Advertising

The National Advertising Division (NAD) of BBB National Programs told T-Mobile to stop claiming its T-Mobile Home Internet service is “fast” and “reliable.” Of course, that didn’t go over well at T-Mobile, which is appealing parts of the NAD decision that came after a complaint was lodged by rival Comcast. NAD told T-Mobile to discontinue claims that its home internet service is “fast” or “high speed” or modify its advertising to avoid conveying a message that the service will be “fast” or “high speed” for all fixed wireless access (FWA) customers. T-Mobile Home Internet (T-HINT) customers

Apple is taking steps to separate its mobile operating system from features offered by Google, making advances around maps, search and advertising that have created a collision course between the Big Tech companies. The two Silicon Valley giants have been rivals in the smartphone market since Google acquired and popularized the Android operating system in the 2000s. Apple is still engaged in a “silent war” against its arch-rival by developing features that could allow the iPhone maker to further separate its products from services offered by Google. The first front of this battle is mapping

The Justice Department—along with the Attorneys General of California, Colorado, Connecticut, New Jersey, New York, Rhode Island, Tennessee, and Virginia—filed a civil antitrust suit against Google for monopolizing multiple digital advertising technology products in violation of Sections 1 and 2 of the Sherman Act. Filed in the US District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia, the complaint alleges that Google monopolizes key digital advertising technologies, collectively referred to as the “ad tech stack,” that website publishers depend on to sell ads and that advertisers rely on to

Big Tech has far too much power. Ahey have a chokehold over essential channels of communication and commerce, allowing them to be gatekeepers to the digital world. They vacuum up a trove of personal information about users—what they see, hear, read, think and buy. And they distort the “marketplace of ideas.” Congress must act quickly to prohibit the tech giants from unfairly leveraging their dominance into more markets. This doesn’t mean rewriting the antitrust laws but rather taking these three steps:

The Federal Election Commission (FEC) has dismissed a complaint from Republicans that Google’s Gmail app aided Democratic candidates by sending GOP fundraising emails to spam at a far higher rate than Democratic solicitations. The Republican National Committee and others contended that the alleged benefit amounted to unreported campaign contributions to Democrats. The Republican National Committee, the National Republican Senatorial Committee, and the National Republican Congressional Committee complained to the FEC in 2022, citing 

Meta Platforms, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, said advertisers will no longer be able to use a teenager’s gender to target them with promoted messages on its sites. The updated settings are scheduled to go into effect in February and will mean advertisers can market to teens based only on age and location. Meta previously stopped advertisers from targeting teenagers based on their Facebook or Instagram activity, such as the Pages they like. The changes will apply to those 13 to 17 years old.

The Justice Department reached a key milestone in its settlement agreement with Meta Platforms, formerly known as Facebook, requiring Meta to change its advertisement delivery system to prevent discriminatory advertising in violation of the Fair Housing Act (FHA).

Facebook parent Meta has agreed to pay $725 million to settle a class action lawsuit that claimed the social media giant gave third parties access to user data without their consent. It is the “largest recovery ever achieved in a data privacy class action and the most Facebook has ever paid to resolve a private class action,” said Keller Rohrback L.L.P, the law firm representing the plaintiffs. The class action lawsuit was prompted in 2018 after Facebook disclosed that the information of 87 million users was improperly shared with Cambridge Analytica, a consultancy firm linked to former Pre

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 and Meta, known together in the ad industry as the "duopoly," are expected to bring in less than half of all US digital advertising this year for the first time since 2014.