New literacy research can help improve learning outcomes and fight global poverty

THE NARODNIKI PROGRAM IN 19TH CENTURY RUSSIA

by Josh Stowe, University of Notre Dame

Haitian elementary school students learn to read in their classroom as part of literacy 

intervention efforts to improve learning outcomes. 

Credit: University of Notre Dame

A new study by a team of University of Notre Dame researchers makes a significant contribution to understanding the factors that influence how young elementary school students respond to reading interventions in fragile and low-income contexts.

The study, published in the Comparative Education Review, evaluated an early-grade literacy intervention in Catholic schools in Haiti. The study has important implications for addressing educational inequities and improving learning outcomes to create opportunity and lift millions of children globally out of poverty.

"This research brings greater attention to questions of educational equity in the acquisition of foundational skills," said lead author TJ D'Agostino, assistant professor of the practice with the Pulte Institute for Global Development, part of the University of Notre Dame's Keough School of Global Affairs. "Which populations are being well served, which can we serve better, and how do we accomplish that? These findings can help guide future research and policy to expand literacy rates in low- and middle-income countries."

Past research has shown that achieving reading comprehension by the end of second grade is crucial to progressing in school, which impacts future life opportunities, D'Agostino said. Some studies suggest achieving universal literacy could reduce global poverty by more than 10%.

Schools participating in the study received specialized teacher training as well as a curriculum in Haitian Creole and French that included a collated library. The curriculum included time for teachers to read aloud to students as well as time for students to read on their own. A group of coaches regularly visited participating schools to share best practices and evaluate what worked.

The study identified several factors that affected outcomes, including:

• Instructional time (which suffered in some schools because of high rates of student and teacher absenteeism)
• Curriculum uptake (whether teachers adhered to the new curriculum or instead mixed and matched it with more familiar resources)
• School leadership (which was crucial to protecting time for learning, encouraging teacher buy-in to the program and providing extra support for students)

A Haitian boy reads at school as part of a literacy intervention evaluated by Notre Dame 

researchers. The team's work can inform the global work of major literacy donors such as

 USAID. Credit: University of Notre Dame

Researchers found that rural schools faced particular challenges, D'Agostino said, since they were more remote, received fewer coaching visits, tended to serve more marginalized populations and often experienced higher rates of student absenteeism.

D'Agostino worked with fellow co-authors Danice Brown Guzmán and Paul Perrin of the Keough School's Pulte Institute; Anasthasie Liberiste-Osirus, a training and technical assistance consultant who previously worked with Notre Dame's Global Center for the Development of the Whole Child (GC-DWC), part of the University's Institute for Educational Initiatives; and Kate Schuenke-Lucien of the GC-DWC.

The literacy intervention program served more than 100,000 first- through third-grade students in nearly 350 schools between 2016 and 2020. Ultimately, the study helped the Notre Dame team identify questions for future research, the co-authors said, and can inform future literacy interventions by organizations such as USAID, which is the largest bilateral donor of basic education assistance and works in more than 50 countries.

"Improving literacy skills in the school environment is an important part of a broader, deeper set of outcomes needed to address poverty," Schuenke-Lucien said, noting that researchers sought to engage students holistically using home and church resources as well.

D'Agostino agreed. "It is deeply rewarding to contribute to programs that help people in marginalized communities develop life-changing skills," he said, "and it is energizing to be a part of Notre Dame's larger work to fight poverty."

More information: TJ D'Agostino et al, Explaining Variation in Treatment Effects: An Impact Evaluation and Mixed-Methods Study of Variation in Early Grade Reading Program Effects, Comparative Education Review (2024). DOI: 10.1086/728393

Provided by University of Notre Dame Learning in two languages: Lessons from francophone Africa on what works best

 

The secret lives of roots: Tropical forest root systems are central to improving climate change predictions

by Chapman University

Credit: New Phytologist (2024). DOI: 10.1111/nph.19561

International research co-authored by Joshua Fisher, associate professor in Chapman University's Schmid College of Science and Technology, suggests that studying root function in tropical forests could help vegetation models improve predictions of climate change. The study was published on Feb. 28 in New Phytologist.

When it comes to understanding climate change, vegetation models are vital tools that help scientists study plants' adaptation strategies to changing environmental conditions, including drying, warming and elevated carbon dioxide levels. However, these models have historically omitted one of the largest biomasses on earth: tropical forests.

"Tropical rainforests are among the least understood biomes on the planet, but exert among the greatest impacts on global climate, water and carbon cycling," Fisher said. "Our team coalesced the latest scientific understanding of how these ecosystems function together with how to mathematically capture these dynamics in global models. This forges a path forward to improved predictions of the fate of Earth under a changing climate."

An international group of scientists called TropiRoot, led by Colorado State University, has been working to provide much needed representation of tropical forests and root function in vegetation models. After studying root functions by synthesizing literature on the subject and measuring roots in tropical ecosystems in Costa Rica, Panama, Puerto Rico and Singapore, the team has contributed to a greater understanding of how carbon storage and belowground dynamics will respond to global change.

According to the study, tropical forests contain 30% of global soil carbon, most of which likely originates from root biomass, representing the second highest soil carbon storage rate after permafrost. By acting as carbon banks, tropical forests can help to prevent severe effects of climate change, but these banks are at risk as tropical forests experience warming, shifting rainfall patterns, deforestation and relative depletion of soil nutrients due to elevated levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

Compared to temperate forests, tropical forests have greater biodiversity, faster-acting processes and seasons based on rainfall rather than temperature. Over 50% of tropical forests are on old and strongly weathered soils, meaning their soils lack essential nutrients like phosphorus, so root systems have been forced to develop more efficient processes for recycling minerals. Additionally, tropical root systems have recently been described as growing differently from roots in other ecosystems, with unique combinations of physical traits and symbiosis with fungi and bacteria.

These unique features, combined with a lack of funding to support tropical forest research, have historically made tropical forests difficult to study and underrepresented in vegetation and global land-climate models. Better understanding how these aspects are responding to global change could give insights into the future of land-climate feedback.

More information: Daniela F. Cusack et al, Toward a coordinated understanding of hydro‐biogeochemical root functions in tropical forests for application in vegetation models, New Phytologist (2024). DOI: 10.1111/nph.19561

Provided by Chapman University Increasing tropical land use is disrupting the carbon cycle

 

Tetanus Vaccine May Be in Short Supply After Company Stops Production

Sanofi plans to ramp up production of its version, but doctors should switch to Tdap shot in the meantime

Adobe Stock

By:

Physician’s Briefing Staff

Published on: 

Feb 29, 2024, 

(HealthDay News) -- In an effort to prevent a shortage, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is advising doctors to conserve the tetanus vaccine because one manufacturer is stopping production.

The vaccine in question is the Td shot, which shields against both tetanus and diphtheria. In an update, the agency said that "MassBiologics has discontinued production of their Td vaccine, TdVax." The product's distributor only expects to have the shot on hand until June, the update added.

While another company, Sanofi, plans to step up production of its own Td vaccine, "it is anticipated that the supply of Td vaccine in the U.S. market will be constrained during 2024," the CDC said.

Doctors do have an alternative: The broader Tdap (tetanus, diphtheria, pertussis) vaccine. "Tdap vaccine is available from both U.S.-licensed manufacturers without supply constraints at this time," so physicians should switch to that shot when possible, the CDC advised.

According to CBS News, doctors have already been migrating to use of the Tdap vaccine. A spokesperson for the nonprofit MassBiologics told CBS that "similar vaccines have led to a reduction in demand," leading to the company's decision to cut production.

Pfizer Filing Shows 70 Percent Decline in COVID Vaccine Revenue

By Jack Phillips

February 29, 2024

A medical syringe and vials of the Pfizer US pharmaceutical corporation and BioNTech German biotechnology 2021 company logos in New York on Oct. 3, 2021. (Cindy Ord/Getty Images for Pfizer/BioNTech)

Vaccine-maker Pfizer Inc., in a filing to the U.S. Securities Exchange Commission, wrote that its COVID-19 vaccine revenue is down 70 percent in 2023.

“Declines largely driven by lower contracted deliveries and demand in international markets and lower U.S. government contracted deliveries, due to transition to new variant vaccines in most markets and the transition to traditional U.S. commercial market sales which began in September 2023,” the company wrote in the filing, which was drafted last week.

Global revenues for the vaccine hit $11.2 billion for last year, said the filing. However, that’s a far cry from 2022’s numbers when the company’s vaccine revenue stood at $37 billion for the year, or down about 70 percent.

Pfizer earned record revenue in 2021 and 2022, topping $100 billion last year, after developing its vaccine with German partner BioNTech SE, and the antiviral treatment Paxlovid on its own.

Last year, the company, on multiple occasions, slashed its revenue estimate for 2023 due to a drop in demand for the vaccine and other COVID-19 products. At one point, the firm slashed estimates by $9 billion.

Pfizer CEO Albert Boura said in a statement at the time: “As we gain additional clarity around vaccination and treatment rates for COVID, we will be better able to estimate the appropriate level of supply to meet demand.”

Later that year, the firm announced layoffs, in part due to the lower-than-anticipated profits.

“The program is expected to deliver targeted savings of at least $3.5 billion, of which $1 billion is expected to be realized in 2023 and an additional $2.5 billion is expected to be realized in 2024,” Pfizer said in an October news release. “The one-time costs to achieve the savings associated with the new cost realignment program are expected to be approximately $3 billion, of which the majority is expected to be cash. These costs will primarily include severance and implementation costs.”

The filing comes as U.S. Centers of Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) said this week it recommends that older adults should receive another updated COVID-19 booster vaccine dose, which are made by Pfizer and Moderna.

Notably, the agency did not recommend the booster shot for any other age demographic. Previously, the it had recommended booster shots and initial vaccine series for everyone aged six months and older.

But under the latest recommendations, adults aged 65 and older are advised to get another dose of any updated COVID-19 vaccine, which became available in September, at least four months after the previous one. It came after the agency’s advisory committee voted to endorse the guidance, which was then backed by CDC Director Mandy Cohen this week.

“Today’s recommendation allows older adults to receive an additional dose of this season’s COVID-19 vaccine to provide added protection,” the CDC director said in a news release released by the agency. “Most COVID-19 deaths and hospitalizations last year were among people 65 years and older. An additional vaccine dose can provide added protection that may have decreased over time for those at highest risk.”

Late last year, the CDC issued an alert that Americans’ uptake of the latest COVID-19 boosters as well as RSV and influenza vaccines is lower than previous year.

“Low vaccination rates, coupled with ongoing increases in national and international respiratory disease activity caused by multiple pathogens, including influenza viruses, SARS-CoV-2 (the virus that causes COVID-19), and RSV, could lead to more severe disease and increased healthcare capacity strain in the coming weeks,” the agency wrote in a health advisory right before Christmas 2023.

Around 17 percent of adults and about 8 percent percent children getting the latest shot, according to the CDC data at the time. That includes about 36 percent of elderly adults.

“We are seeing too few folks get vaccinated this season,” Dr. Cohen said late last year. “The voice of the physician matters so much in whether or not folks decide to get vaccinated.”

Reuters contributed to this report.

Vaccines Didn’t Turn Back Mpox, Study Finds. People Did.


By Apoorva Mandavilli
Feb. 29, 2024

The News

The 2022 outbreak of mpox, previously known as monkeypox, was curbed in large part by drastic changes in behavior among gay and bisexual men, and not by vaccination, according to a new analysis published on Thursday in the journal Cell.

Mpox vaccinations in a mobile clinic outside a Manhattan club in 2022.

Credit...Kholood Eid for The New York Times

Why It Matters: Vaccines often arrive too late to stamp out outbreaks.

Public health response to outbreaks often relies heavily on vaccines and treatments, but that underestimates the importance of other measures, said Miguel Paredes, lead author of the new study and an epidemiologist at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center in Seattle.

Although the Food and Drug Administration approved a vaccine for mpox in 2019, getting enough doses produced and into arms proved challenging for many months after the outbreak began. Vaccines for new pathogens are likely to take even longer.

The new analysis suggests an alternative. Alerting high-risk communities allowed individuals to alter their behavior, such as reducing the number of partners, and led to a sharp decrease in transmission, Mr. Paredes said. In North America, the outbreak began petering out in August 2022, when less than 8 percent of high-risk individuals had been vaccinated.

Public health messaging can “be really powerful to control epidemics, even as we’re waiting for things like vaccines to come,” he said.

The Long View: Vaccines are still important.

Some experts unrelated to the work were not convinced that behavioral change was largely responsible for stemming the outbreak.

“If the national numbers are driven by large outbreaks in a few places, then the folks at the highest risk in those places would get infected pretty quickly, and their immunity would be especially valuable in limiting the outbreak size,” said Bill Hanage, an epidemiologist at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.

“Add in some vaccine-induced immunity in this group and a bit of behavior change, and it will be even more effective,” he said.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention worked closely with the L.G.B.T.Q. community to raise awareness about the importance of behavior modification, said Thomas Skinner, a spokesman for the agency.

While behavioral change can curtail outbreaks in the short term, vaccinations prevent the outbreak from resurging once people return to their normal routines, said Virginia Pitzer, an epidemiologist at the Yale School of Public Health.

“As we’ve seen with Covid, the behavioral change only lasts so long,” she said.

Back Story: The mpox outbreak was underway well before it was detected.

Mr. Paredes and his colleagues analyzed genetic sequences of the mpox virus from five global regions, along with air travel and epidemiological data. They were able to map the evolution of the virus to determine that the outbreak originated in Western Europe, most likely in Britain, some time between December 2021 and late March 2022. The first case was detected in Britain in May 2022.

In all five regions, the virus was spreading extensively long before it was detected by public health authorities. Later introductions from outside a particular region played a limited role in feeding the outbreak, accounting for less than 15 percent of new cases, the researchers said. That suggests that travel bans would have had only a minor impact.

The analysis also found that about one-third of infected individuals or less were responsible for most of the virus transmission as the outbreak waned.

“The most impact you can get from public health is not necessarily from these huge population-wide policies,” Mr. Paredes said. Instead, by focusing on this high-risk group, “you can go a really long way into controlling the epidemic.”

What’s Next: Surveillance prevents outbreaks.

The fact that the virus was circulating widely long before it was detected points to the need for better surveillance of pathogens — a lesson also learned from Covid, said Trevor Bedford, an evolutionary biologist at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center, in whose lab Mr. Paredes works.

“If we can catch emerging pathogens earlier on, like even weeks, it will make a big difference in terms of changing the course of these epidemics,” Dr. Bedford said.

In the case of mpox, the pattern of virus spread was consistent with the volume of air travel between the United States and Western Europe.

“As soon as there was an outbreak of mpox in Western Europe, we should have known that we would be seeing cases in the U.S.,” Dr. Pitzer said.

The new study focused on the dynamics of the 2022 outbreak. But other research has shown that the mpox virus has been circulating among people since 2016.

“It remains a mystery to me how we could have sustained human-to-human transmission between 2016 and the beginning of 2022 and not have more of a visible epidemic,” Dr. Bedford said.



Apoorva Mandavilli is a reporter focused on science and global health. She was a part of the team that won the 2021 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service for coverage of the pandemic. More about Apoorva Mandavilli

 

AI reveals secret roads endangering 

the world's rainforests

by James Cook University

A sampled image at full extent (top) and for a smaller inset area (bottom) featuring clearly

 discernible land covers and road infrastructure. 

Credit: Remote Sensing (2024). DOI: 10.3390/rs16050839

Satellite images analyzed by AI are emerging as a new tool in finding unmapped roads that bring environmental destruction to wilderness areas.

James Cook University's Distinguished Professor Bill Laurance was co-author of a study analyzing the reliability of an automated approach to large-scale road mapping, using convolutional neural networks trained on road data, using satellite images.

He said the Earth is experiencing an unprecedented wave of road building, with some 25 million kilometers of new paved roads expected by mid-century.

"Roughly 90% of all road construction is occurring in developing nations including many tropical and subtropical regions of exceptional biodiversity.

"By sharply increasing access to formerly remote natural areas, poorly regulated road development triggers dramatic increases in environmental disruption due to activities such as logging, mining and land clearing," said Professor Laurance.

He said many roads in such regions, both legal and illegal, are unmapped, with road-mapping studies in the Brazilian Amazon, Asia-Pacific and elsewhere regularly finding up to 13 times more road length than reported in government or road databases.

"Traditionally, road mapping meant tracing road features by hand, using satellite imagery. This is incredibly slow, making it almost impossible to stay on top of the global road tsunami," said Professor Laurance.

The researchers trained three machine-learning models to automatically map road features from high-resolution satellite imagery covering rural, generally remote and often forested areas of Papua New Guinea, Indonesia and Malaysia.

"This study shows the remarkable potential of AI for large-scale tasks like global road-mapping. We're not there yet, but we're making good progress," said Professor Laurance.

"Proliferating roads are probably the most important direct threat to tropical forests globally. In a few more years, AI might give us the means to map and monitor roads across the world's most environmentally critical areas."

The work is published in the journal Remote Sensing.

More information: Sean Sloan et al, Mapping Remote Roads Using Artificial Intelligence and Satellite Imagery, Remote Sensing (2024). DOI: 10.3390/rs16050839

Provided by James Cook University Global road-building explosion could be disastrous for people and nature, say scientists

Laurie Anderson on making an AI chatbot of Lou Reed: ‘I’m totally, 100%, sadly addicted’

Anderson’s experiments with language-based AI predated ChatGPT – with one machine modelled on her dead husband that her friends ‘just can’t stand’

Walter Mars
Wed 28 Feb 2024 

There’s a 2013 Black Mirror episode in which a young widow played by Hayley Atwell signs up to an online service that scrapes a person’s entire digital footprint to create a virtual simulation. She soon starts chatting online with her late husband (Domhnall Gleeson), before things inevitably get Black Mirror-y.

Laurie Anderson, the American avant garde artist, musician and thinker, hasn’t seen the episode but, in the last few years, has lived a version of it: growing hopelessly hooked on an AI text generator that emulates the vocabulary and style of her own longtime partner and collaborator, Velvet Underground co-founder Lou Reed, who died in 2013.


“People are like, ‘Wow, you were so prescient; I didn’t even know what you were talking about back then’,” she says on a video call from New York.

A new Anderson exhibition, I’ll Be Your Mirror, has just opened in Adelaide, where Anderson will be doing an In Conversation event via live stream on Wednesday 6 March. The last time Anderson was in Australia, in March 2020, she spent a week working with the University of Adelaide’s Australian Institute for Machine Learning. Before the pandemic forced her to catch one of the last flights home, they had been exploring language-based AI models and their artistic possibilities, drawing on Anderson’s body of written work.

In one experiment, they fed a vast cache of Reed’s writing, songs and interviews into the machine. A decade after his death, the resulting algorithm lets Anderson type in prompts before an AI Reed begins “riffing” written responses back to her, in prose and verse.

Laurie Anderson and Lou Reed in Spain in 2009. Photograph: Robin Towsend/EPA

“I’m totally 100%, sadly addicted to this,” she laughs. “I still am, after all this time. I kind of literally just can’t stop doing it, and my friends just can’t stand it – ‘You’re not doing that again are you?’

“I mean, I really do not think I’m talking to my dead husband and writing songs with him – I really don’t. But people have styles, and they can be replicated.”

The results, Anderson says, can be hit and miss. “Three-quarters of it is just completely idiotic and stupid. And then maybe 15% is like, ‘Oh?’. And then the rest is pretty interesting. And that’s a pretty good ratio for writing, I think.”

On her side of the call, Anderson starts typing. “You know what, I’ll just bring it up right now while we’re talking and you can give me a phrase.”

Looking at the morning traffic outside my window, I offer the very mundane, “bus idling on the street”. She feeds it in as we keep talking.

I really do not think I’m talking to my dead husband … but people have styles, and they can be replicated.’ Photograph: Stephanie Diani

Back in 2020, Anderson said the institute’s work was “like collaborating with the biggest brain you could imagine”.

This was before ChatGPT and Midjourney, when for most people AI remained a far-off concept without mainstream applications – just fodder for sci-fi.

These newer developments have brought fresh creative, ethical and legal questions, from concerns over AI porn to copyrighted works being used without permission, to “fake” songs made by digital doppelgangers of real, living artists such as Drake and the Weeknd.

Some of Anderson’s peers have been scathing; confronted with lyrics written in his own style by ChatGPT, Nick Cave dismissed it as “a grotesque mockery”. (Even worse, perhaps, he said, “this song sucks”.)

Anderson appreciates those reservations, which run deeper than the latest uncanny innovations.

“It just made me think about a Čapek play from 1920: RUR, or, Rossum’s Universal Robots,” Anderson says. “It was a play about robots taking over the world – people 100 years ago were very worried that robots were going to take their jobs, and take over, and be evil. I think ever since a golem was invented, people are afraid of that, you know?

The first thing the institute created using Anderson’s input had a similarly Old Testament quality, generated by an AI Laurie Anderson.

“It was a 9,000-page document [written] in my style, telling the stories of the Bible. It was deeply creepy, and really fun. Because the Bible is already insane – a snake that was talking? A guy who lived for 800 years?”

‘The Bible is already insane – a snake that was talking? A guy who lived for 800 years?’: Laurie Anderson’s AI-generated Bible, Scroll. Photograph: Adelaide festival

This week, the AI-generated Bible and other works created by Anderson and Reed’s doppelgangers will feature in I’ll Be Your Mirror, exhibited at the State Library of South Australia as part of Adelaide festival. Anderson won’t be making the trip this time but will dial in for a few talks – the steady ping of emails arriving throughout our conversation hint at the 76-year-old’s relentless schedule.

I wonder if, after being given a lifetime achievement award at the Grammys in February, the prospect of these algorithms continuing to make “Laurie Anderson” art beyond her own lifetime has caused her to reflect on her legacy.

“Oh, why not? I mean, that doesn’t bother me. I don’t feel that attached to time anyway, you know?

“When people die and you hear their words or hear their music or read their things, it’s like they’re alive, you know? In many ways, there they are. You can say that about Dostoevsky, Plato, you know, the Buddha. People leave things around, and so I feel fine about that. I mean, we’re just mayflies, really.”

When the ghost in the machine has finished thinking, it serves up some fresh Lou Reed-ish lyrics inspired by my bus stop:


The street and the sky
When you die
I’ll be sitting in an idling bus
On my way to work
And no more
Than ten minutes before
The last train of the day
Pulls into the city, the light
Dim, insubstantial at first
Then less than a sliver of that
In half a second it’s all
You’ve got to live it, as they used to say
So much can go wrong
But why did you think this
Was a good idea
Don’t you get paid enough
To pay taxes? Why not play
Some tennis or take up quilting
Or improve the sanitation
Of this vast and sordidized
Island from which you sail
Is it such a wonder you’re alive
After all this sugar-fied waste
One cigarette, a glass of wine
Tell me, do you like it
How does it make you feel
Do you like the bitter taste

I ask if Reed referenced “quilting” a lot in his writing, and Anderson laughs with her usual mix of playful and profound:

“Hah, I think that might be the first time.”

I’ll Be Your Mirror runs until 17 March as part of Adelaide festival. Laurie Anderson will be speaking via live stream at an In Conversation event on Wednesday 6 March, as part of Adelaide writers’ week

 

Google Faces Widening Antitrust Probe Over Online Ads in Canada

Thomas Seal, Bloomberg News

A Google logo outside the Google Cloud data center ahead of its ceremonial opening in Hanau, Germany, on Friday, Oct. 6, 2023. Photographer: Alex Kraus/Bloomberg , Bloomberg

(Bloomberg) -- Canada’s Competition Bureau secured a court order allowing it to deepen a long-running investigation into the advertising market power of Alphabet Inc.’s Google.

The watchdog’s investigation started in 2020, and initially focused on whether Google was using its share of the video advertising business to gain power in the market for advertiser buying tools.

That probe has been extended to look at Google’s power across the display advertising technology business, the Canadian watchdog said Thursday. The agency said it was investigating the possibilities Google is using “predatory” pricing in the ad-tech market, reducing choices and hindering innovation in the market for online display ads. 

The court order compels the Mountain View, California-based company to produce evidence for the bureau’s investigation.

Although Canada’s antitrust enforcement is not considered the world’s fiercest, the expanded investigation adds to Google’s mounting legal and regulatory woes as it faces investigations and court cases across its broad suite of services, including its app store and now artificial intelligence.

Google owns four of the largest online advertising technology services used in Canada, according to the bureau, including AdX and Display & Video 360. 

Read More: Alphabet, Epic Games Hit Impasse in Google Play Antitrust Talks

A Google spokesperson said by email that Canadian businesses choose their products because they work effectively, and that the company would continue to engage with the Competition Bureau. 

“As we’ve said before, the advertising technology industry is highly competitive and constantly evolving, which has lowered costs and expanded choices for consumers,” the statement added. 

Google ‘predatory’ advertising practices probe expanded by Canada antitrust watchdog

SHANNON THALER
February 29, 2024 

google canada

Canada’s antitrust watchdog widened its investigation into whether Google’s online advertising business is engaging in predatory pricing.

As part of the Competition Bureau’s probe — which expands on an investigation that initially began in 2020 — the law enforcement agency obtained an order from the Federal Court of Canada requiring Google to producing relevant records and written information, according to The Wall Street Journal.

The Competition Bureau was issued its first court order related to their investigation into Google’s conduct in the online-display-advertising market in October 2021, which sought to determine whether the Alphabet subsidiary was “impeding the success of competitors” and surging prices as a result, The Journal reported.

Canada’s antitrust watchdog, the Competition Bureau, expanded on an investigation that initially began in 2020. On Thursday, the agency said it would look into whether Google is using predatory pricing and harming competition. dennizn – stock.adobe.com

The bureau said Thursday that it’s also now examining whether Google is using its market power across display-advertising-technology services to harm competition.

In addition, the Competition Bureau is looking into Google’s potential predatory pricing, according to The Journal, which is a strategy often deployed to weaken rivals by establishing extremely low prices.

“The investigation is ongoing and there is no conclusion of wrongdoing at this time,” the bureau told The Journal.

A Google spokesperson argued in a statement to The Post that “the advertising technology industry is highly competitive and constantly evolving, which has lowered costs and expanded choices for consumers.”

“We will continue to engage constructively with the Canadian Competition Bureau and demonstrate the benefits of our products to Canadian businesses and consumers,” the spokesperson added. “Canadian businesses choose to use our advertising products because they’re effective and reliable at helping them reach their customers and grow.”

The Competition Bureau announced the expanded investigation on Thursday. X / @CompBureau

The Competition Bureau’s investigation adds to the scrutiny Google is facing from other organizations around the globe.

On Wednesday, the Mountain View, Calif.-based tech behemoth was hit with a $2.3 billion lawsuit by media giant Axel Springer and 31 other publishers, alleging that they suffered heavy losses due to the search giant’s practices in digital advertising.

The move by the group — which include publishers in Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, Hungary, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Spain and Sweden — comes as Europe’s antitrust regulators crack down on Google’s ad tech business.

“The media companies involved have incurred losses due to a less competitive market, which is a direct result of Google’s misconduct,” the media firms’ counsel at Geradin Partners and Stek Lawyers said in a statement obtained by The Post.

“Crucially, these funds could have been reinvested into strengthening the European media landscape.”

They cited the French competition authority’s nearly $240 million fine against Google on its ad tech business in 2021 as well as the European Commission’s charges last year to buttress their group claim.

Google said that it will oppose the claims “vigorously,” and called the lawsuit “speculative and opportunistic.”

The Sundar Pichai-led firm also similarly said last year that it disagreed with EU antitrust charges against its ad tech business where it is involved in both the buy-side as well as the sell-side of the ad-tech business.

The European Union — which has implemented tougher regulations on Big Tech firms than American officials with the Digital Service Act, which took effect earlier this month — also slapped Google with a $2.7 billion antitrust fine in 2017 for market abuse related to its shopping service.

The bureau widened its probe the day after Google — a subsidiary of Alphabet, both headed by Sundar Pichai — was hit with a $2.3 billion lawsuit filed by 32 media groups across Europe. AFP via Getty Images

In the year’s since, Google has tried to skirt the fine, but Europe’s top court struck down the company’s last-ditch effort to avoid the payment last month, dealing a potential blow to the world’s most popular internet search engine.

All the while, Google has been involved in a “historic” in-court battle with the US Justice Department, which alleged the company wielding illegal “monopoly power” that has “harmed consumers.”

Throughout the trial, which kicked off last month, the DOJ has made an effort to expose Google’s shady tactics and anticompetitive practices.

US District Judge Amit Mehta is expected to render a decision in May.