CDP Institute

Last week didn’t turn out so well for Google after all. Despite rumors that the EU would bow to U.S. threats, the European Commission assessed a €2.95 billion ($3.46 billion) fine for adtech anti-trust violations. Google also has to change self-preferencing practices and avoid future conflicts of interest.

In what might be considered another setback for Big Tech, Anthropic has agreed to pay authors $1.5 billion to settle a lawsuit over its use of books to train AI. It’s a small victory at best, since the judge had already accepted Anthropic’s claim that using copyrighted books was legal. The settlement is limited to compensation for using pirated texts.

Since today’s newsletter is apparently brought to you by the letter B, as in Billion, let’s also note that OpenAI is reportedly investing $10 billion to build its own AI chips. Readers of this newsletter may be more interested that OpenAI also announced plans for a hiring platform to help companies find AI workers. This could put them in direct competition with Microsoft-owned LinkedIn.

You won’t be surprised that the main product theme at HubSpot’s annual Inbound conference is AI, and “hybrid human-AI teams” in particular. The most CDP-relevant announcement is a new Data Hub, which uses AI to assemble, clean, and activate data from structured, unstructured and external sources.

Google continued its Very Good Week with a report that Apple may use Google technology for an AI-powered web search feature. Apple has glaringly lagged in its AI efforts, but apparently intends to build an answer engine to compete with OpenAI and Perplexity.

Even Google hits an occasional speed bump: a California jury assessed it with $425 million in compensatory damages for collecting data on users who had opted out of app activity tracking. Then again, the class action plaintiffs had asked for more than $30 billion in damages so maybe that’s really a win. In any event, the result will probably be appealed.

Audience measurement vendor Comscore has launched a new venture to build privacy-safe audiences from privacy-unsafe customer data. The trick is to match IDs from third-party audiences to Comscore’s own consumer panel, and then build a look-alike model using non-personal attributes. The dozen or so partners providing the input audiences include Circana, Dynata, Eyeota, Polk Automotive Solutions, Symphony Health, and TransUnion.

It’s been a good week for Google, if not necessarily the rest of us. Fresh from a U.S. court ruling effectively preserving its search money, the company learned that European Union regulators have paused an expected fine for adtech abuses. No reason was given although fear of U.S. retaliation is suspected.

Speaking of monopolists, Amazon wants to capture every purchase possible, even from customers standing in a retail store. To help things along, they’ve enhanced their Lens visual shopping tool with Lens Live, which lets users research a product by pointing at it with their camera. This removes the step of uploading an image. As TechCrunch points out, Google and Pinterest already have similar features.

That whizzing noise you just heard was the bullet that Google dodged in the judge’s ruling on its search anti-trust case. The court won’t require Google to divest Chrome and lets it continue to pay device makers for loading Chrome on their systems. Google does have to share some search data with competitors but not on a regular basis. Appeals are certain.

Berlin-based Zeotap is one of the few CDPs that also provide clients with third-party audience data. Or they were: Zeotap has sold its data business to Berlin-based Roqad, which calls itself “Europe’s largest trusted identity aggregator and data onboarding partner.” Roqad also gains Zeotap’s integrations with Amazon DSP, The Trade Desk, Adform, and other platforms.