Shailesh Prakash, the vice president and general manager for Google News, has resigned amid rising tensions with news publications that accused the search engine giant of taking important advertising revenue, Wall Street Journal reported, citing unnamed sources familiar with the matter.
However, the official reason behind Prakash’s resignation isn’t known yet.
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Why did news publications clash with Google?
Google’s business practices with news have come under intense scrutiny, especially because news organisations rely on the search engine for traffic.
For example, AI Overviews, which was introduced last May, gives an AI-generated summary on top of search results while burying links to other sites. In response, News Media Alliance, a nonprofit representing more than 2,200 publishers told the the feature would be “catastrophic to our traffic” and even called on the feds to intervene.
In addition, Google was also alleged to have used publishers’ copyrighted content to train its AI tools without attribution.
According to a New York Post report, Google was even alleged to have used its access to the Office of the US Trade Representative to undermine foreign regulations such as Canada’s Online News Act, which required Google to pay for the right to display news content.
Who is Shailesh Prakash?
Shailesh Prakash joined Google in November 2022 after an 11-year career with The Washington Post, serving as chief product and technology officer and also working at Sears and Microsoft before that.
At the Washington Post, he was credited with guiding the paper’s digital shift and also headed the creation of its in-house advertising technology business.
He even worked closely with billionaire Jeff Bezos who bought the newspaper for $500 million in 2013.
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