US Supreme Court hears Google bid to end Oracle copyright lawsuit

 The US Supreme Court on Wednesday considered whether to protect Alphabet Inc's Google from a long-running lawsuit by Oracle Corp accusing it of infringing Oracle copyrights to build the Android operating system that runs most of the world's smartphones.

The shorthanded court, down one justice following the death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg last month, began hearing oral arguments in Google's appeal of a lower court ruling reviving the lawsuit in which Oracle has sought at least $8 billion in damages. The arguments were conducted by teleconference because of the coronavirus pandemic.

A jury cleared Google in 2016, but the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit overturned that decision in 2018, finding that Google's inclusion of Oracle's software code in Android was not permissible under US copyright law.

Oracle and Google, two California-based technology giants with combined annual revenues of about $200 billion, have been feuding since Oracle sued for copyright infringement in 2010 in federal court in San Francisco. The case's outcome will help determine the level of copyright protection for software, according to intellectual property lawyers.

Oracle accused Google of copying thousands of lines of computer code from its popular Java programming language without a license in order to make Android, a competing platform that has harmed Oracle's business.

Google has said the shortcut commands it copied into Android do not warrant copyright protection because they help developers write programs to work across platforms, a key to software innovation.

Even if the commands can be copyrighted, Google has said, its use of them was permissible under the "fair use" defense to copyright infringement, which can protect copying that transforms an original copyrighted work. Google has argued that its copying was "undoubtedly transformative" because it resulted in "an entirely new smartphone platform." "Developers want to create applications that work across platforms, without fearing that companies will misuse copyright law to block interoperability," Google Senior Vice President Kent Walker said in a statement.

The Federal Circuit in 2018 rejected Google's defense, saying "a mere change in format (e.g., from desktop and laptop computers to smartphones and tablets) is insufficient as a matter of law to qualify as a transformative use." Oracle will recalculate its damages request if it wins at the Supreme Court and the case is sent back to a lower court, Oracle General Counsel Dorian Daley said in an interview. The compensation request would exceed the roughly $8 billion Oracle previously demanded, Daley added.

President Donald Trump's administration backed Oracle in the case, previously urging the justices to turn away Google's appeal.

The Supreme Court originally scheduled the argument for March but postponed it due to the pandemic.

The court has eight justices rather than its full complement of nine. President Donald Trump has asked the US Senate to confirm Amy Coney Barrett, his nominee to replace Ginsburg, by the Nov. 3 US election.

Paytm, other startups vow to fight 'big daddy' Google's clout: sources

 Dozens of India's technology startups, chafing at Google's local dominance of key apps, are banding together to consider ways to challenge the US tech giant, including by lodging complaints with the government and courts, executives told Reuters.

Although Google, owned by Alphabet Inc, has worked closely with India's booming startup sector and is ramping up its investments, it has recently angered many tech companies with what they say are unfair practices.

Setting the stage for a potential showdown, entrepreneurs held two video conferences this week to strategise, three executives told Reuters.

"It's definitely going to be a bitter fight," said Dinesh Agarwal, CEO of e-commerce firm IndiaMART. "Google will lose this battle. It's just a matter of time."

He said executives have discussed forming a new startup association aimed chiefly at lodging protests with the Indian government and courts against the Silicon Valley company.

Nearly 99% of the smartphones of India's half a billion users run on Google's Android mobile operating system. Some Indian startups say that allows Google to exert excessive control over the types of apps and other services they can offer, an allegation the company denies.

The uproar began last month when Google removed popular payments app Paytm from its Play Store, citing policy violations. This led to a sharp rebuke from the Indian firm's founder, Vijay Shekhar Sharma, whose app returned to the Google platform a few hours later, after Paytm made certain changes.

In a video call on Tuesday, Sharma called Google the "big daddy" that controls the "oxygen supply of (app) distribution" on Android phones, according to an attendee. He urged the roughly 50 executives on the call to join hands to "stop this tsunami."

"If we together don't do anything, then history will not be kind to us. We have to control our digital destiny," Sharma said.

One idea raised was to launch a local rival to Google's app store, but Sharma said this would not be immediately effective given Google's dominance, one source said.

Sharma and Paytm, which is backed by Japan's SoftBank Group Corp, did not respond to requests for comment.

Google declined to comment. It has previously said its policies aim to protect Android users and that it applies and enforces them consistently on developers.

Straining Ties

This week the US company angered some Indian startups by deciding to enforce a 30% commission it charges on payments made within apps on the Android store.

Two dozen executives were on a call on Friday where many slammed that decision. They discussed filing antitrust complaints and approaching Google's India head for discussions, said two sources with direct knowledge of the call.

Participants included sports technology firm Dream Sports, backed by US hedge fund Tiger Global, social media company ShareChat and digital payments firm PhonePe, the sources said. None of those companies responded to requests for comment.

Google defends the policy, saying 97% of apps worldwide comply with it.

Google already faces an antitrust case related to its payments app in India and a competition investigation into claims it abused Android's dominant position. The company says it complies with all laws.

These spats strain Google's strong ties to Indian startups. It has invested in some and helped hundreds with product development. In July, its Indian-born CEO Sundar Pichai committed $10 billion in new investments over five to seven years.

The conflict "is counterproductive to what Google has been doing - it's an odd place for them to be," said a senior tech executive familiar with Google's thinking. "It's a reputation issue. It's in the interest of Google to resolve this issue."

Google looms over every aspect of the industry.

Paytm on Saturday told several startup founders, in a communication seen by Reuters, that it was collating input on challenges to Google Play Store and its policies to submit to the authorities.

To craft their attack, they are using a shared Google document.

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Covid-19 lockdown: You can find food, night shelters on Google Maps, Search

Search engine giant Google on Monday said it will show the locations of food shelters and night shelters on Google Maps across cities in India to help people find these essential services during the ongoing lockdown.

Google, in a statement, said it is working closely with state and central government authorities to surface the locations of these relief centres.

"To date, across 30 cities, people can now find these locations on Google Maps, Search and Google Assistant," it added.

Users can search for 'Food shelters in ' or 'Night shelters in ' in any of these Google products.

The service will also be made available in Hindi soon, the statement said.

Google is working to bring this service to other Indian languages over the coming weeks, as well as adding additional shelters in more cities across the country, it added.

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"As the COVID-19 situation develops, we are making a concerted effort to build solutions that help people during these times of need," Google India Senior Programme Manager Anal Ghosh said.

He added that highlighting the locations of food and night shelters on Google Maps is a step to make this information easily available to the users in need, and ensure they can avail the food and shelter services being provided by the government authorities.

"With the help of volunteers, NGOs, and traffic authorities, we hope to convey this important information to the affected people, many of whom may not have access to a smartphone or mobile device during this time," he said.

Google appoints Karan Bajwa as Managing Director for India Cloud business

Google on Wednesday appointed long-time industry veteran Karan Bajwa as Managing Director of Google Cloud in India.

A senior leader with over three decades of leadership experience, Bajwa will be responsible for driving all revenue and go-to-market operations for Google Cloud's extensive solution portfolio that includes Google Cloud Platform and G Suite in the country.

"His experience will be a tremendous asset to Google Cloud's business, our partners and our customers as we embark on this next phase of growth," Rick Harshman, Managing Director of Google Cloud in Asia Pacific, said in a statement.

Google Cloud's field sales, partner and customer engineering organisations in India will also report to Bajwa, and he will advise Google Cloud's continued work with the local developer ecosystem and India-based Global System Integrators (GSIs).

"Leveraging cloud computing technology to modernize and scale for growth is on the agenda of almost every enterprise CEO and CIO and Google Cloud is committed to help every organization accelerate their digital transformation," said Bajwa who recently served as Managing Director for India and South Asia for IBM.

Prior to IBM, he worked with Microsoft for nine years, his last role being the Managing Director for the company's operations in India.

He has also worked with Cisco Systems in India and Singapore.

Google Cloud has a rich list of customers in India, including Dr. Reddy's Laboratories, Indiamart, Hero Motocorp, ICICI Prudential, L&T Finance, LIC HFL, Manipal Hospitals, OYO Hotels and Homes, Truecaller, Wipro and others.

Earlier this month, the company announced plans to expand its presence in India by launching a cloud region in Delhi, adding to its Mumbai region which was opened in 2017.

Coronavirus: Bengaluru shuts down; firms ask employees to work from home

After a Google employee in Bengaluru tested positive on Thursday, the US-headquartered company has shut its office in the city for a day asking all employees to work from home as a precautionary measure.

"We can confirm that an employee from our Bangalore office has been diagnosed with COVID-19. They were in one of our Bangalore offices for a few hours before developing any symptoms. The employee has been on quarantine since then, and we have asked colleagues who were in close contact with the employee to quarantine themselves and monitor their health,” said the company in a statement.

After Dell and Mindtree, Google is now the third tech firm in Bengaluru to have an employee diagnosed with coronavirus.

E-commerce giant Amazon early on Friday issued an advisory to all its employees to work from home till March end in response to the coronavirus outbreak.

The company, in an email, has recommended its employees around the world, who are able to work from home, do so. Amit Agarwal, India head of Amazon, told employees it was a precautionary measure aimed at allowing the company to manage any risk. Worldwide, the company has reported three positive coronavirus cases, one in Seattle and two in Italy.

Earlier, Amazon also announced that employees diagnosed with COVID-19 or placed in quarantine would also receive up to two-weeks of pay. “This additional pay while away from work is to ensure employees have the time they need to return to good health without the worry of lost pay,” said the company in a blogpost.

Flipkart too, has piloted a work-from-home for three days for its 10,000 employees working out of its Bellandur office in Bengaluru. The Walmart-owned company has made it compulsory for its employees, who operate out of its corporate headquarters in the city, to work from home, starting Wednesday for three days.

While most of Uber India employees have been working from home for the past one week, they said they were expecting an announcement on a work-from-home advisory from the company soon.

Several companies like Swiggy, Ola, BYJU’s and Udaan are also recommending work-from-home in the city as companies step up measures to prevent the virus from spreading.

Bengaluru has also shut down all schools till the start of the new academic session in June.

Google users in UK to lose EU data protection due to Brexit: Report

Google is planning to move its British users' accounts out of the control of European Union privacy regulators, placing them under U.S. jurisdiction instead, sources said.

The shift, prompted by Britain's exit from the EU, will leave the sensitive personal information of tens of millions with less protection and within easier reach of British law enforcement.

The change was described to Reuters by three people familiar with its plans. Google intends to require its British users to acknowledge new terms of service including the new jurisdiction.

Ireland, where Google and other U.S. tech companies have their European headquarters, is staying in the EU, which has one of the world's most aggressive data protection rules, the General Data Protection Regulation.

Google has decided to move its British users out of Irish jurisdiction because it is unclear whether Britain will follow GDPR or adopt other rules that could affect the handling of user data, the people said.

If British Google users have their data kept in Ireland, it would be more difficult for British authorities to recover it in criminal investigations.

The recent Cloud Act in the United States, however, is expected to make it easier for British authorities to obtain data from U.S. companies. Britain and the United States are also on track to negotiate a broader trade agreement.

Beyond that, the United States has among the weakest privacy protections of any major economy, with no broad law despite years of advocacy by consumer protection groups.

A Google spokesman declined to comment ahead of a public announcement.

An employee familiar with the planned move said that British privacy rules, which at least for now track GDPR, would continue to apply to that government's requests for data from Google's U.S. headquarters.

Google has amassed one of the largest stores of information about people on the planet, using the data to tailor services and sell advertising.

Google could also have had British accounts answer to a British subsidiary, but has opted not to, the people said.

Lea Kissner, Google's former lead for global privacy technology, said she would have been surprised if the company had kept British accounts controlled in an EU country with the United Kingdom no longer a member.

"There's a bunch of noise about the U.K. government possibly trading away enough data protection to lose adequacy under GDPR, at which point having them in Google Ireland's scope sounds super-messy," Kissner said.

"Never discount the desire of tech companies not be caught in between two different governments."

In coming months, other U.S. tech companies will have to make similar choices, according to people involved in internal discussions elsewhere.

Facebook, which has a similar set-up to Google, did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Google-backed Dunzo raises Rs 78 cr from Alteria, expands into other cities

Google-backed delivery and e-commerce firm Dunzo said it has raised $11 million (over Rs 78 crore) from Alteria Capital. It said Alteria Capital, India’s largest venture debt fund, has been a crucial peg in Dunzo’s mission to become a profitable local e-commerce company.

As a quickly maturing business, Dunzo said it has built a playbook on profitability across the cities it is present in, especially crucial cities like Bengaluru and Pune. The company is now steadily expanding deeper into other cities and is also adapting its strategy to the changing demands of urban cities.

“From the early stages of Dunzo, we’ve always focused on building a sustainable business model. Profitability has always been the barometer of success and we’re seeing it manifest across several of our micro-markets. As we deploy this playbook into other cities, we’re extremely conscious of what our consumers want,” said Kabeer Biswas, CEO and co-founder, Dunzo. “Our aim is to keep building exceptional customer experiences for our merchants, delivery partners, and users with the most efficient logistics solution in the world. In this journey, as markets turn profitable, we are able to fuel our growth with debt while having a significantly higher return on investment for customers and stakeholders,” he said.

Founded by Kabeer Biswas, Mukund Jha, Dalvir Suri, and Ankur Aggarwal in 2015, Dunzo has been pioneering the way urban India transacts with the offline world. Venture debt from Alteria would allow Dunzo to scale profitable geographies while retaining value for its existing shareholders, including employees.

“Kabeer and the team at Dunzo have ensured that the benchmark for hyperlocal services has been raised significantly,” said Vinod Murali, managing partner, Alteria Capital. He further said, “While this segment is quite competitive, Dunzo is equipped to be a market leader in the medium term and we are very happy to double down on a high performing company in our portfolio.”

Google says HR chief stepping down as company faces worker activism

Google has confirmed that head of human resources Eileen Naughton was stepping away from her job as "vice president of people operations" at the internet company.

"We're grateful to Eileen for all she's done and look forward to her next chapter at Google," Sundar Pichai, the head of Google and its parent company Alphabet, said in a statement on Monday. Google added more than 70,000 employees during Naughton's time as head of human resources, according to Pichai.

Naughton said that she would work with Pichai and chief financial officer Ruth Porat to find a successor.

"My husband and I have decided—after six years on the road, first in London and now San Francisco—to return home to New York to be closer to our family," Naughton said. In recent years, the Google workplace has been disrupted by employee opposition to top-level decisions ranging from forging contracts with the US military to tailoring a version of the search engine for China.

Google in November fired four employees on the grounds they had violated data security policies, but the tech titan was accused of persecuting them for trying to unionise staff.

The dismissals of the quartet—dubbed the "Thanksgiving Four" on social media—deepened staff-management tensions at a company once seen as a paradigm of Silicon Valley freedoms but now embroiled in numerous controversies. One of the workers fired was connected to a petition condemning Google for working with the US customs and border patrol agency, which has been involved in President Donald Trump's crackdown on illegal immigration.

Google employees have also openly opposed the company pursuing contracts to put its technology to work for the US military. In 2018, Google employees poured out of premises at its Mountain View campus and around the world to protest the company's handling of sexual misconduct allegations.

Disappointing revenue growth hits Google parent Alphabet shares in Q4

Google parent Alphabet on Monday saw disappointing revenue growth in the fourth quarter, sending shares lower even as profits topped most forecasts.

Detailing its cloud computing and YouTube revenues for the first time -- both of which showed sharp gains -- it said profits rose 19 percent from a year ago in the quarter to nearly $10.7 billion as revenues increased 17 percent to $46 billion.

Alphabet shares slipped 4.7 percent in after-market trades that followed release of the earnings figures.

The California tech giant, which dominates online search and has developed the Android mobile operating system, has been working to reduce its dependence on the digital advertising which delivers most of its cash.

"Our investments in deep computer science, including artificial intelligence, ambient computing and cloud computing, provide a strong base for continued growth and new opportunities across Alphabet," said chief executive Sundar Pichai.

Ruth Porat, chief financial officer, told reporters after the earnings release that the company has "consistently expanded disclosure" and "the expansion today we think is the most relevant data".

The company said its cloud computing services took in $2.6 billion in revenue in the past quarter, up more than 50 percent, and nearly $9 billion for the year.

Still, Google advertising took in the majority of revenue at $38 billion in the quarter, and more than 80 percent of its annual revenues of $162 billion.

Colin Sebastian, an analyst at Baird, said the earnings report showed "a deceleration" in growth for Google, which may have been due to the impact of fewer holiday shopping days.

Despite that, Sebastian said he sees "no change to our positive long-term thesis" for Alphabet.

Analyst Nicole Perrin at eMarketer said the results highlight the significance of YouTube, the popular video service for which Alphabet had not up to now disclosed financial data.

"This is something investors have been looking for, but the information should also give advertisers valuable information about the importance of YouTube as a digital ad vehicle," Perrin said.

"YouTube is growing strongly according to this report, and revenues are above where eMarketer had thought they were." Alphabet's "other bets" which include Waymo autonomous vehicles, life sciences and drone delivery, took in $172 million in revenue in the final three months of the year, producing an operating loss of more than $2 billion.

The results come with the company facing intense pressure around the globe over its dominance of the online ecosystem.

It also has been at the center of a dispute over tax policy for multinational firms. Global negotiators are seeking a new treaty on how to tax digital operations spanning the globe.

Pichai, who had been CEO of Google, was promoted last year to the same role at Alphabet, raising speculation on whether the tech giant might seek to reorganize its operations.

Google asks law enforcement, other agencies to pay for data search warrant

Facing an increasing number of requests for its users’ information, Google began charging law enforcement and other government agencies this month for legal demands seeking data such as emails, location tracking information and search queries.

Google’s fees range from $45 for a subpoena and $60 for a wiretap to $245 for a search warrant, according to a notice sent to law enforcement officials and reviewed by The New York Times. The notice also included fees for other legal requests.

A spokesman for Google said the fees were intended in part to help offset the costs of complying with warrants and subpoenas.

Federal law allows companies to charge the government reimbursement fees of this type, but Google’s decision is a major change in how it deals with legal requests.

Some Silicon Valley companies have for years forgone such charges, which can be difficult to enforce at a large scale and could give the impression that a company aims to profit from legal searches. But privacy experts support such fees as a deterrent to overbroad surveillance.

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Google has a tremendous amount of information on billions of users, and law enforcement agencies in the United States and around the world routinely submit legal requests seeking that data. In the first half of 2019, the company received more than 75,000 requests for data on nearly 165,000 accounts worldwide; one in three of those requests came from the United States.

Google has previously charged for legal requests. A record from 2008 showed that the company sought reimbursement for a legal request for user data. But a spokesman said that for many years now, the tech firm had not systematically charged for standard legal processes.

The money brought in from the new fees would be inconsequential for Google. Just last week, the valuation of its parent company, Alphabet, topped $1 trillion for the first time. Alphabet is scheduled to report its latest financial results on February 3.

The new fees could help recover some of the costs required to fill such a large volume of legal requests, said Al Gidari, a lawyer who for years represented Google and other technology and telecommunications companies.

The requests have also grown more complicated as tech companies have acquired more data and law enforcement has become more technologically sophisticated.

“None of the services were designed with exfiltrating data for law enforcement in mind,” said Gidari, who is now the consulting privacy director at Stanford’s Center for Internet and Society.

Gidari also said it was good that the fees might result in fewer legal requests to the company. “The actual costs of doing wiretaps and responding to search warrants is high, and when you pass those costs on to the government, it deters from excessive surveillance,” he said.

In April, The Times reported that Google had been inundated with a new type of search warrant request, known as geofence searches. Drawing on an enormous Google database called Sensorvault, they provide law enforcement with the opportunity to find suspects and witnesses using location data gleaned from user devices.

Those warrants often result in information on dozens or hundreds of devices, and require more extensive legal review than other requests.

A Google spokesman said that there was no specific reason the fees were announced this month and that they had been under consideration for some time. Reports put out by the company show a rise of just over 50 percent in the number of search warrants received in the first half of 2019 compared with a year earlier. The volume of subpoenas increased about 15 percent. From last January through June, the company received nearly 13,000 subpoenas and over 10,000 search warrants from American law enforcement.

Google will not ask for reimbursement in some cases, including child safety investigations and life-threatening emergencies, the spokesman said.

Law enforcement officials said it was too early to know the impact of the fees, which Google’s notice said would go into effect in mid-January.

Gary Ernsdorff, a senior prosecutor in Washington State, said he was concerned that the charges for search warrants would set a precedent that led more companies to charge for similar requests. That could hamper smaller law enforcement agencies, he said.

“Officers would have to make decisions when to issue warrants based on their budgets,” he said.

Mr. Ernsdorff said there was a potential silver lining, noting that the time it takes for Google to respond to warrants has significantly increased in the past year. Other law enforcement officers also said the time they had to wait for Google to fulfill legal requests had grown.

Google doodle depicts India's diverse culture to mark 71st Republic Day

Google on Sunday marked India's 71st Republic Day by dedicating a doodle illustrating the country's rich cultural heritage that permeates and unites the diverse nation.

From its world-famous landmarks like the Taj Mahal and India Gate, to the wide array of fauna such as its national bird (the Indian peafowl), to classical arts, textiles, and dances, the doodle, designed by Singapore-based artist Meroo Seth, brings together the rich cultural heritage of the country.

Republic Day marks the completion of India's transition towards becoming an independent republic after its constitution came into effect. The governing document had taken nearly three years of careful deliberation to finalise, and its eventual enactment was joyfully celebrated across the country.

While the Constitution was adopted by the Indian Constituent Assembly on 26 November 1949, it came into effect on January 26 -- a day when Declaration of Indian Independence (Purna Swaraj) was proclaimed by the Indian National Congress back in 1929, as opposed to the Dominion status offered by the British Regime.

Festivities embody the essence of diversity found in one of the world's most populous nations, celebrated over a three-day period with cultural events 

Artificial intelligence can spot breast cancer better than doctors: Google

Artificial intelligence can spot breast cancer more accurately than doctors, according to a study by Google Health.

The technology’s reading of mammograms reduced both false positives, where healthy patients are mistakenly diagnosed with the disease, and false negatives, where the cancer is missed, the Alphabet unit said in a blog post. The system reduced false positives by 5.7 per cent in the US, according to the data from more than 28,000 mammograms performed there and in the UK.

Artificial intelligence is particularly good at reading scans, often outperforming experts. Last year, Google published research that showed how the technology could be used to tell whether breast cancer had spread to surrounding lymph nodes, helping pathologists make more accurate diagnoses.

Google is also training artificial intelligence to help determine whether a patient is likely to live or die, mining thousands of data points to help make predictions about outcomes. Still, the company found it has to tread carefully when using patient data. In 2017, British regulators said Alphabet’s artificial intelligence unit, DeepMind, violated UK data-protection law when it tested an app that analysed public medical records without telling patients.

The initial findings for the breast cancer study were published in the journal Nature. The research was done in partnership with DeepMind as well as Cancer Research UK Imperial Centre, Northwestern University and Royal Surrey County Hospital.

Google fined $167 million in France amid crackdown on online advertising

Google was fined 150 million euros ($167 million) in a French antitrust case involving online advertising as regulators throughout Europe criticize the tech giant’s business practices.

The French authority found Google abused its dominant position in search when it set “opaque and difficult to understand operating rules” for its Google Ads advertising platform that it applied unfairly and randomly. It’s the first time France’s Autorite de la concurrence has fined Google, its president Isabelle de Silva told reporters at a Paris press conference Friday.

While the fine is a fraction of Google’s revenue, the company has had several run-ins with antitrust watchdogs in Europe. Earlier this week, U.K. officials said splitting Google’s ad-server operations from the rest of its business could be an option to counter its dominance. European Union antitrust chief Margrethe Vestager has fined the U.S. technology giant 8.2 billion euros in three probes over the last two years.

“Google has to do more and better than just any company,” de Silva said. “The rules were not only very difficult to understand” but they also “changed all the time, from one month to the other” without clear communication from Google making it very difficult for advertisers to understand what they could and could not do.

De Silva said the French case was prompted by Gibmedia, which operated weather information and reverse directory websites, which complained after its online ad account was suspended in 2015. Officials have been scrutinizing the way U.S. technology firms collect and exploit data to compete in the online advertising sector.

Google, a unit of Alphabet Inc. said it will appeal, arguing that its advertising policies were designed to protect people from “exploitative and abusive ads.”

“Gibmedia was running ads for websites that deceived people into paying for services on unclear billing terms,” the Mountain View, California-based company said in a statement. “We do not want these kinds of ads on our systems, so we suspended Gibmedia and gave up advertising revenue to protect consumers from harm.”

Google was also ordered to clarify the rules for Google Ads and its procedure for suspending accounts. It will have to put in place measures to prevent, detect and deal with violations of Google Ads rules. The French authority’s decision must be displayed on the google.com and google.fr home pages for a week.

De Silva said the authority had been in contact with Google over online advertising issues since 2010. Despite some pledges from the company “there’s been very little progress on the points that were raised” nine years ago. “Google was particularly aware of what was expected of it.” Regulators have told the company how it should apply online ad rules including notifying companies to avoid “brutal and unjustified” closures of advertising accounts.

The fine is France’s third biggest monopoly abuse penalty since 2009. French regulators are separately investigating Facebook Inc. following a complaint from Criteo, De Silva said. It will also set up a new digital unit to handle internet issues.

Google fined $167 million by France over search engine advertising

France's competition authority has fined Google 150 million euros ($167 million) for abusing its dominant position on the market for advertising linked to web searches, the regulator announced Friday.

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The authority, in its first ever sanctioning of the American giant, also ordered Google to "clarify the operating rules of its Google Ads advertising platform and the procedures for suspending the accounts" of certain advertisers.

Employees fret as Google's idealistic philosophy of transparency changes

When it was founded two decades ago, Google established an unusual corporate practice. Nearly all of its internal documents were widely available for workers to review. A programmer working on Google search could for instance, dip into the software scaffolding of Google Maps to crib some elegant block of code to fix a bug or replicate a feature. Employees also had access to notes taken during brainstorming sessions, candid project evaluations, computer design documents, and strategic business plans. (The openness doesn’t apply to sensitive data such as user information.)

Sundar Pichai

The idea came from open-source software development, where the broader programming community collaborates to create code by making it freely available to anyone with ideas to alter and improve it. The philosophy came with technical advantages. “That interconnected way of working is an integral part of what got Google to where it is now,” said John Spong, a software engineer who worked at Google until this July.

A culture of transparency

Google has flaunted its openness as a recruiting tool and public relations tactic as recently as 2015. "As for transparency, it’s part of everything we do," Laszlo Bock, then the head of Google human relations, said in an interview that year. He cited the immediate access staff have to software documentation, and said employees "have an obligation to make their voices heard."

Google’s open systems also proved valuable for activists within the company, who have examined its systems for evidence of controversial product developments and then circulated their findings among colleagues. Such investigations have been integral to campaigns against the projects for the Pentagon and China. Some people involved in this research refer to it as "internal journalism."

Management would describe it differently. In November, Google fired four engineers who it said had been carrying out “systematic searches for other employees’ materials and work. This includes searching for, accessing, and distributing business information outside the scope of their jobs.” The engineers said they were active in an internal campaign against Google’s work with the U.S. Customs and Border Protection, and denied violating the company’s data security policies.

Rebecca Rivers, one of the fired employees, said she initially logged into Google’s intranet, a web portal open to all staff, and typed the terms: “CBP” and “GCP,” for Google Cloud Platform. “That’s how simple it was,” she said. “Anyone could have stumbled onto it easily,” she said.

In an internal email describing the firings, Google accused one employee of tracking a colleague’s calendar without permission, gathering information about both personal and professional appointments in a way that made the targeted employee feel uncomfortable. Laurence Berland, one of the employees who was fired recently, acknowledged he had accessed internal calendars, but said they were not private. He used them to confirm his suspicions that the company was censoring activist employees. Berland, who first joined Google in 2005, added that he felt the company was punishing him for breaking a rule that didn’t exist at the time of the alleged violations.

Secrecy change

Google declined to identify the four employees it fired, but a company spokeswoman said the person who tracked calendars accessed unauthorized information.

Other employees say they are now afraid to click on certain documents from other teams or departments because they are worried they could later be disciplined for doing so, a fear the company says is unfounded. Some workers have interpreted the policies as an attempt to stifle criticism of particular projects, which they allege amounts to a violation of the company’s code of conduct. These employees point to a clause in the code that actively encourages dissent: “Don’t be evil, and if you see something that you think isn’t right—speak up!” Workers are "trying to report internally on problematic situations, and in some cases are not being allowed to make that information useful and accessible,” said Hahne. There is now a “climate of fear” inside Google offices, he said.

Google’s permissive workplace culture became the prime example of Silicon Valley’s brand of employment. But transparency is hardly universal. Apple Inc. and Amazon.com Inc. demand that workers operate in rigid silos to keep the details of sensitive projects from leaking to competitors. Engineers building a phone’s camera may have no idea what the people building its operating system are doing, and vice versa. Similar restrictions are common at government contractors and other companies working with clients who demand discretion.

The specifics of Google’s business operations traditionally haven’t required this level of secrecy, but that is changing. Google’s cloud business in particular requires it to convince business clients it can handle sensitive data and work on discrete projects. This has brought it more in line with its secrecy-minded competitors. The protests themselves have also inspired new restrictions, as executives have looked to cut off the tools of the activists it argues are operating in bad faith.

Google’s leaders have acknowledged the delicacy of adjusting a culture that has entrenched itself over two decades. “Employees today are much, much more active in the governance in the company,” Eric Schmidt, Google’s former CEO and chair, said at an event at Stanford University in October.

Amy Edmonson, a professor of leadership and management at Harvard Business School, said that Google’s idealistic history increases the burden on its executives to bring along reluctant employees as it adopts more conventional corporate practices. “It’s just really important that if you’re going to do something that is perceived as change that you’re going to explain it,” she said.

Bock, the company’s former HR director who is now CEO of Humu, a workplace software startup, suggested that Google hasn’t succeeded here. “Maybe Alphabet is just a different company than it used to be,” he wrote in an email to Bloomberg News. “But not everyone’s gotten the memo.”

Sundar Pichai named CEO at Google parent Alphabet after founders step down

Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin have announced that they are stepping down from the leadership role of the parent company Alphabet.

Google CEO Indian-American Sundar Pichai (47), will be assuming the role of Alphabet CEO, making him one of the most powerful corporate leaders of the world.

Considered as a significant shakeup in the Silicon Valley company, an announcement in this regard was made by Page and Brin in a letter to the company employees, which also included a statement from Pichai.

With Alphabet now well-established, and Google and 'Other Bets' operating effectively as independent companies, it's the natural time to simplify our management structure, wrote the two Google co-founders.

"We've never been ones to hold on to management roles when we think there's a better way to run the company," they said.

"And Alphabet and Google no longer need two CEOs and a President. Going forward, Sundar will be the CEO of both Google and Alphabet. He will be the executive responsible and accountable for leading Google, and managing Alphabet's investment in our portfolio of Other Bets," said Page and Brin.

"We are deeply committed to Google and Alphabet for the long term, and will remain actively involved as Board members, shareholders and co-founders. In addition, we plan to continue talking with Sundar regularly, especially on topics we're passionate about!" they wrote.

In his statement, Pichai made it clear that the transition will not affect the Alphabet structure or the work they do day to day.

"I will continue to be very focused on Google and the deep work we're doing to push the boundaries of computing and build a more helpful Google for everyone," he wrote.

"At the same time, I'm excited about Alphabet and its long term focus on tackling big challenges through technology," he said in his email.

Endorsing the leadership role played by Pichai ever since he was made Google CEO, Page and Sergey said the Indian-American brings humility and a deep passion for technology to their users, partners, and employees every day.

"He's worked closely with us for 15 years, through the formation of Alphabet, as CEO of Google, and a member of the Alphabet Board of Directors. He shares our confidence in the value of the Alphabet structure, and the ability it provides us to tackle big challenges through technology," they wrote.

"There is no one that we have relied on more since Alphabet was founded, and no better person to lead Google and Alphabet into the future," they said.

A big question before Alphabet: Is Pichai up for a gruelling top role?

Google’s parent company took an obvious step on Tuesday to replace its absentee chief executive officer. And while Alphabet Inc.’s leadership change removes a cloud hanging over the company, it also creates potential new ones.

Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the founders of Alphabet, wrote that Sundar Pichai will become the CEO of the corporate parent of Google in addition to the post as Google boss that he has held since 2015. This change was long overdue. Page had grown increasingly invisible inside and outside the company, and he was no longer doing the job required of a powerful corporate chieftain in 2019.

It’s not that his company necessarily suffered from Page’s reluctance or inability to fulfill his role. Pichai has been running all the functional, important parts of the company such as web search, YouTube, cloud computing and more. Alphabet has done more than fine. But as long as Page was the Alphabet CEO, there was a problem of split authority — or a perception of it — between the figurehead boss and the the functional one. It no longer felt tenable for Page to do only the bits of the CEO job he liked and ignore everything else.

That problem is gone. Brin will also step down from his role as president of Alphabet; both he and Page will remain on the board, and they will remain the ultimate authority through their control of the company’s voting stock. Answering the leadership question, however, raises a couple of fresh ones.

The first is whether Pichai is up for the horrible, unpleasant task of being the official CEO of a big tech company. It’s an awkward question to ask, in part because no one can possibly be prepared for what has become an even more demanding and personally grueling job as the tech industry becomes more muscular and less unquestionably admired.

Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg has become extremely practiced at apologizing. Jeff Bezos, the CEO of Amazon, had his personal life splashed on the pages of tabloids. Apple Inc.’s Tim Cook is at the White House so often he should have a West Wing frequent visitor card. This is probably not what any of them imagined the job would be.

Pichai remains relatively untested at making decisions that will make him enemies no matter what he does — whether it’s dealing with demands from governments around the world or leading a workforce that is increasingly divided about policies and culture. To borrow a line from my Bloomberg News colleague Mark Bergen, what Alphabet needs as much as a capable technologist is a charismatic champion and a good politician.

We’ll see how Pichai does in those roles, or if he perhaps leans on Google’s top lawyer or other more political- and policy-minded executives. That is what Page did in much of his time as Google’s CEO with Eric Schmidt as chairman.

The second question is whether the Alphabet structure has outlived its usefulness. One original motivation for creating an umbrella structure over Google in 2015 was to give operational independence and a separate budget to nascent projects inside the company such as driverless cars, health-care initiatives and novel approaches to internet services.

The company’s shareholders back then were anxious that Google was pouring money into long-shot projects that might never pan out and diluting the earnings potential of Google’s cash-minting businesses. Creating the Alphabet structure let the company put all those projects into a money-draining box — the “here be dragons” portion of the company’s P&L — and spotlight the earnings power of Google’s mostly advertising-focused businesses. The idea was that Page and Brin could focus on the big picture and leave the day-to-day stuff to Pichai and others.

But shielding Google from those “other bets” such as driverless cars no longer seems so urgent. Alphabet and other tech titans — particularly those effectively controlled by their founders — have a relatively long leash from investors to invest in both the projects that generate earnings now and on whatever comes next. Amazon, for example, spent $14 billion to buy a niche grocery store chain, and it’s investing in far-flung businesses such as health care and entertainment.

Amazon has always received a longer leash to tinker than most other companies, but I think Google’s cash firepower also lets it experiment without creating an artificial structure to shield Google from its less mature corporate cousins. There may be a reason that Alphabet never became a blueprint for other technology companies that wanted to keep up with the times. They could keep up with the times, or not, without the blueprint.

It is a credit to Page, Brin, Pichai and many others that Google has outlasted all predictions of its doom. It was a popular Silicon Valley parlor game a decade ago to say that Google would be rendered irrelevant by the smartphone age. No one would need to search in the app age, the thinking went. Google would become the next in the long list of technology companies that couldn’t escape revolutionary technology changes. Google defied the odds and made that leap across the evolutionary gap.

The next challenges for the company are technological, political and cultural. They’re just as existential as the last challenge of keeping up with an evolutionary technology shift. And now we’ll see if Pichai, and the structure Page left him, are up to the task.

After WhatsApp snooping row, now Google warned 12,000 users

It’s not even a month ago that messaging giant Whatsapp revealed that an Israeli software called Pegasus had been used to spy on journalists and human rights activists globally. 121 Indians were among those spied on.

Well, by this time you might be aware of the news, but if not, here’s a lowdown on it:

Google said on Tuesday it has warned 12,000 users, including 500 from India, between July and September this year, about being targeted by ‘government-backed attackers’.

What is a government-backed attack?

It’s when a nation state helps cyber criminals with funds and access to resources to attack a specified target.

Russia, North Korea, China, and Iran have been known to sponsor attacks through phishing and other means on people from different countries.

In fact, in a blogpost, Google said its Threat Analysis Group (TAG) tracks more than 270-targetes or government-backed groups from over 50 countries, without naming any entity.

TAG is a part of Google and YouTube’s broader efforts to tackle coordinated influence operations that attempt to game Google’s services. Google said it shares relevant threat information on these campaigns with law enforcement and other tech companies.

Shane Huntley, one of the members of TAG, said in a blogpost that the affected users were spread across 149 countries, and the number was similar to (up or down 10 per cent) the number of warnings sent in the same period of 2018 and 2017.

He said...

Google sued by rival company for antitrust violations in ad market

Alphabet’s Google was sued by a company that claims it was driven out of the digital advertising market by the search giant’s anti-competitive behavior, which is already under scrutiny by state and federal officials.

Advertising technology company Inform Inc. alleges that Google has used its monopoly power in internet search and mobile operating systems to undermine competition in the ad market. Inform claims that while it posted revenue of more than $100 million from 2014 to 2016 from its online ad services, Google’s conduct “effectively put Inform out of business,” according to the complaint filed Monday in federal court in Atlanta.

“The totality of Google’s illegal and anti-competitive conduct across multiple, inter-related markets demonstrates a frightening march to online and digital dominance,” the company said in the suit.

The lawsuit comes on the heels of antitrust investigations into Google by state attorneys general, the Justice Department and Congress. Google’s control over the technology that delivers ads across the web are a focus of all the probes.

Inform, based in Atlanta, says it competes with Google in online video advertising by providing services to publishers and advertisers. The company agreed to a sale to Bright Mountain Media earlier this year.

Google Nest Mini with built-in voice assistant launched in India at Rs 4499

Google India on Monday announced its latest smart speaker -- Nest Mini is available in India on Flipkart for Rs 4,499.

The device is a successor to Google Home Mini, and has been completely re-engineered with Google Assistant. The Nest Mini will be available in chalk and charcoal colour variants.

"Nest Mini provides bass that's twice as strong as the original Google Home Mini (measured from 60-100 Hz at maximum volume). Google's expert audio engineers developed proprietary audio tuning software, allowing users to get the most out of the hardware," the company said in a statement.

The new device brings improved ability to operate in noisy environments, according to the company.

The Assistant automatically modulates the output sound according to the background noise in the room. It also senses proximity to light up the LED as soon as the user's hand gets close to the device -- guiding where to tap and adjust the volume.

"Users can connect multiple Google or Nest speakers to build a sound system for their whole home. By simply creating different groups in the Google Home app, users can enjoy music, podcasts and more throughout their home. With stream transfer, users can fill their home with sound by moving their music, audiobooks and podcasts from one speaker to another by just using voice," the company added.

The Nest Mini has the same design as the original Mini, with soft rounded edges that blend in with the interior of homes.