The attempted merger of AT&T and Time Warner has drawn a lot of attention lately. So much that a Senate hearing was held last week to investigate the possibility of the combined companies forming a monopoly. During the meeting of the Senate Judiciary Antitrust Subcommittee, Mark Cuban, internet entrepreneur, made the comment that people should not be concerned with the waning phone business but internet giants, Google and Facebook. Jonathan Taplin, Op-Ed contributor for the New York Times, investigates this further in, Forget AT&T. The Real Monopolies Are Google and Facebook.
Tag: Google
Google Takes A Stand
Wednesday, Google announced they would ban all ads pertaining to payday loan businesses. Customers will still be able to find these companies through an organic search on the browser but the ads will not be featured. Google has seen fit to “edit” their ad content previously as noted by Christine Hauser for the New York Times in, Google to Ban All Payday Loan Ads.
Google has taken similar action against advertisements for other products or services that it deems harmful or dangerous, such as guns, fireworks and tobacco. Last year, Google disabled more than 780 million advertisements for reasons ranging from counterfeiting to phishing.
It’s quite refreshing to see such a well known, worldwide company taking a stand of this magnitude. Go Google!
April “Fools?”
Did you get a minion mic drop in your inbox this April Fools? Google’s famous elaborate April Fool’s pranks may have finally gone too far. This year, the idea was that you could select the “Mic drop” button on Gmail and send a .gif of a minion dropping a realistic mic. After sending, no other replies from that mail stream would come back to you. Conversation over, the end. What an amazing way to handle a never ending work email, right? Turns out that the “Mic drop” button was a little too close to the send button, causing quite a few misfires to clients and bosses. Oops. After a myriad of complaints on their Google forum, the button was removed and an apology issued.
What do you think? Did they go too far or do we all take ourselves just a little too seriously in this day and age of electronic communication?