Nathan Newman

The European Union has all but announced that it will find that Google has abused its dominant position to undermine competition online -- and it is giving the company "a matter of weeks" to agree to remedies to fix the problems that the EU has identified.

The four main concerns...

It's not the crime, it's the cover-up.

You'd think most people would have learned that lesson of Watergate, but Friday's decision by the Federal Communication Commission to fine Google $25,000 for "willfully" ignoring subpoenas and delaying investigations into the company's "wi-spy" scandal should be a 25-page wake-up call that...

With the threat of the Supreme Court striking down the most important progressive domestic initiative in a generation, we should be talking about impeaching Supreme Court Justices who engage in such right-wing judicial activism.

Impeachment?  Many progressives shrink back in horror at such a supposed affront to judicial independence.  For...

Google's new privacy policy of combining all your data across all Google products -- assumedly to better market your eyeballs to advertisers -- has provoked a wave of reactions across the Internet, as well as among policymakers.

European Union data protection agencies have condemned the practice and have already indicated...

We seem to be having two debates about Google -- on the cultural side, the question is whether the company violates user privacy too much and, on the business side, is Google a monopoly threat in the marketplace?

But these are not separate issues at all.

Larry Page and Sergey...

Last week, union and management in the New York City hotel industry announced a new contract for 30,000 hotel workers in the city, including the headline-making number that housekeepers would be making $60,000 per year at the end of the seven-year contract, an increase of 30 percent over...

Google dominates Internet advertising, with 44.1% of the $113 billion per year global online advertising market, but it's quietly gunning for control of the even larger television advertising sector. As Robert Kyncl, a senior manager at Google's YouTube operation, said in a recent New Yorker interview, "[T]his industry...

There are hesitant signs of economic recovery but high unemployment is still chronic and black and Latino communities face a full-fledged jobs depression. As calculated by the Department of Labor in December, Latino unemployment was at 11.4 percent and black unemployment at 15.5 percent -- fully twice the...

Facebook this past month agreed to twenty years of independent audits of its privacy practices, joining Google which agreed earlier this year to similar audits following its breaches of user privacy when it introduced its aborted Buzz social network.

As this piece outlines, the audits should be moderately extensive...

Free services are a kind of honey pot for online services. They attract users and, more importantly, their personal data, which in turn allows companies like Google and Facebook to sell advertising.

A lot of users, when they even think about the exchange, treat the advertising as a minor...

Steve Jobs is rightly hailed for the software design innovations of Apple products, but the citing of his corporate leadership as epitomizing the modern economy may also reflect some unfortunate truths as well. Apple has the highest market capitalization of any company on Wall Street, yet it only employs 50,000...

Back in July, I wrote a series, The Cost of Lost Privacy: How Google and Datamining Drive Economic Inequality in Our Nation, about how advertisers are increasingly able to use demographic and behavioral activity...

On my cell phone, I don't pay for a texting plan from AT&T, since I use the Textfree smartphone app. I regularly bypass my data plan by accessing the Internet through my TimeWarner Internet service at home and at coffee shops around the city. And while I'm not a big...

Late last week, the Department of Justice announced a settlement with Google of $500 million for working with illegal pharmacies to place ads for selling counterfeit drugs and selling drugs without a prescription. While websites aren't usually liable for just linking to an illegal site, they are liable...

This summer, Elizabeth Warren's Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) opened its doors for business (unfortunately sans Elizabeth Warren) and one of its first orders of business is developing rules for regulating the activities of "non-banks" that still potentially impact the...

There's been a lot of commentary and response to a Reuter's opinion piece last week which calls on Microsoft to sell off its money-losing Bing search operation.

Apparently, Bing is losing something on the order of $2.6 billion per year on an operation that brings in $2.5 billion...

This is the third part in a three-part series that is running this week at HuffPost on how lost privacy online drives economic inequality in our economy. The first part looked at the ways lost privacy leads to greater economic inequality in our economy and how Google users...

Why has economic inequality increased so radically in the United States over the last generation?

General explanations range from globalization to the decline in trade unions to rising returns to education -- and therefore the loss of income to the less educated. These all no doubt play a role but...

This is the second part in a three-part series that will run this week at HuffPost on why lost privacy online matters for economic equity in our economy. The first part looked at the ways lost privacy leads to greater economic inequality in our economy and how Google...

This is the first part in a three-part series that will run this week at HuffPost on why lost privacy online matters for economic equity in our economy.

Why has economic inequality increased so radically in the United States over the last generation?

General explanations range from globalization to...