"Google and Facebook are both fighting against legislation currently before the parliament that would force them to enter into negotiations with news media companies for payment for content, with an arbiter to ultimately decide the payment amount if no agreement can be reached.
On Friday, the pair escalated the dispute by threatening to remove the Google search engine from Australia and Facebook to remove news from the Facebook feeds of all Australian users."
"Jack Poulson was a senior research scientist at Google whose work on machine learning work was used to improve Google's search results; now he's quit the company over its Project Dragonfly, a once-secret plan to launch a censored Chinese search engine; Poulson called the move a "forfeiture of our values."
Tech companies find it hard to qualify skilled engineers at any price, and machine learning specialists are especially prize, commanding salaries of $1MM/year or more. "
"Jimmy Wales said it was dangerous to have companies decide what should and should not be allowed to appear on the internet. His comments came after the bosses of the leading search engines met the heads of European data watchdogs on Thursday."
"In some respects, singling out Twitter is unfair: it was a collective failure of social media. People were able to name Edwards as the BBC presenter with impunity in social media comment sections. TikTok suggested Edwards and other BBC presenters' names as "hot" search terms, appending the fire emoji to their names. Google showed news stories and videos about the then-unnamed BBC presenter to people who searched for Huw Edwards' name, connecting him to the scandal."