Google on Wednesday said it removed 1.7 billion bad advertisements from its various sites in 2016, more than double the prior year's totals. Google took several steps to crack down on the deceptive advertising, including updating its policies to protect users from "misleading and predatory offers." ...

Google last week filed a response in a 6-year-old antitrust battle with the EU, which has charged that its search ads unfairly promoted its own shopping service and blocked rivals. The response addresses a supplementary statement of objections the European Commission sent to Google this summer. The ...

Google has announced that it soon will downgrade mobile pages in its search rankings if they carry ads that obscure content. Such ads "provide a poorer experience to users than other pages where content is immediately accessible," explained Doantam Phan, a product manager at Google. Techniques that ...

Verizon Communications on Monday announced that it had entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Yahoo's operating business for approximately $4.83 billion in cash. The deal, which comes on the heels of Verizon's $4.4 billion AOL purchase last year, will allow it to expand its digital advertis...

Verizon reportedly is close to a deal to buy the core Web assets of Yahoo for $5 billion, which would end a months-long process of jockeying over the future of the struggling company. Verizon emerged as the winner of a lengthy bidding contest to acquire the assets, according to reports that surfaced...

Yahoo on Monday reported second quarter earnings that fell just short of Wall Street estimates but left investors and analysts waiting to hear about progress in finding a strategic investment partner. Negotiations over the potential sale of the company's core assets are under way. The company report...

Google and its parent company Alphabet are facing new charges in the European Commission's ongoing investigation of allegations that Google's comparison shopping and online advertising platforms violated antitrust laws. The EC on Thursday alleged that Google had abused its dominant position by syste...

Yahoo reportedly has notified potential buyers that it plans to auction off about 3,000 patents and will be accepting bids until mid-June. The intellectual property for sale includes patents for its original search technology. The patents "cover strategic areas such as search, e-commerce and online...

Apple is planning a major overhaul of its App Store, including the introduction of a new subscription model for developers and the implementation of a paid search ad program, SVP Phil Schiller indicated in interviews ahead of the company's Worldwide Developer Conference in San Francisco next week. T...

The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday declined to hear Google's appeal of a lower court ruling in a suit alleging the company used deceptive practices in the sale and placement of advertising through its AdWords program between 2004 and 2008. Google, a unit of Alphabet, sought to overturn the 9th U.S. Ci...

Google on Thursday filed an appeal with France's supreme administrative court over an order from a privacy regulator requiring it to scrub certain search results around the world under a law called "the right to be forgotten." The March order from the CNIL requires Google and other search engines to...

You're making soap or jewelry or handcrafted leather bags, and you want to sell them online. Where do you go? What spaces work best? How do you decide where to sell your wares? It's important to choose the right selling spaces for your products and business strategy. That can include selling on both...

Google, which lags far behind Amazon and Microsoft in the cloud infrastructure services space, last week released a slew of machine learning and analytics products and services. The Cloud Machine Learning platform provides access through REST APIs to the technologies powering Google Now, Google Phot...

TECHNOLOGY LAW CORNER

Do 1800s Antitrust Laws Apply in the E-Commerce Age?

Laws usually are established after interpersonal or business activities collide with the real or perceived rights of others. After parties with different positions fight about who's right and who's wrong, legislatures create laws to solve the legal issues raised, and courts enforce them or create th...

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