The said data hub will add to the already operational center near Columbus, bringing Google’s total investment in Ohio to over $2 billion. In December 2022, Google debuted OSV-Scanner, a Go tool for finding security holes in open source software, which pulls from the largest open source vulnerability database of its kind to defend against supply chain attacks. It would not remove content that is “broadly useful”, such as news articles, or already part of the public record. Even with the new policy, Google may remove information from only certain but not all search queries. It had previously accepted requests for removing confidential data only, such as Social Security numbers, bank account and credit card numbers, personal signatures, and medical records. In 2022, Google began accepting requests for the removal of phone numbers, physical addresses and email addresses from its search results.

Accounts and subscriptions

• The company subsequently announced that “48 employees have been fired over the last two years” for sexual misconduct.
• In January 2014, Spotify removed all time limits for Free users on all platforms, including on computers, which previously had a 10-hour monthly listening limit after a 6-month grace period.
• In February 2020, Spotify announced it was acquiring The Ringer, and inheriting the previously established union.
• Spotify supports integration with DJ software, allowing DJs to mix with music streamed from the platform.
• Named the Car Thing, it represents the music-streaming service’s first entry into hardware devices.

This will grow their green energy profile by 40%, giving them an extra 1.6 gigawatt of clean energy, the company said. In September 2019, Google’s chief executive announced plans for a $2 billion wind and solar investment, the biggest renewable energy deal in corporate history. An average search uses only 0.3 watt-hours of electricity, so all global searches are only 12.5 million watts or 5% of the total electricity consumption by Google. Total carbon emissions for 2010 were just under 1.5 million metric tons, mostly due to fossil fuels that provide electricity for the data centers. The company’s fourth cable, named Grace Hopper, connects landing points in New York (US), Bude (UK) and Bilbao (Spain), and is expected to become operational in 2022.
On January 21, 2019, French data regulator CNIL imposed a record €50 million fine on Google for breaching the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation. The project was canceled in December following the backlash it garnered both externally and internally within the company. In June 2022, Google agreed to pay a $118 million settlement to 15,550 female employees working in California since 2013. Google called these proposals excessive and harmful to consumers, pledging to appeal.
In 2021, a conspiracy theory began to take hold that Spotify was filling its playlists in some genres (including jazz, chill and “peaceful piano”) with stock music attributed to a handful of little-known musicians, mostly Swedish, in an effort to meet demand for background music. In 2024, Spotify Wrapped, which has become a key marketing strategy for the company, was criticised for appearing to rely on AI-generated content and producing uninteresting insights. He explained, “An extension of the internet radio craze of the early 2000s, Spotify would license content from record labels, and then support artists as people listened to their music.”

• Technology news website Recode reported that the company was purchased for $400 million, yet the source of the information was not disclosed.
• Spotify thereafter announced it was planning to add more of these pages and playlists to highlight songwriters.
• The EU Court of Justice found that Google’s treatment of rival shopping searches, which the court referred to as “discriminatory”, was in violation of the Digital Markets Act.
• He had been trying to find a CEO that Page and Brin would accept for several months, but they rejected several candidates because they wanted to retain control over the company.
• In April, Spotify announced a discounted entertainment bundle with video-on-demand provider Hulu, which included discounted rates for university students.
• While Waze would remain an independent entity, its social features, such as its crowdsourced location platform, were reportedly valuable integrations between Waze and Google Maps, Google’s own mapping service.

Initial public offering

Spotify intended to use MightyTV to improve its advertising efforts on the free tier of service. In March 2017, Spotify acquired Sonalytic, an audio detection startup, for an undisclosed amount of money. The database was thought to be evidence of an impending credential stuffing cyberattack targeting Spotify as it contained the credentials of up to 350,000 compromised user accounts. This approach is not intended to raise fresh capital, but to let investors get their returns.

Gemini 3 Flash: Bring any idea to life faster

Google launched its Google News service in 2002, an automated service which summarizes news articles from various websites. According to comScore market research from November 2009, Google Search is the dominant search engine in the United States market, with a market share of 65.6%. Department of Defense announced that Google had received a $200 million contract for AI in the military, along with Anthropic, OpenAI, and xAI.
The company also actively funds and profits from climate disinformation by monetizing ad spaces on most of the largest climate disinformation sites. Google donates to climate change denial political groups including the State Policy Network and the Competitive Enterprise Institute. In October 2020, the company pledged to make the packaging for its hardware products 100% plastic-free and 100% recyclable by 2025. It also stated that it is committed to operating its data centers and offices using only carbon-free energy by 2030.
However, after talking it out and renewing the contracts between the two, Spotify later announced that they had reached an agreement with Kakao Entertainment, allowing their content to be available once again on the platform across the globe. On 1 March 2021, Spotify confirmed that its platform would no longer have access to music from artists represented by Kakao Entertainment. It also said that Apple believed Spotify users on the app store were Apple’s customers and not Spotify’s. In March 2023, Spotify announced a partnership with Patreon, which Spotify claimed would “enable creators to expand their creative business through direct payments from fans, and allow fans to listen to their Patreon content on Spotify”. In May 2022, Spotify announced a partnership with the online game platform and game creation system Roblox, the partnership saw Spotify as the first streaming brand to have a presence within the game with the launch of “Spotify Island”.
The aim was to help users to listen to the music they want without information overload or spending time building their own playlists. Spotify gets its content from major record labels as well as independent artists and pays copyright holders royalties for streaming music. On October 6, 2025, Spotify announced a partnership with OpenAI to bring music and podcast recommendations inside ChatGPT, allowing Spotify users to discover and queue new music through conversations, rather than search.

Research and technology

Other artists and podcasters, such as Joni Mitchell, Nils Lofgren, Brené Brown, and Crosby, Stills, & Nash, also announced a boycott of Spotify. This policy was revoked in June because the company deemed the original wording to be too “vague”; they stated that “Across all genres, our role is not to regulate artists. Therefore, we are moving away from implementing a policy around artist conduct”. In response to the allegations about unfair compensation, Spotify claims that it is benefitting the industry by migrating users away from unauthorized copying and less monetized platforms to its free service tier, and then downgrades that service until they upgrade to paid accounts.

After the success of its original service, Google Search (often known simply as “Google”), the company has rapidly grown to offer a multitude of products and services. Spotify does not sell user data but did begin selling broader trend data, often coined “streaming intelligence” to marketing firms in 2016, allowing for the data to be available directly to clients. Pelly advocated for a move away from the current royalty model that says the artists who people listen to the most should make the most money toward a more generalized approach where the decision for who gets paid rests with industry or government bodies, not audiences. In July 2025, several artists joined a boycott of Spotify because Spotify CEO and co-founder Daniel Ek raised another $600 million in support of German defense company Helsing through his investment fund.
Before May 2020, all service users were limited to 10,000 songs in their library, after which they would receive an “Epic collection, friend” notification and would not be able to save more music to their library. In April 2018, Spotify began to allow Free users to listen on-demand to whatever songs they want for an unlimited number of times, as long as the song is on one of the user’s 15 personalized discovery playlists. Discovery Mode allows artists who meet certain criteria and have a Spotify For Artists account to submit qualifying songs for Spotify’s in-house promotion services. A camera icon in the apps’ search fields lets other users point their device’s camera at the code, which takes them to the same content. In May 2017, Spotify introduced Spotify Codes for its mobile apps, a way for users to share specific artists, tracks, playlists or albums with other people. The company also introduced “Spotify Running”, a feature aimed at improving music while running with music matched to running tempo, and announced that podcasts and videos (“entertainment, news and clips”) would be coming to Spotify, along with “Spotify Originals” content.
Your Google Account also makes it easy for you to sign in to third-party apps safely and quickly so your preferences go with you even beyond Google. From resuming YouTube videos across devices, to having your contacts, and favorite Play Store apps easily available, a single sign-in allows for a seamless experience across Google. For example, flight confirmations in your Gmail inbox will automatically sync with your Google Calendar and Google Maps to help you get to the airport on time. Your Google Account helps you save time by automatically filling in passwords, addresses, and payment details using the information you’ve saved to your account.

Google Password Manager

The felice bet “deeper” loss came as a result of the company’s tax debt to over one-third of its employees in Sweden. That September, Spotify announced that it had paid a total of over $5 billion to the music industry. In May 2016, Spotify announced “Sponsored Playlists”, a monetisation opportunity in which brands can specify the audiences they have in mind, with Spotify matching the marketer with suitable music in a playlist. This eligibility rule only applies to royalties for sound recordings, not musical compositions. In November 2023, Spotify announced a new royalty model taking effect in 2024, aiming to reduce the amount of “fraudulent” royalties collected from “functional” non-music tracks with short lengths (such as environmental sounds and white noise). In December 2013, the company launched a new website, “Spotify for Artists”, explaining its business model and revenue data.
In April, Spotify announced a discounted entertainment bundle with video-on-demand provider Hulu, which included discounted rates for university students. In December, Spotify and Tencent’s music arm, Tencent Music Entertainment (TME), agreed to swap stakes and make an investment in each other’s music businesses. The WNYC Studios partnership brought various podcasts from WNYC to Spotify, including Note to Self, On the Media and Here’s the Thing. Two more partnerships were announced in March; one with WNYC Studios, and one with Waze. PlayStation Music incorporates the Spotify service into Sony’s PlayStation 3 and PlayStation 4 gaming consoles, and Sony Xperia mobile devices. In 2023, Spotify merged Anchor into their Spotify for Podcasters tool, a rebranding move and to organize its tools for creating, managing, growing, and monetizing their content in one place.
The company is listed on the NASDAQ stock exchange under the ticker symbols GOOGL and GOOG, and on the Frankfurt Stock Exchange under the ticker symbol GGQ1. The stock performed well after the IPO, with shares hitting $350 for the first time on October 31, 2007, primarily because of strong sales and earnings in the online advertising market. In August 2023, Google became the first major tech company to join the OpenWallet Foundation, launched earlier in the year, whose goal was creating open-source software for interoperable digital wallets.
Explore AI experiments from across the company. Your personalized AI research assistant, right at your fingertips. Following media reports about PRISM, the NSA’s massive electronic surveillance program, in June 2013, several technology companies were identified as participants, including Google. Google provided anonymized location data from devices in the area, which raised privacy concerns due to the potential inclusion of unrelated protesters. In 2020, the FBI used a geofence warrant to request data from Google about Android devices near the Seattle Police Officers Guild building following an arson attempt during Black Lives Matter protests. In August 2024, Google sent an email to users informing them of its legal obligation to disclose certain confidential information to U.S. government authorities.