Google

Google said today it would make changes to its global advertising business to ensure it did not abuse its dominance, bowing to antitrust pressure for the first time in a landmark settlement with French authorities. The deal with the French competition watchdog could help rebalance the power over advertising in favor of publishers, which held sway over the business in the pre-internet era but lost control with the rapid rise of Google and Facebook

The robust first quarter advertising growth announced Tuesday provides the latest sign that advertisers are expecting the economy to roar back to life as more people get vaccinated against COVID-19 and burst out of their pandemic cocoons.

Univision said it has made a multi-year deal to use products and services from Google to make its media businesses more digital. The deal includes Univision using Google’s cloud to consolidate its multiple digital distribution platforms and run production and data applications. Univision will also take advantage of Google’s Android, Android TV OS, YouTube, Google Play, Google Ad Manager and Google search.

Two Democratic lawmakers are urging the Federal Trade Commission to investigate whether Google misleads parents by falsely representing that childrens’ apps on the Play Store comply with a federal privacy law. “New research suggests that Google misleadingly markets children’s apps as compliant with the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act … despite evidence that many of those apps illegally track children’s behavior and share their personal information without consent,” Sen. Ed Markey and Rep. Kathy Castor said Wednesday in a letter to the agency.

Google can let out a huge sigh of relief now that the Supreme Court has saved the tech giant from billions of dollars in damages in a long-lasting lawsuit brought by Oracle over computer code used to build the Android operating system.  As for big movie studios, while a copyright dispute about computer code might not seem like a subject of particular consequence for them, an opinion from Justice Stephen Breyer concluding that Google made fair use of copyrighted material will very likely be discussed for quite some time and be invoked in other contexts. As such, a few lines in particular from today’s opinion could have many in Hollywood quite tense about a future staked on intellectual property.

After a dip in the second quarter as spending paused in the early days of the pandemic, advanced TV ad impressions rebounded as 2020 went on, according to a report from Google. Advanced ad impressions fell 18% in the second quarter, despite a 14% increase in viewing. By the third quarter, advanced TV ad impressions were up 40% from the second quarter lows and continued to increase in the fourth quarter.

Google this week began testing its controversial cookie-less tracking and targeting system, which relies on placing Chrome users into audience segments based on their web-browsing history, and then transmitting data about those segments directly to publishers. The company has enrolled “a small percentage” of users in the United States and other countries in tests of its new, so-called “Federated Learning of Cohorts.”

Facebook overwhelmingly is the most important social media platform for TV stations, say executives for CBS stations, E.W. Scripps, Nexstar, NBCU stations, Fox stations and Meredith. Broadcasters’ relationship with the platform once widely viewed as a “frenemy” continues to evolve, though the opacity of its all-important algorithm still frustrates. Note: This story is available to TVNewsCheck Premium members only. If you would like to upgrade your free TVNewsCheck membership to Premium now, you can visit your Member Home Page, available when you log in at the very top right corner of the site or in the Stay Connected Box that appears in the right column of virtually every page on the site. If you don’t see Member Home, you will need to click Log In or Subscribe.

Facebook and Google’s market power, especially over digital advertising, has translated to a potential “extinction level event” for local news operations, broadcast, online and print. That was the underlying message of House Antitrust Subcommittee chairman David Cicilline (D-R.I.) at a hearing Friday on “Saving a Free and Diverse Press.”

Lobbyists for Facebook and Google threw their weight against new U.S. legislation that seeks to aid struggling news publishers by allowing them to negotiate collectively against the tech companies over revenue sharing and other deals. Google, which declined comment on the proposal, launched a website on Thursday asserting it is “one of the world’s biggest financial supporters of journalism” by virtue of the ad revenue and content licensing fees it provides to media.

Google on Wednesday said it will stop selling ads based on tracking specific users from website to website — a major decision from the world’s biggest digital advertiser that will surely affect the entire industry moving forward.

A coalition of trade organizations filed a lawsuit Thursday against the Maryland state government over passage of a bill that imposes a tax on digital ad revenue. The Computer & Communications Industry Association, along with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the Internet Association, sued Maryland Comptroller Peter Franchot (D). CCIA’s members include Amazon, eBay, Facebook, Google and Uber.

News Corp. this morning announced what it described as a “historic” three-year deal with Google, ensuring it will receive “significant payments” from the search giant for its news sites’ content worldwide, including Australia. While terms of the deal were not disclosed, the announcement comes as Google faces a potential stalemate with Australia, which recently passed a new law requiring Google to negotiate fair payment for news it distributes from publishers Down Under.

Google/YouTube parent Alphabet saw revenue jump last quarter driven by YouTube and search. Total sales surged to $56.9 billion for the last three months of 2020 from $46 billion the year before, smashing expectations. YouTube ad revenue jumped to $6.9 billion from $4.7 billion the year before and $5 billion last quarter. Google search and other advertising revenue was $31.9 billion, from $27.2 billion the year before.

“There is no longer a competitive market in which newspapers can fairly compete for online advertising revenue,” the owner of The Charleston Gazette-Mail and other West Virginia news publications said in a lawsuit in federal court on Friday. It accuses the companies of profiting from “anticompetitive and monopolistic practices” that have damaged the newspaper business.

Google today threatened to make its search engine unavailable in Australia if the government goes ahead with plans to make tech giants pay for news content. Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison quickly hit back, saying “we don’t respond to threats.” Above, Mel Silva (r), the managing director of Google Australia and New Zealand, appears via a video link during a Senate inquiry into a mandatory code of conduct proposed by the government at Parliament House in Canberra, Friday, Jan. 22. (Mick Tsikas/AAP Image via AP)

Google will suspend political ads along with any reference to “impeachment, inauguration or protests at the U.S. Capitol” beginning Thursday. The ban will run through the day after President-elect Joe Biden’s inauguration on several platforms.

Though deprived of his big online megaphones, Trump does have alternative options of much smaller reach, led by the far right-friendly Parler — even if Google and Apple both removed it from their app stores.

A federal appellate court has revived a class-action complaint alleging that Google overcharged pay-per-click advertisers by reneging on a promise to discount some ads, and failing to limit ads by location.

An audit reveals that Google News sends readers — and advertising dollars — away from local news outlets.

Google is pushing back in court this week on antitrust claims brought against it by the Justice Department two months ago. In a legal filing with the U.S. District Court […]

Facebook and Google agreed to “cooperate and assist one another” if they ever faced an investigation into their pact to work together in online advertising, according to an unredacted version of a lawsuit filed by 10 states against Google last week.

The judge hearing the U.S. Justice Department’s antitrust case against Alphabet Inc.’s Google suggested a trial date of Sept. 12, 2023, on Friday. U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta suggested the date during a status conference, and counsel for the two sides did not object. Mehta noted that the two sides appeared to expect that discovery would be completed in March 2022, with other pretrial matters not addressed until early 2023.

A bipartisan group of state attorneys general filed another antitrust lawsuit against Google on Thursday focused on its online search market power, adding to the growing legal battles facing the tech giant. The lawsuit — filed by 35 states and Washington, D.C., Guam and Puerto Rico — alleges Google illegally maintains monopoly power over search engines and search advertising markets through a series of anticompetitive contracts and conduct.

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton announced the suit, which was filed in a federal court in Texas, saying Google is using its “monopolistic power” to control pricing of online advertisements, fixing the market in its favor and eliminating competition.

Google has announced the recipients of the second round of the 2020 GNI Innovation Challenge for North America. The 33 projects tackle diversity, equity and inclusion in local news.

The feature will begin in Ad Settings in the U.S. with YouTube Ads, then in Google Ads and YouTube globally in early 2021. Countries with legal restrictions against serving gambling and alcohol ads will not see any change in their policies.

Google has asked a judge to dismiss an antitrust lawsuit brought by a group of marketers that allege the company monopolized “online display advertising services.” “The whole is no greater than the sum of the parts, and the amalgam does not add up to a monopolization claim,” Google argues in papers filed Monday with U.S. District Court Judge Beth Labson Freeman in San Jose.

During its third quarter earnings call, Google and YouTube parent company Alphabet reported that YouTube TV subscribers had passed 3 million. That’s up from 2 million reported in February — despite a monthly price hike from $50 to $65 at the end of the third quarter, following its deal to carry legacy Viacom cable networks. The new number puts YouTube TV in second place among virtual vMVPDs, behind Hulu, with 3.4 million subscribers as of 2Q.

Alphabet’s Google must tell a district court how it will respond to a federal antitrust lawsuit by mid-November, with the two sides making initial disclosures later in the month, U.S. Judge Amit Mehta said in a brief order on Friday. The U.S. Justice Department sued Google on Oct. 20 in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, accusing the $1 trillion company of illegally using its market muscle to hobble rivals in the biggest challenge to the power and influence of Big Tech in decades.

The CEOs of Twitter, Facebook and Google were scolded by Republicans at a Senate hearing Wednesday for alleged anti-conservative bias in the companies’ social media platforms and received a warning of coming restrictions from Congress. Lawmakers of both parties are assessing the companies’ tremendous power to disseminate speech and ideas, and are looking to challenge their long-enjoyed bedrock legal protections for online speech.

The Senate Commerce Committee has summoned Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg and Google’s Sundar Pichai to testify for a hearing Wednesday. The executives agreed to appear remotely after being threatened with subpoenas. With the presidential election looming, Republicans led by President Donald Trump have thrown a barrage of grievances at Big Tech’s social media platforms, which they accuse without evidence of deliberately suppressing conservative, religious and anti-abortion views. Above (l-r): Dorsey, Pichai and Zuckerberg.

The lawsuit marks the government’s most significant attempt to protect competition since its groundbreaking case against Microsoft more than 20 years ago. It could be an opening salvo ahead of other major government antitrust actions, given ongoing investigations of major tech companies including Apple, Amazon and Facebook at both the Justice Department and the Federal Trade Commission.

Prosecutors for the Justice Department and state attorney general offices are discussing ways of curbing the search giant’s market power as they prepare to sue the company.

The case before the justices Wednesday has to do with Google’s creation of the Android operating system now used on the vast majority of smartphones worldwide. Google says that to create Android, which was released in 2007, it wrote millions of lines of new computer code. But it also used 11,330 lines of code and an organization that’s part of Oracle’s Java platform.