In a legal action, 1-800 Contacts has been sued by the US Federal Trad Commission for allegedly pursuing “anticompetitive agreements with rival online contact lens sellers that suppress competition in certain online search advertising auctions.” According to the FTC: 1-800 Contacts entered into bidding agreements with at least 14 competing online contact lens retailers that eliminate competition […]

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, […]

China has, once again, began cracking down on search content.  This crack down is in response, at least partially, to the death of the college sophomore Wei Zexi.  Now, according to Bloomberg, China has begun requiring search engines to “report banned content and verify advertisers’ qualifications.” In the report, it says that any “banned information” can’t […]

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 […]

It looks like the Commission Nationale de l’informatique et des Libertés (CNIL), the French privacy authority, has decided to take a dangerous position that supports internet censorship.  The CNIL, along with others in Europe, wants Google to remove links from the global search index under Europe’s “Right to Be Forgotten” law (RTBF). The position, which is […]