Tag: Google Search

5 1: Can big tech stocks recover? Apple even breached the $1trn trillionmark, with Amazon close behind. Tech companies, in the eyes of many, are simply getting too big and powerful. In Ireland, tech firm’sfirms’ political importance came to the fore when some of the biggest internet firms took an unprecedented decision not to allow campaigning ads in the weeks preceding the country’s abortion referendum in May. 3: When Chinese tech firms ran into political trouble Huawei is now Ireland’s third-largest smartphone manufacturer and second in the world after Samsung. The reason, they say, is that Huawei has close links to Chinese authorities. Huawei comes in for particular atttention because it’s such a big player in communications network infrastructure. British Telecom will now move Huawei kit away from “core” network functions in rolling out 5G infrastructure, the Financial Times reported. The Chinese government was outraged by the detention, interpreting it as a direct assault on Chinese interests. This might dash hopes for connections to rural homes by the end of 2019, something that had been on the cards until the controversy around Mr Naughten’s meetings blew up at the tail end of 2018. disruption.

Tech giants Facebook and Google will pay Washington state more than $450,000 to settle twin lawsuits filed by Attorney General Bob Ferguson accusing the companies of failure to abide by state laws on political advertising transparency. In the settlements, filed Tuesday in King County Superior Court, the companies did not admit any violations of state law, but agreed to pay $200,000 each to end the legal disputes. Ferguson’s office filed the lawsuits in June, citing longstanding state law that requires media companies to collect and make public detailed information about political ads. I am pretty shocked by that, honestly,” Edwards said, questioning whether the state gained any assurances of compliance by the companies. He said he takes Edwards’ criticisms “with a grain of salt” and that the size of the settlements was proper given the allegations. Ferguson added: “If there is not full and complete disclosure going forward, Facebook and Google will hear from my office again.” The lawsuits have already had some effect, as Google stopped accepting political ads for state and local races in Washington days after the complaint was filed in June. In stopping those ads, the company cited emergency rules issued by the state Public Disclosure Commission (PDC) that clarified that the state law applies to digital firms, which must make information about political ads available as soon as they are published, including viewership data and the geographic areas targeted. “At that point, we paused accepting election advertising in Washington because our systems weren’t built to comply with these new requirements. Meanwhile, Facebook has continued to accept political ads in Washington, with the company pointing to its voluntary efforts to disclose more information even while its attorneys argued the state regulations were pre-empted by federal law. But Ferguson said the information provided by the archive has not been adequate to comply with Washington’s rules — failing, for example, to provide enough information on who bought ads and the precise amount of payments.

Embattled Google CEO Sundar Pichai, amid allegations of anti-conservative bias and privacy violations on the platform, plans to tell the House Judiciary Committee on Tuesday that his company is no haven for political bias. The CEO met privately with GOP lawmakers on Capitol Hill in September to discuss the allegations and concerns about the firm’s re-entry into China and privacy issues. In his prepared testimony before the House Judiciary Committee Pichai also noted that Google supports federal privacy legislation. As such, the Google chief's appearance on Capitol Hill will be closely followed. “Of course he’s not going to have a network in Washington,” he added. A number of employees have reportedly resigned over the project, which has also drawn bipartisan howls on Capitol Hill at a sensitive time for America's relationship with China, and Google has reportedly clamped down on internal leaks this year. "It is a coup for the Chinese government and Communist Party to force Google—the biggest search engine in the world—to comply with their onerous censorship requirements, and sets a worrying precedent for other companies seeking to do business in China without compromising their core values," a bipartisan group of senators said in an August letter to Pichai. At the same time, in the wake of Facebook's known security issues like Cambridge Analytica, Google will be questioned about why it took months for the company to publicly disclose the privacy flaw in its Google+ social network. To conservative critics, the video feeds the perception that Google is biased against them. Google has consistently denied any political bias.

Faced with growing criticism that his company’s best known products and services may be biased by its employees’ political views, Google Chief Executive Sundar Pichai has urged those who work at the internet giant to keep their opinions on politics to themselves. According to the Wall Street Journal, Pichai sent a memo to Google’s employees, also known as “Googlers”, on Friday warning them to that if they do anything that “undermines (users’) trust, we will hold them accountable.” “We do not bias our products to favor any political agenda,” Pichai said, in a copy of the memo that Journal said it obtained. “The trust our users place in us is our greatest asset and we must always protect it.” Pichai’s laying down of the law regarding employees’ political bias in their work comes after the leaking to the public of some discussions by Google employees that appeared to show those workers lamenting the policies and administration of President Donald Trump. Among the matters that the Journal said Google employees talked about was President Trump’s January 2017 travel ban, and ways that they could alter Google search functions to connect people to organizations and efforts opposed to the travel ban. In his memo, Pichai said no such changes were put in place. “Recent news stories reference an internal email to suggest that we would compromise the integrity of our search results for a political end,” the Journal reported Pichai as saying in the memo. “This is absolutely false.” Last month, President Trump, took to Twitter to call out Google for what he said was promoting stories critical about his presidency and tamping down reports by more friendly outlets. Trump called the actions a “very serious situation” that “will be addressed.”

Ajit Pai, chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, earlier this week called for tech companies such as Facebook and Twitter to disclose more information about how they operate their services and about their privacy practices. Pai suggested that new regulations might be needed to force this transparency and even indicated that his agency might be the one to put the new rules in place and enforce them. Pai's comments appear to be more about politics than policy; it's no coincidence that they come hot on the heels of President Trump's own attacks on the big tech companies. The companies ought to be disclosing how they operate their services, what they do with customers' private information, and how they decide which posts or people to block. He's such a believer in deregulation that he's questioned whether his agency has the authority to oversee broadband companies at all and abdicated pretty much all oversight over them to the Federal Trade Commission, an agency with both a much broader mandate and much narrower powers. Pai's concern for transparency would be more convincing if he hadn't — in the process of repealing the FCC's net neutrality rules — taken a hacksaw to the disclosure requirements the agency put on broadband providers. Without them, broadband providers are free to block or throttle access to any sites or services they like for any reason at all — including to suppress particular speakers or speech. Pai wants to regulate companies his agency doesn't oversee But Pai's newfound regulatory zeal is even less convincing because he seems to imply that the FCC ought to have some role in imposing new rules on Google, Facebook, and other internet companies. So here you have an official who washed his hands of regulating the companies his agency is actually charged with overseeing seemingly suggesting that his agency ought to crack down on companies it doesn't actually regulate. Drew Angerer/Getty Images Again, all this concern over the power of the big tech companies would be more convincing if conservatives had made any kind of noise about corporate power before Trump started making sounding off about it.