It has been ruled by German court that Google isn’t required to pre-screen websites for defamation before they are displayed in search results.  This comes from the country’s highest court, the German Federal Court of Justice. For the plaintiffs, they sought to make Google filter out websites that allegedly displayed defamatory content about them in an IT-related online […]

On February 8, the Competition Commission of India (CCI) fined Google $1.36 billion rupees (roughly $21.1 million) for “abuse of its dominant position” in search.  The specific finding made by CCI surrounded Google’s treatment of flight search results.  The decision was 4 to 2 against Google. According to CCI, Google “allocated disproportionate real estate” to the box […]

Back in 2012, Google had to pay $22.5 million to settle an FTC claim that the company “misrepresented to users of Apple Inc.’s Safari Internet browser that it would not place tracking cookies or serve targeted ads to those users . . .” The company bypassed Safari’s cookie-blocking settings, it said, to deliver a “signed-in” user experience. According to Google, it “used known […]

According to a post on the The Telegraph, Google plans to file an appeal against the roughly $2.7 billion (€2.4 billion) antitrust fine imposed by the European Commission in June for abuse of market position in shopping search.  Aside from the $1.3 billion against Intel, the Google fine is the largest in EU history. Intel had won a rare partial […]

Google, which is aiming its voice typing technology more inclusive, has added 30 new languages to voice search, bringing the total number of languages support by speech recognition via Gboard on Android to 119. Some of languages that are included are Bengali, Lao, Sundanese, Urdu, Swahili and Amharic.  There is even an ancient language included, Georgian. […]

The newest transparency report update has been released by Google, and it reports 40,677 requests for user data from governments around the world. According to the transparency report, over 5,000 more requests during the second half of 2015 was compared to January through June of 2015, with 81,311 total users/accounts specified. There were over 100 countries listed […]

In a report in the Wall Street Journal, European Commission (EC) regulators, are preparing a “supplementary statement of objections” in the existing shopping search antitrust matter  The original “statement of objections (which were originally antitrust charges) were filed against Google back in 2015. Although, in the original charges, teh EC had been focusing exclusively on shopping search, […]

It was reported yesterday that Google was appealing the French Data protection regulator’s (CNIL’s) decision that Google must remove/censor “right to be forgotten” (RTBF) URLs on a global level.  Before, Google trying finding a compromise an enforce RTBF in Europe, but preserve the content in other markets with different rules and privacy standards. CNIL didn’t accept that […]

Google is getting yet another formal antitrust complaint filed against Google today.  The complaint is being filed with the European Commission (EC)  This news was first reported by Time. There are some published reports that says Getting is claiming that there are high-resolution Google image search results that are being “scraped” from its customers’ sites and are […]

These days, when you think of Google and antitrust battles, we think of the search engine’s battle with the European Union.  But surprisingly, there is another ongoing investigation going on in India that hasn’t gotten nearly the same amount of coverage the European antitrust investigation.  There was an article that has appeared in the India-based Economic Times that […]