It also objected to Google limiting or refusing to allow interoperability of services included in GAS with third-party services.
“We are particularly concerned about the compulsory bundling of services with great market strength and reach with services that are less strong.
“Google is also prepared to eliminate its contractual provisions on setting Google services as default applications or displaying them prominently in the infotainment platform,” the FCO also noted.
The question of whether Google’s proposals will result in an unbundled offering of Google’s services in the automotive sector will be decisive in this context,” it added.
Which may give the FCO reason enough to continue its scrutiny of Google Maps in the meanwhile.
Google is launching a few updates to Chrome on desktop this week that aim to make your browsing experience a bit safer and give you more control over your browser’s memory usage.
The marquee feature for this update is proactive Safety Check.
Starting with version 120, which actually launched a few weeks ago, desktop Chrome’s Safety Check on desktop will now run in the background and send out proactive alerts when it detects if a password in Chrome has been compromised or when an extension you’ve installed is malware.
It’ll also remind you to update Chrome.
Google is also highlighting two other updates to Chrome on desktop today.
Cisco announced this morning that it intends to acquire Isovalent, a cloud-native security and networking startup that should fit well with the company’s core networking and security strategy.
Tetragon is the company’s open source security visibility component.
Jeetu Patel, executive vice president and general manager of security and collaboration at Cisco said that it is essential for companies to work together where security is concerned.
And we need to make sure that we stay open in this market and co-innovate, and I think open source is probably one of the best models to co-innovate with,” Patel said.
Cisco has been extremely acquisitive this year with this representing the 11th acquisition by the company, the fifth related to security.
Google announced today that it will pay $700 million as a part of a settlement with the U.S. Attorney General for a lawsuit over Google Play Store.
Third-party app stores and side-loadingFor at least seven years, Google will support app installs on Android outside of Google Play through different ways including third-party app stores.
Google won’t force developers to launch their apps at the same time or earlier on the Google Play for at least four years.
Plus, Google can’t stop them from displaying fees linked with Google Play or Google Play’s billing system.
OEM clausesGoogle can’t enter a deal with phone makers to have Google Play as the exclusive app store on devices to place Google Play on the home screen for at least five years.
“India is a massive, massive country with so many diverse needs,” said Miriam Karthika, VP for Google Maps Experience, at the event.
This India-first capability, introduced for developers on Google Maps Platform earlier this year, will be available across over 75 Indian cities.
Apart from launching the global features in India, Google partnered with India’s Open Network for Digital Commerce (ONDC) and mobility app Namma Yatri to provide metro schedules and bookings to users directly through Google Maps.
In July last year, Google introduced Street View in India six years after the feature was banned in the country over security concerns.
Today, over 50 million users are viewing Street View in the country, Google said.
Google said today it will pay $700 million — $630 million to U.S. consumers and $70 to a fund used by U.S. states — in a settlement over Play Store reached in September.
In September, the company reached a tentative settlement in a class action lawsuit filed by U.S. states and consumers originally filed in 2021.
The complaint highlighted Google’s monopoly over app distribution on Android through the Play Store.
Today, the company said it will expand the program in the country as part of the settlement.
The company also said that it would make the sideloading process streamlined without giving any further details about the new process.
Even the courts cannot agree on whether geofence warrants are legal, likely setting up an eventual challenge at the U.S. Supreme Court.
While Google is not the only company subject to geofence warrants, Google has been far the biggest collector of sensitive location data, and the first to be tapped for it.
Although the companies have said little about how many geofence warrants they receive, Google, Microsoft and Yahoo last year backed a New York state bill that would have banned the use of geofence warrants across the state.
The data showed Google received 982 geofence warrants in 2018, then 8,396 geofence warrants in 2019, and 11,554 geofence warrants in 2020 — or about one-quarter of all the legal demands that Google received.
But there is hope that Google shutting the door on geofence warrants — at least going forward — could significantly curtail this surveillance loophole.
OhmConnect is currently active in California, Texas, and New York, and the new company, Renew Home, plans to expand into new markets once launched, the spokesperson added.
Sidewalk Infrastructure Partners itself was once a part of Sidewalk Labs.
Sidewalk Labs got its start originally as a Google moonshot in 2015 with the lofty goal of using tech to improve urban life.
SIP was eventually spun out of Sidewalk Labs in 2020 fuelled with a $400 million investment from Google.
Nest Renew has been one of OhmConnect’s customers, alongside Sensi, ecobee, Carrier and others.
Instead, what is immediately changing as a result of this ruling is the legality surrounding the app store business model itself — and potentially others.
“What we know right now is that this is going to impact the walled garden business model Google and Apple and other companies have enjoyed for a while,” Swanson said.
In fact, the legal risk from this business model may encourage other businesses to change, even without being dragged to court.
Apple didn’t regularly engage in side deals (though it considered one with Netflix) nor did it pay developers to launch on its app store instead of theirs, as Apple only offers one route to app distribution: the App Store.
“Just because it is your business model does not mean it is legal or that it’s right,” VanMeter pointed out.
Apple said it will no longer give over records of users’ push notifications to law enforcement unless the company receives a valid judge’s order.
For its part, Google requires a court-issued order before it will hand over push notification data.
Apple did not respond to a request for comment, or say for what reason it previously allowed law enforcement to obtain users’ push notification data without a warrant.
Push notifications appear as pop-up messages on a phone alerting the user to new messages, breaking news, and other app-based updates.
Wyden said unnamed foreign governments are also demanding Apple and Google turn over users’ push notification data.
