Google's parent company, Alphabet, announced Tuesday that Sundar Pichai will take over as CEO of Alphabet in addition to his current role as head of the core Google unit. Pichai will replace Larry Page, who, along with Sergey Brin, will remain "actively involved as shareholders and co-founders."
Why it matters: Page and Brin, who started Google in 1998, have been increasingly invisible in recent years, not even appearing at key Google events.
Four employees fired by Google right before Thanksgiving plan to file an unfair labor practices complaint this week with the National Labor Relations Board, charging that the company fired them for engaging in protected labor organizing.
Why it matters: The prospect of engineers challenging an iconic Silicon Valley firm under well-established labor laws could mark a sea change for the largely non-unionized tech industry.
After months of talks on bipartisan legislation, Senate Commerce Committee leaders have unveiled dueling privacy bills ahead of a hearing this week. But insiders believe the process might still yield a compromise both parties can embrace.
What they're saying: "Now there’s actually opportunity for serious negotiations between the different positions," said Jules Polonetsky, CEO of the Future of Privacy Forum, which did a comparison of the two bills. "These bills have more in common than they have dividing them."
While content companies are pushing to diversify their businesses with subscriptions and licensing, and big tech companies draw on income from hardware sales and software sales and subscriptions, Facebook is sticking with advertising at scale for the foreseeable future.
Why it matters: Facebook created its massive business by handing out a free social network and monetizing it through ads. As it expands into other businesses like commerce, payments, and hardware, it's mostly sticking with that formula — convinced that "free and ad-supported" remains the best route to achieve massive scale and to deliver on its mission of connecting the world.
The 2020 bull case for tech startups, and the investors who love them, is that federal regulators will intensify their antitrust investigations into incumbents like Apple, Amazon, Facebook, and Google.
The catch: This isn't about successfully breaking up the goliaths, which could only come after years of legal challenges. It's about distraction — and disincentives to move into new categories, thus creating more space for startups to grow.
T-Mobile is officially debuting its nationwide 5G service today using its 600 MHz spectrum.
Why it matters: The move allows T-Mobile to claim the broadest 5G coverage, even if that frequency doesn't give the kind of ultra-fast speeds possible using millimeter wave frequencies.
As Qualcomm appeals a landmark antitrust verdict attacking the heart of its business, the briefs from other parties suggest just how high the stakes are.
Why it matters: Qualcomm is highly powerful, to be sure, and has a number of controversial business practices, including its requirement that companies license its patents in order to buy its chips.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg remained defiant in a "CBS This Morning" interview airing Monday on the social media giant posting political ads containing false information.
The big picture: Per Axios' Scott Rosenberg, Facebook's policy lets politicians make virtually any claim they want, in ads or posts, including repeating verbatim a false claim that has already been labeled elsewhere as false.
What they're saying: In CBS host Gayle King's interview with Zuckerberg and his wife, pediatrician Priscilla Chan, the Facebook co-founder said, "I don't think that a private company should be censoring politicians or news."
