Davey Alba

The former head of search at Google told colleagues in February 2019 that his team was “getting too involved with ads for the good of the product and company,” according to emails shown at the Justice Department’s landmark antitrust trial against the company. Google maintains a firewall between its ads and search teams so that its engineers can innovate on Google’s search engine, unsullied by the influence of the team whose goal is to maximize advertising revenue.

There is a fast-growing network of nearly 1,300 websites that aim to fill a void left by vanishing local newspapers across the country. Yet the network, now in all 50 states, is built not on traditional journalism but on propaganda ordered up by dozens of conservative think tanks, political operatives, corporate executives and public-relations professionals. The sites appear as ordinary local-news outlets, with names like Des Moines Sun, Ann Arbor Times and Empire State Today.

Twenty state attorneys general called on Facebook to better prevent messages of hate, bias and disinformation from spreading, and said the company needed to provide more help to users facing online abuse. In a letter to the social media giant, the officials said they regularly encountered people facing online intimidation and harassment on Facebook. They outlined seven steps the company should take, including allowing third-party audits of hate content and offering real-time assistance to users.

Last week, as a wave of stay-at-home orders rolled out across the United States, the average time it took to download videos, emails and documents increased as broadband speeds declined 4.9 percent from the previous week, according to Ookla, a broadband speed testing service.

As millions of people across the US shift to working and learning from home this week to limit the spread of the coronavirus, they will test internet networks with one of the biggest mass behavior changes that the nation has experienced. That is set to strain the internet’s underlying infrastructure, with the burden likely to be particularly felt in two areas: the home networks that people have set up in their residences, and the home internet services from Comcast, Charter and Verizon that those home networks rely on.

Moat calls itself the “Nielsen of digital.” It’s a service advertisers use to make sure the right people are seeing and clicking on their ads. And those advertisers today have a problem: Because of the automated nature of so much online advertising, cash is increasingly flowing to sites that peddle fake news, often without the knowledge of the advertisers themselves. That’s not the kind of news brands want to be seen paying for. But Moat says it’s got a fake-news fix that could dry up ad dollars that keep fake news sites in busines

Facebook and several other Western companies tried to give away free Internet in India, but regulators wouldn’t allow it. The trouble is that the service provided free access to some online apps—including Facebook—but not others. This is called zero-rating, and regulators believe it harms online competition, giving certain companies an unfair advantage over others. So far, despite complaints from various public advocates, US regulators have just let zero rating happen. But the issue may soon come to a head, now that AT&T, one of the world’s biggest Internet service providers, has signed an $85.4 billion agreement to acquire Time Warner, one of the world’s biggest media companies.

The overarching problem here is that widespread zero-rating harms innovation. It prevents newer and smaller players from challenging the established companies, and that’s particularly true when those established companies start consolidating and getting even bigger. And companies of a certain size can have an influence on the rest of the playing field—as the Justice Department seeks to show with a new lawsuit against none other than DirecTV, accusing the company of colluding with other pay-TV companies to block content (before its merger with AT&T). Among public advocates, the hope is that regulators will bar a combined AT&T-Time Warner from practicing zero-rating, but that’s not enough. The bigger hope is that the AT&T deal leads to stiffer rules for the entire industry—a firm declaration that zero-rating harms competition wherever it’s practiced.