Interactive

Congressional antitrust investigators are scrutinizing plans by Google to use a new internet protocol because of concerns that it could give the company a competitive advantage by making it harder for others to access consumer data. Investigators for the House Judiciary Committee asked Google for information about its “decision regarding whether to adopt or promote the adoption” of the protocol, which the company said is aimed at improving internet security.

Google and its subsidiary YouTube will pay a record $170 million to settle allegations by the Federal Trade Commission and the New York Attorney General that the YouTube video sharing service illegally collected personal information from children without their parents’ consent.

Apparently, the Federal Trade Commission has finalized a settlement with Google in its investigation into YouTube for violating federal data privacy laws for children. The settlement — backed by the agency’s three Republicans and opposed by its two Democrats — finds that Google inadequately protected kids who used its video-streaming service and improperly collected their data in breach of the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act, or COPPA, which prohibits the tracking and targeting of users younger than 13, the people said.

In light of continued rapid changes in technology, the Federal Trade Commission is seeking comment on the effectiveness of the amendments the agency made to the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Rule (COPPA Rule) in 2013 and whether additional changes are needed.

As American regulators and lawmakers intensify their scrutiny of Big Tech, there is a lot of discussion about whether or how they could accuse the companies of violating antitrust law.

Sens.

$4.7 billion is the amount that Google made from the work of news publishers in 2018 via search and Google News, according to a study by the News Media Alliance. That $4.7 billion is nearly as much as the $5.1 billion brought in by the United States news industry as a whole from digital advertising in 2018 — and the News Media Alliance cautioned that its estimate for Google’s income was conservative. For one thing, it does not count the value of the personal data the company collects on consumers every time they click on an article like this one.

Behavioral advertising, which involves collecting data about readers’ online behavior and using it to serve them specially tailored ads, often through bits of code called cookies, has become the dominant force in digital advertising in recent years.

The European Union fined Google €1.49 billion for hampering potential rival search advertisers between 2006 and 2016, closing the last formal EU investigation into the US tech company.

The report calls for a tax on targeted online advertising to respond to the crisis in journalism and fund diverse, local, independent and non-commercial news and information. The report proposes a series of proposals to levy a small tax on ads sold by highly profitable companies like Facebook and Google.