The European Commission claims that Google boosted its own apps and products to the top of search rankings to the detriment of its competitors. The European Commission has levied a $1 billion penalty against Google over alleged competition law violations. An EC investigation found that Google had abused its dominance in the European Union's search and app store markets to funnel people toward its own apps and services, in violation of the EU's Digital Markets Act . The body has ordered Google to refrain from giving preferential treatment to its own services--such as shopping, accommodations, transport, and flights--in search rankings. Google must also allow app developers to communicate and transact with users outside the Play Store, where it takes a commission on sales .

The European Union has fined Google 890 million euros ($1bn), saying the technology giant broke digital antitrust rules by steering users of Google Play and its search engine towards its own services and apps at the expense of rivals. Thursday's penalty is the latest in Brussels' crackdown on Big Tech, which has seen the bloc lead the world in reining in the largest firms from Silicon Valley to Beijing. The European Commission, the bloc's executive branch, said it was acting in the interest of consumers. "The best products should succeed because they're better, not because they're owned by the company running the search engine. And European consumers have a right to be told by app developers where to sign up to the best offers, even when the app store owner does not get a cut," said Teresa Ribera, the commission's executive vice president for clean, just and competitive transition.

Things to Do in L.A. Tap to enable a layout that focuses on the article. This is read by an automated voice. Please report any issues or inconsistencies here . See more from the L.A. Times in Google Search. A new federal lawsuit by California drivers accuses major gas chains, including Walmart and 7-Eleven, and technology company Kalibrate of using AI software to collude and keep pump prices artificially high.

Firms' algorithm development practices are often homogeneous. Whether firms train algorithms on similar data or rely on similar pre-trained models, the result is correlated predictions. In the context of personalized pricing, correlated algorithms can be viewed as a means to collude among competing firms, but whether or not this conduct is legal depends on the mechanisms of achieving collusion. We investigate the precise mechanisms through a formal game-theoretic model. Indeed, we find that (1) higher correlation diminishes consumer welfare and (2) as consumers become more price sensitive, firms are increasingly incentivized to compromise on the accuracy of their predictions in exchange for coordination. We demonstrate our theoretical results in a stylized empirical study where two firms compete using personalized pricing algorithms. Our results demonstrate a new mechanism for achieving collusion through correlation, which allows us to analyze its legal implications. Correlation through algorithms is a new frontier of anti-competitive behavior that is largely unconsidered by US antitrust law.

A top Google scientist warned EU antitrust regulators that its proposal requiring the company to share search engine data with rivals risked exposing users' private information. BRUSSELS - A top Google scientist sent a warning to EU antitrust regulators on Tuesday that its proposal requiring the company to share search engine data with rivals such as OpenAI risked exposing users' private information, the sternest rebuke yet in a tussle over Google's lucrative business model. The European Commission, which acts as the EU competition enforcer, has in recent years cracked down on Big Tech via a slew of legislation to ensure that users have more choices and that smaller rivals have room to compete. However, that has triggered the ire of the U.S. government. Sergei Vassilvitskii, with the title of distinguished scientist at Google since 2012 and regarded a leader in his field, will meet EU antitrust officials on Wednesday to voice his concerns and propose a broader approach with better guardrails.

Valve's Steam Machine: Everything we know MetaAI is essentially the only AI assistant now available on WhatsApp. The EU could take interim measures against WhatsApp as it investigates AI providers' access to the app. On Monday, the EU's regulatory arm announced its preliminary view that Meta, WhatsApp's parent company, violated antitrust laws by blocking third-party AI assistants from operating on WhatsApp. The European Commission's is concerned that Meta's actions will limit competitors from entering the AI assistant market. We must protect effective competition in this vibrant field, which means we cannot allow dominant tech companies to illegally leverage their dominance to give themselves an unfair advantage, Teresa Ribera, executive vice-president for Clean, Just and Competitive Transition said in a statement. Ribera continued: AI markets are developing at rapid pace, so we also need to be swift in our action.

The integration of knowledge graphs (KGs) with large language models (LLMs) offers significant potential to improve the retrieval phase of retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems. In this study, we propose KG-CQR, a novel framework for Contextual Query Retrieval (CQR) that enhances the retrieval phase by enriching the contextual representation of complex input queries using a corpus-centric KG. Unlike existing methods that primarily address corpus-level context loss, KG-CQR focuses on query enrichment through structured relation representations, extracting and completing relevant KG subgraphs to generate semantically rich query contexts. Comprising subgraph extraction, completion, and contextual generation modules, KG-CQR operates as a model-agnostic pipeline, ensuring scalability across LLMs of varying sizes without additional training. Experimental results on RAGBench and MultiHop-RAG datasets demonstrate KG-CQR's superior performance, achieving a 4-6% improvement in mAP and a 2-3% improvement in Recall@25 over strong baseline models. Furthermore, evaluations on challenging RAG tasks such as multi-hop question answering show that, by incorporating KG-CQR, the performance consistently outperforms the existing baseline in terms of retrieval effectiveness

Google will not be forced to sell its Chrome browser, a federal judge ruled on Tuesday in the tech giant's ongoing legal battle over being ruled a monopoly last year. The company will be barred from certain exclusive deals with device makers and must share data from its search engine with competitors, the judge ruled. Judge Amit Mehta's ruling follows months of speculation surrounding what penalties Google would face as a result of his decision last year that the company violated antitrust laws as it built what he called an online search monopoly. The ruling, one of the most significant antitrust cases in decades, resulted in an additional hearing in April to determine what actions the government should take as a remedy. Mehta's decision to allow Google to keep Chrome represents a more lenient outcome for the company than what federal prosecutors requested: force the tech giant sell off its marquee search product and to ban it from entering the browser market for five years.

Elon Musk has threatened legal action against Apple on behalf of his artificial intelligence startup xAI, accusing the iPhone maker of favoring OpenAI and breaching antitrust regulations in managing the rankings in its App Store. The posts elicited snide responses from Sam Altman, the OpenAI CEO, and began a spat between the two former business partners on X. "Apple is behaving in a manner that makes it impossible for any AI company besides OpenAI to reach #1 in the App Store, which is an unequivocal antitrust violation. In a post earlier that day, he wrote: "Hey @Apple App Store, why do you refuse to put either X or Grok in your'Must Have' section when X is the #1 news app in the world and Grok is #5 among all apps? OpenAI's ChatGPT currently holds the top spot in the App Store's "Top Free Apps" section in the US, while xAI's Grok ranks fifth. Apple has a partnership with OpenAI that integrates ChatGPT into iPhones, iPads and Macs.

Google has a monopoly, and that's the official line of the US federal government. In fact, it has two of them, losing two separate antitrust cases that threaten to cripple the tech giant. The Department of Justice has proposed forcing Google to sell or otherwise divest itself of the Chrome browser as its first and preferred remedy. But who would buy it? Unsurprisingly, there are beaucoup business beaus lining up around the block for this browser bachelorette.