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The dispute over the YouTube Music union, whose 43 members were abruptly laid off last week while one was testifying during an Austin City Council meeting, largely depends on the definition of “contractor.” Because they are not permanent, full-time employees, “their project on YouTube Music has ended,” according to a rep from their employer, information-technology subcontractor Cognizant, and “the contract expired at its natural end date.”
Independent contractors, according to Kate Bronfenbrenner, Cornell University’s director of labor education research, are “not under the regulatory state,” so they lack basic workplace protections. “Whether it’s labor law, health and safety or race discrimination, independent contractors have almost no rights in our economy,” she says. “So employers say, ‘We want to make as much money as possible — let’s make all our employees temporary employees.’”
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The 43 YouTube contractors, who work for Cognizant and Google to oversee content for the music-streaming service’s 80 million subscribers, voted unanimously almost a year ago to form a union under the auspices of Alphabet Workers Union-CWA. They’ve complained of hourly wages as low as $19 and a lack of sick pay and benefits. And they say Google has not been willing to bargain with them; in January, the National Labor Relations Board ruled that Google’s refusal to do so was illegal and must “bargain on request.” (An appeal is pending.)
In a statement, Google spokeswoman Courtenay Mencini repeated that Cognizant, not Google, is “responsible for these workers’ employment terms.” On Cognizant’s side, Jeff DeMarrais, chief communications officer, says “nobody was laid off” from YouTube Music and the contractors have seven weeks of paid time to “explore other roles within the organization.”
Sam Regan, a YouTube Music data analyst who is on the union’s organizing committee, responds that his team’s project was “never considered as temporary” and the Cognizant moves are, in fact, layoffs, as opposed to reassignments to different areas of the company. “Our team was fired and we had no notice, no warning, that we were going to get laid off,” he says. “It was cold, ruthless, dehumanizing, inhumane. The practice of tech companies laying off large swaths of people without notice is indicative of a pretty sick orientation towards workers in our culture.”
Regan and Katie-Marie Marschner, a subject matter expert on YouTube Music’s charts team until last week, accuse company managers of forcing them to leave their office without giving them a chance to remove their belongings. The office was a “total destruction zone,” Marschner says, alleging company employees and on-site security refused to let them remove certain personal items. “The experience was traumatic for a lot of us,” Regan adds.
Members of the YouTube Music team had been scheduled to testify before the Austin City Council on Feb. 29 to ask city officials to help convince Google to negotiate with their union. But as data analyst Jack Benedict was speaking, Marschner received a text saying her entire team was fired. Shaken, she interrupted the colleague’s speech — a moment captured in a video clip that went viral. Watching the clip afterwards, Marschner says, has been surreal and traumatic. “It’s such an insane experience opening my phone and that’s the first thing I see — myself talking, and not just talking, but the sound of my voice and the pain and shock,” she says.
Marschner accuses Cognizant and Google of “union-busting” and says the team members were “fired illegally.” And Cornell’s Bronfenbrenner is skeptical of Cognizant’s assertion that the temporary employees had a “natural end date” of Feb. 29. “There are a whole lot of questions about that,” she says. “From everything I’ve read, there wasn’t a certain date. And if there was an uncertain date, the employer can’t say their contract just ended and they can’t be laid off.”
Reached at home, Marschner says she plans to continue pursuing union recognition for her team: “We’re not done with this. We’re very much ready to keep the fight going.”
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Source: NurPhoto / Getty / Elon Musk / XMail
Elon Musk, a.k.a. bootleg Phony Stark, isn’t done with dumb ideas. The Tesla chief now wants to compete with Google’s popular email client, Gmail, with a new product called XMail.
Musk seems to have a serious one-sided beef with Google, and we wonder if the folks there know about it. First, he drops his version of ChatGPT called “Grok.”
He has also been calling out the Alpahabet Inc. owned company’s search tool, calling its AI tool Gemini “insane” and “racist.” He claims he spoke with a “senior exec” who assured him the company will “take immediate action to fix the racial and gender bias in Gemini.”
Now, he claims he is dropping his own email client called XMail.
In a post on X, formerly Twitter, Musk revealed “it’s coming” when replying to X Engineer Nate McGrady asking, “When are we making XMail?”
We all know Musk is full of you-know-what and tends to make outlandish claims all the time, but he could be serious about this XMail thing.
If he thinks he will be able to compete with Google’s Gmail immediately, he’s definitely going to have some serious work cut out for him.
Demand Sage claims that Gmail currently has 1.8 billion active users globally, and we don’t see XMail coming anywhere near that.
Yeah, so good luck with peeling off longtime Gmail users and luring them to “XMail” if he decides to create it.
We truly believe Elon Musk is just talking out the side of his a** like he does with everything else.
You can see more reactions to the possibitly of XMail arriving in the gallery below.
1. Accurate
3. Howling
4. Sure Jan
5. This guy gets it.
6. Excellent question
After a string of pivots, rebrands, upgraded offerings and expanded plans, YouTube Premium and Music has passed the magical 100 million subscribers mark, counting users in trials, the company announced Thursday (Feb. 1).
That’s up from the 80 million Premium and Music subscribers around the world (including trials), reported in November 2022, and a jump from 50 million users at the end of 2021.
The milestone is cause for great celebration at the company, notes Lyor Cohen, global head of music at YouTube, in an open letter to the industry issued today (Feb. 1). “This 20-million-member growth in just over a year underscores the strength of our twin engine of advertising and subscriptions revenue,” writes Cohen.
The Alphabet-owned business unveiled its subscription offering, YouTube Music, back in October 2015, and launched its dedicated app the following month.
The streaming landscape then was littered with naysayers. “Many doubted a subscription model could thrive on YouTube,” Cohen notes. “They said the market was crowded and our platform was too different. Today – 100 million subscribers later – our distinctiveness is precisely what drives our success and why I still see so much room for growth.”
Later, in June 2018, YouTube announced the launch of YouTube Premium, formerly known as YouTube Red. Since then, notes Cohen, the Premium service’s global expansion has ramped up and is “now thriving in over 100 countries and regions” with “more on the horizon in 2024.”
By crossing the 100 million mark, “we’re delighted and humbled,” comments Adam Smith, vice president of product management at YouTube, in a separate statement.
Along the way, “we learned a lot, made a few pivots (and even rebranded), expanded our offerings and plans, and made YouTube Music and Premium available in over 100 countries and regions,” adds Smith.
In a matchup of streaming heavyweights, Spotify, the market-leading music platform, holds the advantage. The Sweden-based business came to market early, in 2008, and boasted 226 million premium subscribers worldwide in Q3 2023.
Though Apple rarely shares updates on subscriber numbers, in June 2022, J.P. Morgan estimated Apple Music could hit 110 million subscribers by 2025. The last time the company reported subscriber numbers for Apple Music was in 2019, when it reported 60 million paid users.
As YouTube hangs the decorations, captains of the industry are lining up to thank their tech partner — including a former YouTuber now leading a major label.
“Having been at YouTube when we conceived of the subscription service, 100 million customers felt like a distant possibility,” says Robert Kyncl, who was chief business officer at YT before joining Warner Music Group as CEO. “Today, it’s yet another signpost on a journey of extraordinary growth. The fact that YouTube continues to go from strength to strength isn’t just good for them, it’s healthy for the entire music ecosystem.”
Lucian Grainge, chairman and CEO of Universal Music Group, says the team led by Cohen and YouTube CEO Neal Mohan deserves credit for “continuing to grow and drive innovation while making significant contributions to the global music ecosystem. Our partnership demonstrates that if you start from a foundation of respect for artists and songwriters, there are limitless opportunities to create thriving businesses that benefit artists and fans alike.”
Adds Helen Smith, executive chair of pan-European independent music companies’ trade body IMPALA: “YouTube has a unique place in the music ecosystem, is a valued member of IMPALA’s Friends scheme and a great partner of our 100 Artists to Watch program.” She continues, “We look forward to continuing to work together across the whole European market where there is so much potential for digital services who see diversity as an asset.”
According to Cohen, YT’s businesses have contributed $6 billion in the past year.
“The music industry is at a critical juncture,” he writes. “Together, we can harness technological innovation to drive unprecedented value for artists and fans, building on our momentum that contributed $6 billion to the music industry in 12 months.”
That future, one where the music industry “thrives,” he insists, would see both sides leveraging AI to enhance creative imagination, seamlessly bridging short-form and long-form content for maximum artist exposure, and more.
Read Cohen’s thank you letter here.
Lyor Cohen’s first encounter with Google’s generative artificial intelligence left him gobsmacked. “Demis [Hassabis, CEO of Google Deepmind] and his team presented a research project around genAI and music and my head came off of my shoulders,” Cohen, global head of music for Google and YouTube, told Billboard in November. “I walked around London for two days excited about the possibilities, thinking about all the issues and recognizing that genAI in music is here — it’s not around the corner.”
While some of the major labels are touting YouTube as an important partner in the evolving world of music and AI, not everyone in the music industry has been as enthusiastic about these new efforts. That’s because Google trained its model on a large set of music — including copyrighted major-label recordings — and then went to show it to rights holders, rather than asking permission first, according to four sources with knowledge of the search giant’s push into generative AI and music. That could mean artists “opting out” of such AI training — a key condition for many rights holders — is not an option.
YouTube did make sure to sign one-off licenses with some parties before rolling out a beta version of its new genAI “experiment” in November. Dream Track, the only AI product it has released publicly so far, allows select YouTube creators to soundtrack clips on Shorts with pieces of music, based on text prompts, that can include replicas of famous artists’ voices. (A handful of major-label acts participated, including Demi Lovato and Charli XCX.) “Our superpower was our deep collaboration with the music industry,” Cohen said at the time. But negotiations that many in the business see as precedent-setting for broader, labelwide licensing deals have dragged on for months.
Negotiating with a company as massive as YouTube was made harder because it had already taken what it wanted, according to multiple sources familiar with the company’s label talks. Meanwhile, other AI companies continue to move ahead with their own music products, adding pressure on YouTube to keep progressing its technology.
In a statement, a YouTube representative said, “We remain committed to working collaboratively with our partners across the music industry to develop AI responsibly and in a way that rewards participants with long-term opportunities for monetization, controls and attribution for potential genAI tools and content down the road,” declining to get specific about licenses.
GenAI models require training before they can start generating properly. “AI training is a computational process of deconstructing existing works for the purpose of modeling mathematically how [they] work,” Google explained in comments to the U.S. Copyright Office in October. “By taking existing works apart, the algorithm develops a capacity to infer how new ones should be put together.”
Whether a company needs permission before undertaking this process on copyrighted works is already the subject of several lawsuits, including Getty Images v. Stability AI and the Authors Guild v. OpenAI. In October, Universal Music Group (UMG) was among the companies that sued AI startup Anthropic, alleging that “in the process of building and operating AI models, [the company] unlawfully copies and disseminates vast amounts of copyrighted works.”
As these cases proceed, they are expected to set precedent for AI training — but that could take years. In the meantime, many technology companies seem set on adhering to the Silicon Valley rallying call of “move fast and break things.”
While rights holders decry what they call copyright infringement, tech companies argue their activities fall under “fair use” — the U.S. legal doctrine that allows for the unlicensed use of copyrighted works in certain situations. News reporting and criticism are the most common examples, but recording a TV show to watch later, parody and other uses are also covered.
“A diverse array of cases supports the proposition that copying of a copyrighted work as an intermediate step to create a noninfringing output can constitute fair use,” Anthropic wrote in its own comments to the U.S. Copyright Office. “Innovation in AI fundamentally depends on the ability of [large language models] to learn in the computational sense from the widest possible variety of publicly available material,” Google said in its comments.
“When you think of generative AI, you mostly think of the companies taking that very modern approach — Google, OpenAI — with state-of-the-art models that need a lot of data,” says Ed Newton-Rex, who resigned as Stability AI’s vp of audio in November because the company was training on copyrighted works. “In that community, where you need a huge amount of data, you don’t see many people talking about the concerns of rights holders.”
When Dennis Kooker, president of global digital business and U.S. sales for Sony Music Entertainment, spoke at a Senate forum on AI in November, he rejected the fair use argument. “If a generative AI model is trained on music for the purpose of creating new musical works that compete in the music market, then the training is not a fair use,” Kooker said. “Training in that case, cannot be without consent, credit and compensation to the artists and rights holders.”
UMG and other music companies took a similar stance in their lawsuit against Anthropic, warning that AI firms should not be “excused from complying with copyright law” simply because they claim they’ll “facilitate immense value to society.”
“Undisputedly, Anthropic will be a more valuable company if it can avoid paying for the content on which it admittedly relies,” UMG wrote at the time. “But that should hardly compel the court to provide it a get-out-of-jail-free card for its wholesale theft of copyrighted content.”
In this climate, bringing the major labels on board as Google and YouTube did last year with Dream Track — after training the model, but before releasing it — may well be a step forward from the music industry’s perspective. At least it’s better than nothing: Google infamously started scanning massive numbers of books in 2004 without asking permission from copyright holders to create what is now known as Google Books. The Authors Guild sued, accusing Google of violating copyright, but the suit was eventually dismissed — almost a decade later in 2013.
While AI-related bills supported by the music business have already been proposed in Congress, for now the two sides are shouting past each other. Newton-Rex summarized the different mindsets succinctly: “What we in the AI world think of as ‘training data’ is what the rest of the world has thought of for a long time as creative output.”
Additional reporting by Bill Donahue.
Google has laid off hundreds of employees working on its hardware, voice assistance and engineering teams as part of cost-cutting measures.
The cuts come as Google looks towards “responsibly investing in our company’s biggest priorities and the significant opportunities ahead,” the company said in a statement.
“Some teams are continuing to make these kinds of organizational changes, which include some role eliminations globally,” it said.
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Google earlier said it was eliminating a few hundred roles, with most of the impact on its augmented reality hardware team.
The cuts follow pledges by executives of Google and its parent company Alphabet to reduce costs. A year ago, Google said it would lay off 12,000 employees or around 6% of its workforce.
In a post on X — previously known as Twitter — the Alphabet Workers Union described the job cuts as “another round of needless layoffs.”
“Our members and teammates work hard every day to build great products for our users, and the company cannot continue to fire our coworkers while making billions every quarter,” the union wrote. “We won’t stop fighting until our jobs are safe!”
Google is not the only technology company cutting back. In the past year, Meta — the parent company of Facebook — has slashed more than 20,000 jobs to reassure investors. Meta’s stock price gained about 178% in 2023.
Spotify said in December that it was axing 17% of its global workforce, the music streaming service’s third round of layoffs in 2023 as it moved to slash costs and improve its profitability.
Earlier this week, Amazon laid off hundreds of employees in its Prime Video and studios units. It also will lay off about 500 employees who work on its livestreaming platform Twitch.
Amazon has cut thousands of jobs after a hiring surge during the pandemic. In March, Amazon announced that it planned to lay off 9,000 employees, on top of 18,000 employees it said that it would lay off in January 2023.
Google is currently locked in a fierce rivalry with Microsoft as both firms strive to lead in the artificial intelligence domain.
Microsoft has stepped up its artificial intelligence offerings to rival Google’s. In September, Microsoft introduced a Copilot feature that incorporates artificial intelligence into products like search engine Bing, browser Edge as well as Windows for its corporate customers.
Google has agreed to pay $700 million and make several other concessions to settle allegations that it had been stifling competition against its Android app store — the same issue that went to trial in another case that could result in even bigger changes.
Although Google struck the deal with state attorneys general in September, the settlement’s terms weren’t revealed until late Monday in documents filed in San Francisco federal court. The disclosure came a week after a federal court jury rebuked Google for deploying anticompetitive tactics in its Play Store for Android apps.
The settlement with the states includes $630 million to compensate U.S. consumers funneled into a payment processing system that state attorneys general alleged drove up the prices for digital transactions within apps downloaded from the Play Store. That store caters to the Android software that powers most of the world’s smartphones.
Like Apple does in its iPhone app store, Google collects commissions ranging from 15% to 30% on in-app purchases — fees that state attorneys general contended drove prices higher than they would have been had there been an open market for payment processing. Those commissions generated billions of dollars in profit annually for Google, according to evidence presented in the recent trial focused on its Play Store.
Eligible consumers will receive at least $2, according to the settlement, and may get additional payments based on their spending on the Play store between Aug. 16, 2016 and Sept. 30, 2023. The estimated 102 million U.S. consumers who made in-app purchases during that time frame are supposed to be automatically notified about various options for how they can receive their cut of the money.
Another $70 million of the pre-trial settlement will cover the penalties and other costs that Google is being forced to pay to the states.
Although Google is forking over a sizeable sum, it’s a fraction of the $10.5 billion in damages that the attorneys general estimated the company could be forced to pay if they had taken the case to trial instead of settling.
Google also agreed to make other changes designed to make it even easier for consumers to download and install Android apps from other outlets besides its Play Store for the next five years. It will refrain from issuing as many security warnings, or “scare screens,” when alternative choices are being used.
The makers of Android apps will also gain more flexibility to offer alternative payment choices to consumers instead of having transactions automatically processed through the Play Store and its commission system. Apps will also be able to promote lower prices available to consumers who choose an alternate to the Play Store’s payment processing.
Investors seemed unfazed by the settlement as shares in Google’s corporate parent, Alphabet Inc., rose slightly in Tuesday’s midday trading.
The settlement represents a “loud and clear message to Big Tech — attorneys general across the country are unified, and we are prepared to use the full weight of our collective authority to ensure free and fair access to the digital marketplace,” said Connecticut Attorney General William Tong.
Wilson White, Google’s vice president of government affairs and public policy, framed the deal as a positive for the company, despite the money and concessions it entails. The settlement “builds on Android’s choice and flexibility, maintains strong security protections, and retains Google’s ability to compete with other (software) makers, and invest in the Android ecosystem for users and developers,” White wrote in a blog post.
Although the state attorneys general hailed the settlement as a huge win for consumers, it didn’t go far enough for Epic Games, which spearheaded the attack on Google’s app store practices with an antitrust lawsuit filed in August 2020.
Epic, the maker of the popular Fortnite video game, rebuffed the settlement in September and instead chose to take its case to trial, even though it had already lost on most of its key claims in a similar trial targeting Apple and its iPhone app store in 2021.
The Apple trial, though, was decided by a federal judge instead of the jury that vindicated Epic with a unanimous verdict that Google had built anticompetitive barriers around the Play Store. Google has vowed to appeal the verdict.
Corie Wright, Epic’s vice president of public policy, derided the states’ settlement as little more than a one-time payout that provides “no true relief for consumers or developers,” in a blog post.
In court documents, the attorneys general said they decided to settle because of significant risks posed by a trial, including the possibility that a jury may have thought their plan to seek $10.5 billion in damages was exorbitant. The attorneys general also cited for the potential of jurors becoming confused had their case been presented alongside Epic’s claims in the trial, as had been the original plan.
But now the Epic trial’s outcome nevertheless raises the specter of Google potentially being ordered to pay even more money as punishment for its past practices and making even more dramatic changes to its lucrative Android app ecosystem.
Those changes will be determined next year by U.S. District Judge James Donato, who presided over the Epic Games trial. Donato also still must approve Google’s Play Store settlement with the states.
“In the next phase of the case, Epic will seek meaningful remedies to truly open up the Android ecosystem so consumers and developers will genuinely benefit from the competition that U.S. antitrust laws were designed to promote,” Wright pledged.
Google faces an even bigger legal threat in another antitrust case targeting its dominant search engine that serves as the centerpiece of a digital ad empire that generates more than $200 billion in sales annually. Closing arguments in a trial pitting Google against the Justice Department are scheduled for early May before a federal judge in Washington D.C.
Google released its list of the biggest trending searches of 2023 and when it comes to music, Jason Aldean‘s controversial “Try That in a Small Town” led the list of search inquiries for songs, with Aldean also hitting No. 1 as the top trending musician.
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In a year when Taylor Swift and Beyoncé were perpetually in the news thanks to their massive tours and the live concert films, the high placement for Aldean was not totally surprising given the weeks of attention he got for “Small Town,” which was pulled from CMT and labeled by some detractors as being pro-gun, pro-violence and akin to a “modern lynching song” after the release of the track’s video.
The visual found Aldean performing the song in front of the Maury County Courthouse in Columbia, TN, the site of the 1927 lynching and hanging of 18-year-old Henry Choate over allegations that he sexually assaulted a white girl, as well as the spot of a 1946 race riot in which two Black men were killed. Aldean rejected detractors’ claims about the song whose video featured images of an American flag burning, protesters clashing with police, looters breaking a display case and thieves robbing a convenience store; the video was later seemingly edited to remove images of a Black Lives Matter protest following the backlash.
Right behind Aldean was buzzy rapper Ice Spice, followed by “Rich Men North of Richmond” country singer Oliver Anthony, Peso Pluma, Joe Jonas, Sam Smith, The 1975’s Matty Healy, Kellie Pickler, Kim Petras and Sexxy Red.
Google’s data shows the top trending searches in the U.S., referring to trending queries as searches that had a major spike in traffic over a sustained period in 2023 versus 2022, which is why despite being a near-ubiquitous search term who has a consistently high search interest, TIME‘s Person of the Year Swift (and Beyoncé) didn’t top the ranking for musicians; click here for Gizmodo‘s explanation.
The year’s most buzzed-about movies, Barbie and Oppenheimer (combined as Barbenheimer by fans) came out on top, followed by the controversial anti-trafficking movie Sound of Freedom and Oscar-winner Everything Everywhere All At Once, as well as Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3, The Super Mario Bros. Movie, Creed III, John Wick: Chapter 4, Five Nights at Freddy’s and Cocaine Bear. The No. 1 trending actor was Jeremy Renner, who suffered serious injuries in a snowplow incident in January.
Jamie Foxx, who was sidelined most of this year after an unexplained “medical complication” in April, was just behind Renner, followed by disgraced That 70’s Show actor Danny Masterson, comedian Matt Rife, Pedro Pascal, Jonathan Majors, Sophie Turner, Russell Brand, Ke Huy Quan and Josh Hutcherson.
The trending people list had Buffalo Bills safety Damar Hamlin at No. 1 following his scary on-field cardiac incident during a Cincinnati Bengals game in January, followed by Renner and Kansas City Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce, likely due to his romance with Taylor Swift; Kelce was also among the top five most-searched athletes.
The TV tally featured mostly Netflix projects, including its originals Ginny & Georgia, Queen Charlotte: A Bridgerton Story, Wednesday, That 90’s Show, Kaleidoscope, Beef and The Fall of the House of Usher. Other shows that got in the mix included Daisy Jones & the Six (No. 4) and The Weeknd’s one-and-done HBO series The Idol (No. 9).
Late Friends star Matthew Perry was No. 1 on searches for celebrity deaths, followed by Tina Turner, Jerry Springer, Jimmy Buffett and Sinead O’Connor, with Lisa Marie Presley coming in at No. 8. The news headlines that we searched the most were those related to the war between Israel and Hamas, followed by the sinking of the Titanic tourist submarine, Hurricanes Hilary, Idalia and Lee, as well as a mass shootings in Maine and Nashville, the Maui wildfire, the Idaho college campus murder trail and the Canadian wildfires.
A federal court jury has decided that Google’s Android app store has been protected by anticompetitive barriers that have damaged smartphone consumers and software developers, dealing a blow to a major pillar of a technology empire.
The unanimous verdict reached Monday came after just three hours of deliberation following a four-week trial revolving around a lucrative payment system within Google’s Play Store. The store is the main place where hundreds of millions of people around the world download and install apps that work on smartphones powered by Google’s Android software.
Epic Games, the maker of the popular Fortnite video game, filed a lawsuit against Google three years ago, alleging that the internet search giant has been abusing its power to shield its Play Store from competition in order to protect a gold mine that makes billions of dollars annually. Just as Apple does for its iPhone app store, Google collects a commission ranging from 15% to 30% on digital transactions completed within apps.
Apple prevailed in a similar case that Epic brought against the iPhone app store. But that 2021 trial was decided by a federal judge in a ruling that is under appeal at the U.S. Supreme Court.
The nine-person jury in the Play Store case apparently saw things through a different lens, even though Google technically allows Android apps to be downloaded from different stores — an option that Apple prohibits on the iPhone.
Just before the Play Store trial started, Google sought to avoid having a jury determine the outcome, only to have its request rejected by U.S. District Judge James Donato. Now it will be up to Donato to determine what steps Google will have to take to unwind its illegal behavior in the Play Store. The judge indicated he will hold hearings on the issue during the second week of January.
Epic CEO Tim Sweeney broke into a wide grin after the verdict was read and slapped his lawyers on the back and also shook the hand of a Google attorney, whom he thanked for his professional attitude during the proceedings.
“Victory over Google!” Sweeney wrote in a post on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter. In a company post, Epic hailed the verdict as “a win for all app developers and consumers around the world.”
Google plans to appeal the verdict, according to a statement from Wilson White, the company’s vice president of government affairs and public policy.
“Android and Google Play provide more choice and openness than any other major mobile platform,” White said.
Depending on how the judge enforces the jury’s verdict, Google could lose billions of dollars in annual profit generated from its Play Store commissions. The company’s main source of revenue — digital advertising tied mostly to its search engine, Gmail and other services — won’t be directly affected by the trial’s outcome.
The jury reached its decision after listening to two hours of closing arguments from the lawyers on the opposing sides of the case.
Epic lawyer Gary Bornstein depicted Google as a ruthless bully that deploys a “bribe and block” strategy to discourage competition against its Play Store for Android apps. Google lawyer Jonathan Kravis attacked Epic as a self-interested game maker trying to use the courts to save itself money while undermining an ecosystem that has spawned billions of Android smartphones to compete against Apple and its iPhone.
Much of the lawyers’ dueling arguments touched upon the testimony from a litany of witnesses who came to court during the trial.
The key witnesses included Google CEO Sundar Pichai, who sometimes seemed like a professor explaining complex topics while standing behind a lectern because of a health issue, and Sweeney, who painted himself as a video game lover on a mission to take down a greedy tech titan.
In his closing argument for Epic, Bornstein railed against Google for exploiting its power over the Android software in a way that “has led to higher prices for developers and consumers, as well as less innovation and quality.”
Google has staunchly defended the commissions as a way to help recoup the more than $40 billion that it has poured into building into the Android software that it has been giving away since 2007 to manufacturers to compete against the iPhone.
“Android phones cannot compete against the iPhone without a great app store on them,” Kravis asserted in his closing argument. “The competition between the app stores is tied to the competition between the phones.”
But Bornstein ridiculed the notion of Google and Android competing against Apple and its incompatible iPhone software system. “Apple is not the ‘get out of jail for free’ card that Google wants it to be,” Bornstein told the jury.
Google also pointed to rival Android app stores such as the one that Samsung installs on its popular smartphones as evidence of a free market. Combined with the rival app stores pre-installed on devices made by other companies, more than 60% of Android phones offer alternative outlets for Android apps.
Epic, though, presented evidence asserting the notion that Google welcomes competition as a pretense, citing the hundreds of billions of dollars it has doled out to companies, such as game maker Activision Blizzard, to discourage them from opening rival app stores. Besides making these payments, Bornstein also urged the jury to consider the Google “scare screens” that pop up, warning consumers of potential security threats when they try to download Android apps from some of the alternatives to the Play Store.
“These are classic anticompetitive strategies used by dominant firms to protect their monopolies,” Bornstein said.
Google’s empire could be further undermined by another major antitrust trial in Washington that will be decided by a federal judge after hearing final arguments in May. That trial has cast a spotlight on Google’s cozy relationship with Apple in online search, the technology that turned Google into a household word a few years after two former Stanford University graduate students started the company in a Silicon Valley garage in 1998.
The American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP) argued that AI companies need to license material from copyright owners to train their models and that “a new federal right of publicity… is necessary to address the unprecedented scale on which AI tools facilitate the improper use of a creator’s image, likeness, and voice” in a document filed to the Copyright Office on Wednesday (Dec. 6).
The Copyright Office announced that it was studying “the copyright issues raised by generative artificial intelligence” in August and solicited written comments from relevant players in the space. Initial written comments had to be submitted by October 30, while reply comments — which give organizations like ASCAP the chance to push back against assertions made by AI companies like Anthropic and Open AI — were due December 6.
Generative AI models require training: They ingest large amounts of data to identify patterns. “AI training is a computational process of deconstructing existing works for the purpose of modeling mathematically how [they] work,” Google wrote in its reply comments for the Copyright Office. “By taking existing works apart, the algorithm develops a capacity to infer how new ones should be put together” — hence the “generative” part of this.
ASCAP represents songwriters, composers, and music publishers, and its chief concern is that AI companies will be allowed to train models on its members’ works without coming to some sort of licensing arrangement ahead of time. “Numerous comments from AI industry members raise doubts about the technical or economic feasibility of licensing as a model for the authorized use of protected content,” ASCAP writes. “But armchair speculations about the efficiency of licensing do not justify a rampant disregard for creators’ rights.”
ASCAP adds that “numerous large-scale AI tools have already been developed exclusively on the basis of fully licensed or otherwise legally obtained materials” — pointing to Boomy, Stable Audio, Generative AI by Getty Images, and Adobe Firefly — “demonstrating that the development of generative AI technologies need not come at the expense of creators’ rights.”
ASCAP also calls for the implementation of a new federal right-of-publicity law, worried that voice-cloning technology, for example, can threaten artists’ livelihood. “Generative AI technology introduces unprecedented possibilities for the unauthorized use of a creator’s image, likeness, and voice,” ASCAP argues. “The existing patchwork of state laws were not written with this technology in view, and do not adequately protect creators.”
“Without allowing the artists and creators to control their voice and likeness,” ASCAP continues, “this technology will create both consumer confusion and serious financial harm to the original music creators.”
While Google usually takes a 15% cut of customer payments for app subscriptions in its Play Store on Android devices, Spotify obtained a deal that allowed it to pay a drastically reduced commission, according to The Verge.
The details of the business arrangement were divulged by Google head of global partnerships Don Harrison on Monday (Nov. 20) in testimony during the Epic Games vs. Google trial: Spotify paid no commission if users bought subscriptions through Spotify, and 4% if users selected Google as their payment processor.
Harrison said in court that Spotify landed this “bespoke” agreement because “if we don’t have Spotify working properly across Play services and core services, people will not buy Android phones.” His testimony also indicated that the deal entailed a $50 million investment by both Google and Spotify in a “success fund.”
In a statement to The Verge, a Google spokesperson said that “a small number of developers that invest more directly in Android and Play may have different service fees as part of a broader partnership that includes substantial financial investments and product integrations across different form factors. These key investment partnerships allow us to bring more users to Android and Play by continuously improving the experience for all users and create new opportunities for all developers.”
A rep for Spotify did not respond to Billboard’s request for comment.
Epic Games, which is known for furnishing the world with the popular game Fortnite, has been battling Google since way back in 2020 over the 30% fee the search giant charges app developers for purchases made on its Play Store on Android devices. Epic tried to circumvent Google’s system by putting its own payment system into the Fortnite app and charging a reduced price; Google hit back by yanking Fortnite off the Play Store.
Epic then sued Google. “Google… is using its size to do evil upon competitors, innovators, customers and users in a slew of markets it has grown to monopolize,” Epic wrote in its complaint. The New York Times reported that Epic’s CEO, Tim Sweeney, said in court on Monday (Nov. 20) that Google “exercises de facto control over the availability of apps on Android.”
Wilson White, a Google vp of public policy, told reporters earlier this month that “Epic wants all the benefits of Android and Google Play without having to pay for them,” according to The New York Times. “The lawsuit [from Epic] would upend a business model that has lowered prices and increased choices,” White argued.
Google had tried to avoid revealing the nature of its relationship with Spotify in court, The Verge reported earlier this month. “Disclosure of the Spotify deal would be very, very detrimental for the negotiation we’d be having with… other parties,” Google attorney Glenn Pomerantz told the judge overseeing the case.
