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More than 30 states added to Google’s mushrooming legal woes, accusing the company of illegally arranging its search results to push out smaller rivals. The bipartisan group of state prosecutors said in a lawsuit that Google downplayed websites that let users search for information in specialized areas like home repair services and travel reviews. The prosecutors also accused the company of using exclusive deals with phone makers like Apple to prioritize Google’s search service over rivals like Firefox and DuckDuckGo.

A coalition of state attorneys general sued Google, accusing the search giant of operating an illegal digital-advertising monopoly, in part thanks to an auction-rigging deal with rival Facebook. The complaint, filed in US District Court in Texas, alleges that Facebook emerged in 2017 as a powerful new rival to the Alphabet unit’s established dominance in the market for online advertising.

Content is moving online and the government needs to keep pace. This accelerating shift toward Internet-based platforms is transforming the media marketplace, and the regulatory framework must change accordingly.  In 2020, for example, Google and Facebook are each expected to bring in more ad revenue than every TV and radio station in the U.S. combined.

The European Commission proposed an ambitious reform of the digital space, a comprehensive set of new rules for all digital services, including social media, online market places, and other online platforms that operate in the European Union: the Digital Services Act and the Digital Markets Act. Under the Digital Services Act, binding EU-wide obligations will apply to all digital services that connect consumers to goods, services, or content, including new procedures for faster

In 2000, just two years after it was founded, Google reached a milestone that would lay the foundation for its dominance over the next 20 years: It became the world’s largest search engine, with an index of more than one billion web pages. The rest of the internet never caught up, and Google’s index just kept on getting bigger.

Despite having many fewer followers and much less engagement on social media than President Donald Trump, Joe Biden's campaign raised record amounts of money and ultimately neutralized Trump’s vaunted “Death Star” — the name his erstwhile campaign manager, Brad Parscale, gave to the campaign’s digital operation. Figuring out whether any particular online strategy decisively moved the needle for President-elect Biden is probably impossible. Offline factors, such as Trump’s mishandling of the pandemic and the economic devastation it has caused, undoubtedly played a major role.

A fight over foreign countries' efforts to tax big American tech companies' digital services is likely to come to a head in January just as Joe Biden takes office. Governments have failed to reach a broad multilateral agreement on how to structure such taxes.

Connected Nation finds that 47 percent of US school districts—6,132, to be exact, representing about one-third of public K-12 students—meet the 1 Mbps/student standard. Still, that means about two-thirds of students lack what Connected Nation calls “scalable broadband” in schools. The broadband gap isn’t only a problem for remote learning. “Early childhood” videos on YouTube nearly all have advertising. And as video dominates online instruction, more educators need easy-to-use resources for video creation.

Senate Commerce Committee Ranking Member Maria Cantwell (D-WA) released a  report showing the impact of the transformation of news online and the accompanying loss of revenue. The report shows one factor of the revenue loss is the unfair and abusive practices by tech platforms. The impact of these practices indicates the need for Congress to provide the Federal Trade Commission new authority to protect the local news industry. The report closely examines the unfair and abusive practices by major tech platforms that have contributed to the drastic revenue declines.

It is helpful to look for the profit motives behind what’s happening in our shopping lives. So why does it feel as if every other commercial you see on TV or online is a phone company blaring “5G! 5G! 5G!” into your earholes? Because each once-in-a-decade changeover in wireless technology is a shot for companies like Verizon, AT&T, and T-Mobile to pad our cellphone bills without us going nuts and to steal customers from one another.