Google is under investigation by DoJ

If the DoJ's case against Alphabet' Google is to go ahead, there will be some changes to how the Advertising dollars span the world and coffers. Alphabet, is ranked among the world’s five largest corporations by market capitalization. The company's growth is mostly due to its powerful position in online advertising, a lucrative market that threatens to eclipse other forms of advertising. This was shared by News Papers, Magazines and TV prior.
WSJ (Pay walled) first dropped the news but the information is still sketchy.

The Justice Department is gearing up for an antitrust investigation of Alphabet Inc.’s Google, a move that could present a major new layer of regulatory scrutiny for the search giant, according to people familiar with the matter. The department’s antitrust division in recent weeks has been laying the groundwork for the probe, the people said…
The department is preparing to closely examine Google’s business practices related to its search and other businesses, the people said.
It couldn’t immediately be learned whether Google has been contacted by the department. Third-party critics of the search giant, however, already have been in contact with Justice Department officials, some of the people familiar with the matter said…
Alphabet, Google’s parent, typically is ranked among the world’s five largest firms by market capitalization. It has grown, thanks largely to its powerful position in online advertising, a lucrative market that threatens to eclipse other forms of advertising.

Google might be looking to block ADblockers in Chromium.

It seems Google might be looking to block AD blockers in Chrome. Google engineers have proposed changes to the open-source Chromium browser that will break content-blocking extensions, including ad blockers.

If the changes happen as planed, plugins like Adblock Plus that rely on basic filtering might continue to work if properly tweaked, and block ads. But the more aggressive extensions like uBlock Origin will meet a wall. The drafted changes will limit the capabilities available to extension developers, apparently for the sake of speed and safety. Chromium forms the central core of Google Chrome, and, soon, Microsoft Edge.

From the Chromium bug tracker

From the description of the declarativeNetRequest API[1], I understand that its purpose is to merely enforce Adblock Plus ("ABP")-compatible filtering capabilities[2]. It shares the same basic filtering syntax: double-pipe to anchor to hostname, single pipe to anchor to start or end of URL,  caret as a special placeholder, and so on. The described matching algorithm is exactly that of a ABP-like filtering engine.

If this (quite limited) declarativeNetRequest API ends up being the only way content blockers can accomplish their duty, this essentially means that two content blockers I have maintained for years, uBlock Origin ("uBO") and uMatrix, can no longer exist.

Beside causing uBO and uMatrix to no longer be able to exist, it's really concerning that the proposed declarativeNetRequest API will make it impossible to come up with new and novel filtering engine designs, as the declarativeNetRequest API is no more than the implementation of one specific filtering engine, and a rather limited one (the 30,000 limit is not sufficient to enforce the famous EasyList alone).

Key portions of uBlock Origin[3] and all of uMatrix[4] use a different matching algorithm than that of the declarativeNetRequest API. Block/allow rules are enforced according to their *specificity*, whereas block/allow rules can override each others with no limit. This cannot be translated into a declarativeNetRequest API (assuming a 30,000 entries limit would not be a crippling limitation in itself).

There are other features (which I understand are appreciated by many users) which can't be implemented with the declarativeNetRequest API, for examples, the blocking of media element which are larger than a set size, the disabling of JavaScript execution through the injection of CSP directives, the removal of outgoing Cookie headers, etc. -- and all of these can be set to override a less specific setting, i.e. one could choose to globally block large media elements, but allow them on a few specific sites, and so on still be able to override these rules with ever more specific rules.

Extensions act on behalf of users, they add capabilities to a *user agent*, and deprecating the blocking ability of the webRequest API will essentially decrease the level of user agency in Chromium, to the benefit of web sites which obviously would be happy to have the last word in what resources their pages can fetch/execute/render.

With such a limited declarativeNetRequest API and the deprecation of blocking ability of the webRequest API, I am skeptical "user agent" will still be a proper category to classify Chromium.

The European Commision Puts Google on Spotlight For AdSense's Panda 4.0 Algorithm and Other Changes

Google has been on EU's cross hairs for last one and half years and so far has been fined a total 6.76 billion euros ($7.7 billion) for favoring its comparison shopping service and for leveraging Google's own Android mobile operating system to further its search engine market power.

Now the European Commission is wrapping up a third case which involves Google’s AdSense advertising service. This case was brought about by a complaint by U.S. search and advertising company Yelp (YELP.N) and other competitors in travel, restaurant and accommodation industries.

EU authority sent questionnaires to Google competitors last month, requesting information on the Google’s practices and the impact on their services between January 2012 to December 2017. The focus is on the

search algorithm changes introduced by Google, including the introduction of its Panda 4.0 algorithm. Also among the questions were, if Google’s introduction of the Local Universal or One Box had a substantial impact on their local search services. Local Universal handles hotel ads and One Box is a tool for local businesses to get more visibility in Google search results.

Via Reuters.

Methbot and 3ve Taken Down by FBI With The Aid of Google and WhiteOps

Two global botnets, Methbot and 3ve have completely been shutdown and the culprits have been identified. Of the two botnets, the Methbot was shutdown in December 2016. 3ve, pronounced Eve was shutdown by the recent operations.
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The DOJ unsealed the indictments on Tuesday. They were against eight people from Russia and Kazakhstan accused of running the schemes, who bilked millions of dollars out of the advertisers of all levels over several years.
The FBI, collaborated with White Ops, Google and a group of other ad tech companies to detect and demolish the operations. Methbot was shut down in December 2016, close to the time White Ops went public with the more than 4,000 compromised IP addresses involved in the plot.

Sandeep Swadia, the CEO of White Ops, called it a “very complex, ever-shifting maze,” while Scott Spencer, a Google product manager, labeled it a “multiheaded beast” in exclusive interviews with BuzzFeed News.

The accused are Aleksandr Zhukov, Boris Timokhin, Mikhail Andreev, Denis Avdeev, Dmitry Novikov, Sergey Ovsyannikov, Aleksandr Isaev, and Yevgeniy Timchenko. Three of the men have been arrested and are awaiting extradition to the United States, while the rest remain at large. The details are available here.
One could get more information on this complex issue at the Buzzfeed.
Also here is a white Paper on the subject, very interesting read.