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Welcome today to new subs from The Guardian, TikTok-owner ByteDance, JP Morgan, The Telegraph in the UK, Canva, Britain’s The Sun, Australian broadcaster Nine and its rival Seven too, Globant in Argentina, Wizeline in Guadalajara, Salesforce, and many more…
This one’s going to be fun…
Google has begun offering redundancies to staff in its search and core engineering divisions as it prepares for its upcoming break-up.
The scoop was reported by The Information and comes nine weeks before two judges begin ruling on remedies to end its trio of monopolies on search, ads and apps.
Staff arrived at work to find emails from Google knowledge chief Nick Fox in their inboxes yesterday, as I reported in Australia’s media and publishing platform Mi3.
He said it was to provide a “supportive exit path for those of you who don’t feel aligned with our strategy, don’t feel energized by your work, or are having difficulty meeting the expectations of your role”.
The Verge said Google was branding the move internally as a “voluntary exit program”. Gotta love marketers…
Courts have found Google is a “once, twice, three times a monopolist” after years of cases and investigations by the US Department of Justice.
Judges are now considering demands from the DoJ that Google sells its Chrome browser and releases data on how its search engine works to free up competition.
It also wants Google to be forced to sell off its Google Ad Manager (GAM) ad server, and ad exchange AdX, and reveal the inner workings, pricing, and tech of its ad stack.
The job losses came days after former Bauer CEO
and I got into the details of the Google break-up up plan on Scotch and Watch live.It turns out that after 650 days covering a court case and reading almost 1.5 million words of evidence, we have developed some spicy opinions...
And that’s what Scotch and Watch is for. It’s an unflinching, unscripted and unapologetic deep debate into the biggest topics affecting publishing and tech.
Chris and I get into the nuts and bolts, the facts and the fictions, and the real story of what’s happening here, when, and why.
Why Chrome will be sold for $1 not billions.
The reason the DoJ is pushing Apple into search.
Which tech CEOs will be fired first.
The future of AI Overviews and Gemini, and
A colossal revolt coming soon from furious investors.
The outcome will be how tens of billions of pages of content are discovered, distributed, and monetised, in a way that reconstructs and reoxygenates publishing.
You can also catch us on Spotify, Apple, Art19, or wherever you get your pods.
Can’t wait to see you there…
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