Matt Winkelmeyer/Getty Images for Vanity Fair
Last week a coalition of state attorneys general filed a heavily redacted antitrust lawsuit against Google over its ads business.
The Wall Street Journal obtained an unredacted draft of the lawsuit, revealing it alleges Google and Facebook agreed to help each other if a deal they d struck ever faced antitrust scrutiny.
The suit alleges the two tech giants struck an illegal advertising deal which gave Facebook preferential treatment.
Google denied this in a statement to Business Insider.
Facebook and Google agreed to help each other out if a deal struck between them came under the antitrust microscope, according an unredacted draft lawsuit seen by the Wall Street Journal.
Photo: John Thys, Getty Images
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This past summer, dozens of major brands pulled their ad dollars from Facebook in a protest of the company’s handling of the hate speech and disinformation. Apparently the company has done enough to win back one of its biggest fish: Unilever, which announced late last week that it would be picking up its ad campaigns where they left off six months prior. Arguably, this marks the end of the boycott that when you look a little closer was never really much of a boycott to begin with.
Photo: John Thys (Getty Images)
This past summer, dozens of major brands pulled their ad dollars from Facebook in a protest of the company’s handling of the hate speech and disinformation. Apparently the company has done enough to win back one of its biggest fish: Unilever, which announced late last week that it would be picking up its ad campaigns where they left off six months prior. Arguably, this marks the end of the boycott that when you look a little closer was never really much of a boycott to begin with.
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Even if you don’t know Unilever by name, you’ve probably bought one of their products, which include everything from Lipton tea to Axe body spray to Ben & Jerry’s ice cream. Per The Wall Street Journal, the branding behemoth didn’t formally sign onto the “Stop Hate For Profit” campaign that was spearheaded by the likes of the Anti-Defamation League and NAACP (among others). Rather, Unilever independently took the stance of pausing its spend acr
This Week in Apps: App Store privacy labels, Facebook criticizes Apple over ad targeting, Twitter kills Periscope
Welcome back to This Week in Apps, the weekly TechCrunch series that recaps the latest in mobile OS news, mobile applications and the overall app economy.
The app industry is as hot as ever, with a record 204 billion downloads and $120 billion in global consumer spend in 2019. Not including third-party Chinese app stores, iOS and Android users downloaded 130 billion apps in 2020. Consumer spend also hit a record $112 billion across iOS and Android alone. In 2019, people spent three hours and 40 minutes per day using apps, rivaling TV. Due to COVID-19, time spent in apps jumped 25% year-over-year on Android.
Google s Star Wars Facebook pact is latest antitrust target
Mark Bergen, Bloomberg News
It reads like a grand conspiracy of the nerds.
On Wednesday, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton filed an antitrust lawsuit against Alphabet Inc.âs Google. At its center is a bold claim: Google colluded with archrival Facebook Inc. in an illegal deal to manipulate auctions for online advertising, an industry the two companies dominate. Google named the secret pact after a Star Wars character.
âAny collaboration between two competitors of such magnitude should have set off the loudest alarm bells in terms of antitrust compliance,â the Texas lawsuit read. âApparently, it did not.â Google disputed the allegation it had done anything improper, while Facebook declined to comment.