November 27th marks the birthday of iconic American guitarist and songwriter Jimi Hendrix. In his hometown of Seattle, the Museum of Pop Culture, inspired by his groundbreaking music, celebrated his enduring legacy with family members, former colleagues, and fans. Natasha Mozgovaya has the story.
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Day: November 26, 2024
SYDNEY — Google and Facebook-owner Meta Platforms urged the Australian government on Tuesday to delay a bill that will ban most forms of social media for children under 16, saying more time was needed to assess its potential impact.
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s center-left government wants to pass the bill, which represents some of the toughest controls on children’s social media use imposed by any country, into law by the end of the parliamentary year on Thursday.
The bill was introduced in parliament last week and opened for submissions of opinions for only one day.
Google and Meta said in their submissions that the government should wait for the results of an age-verification trial before going ahead.
The age-verification system may include biometrics or government identification to enforce a social media age cut-off.
“In the absence of such results, neither industry nor Australians will understand the nature or scale of age assurance required by the bill, nor the impact of such measures on Australians,” Meta said.
“In its present form, the bill is inconsistent and ineffective.”
The law would force social media platforms, and not parents or children, to take reasonable steps to ensure age-verification protections are in place. Companies could be fined up to $32 million for systemic breaches.
The opposition Liberal party is expected to support the bill though some independent lawmakers have accused the government of rushing through the entire process in around a week.
A Senate committee responsible for communications legislation is scheduled to deliver a report on Tuesday.
Bytedance’s TikTok said the bill lacked clarity and that it had “significant concerns” with the government’s plan to pass the bill without detailed consultation with experts, social media platforms, mental health organizations and young people.
“Where novel policy is put forward, it’s important that legislation is drafted in a thorough and considered way, to ensure it is able to achieve its stated intention. This has not been the case with respect to this Bill,” TikTok said.
Elon Musk’s X raised concerns that the bill will negatively impact the human rights of children and young people, including their rights to freedom of expression and access to information.
The U.S. billionaire, who views himself as a champion of free speech, last week attacked the Australian government saying the bill seemed like a backdoor way to control access to the internet.
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ALEXANDRIA, Virginia — The U.S. Justice Department told a federal judge that Google illegally dominated online advertising technology in seeking a second antitrust win against the company.
The closing arguments in Alexandria cap a 15-day trial held in September in which prosecutors sought to show Google monopolized markets for publisher ad servers and advertiser ad networks and tried to dominate the market for ad exchanges, which sit between buyers and sellers.
“Google rigged the rules of the road,” said DOJ lawyer Aaron Teitelbaum, who asked the judge to hold Google accountable for anti-competitive conduct and added that Google is “once, twice, three times a monopolist.”
Another DOJ lawyer, Julia Tarver Wood, compared the case to the Charles Dickens novel A Tale of Two Cities and said U.S. Judge Leonie Brinkema had to decide whether to adopt the DOJ or Google version of the state of the ad market.
Google lawyer Karen Dunn said the DOJ had not met its legal burden and was asking Brinkema to overrule key precedents. “The law simply does not support what the plaintiffs are arguing in this case,” Dunn said.
She argued the DOJ was ignoring Google’s legitimate business decisions and the robust quality of the online advertising market. The company argues the government had cherry-picked a narrow slice of the online market and did not account for aggressive competition.
Shares of Alphabet, the parent company of Google, were up 1.4% in afternoon trading.
Publishers testified at the trial that they could not switch away from Google, even when it rolled out features they disliked, since there was no other way to access the huge advertising demand within Google’s ad network.
In 2017, News Corp estimated losing at least $9 million in ad revenue that year if it had switched away, one witness said.
If Brinkema finds that Google broke the law, she would consider prosecutors’ request to make Google at least sell off Google Ad Manager, a platform that includes the company’s publisher ad server and its ad exchange.
Google offered to sell the ad exchange this year to end a European Union antitrust investigation, but European publishers rejected the proposal as insufficient, Reuters first reported in September.
Analysts view the ad tech case as a smaller financial risk than the case in which a judge ruled Google maintains an illegal monopoly in online search, and in which prosecutors have argued the company must be forced to sell its Chrome browser.
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