Search, Play, Ads: Google’s many antitrust problems

This story is part of a Recode series about Big Tech and antitrust. Over the last several weeks, we’ve covered what’s happening with Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, Meta, and Google.

There’s a new Big Tech antitrust bill in town, and this one is especially painful for Google.

A group of lawmakers led by Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) introduced the Competition and Transparency in Digital Advertising Act on Thursday. This bipartisan and bicameral legislation would forbid any company with more than $20 billion in digital advertising revenue — that’s Google and Meta, basically — from owning multiple parts of the digital advertising chain. Google would have to choose between being a buyer or a seller or running the ad exchange between the two. It currently owns all three parts, and has been dogged by allegations, which it denies, that it uses that power to unfairly manipulate that market to its own advantage.

“This lack of competition in digital advertising means that monopoly rents are being imposed upon every website that is ad-supported and every company — small, medium, or large — that relies on internet advertising to grow its business,” Sen. Lee said in a statement. “It is essentially a tax on thousands of American businesses, and thus a tax on millions of American consumers.”

Google said in a statement that this is “the wrong bill, at the wrong time, aimed at the wrong target,” and that its ad tools produce better quality ads and protect user privacy.

You can add the new legislation to the growing pile of Google’s antitrust woes. While the media has given more attention to the antitrust issues of rivals Apple and Meta, Google is potentially in more trouble than any other Big Tech company. State and federal governments have filed four antitrust cases, all within a year of each other. In October 2020, the Department of Justice and 14 state attorneys general sued Google over alleged anti-competitive practices to maintain its search engine and search ad monopoly. That December, 38 other state attorneys general filed a separate, similar case. If you

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How Pinterest utterly ruined photo search on the internet

Previous thirty day period, there had been rumors of a deal that would have valued Pinterest at $75 billion — a mega-merger among a social media titan and a single of the major digital payments solutions.

But it in no way happened. PayPal was in the running to get Pinterest for $70 a share — till, suddenly, it wasn’t. PayPal on Oct 24 made available a just one-sentence assertion: “In reaction to industry rumors about a likely acquisition of Pinterest by PayPal, PayPal stated that it is not pursuing an acquisition of Pinterest at this time.”

PayPal failed to elaborate, but regardless of the serious cause, one thing quite a few of us can agree on is this: Pinterest sucks, and it has completely ruined image searching on the world wide web.

Beloved by moodboard aficionados and marriage planners alike, the system is hated by rank-and-file internet surfers. It’s not that it does not have its objective it’s just that it intrudes on the look for practical experience of quite a great deal anyone who doesn’t want to use it.

KAREN BLEIER/AFP/Getty Images

Much more than 28,000 Chrome people have put in Unpinterested!, an extension to take away Pinterest from Google search results, even though plenty of many others trade ideas on how to craft search queries to exclude the photo-sharing web-site. The dilemma? Pinterest will make it obnoxiously hard to see any picture hosted on its system without having signing up for an account.

And it’s managed to accomplish an incredibly sturdy existence on numerous preferred picture searches. This state of affairs results in friction in the graphic-grabbing procedure, which has been wonderful-tuned around the past 20 a long time to grow to be as frictionless as probable. And it is all seemingly for the goal of boosting Pinterest person figures.

Pinterest, it should be famous, does not value something to indicator up for. But as the aged web maxim goes, “If you are not spending for it, you are the product.’” In the meantime, folks who do use the support complain that the resolution of Pinterest visuals

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