News in brief: Google ordered to pay €26.5m in damages to Equativ over anti-competitive behaviour; Meta moves into the AI podcast game; Elon Musk's X set to miss political advertising revenue targets

Google Fined for Anti-Competitive Practices in Online Advertising

The Paris Commercial Court has ordered Google to pay €26.5 million to French ad tech company Equativ in light of their anti-competitive practices in online advertising. This ruling comes as French regulators are closely monitoring digital giants in the industry. Google has expressed disagreement with the ruling and has not yet decided if they will appeal. This case highlights that concrete action on Google’s anticompetitive practices, which were condemned by the French Competition Authority in 2021, is being taken. It's a huge result for European independent ad tech, and will be watched with interest by other ad tech players in the EU who feel they've been on the receiving end of such Google tactics.

Meta Releases NotebookLlama for AI-Generated Podcasts

Meta has recently released NotebookLlama, an open implementation of the viral generate-a-podcast feature in Google’s NotebookLM. This new tool uses Meta’s Llama models for processing and can generate podcast-style digests of text files. While the text-to-speech models in NotebookLlama may not be as advanced as those in NotebookLM, Meta researchers are confident that they can be improved with stronger models.

X failing on  political advertising

Elon Musk’s X is likely to miss its $100 million political ad revenue goal for 2024, having generated just $15 million so far, largely from increased support from Republicans and the Trump campaign, the FT reports Last year, CEO Linda Yaccarino reportedly set a target of $100 million in political ad revenue for election years. The company is focusing on political ads to help counteract revenue losses after major brands cut their spending on the platform.