There is no sugar coating how brutal the last week has been. ICE agents murdered yet another regular person in the American federal government's relentless and brutal crackdown on Minneapolis Minnesota. This week's extra-judicial killing was broadcast live to the Internet by dozens of bystanders with mobile phones as was the previous one, just a week before. The mental and emotional burden of accepting this outrageous behaviour is the new normal for the American federal government makes it hard to prioritized our work and coverage of tech. It's especially difficult because so many of the companies our work relies on are lending or selling their tools to the now outwardly authoritarian federal government. This week we note how Canadian social media tool Hootsuite is providing social media services to the DHS and the outrage . We also talk about the Electronic Frontier Foundation's efforts to push digital security training to help people protect themselves in the digital space.
Amidst the chaos, Google is facing another anti-trust suit, this one filed by Californian consumers citing Google's dominance of the search space. Google is, meanwhile, appealing another anti-trust ruling that forced it to share search data with competitors suggesting the courts neglected to consider several of the issues properly. Every time Google goes to court, secrets spill out in court filings. This time some of those secrets address how Google looks at spam. Google worries that if spammers learn how Google deals with them, result quality will degrade. The documents go on to mention how user-side data is used to build and train GLUE statistical models and RankEmbed models. The UK and France are considering banning young people from using social media due to the harms social media can do to teens. Australia banned users under age 16, forcing the removal of 5million accounts (from a population of 28million). OpenAI is introducing test ads to the lower tiers of ChatGPT in the coming weeks. The Financial Times reports they expect to make somewhere in the "low billions" in ad revenues in 2026. Google is not expected to introduce ads to the Gemini environment in 2026. These ads are going to be impression based rather than pay per click. Organic search is up and, (surprise), clicks are down only slightly at a decrease of 2.5% year over year according to a large scale study using Similarweb data. All this and a lot more in a densely packed episode as our New Roman Times start to change forever.