Europe data regulators have apparently had it with Google. After years of Google stonewalling governments on the so-called wi-spy scandal around Google snooping on individual data in homes using Street View vehicles and then, last year, changing its privacy policies without getting consent from its users, a taskforce of six European government data agencies announced [...]
As predicted, the Federal Trade Commission has punted any serious action against Google’s monopoly dominance of search advertising and related sectors. Worse, it turns out the investigation was so narrow and ultimately so perfunctory that it’s hard to understand what took nineteen months to get such a meager result. Conservative FTC Commissioner J. Thomas Rosch [...]
With reports that Google is likely to be let off the hook with minor restrictions on its behavior, the Federal Trade Commission seems ready to punt on the most important antitrust case to come across its desk in years. Given how narrowly the FTC had been approaching the case in the first place, that’s probably [...]
Google recently made a radical revamp of its main search page, adding a new category of “sponsored” e-commerce results when consumers search for a particular product — and Microsoft is highlighting the change in a new ad campaign arguing users are getting “Scroogled.” In the past, Google kept a firm distinction between search results that [...]
It’s now being reported that Google has negotiated a deal with the FTC to settle charges of illegally bypassing privacy settings on users using the Safari browser. According to the Guardian: The Wall Street Journal reports that the FTC and Google are close to agreeing a settlement over the privacy breach, in which Google circumvented Apple‘s protections [...]
The European Union has all but announced that it will find that Google has abused its dominant position to undermine competition online – and they are giving the company two weeks to agree to remedies to fix the problems that the EU has identified. The four main concerns include ones regularly discussed in the media [...]
Euro regulators asked Google to hold off on implementing its new privacy policy. Google ignored the request, so regulators are now drilling down in an investigation of whether the policy violates European privacy laws and regulations. Acting on behalf of the European network of data protection authorities, the French Commission Nationale de l’Informatique et des [...]
We seem to be having two debates about Google— on the cultural side, the question is whether the company violates user privacy too much and, on the business side, is Google a monopoly threat in the marketplace? But these are not separate issues at all. Larry Page and Sergey Brin did not create Google because [...]
Last month, Google announced that it would begin integrating user data across all its services and create a single privacy policy that users would automatically agree to for all its services whenever they used any single Google service. European regulators on Feb. 2nd asked Google to hold off implementing the policy until they had a [...]
Now, Google is hardly alone in abusing patents, but a German high court’s ruling against Motorola shows that Google is just adding to the list of its monopoly abuses by playing the patent abuser game. The ruling stemmed from Google demanding that companies either pay an absurdly high patent license fee — in this case [...]
