Keach Hagey

A collective cry is breaking out as authors, artists and internet publishers realize that the generative-AI phenomenon sweeping the globe is built partly on the back of their work. The emerging awareness has set up a war between the forces behind the inputs and the outputs of these new artificial-intelligence tools, over whether and how content originators should be compensated. The disputes threaten to throw sand into the gears of the AI boom just as it seems poised to revolutionize the global economy.

Last year when Facebook blocked news in Australia in response to potential legislation making platforms pay publishers for content, it also took down the pages of Australian hospitals, emergency services and charities. It publicly called the resulting chaos “inadvertent.” Internally, the pre-emptive strike was hailed as a strategic masterstroke.

Russia is dropping a digital iron curtain over its population, creating a big, new fracture in the global internet—but there are still big gaps in President Vladimir Putin’s efforts to cut off the country from online information accessible in much of the rest of the world. At the same time, more Western companies are pulling back some digital services from Russia under pressure from Western sanctions. It is too early to say how permanent the restrictions will be.

Many Republicans say Facebook discriminates against conservatives. But internal communications at the company show that employees and their bosses have hotly debated whether and how to restrain right-wing publishers, with more-senior employees often providing a check on agitation from the rank and file. The documents, which don’t capture all of the employee messaging, didn’t mention equivalent debates over left-wing publications.

Google plans to stop selling ads based on individuals’ browsing across multiple websites, a change that could hasten upheaval in the digital advertising industry. In 2022 Google plans to stop using or investing in tracking technologies that uniquely identify web users as they move from site to site across the internet. The decision, coming from the world’s biggest digital-advertising company, could help push the industry away from the use of such individualized tracking, which has come under increasing criticism from privacy advocates and faces scrutiny from regulators.

Lawmakers from both parties sharply criticized Google over its dominance in advertising at a Senate hearing that showcased the arguments likely to play out if the government moves to sue the tech giant for anticompetitive practices. The senators were particularly focused on Google’s dominant position at every step in the chain of technology that connects web publishers with advertisers, and on the ways Google has used the market power it wields through it

Behavioral advertising, which involves collecting data about readers’ online behavior and using it to serve them specially tailored ads, often through bits of code called cookies, has become the dominant force in digital advertising in recent years.

As mainstream social-media companies such as Facebook, Twitter, and Reddit try to push racist commentary and hate speech off their platforms, those conversations are finding homes in other corners of the web. They are happening on Discord, a chat service for videogamers, and message boards such as 4chan. Gab was founded explicitly to be a haven for free commentary, no holds barred. Discord says its rules prohibit harassment, threatening messages and calls to violence, and it has shut down accounts over those issues. Grappling with such web speech is proving challenging.

The tech industry has largely declared it is off limits to scan emails for information to sell to advertisers. Yahoo still sees the practice as a potential gold mine. Yahoo’s owner, the Oath unit of Verizon Communications has been pitching a service to advertisers that analyzes more than 200 million Yahoo Mail inboxes and the rich user data they contain, searching for clues about what products those users might buy, said people who have attended Oath’s presentations as well as current and former employees of the company. Oath said the practice extends to AOL Mail, which it also owns.

Apparently, the Justice Department is investigating whether television station owners violated antitrust law in ways that inflated local television advertising prices. The probe has examined whether Sinclair Broadcast Group, Tribune Media Co,  and other independent TV station owners coordinated efforts when their ad sales teams communicated with each other about their performance, potentially leading to higher rates for TV commercials. Companies like Sinclair and Tribune own dozens of local TV stations that carry programming from national broadcast networks like ABC, CBS, NBC and Fox.