CMA says tech company has ‘abused its dominant position’ to the detriment of
publishers and advertisers
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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.
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Tag - Alphabet
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.
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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”.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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The ChatGPT maker is betting big, while Google hopes its AI tools won’t replace
workers, but help them to work better
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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