Displaying items by tag: Sundar Pichai

The US Department of Justice has accused Google of making "excessive and intentional efforts" to misuse its attorney-client privilege and hide business documents relevant to an anti-trust suit filed against the search firm in October 2020.

In an event featuring Australian Prime Minister, Scott Morrison, and Google CEO Sundar Pichai, Google Australia has launched its "Digital Future Initiative," a AUD $1 billion investment in Australian infrastructure, research and partnerships that aims to "strengthen local capabilities, support jobs and help build Australia’s digital economy for the future."

Treasurer Josh Frydenberg has said he expects to see "some significant commercial deals" between Australian news publishers and digital platforms before the government votes on its news media code which is currently before Parliament.

The Federal Government appears to be trying to remove the need for passing the news media code legislation by encouraging, and helping, media companies to join up to Google News Showcase.

The Federal Government is likely to give Google and Facebook a major concession before it puts its news media code legislation up for a vote, with a clause that says the two companies do not have to cut deals with publishers under the law if they can convince them to sign up to their news products.

A Senate committee that has held public hearings into the Federal Government's news media code is unlikely to propose any changes to the bill before it.

Google has refused to rule out the possibility that it will pull other services apart from search from Australia in the event that the Federal Government goes ahead and legislates its News Media and Digital Platforms Mandatory Bargaining Code which was introduced into Parliament in December last year.

Google has launched its News Showcase in Australia, a product that was announced in October 2020, but not introduced Down Under till now due to the company's stoush with the government over the news media code.

Google has very cleverly got its way as far as the news media code is concerned, leading Australian politicians on and ensnaring them in a very neat trap. And the company has ensured that nobody will lose face as a result of all the threats.

Well in advance of any Apple car arriving, Ford and Google have announced "a unique strategic partnership to accelerate Ford’s transformation and reinvent the connected vehicle experience."

The boffins at Google know many things, but one of the lessons in life they have failed to grasp is that one should learn to acknowledge defeat gracefully.

Google has held out a nice, juicy carrot overnight, hoping that Australia will bite and agree to the terms that it wants for the media code that is being negotiated with the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission.

Sundar Pichai, the head of Alphabet, the parent company of Google, has announced that the company will put up US$1 billion (A$1.39 billion) for an initiative called the Google News Showcase, which would "pay publishers to create and curate high-quality content for a different kind of online news experience".

The US state of California has sued networking giant Cisco claiming that one of its Indian employees, who belongs to the lowest caste on the Indian caste system, faced discrimination from his superiors, both Indian and from a higher caste.

Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin have decided to step down from their roles in the company's parent body, Alphabet, but will remain as members of Alphabet's board of directors and will retain controlling voting shares in the company.

Google has admitted that YouTube is far too big for it to clean up the site and remove every bit of harmful content.

Google has outlined the changes it proposes to make to the Chrome browser in order to reduce the ad-blocking potential of extensions and, as I suspected, it's all done for the sake of users.

Gmail users are finding that details of all their purchases are being stored within their Google account, even though they do not use Google Pay, a post on Reddit claims.

Google has been caught out hiding privacy settings in its Google Pay app that can restrict what information the company collects about users. Three settings are all selected and only accessible via a special URL and not through the settings link of the app.

After a week of hard labour, the obvious instinct of a worker is to look for some light relief. Thankfully, one need not look very far this week, for Google chief executive Pichai Sundararajan — who now goes by the Westernised name Sundar Pichai — has been waxing voluble on privacy, a topic which provides much comedic relief when tackled by Google executives.