Tag: Google

US accuses Google of illegal methods to push up ad prices

An illuminated Google logo is seen inside an office building in Zurich, Switzerland December 5, 2018. REUTERS/Arnd Wiegmann/File Photo Acquire Licensing Rights

A lawyer for the U.S. Justice Department pressed a Google executive on Wednesday about techniques the search and advertising giant used to push up online advertising prices in an allegedly unfair way.

Testifying at a once-in-a-generation antitrust trial in Washington where the United States has accused Google of abusing its dominance of search and some advertising, Google executive Adam Juda said the company uses a formula, which includes the quality of an ad, to decide who wins auctions that are used to place advertising on websites.

The Justice Department has accused Google of manipulating online auctions – a multibillion dollar industry dominated by Google – with these formulas to favor its own bottom line.

Justice Department attorney David Dahlquist asked Juda if he agreed with a document that Google had prepared for the European Union, which said that the company can “directly affect pricing through tunings of our auction mechanisms.” Juda said he did not.

Pressed on if “tuning” can impact pricing, Juda said, “They can.” Juda’s testimony began on Tuesday and continued into Wednesday.

Juda said one thing that can be “tuned” is a rough formula that gives an ad a long-term value, or LTV, based on the bid given, the potential click-through rate or how many people will likely click on it and the quality of the advertisement and website associated with it.

Source: https://www.reuters.com/legal/us-antitrust-trial-accuses-google-illegal-methods-push-up-ad-prices-2023-10-04/

Google doesn’t allow competition, Apple is kingmaker: Nadella testifies in Google anti-trust trial

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella. Credit: Reuters

Satya Nadella, the CEO of Microsoft, testified as a witness for the US Justice Department in a antitrust trial against Alphabet, the parent company of Google.

The prosecution claims that in order to maintain its position at the top, Google paid illegally $10 billion annually to wireless carriers like AT&T, smartphone manufacturers like Apple, and other parties to be the default search engine on their devices.

Satya Nadella testified in the Google anti-trust trial, claiming that due to Google’s market dominance, Microsoft is unable to compete, media outlets reported.

Source: https://www.deccanherald.com/business/google-doesnt-allow-competition-apple-is-kingmaker-nadella-testifies-in-google-anti-trust-trial-2710411

Microsoft C.E.O. Testifies That Google’s Power in Search Is Ubiquitous

Satya Nadella, Microsoft’s chief executive, testified on Monday that Google’s power in online search was so ubiquitous that even his company found it difficult to compete on the internet, becoming the government’s highest-profile witness in its landmark antitrust trial against the search giant.

In more than three hours of testimony in federal court in Washington, Mr. Nadella was often direct and sometimes combative as he laid out how Microsoft could not overcome Google’s use of multibillion-dollar deals to be the default search engine on smartphones and web browsers.

The internet was really the “Google web,” Mr. Nadella told the packed courtroom, adding that Google could now use its advantage and scale to build tools to dominate the emerging artificial intelligence industry.

The image of the chief executive of a leading tech rival — Microsoft is one of the world’s biggest public companies, valued at $2.4 trillion — saying it could not easily fight Google was striking. Mr. Nadella’s testimony underscored how entrenched Google has become in online search as the government seeks to prove that the company broke monopoly laws by striking anti-competitive deals to crush rivals.

Mr. Nadella’s appearance on the witness stand in the case — U.S. et al v. Google, which is the first monopoly trial of the modern internet era — was also a sign that the bitter rivalry between Microsoft and Google continues unfettered. Over more than two decades, the two companies have battled over online search, mobile computing, web browsing and cloud computing and dueled in multiple legal battles as they both became ever more powerful. Now the companies are locked in an increasingly intense fight over A.I.

“Despite my enthusiasm that there is a new angle with A.I., I worry a lot that this vicious cycle that I’m trapped in could get even more vicious,” Mr. Nadella said.

Regulators around the world have been working to rein in the power and reach of Google, Apple, Amazon and Meta, which owns Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp. Last week, the Federal Trade Commission filed a lawsuit against Amazon, arguing it broke antitrust laws by squeezing merchants on its site. The F.T.C. has also filed an antitrust lawsuit against Meta, claiming it snuffed out nascent rivals, and the Justice Department has sued Google in a second case over its control of online advertising.

The 10-week Google trial is being closely watched as a referendum on whether the government can slow down Silicon Valley’s biggest companies. A Google victory could be a major rebuke of regulators who say the tech giants have too much sway over their customers, partners and start-up competitors.

At the heart of the government’s case against Google is the accusation that the company illegally cemented its monopoly in online search by paying to be the default search engine on browsers like Apple’s Safari and Mozilla’s Firefox, as well as on the home screen of smartphones. Google has argued that the default positions are not overwhelmingly powerful and that users can switch to a new search engine if they like.

But in court, Mr. Nadella said that argument was “bogus” because users generally don’t change their default search engine, even if they have the ability to do so.

“You get up in the morning, you brush you teeth and you search on Google,” he said.

Mr. Nadella said Microsoft had tried to win deals for the default positions on browsers and smartphones for Bing, its own search engine. But it had not been very successful, he said.

Microsoft introduced Bing to compete against Google in 2009. At the time, Microsoft began an aggressive public relations campaign against Google and both companies lobbied against the other with regulators in Europe and the U.S.

In 2016, the public mudslinging seemed to come to an end with Mr. Nadella and Google’s chief executive, Sundar Pichai, who were both new to their roles, declaring a détente. The rivalry had become a distraction, they said, and they had different priorities.

The testimony from Mr. Nadella showed their rivalry had continued. John Schmidtlein, Google’s lead litigator, said in his opening statement that the case was “really all about Microsoft.”

On Monday, Mr. Schmidtlein sought to undermine Mr. Nadella’s testimony by suggesting that Microsoft’s failure to compete with Google was the result of an inferior product and a lack of investment.

Mr. Schmidtlein hammered Mr. Nadella with questions about instances in which Bing had been the default on mobile phones only for users to switch back to Google. He noted that Mr. Nadella had referred to Google as “dominant,” and asked him if he could substitute for the word “popular.”

Mr. Nadella said that whether you “call it popular or dominant,” Microsoft was still competing against Google’s massive market share.

Source: https://dnyuz.com/2023/10/02/microsoft-c-e-o-testifies-that-googles-power-in-search-is-ubiquitous/

Google turns 25, celebrates birthday with a doodle: ‘A walk down memory lane’

Google turned 25 years old on Wednesday and is celebrating its birthday with a doodle.

Google, everyone’s favourite search engine, turned 25 years old on Wednesday and is celebrating its birthday with a doodle. Taking a “walk down memory lane”, the company showcased different doodles on its birthday over the years. The latest one comes with a GIF which turns ‘Google’ into ‘G25gle’ – marking the 25 years. Once you click on the logo, you can see confetti on the page.

“Today’s Doodle celebrates Google’s 25th year. And while here at Google we’re oriented towards the future, birthdays can also be a time to reflect. Let’s take a walk down memory lane to learn how we were born 25 years ago,” the company wrote in its blog.

It added, “Much has changed since 1998 — including our logo as seen in today’s Doodle — but the mission has remained the same: to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful…Thank you for evolving with us over the past 25 years. We can’t wait to see where the future takes us, together.”

Google’s history
Google was founded by doctoral students Sergey Brin and Larry Page who met in Stanford University’s computer science program in the late 90s. The two soon learned that they shared a similar vision – to make the World Wide Web a more accessible place. Google was founded on September 4, 1998, and on September 27, 1998, Google Inc. was officially born.

While the company observed its birthday on September 4 for the first seven years, it decided to shift the celebrations to September 27 to coincide with the announcement of the record number of pages that this search engine was indexing.

The worldwide search engine’s current CEO is Sundar Pichai, who succeeded Page on October 24, 2015. Page, meanwhile, took over the same position at Alphabet Inc. On December 3, 2019, Pichai became the CEO of Alphabet as well.

Google doodle history
The history of the doodle dates back to 1998 – a month before Google was founded. The very first doodle was on the long-running “Burning Man” event in Black Rock City, Nevada.

Google CEO Sundar Pichai’s note
Last month, Google CEO Sundar Pichai penned a note as a blog post regarding the company celebrating its 25th birthday. Reflecting on the first quarter century, he shared some thoughts on the opportunities with AI to do things that matter on an even bigger scale.

Source: https://www.hindustantimes.com/technology/google-turns-25-celebrates-birthday-with-a-doodle-a-walk-down-memory-lane-101695774689829.html

In the Google antitrust trial, defaults are everything and nobody likes Bing

Illustration by Cath Virginia / The Verge

Google is one of the biggest tech companies in existence, but its empire is built on one little white search bar, and the US Justice Department has just launched what might be one of the biggest challenges it’s ever faced. In one of the largest antitrust trials in recent memory, the government argues that Google owes its dominance not simply to a good design but to a series of coercive deals that have let the search engine market stagnate — while Google complains it’s being punished for success.

For all that, the trial began quietly. I got to the courthouse around sunrise for the start of US v. Google, worried I’d find a line around the corner. Instead, the sidewalk was nearly empty, populated by a handful of similarly cautious early arrivals. “I thought there’d be more people,” one said while we waited in the muggy DC air. In the hours that followed, a small crowd emerged — filling the courtroom and spilling into an overflow room and two dedicated media rooms for journalists. A man in an Uncle Pennybags-style top hat, fake mustache, and monocle wandered the halls of the courtroom; “I’m here to highlight Google’s monopoly and provide moral support as a fellow billionaire,” he told me between mustache twirls. He admitted he might not be there to keep up the joke every day — it’s a 10-week trial, he conceded, and “I have a job.”

The case against Google is relatively straightforward and also potentially explosive. The Justice Department argues that around 2010, Google began using anti-competitive tactics to maintain an overwhelming search engine monopoly. Already dominant over alternatives like Bing and Yahoo, it cemented its position with the “power of defaults,” striking deals that put Google’s product front and center. That included paying Apple and Mozilla to make Google the default engine in Safari and Firefox and requiring that Android manufacturers prominently display a Google search widget on phones. (That agreement is called the Mobile Application Distribution Agreement or MADA, and it’s been legally contentious in Europe for years.) As it grew, it used vast quantities of search data to improve its engine, creating a feedback loop that — the Justice Department alleges — has made it almost impossible to beat. “This case is about the future of the internet and whether Google Search will ever face meaningful competition,” said attorney Kenneth Dintzer in opening statements.

US v. Google follows a series of abortive legal attempts to limit the power and growth of America’s biggest tech companies. It’s the Justice Department’s most aggressive action since its 1990s antitrust lawsuit against Microsoft, which established it had shut down competition for web browsers on its dominant Windows system. But this trial kicks off two years after a district judge found Apple could maintain its locked-down iOS ecosystem and two months after Microsoft won a ruling letting it buy Activision Blizzard, continuing a rapid consolidation of the games industry. In both battles, the companies convinced a judge that they weren’t simply trying to lock up a market — they were making decisions that helped consumers, too. They also painted the allegations as disingenuous complaints from fellow tech companies who couldn’t compete fairly: in Apple’s case, the Fortnite publisher Epic, and in Microsoft’s, the rival console maker Sony.

Google has taken a similar approach. “If Google is prevented from competing, that won’t make Yahoo or DuckDuckGo run faster,” attorney John Schmidtlein said in the company’s opening statement. While the Justice Department has drawn parallels between ’90s Microsoft and modern-day Google, Schmidtlein said that the facts in US v. Google and the antitrust fight over Microsoft’s unloved Internet Explorer browser “could not be more opposite and different,” arguing that people overwhelmingly and proactively choose Google even when they’re given alternatives. Separately, he argued that Google’s default search deals give web browsers much-needed revenue and that its Android agreements help create a viable mobile competitor to iOS.

So far, the Justice Department is combating this argument by focusing on reams of internal communications it obtained during its investigations. It’s zeroed in on memos and emails where Google nakedly lays out the value it gets from being a default search option, as well as messages that allegedly dictate precise terms for how Apple and others could use any non-Google Search-adjacent service. (“Your honor, this is a monopolist flexing,” intoned Dintzer.) Schmidtlein has derided the excerpts as cherry-picked and “out of context.” But whatever they ultimately reveal, the Justice Department’s goal so far is clear: keep the focus on executives talking about how Google’s actions benefit Google, not the consumers it says it’s trying to serve.

The Justice Department is also drawing direct parallels to the Microsoft antitrust case but in a complicated way. Some of the most damning allegations included Microsoft making unvarnished and rhetorically violent statements about “cut[ting] off Netscape’s air supply” in the browser wars. This time around, government attorneys are pointing to communications in which Google employees carefully avoid terms that could raise antitrust watchdogs’ ire.

(Don’t) cut off their air supply
Before the trial, the Justice Department sought to sanction Google for deliberately (and allegedly) deleting conversations that could illuminate how it approaches competition. In the first week, it’s focused on the tech giant’s judicious use of language. Its first witness was Google chief economist Hal Varian, whom Dintzer led through a series of email chains about Google’s search business. In one, Varian takes issue with Marissa Mayer (who at that point oversaw Google’s homepage) referring to the company’s “market share” — a term that could indicate overall market dominance. “Let’s make sure we are consistent in calling this ‘query share’ rather than ‘market share,’” Varian told another Google employee, Penny Chu. “Absolutely, I’m aware of not using the word ‘market,’” Chu replied. “The one big thing I remember from all that Legal training.”

Varian responded that “query share” was simply the more accurate term. And he professed unfamiliarity with a 2011 presentation that laid out more rules for avoiding touchy language, including terms like “network effects,” “scale,” “bundle,” or “tie.” The concerns go back to at least 2003, when Varian urged Googlers in a memo to be “sensitive” about perceptions of monopolistic behavior, citing the “air supply” comment as an example of what to avoid.

The Justice Department also dissected claims Varian made in 2009 about data from user searches being less than vital to search engine quality — a tortuously drawn-out process that drew multiple objections from Google’s lawyers. In an email chain from later that year, then-Google engineer Udi Manber argued that Varian had been “factually wrong” to dismiss the importance of data-sharing in a Microsoft-Yahoo pact. “It’s absolutely not true that scale is not important. We make very good use of everything we get,” Manber said. “If Microsoft had the same traffic we have, their quality will improve significantly, and if we had the same traffic they have, ours will drop significantly. That’s a fact.”

Source: https://www.theverge.com/2023/9/15/23875342/justice-department-google-antitrust-search-trial-week-one-recap

Google Pays $10 Billion A Year To Maintain Monopoly Over Online Search: US

The accusation came on the opening day of a landmark trial that is the biggest antitrust case in the United States in more than two decades.

Google firmly rejected the US case saying that its search engine was successful because of its quality.

The US government on Tuesday accused Google of paying out $10 billion a year to Apple and other firms in order to safeguard its monopoly over online search.
The accusation came on the opening day of a landmark trial that is the biggest antitrust case in the United States in more than two decades.

“This case is about the future of the internet and whether Google will ever face meaningful competition in search,” said Justice Department lawyer Kenneth Dintzer as the United States government began making its case against the tech titan.

Over 10-weeks and with dozens of witnesses called to the bar, Google will try to persuade Judge Amit P. Mehta that the case brought by the Department of Justice is without merit.

“Google has for decades innovated and improved its search engine, plaintiffs escape this inescapable truth,” Google’s lawyer John Schmidtlein argued before the court.

Held in a Washington courtroom, the trial is the first time US prosecutors have tackled a big tech company head-on since Microsoft was targeted more than two decades ago over the dominance of its Windows operating system.

“Even for Washington DC, I think we have the highest concentration of blue suits in any location here today,” Mehta joked, observing the dozens of lawyers packed into his courtroom.

The Google case centers on the government’s contention that the tech titan unfairly gained its domination of online search by forging exclusivity contracts with device makers, mobile operators and other companies that left rivals no chance to compete.

Dintzer told Judge Mehta that Google pays out $10 billion every year to Apple and others to secure its search engine default status on phones and web browsers, thereby burying upstarts before they have a chance to grow.

Over the past decade, this created what the government calls a “feedback loop” in which Google’s dominance grew ever bigger because of its monopolist access to user data that rivals could never match.

“Through this feedback loop, this wheel has been turning for more than 12 years. It always turns to Google’s advantage,” Dintzer said.

That dominance has made Google parent Alphabet one of the world’s richest companies, with search ads generating nearly 60 percent of the company’s revenue, dwarfing income from other activities such as YouTube or Android phones.

“We will track what Google did to maintain its monopoly… It’s not about what it could have done or should have done, it’s about what they did,” Dintzer told the court.

– Court ‘cannot intervene’ –

Google firmly rejected the US case saying that its search engine was successful because of its quality and the huge investments made over the years.

“This court cannot intervene in the market and say ‘Google you are not allowed to compete.’ That is anathema to US antitrust law,” Google’s Schmidtlein said.

Schmidtlein insisted that testimony from executives at Apple and others will demonstrate that Google won the coveted default status on iPhone and browsers “on the merits.”

The biggest alleged victims in the case are rival search engines that have yet to eke out a meaningful market share for search or search ads against Google, like Microsoft’s Bing and DuckDuckGo.

Google remains the world’s go-to search engine, capturing 90 percent of the market in the United States and across the globe, much of which comes through mobile usage on iPhones and phones running on Google-owned Android.

Source: https://www.ndtv.com/world-news/google-antitrust-trial-google-pays-10-billion-a-year-to-maintain-monopoly-over-online-search-us-4384563

In Its First Monopoly Trial of Modern Internet Era, U.S. Sets Sights on Google

The Justice Department has spent three years over two presidential administrations building the case that Google illegally abused its power over online search to throttle competition. To defend itself, Google has enlisted hundreds of employees and three powerful law firms and spent millions of dollars on legal fees and lobbyists.

On Tuesday, a judge in U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia will begin considering their arguments at a trial that cuts to the heart of a long-simmering question: Did today’s tech giants become dominant by breaking the law?

The case — U.S. et al v. Google — is the federal government’s first monopoly trial of the modern internet era, as a generation of tech companies has come to wield immense influence over commerce, information, public discourse, entertainment and labor. The trial moves the antitrust battle against those companies to a new phase, shifting from challenging their mergers and acquisitions to more deeply examining the businesses that thrust them into power.

Such a consequential case over tech power has not unfolded since the Justice Department took Microsoft to court in 1998 for antitrust violations. But since then, companies like Google, Apple, Amazon and Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, have woven themselves into people’s lives to an even greater degree. Any ruling from the trial could have broad ripple effects, slowing down or potentially dismantling the largest internet companies after decades of unbridled growth.

The stakes are particularly high for Google, the Silicon Valley company founded in 1998, which grew into a $1.7 trillion giant by becoming the first place people turned to online to search the web. The government has said in its complaint that it wants Google to change its monopolistic business practices, potentially pay damages and restructure itself.

“This is a pivotal case and a moment to create precedents for these new platforms that lend themselves to real and durable market power,” said Laura Phillips-Sawyer, who teaches antitrust law at the University of Georgia School of Law.

The case centers on whether Google illegally cemented its dominance and squashed competition by paying Apple and other companies to make its internet search engine the default on the iPhone as well as on other devices and platforms.

In legal filings, the Justice Department has argued that Google maintained a monopoly through such agreements, making it harder for consumers to use other search engines. Google has said that its deals with Apple and others were not exclusive and that consumers could alter the default settings on their devices to choose alternative search engines.

Google has amassed 90 percent of the search engine market in the United States and 91 percent globally, according to Similarweb, a data analysis firm.

Fireworks are expected at the trial, which is scheduled to last 10 weeks. Google’s chief executive, Sundar Pichai, as well as executives from Apple and other tech companies will probably be called as witnesses.

Judge Amit P. Mehta, who was appointed by President Barack Obama in 2014, is presiding over the trial, which will not have a jury, and he will issue the final ruling. Kenneth Dintzer, a 30-year veteran litigator for the Justice Department, will lead the government’s arguments in the courtroom, while John E. Schmidtlein, a partner at the law firm Williams & Connolly, will do the same for Google.

The jockeying over the trial has already been intense. The Justice Department and Google have deposed more than 150 people for the case and produced more than five million pages of documents. Google has argued that Jonathan Kanter, the Justice Department’s head of antitrust, is biased because of his earlier work as a private lawyer representing Microsoft and News Corp. The Justice Department has accused Google of destroying employees’ instant messages that could have contained relevant information for the case.

Kent Walker, Google’s president of global affairs, said in an interview last month that the company’s tactics were “completely lawful” and that its success “comes down to the quality of our products.”

“It’s frustrating — maybe it’s ironic — that we’re seeing this backward-looking case and really unprecedented, forward-looking innovation,” he said.

The Justice Department declined to comment.

Google’s search engine was created by Sergey Brin and Larry Page when they were students at Stanford University in the 1990s. Their technology was widely praised for serving up more relevant results than other web search tools. Google eventually parlayed that success into new business lines including online advertising, video streaming, maps, office apps, driverless cars and artificial intelligence.

Rivals have long accused Google of brandishing its power in search to suppress competitors’ links to travel, restaurant reviews and maps, while giving greater prominence to its own content. Those complaints brought scrutiny from regulators, though little action was taken.

Source: https://dnyuz.com/2023/09/06/in-its-first-monopoly-trial-of-modern-internet-era-u-s-sets-sights-on-google/

Google’s search for an AI future as it turns 25

The tech giant Google and I almost share the same birthday… give or take a few years.

Google turns 25 this month (I’ll have a few more candles on my cake) – and finds itself in a tech landscape that has changed dramatically since founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin started it in 1998.

Back then Google was only a search engine, and it lived for its first few months in the garage of Susan Wojcicki – the future boss of YouTube.

You do not need me to tell you how well that search engine worked out. It has been 17 years since the word Google officially entered the dictionary. I remember a BBC discussion about whether we should use it as a verb on-air because of its potential to be a free advert for the firm.

That company – now part of a larger parent group called Alphabet – has since diversified into pretty much every area of tech and dominates some of them to an extent which sometimes troubles anti-competition regulators. Right now it is trying to Google itself into pole position in the AI race – but some say it has already fallen behind.

Hits and misses
Email and smartphones, software and hardware, driverless cars, digital assistants, YouTube – Google has spawned (and acquired) hundreds of products and services. Not all of them have worked out.

There are 288 retired projects listed on the Killed by Google website, include gaming platform Stadia and budget VR headset Google Cardboard.

Google vice-president Phil Harrison showed off the Stadia controller on-stage at its launch in 2019

The question now is whether Google can maintain its omnipresence in the rapidly evolving world of artificial intelligence.

There have been mutterings, including from within, that it has fallen behind. A leaked memo from a Google engineer found its way on to the net, in which he said the firm had no AI “secret sauce” and was not in a position to win the race.

This feeling was further fuelled by the battle of the bots.

What is AI, is it dangerous and what jobs are at risk?
‘Google killer’ ChatGPT sparks AI chatbot race
Google what our chatbot tells you… says Google
For many people, the first time they knowingly interacted with AI – and were impressed by it – came in the form of ChatGPT, the viral AI chatbot which exploded into the world in November 2022.

Its creator OpenAI has received billions of dollars in investment from Microsoft, which is now working it into its own products, including the Bing search engine and Office 365.

ChatGPT has been dubbed the “Google killer” because of the way it can answer a question in one go, rather than serve up pages and pages of search results.

It uses a language-processing architecture called a transformer which was actually invented by Google, but when Google followed up a few months later with its own rival Bard, it had nowhere near the same impact.

Bard was given a surprisingly cautious launch. It was not for under-18s, the tech giant said, and it was described to me as “an experiment” by a senior exec.

Perhaps part of its caution was in part a result of a weird situation which preceded Bard.

Source: https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-66659361

Google and YouTube are trying to have it both ways with AI and copyright

Google has made clear it is going to use the open web to inform and create anything it wants, and nothing can get in its way. Except maybe Frank Sinatra.

There’s only one name that springs to mind when you think of the cutting edge in copyright law online: Frank Sinatra.

There’s nothing more important than making sure his estate — and his label, Universal Music Group — gets paid when people do AI versions of Ol’ Blue Eyes singing “Get Low” on YouTube, right? Even if that means creating an entirely new class of extralegal contractual royalties for big music labels just to protect the online dominance of your video platform while simultaneously insisting that training AI search results on books and news websites without paying anyone is permissible fair use? Right? Right?

This, broadly, is the position that Google is taking after announcing a deal with Universal Music Group yesterday “to develop an AI framework to help us work toward our common goals.” Google is signaling that it will pay off the music industry with special deals that create brand-new — and potentially devastating! — private intellectual property rights, while basically telling the rest of the web that the price of being indexed in Search is complete capitulation to allowing Google to scrape data for AI training.

Let’s walk through it.

YouTube video player

The quick background here is that, in April, a track called “Heart on My Sleeve” from an artist called Ghostwriter977 with the AI-generated voices of Drake and the Weeknd went viral. Drake and the Weeknd are Universal Music Group artists, and UMG was not happy about it, widely issuing statements saying music platforms needed to do the right thing and take the tracks down.

Streaming services like Apple and Spotify, which control their entire catalogs, quickly complied. The problem then (and now) was open platforms like YouTube, which generally don’t take user content down without a policy violation — most often, copyright infringement. And here, there wasn’t a clear policy violation: legally, voices are not copyrightable (although individual songs used to train their AI doppelgangers are), and there is no federal law protecting likenesses — it’s all a mishmash of state laws. So UMG fell back on something simple: the track contained a sample of the Metro Boomin producer tag, which is copyrighted, allowing UMG to issue takedown requests to YouTube.

This all created a gigantic policy dilemma for Google, which, like every other AI company, is busily scraping the entire web to train its AI systems. None of these companies are paying anyone for making copies of all that data, and as various copyright lawsuits proliferate, they have mostly fallen back on the idea that these copies are permissible fair use under Section 107 of the Copyright Act.

Source : https://www.theverge.com/2023/8/22/23841822/google-youtube-ai-copyright-umg-scraping-universal

Will Musk’s Scrapping of Blocking Feature from ‘X’ Remove it From Apple, Google App Stores | Explained

Elon Musk looks on as he speaks during his visit at the Vivatech technology startups and innovation fair in Paris. (Photo by AFP)

Elon Musk has said the microblogging site X, formerly known as Twitter, will remove a protective feature that lets users block other accounts.

“Block is going to be deleted as a ‘feature’, except for DMs [direct messages],” Musk said in a post on X, adding later, “It makes no sense.”

The block feature allows an X user to restrict accounts they like from contacting them, seeing their posts or following them on the social media platform.

However, the platform would retain the mute function, which screens a user from seeing specified accounts but, unlike blocking, does not alert the other account to the action.

WHY ELON MUSK’S MOVE CONTROVERSIAL?

Removing blocking feature can reshape the way users connect, communicate and coexist in the microblogging site. There have been renewed concerns over some fraudsters impersonating, abusing, and harassing uses on social media.

Users have been resorting to this block feature as a means of defense against harassment, threats or stalking within the platform.

However, X is trying to convey that there will be “a stronger form of mute” in place of blocking. Currently, the mute function of the platform hides individual accounts that users don’t want to interact to on their timeline.

“We can make mutes stronger, like not allow people you mute to reply or quote you. We can also transfer [your] block list to mute list,” Aqueel Miqdad, a software engineer at X, suggested in a post.

Source: https://www.news18.com/explainers/elon-musk-twitter-x-blocking-feature-apple-google-app-stores-explained-8543238.html

Google, Amazon announce major investments in India after meeting with PM Modi in US

These investments aim to foster digital transformation, promote local language content, create employment opportunities, and boost the export of Indian products globally.

PM Modi in US
PM Modi in US

In an exciting development for India’s digital landscape, Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google, and Andrew Jassy, CEO of Amazon, have announced significant investment plans following their meetings with Prime Minister Narendra Modi during his visit to the US.

These investments aim to foster digital transformation, promote local language content, create employment opportunities, and boost the export of Indian products globally.

During his meeting with the Prime Minister, Sundar Pichai revealed Google’s plans to open a global fintech operation center in GIFT City, Gujarat. This move highlights Google’s commitment to expanding its presence in India and leveraging the country’s growing digital economy. Pichai also shared that Google will invest a substantial $10 billion in the India Digitization Fund, further accelerating the country’s digital revolution.

Furthermore, Pichai expressed Google’s intention to introduce its virtual assistant, Bard, to more Indian languages in the near future. This expansion aims to enhance accessibility and inclusivity by providing a localized digital experience to a wider population, empowering them with the latest technology.

Praising the Prime Minister’s visionary approach, Pichai acknowledged that Modi’s Digital India initiative had set a global blueprint that other countries are now looking to follow. The Prime Minister’s foresight in promoting digitalization has positioned India as a leading hub for technological advancements.

Following suit, Amazon’s CEO, Andrew Jassy, also expressed the company’s keen interest in contributing to India’s growth. After his meeting with Prime Minister Modi, Jassy announced that Amazon has already invested a staggering $11 billion in India. In a testament to their commitment, Amazon intends to invest an additional $15 billion, bringing their total investment to a remarkable $26 billion. These funds will be utilized to create more employment opportunities, support the digitization of small and medium-sized businesses, and facilitate the export of Indian products worldwide.

Source : https://www.moneycontrol.com/news/india/google-and-amazon-announce-major-investments-in-india-after-meeting-with-pm-modi-in-us-10849581.html

Google to set up global fintech operations centre in Gujarat; to invest $10 bn in India’s digitisation fund: Sundar Pichai

Sundar Pichai also praised the Prime Minister’s vision for Digital India, the flagship campaign of the Modi-led government, stating that it was ahead of its time and that other countries are following it.

Pichai also announced that Google is bringing the company’s generative AI chatbot Bard to more Indian languages very soon.
Pichai also announced that Google is bringing the company’s generative AI chatbot Bard to more Indian languages very soon.

Google CEO Sundar Pichai on Friday said that the tech major will open its global fintech operation centre in Gujarat and invest $10 billion in India’s digitisation fund. He made this announcement after meeting Prime Minister Narendra Modi in Washington earlier in the day.

“It was an honour to meet PM Modi during the historic visit to the US. We shared with the prime minister that Google is investing $10 billion in India’s digitisation fund. We are announcing the opening of our global fintech operation centre in GIFT City, Gujarat,” Pichai was quoted as saying by news agency ANI.

He added: “We are continuing to invest through that, including in companies working on artificial intelligence. As part of that, we have a 100-language initiative. We are bringing bot to more Indian languages very soon.”

The Gujarat International Finance Tec-City, which is popularly known as the GIFT city, is in Gandhinagar.

He also praised the Prime Minister’s vision for Digital India, the flagship campaign of the Modi-led government. He said that the digital campaign is a blueprint that other countries are looking to adopt. “The PM’s vision for Digital India was way ahead of his time and I now see it as a blueprint that other countries are looking to do,” he said.

Source : https://www.businesstoday.in/latest/in-focus/story/google-to-set-up-global-fintech-operations-centre-in-gujarat-to-invest-10-bn-in-indias-digitisation-fund-sundar-pichai-386918-2023-06-24

Gannett sues Google over its alleged ad tech monopoly

USA Today publisher Gannett is suing Google for allegedly illegally monopolizing the advertising technology market, adding to an already-extensive list of lawsuits against the company for alleged anti-competitive behavior.

“With control over the largest ad exchange and ad server — both of which Google acquired rather than developed — Google has carried out a sophisticated, anticompetitive, and deceptive scheme for well over a decade,” Gannett argued in a complaint filed in the Southern District of New York on Tuesday. The publisher said Google’s broad control of the ad tech market has hurt news publishers, claiming online readership has grown while online ad spending has decreased for publishers.

“Google has monopolized market trading to their advantage and at the expense of publishers, readers and everyone else,” Gannett Chairman and CEO Michael Reed said in a statement. “Digital advertising is the lifeblood of the online economy. Without free and fair competition for digital ad space, publishers cannot invest in their newsrooms.”

The lawsuit echoes arguments made by the U.S. Department of Justice in its second lawsuit against Google, following an earlier one focused on how it distributes its search product. That lawsuit similarly alleged Google illegally maintained a monopoly through its control of multiple parts of the ad selling and buying market.

A group of attorneys general led by Texas also alleged anti-competitive practices over Google’s ad tech products in a 2020 lawsuit.

VP of Google Ads Dan Taylor called Gannett’s claims “simply wrong” in a statement following the lawsuit.

Source : https://www.cnbc.com/2023/06/20/gannett-sues-google-over-its-alleged-ad-tech-monopoly.html

Google’s new Magic Editor pushes us toward AI-perfected fakery

Image: Google

One of the most impressive demos at Google I/O started with a photo of a woman in front of a waterfall. A presenter onstage tapped on the woman, picked her up, and moved her to the other side of the image, with the app automatically filling in the space where she once stood. They then tapped on the overcast sky, and it instantly bloomed into a brighter cloudless blue. In just a matter of seconds, the image had been transformed.

The AI-powered tool, dubbed the Magic Editor, certainly lived up to its name during the demo. It’s the kind of tool that Google has been building toward for years. It already has a couple of AI-powered image editing features in its arsenal, including the Magic Eraser, which lets you quickly remove people or objects from the background of an image. But this type of tool takes things up a notch by letting you alter the contents — and potentially, the meaning — of a photo in much more significant ways.

While it’s clear that this tool isn’t flawless — and there remains no firm release date for it — Google’s end goal is clear: to make perfecting photos as easy as just tapping or dragging something on your screen. The company markets the tool as a way to “make complex edits without pro-level editing tools,” allowing you to leverage the power of AI to single out and transform a portion of your photo. That includes the ability to enhance the sky, move and scale subjects, as well as remove parts of an image with just a few taps.

Google’s Magic Editor attempts to package all the steps that it would take to make similar edits in a program like Photoshop into a single tap — or, at least, that’s what it looks like from the demo. In Photoshop, for example, you’re stuck using the Content-Aware Move tool (or any of the other methods of your choice) to pick up and move a subject inside of an image. Even then, the photo still might not look quite right, which means you’ll have to pick up other tools, like the Clone Stamp tool or maybe even the Spot Healing Brush, to fix any leftover artifacts or a mismatched background. It’s not the most complicated process ever, but as with most professional creative tools, there’s a definite learning curve for people who are new to the program.

I’m all for Google making photo editing tools free and more accessible, given that Photoshop and some of the other image editing apps out there are expensive and pretty unintuitive. But putting powerful and incredibly easy-to-use image editing tools into the hands of, well, just about everyone who downloads Google Photos could transform the way we edit — and look at — photos. There have long been discussions about how far a photo can be edited before it’s no longer a photo, and Google’s tools push us closer to a world where we tap on every image to perfect it, reality or not.

Samsung recently brought attention to the power of AI-“enhanced” photos with “Space Zoom,” a feature that’s supposed to let you capture incredible pictures of the Moon on newer Galaxy devices. In March, a Reddit user tried using Space Zoom on an almost unsalvageable image of the Moon and found that Samsung appeared to add craters and other patches that weren’t actually there. Not only does this run the risk of creating a “fake” image of the Moon, but it also leaves actual space photographers in a strange place, as they spend years mastering the art of capturing the night sky, only for the public to often be presented with fakes.

Source: https://www.theverge.com/23721763/google-magic-editor-ai-photos-pixel-fakery

Google’s new cost-cutting measures; stop free snacks, laundry services and other employee perks: Report

The company stated that these changes will help ‘reduce food waste and be better for the environment’

Google’s new cost-cutting measures; stop free snacks, laundry services and other employee perks: Report | Image: Wikipedia (Representative)

Google has reportedly announced new cost-cutting measures. The company has decided to focus on key matters, including “prioritising its work in AI,” as reported Business Insider.

“This work is particularly vital because of our recent growth, the challenging economic environment, and our incredible investment opportunities to drive technology forward- particularly in AI,” read the memo, which was signed by Ruth Porat, Google’s chief financial officer, and Prabhakar Raghavan, the company search lead, on behalf of all PA and Functional leads. The report added that the announcement was made in a memo released by Google.

To cut down cafes and micro kitchens

The company has also stated that employees will no longer be able to take advantage of cafes, micro kitchens, and other facilities, according to the report.

The company stated that these changes will help ‘reduce food waste and be better for the environment’.

The memo also stated, “We’re adjusting our office services to the new hybrid workweek. Cafes, MicroKitchens and other facilities will be tailored to better match how and when they are being used. Decisions will be based on data. For example, where a cafe is seeing a significantly lower volume of use on certain days, we’ll close it on those days and put more focus instead on popular options that are close by.”

Google’s layoff

The new cost-cutting measure comes months after Google announced that the company will “cut 12000 jobs.”

In a memo, Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai said that the company had reviewed its products, people and priorities, leading to job cuts across geographies and tech. He said it’s a “different economic reality”.

“The fact that these changes will impact the lives of Googlers weighs heavily on me, and I take full responsibility for the decisions that led us here,” said Pichai.

Source: https://www.freepressjournal.in/business/googles-new-cost-cutting-measures-stop-free-snacks-laundry-services-and-other-employee-perks-report

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