Google News CEO Shailesh Prakash resigns amid rising tensions with news publications: report

Shailesh Prakash, the vice president and general manager of Google News, has resigned amid rising tensions with news publications that accused the search engine giant of raking in key advertising revenue, the Wall Street Journal reported, citing unnamed sources are familiar with the matter.

However, the official reason behind Prakash’s resignation is not yet known.

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Why did news publications clash with Google?

Google’s business practices with news have come under intense scrutiny, especially as news organizations rely on the search engine for their traffic.

For example, AI Overviews, introduced last May, provides an AI-generated summary on top of search results while burying links to other sites. In response, News Media Alliance, a nonprofit representing more than 2,200 publishers, said the feature would be “catastrophic for our traffic” and even called on the FBI to intervene.

In addition, Google is also said to have used copyrighted content from publishers to train its AI tools without attribution.

According to a New York Post report, Google even used its access to the US Trade Representative’s office to undermine foreign regulations such as Canada’s Online News Act, which required Google to pay for the right to display news content.

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Who is Shailesh Prakash?

Shailesh Prakash joined Google in November 2022 after an eleven-year career at Google The Washington Postserved as Chief Product and Technology Officer and previously also worked at Sears and Microsoft.

At the Washington Post, he was credited with guiding the paper’s digital shift and also led the creation of its in-house advertising technology division.

He even worked closely with billionaire Jeff Bezos, who bought the newspaper for $500 million in 2013.

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