CMA says tech company has ‘abused its dominant position’ to the detriment of publishers and advertisers * Business live – latest updates The UK competition watchdog has accused Google of anti-competitive behaviour in the market for buying and selling ads on websites, in a move that follows similar investigations in the US and the EU. The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) said it had found that Google has “abused its dominant position” in online advertising to the detriment of thousands of UK publishers and advertisers. Continue reading...

DoJ could force divestment of Android operation system and Chrome web browser following the antitrust verdict A week after a judge ruled the tech giant illegally monopolized the online search market, the US Department of Justice is considering options that include breaking up Alphabet’s Google, worth some $2tn, according to reports from the New York Times and Bloomberg News. Divesting the Android operating system was one of the remedies most frequently discussed by justice department attorneys, the reports said. Continue reading...

An abandoned Australian ‘experiment’ shows that the public can successfully object to what companies and politicians claim is inevitable progress Scratch a digital capitalist and you’ll find a technological determinist – someone who believes that technology drives history. These people see themselves as agents of what Joseph Schumpeter famously described as “creative destruction”. They revel in “moving fast and breaking things” as the Facebook founder, Mark Zuckerberg, used to put it until his PR people convinced him it was not a good vibe, not least because it implied leaving taxpayers to pick up the broken pieces. Tech determinism is an ideology, really; it’s what determines how you think when you don’t even know that you’re thinking. And it feeds on a narrative of technological inevitability, which says that new stuff is coming down the line whether you like it or not. As the writer LM Sacasas puts it, “all assertions of inevitability have agendas, and narratives of technological inevitability provide convenient cover for tech companies to secure their desired ends, minimise resistance, and convince consumers that they are buying into a necessary, if not necessarily desirable future”. Continue reading...

The ruling found Google broke antitrust laws by making multibillion-dollar deals. Will those agreements evaporate? Google lost its landmark antitrust case against the US Department of Justice this week after a federal judge ruled the tech giant had built an illegal monopoly over the online search and advertising industry. The decision will probably have immense implications for both Google’s internal operations and how people interact with the most popular page on the internet. Judge Amit Mehta’s ruling specifically found that Google broke antitrust laws by striking exclusive agreements with device makers like Apple and Samsung, in which Google would pay billions of dollars to ensure that its product was the default search engine on their phones and tablets. During the trial, it was revealed that Google paid companies, including Apple, more than $26bn in 2021 alone to remain the default option for search in Safari. Those deals allowed Google to build a monopoly over search and unfairly suppress competition, Mehta found. Continue reading...

White House calls decision – that could have major implications for web use – ‘victory for the American people’ Google violated antitrust laws as it built an internet search empire, a federal judge ruled on Monday in a decision that could have major implications for the way people interact with the internet. Judge Amit Mehta found that Google violated section 2 of the Sherman Act, a US antitrust law. His decision states that Google maintained a monopoly over search services and advertising. Continue reading...

Their shares have fallen 11.8% from last month’s peak but more AI breakthroughs may reassure investors It has been tough week for the magnificent seven, the group of technology stocks that has played a dominant role in the US stock market, buoyed by investor excitement about breakthroughs in artificial intelligence. Last year Microsoft, Amazon, Apple, the chipmaker Nvidia, Google’s parent, Alphabet, Facebook’s owner, Meta, and Elon Musk’s Tesla accounted for half the gains in the S&P 500 share index. But doubts about the return on AI investment, along with a mixed set of quarterly results, investors shifting their focus to other sectors and weak US economic data have hit the group over the past month. Continue reading...

The ChatGPT maker is betting big, while Google hopes its AI tools won’t replace workers, but help them to work better • Don’t get TechScape delivered to your inbox? Sign up here What if you build it and they don’t come? It’s fair to say the shine is coming off the AI boom. Soaring valuations are starting to look unstable next to the sky-high spending required to sustain them. Over the weekend, one report from tech site the Information estimated that OpenAI was on course to spend an astonishing $5bn more than it makes in revenue this year alone: If we’re right, OpenAI, most recently valued at $80bn, will need to raise more cash in the next 12 months or so. We’ve based our analysis on our informed estimates of what OpenAI spends to run its ChatGPT chatbot and train future large language models, plus ‘guesstimates’ of what OpenAI’s staffing would cost, based on its prior projections and what we know about its hiring. Our conclusion pinpoints why so many investors worry about the profit prospects of conversational artificial intelligence. In this paper, we argue against the view that when ChatGPT and the like produce false claims, they are lying or even hallucinating, and in favour of the position that the activity they are engaged in is bullshitting … Because these programs cannot themselves be concerned with truth, and because they are designed to produce text that looks truth-apt without any actual concern for truth, it seems appropriate to call their outputs bullshit. Part of what’s tricky about us talking about it now is that we actually don’t know exactly what’s going to transpire. What we do know is the first step is going to be sitting down [with the partners] and really understanding the use cases. If it’s school administrators versus people in the classroom, what are the particular tasks we actually want to get after for these folks? If you are a school teacher some of it might be a simple email with ideas about how to use Gemini in lesson planning, some of it might be formal classroom training, some of it one on one coaching. Across 1,200 people there will be a lot of different pilots, each group with around 100 people. Continue reading...

Prototype, initially launching with select publishers and users, set to challenge Google’s dominance of online search OpenAI is testing a new search engine that uses generative artificial intelligence to produce results, raising the prospect of a significant challenge to Google’s dominance of the online search market. SearchGPT will launch with a small group of users and publishers before a potential wider rollout, the company announced on Thursday. OpenAI ultimately intends to incorporate the search features into ChatGPT, rather offer a standalone product. Continue reading...

Research commissioned by Google estimates 31% of jobs would be insulated from AI and 61% radically transformed by it Almost two-thirds of British jobs could be “enhanced” with AI, Google has claimed, with only a tiny proportion at risk of being “phased out” entirely. Instead of worrying about job losses caused by AI, the focus needed to be on making sure the millions of Britons who could work in smarter and faster ways with AI tech got the support to use it, the company said. Continue reading...

Alphabet reports $84.7bn in revenue, on back of Search and Cloud, up from the same period last year Google’s parent company, Alphabet, outperformed analysts’ expectations on Tuesday, reporting second-quarter earnings of $1.89 per share, the same as its first quarter results. Alphabet’s CEO, Sundar Pichai, touted the results as proof that the company’s investments across different areas of its tech empire were seeing positive returns. Continue reading...