Digital Content

The Justice Department’s lawsuit against Google reveals new details about a secretive, multibillion-dollar deal between Google and Apple. The suit targets paid deals Google negotiates to get its search engine to be the default on browsers, phones and other devices. The biggest of these is an agreement that makes Google search the default on iPhones and other Apple devices. The Justice Department said Apple Chief Executive Officer Tim Cook and Google CEO Sundar Pichai met in 2018 to discuss the deal.

The Department of Justice — along with eleven state Attorneys General — filed a civil antitrust lawsuit in the US District Court for the District of Columbia to stop Google from unlawfully maintaining monopolies through anticompetitive and exclusionary practices in the search and search advertising markets and to remedy the competitive harms.

Internet service providers will suffer “irreparable harm” if California is allowed to enforce its net neutrality law, which includes restrictions on carriers' ability to exempt video streams from data caps, trade groups told a federal judge.

Without us even realizing it, the Internet’s most-used website has been getting worse. On too many queries, Google is more interested in making search lucrative than a better product for us. There’s one reason it gets away with this, according to a recent congressional investigation: Google is so darn big.

Our digital public sphere has been failing for some time. Technologies designed to connect us have instead inflamed our arguments and torn our social fabric. It doesn’t have to be this way. History offers a proven template for how to build healthier public spaces. As wild as it sounds, part of the solution is no further than your nearest public park. But social media and messaging platforms weren't designed to serve as public spaces. They were designed to monetize attention.

Microsoft adopted a whole slew of "fairness principles" for its Windows app store.

Things got technical at the Supreme Court as the justices heard arguments from Google and Oracle in a blockbuster copyright dispute that has captivated Silicon Valley for a decade. The dispute concerns about 11,500 lines of code that Google used to build its popular Android mobile operating system, which were replicated from the Java application programming interface developed by Sun Microsystems. Oracle, which acquired Sun in 2010, sued Google shortly afterward, arguing that Google’s use of the code violates its ownership rights.

Conservatives claim that tech platforms disproportionately suppress and censor conservative views online. But the facts to support that case have been hard to find. Technology experts say there is no statistical evidence to support the argument that Facebook does not give conservative views a fair shake. When Republicans claim Facebook is "biased," they often collapse two distinct complaints into one. First, that the social network deliberately scrubs right-leaning content from its site. There is no proof to back this up.

Apparently, the Trump administration is pressuring Republican Senators to ratchet up scrutiny of social media companies it sees as biased against conservatives in the run-up to the Nov 2020 election. In recent weeks, the White House has pressed Senate Republican leaders on key committees to hold public hearings on the law that protects Facebook, Twitter and other internet companies from lawsuits over how they treat user posts. And action is following.

Big tech firms could be banned from preferencing their own services in search rankings or exclusively pre-installing their own applications on devices, under new regulations planned by the European Union.