Alibaba's internet browser has been removed from several app stores in China as the company's feud with the Chinese government continues. From a report: Android app stores including those operated by Huawei and Xiaomi have blocked downloads or removed Alibaba's "UC Browser," according to Huawei and Xiaomi phone owners who spoke to CNBC. However, one Samsung phone owner in China said they could still see the browser in Samsung's app store. The UC Browser is also still available on Apple's App Store. It comes after the UC Browser was criticized on a TV show, broadcast by state-owned broadcaster CCTV, about misleading online medical advertising. The show accused the browser of allowing private hospitals to bid for the names of China's best known hospitals in keyword searches. Thus potentially luring patients to their websites instead of the public hospitals they are supposed to visit.

The Big Four all lean on the online encyclopedia at no cost. With the launch of Wikimedia Enterprise, the volunteer project will change that -- and possibly itself too. From a report: From the start, Google and Wikipedia have been in a kind of unspoken partnership: Wikipedia produces the information Google serves up in response to user queries, and Google builds up Wikipedia's reputation as a source of trustworthy information. Of course, there have been bumps, including Google's bold attempt to replace Wikipedia with its own version of user-generated articles, under the clumsy name "Knol," short for knowledge. Knol never did catch on, despite Google's offer to pay the principal author of an article a share of advertising money. But after that failure, Google embraced Wikipedia even tighter -- not only linking to its articles but reprinting key excerpts on its search result pages to quickly deliver Wikipedia's knowledge to those seeking answers. The two have grown in tandem over the past 20 years, each becoming its own household word. But whereas one mushroomed into a trillion-dollar company, the other has remained a midsize nonprofit, depending on the generosity of individual users, grant-giving foundations, and the Silicon Valley giants themselves to stay afloat. Now Wikipedia is seeking to rebalance its relationships with Google and other big tech firms like Amazon, Facebook, and Apple, whose platforms and virtual assistants lean on Wikipedia as a cost-free virtual crib sheet.

Today, the Wikimedia Foundation, which operates the Wikipedia project in more than 300 languages as well as other wiki-projects, is announcing the launch of a commercial product, Wikimedia Enterprise. The new service is designed for the sale and efficient delivery of Wikipedia's content directly to these online behemoths (and eventually, to smaller companies too). Conversations between the foundation's newly created subsidiary, Wikimedia LLC, and Big Tech companies are already underway, point-people on the project said in an interview, but the next couple of months will be about seeking the reaction of Wikipedia's thousands of volunteers. Agreements with the firms could be reached as soon as June.

Some of China's biggest technology companies, including ByteDance and Tencent, are testing a tool to bypass Apple's new privacy rules and continue tracking iPhone users without their consent to serve them targeted mobile advertisements. From a report: Apple is expected in the coming weeks to roll out changes it announced last June to iPhones that it says will give users more privacy. Until now, apps have been able to rely on Apple's IDFA system to see who clicks on ads and which apps are downloaded. In future, they will have to ask permission to gather tracking data, a change which is expected to deal a multibillion-dollar bombshell to the online advertising industry, and has been fought by Facebook, since most users are expected to decline to be tracked. In response, the state-backed China Advertising Association, which has 2,000 members, has launched a new way to track and identify iPhone users called CAID, which is being widely tested by tech companies and advertisers in the country. ByteDance, the owner of the social video app TikTok, referred to CAID in an 11-page guide to app developers obtained by the Financial Times, suggesting that advertisers "can use the CAID as a substitute if the user's IDFA is unavailable."

People close to Tencent and ByteDance confirmed the companies were testing the system, but both companies declined to comment. Several efforts are under way to get around Apple's rules, but CAID is the biggest challenge to them yet, and the iPhone maker declined to comment directly on it. But in a move that sets the stage for a major confrontation, Apple denied that it would grant any exceptions. "The App Store terms and guidelines apply equally to all developers around the world, including Apple," the company said. "We believe strongly that users should be asked for their permission before being tracked. Apps that are found to disregard the user's choice will be rejected."

China's government has asked Alibaba Group to dispose of its media assets, as officials grow more concerned about the technology giant's sway over public opinion in the country, WSJ reported Monday, citing people familiar with the matter. From a report: Discussions over the matter have been held since early this year, after Chinese regulators reviewed a list of media assets owned by the Hangzhou-headquartered company, whose mainstay business is online retail. Officials were appalled at how expansive Alibaba's media interests have become and asked the company to come up with a plan to substantially curtail its media holdings, the people said. Alibaba, founded by billionaire Jack Ma, has throughout the years assembled a formidable portfolio of media assets that span print, broadcast, digital, social media and advertising. Notable holdings include stakes in the Twitter-like Weibo platform and several popular Chinese digital and print news outlets, as well as the South China Morning Post, the premier English-language newspaper in Hong Kong. Several of these holdings are in U.S.-listed companies. Such influence is seen as posing serious challenges to the Chinese Communist Party and its own powerful propaganda apparatus, the people said.

"Even as IBM has sued an increasing number of companies, its IP income has shrunk," reports Bloomberg: Intellectual property rights historically brought in more than $1 billion a year, on average, helping offset massive research and development costs and shrinking revenue. Last year, IBM's income from intellectual property was $626 million, its lowest point since 1996, and 2019 wasn't much higher. While it continues to secure license deals, they are fewer and harder-won, with companies like Airbnb Inc. and Chewy Inc. waging battles in court...

In February, online pet-food seller Chewy requested a court order to block a $36 million patent fee IBM is demanding. Chewy accused IBM of "seeking exorbitant licensing fees for early internet patents having no value." IBM's claims against Chewy include years-old inventions such as targeted advertising and content resizing based on cursor activity, both ubiquitous on the web. Chewy said IBM doesn't make or sell products covered by the vast majority of the thousands of patents it has received over the past 20 years, but instead just threatens to sue if companies don't agree to pay for licenses. IBM has not answered Chewy's complaint, and no trial date has been set.

Companies that use their IP licensing aggressively as a way to make money are often referred to as patent trolls. However, IBM's position as the largest aggregator of U.S. intellectual property is more akin to being a patent godfather, says Robin Feldman, a law professor at the University of California, Hastings. With more than 38,000 active patents in its portfolio, and thousands of license agreements bolstering its legitimacy, IBM's demands have traditionally gone unchallenged, Feldman said. Such patent godfathers, with large portfolios, are "able to make offers that can't be refused." Even some of the most innovative technology giants have licensed IBM patents over the years. Alphabet Inc.'s Google, Amazon.com Inc. and LinkedIn are among countless companies that have had to pony up.

IBM also has long served as a patent bank for young companies to jump-start their portfolios. Facebook Inc. was not yet public in 2012 when it bought 750 patents on software and networking from IBM. As Instacart Inc. prepares to go public, it purchased almost 300 IBM patents in January ranging from e-commerce to smart shopping bags.
Noting a series of Supreme Court verdicts making it easier to invalidate a patent, Feldman, the law professor, told Bloomberg that "Being the godfather isn't what it used to be. It's not that patent aggregation as a business is over. You just make less money."

Google is failing to do enough to combat fake reviews within its business listings, and must be held to account by a UK watchdog, according to Which? The BBC reports: Which? conducted its research by essentially setting up a "sting" operation to catch unscrupulous operators in the act. It created a fake business listing which it called "five-star reviews," and searched online for companies advertising paid-for Google reviews. It then spent $150 on their services. Which? told each company it wanted five-star reviews only, and between three and five of them a day -- and the consumer group's researchers wrote the reviews themselves, "praising how good the made-up business and its fake owner Catherine are." The fake reviews appeared over the following week, a few at a time.

But in investigating the "reviewers" behind them, the Which? team found, among others:
- 15 reviewers who had rated both an Edinburgh search engine optimization business and a London psychic as five stars, which it called "an unlikely coincidence"
- A stockbroker in Canary Wharf who, having had several bad reviews in mid-2020, received 30 five-star ones "in quick succession" a few months later
- A reviewer who claimed to have lived in Surrey for years while praising a local car company, and a Glasgow electric gate firm 412 miles (663 km) away for work on his home
- The same reviewer also praised a dentist in Manchester, a paving firm in Bournemouth, and a Cambridgeshire locksmith, who allegedly saved his toddler from a locked car

Which? said it linked some 45 businesses scattered across the country to three suspicious "reviewers." That suggested they had each paid the same review seller to post their reviews, it said. It called on regulators and Google to take action. When it presented Google with the findings, the fake sting company was immediately deleted, Which? said.

T-Mobile will automatically enroll its phone subscribers in an advertising program informed by their online activity, testing businesses' appetite for information that other companies have restricted. From a report: The No. 2 U.S. carrier by subscribers said in a recent privacy-policy update that unless they opt out it will share customers' web and mobile-app data with advertisers starting April 26. For example, the program could help advertisers identify people who enjoy cooking or are sports enthusiasts, the company said. T-Mobile's new policy will also cover Sprint customers acquired through the carriers' 2020 merger. Sprint had previously shared similar data only from customers who opted into its third-party ad program.

A T-Mobile spokeswoman said the changes give subscribers advertising that aligns with their interests. "We've heard many say they prefer more relevant ads so we're defaulting to this setting," she said. T-Mobile ended 2020 with more than 60 million phone users under its main brand and more than 20 million customers on prepaid plans. The company said the changes wouldn't apply to business accounts or children's lines.

After downloading Microsoft's Edge, "Technically Incorrect" columnist Chris Matyszczyk "was then subject to constant pestering from Microsoft to, well, download the new Edge. Which was an entirely new dimension of irritation."

But occasionally browsing with Edge triggered other responses... Initially, this annoyed Google. When the misguided logged into their Gmail accounts from Edge, Google sent them a helpful message telling them that Chrome was better. You know, fast, simple, and secure. Supposedly. As the months rolled on, things seem to calm down. Google and Microsoft came to a rapprochement. Edge is now the second most popular browser — it does help that it descends upon all Windows users like manna from Seattle.

Perhaps it's Edge's swift rise that has finally made Apple shriek in public. Last week, I opened Edge, only to get a big surprise. In the top right-hand corner of my MacBook Air, there appeared a message. From Apple. "TRY THE NEW SAFARI," shouted the headline. The text added: "Fast, energy efficient and with a beautiful design."

I gasped in wonder. I stared and then, naturally, took a screenshot.

The notifications in the top right-hand corner of my screen are usually confined to declarations of a pending update, or a nag about my last backup. But never actually selling. I've never seen an Apple ad appear there. I don't think I've ever seen Apple instantly react to my opening any rival's product on my MacBook Air.

It's not as if, every time I open Microsoft Word, Apple taps me on the shoulder and aggressively suggests I use Pages.

"Algorithms are meaningless without good data. The public can exploit that to demand change," argues a new article in MIT's Technology Review (shared by long-time Slashdot reader mspohr): Data is fed into machine-learning algorithms to target you with ads and recommendations. Google cashes your data in for over $120 billion a year of ad revenue. Increasingly, we can no longer opt out of this arrangement... Now researchers at Northwestern University are suggesting new ways to redress this power imbalance by treating our collective data as a bargaining chip...

In a new paper being presented at the Association for Computing Machinery's Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency conference next week, researchers including PhD students Nicholas Vincent and Hanlin Li propose three ways the public can exploit this to their advantage:

Data strikes, inspired by the idea of labor strikes, which involve withholding or deleting your data so a tech firm cannot use it — leaving a platform or installing privacy tools, for instance.

Data poisoning, which involves contributing meaningless or harmful data. AdNauseam, for example, is a browser extension that clicks on every single ad served to you, thus confusing Google's ad-targeting algorithms.

Conscious data contribution, which involves giving meaningful data to the competitor of a platform you want to protest, such as by uploading your Facebook photos to Tumblr instead.
Will we someday see "white-hat data poisoners" trying to convince tech companies that the best place to advertise is the classified sections of small local newspapers?

While the researchers believe sporadic individual actions have little impact, the article takes this to its ultimate conclusion. "What if millions of people were to coordinate to poison a tech giant's data well...? That might just give them some leverage to assert their demands."

Long-time Slashdot reader lee1 shares a new article from Linux magazine: The danger and irritations of the modern web have unleashed a movement dedicated to creating a safer and simpler alternative. The old Gopher network and the new Gemini protocol have emerged as building blocks for this new "small Internet."

Anyone who has used the World Wide Web (WWW) lately knows that something bad is happening to it. It does not resemble the WWW of the early years, with enthusiastic amateurs freely sharing ideas and information. These things still exist, and the web is still an indispensable medium connecting the world. But the web experience is now encumbered with advertising, invasions of privacy in the form of pervasive tracking, enormous file sizes, CPU straining JavaScript, the danger of exploits, and door slams asking you to subscribe to a newsletter before viewing a site.

This unpleasant environment has led to a backlash. There are now some communities of developers and computer users who still desire a connected information system, but who seek a refuge from the noise, danger, and increasingly resource-hungry WWW. They feel that web technology does too much, and that since it makes various forms of abuse too easy, no lasting reform is possible.

The solution is to use or create a separate protocol that is simply not capable of supporting the technologies that enable advertising networks, user fingerprinting, or the myriad of other things that exploit users rather than helping them. This small movement has approached the problem from two directions that in practice are often merged: the revival of the Gopher protocol and the creation of a new protocol called Gemini.
Gemini would support its own lightweight hypertext format, and would co-exist with Gopher and HTTP as an alternative client-server protocol with built-in privacy-assuring features like mandatory Transport Layer Security and a "Trust On First Use" public-key security model. ("Connections are closed at the end of a single transaction and cannot be reused," notes the Project Gemini home page.) "You may think of Gemini as 'the web, stripped right back to its essence,'" explains its FAQ, "or as 'Gopher, souped up and modernised just a little', depending upon your perspective..."

"Gemini is also intended to be very privacy conscious, to be difficult to extend in the future (so that it will *stay* simple and privacy conscious), and to be compatible with a 'do it yourself' computing ethos."

Earlier this week, Google said that after it finishes phasing out third-party cookies over the next year or so, it won't introduce other forms of identifiers to track individuals as they browse across the web. Instead, the search giant plans to use something called Federated Learning of Cohorts (FLoC), which the company says has shown promising results. In a deep-dive, EFF has outlined several issues surrounding the usage of FLoC. The introductory excerpt follows: The third-party cookie is dying, and Google is trying to create its replacement. No one should mourn the death of the cookie as we know it. For more than two decades, the third-party cookie has been the lynchpin in a shadowy, seedy, multi-billion dollar advertising-surveillance industry on the Web; phasing out tracking cookies and other persistent third-party identifiers is long overdue. However, as the foundations shift beneath the advertising industry, its biggest players are determined to land on their feet. Google is leading the charge to replace third-party cookies with a new suite of technologies to target ads on the Web. And some of its proposals show that it hasn't learned the right lessons from the ongoing backlash to the surveillance business model. This post will focus on one of those proposals, Federated Learning of Cohorts (FLoC), which is perhaps the most ambitious -- and potentially the most harmful.

FLoC is meant to be a new way to make your browser do the profiling that third-party trackers used to do themselves: in this case, boiling down your recent browsing activity into a behavioral label, and then sharing it with websites and advertisers. The technology will avoid the privacy risks of third-party cookies, but it will create new ones in the process. It may also exacerbate many of the worst non-privacy problems with behavioral ads, including discrimination and predatory targeting. Google's pitch to privacy advocates is that a world with FLoC (and other elements of the "privacy sandbox") will be better than the world we have today, where data brokers and ad-tech giants track and profile with impunity. But that framing is based on a false premise that we have to choose between "old tracking" and "new tracking." It's not either-or. Instead of re-inventing the tracking wheel, we should imagine a better world without the myriad problems of targeted ads.

We stand at a fork in the road. Behind us is the era of the third-party cookie, perhaps the Web's biggest mistake. Ahead of us are two possible futures. In one, users get to decide what information to share with each site they choose to interact with. No one needs to worry that their past browsing will be held against them -- or leveraged to manipulate them -- when they next open a tab. In the other, each user's behavior follows them from site to site as a label, inscrutable at a glance but rich with meaning to those in the know. Their recent history, distilled into a few bits, is "democratized" and shared with dozens of nameless actors that take part in the service of each web page. Users begin every interaction with a confession: here's what I've been up to this week, please treat me accordingly. Users and advocates must reject FLoC and other misguided attempts to reinvent behavioral targeting. We implore Google to abandon FLoC and redirect its effort towards building a truly user-friendly Web.

Facebook will lift its ban on political ads on Thursday, ending a self-imposed prohibition that began immediately after the November 2020 general election and remained active for months. Politico reports: Facebook informed top political advertisers of its decision by phone and email on Wednesday, according to sources with knowledge of the announcement. The social media giant banned political and social issue-related ads in early November in an effort to curb misinformation around the general election. But the pause on political ads extended deep into the first months of the Biden administration, only partially lifted ahead of the Georgia Senate runoffs in early January.

Facebook will now return political ads to its platform, one of the largest and most cost-effective ways for campaigns to reach voters and potential supporters. Digital strategists in both parties were sharply critical of Facebook's decision to cut off access to voters for the last several months, upending off-year campaign strategies. In an email sent to clients on Wednesday, Facebook representatives said, "while we are lifting the ad pause, our work is not over."

"For the past several years, we invested heavily to fight misinformation, voter suppression and election interference, and remain committed to removing and reducing this type of content while connecting people with reliable information across our apps," the email continued, signed by two Facebook partners. "As a result, we plan to use the coming months to take a closer look at how these ads work on our service to see where further changes may be merited."

Google says it's refusing to ditch planned changes to its cookie policy that attracted regulatory scrutiny and a wave of opposition from ad-tech companies and publishers. From a report: The Alphabet unit upended the advertising industry with its decision last year to phase out third-party cookies that help advertisers pinpoint customers with ads for websites they previously visited and monitor which ads convinced them to buy. "We're making explicit that once third-party cookies are phased out, we will not build alternate identifiers to track individuals as they browse across the web, nor will we use them in our products," David Temkin, Google's director of product management, ads privacy and user trust, said in a blog post on Wednesday. Google said last year that its so-called privacy sandbox initiative aims to tackle concerns people have about privacy and how their personal identity is used.

ZDNet reports: A handful of technology giants operating in Australia have agreed on a code of practice that aims to stem disinformation on their respective platforms. All signatories — Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Redbubble, TikTok, and Twitter — have committed to the Australian Code of Practice on Disinformation and Misinformation. They have also committed to releasing an annual transparency report about their efforts under the code...

[The Code] provides seven guiding principles, with the first aimed at protecting freedom of expression. "Signatories should not be compelled by governments or other parties to remove content solely on the basis of its alleged falsity if the content would not otherwise be unlawful," the code said. Another is centred on protecting user privacy and notes that any actions taken by digital platforms to address the propagation of disinformation and misinformation should not contravene commitments they have made to respect the privacy of Australian users...

"Empowering users" is another principle, that is to enable users to make informed choices about digital media content that purports to be a source of authoritative current news or of factual information. Signatories also commited to supporting independent researchers and having policies and processes concerning advertising placements implemented.

Business Insider reports: Facebook executives knew for years its "potential reach" advertising metric was inflated and overruled an employee warning to adjust it to avoid a revenue hit, plaintiffs of a lawsuit against the social media giant argued in an unredacted court filing.
Gizmodo writes: In a nutshell, this class action suit, which was first filed back in 2018, alleges that Facebook massaged figures for "Potential Reach" — an estimate that Facebook gives its advertisers for the number of people that might see their ad — to goad advertisers into spending more money on the platform, all in the hopes of reaching the people that Facebook had promised. These filings detail that some of Facebook's top brass, including Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg, were fully aware that the company spent years exaggerating the number of eyeballs its advertisers could reach...

Thanks to these unsealed filings, we know just how inflated some of those figures were. Here's an example: in 2018, Facebook told its advertisers that it had a Potential Reach of 230 million adults across the U.S., out of the 250 million adults that were counted by U.S. census data that year. But according to a 2018 Pew Research study, only about 68% (or 170 million adults) actually use the platform at all. Sandberg acknowledged in an internal email that "she'd known about problems with Potential Reach for years." But she repeatedly shot down employee's attempts to rectify those figures, according to the filing.

Internally, employees acknowledged that while the product bills itself as an estimate for how many "people" your ad might reach, it is, at best, an estimate for the number of accounts — including the untold numbers of fakes and duplicates. Some employees even ran the numbers in 2018, just to see what would happen if known duplicate accounts were cut out of Potential Reach, and saw a 10% drop in the numbers advertisers were given. Facebook chose not to cut them...

The suit points out that numbers Facebook continues to give its advertisers make even less sense, like telling them it can reach "100 million" 18-to-34 year old's across the country. Census data shows there's in fact only 76 million of them — and we know not all of them use Facebook.

Top lobbying groups backed by Amazon, Facebook, Google and other technology giants sued Maryland on Thursday, seeking to scuttle a new state tax on their massive online-advertising revenue -- and stop other local governments from following its lead. From a report: The legal challenge contends that Maryland's first-in-the-nation tax is unfair, unconstitutional and incompatible with federal laws that prohibit state policymakers from instituting levies specifically targeting online services. The lawsuit is backed by a broad coalition of businesses nationwide through a series of trade groups, including the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the Internet Association, a Washington-based organization that counts Silicon Valley's most prominent companies among its members. It carries great legal and political significance at a time when lawmakers well beyond Maryland's borders are starting to eye the tech industry's eye-popping pandemic profits as a potential source of much-needed new revenue.

"In light of the current pandemic and economic uncertainty, increasing taxes on services used by small businesses to keep themselves running is a particularly poor and ill-timed policy," Caroline Harris, the vice president for tax policy at the U.S. Chamber, said in a statement. In the complaint, which was filed in U.S. District Court in Maryland, the tech giants and their political allies argue that the state's online advertising tax suffers from "many infirmities" and, as a result, threatens to "raise costs for consumers and make it more difficult for businesses to connect with potential customers."

schwit1 writes: With a pair of votes, Maryland can now claim to be a pioneer: it's the first place in the country that will impose a tax on the sale of online ads. The House of Delegates and Senate both voted this week to override Gov. Larry Hogan's veto of a bill passed last year to levy a tax on online ads. The tax will apply to the revenue companies like Facebook and Google make from selling digital ads, and will range from 2.5% to 10% per ad, depending on the value of the company selling the ad. (The tax would only apply to companies making more than $100 million a year.)

Proponents say the new tax is simply a reflection of where the economy has gone, and an attempt to have Maryland's tax code catch up to it. The tax is expected to draw in an estimated $250 million a year to help fund an ambitious decade-long overhaul of public education in the state that's expected to cost $4 billion a year in new spending by 2030. (Hogan also vetoed that bill, and the Democrat-led General Assembly also overrode him this week.) Still, there remains the possibility of lawsuits to stop the tax from taking effect; Maryland Attorney General Brian Frosh warned last year that "there is some risk" that a court could strike down some provisions of the bill over constitutional concerns.

Facebook said Wednesday that it would no longer allow Australian publishers to share news on Facebook or allow Australian people to view or share international news sources. From a report: The change comes as Australia prepares to pass a law that would require companies like Facebook and Google to pay news publishers to carry their stories. "The proposed law fundamentally misunderstands the relationship between our platform and publishers who use it to share news content. It has left us facing a stark choice: attempt to comply with a law that ignores the realities of this relationship, or stop allowing news content on our services in Australia," Facebook's managing director of Australia and New Zealand, William Easton, wrote in a blog post. "With a heavy heart, we are choosing the latter." Before Facebook's announcement Wednesday, Google and News Corp struck a deal through which Google will pay the company -- which owns The Wall Street Journal, Barron's, MarketWatch and The New York Post -- to feature their stories in Google News Showcase. Facebook addressed the companies' divergent responses in the blog post. "Our platforms have fundamentally different relationships with news. Google Search is inextricably intertwined with news and publishers do not voluntarily provide their content," Easton wrote. "On the other hand, publishers willingly choose to post news on Facebook, as it allows them to sell more subscriptions, grow their audiences and increase advertising revenue." Easton went on to describe the "business gains" of news on Facebook as "minimal," writing that it accounts for 4% of all content on the platform.

"Microsoft has said the USA should copy Australia's plan to force Google and Facebook to pay for links to news content," reports The Register, "and suggested that doing so will help improve social cohesion and strengthen democracy." But Google has fired back with a statement asserting that Microsoft's motives are impure. "Of course they'd be eager to impose an unworkable levy on a rival and increase their market share," wrote Kent Walker, Google's chief legal officer.

Microsoft's suggestion to the Biden administration came from company president Brad Smith arrived in a Thursday blog post that opens: "As the dust slowly settles on a horrifying assault on the Capitol, it's apparent that American democracy is in a fragile state." Smith attributed much of that fragility to disinformation spreading on social media and "the erosion of more traditional, independent and professional journalism... The internet eroded the news business as dotcoms like Craigslist disrupted advertising revenue, news aggregators lured away readers, and search engines and social media giants devoured both," Smith wrote...

Smith also points out that Microsoft's decision to support Australia's plan and pay local news outlets quickly saw Google CEO Sundar Pichai call Australian prime minister Scott Morrison, then asserts that Pichai only did so once the prospect of increased competition roused him to action.

"At the end of the day, what is wrong with compensating independent news organizations for the benefits the tech gatekeepers derive from this content?" Smith asks.

Facebook is being sued for "losing control" of the data of about a million users in England and Wales. From a report: The alleged failings were revealed in the Cambridge Analytica scandal, where harvested data was used for advertising during elections. Journalist Peter Jukes, leading the action, claims his data was compromised. Facebook told BBC News there was "no evidence" UK or EU users' data had been transferred to Cambridge Analytica. But the case against the technology giant, expected to last for at least three years, will argue a "loss of control" over users' personal data warrants individual compensation. The harvesting of Facebook users' personal information by third-party apps was at the centre of the Cambridge Analytica privacy scandal, exposed in 2018. Cambridge Analytica's app on Facebook had harvested the data of people who interacted with it -- and that of friends who had not given consent.