In today’s Digest, we cover Magnite suing Google, Google investing £5bn in the UK’s AI sector, and the Australian government guiding platforms on the under-16 social media ban.

Magnite sues Google

Magnite has sued Google in US District Court, seeking damages and remedies after an April 2025 ruling found the tech giant had willfully engaged in anticompetitive practices to maintain its dominance in ad tech. The sell-side ad firm alleges Google ran an exclusionary scheme that locked publishers into its ad server and gave preferential treatment to its own exchange, undermining competition and harming publishers, advertisers, and independent players such as Magnite.

According to Michael Barrett, CEO of Magnite: “For years, Google undermined our ability to execute on this mission with practices that favored its own business over the health of the open web, causing harm to publishers, advertisers, and partners like us. We look forward to a future that promotes healthy competition, ongoing innovation, and value creation for the ecosystem as a whole.”

Google to invest £5bn in UK AI

Google will invest £5bn in the UK over the next two years to meet rising demand for artificial intelligence services. The opening of a new datacentre in Waltham Cross, Hertfordshire – its first in the UK – forms part of this investment.

The company said the investment will support thousands of jobs and fund capital expenditure, research and development, and engineering. Google DeepMind will lead new AI research projects in science and healthcare.

Google also confirmed a partnership with Shell to manage its renewable energy supply in the UK. Meanwhile, it’s estimated that Google’s new Essex datacentre will emit 570,000 tonnes of CO₂per year. 

Australian Government guides platforms on under-16 social ban

Australia’s eSafety Commissioner, in collaboration with the federal government, has issued fresh guidance to digital platforms on enforcing the country’s incoming ban on social media accounts for under-16s. It stresses that compliance must be kind, careful and clear and avoid burdening older Australians with unnecessary age checks. The guidance document makes clear that social media companies will be responsible for deciding how to enforce the ban.

The guidance also outlines potential methods for verifying users’ ages, including checking the age of accounts, analysing activity patterns that align with school schedules, flagging accounts linked to younger users, and using visual or audio analysis to estimate age from photos, videos or voice files, among others. 

However, the ban will permit platforms to make some errors when checking users’ ages, raising concerns about enforcement. Regulatory guidance released confirms the eSafety Commissioner will not mandate a minimum accuracy threshold for age-verification tools when the law takes effect on 10th December. Instead, platforms including Meta, TikTok, Snapchat, X, and YouTube will be expected to “define acceptable error thresholds” based on their risk profile, service type, and user base.