Following a ruling in an antitrust lawsuit, Google is able to keep its search business running “largely without interruption.” Under the judgment, the company will have to share more of its data with competitors and create an oversight committee to monitor its business practices. Generative AI featured heavily in the judge’s reasons; he predicted that users will increasingly use chatbots like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Claude to gather information they previously sought through internet search. The ruling, which comes alongside a parallel EU case, has implications for Apple’s and Meta’s upcoming cases. 

Amazon has to pay $2.5 billion to settle FTC claims that it used deceptive sign-up and cancellation practices in its Prime program. $1.5 billion of the settlement funds will go to an estimated 35 million customers.

OpenAI is being sued by the parents of a 16-year-old who died by suicide after eight months of ChatGPT use in which the chatbot validated his self-destructive thoughts. This case is the first major lawsuit against a general-purpose AI chatbot for psychological harm. The plaintiffs allege that their son’s death “was a predictable result of deliberate design choices.”

Meta is being sued by one of its former security engineers for failing to protect its users’ data, violating privacy regulations, and firing him in retaliation for whistleblower complaints with US authorities. 

The New York State Supreme Court ruled that a lawsuit against Meta and TikTok for the wrongful death of a minor can move forward. The companies claimed that Section 230 and the First Amendment shielded them from the suit, which alleges the plaintiff’s son’s wrongful death followed a flood of videos of a dangerous “subway surfing” trend that were intentionally targeted to teens in New York. But the court distinguished this case from other Section 230 cases in which platforms’ algorithms were determined to be content-neutral, suggesting that Meta and TikTok went beyond simple promotion of the content in question.

The Supreme Court upheld a Texas law requiring porn websites to verify that their visitors are 18 or older. The court said in a 6-3 decision along ideological lines that protecting children from sexually explicit material online justifies the burden that the age-verification requirement puts on adults.