Google was found guilty of maintaining an illegal search and text advertising monopoly. Yesterday the US Department of Justice asked the court to require Google to divest of it Chrome browser. This will be decided in April.

Automattic has published a site that tracks customers who left WP Engine and provides a downloadable list of those remaining. This is an escalation of the dispute between Automattic vs WP Engine.

The dispute between WP Engine on the one side and Automattic and Matt Mullenweg on the other, is spilling into the mainstream now. The BBC reports on the dispute and how it is bringing uncertainty and risk to WordPress businesses.

WooCommerce 9.4 adds Brands functionality into WooCommerce. This new feature provides free access to brand management, product assignment, and customization.

The new Brands feature will allow you to create and manage brands for stores and assign them to products. It works similar to how categories work and will be released end of this month.

Rae Morey reports that Matt Mullenweg has revised up his demands of WP Engine.

The well respected WordPress security company, Patchstack, received $5M in funding from Emilia Capital. Also, Joost de Valk, co-founder of Yoast will be joining their board.

The WordPress Five for the Future website has been redone using Gutenberg. It looks pretty sharp. I imagine it was done with core blocks and extra CSS.

Paul Charlton jumps ahead to look at the future of the admin dashboard based on current experiments in the Gutenberg plugin. It looks like a good step forward.

Lemon Squeezy is known as an easy to use platform for independent developers for selling their digital products. The platform has been acquired by Stripe.