Google

The Senate Commerce Committee voted last week to authorize subpoenas for (l-r) Twitter’s Jack Dorsey, Sundar Pichai of Google and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg to force them to testify if they didn’t agree to do so voluntarily. Spokespeople for the companies said Monday that the CEOs will cooperate and appear at an Oct. 28 hearing.

Google will pay publishers more than $1 billion over the next three years through a new program for licensing news. The tech giant has signed licensing deals with about 200 publications in select countries with plans to add more and expand geographically.

Google has altered its approach to TV and streaming, merging Chromecast and Android TV into a $50 Google-branded offering featuring a remote control. Chromecast with Google TV is the official new name for the setup, which marks the end of the Android TV brand name, which had been in use since 2014.

Alphabet Inc. on Friday settled a shareholder lawsuit that accused the Google parent of covering up lavish exit packages to executives found responsible for sexual misconduct, saying it would overhaul workplace policies and increase oversight of its diversity efforts.

The Justice Department plans to bring an antitrust case against Google as soon as this month, after Attorney General William Barr overruled career lawyers who said they needed more time to build a strong case against one of the world’s wealthiest, most formidable technology companies, according to five people briefed on internal department conversations.

Telecom giant AT&T plans to push for changes to a federal law that protects companies like Google, Facebook and Twitter from liability for users’ posts. “There is no longer any reason that the nation’s most powerful online platforms should enjoy legal immunities unavailable to similarly-situated traditional companies,” AT&T EVP Joan Marsh said Monday in a blog post.

Low-cost, sports-free streaming television service Philo said it has reached a deal with Google and is now available via Chromecast. Philo also said it rolled out Philo Connect, which will help Philo users connect and watch programming all of their devices.

In releasing a draft of a mandatory code of conduct, the government aims to succeed where other countries have failed in making the global digital giants pay for news siphoned from commercial media companies.

Invective flew Wednesday as legislators questioned Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Sundar Pichai of Google and Tim Cook of Apple at a hearing of the House Judiciary subcommittee on antitrust. For the last year, that panel has probed the business practices of the Silicon Valley giants with an eye to determining if they need to be regulated more heavily, or even broken up.

The powerful executives sought to defend their companies amid intense grilling by lawmakers on Wednesday. The executives provided bursts of data showing how competitive their markets are, and the value of their innovation and essential services to consumers. But they sometimes struggled to answer pointed questions about their business practices. They also confronted a range of other concerns about alleged political bias, their effect on U.S. democracy and their role in China.

On Wednesday, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, Google’s Sundar Pichai and Tim Cook of Apple will answer for their companies’ practices before Congress for the first time as a group. Summoned for a House hearing, they’ll raise a hand (remotely) and swear to tell the truth, in the manner of tycoons of Wall Street or the tobacco industry in earlier high-octane televised shamings.

Facebook and other competitors host the same videos, but engineers have made changes that effectively preference YouTube — owned by Google — over other video sources. Wall Street Journal tests show YouTube usually ends up first and takes most of the slots in Google Search video carousels and prime results real estate.

With the incumbent OTT operating systems at impasse with Peacock and HBO Max, Google finally has its opening into the living room, LightShed Partners says.

Publisher complaints about Google have grown more pointed as the Justice Department investigates the search giant for possible anticompetitive practices. The News Media Alliance, which represents more than 2,000 news organizations in the U.S., last week published a white paper that provides more concrete examples of how Google allegedly interferes with the digital operations of publishers.

Peacock, the NBCUniversal streaming service initially launched in April, has set a distribution deal with Google for its national expansion in July. Google platforms and devices spanning Android, Android TV and Chromecast will begin carrying Peacock on July 15. Starting then, Peacock will offer a free tier featuring more than 7,500 hours of movies and TV programming. The higher level, Peacock Premium, will have 15,000 hours of content, and Android and Android TV users will get Premium for free until Oct. 15.

Three online advertisers are suing Google for allegedly violating antitrust laws by monopolizing digital advertising markets. “Google leveraged its stranglehold on online search and search advertising to gain an illegal monopoly in brokering display advertising on other companies’ websites,” the marketers allege in a class-action complaint filed last week in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California.

HBO Max, the upcoming streaming service from AT&T-owned WarnerMedia, will be available across Google platforms and devices when it launches on May 27, the company said on Wednesday.

Alphabet Inc.’s Google on Wednesday said any user will soon be able to host free video conferences on Meet, turning its previously business-only tool into a bigger rival to Zoom and others battling for users during the coronavirus outbreak.

Google plans to soon require all advertisers to provide proof of their identities as well as the countries where they do business, in hopes of providing consumers with more insight into online advertising.

Google  is offering financial support to local newsrooms hit by the economic fallout of the COVID-19 pandemic, as part of its Google News Initiative. The company isn’t disclosing the size of what it’s calling its Journalism Emergency Relief Fund, but in a blog post, Google VP of News Richard Gingras said the goal is to fund “thousands of small, medium and local news publishers globally,” through awards ranging from “low thousands of dollars for small hyper-local newsrooms to low tens of thousands for larger newsrooms, with variations per region.”

Reversing course, Google said on Thursday it will begin allowing political groups to run ads related to COVID-19. The company’s move comes shortly after liberal digital ad shop DSPolitical publicly complained that Google was giving President Donald Trump “an unprecedented advantage in our upcoming elections” by banning Democratic ads relating to the outbreak, while allowing the current administration to run ads referencing the virus.

Siding with Google, a federal judge has thrown out Democratic presidential candidate Tulsi Gabbard’s free-speech lawsuit against the tech company over a brief suspension of her advertising account.

The Google-owned video giant is considering giving people the ability to sign up, through YouTube, for a wide range of subscription-streaming services run by entertainment companies, according to people familiar with the situation. YouTube has talked with several entertainment companies about adding their services, the people said.

The Federal Trade Commission has launched a lookback at some of the smaller past acquisitions by some of the largest tech companies. The FTC said Tuesday it has issued “special orders” to Alphabet (Google), Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google and Microsoft, which require them to provide info on all acquisitions over the past decade (Jan. 1, 2010 through Dec. 31, 2019).

Makan Delrahim, the Justice Department’s head of antitrust, removed himself from examining the search giant over a conflict of interest, people with knowledge of the situation say.

For the first time, Google on Monday revealed just how big of an advertising machine YouTube is. The company said that YouTube generated $15.1 billion in ad revenue in fiscal 2019, including $4.7 billion in the fourth quarter.

Google’s parent company becomes the fourth tech company — after Apple, Amazon and Microsoft — to reach the market milestone.

Google, Alibaba and other Big Tech companies could be forced to share data on financial services customers with banks and financial technology firms to prevent unfair competition. As Facebook’s plan for its Libra “stablecoin” faces scrutiny, a global body of regulators from the world’s main financial centers said that Big Tech’s growing tentacles raised questions for financial stability, competition and data privacy.

Google co-founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page (above, l-r, in 2008) are stepping down from their roles within the parent company, Alphabet. Page, who had been serving as CEO of Alphabet, and Brin, who had been president of Alphabet, will remain on the board of the company.