Digital Content

When I saw that Google had introduced a “Classic Papers” section of Google Scholar, its search tool for academic journals, I couldn’t help but stroke my chin professorially. What would make a paper a classic, especially for the search giant? In a blog post introducing the feature, Google software engineer Sean Henderson explains the company’s rationale. While some articles gain temporary attention for a new and surprising finding or discovery, others “have stood the test of time,” as Henderson puts it. How to measure that longevity? Classic Papers selects papers published in 2006, in a wide range of disciplines, which had earned the most citations as of this year. To become a classic, according to Google, is just to have been the most popular over the decade during which Google itself rose to prominence. It might seem like an unimportant, pedantic gripe to people outside of academia. But Scholar’s classic papers offers a window into how Google conceives of knowledge—and the effect that theory has on the ideas people find with its services.

Canadian courts can force internet search leader Google to remove results worldwide, the country's top court ruled June 28, drawing criticism from civil liberties groups arguing such a move sets a precedent for censorship on the internet.

In its 7-2 decision, Canada's Supreme Court found that a court in the country can grant an injunction preventing conduct anywhere in the world when it is necessary to ensure the injunction's effectiveness. "The internet has no borders - its natural habitat is global," the Supreme Court wrote in its judgment. "The only way to ensure that the interlocutory injunction attained its objective was to have it apply where Google operates - globally."

10 findings about smartphones:

1) About three-quarters of U.S. adults (77%) say they own a smartphone, up from 35% in 2011.
2) Half of younger adults live in a household with three or more smartphones.
3) Mobile devices aren’t just for calling or texting. Americans are using their phones for a variety of nontraditional phone activities, such as looking for a job, finding a date or reading a book.
4) The smartphone is becoming an important tool for shoppers.
5) Growing shares of Americans – especially those who are lower-income – rely on smartphones to access the internet. Overall, 12% of U.S. adults were “smartphone-only” internet users in 2016 – meaning they owned a smartphone but did not have broadband internet at home. This represents an increase from 8% in 2013.
6) More than half of smartphone owners say they get news alerts on their phones, but few get these alerts frequently.
7) While smartphones are becoming more integrated into our lives, many users aren’t taking the necessary steps to secure their devices.
8) Smartphone ownership is climbing in developing nations, but the digital divide remains. Median smartphone adoption in developing nations rose to 37% in 2015, up from 21% in 2013, according to a Pew Research Center survey of 21 emerging and developing nations conducted in 2015. But with a median of 68%, advanced economies still have considerably higher rates of smartphone adoption, with the highest rates among surveyed countries found in South Korea, Australia, Israel, the U.S. and Spain.
9) Americans have different views about where it is and isn’t appropriate to use a cellphone.
10) The smartphone is essential for many owners, but a slight majority says it’s not always needed. Some 46% of smartphone owners said their smartphone is something “they couldn’t live without,” compared with 54% who said in a 2014 Pew Research Center survey that their phone is “not always needed.”

The April 2 edition of the Sunday New York Times, where the paper features its best journalism, included a six-page special section, “Women Today,” pegged to a summit in Manhattan a few days later. What wasn’t in any of the stories was the fact that the Times itself owned a minority stake in the conference.

Although the paper’s own standards call for transparency in this area, the section didn’t disclose the paper’s financial interest. These sections, often paired with Times-backed live events, are a growing part of the business model of what has been the newspaper of record, and just one example of the extent to which the newsroom and the company’s marketing department now work together in an effort to generate new sources of revenue. The editor of these sections meets once a week with the advertising department to discuss possible projects, while the advertising studio of the Times acts as a matchmaker between reporters and sponsors. In one sense, such initiatives might be seen as the new normal, as newspapers like the Times scramble for creative approaches in an industry whose finances are growing creakier by the day. But the Times is a unique beast, in journalism and within its own midtown Manhattan tower, and a bevy of new initiatives being rolled out to buoy the company’s bottom line worry journalists at a paper that has long maintained a firm separation between its news and business operations. Continuing job cuts in the newsroom, even as the business side of the paper continues to grow, have made those tensions even more acute.

Snap-happy tourists have long posed next to the billboard-sized “Like” sign outside Facebook’s headquarters, in awe of seeing the real-life company behind the app. But it has taken until 2017 — and a political situation the tech industry sees as a crisis — to get Silicon Valley truly interested in the real lives of its users.

So...what apps did people describe as their friend? Amazon, Uber and — a big surprise — the Bible. The Bible app allows users to choose their preferred version, bookmark key passages and sign up for daily quotes. An instant-access Bible may be the only on-demand app that Silicon Valley failed to dream up. It was created by religious organisation Life.Church, which has locations all over the south and is now on 250 million devices worldwide.

Even if you didn’t commit a crime, and so no warrant has been issued (per your Fourth Amendment rights), the government can still take away your online anonymity, says a court. Even if all you did was use your First Amendment-protected right to speak about a private company online, the government can unmask you. This is what occurred in a ruling against Glassdoor, an online job-review website.

Judge Diane J. Humetewa of the US District Court for the District of Arizona ruled that the US Department of Justice can compel a private company—say, Facebook, Yelp, Twitter…—to give up your private information just because you expressed an opinion online. Glassdoor, which is a California-based company, has appealed the ruling to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. If it stands, this case could crack the foundation of online freedom. How could a labor union organize if its members’ views, through no fault of their own, might be made public by the government? How could any whistleblower act with this threat being a real possibility?

[Commentary] The First Amendment protects our right to use social networks like Facebook and Twitter, the Supreme Court declared. The decision called social media “the modern public square” and “one of the most important places” for the exchange of views. The holding is a reminder of the enormous role such networks play in our speech, our access to information and, consequently, our democracy. But while the government cannot block people from social media, these private platforms can. Today, as social media sites are accused of spreading false news, influencing elections and allowing horrific speech, they may respond by increasing their policing of content. Clarity about their internal speech regulation is more important now than ever. The ways in which this newfound transparency is harnessed by the public could be as meaningful for online speech as any case decided in a United States court.

[Margot E. Kaminski is an assistant professor at the Ohio State University Moritz College of Law. Kate Klonick is a Ph.D. candidate at Yale Law School.]

The European Commission has hit Google with a €2.42 billion (approximately $2.73 billion) antitrust fine for abusing its dominance in search, a decision with potentially far-reaching implications for both the tech sector and already strained transatlantic relations.

The European Commission ended its seven-year competition investigation, concluding that the search group had abused its near-monopoly in online search to “give illegal advantage” to its own shopping service. Margrethe Vestager, the EU’s competition commissioner, said Google “denied other companies the chance to compete” and left consumers without “genuine choice”. “Google’s strategy for its comparison shopping service wasn’t just about attracting customers by making its product better than those of its rivals. Instead, Google abused its market dominance as a search engine by promoting its own comparison shopping service in its search results and demoting those of competitors. What Google has done is illegal under EU antitrust rules.” The company has 90 days to make changes and must “refrain from any measure that has the same or an equivalent object or effect”, the commission said.

Businesses leaders expressed surprise that the Department of Justice is appealing a case about when law enforcement should have access to data stored in other countries. The case pits the DOJ against Microsoft over an issue both sides have indicated requires a legislative fix: whether or not a domestic warrant can require a company to retrieve data stored on a foreign server.

Both chambers of Congress had taken up the issue with hearings involving the DOJ, industry and other stakeholders, and both chambers had expressed a sense of urgency to resolve the conflict. The DOJ filed paperwork for the appeal on June 23. The government is appealing lower court rulings that law enforcement cannot obtain data stored in a foreign nation with a warrant. Rather, the ruling says law enforcement needs to follow the foreign nation's policies for searching and seizing evidence. This has long been the case with physical evidence and the United States has several treaties known as Mutual Legal Assistance Treaties (MLATs) to provide a diplomatic apparatus to request evidence be retrieved and sent stateside.

Brussels plans to hit Google with a fine of more than $1.2 billion for abusing its dominance in search, a decision that is likely to inflame already strained transatlantic relations. European Union antitrust officials have formally recommended that the search giant be found in breach of competition regulations for using its near-monopoly in online search to steer customers unfairly to its own Google Shopping service. The final decision is expected to be made on June 28 by the EU college of commissioners, the collective decision-making body, apparently. The decision relates to one of three competition claims against the company being investigated by EU authorities and would be the first sanction by a leading competition regulator on the way Google operates.