Jack Nicas

As Facebook has taken it on the chin over the way it has handled the personal information of its users, the leaders of other tech companies have demonstrated that even in publicity-hungry Silicon Valley, it is entirely possible for billionaire executives and their sprawling empires to keep a low profile.

Once one of President Trump’s most vocal opponents, Silicon Valley’s technology industry has increasingly found common ground with the White House. When President Trump was elected, tech executives were largely up in arms over a leader who espoused policies on immigration and other issues that were antithetical to their companies’ values. Now, many of the industry’s executives are growing more comfortable with the president and how his economic agenda furthers their business interests, even as many of their employees continue to disagree with President Trump on social issues.

YouTube is the new television, with more than 1.5 billion users, and videos the site recommends have the power to influence viewpoints around the world. Those recommendations often present divisive, misleading or false content despite changes the site has recently made to highlight more-neutral fare. People cumulatively watch more than a billion YouTube hours daily world-wide, a 10-fold increase from 2012, the site says. Behind that growth is an algorithm that creates personalized playlists.

Google-parent Alphabet said Eric Schmidt will step down from his post as executive chairman in January and transition to a role as technical adviser. Schmidt, who joined Google in 2001 and served as its chief executive until 2011, also will continue to serve on Alphabet’s board. Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Google Chief Executive Sundar Pichai “and I all believe that the time is right in Alphabet’s evolution for this transition,” Schmidt said.

Google said it is pulling YouTube from some Amazon.com Inc. devices in retaliation for Amazon refusing to sell many Google products, escalating a battle between two tech titans as their businesses increasingly overlap. Google said Amazon’s retail website doesn’t sell competing products like the Google Home smart speaker or Google’s Chromecast streaming device. Google also claimed that Amazon’s Prime Video lineup of shows and movies isn’t available via the Chromecast.

Google became the world’s go-to source of information by ranking billions of links from millions of sources. Now, for many queries, the company is presenting itself as the authority on truth by promoting a single search result as the answer. The promoted answers, called featured snippets, are outlined in boxes above other results and presented in larger type, often with images. Google’s voice assistant sometimes reads them aloud.

An investigation of Google has found it systematically pays female employees less than their male counterparts, US Department of Labor officials said, a claim that adds to allegations of gender bias in Silicon Valley.

The Labor Department found the gender-pay gap during a routine probe into whether Google, a federal contractor, is complying with laws that prohibit contractors from discriminating against applicants or employees. The department is suing Google to compel the company to disclose more compensation data for its investigation. At a procedural hearing before a federal administrative law judge in San Francisco, Labor Department Regional Director Janette Wipper said the agency “found systemic compensation disparities against women pretty much across the entire workforce” at Google.

Software giant Oracle said it briefed European regulators late in 2016 on recent changes to Google’s privacy policies in hopes of compounding its rival’s already complicated regulatory challenges. In June, Google asked users to accept a new privacy policy that allowed it to combine their browsing and search data, giving the company more robust profiles of its users. Oracle said it told antitrust regulators that the policy change will make it harder for other companies to compete by enabling Google, a unit of Alphabet Inc., to even more accurately target ads to users. Privacy advocates have also complained to US regulators. “‘Super profiles’ now a reality,” reads a headline on one slide of a presentation that Oracle provided to regulators. “Policy change gives Google, exclusive, unprecedented insight into users’ lives.” An EU official confirmed regulators had been briefed by Oracle on the privacy-policychange and said they were taking the allegations “seriously.”

Google runs the world’s largest advertising business, selling space atop its search results. Google is also among the biggest buyers of those ads, promoting products from its music service to its app store. These days, Google often pushes its growing list of hardware products, from Pixel phones to Nest smart thermostats, in the top ad spot above its search results. A Wall Street Journal analysis found that ads for products sold by Google and its sister companies appeared in the most prominent spot in 91% of 25,000 recent searches related to such items. In 43% of the searches, the top two ads both were for Google-related products.

President-elect Donald Trump struck a conciliatory tone at the start of a high-profile meeting with top tech executives Dec 14, telling the Silicon Valley leaders that his goal is “to help you folks do well.” “We want you to keep going with the incredible innovation... Anything we can do to help this go along we’re going to be there for you,” he told the tech executives. “You call my people, you call me. It doesn’t make any difference.” President-elect Trump also told the executives that he would “do fair-trade deals” and said he was “going to make it a lot easier for you to trade across borders.” Trump has been a persistent critic of past trade deals, including the pending Trans Pacific Partnership.

At the meeting, Trump was flanked by Vice President-elect Mike Pence and billionaire investor Peter Thiel, who is advising the president-elect. Tech executives present included Alphabet Chief Executive Larry Page, Apple CEO Tim Cook and Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella. About a dozen executives were scheduled to attend the meeting. The attendee list is a Who’s Who of tech, including Amazon.com CEO Jeff Bezos, Facebook Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg, Tesla Motors CEO Elon Musk, and chairman of Google parent Alphabet Eric Schmidt, apparently.