Yahoo Is Ready to Buy Chrome Browser If Google Is Forced to Sell
Internet company Yahoo Inc. — backed by owner Apollo Global Management Inc. — would bid for the Chrome web browser if a federal court orders Google to divest it as a remedy for maintaining an illegal monopoly, a senior executive said.
Brian Provost, the general manager for Yahoo Search, testified Thursday during Google's trial in Washington that his company estimates the browser would have a sale price in the tens of billions of dollars.
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Yahoo
2 hours ago
- Yahoo
Google comes out on top as years-long Mexico antitrust case closed
MEXICO CITY (Reuters) -Mexico's antitrust watchdog said on Friday it had closed a case against Google, clearing the tech giant from any potential fines, after a multi-year investigation determined it did not engage in monopolistic practices in the country. The investigation by Mexico's Federal Economic Competition Commission (Cofece), which began in 2020, focused on Google's digital advertising services via its search page as well as third-party websites. The investigation focused on Google's advertising services via its search page as well as third-party websites, examining whether the company had an undue advantage over competitors in the digital advertising sector stemming from the design of its platform for buying online advertising. Cofece said in a statement on Friday that its analysis had determined that Google users were not required to purchase advertising on third-party websites in order to purchase advertising on the Google search engine. "We appreciate COFECE's decision recognizing that our products give advertisers the freedom and control to use our tools in the ways that best suit their needs," a Google spokesperson said. Google had been facing a fine of up to 8% of its annual revenue in Mexico if Cofece determined it engaged in monopolistic practices. Google parent Alphabet does not include specific revenue numbers for Mexico in its earnings reports, but according to annual results for 2024, the company's revenue for its "other Americas" region, which includes Latin America, was about $20.4 billion. Google is facing antitrust challenges around the world as regulators fear how its search engine gives it an advantage. In the United States, a U.S. district judge last year ruled Google holds an unlawful monopoly in online search and related advertising. The U.S. Justice Department and a coalition of states want Google to share search data and cease multibillion-dollar payments to Apple and other smartphone makers to be the default search engine on new devices. In a separate case, a U.S. federal judge said Google illegally dominated two markets for online advertising technology, with the Justice Department saying that Google should sell off at least its Google Ad Manager, which includes the company's publisher ad server and its ad exchange.
Yahoo
2 hours ago
- Yahoo
New York passes a bill to prevent AI-fueled disasters
New York state lawmakers passed a bill on Thursday that aims to prevent frontier AI models from OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic from contributing to disaster scenarios, including the death or injury of more than 100 people, or more than $1 billion in damages. The passage of the RAISE Act represents a win for the AI safety movement, which has lost ground in recent years as Silicon Valley and the Trump Administration have prioritized speed and innovation. Safety advocates including Nobel prize laureate Geoffrey Hinton and AI research pioneer Yoshua Bengio have championed the RAISE Act. Should it become law, the bill would establish America's first set of legally mandated transparency standards for frontier AI labs. The RAISE Act has some of the same provisions and goals as California's controversial AI safety bill, SB 1047, which was ultimately vetoed. However, the co-sponsor of the bill, New York state Senator Andrew Gounardes told TechCrunch in an interview that he deliberately designed the RAISE Act such that it doesn't chill innovation among startups or academic researchers — a common criticism of SB 1047. 'The window to put in place guardrails is rapidly shrinking given how fast this technology is evolving,' said Senator Gounardes. 'The people that know [AI] the best say that these risks are incredibly likely […] That's alarming.' The RAISE Act is now headed for New York Governor Kathy Hochul's desk, where could either sign the bill into law, send it back for amendments, or veto it altogether. If signed into law, New York's AI safety bill would require the world's largest AI labs to publish thorough safety and security reports on their frontier AI models. The bill also requires AI labs to report safety incidents, such as concerning AI model behavior or bad actors stealing an AI model, should they happen. If tech companies fail to live up to these standards, the RAISE Act empowers New York's Attorney General to bring civil penalties of up to $30 million. The RAISE Act aims to narrowly regulate the world's largest companies — whether they're based in California (like OpenAI and Google) or China (like DeepSeek and Alibaba). The bill's transparency requirements apply to companies whose AI models were trained using more than $100 million in computing resources (seemingly, more than any AI model available today), and are being made available to New York residents. While similar to SB 1047 in some ways, the RAISE Act was designed to address criticisms of previous AI safety bills, according to Nathan Calvin, the Vice President of State Affairs and General Counsel at Encode, who worked on this bill and SB 1047. Notably, the RAISE Act does not require AI model developers to include a 'kill switch' on their models, nor does it hold companies that post-train frontier AI models accountable for critical harms. Nevertheless, Silicon Valley has pushed back significantly on New York's AI safety bill, New York state Assemblymember and co-sponsor of the RAISE Act Alex Bores told TechCrunch. Bores called the industry resistance unsurprising, but claimed that the RAISE Act would not limit innovation of tech companies in any way. 'The NY RAISE Act is yet another stupid, stupid state level AI bill that will only hurt the US at a time when our adversaries are racing ahead,' said Andreessen Horowitz general partner Anjney Midha in a Friday post on X. Andreessen Horowitz, alongside the startup incubator Y Combinator, were some of the fiercest opponents to SB 1047. Anthropic, the safety-focused AI lab that called for federal transparency standards for AI companies earlier this month, has not reached an official stance on the bill, co-founder Jack Clark said in a Friday post on X. However, Clark expressed some grievances over how broad the RAISE Act is, noting that it could present a risk to 'smaller companies.' When asked about Anthropic's criticism, state Senator Gounardes told TechCrunch he thought it 'misses the mark,' noting that he designed the bill not to apply to small companies. OpenAI, Google, and Meta did not respond to TechCrunch's request for comment. Another common criticism of the RAISE Act is that AI model developers simply wouldn't offer their most advanced AI models in the state of New York. That was a similar criticism brought against SB 1047, and it's largely what's played out in Europe thanks to the continent's tough regulations on technology. Assemblymember Bores told TechCrunch that the regulatory burden of the RAISE Act is relatively light, and therefore, shouldn't require tech companies to stop operating their products in New York. Given the fact that New York has the third largest GDP in the U.S., pulling out of the state is not something most companies would take lightly. 'I don't want to underestimate the political pettiness that might happen, but I am very confident that there is no economic reasons for them to not make their models available in New York,' said Assemblymember Borres. Sign in to access your portfolio
The Verge
3 hours ago
- The Verge
Posted Jun 13, 2025 at 4:16 PM EDT
Google explains Thursday's massive Cloud outage. Yesterday, a global outage on the Google Cloud platform knocked out Google Home, Spotify, Snapchat, and even some Cloudflare features, and today the company released a mini incident report as it continues to investigate. For Cloudflare's part, its report says the Google failure took out a central data store for one of its services. Google: From our initial analysis, the issue occurred due to an invalid automated quota update to our API management system which was distributed globally, causing external API requests to be rejected. To recover we bypassed the offending quota check, which allowed recovery in most regions within 2 hours. However, the quota policy database in us-central1 became overloaded, resulting in much longer recovery in that region.
