforms.

The dramatic vote in the French city of Strasbourg confirmed the European Union as Silicon Valley’s most powerful critic and follows anti-trust decisions that have cost Google and Apple billions.

Europe is also leading the political charge on protecting data privacy, and just ahead of the copyright vote warned web firms it could hold them responsible for terrorist propaganda.

European lawmakers were sharply divided on the copyright issue, with both sides engaging in one of the biggest rounds of lobbying that the EU has ever seen.

But, despite uncertainty ahead of the vote, MEPs meeting in Strasbourg ended up passing the draft law with 438 votes in favour, 226 against, and 39 abstentions.

The text MEPs settled on compromised on some of the ways news organisations will charge companies for links to content, with platforms free to use “a few words” of text, according to an amendment.

It also slightly watered down a proposal for so-called upload filters that will make platforms — such as YouTube or Facebook — liable for copyright breaches and force them to automatically delete content by violators.

EU commissioners Andrus Ansip and Mariya Gabriel, who proposed the reform, dubbed the vote “a strong and positive signal and an essential step to achieving our common objective of modernising the copyright rules in the European Union.”

‘Great step forward’

French President Emmanuel Macron, who firmly backed the reform, hailed “a great step forward for Europe”.

“I am proud that France has been at the forefront of this fight,” he added on his Twitter account.

The draft had been fiercely resisted by US tech giants as well as online freedom activists, with some campaigners warning it could spell the end of viral “memes” or jokes.

They also fear that automatic filters to prevent users sharing content subject to copyright could be misused to censor political messages or other forms of free expression.

MEPs can now start negotiations with the European Council representing the 28 member states which had already reached a compromise on the issue in May.

These closed-door discussions, which also include the European Commission, are known in EU jargon as “trilogues” and can take several months before any compromise is put to a fresh vote.

Proponents of the reform would like a law before the European elections in May 2019, when many fear an influx of eurosceptic MEPs with little use for the measure.

The bitter lobbying battle was over two parts of the planned law.

The first and most contentious was Article 13, which would make platforms like Google-owned YouTube legally liable if their users share copyrighted material, to prevent content producers being ripped off.

Critics say the change will lead in effect to blanket censorship of platforms that have become an online hub for creativity as well as the prime source of entertainment — at the expense of TV — for younger generations.

“Upload filters or anything else that restricts this will stop artists from making and creating the future,” said former Fugees star Wyclef Jean on Tuesday in Strasbourg.

The Haitian star was one of several celebrities that waded into the debate, including Paul Mc Cartney who pleaded for the reform in a letter to MEPs in July.

The second key disputed provision was Article 11. This would create a so-called “neighbouring right”, meaning that newspapers, magazines, and news agencies would receive a fee when web services link to their stories.

Julia Reda, an MEP that led the fight against the law, said the adoption of Article 11 was “catastrophic”, calling it a “link tax”.

“Parliament has failed to listen to citizens and expert concerns,” she said.

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Juncker, a grizzled veteran of EU politics, follows a long list of European leaders, including German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who have tried to lure Trump him away from a protectionist onslaught that has spooked financial markets and the world.

The former Luxembourg prime minister is going to Washington without a negotiating mandate, but with the intention of thinking “outside the box” to “find a solution” with Trump, said EU trade commissioner Cecilia Malmstrom, who will join Juncker on the trip.

At stake is a White House threat to slap a daunting wave of tariffs on European auto exports to the US, an action that the Europeans say would trigger a global economic earthquake and earn a withering riposte from Brussels.

If confirmed, Trump’s auto tariffs would add to the steel and aluminium tariffs imposed in June that seriously damaged transatlantic relations already frayed by Trump’s pullout of the Paris Climate accord and the Iran nuclear deal.

In response, the European Union on June 22 imposed a raft of retaliatory tariffs that targeted the most emblematic of American exports, from blue jeans to Harley Davidson motorbikes and whiskey.

Fearing car tariffs, Brussels is already drawing up a list of more US products that could be hit with retaliatory duties if Juncker’s trip fails.

“We will continue to respond toe-to-toe to provocations,” Juncker warned in a speech on Wednesday.

“All efforts to divide Europeans are in vain,” he added.

‘Gun to the head’

Juncker’s commission handles trade matters for the EU 28 and he goes to the White House with the firm backing of Merkel, the leader of export powerhouse Germany, a country that Trump has angrily singled out for punishing the US on trade.

Merkel expressed hope on Friday that Juncker could negotiate a solution with Trump and stop the trade war.

Tit-for-tat feuding between the allies would be “by far the worst-possible solution”, Merkel warned, describing the current trade tensions as “very serious”.

The potential car tariffs would not just violate the rules of the World Trade Organisation, she added, but could also “endanger the prosperity of many people around the world”.

But the prospects for trade peace seemed slim at G20 talks on Saturday after US Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, a close Trump ally, said Washington would demand a wide-ranging trade deal with Europe in order to stand back on its tariff threat.

“If Europe believes in free trade, we’re ready to sign a free trade agreement with no tariffs, no non-tariff barriers and no subsidies. It has to be all three,” said Mnuchin at the talks in Argentina.

But French Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire shot back firmly: “We refuse to negotiate with a gun to the head”, insisting that Trump must first withdraw the steel and aluminium tariffs and stand down on his car tariff threat.

‘Not for long!’

Not to be daunted by Trump’s protectionism, Juncker last week toured Asia, signing the EU’s biggest ever trade deal with Japan while also backing multilateralism alongside the Chinese government during a stop in Beijing.

The EU — the world’s biggest single market with 28 countries and 500 million people — has also secured similar trade deals with US neighbours Canada and Mexico.

Also looming over the Juncker visit is last week’s decision by the commission to slap US tech giant Google with a record fine over its Android mobile phone operating system.

Trump lashed out at the 4.34-billion euro ($5-billion) penalty and warned: “They truly have taken advantage of the US, but not for long!” Trump said.

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Hailed by the plaintiffs— a Spanish taxi association—as “a social victory”, the case is yet another thorn in the side for US-based Uber, which has drawn the fury of taxi drivers and officials for flouting local regulations. 

It also comes the same week as one of its drivers admitted to the attempted rape and murder of a British embassy worker coming home from a night out in Beirut, Lebanon.

“The service provided by Uber connecting individuals with non-professional drivers is covered by services in the field of transport,” said the Luxembourg-based European Court of Justice.

“Member states can therefore regulate the conditions for providing that service.”

Uber, the biggest name in the growing gig economy, claims it is a mere service provider, connecting consumers with drivers in more than 600 cities.

Uber has run into huge opposition from taxi companies and other competitors who say this allows it to dodge costly regulations such as training and licensing requirements for drivers and vehicles.

The case was brought by a taxi drivers’ association in the Spanish city of Barcelona, where belief runs high that Uber is a taxi company that should be subject to rules governing such vehicles.

“This will truly represent a social victory, and the whole of society will benefit from this,” Ivan Esma, spokesman for the Elite Taxi association, told reporters, adding that “the road will be long” for the ruling to be enforced.

 Ruling ‘won’t change things’ 

Uber said the ruling would make little difference in practice.

“This ruling will not change things in most EU countries where we already operate under transportation law,” an Uber spokesperson said in an emailed statement.

“However, millions of Europeans are still prevented from using apps like ours.”

In a dense legal judgement, the ECJ said that Uber was a service that connects “by means of a smartphone application and for remuneration non-professional drivers using their own vehicle with persons who wish to make urban journeys.”

That means it is “inherently linked to a transport service and, accordingly, must be classified as a ‘service in the field of transport’ within the meaning of EU law.”

The EU court’s senior adviser had said in a legal opinion in May that Uber was indeed a transport company.

Uber has had a rough ride in Spain, where a judge ruled in 2014 that its UberPop service risked breaking the law, leading to the Barcelona submission to the ECJ.

Early last year it decided to only operate a limited a version of its UberX service in Spain which uses licensed, professional drivers instead of the amateurs who had previously worked via the UberPop application.

Uber has already had problems with the law in several European countries, particularly France where the company was forced to overhaul its business model.

In November a labour court in London, where the company is threatened with losing its license, said it had to pay the drivers a minimum wage and give them paid leave.

Uber does not employ drivers or own vehicles, but instead relies on private contractors with their own cars, allowing them to run their own businesses.

Licensed taxi drivers meanwhile often have to undergo hundreds of hours of training, and they accuse Uber of endangering their jobs by using cheaper drivers who rely only on a GPS to get around.

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Enter stage left Chinese President Xi Jinping, who in an hour-long speech on Tuesday won over a crowd of ardent capitalists gathered at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.

“I’ve been coming to Davos for years and that’s the kind of speech that was usually given by a US president,” said John Neill, the head of British logistics company Unipart.

“He’s used this brilliantly to try and take global leadership,” Neill added, believing he may have witnessed a turning point in history.

The irony that it was the leader of communist China who preached a message in favour of open markets and globalisation, in contrast to Trump’s “America first” approach, was not lost on attendants such as former Swedish prime minister and Davos regular Carl Bildt.

“A century ago there was a man called Vladimir Lenin, who was sitting in Zurich nearby plotting world revolution. And now a hundred years later we have the leader of the largest communist party in the world coming to the leading meeting of global capitalists to preach the virtues of globalisation,” he told AFP.

“Lenin is dead,” said Bildt, who is now co-chair of the European Council on Foreign Relations.

Like most Xi speeches, this one was rich in historical allusions and Chinese proverbs as he paid his maiden visit to the Davos forum.

But addressing a packed convention hall, Xi also invoked tropes drawn from Western culture including Charles Dickens (“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times”) and the Gettysburg Address.

Countries cannot pursue development in isolation of the world around them, he said.

“Development is of the people, by the people and for the people.”

Actions speeak louder than words
Trump, who takes office as US president on Friday, routinely browbeat China on the campaign trail and has threatened punitive tariffs on its exports as he vies to restore millions of lost factory jobs.

In Davos, Trump transition advisor Anthony Scaramucci said “we want to have a phenomenal relationship with the Chinese”.

“But if the Chinese really believe in globalism, and they really believe in the words of Lincoln, they have to reach now towards us and allow us to create this symmetry, because the path to globalism in the world is through the American worker and the American middle class,” he said.

However, other members of the Davos tribe were thrilled at the prospect of globalisation staying safe under Chinese custodianship.

“I heard a president that was wise and measured,” said Philippe Brassac, the chief executive of Credit Agricole, one of France’s biggest banks.

“In the end this is a leader who is positioning himself as, at least in part, responsible for the fate of humanity,” he said.

Dax Lovegrove, vice president of Austrian jewellery brand Swarovski, contrasted Xi’s message to another speech given Tuesday by British Prime Minister Theresa May.

May said Brexit-bound Britain will leave the European Union’s single market in order to restrict immigration in a clean break from the bloc, but that lawmakers can vote on the final deal.

“I’ve just been listening to President Xi speaking which I found very inspiring because he’s championing openness and cooperation, which is exactly what the world needs,” Lovegrove said.

Still, others in the Davos crowd were unwilling to overlook the kind of political system Xi oversees.

“Close your eyes on Xi’s speech, you could almost forget he leads an authoritarian regime. Do the same for Trump, same happens for democracy,” said analyst Ian Bremmer.

IHS Markit chief economist Nariman Behravesh said he was encouraged by Xi’s promises to open up the Chinese economy further to more imports and foreign investment.

But he added: “In the end what they actually do matters more than what President Xi says.”

Executives on trial in Paris, office raids in Amsterdam, rape allegations in New Delhi: the world has apparently turned on the Uber “revolution”.

“We must reject [Uber’s] law of the jungle”, which “amounts to modern slavery”, French Prime Minister Manuel Valls said this summer after violent taxi protests in Paris helped secure the suspension of the group’s cheaper UberPop service.

“The Uber problem is complex … and costs lots of jobs to taxi drivers,” said Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff after violence in Brazil against Uber drivers, including a kidnapping in Sao Paulo.

But despite the fightback and a growing pile of legal challenges, Uber maintains that the “sky is the limit” with a growth trajectory that “is going to be phenomenal”.

“We have been doing this for five years. We’re in 60 countries, it’s a movie we see time and time again,” said Mark MacGann, Uber’s head of public policy in Europe, the Middle East and Africa.

“We were just as controversial in the US 18-24 months ago as we are in places like Brussels, Barcelona, Berlin today,” he said.

Worth $50-billion
Today, Uber is Silicon Valley’s most visible startup with a market value of $50-billion. It is present in 340 cities with three million trips taken daily, according to the company’s latest figures.

Uber does not employ drivers or own its vehicles, but instead uses non-professionally licensed contractors with their own cars. It, therefore, considers itself a player in the “sharing economy”, which allows the drivers to operate their own business.

Once they have an account, users can call an Uber car with a couple of swipes on their smartphone, instead of having to book a taxi or waiting on a street corner waving their arm.

Taxi operators say it represents unfair competition because Uber drivers can flout the rules and restrictions that regulate the professionals.

The firm is led by the hard-charging chief executive Travis Kalanick, a 39-year-old Californian who has accused city authorities of being beholden to taxi monopolies.

The regulated taxi industry “feels threatened by our high-quality service and quick response time,” Kalanick said in a 2013 interview.

Europe’s biggest battle
Town by town, Uber launched its service first in the US and quickly elsewhere, often in brazen violation of local laws. But the resistance it has faced in Europe is the company’s biggest battle yet.

Two French Uber executives arrested in June face up to two years in prison as well as fines of up to $340 000.

They had their court date postponed to February this week, but that small legal victory came in an otherwise tough few days for Uber.

On Tuesday, police raided the company’s European headquarters in the Netherlands while in London, officials proposed a 27-page set of regulations that Uber said “made no sense”.

In response, Uber launched a massive petition campaign, just as it has done in Brussels where last week its cheaper UberPop option was ordered shut within 21 days.

“It is true from a regulatory perspective and a political perspective, Europe is certainly more challenging than the United States,” MacGann, a 20-year lobbying veteran, told AFP.

In Germany, Europe’s biggest market, a court in March ordered the company to stop its service outright. 

Global plans
To fight back, Uber has turned to the European Union to help undo the bans and filed complaints against Germany, France and Spain.

Regulations in most of Europe “are outdated and not fit for purpose,” MacGann said, while acknowledging that Germany and Spain, as well as Italy, “may end up being the final frontier for Uber”.

In Asia, however, Uber remained very “bullish”.

Uber set up its India operation in September 2013 and now operates in nearly a dozen cities across the country.

But in New Delhi, authorities this month maintained a ban against Uber, inflicted after a driver was charged with raping a passenger.

In China, the region’s top economy, MacGann said “Uber is the underdog”, with 40 percent of the market.

In a live televised address to the nation, the 41-year-old premier said he had worked hard to secure the best possible rescue package for his country, but he now needed a clear new mandate from the Greek people after it cost him his parliamentary majority.

“Now that this difficult cycle has come to an end, I wish to submit to your judgement all that we have done,” Tsipras said, before meeting President Prokopis Pavlopoulous to formally hand in his resignation.

The move leaves Greece in the hands of a caretaker government until the vote.

Tsipras’s announcement came on the same day the debt-crippled country received its first 13-billion euros in bailout cash on Thursday, effectively starting the mammoth rescue package agreed last month, and worth around 86-billion euros over the next three years.

The money arrived just in time to allow the Greek government to make a key debt repayment of 3.4-billion euros to the European Central Bank.

But the hard-won bailout – which kept Greece in the EU but comes with painful demands for spending cuts and tax hikes – has divided Tsipras’s Syriza party after it stormed to power in January on an anti-austerity platform.

Greek MPs on Friday approved the new rescue deal – the country’s third in five years – but 43 of Syriza’s 149 MPs either rebelled or abstained from the vote, forcing the premier to rely on the opposition for support.

Dozens of Syriza MPs had already revolted in two previous votes on the bailout.

In the face of such a large-sale rebellion, Tsipras, who remains popular with the electorate, had been widely expected to call snap polls in a bid to regain office with a stronger hand.

The early vote move is the latest gamble by the charismatic young premier, who successfully persuaded Greeks to reject creditors’ tough reforms in a referendum last month, only to adopt them at a eurozone summit a week later.

‘Risky’
Jeroen Dijsselbloem, the Dutch finance minister who chairs the so-called Eurogroup of eurozone finance ministers, warned that the early elections must not delay Greece from implementing the reforms it has agreed in exchange for the cash.

“It’s crucial that Greece maintain its commitments to the Eurozone,” Dijsselbloem said.

Credit ratings agency Moody’s expressed concern about the latest twist in the debt saga.

“The Greek Prime Minister Tsipras’s move to step down and call snap early elections on 20 September could elevate programme implementation concerns and, potentially, puts future official sector disbursements at risk,” it said in a statement.

But Martin Selmayr, chief of staff to European Commission head Jean-Claude Juncker, was more positive. “Swift elections in Greece can be a way to broaden support for ESM stability support programme just signed by Prime Minister Tsipras on behalf of Greece,” he tweeted ahead of the vote announcement, referring to the EU bailout fund.

Greece’s creditors are expected to welcome Tsipras’ bid to bolster his hand.

The premier’s resignation “is good economic news for Greece and for Europe,” said Marcel Fratzscher, head of economic research institute DIW and an advisor to Germany’s economics minister Sigmar Gabriel.

“This will improve the prospects for a successful third programme and thereby for more economic growth,” he said, though he warned of the short-term risks of a “political vacuum”.

Debt relief?
The all-clear to unblock the first payment of rescue funds came after the bailout was approved by European Parliaments, including Germany’s Bundestag on Wednesday.

The decision unlocked 13-billion euros for Athens to service its debts and set aside another 10-billion euros to recapitalise the country’s cash-starved banks.

Tsipras has said that Greece’s creditors – the European Union, European Central Bank, International Monetary Fund and the European Stability Mechanism – have agreed to discuss public debt relief measures when a first assessment of reform compliance is completed in November.

Greece’s debt currently stands at a towering 312.8-billion euros, the finance ministry said Wednesday, a level the IMF said is unsustainable and requires immediate relief.

Ahead of Tsipras’ announcement of his resignation, Greek stocks closed lower on Thursday in the face of the political uncertainty, falling 3.5%. Frankfurt and Paris were down by 2.0%. – AFP