Google has said that it is pausing enforcement of Google Play billing system (GPBS) for developers in India. This comes after the Competition Commission of India (CCI) imposed a penalty of Rs 2,275 crore in two cases and an immediate cease-and-desist order of its policies of running the Android Mobile device and Play Store ecosystem. In a statement, the company said, "Following the CCI's recent ruling, we are pausing enforcement of the requirement for developers to use Google Play's billing system for the purchase of digital goods and services for transactions by users in India.
'The larger and more opaque this shadow economy becomes, especially online, the greater the risk to India's national security.'
The Competition Commission has ordered a detailed probe against Google for alleged anti-competitive practices in the smart television operating systems market in the country. After assessing a complaint, the watchdog has reached the prima-facie view that Google is dominant in the relevant market for licensable smart TV device operating systems in India. In a 24-page order, the Competition Commission of India (CCI) said that prima-facie mandatory pre-installation of all the Google applications under TADA amounts to imposition of unfair conditions on the smart TV device manufacturers.
In its second ruling against Google in less than a week, the Competition Commission on Tuesday slapped a penalty of Rs 936.44 crore on the internet major for abusing its dominant position with respect to its Play Store policies.
A man, who allegedly made the call in an inebriated state, has been traced to Hyderabad and apprehended from there, they said.
Google will lay off 12,000 jobs across the globe, its CEO Sundar Pichai announced on Friday, becoming the latest tech giant after Microsoft, Facebook and Amazon to retrench staff en mass amid the global economic downturn. In an email to employees, the Indian-origin CEO said: "I have some difficult news to share. We've decided to reduce our workforce by approximately 12,000 roles." Pichai said the layoffs at Google were carried out after a "rigorous review" of its operations.
Developers are expected to not only just learn coding but also oversee what the AI agents are doing.
The National Company Law Appellate Tribunal on Wednesday declined to grant interim relief to Google seeking a stay on competition watchdog CCI's penalty of Rs 936.44 crore on the tech giant for abusing its dominant position with respect to Play Store policies. The appellate tribunal has directed Google to deposit 10 per cent of the fine before its registry in the next four weeks. A two-member bench comprising Justice Rakesh Kumar and Alok Srivastava issued notices to the Competition Commission of India (CCI) and other respondents and posted the matter for hearing on April 17, 2023.
The Competition Commission of India has ordered a probe into complaints against Google for allegedly abusing its dominant position in the online news market.
Google will introduce a new way to search "visually" in the coming months, making it easier for users to express their questions in more natural ways. Google, at its Search On livestream event on Wednesday night, shared details of how the tech giant is bringing the latest in artificial intelligence (AI) to its products, giving people new ways to search and explore information in more natural and intuitive ways. Earlier this year at its flagship event Google I/O, the US-based company had announced that it had reached a critical milestone for understanding information with Multitask Unified Model or MUM.
Across the board, brands use influencers like a Bhuvan Bam or Kusha Kapila as the second or third rung of their strategy. The first rung is always a celebrity that has been created outside the Internet, through mainstream media.
The National Company Law Appellate Tribunal on Wednesday directed Google to pay 10 per cent of the Rs 1,337.76-crore penalty imposed on the tech giant by fair trade regulator CCI. A two-member bench, however, declined to grant any immediate stay the operations of Competition Commission of India (CCI) penalty and said it would pass any order after hearing out other parties. The appellate tribunal has issued notices to CCI and directed to list the matter on February 13, for hearing over interim stay.
In 2023-2024, 95 scheduled commercial banks received over 10 million complaints from their customers. The process of KYC at many banks has become 'HYC' -- harass your customer, points out Tamal Bandyopadhyay.
Tech giant Alphabet on Monday launched a privacy feature on its app marketplace Google Play Store that will require developers to give people more information about how apps collect, share and secure users' data. Users will start seeing the data safety section in Google Play on Tuesday, and developers are required to complete this section for their apps by July 20. As app developers update their functionality or change their data handling practices, they will show the latest in the apps' data safety section.
Tech billionaires shadowed US President Donald Trump at the inauguration on Monday.
Alphabet, the parent company of Google, is likely to join the list of Big Tech companies going for large-scale layoffs. With this, almost the entire universe of FAANG - acronym for Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix and Google - has now come under the layoff turbulence hitting tens of thousands of tech jobs around the world. Reports surfaced on Tuesday about the Mountain View (California)-headquartered tech giant planning to fire around 10,000 employees.
On Jawaharlal Nehru's 61st death anniversary, Utkarsh Mishra recalls how India's first prime minister cultivated a unique role for the newly independent country on the world stage.
At 250 million unique visitors a month, MX Player has for long been in the same bracket as YouTube (454 million) and Meta (324 million) in reach.
'As you're watching the IPL live, there's a conscious effort to showcase the entertainment portfolio.'
'There is need for India-specific pricing.' 'Google, Microsoft and others also have different pricing.' 'It is important for OpenAI to think on these lines as the global pricing may not work in the Indian context.'
The Delhi High Court has ordered the removal of a YouTube video by YouTuber Shyam Meera Singh alleging misconduct against spiritual guru Sadhguru's Isha Foundation. The court found the video's title "clickbait" and restrained Singh from further publishing allegations against the foundation. The court also directed X (formerly Twitter), Meta and Google to remove the alleged defamatory content.
It was an aha! moment to spot India's leading industrialist at the service at St John's church ahead of Trump's inauguration, and then to see him heading to US Capitol Hill Rotunda for the inauguration in the company of the Big 4 - Tim Cook of Apple, Jeff Bezos of Amazon, Sundar Pichai of Google and Mark Zuckerburg of Meta/Facebook.
Google has announced a slew of new features including new privacy settings, AI tools and release of the first beta of Android 12 that will become part of its products over the course of the year. Kicking off Google I/O 2021 in a virtual format from the Mountain View campus, Google CEO Sundar Pichai also announced additions to Google Workspace that will enable richer collaboration, especially in view of the pandemic that has driven enterprises across the globe to embrace remote working solutions. Pichai said that COVID-19 has deeply affected every community over the past year, and "places like Brazil, and my home country of India, are now going through their most difficult moments yet".
'The startup ecosystem, the government, and the owners of large pools of Indian capital need to actively support the creation of these local champions, not pull down the teams that are trying hard to get there.'
Commerce Minister Piyush Goyal's scathing remarks on Indian startup ecosystem and its innovation priorities have drawn sharp reaction from the industry, with Zepto CEO Aadit Palicha putting up a strong defence citing the company's contribution to jobs, FDI and terming it a "miracle in Indian innovation".
Google received 31,497 complaints from users and removed 94,173 pieces of content based on those complaints in December, the tech giant said in its monthly transparency report.
Nasscom Foundation along with Google has set up a call centre in collaboration with a not-for-profit body ISAP to help women farmers scale up their business. The project is being run on a pilot basis to initially reach out to 20,000 rural women entrepreneurs across six states -- Himachal Pradesh, Uttarakhand, Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Haryana and Rajasthan, Nasscom Foundation CEO Nidhi Bhasin said at the launch of "DigiVaani Call Center". "DigiVaani will be one place where rural women entrepreneurs will be able to call and get the information around various schemes available for them, which can help them scale up their business, be it government scheme or any other information that can be of help for them.
The Indian government has said that social media platform X will be held responsible for content generated by its artificial intelligence tool Grok. This comes after users on X asked Grok questions about Indian politicians and the AI platform responded with "unpalatable" answers. The government is currently in discussion with X to understand and assess how Grok works. The government has previously taken action against social media platforms for AI-generated content that has been deemed offensive. In this case, the government is considering holding X accountable for Grok's content, even though it is generated by an AI tool. The government's stance is likely to have implications for other social media platforms that use AI tools.
Cheaper ripoffs was how China powered its way as an economic superpower but hitherto the tech realm had remained out of bounds. With DeepSeek's AI model the West, it seemed, was about to lose its competitive edge in cutting edge generative AI technology. And this is what is causing deep furrows in the forehead of tech titans in Silicon Valley.
Fair trade regulator CCI on Friday ordered a probe against Google for its alleged abuse of dominant position. "In a well-functioning democracy, the critical role played by news media cannot be undermined, and it needs to be ensured that digital gatekeeper firms do not abuse their dominant position to harm the competitive process of determining a fair distribution of revenue amongst all stakeholders," CCI said. It added that the Commission is of prima facie view that Google has violated provisions of Section 4 of the Competition Act, 2002 which pertains to abuse of dominant position.
Major recruiters, with double-digit offers at IIT campuses this year so far, include American Express, Barclays, BCG, Cars24, Deutsche Bank, Goldman Sachs, Google, Intel India, Meesho, Micron Technology, Microsoft, OLA, Oracle, Reliance, and Qualcomm.
Google on Wednesday launched its global 'Be Internet Awesome' programme for children in India in partnership with Indian comic book publisher Amar Chitra Katha to interweave critical internet safety lessons across eight Indian languages. The tech giant has also launched an enhanced Google Safety Centre in eight Indic languages as part of its efforts to step up safety of users on the internet. Google has significantly increased its resources dedicated to India's Trust Safety teams, including product policy analysts, security specialists, and user trust experts that support over 10 vernacular Indian languages, enabling its central teams to benefit from the local nuance and inputs.
Google's chief privacy officer, Keith Enright, has warned policymakers that frequent and large-scale sharing of citizen data, even if anonymized, can damage users' privacy. Pointing to research that shows data sets lose their anonymity if shared consistently over time, he said: "I would encourage policymakers and companies to be extremely circumspect while proceeding in that direction." Anonymization is a technique that removes or modifies personally identifiable information, resulting in data that cannot be associated with any one individual.
A US-based Dalit civil rights organisation on Thursday accused Google of having a casteist and hostile workplace practices.
The students alleged that they were forced to stand naked and were subjected to brutal acts using dumbbells meant for weightlifting.
The Competition Commission of India (CCI) on Monday ordered a detailed probe against internet giant Google for alleged unfair business practices with respect to Google Pay as well as Google Play's payment system. Google Pay is a popular digital payments platform while Google Play is the app store on its Android ecosystem.
In today's rapidly evolving digital payment landscape, security concerns remain a top priority for stakeholders across sectors.
Ashish Narsale/Rediff.com tells you what the Google Nest Hub has to offer.
'If you are not prudent, you may exceed your budget, and if it happens too often, you may end up in debt.'
