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Google on Wednesday was hit by a lawsuit from a group of state attorneys over alleged violation of antitrust laws by its Android app store.

Attorneys general for 36 states and the District of Columbia sued the Big Tech company in a 144-page complaint filed in a Northern California federal court. The group alleges that Google’s Play store for Android apps violates antitrust laws.The complaint centers on the control Google is able to exert on its Play store, allowing it to collect commissions of up to 30 percent on digital transactions within apps installed on Android-powered smartphones. Those devices represent more than 80 percent of the worldwide smartphone market.Led by Utah, North Carolina, Tennessee, New York, Arizona, Colorado, Iowa, and Nebraska, it marks the fourth major antitrust lawsuit filed by U.S. government agencies against the company since October 2020.Other lawsuits filed against Google include a complaint filed by a bipartisan coalition of states, and one filed by the Department of Justice. It echoes allegations made against the company by mobile game maker Epic Games in August 2020. That case is awaiting trial.The complaint contends that Google has deployed various tactics and set up anticompetitive barriers to ensure it distributes more than 90 percent of the apps on Android devices—a market share that the attorneys general argue represents an illegal monopoly. It also alleges Google has been abusing that power to reap billions of dollars in profit at the expense of consumers, who wind up paying higher prices to subsidize the commissions, and the makers of apps who have less money and incentive to innovate.

Ohio’s attorney general, Dave Yost, filed a lawsuit on Tuesday in pursuit of a novel effort to have Google declared a public utility and subject to government regulation.The lawsuit, which was filed in a Delaware County, Ohio court, seeks to use a law that’s over a century old to regulate Google by applying a legal designation historically used for railroads, electricity and the telephone to the search engine.“When you own the railroad or the electric company or the cellphone tower, you have to treat everyone the same and give everybody access,” Mr. Yost, a Republican, said in a statement. He added that Ohio was the first state to bring such a lawsuit against Google.If Google were declared a so-called common carrier like a utility company, it would prevent the company from prioritizing its own products, services and websites in search results.AdvertisementContinue reading the main storyGoogle said it had none of the attributes of a common carrier that usually provide a standardized service for a fee using public assets, such as rights of way.The “lawsuit would make Google Search results worse and make it harder for small businesses to connect directly with customers,” José Castañeda, a Google spokesman, said in a statement. “Ohioans simply don’t want the government to run Google like a gas or electric company. This lawsuit has no basis in fact or law and we’ll defend ourselves against it in court.”Though the Ohio lawsuit is a stretch, there is a long history of government control of certain kinds of companies, said Andrew Schwartzman, a senior fellow at the nonprofit Benton Institute for Broadband & Society. “Think of ‘The Canterbury Tales.’ Travelers needed a place to stay and eat on long road treks, and innkeepers were not allowed to deny them accommodations or rip them off,” he said.

After a series of federal lawsuits filed against Google last year, Ohio’s lawsuit is part of a next wave of state actions aimed at regulating and curtailing the power of Big Tech. Also on Tuesday, Colorado’s legislature passed a data privacy law that would allow consumers to opt out of data collection.On Monday, New York’s Senate passed antitrust legislation that would make it easier for plaintiffs to sue dominant platforms for abuse of power. After years of inaction in Congress with tech legislation, states are beginning to fill the regulatory vacuum.Editors’ PicksThe Abandoned Houses of Instagram21 Easy Summer Dinners You’ll Cook (or Throw Together) on Repeat‘King Richard’ Finds Fresh Drama in WatergateAdvertisementContinue reading the main storyAdvertisementContinue reading the main storyOhio was also one of 38 states that filed an antitrust lawsuit in December accusing Google of being a monopoly and using its dominant position in internet search to squeeze out smaller rivals.

As the DoJ and FTC pursue civil antitrust litigation against some of America's largest tech firms, a House Committee has approved legislation to curb the market dominance of many of these same firms, including Google-owner Alphabet and Facebook. However, according to a report from WSJ, the tech firms targeted by the legislation are ramping up their lobbying efforts, precipitating a pitched battle over the legislation in the Senate.At the core of the six-bill raft of legislation is a measure to bar big tech firms from favoring their own products on their platforms. It was approved by the House committee early Thursday by a vote of 24 to 20.The NYT reported that Apple and other tech giants engaged in aggressive lobbying against the six-bill package, with Apple CEO Tim Cook going so far as to call Speaker Nancy Pelosi and other top lawmakers to warn them against supporting the legislation. Per the NYT, the calls from Cook were "part of a forceful and wide-ranging pushback by the tech industry since the proposals were announced this month. Executives, lobbyists, and more than a dozen think tanks and advocacy groups paid by tech companies have swarmed Capitol offices, called and emailed lawmakers and their staff members, and written letters arguing there will be dire consequences for the industry and the country if the ideas become law."

Mirroring the outcome of several EU anti-trust investigations, the legislation, known as the "American Choice and Innovation Online Act," the legislation would prohibit the owners of big platforms (like Amazon's online marketplace) from creating disadvantages for goods and services provided by competitors.

As a general rule, politicians don’t pick fights with their state’s biggest private employers, but Seattle Congresswoman Pramila Jayapal is doing just that, sponsoring legislation that would break up Amazon.Jayapal’s Ending Platform Monopolies Act is part of a broader, bipartisan effort in Congress to rein in the power of the Big Four tech giants: Amazon, Facebook, Apple and Google.Following up on a 16-month antitrust investigation completed last fall, House lawmakers this month unveiled five antitrust bills aimed at checking the power of the companies by limiting their abilities to gobble up or hamstring competitors.Jayapal’s proposal would allow the federal government to sue to force the Big Four tech firms to sell off lines of business deemed a “conflict of interest.” That would mean Amazon could no longer run its marketplace for third-party sellers while also competing against them with its own products. Similar divestments would be required of the other top tech firms, and all could face massive daily fines for noncompliance.

The focus on today’s ubiquitous big tech giants in some ways echoes past antitrust confrontations in the U.S. In the 1980s, the federal government forced the breakup of the Bell System phone monopoly. In the late 1990s, the U.S. sought to bust up Microsoft over its PC market stranglehold — a battle that ended in a 2002 settlement curbing some of its practices.The Big Four have inspired blowback from across the political spectrum, though not always for the same reasons. All five of the House bills rolled out last week had both Democratic and Republican co-sponsors — producing some unusual alliances.

Amazon will pay almost $62 million to settle allegations by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission that it avoided handing over the full pay and tips it promised to delivery drivers, according to the agency.The company is giving back the amount it kept, according to a complaint released earlier this year by the agency, after it told Amazon Flex drivers and customers in 2015 it would pay $18 to $25 hourly plus tips. Instead, beginning the following year, it used tips to supplement lower base pay rates, and tried to hide the changes, according to the FTC."For a period of over two and a half years, without consumers' permission, Amazon secretly used nearly a third of customer tips to subsidize its own pay to drivers," the FTC had found.Under the 20-year settlement, Amazon will also need consent from drivers to change their pay scheme. All commissioners voted unanimously to approve the settlement.

The European Union and the U.K. opened formal antitrust investigations into Facebook Inc.’s FB -0.86% classified-ads service Marketplace, ramping up regulatory scrutiny for the company in Europe. Both the European Commission—the EU’s top antitrust enforcer—and the U.K.’s Competition and Markets Authority said Friday they are investigating whether Facebook repurposes data it gathers from advertisers who buy ads in order to give illegal advantages to its own services, including its Marketplace online flea market. The U.K. added that it is also investigating whether Facebook uses advertiser data to give similar advantages to its online-dating service. The two competition watchdogs said they would coordinate their investigations.

Separately on Friday, Germany’s competition regulator announced that it is opening an investigation into Google’s News Showcase, in which the tech company pays to license certain content from News publishers. That probe, which is based on New powers Germany had granted the regulator, will look among other things at whether Google is imposing unfair conditions on publishers and how it selects participants, the Federal Cartel Office said.

The three newly opened cases are part of a new wave of antitrust enforcement in Europe. The European Commission filed formal charges last month against Apple Inc. for allegedly abusing its control over the distribution of music-streaming apps, including Spotify Technology SA . In November, it filed formal charges against Amazon.com Inc. for allegedly using nonpublic data it gathers from third-party sellers to unfairly compete against them. Both companies denied wrongdoing. At the same time, the U.K.’s CMA has opened investigations into Google’s announcement that it will retire third-party cookies, a technology advertisers use to track web users, and whether Apple imposes anticompetitive conditions on some app developers, including the use of Apple’s in-app payment system, which is also the subject of a lawsuit in the U.S. In the EU, the European Commission has been investigating Facebook for more than a year on multiple fronts. Facebook and the Commission have squabbled over access to internal documents as part of those investigations.

On Feb. 5, 2021, the United Kingdom (U.K.) Supreme Court issued its judgment in R (on the application of KBR, Inc) v. Director of the Serious Fraud Office, holding that the U.K. Serious Fraud Office (SFO) lacked statutory authority to compel a U.S. company to disclose overseas data under threat of criminal sanction.  This judgment has obvious similarities with the so-called Microsoft Ireland decision of the U.S. Second Circuit Court of Appeals, which held that using U.S. Stored Communication Act (SCA) warrants to reach overseas data was an impermissible extraterritorial application of that legislation.  Microsoft Ireland was viewed by many as hugely controversial, hindering U.S. law enforcement’s access to overseas data, leading to a Supreme Court appeal and, ultimately, legislative amendments.  This new U.K. judgment promises to have an equally significant impact across the Atlantic on equivalent U.K. law enforcement powers.

Facebook Inc on Wednesday pledged to invest at least $1bn in the news industry over the next three years, days after a high-profile standoff with the Australian government over paying news outlets for content. The social network’s commitment to the news industry follows Google’s $1bn investment last year, as technology giants come under scrutiny over their business models as well as the proliferation of misinformation on their platforms.

Facebook on Tuesday restored Australian news pages, ending an unprecedented weeklong blackout after the company wrung concessions from the government over a proposed law that will require tech giants to pay traditional media companies for their content. The brief blackout shocked the global news industry, which has already seen its business model upended by the tech giants.

Facebook said on Wednesday that it has already invested $600m in the news industry since 2018. The social media company added it was in active negotiations with news publishers in Germany and France for a deal to pay for content for its news product, where users can find headlines and stories next to a personalised news feed.

As Silicon Valley censorship radically escalated over the past several months — banning pre-election reporting by The New York Post about the Biden family, denouncing and deleting multiple posts from the U.S. President and then terminating his access altogether, mass-removal of right-wing accounts — so many people migrated to Parler that it was catapulted to the number one spot on the list of most-downloaded apps on the Apple Play Store, the sole and exclusive means which iPhone users have to download apps. “Overall, the app was the 10th most downloaded social media app in 2020 with 8.1 million New installs,” reported TechCrunch.It looked as if Parler had proven critics of Silicon Valley monopolistic power wrong. Their success showed that it was possible after all to create a New social media platform to compete with Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. And they did so by doing exactly what Silicon Valley defenders long insisted should be done: if you don’t like the rules imposed by tech giants, go create your own platform with different rules.

But today, if you want to download, sign up for, or use Parler, you will be unable to do so. That is because three Silicon Valley monopolies — Amazon, Google and Apple — abruptly united to remove Parler from the internet, exactly at the moment when it became the most-downloaded app in the country. If one were looking for evidence to demonstrate that these tech behemoths are, in fact, monopolies that engage in anti-competitive behavior in violation of antitrust laws, and will obliterate any attempt to compete with them in the marketplace, it would be difficult to imagine anything more compelling than how they just used their unconstrained power to utterly destroy a rising competitor.

Google and Facebook, the No. 1 and No. 2 players in online advertising, made a secret illegal pact in 2018 to divide up the market for ads on websites and apps, according to an antitrust suit filed Wednesday against the search giant. The suit — filed by Texas and eight other states — alleges that the companies colluded to fix prices and divvy up the market for mobile advertising between them.

The allegation that Google teamed up with Facebook to suppress competition mirrors a major claim in a separate antitrust suit the Justice Department filed against the company in October: that Google teamed up with Apple to help ensure the continued dominance of its search engine. Such allegations provide some of the strongest ammunition yet to advocates who argue that the U.S. major tech companies have gotten too big and are using their power — sometimes in conjunction with each other — to control markets.Many of the details about the Google-Facebook agreement, including its specific language, are redacted from the complaint. But the states say it “fixes prices and allocates markets between Google and Facebook as competing bidders in the auctions for publishers’ web display and in-app advertising inventory.”

The complaint alleges that the agreement was prompted by Facebook’s move in 2017 to use “header bidding” — a technology popular with website publishers that helped them increase the money they made from advertising. While Facebook sells ads on its own platform, it also operates a network to let advertisers offer ads on third-party apps and mobile websites.

everal technology companies including Snap Inc, Pinterest, Dropbox and eBay announced a coalition on Tuesday that would advocate the benefits of Section 230, a decades-old law protecting internet firms.Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act protects tech companies from liability over content posted by users, and has been under attack from U.S. President Donald Trump and Republican lawmakers. They have criticized internet platforms’ content moderation decisions and accused them of stifling conservative voices.

Trump said earlier this month that he would veto the $740 billion National Defense Authorization Act unless it includes a measure eliminating the law.

The coalition, Internet Works, said on Tuesday it aims to ensure that policymakers understand “the potential unintended consequences of blunt changes to the law”, including limiting effective content moderation efforts."This coalition brings new voices and diverse perspectives to Washington's current Section 230 debate, which too often focuses on the largest internet platforms," it said here.

The European Union unveiled landmark legislation on Tuesday that lays out strict rules for tech giants to do business in the bloc. The draft legislation, dubbed the Digital Services Act (DSA) and the Digital Markets Act (DMA), outlines specific regulations that seek to limit the power of global internet firms on the European market. Companies including Google, Apple, Amazon, Facebook and others could face hefty penalties for violating the rules. EU antitrust czar Margrethe Vestager and EU digital chief Thierry Breton presented the draft on Tuesday, after the content of the new rules was leaked to the media on Monday.

What's in the draft laws? The dual legislation sets out a list of do's, don'ts and penalties for internet giants: Companies with over 45 million EU users would be designated as digital "gatekeepers" — making them subject to stricter regulations. Firms could be fined up to 10% of their annual turnover for violating competition rules. The could also be required to sell one of their businesses or parts of it (including rights or brands). Platforms that refuse to comply and "endanger people's life and safety" could have their service temporarily suspended "as a last resort." Companies would need to inform the EU ahead of any planned mergers or acquisitions. Certain kinds of data must be shared with regulators and rivals. Companies favoring their own services could be outlawed. Platforms would be more responsible for illegal, disturbing or misleading content.

Following the announcement on Tuesday, US internet giant Google criticized the draft legislation, saying it appeared to target specific firms.  "We will carefully study the proposals made by the European Commission over the next few days. However, we are concerned that they seem to specifically target a handful of companies," said Karan Bhatia, the vice president of government affairs and public affairs at Google. Facebook appeared to offer a more conciliatory tone, saying the legislation was "on the right track."

The Federal Trade Commission sued to break up Facebook on Wednesday, asking a federal court to force the sell-off of assets such as Instagram and WhatsApp as independent businesses.“Facebook has maintained its monopoly position by buying up companies that present competitive threats and by imposing restrictive policies that unjustifiably hinder actual or potential rivals that Facebook does not or cannot acquire,” the commission said in the lawsuit filed in federal court in Washington, D.C.The lawsuit asks the court to order the “divestiture of assets, divestiture or reconstruction of businesses (including, but not limited to, Instagram and/or WhatsApp),” as well as other possible relief the court might want to add.

Attorneys general from 48 states and territories said they were filing their own lawsuit against Facebook, reflecting the broad and bipartisan concern about how much power Facebook and its CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, have accumulated on the internet.

European Union regulators filed antitrust charges Tuesday against Amazon, accusing the e-commerce giant of using its access to data from companies that sell products on its platform to gain an unfair advantage over them.The charges, filed two years after the bloc’s antitrust enforcer began looking into the company, are the latest effort by European regulators to curb the power of big technology companies. Margrethe Vestager, the EU commissioner in charge of competition issues, has slapped Google with antitrust fines totaling nearly $10 billion and opened twin antitrust investigations this summer into Apple. The EU’s executive Commission also opened a second investigation Tuesday into whether Amazon favors product offers and merchants that use its own logistics and delivery system.

The EU investigation found that Amazon is accessing and analyzing real-time data from other vendors that sell goods on its platform to help it decide which new products of its own to launch and how to price and market them. That “appears to distort genuine competition,” Vestager said.Investigators focused on that practice in France and Germany, the company’s two biggest markets in the EU, but Vestager didn’t give specific examples of merchants affected by Amazon’s behavior.The stakes have risen for retailers as many European countries have shut nonessential shops temporarily to try to contain the coronavirus pandemic, pushing more shopping online, where Amazon is a major presence. Advertising Skip AdSkip AdSkip Ad Amazon faces a possible fine of up to 10% of its annual worldwide revenue. That could amount to as much as $28 billion, based on its 2019 earnings. The Seattle-based company rejected the accusations.

Two Facebook users are seeking damages on behalf of hundreds of thousands of Canadians whose personal data may have been improperly used for political purposes. The proposed class-action lawsuit filed by Calgary residents Saul Benary and Karma Holoboff asks the Federal Court to order the social-media giant to bolster its security practices to better protect sensitive information and comply with federal privacy law. It also seeks $1,000 for each of the approximately 622,000 Canadians whose information was shared with others through a digital app.

The Justice Department accused Google on Tuesday of illegally protecting its monopoly over search and search advertising, the government’s most significant challenge to a tech company’s market power in a generation and one that could reshape the way consumers use the internet.In a much-anticipated lawsuit, the agency accused Google of locking up deals with giant partners like Apple and throttling competition through exclusive business contracts and agreements.Google’s deals with Apple, mobile carriers and other handset makers to make its search engine the default option for users accounted for most of its dominant market share in search, the agency said, a figure that it put at around 80 percent.“For many years,” the agency said in its 57-page complaint, “Google has used anticompetitive tactics to maintain and extend its monopolies in the markets for general search services, search advertising and general search text advertising — the cornerstones of its empire.”The lawsuit, which may stretch on for years, could set off a cascade of other antitrust lawsuits from state attorneys general. About four dozen states and jurisdictions, including New York and Texas, have conducted parallel investigations and some of them are expected to bring separate complaints against the company’s grip on technology for online advertising. Eleven state attorneys general, all Republicans, signed on to support the federal lawsuit.

The Justice Department did not immediately put forward remedies, such as selling off parts of the company or unwinding business contracts, in the lawsuit. Such actions are typically pursued in later stages of a case.Ryan Shores, an associate deputy attorney general, said “nothing is off the table” in terms of remedies.

Democratic lawmakers on the House Judiciary Committee released a sprawling report on the tech giants two weeks ago, also accusing Google of controlling a monopoly over online search and the ads that come up when users enter a query.

House lawmakers who spent the last 16 months investigating the practices of the world’s largest technology companies said on Tuesday that Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google had exercised and abused their monopoly power and called for the most sweeping changes to antitrust laws in half a century.In a 449-page report that was presented by the House Judiciary Committee’s Democratic leadership, lawmakers said the four companies had turned from “scrappy” start-ups into “the kinds of monopolies we last saw in the era of oil barons and railroad tycoons.” The lawmakers said the companies had abused their dominant positions, setting and often dictating prices and rules for commerce, search, advertising, social networking and publishing.The House ReportRead the full report here »

To amend the inequities, the lawmakers recommended restoring competition by effectively breaking up the companies, emboldening the agencies that police market concentration and throwing up hurdles for the companies to acquire start-ups. They also proposed reforming antitrust laws, in the biggest potential shift since the Hart-Scott-Rodino Act of 1976 created stronger reviews of big mergers.

Though we doubt the broader public needed convincing, this is a significant milestone nonetheless, also after last month Trump shocked reporters by suggesting he could take a look at pardoning Edward Snowden:  Seven years after former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden blew the whistle on the mass surveillance of Americans’ telephone records, an appeals court has found the program was unlawful - and that the U.S. intelligence leaders who publicly defended it were not telling the truth.

And the ACLU said “Today’s ruling is a victory for our privacy rights,” adding that it “makes plain that the NSA’s bulk collection of Americans’ phone records violated the Constitution.” Crucially, the three judge panel on the 9th Circuit specifically credited Edward Snowden for exposing it, as Politico notes: Judge Marsha Berzon's opinion, which contains a half-dozen references to the role of former NSA contractor and whistleblower Edward Snowden in disclosing the NSA metadata program, concludes that the "bulk collection" of such data violated the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

The Justice Department plans to bring an antitrust case against Google as soon as this month, after Attorney General William P. Barr overruled career lawyers who said they needed more time to build a strong case against one of the world’s wealthiest, most formidable technology companies, according to five people briefed on internal department conversations.Justice Department officials told lawyers involved in the antitrust inquiry into Alphabet, the parent company of Google and YouTube, to wrap up their work by the end of September, according to three of the people. Most of the 40-odd lawyers who had been working on the investigation opposed the deadline. Some said they would not sign the complaint, and several of them left the case this summer.Some argued this summer in a memo that ran hundreds of pages that they could bring a strong case but needed more time, according to people who described the document. Disagreement persisted among the team over how broad the complaint should be and what Google could do to resolve the problems the government uncovered. The lawyers viewed the deadline as arbitrary.While there were disagreements about tactics, career lawyers also expressed concerns that Mr. Barr wanted to announce the case in September to take credit for action against a powerful tech company under the Trump administration.

Elon Musk and his team of boffins are exploring ways in which they can connect a computer interface to the mind. The South African-born billionaire claims to have already trialled the revolutionary device on a monkey which was able to control the computer with its brain. Mr Musk said at a presentation on Tuesday: “A monkey has been able to control the computer with his brain.”

NeuraLink describes the device as “sewing machine-like”. The system implants ultra-thin threads deep into the brain’s nervous system.The company has applied to US regulators in the hopes of beginning trials on humans next year.Primarily, the firm states that initially it wants to help people with severe neurological conditions, but as with all of his companies, Mr Musk is aiming for more and sees humanity’s future as having “superhuman cognition”.The device in question, which is nameless so far, will see the tiny thread fitted with 3,000 electrodes which can monitor the activity of 1,000 neurons.

Mr Musk hopes the product will be on the market within four years.