Sam Schechner

France’s privacy watchdog fined Microsoft for not making it easy enough for users of its Bing search engine to reject cookies used for online ads, as part of a broader increase of enforcing Europe’s privacy laws. France’s data-protection regulator, the CNIL, fined a Microsoft subsidiary in Ireland 60 million euros, equivalent to almost $64 million. The company hadn’t—until earlier in 2022—offered users the option to reject so-called cookies alongside the button to accept them, the regulator said.

Google lost most of its appeal to overturn the largest antitrust fine it has so far faced globally, a boost to the European Union’s campaign to rein in alleged anticompetitive conduct by big tech companies.

Amazon has proposed concessions to settle two antitrust cases against it in the European Union, a fresh sign of changing strategy from big tech companies after the bloc passed a strict new digital-competition law. The US-based online retailer offered a pledge not to use nonpublic data about sellers on its marketplace, after the EU accused Amazon of violating competition law by using nonpublic information from merchants to compete against them. The European Commission, the bloc’s top competition regulator, said it was seeking feedback on commitments offered by Amazon to settle the cases.

Russia is dropping a digital iron curtain over its population, creating a big, new fracture in the global internet—but there are still big gaps in President Vladimir Putin’s efforts to cut off the country from online information accessible in much of the rest of the world. At the same time, more Western companies are pulling back some digital services from Russia under pressure from Western sanctions. It is too early to say how permanent the restrictions will be.

Facebook is struggling to detect and deal with users’ creating multiple accounts on its flagship platform, according to internal documents that raise new questions about how the social-media giant measures its audience. An internal Facebook presentation in spring 2021 called the phenomenon of single users with multiple accounts “very prevalent” among new accounts. The finding came after an examination of roughly 5,000 recent sign-ups on the service indicated that at least 32 percent and as many as 56 percent were opened by existing users.

Facebook's oversight board said the company hadn’t been forthcoming about how it exempts high-profile users from its rules and said it is drafting recommendations for how to overhaul the system, following a Wall Street Journal investigation into the practice. The oversight board said Facebook had repeatedly failed to turn over, or provided incomplete, information about how it treats content from large numbers of prominent users.

Google plans to stop selling ads based on individuals’ browsing across multiple websites, a change that could hasten upheaval in the digital advertising industry. In 2022 Google plans to stop using or investing in tracking technologies that uniquely identify web users as they move from site to site across the internet. The decision, coming from the world’s biggest digital-advertising company, could help push the industry away from the use of such individualized tracking, which has come under increasing criticism from privacy advocates and faces scrutiny from regulators.

A system Google set up to promote competition on Android has left some smaller search engines having trouble gaining traction, fueling rivals’ complaints about the tech giant’s compliance with a European Union antitrust decision ahead of potential US charges. Since March, Google has been showing people in Europe who set up new mobile devices running the company’s Android operating system what it calls a “choice screen,” a list of rival search engines that they can select as the device’s default.

Apparently, a European Union privacy regulator has sent Facebook a preliminary order to suspend data transfers to the US about its EU users, an operational and legal challenge for the company that could set a precedent for other tech giants. The preliminary order was sent by Ireland’s Data Protection Commission to Facebook late in Aug, asking for the company’s response. It is the first significant step EU regulators have taken to enforce a July ruling about data transfers from the bloc’s top court.

When choosing the best video clips to promote from around the web, Alphabet’s Google gives a secret advantage to one source in particular: itself. Or, more specifically, YouTube. Google executives in recent years made decisions to prioritize YouTube on the first page of search results, in part to drive traffic to YouTube rather than to competitors, and also to give YouTube more leverage in business deals with content providers seeking traffic for their videos. A Google spokeswoman, Lara Levin, said there is no preference given to YouTube or any other video provider in Google search.