Disney Teams Up with Google's Display & Video 360 and The Trade Desk; EU to Introduce Election Disinformation Legislation; Google Fined for Using Publishers’ Data for Gemini

by Aimee Newell Tarín on 21st Mar 2024 in News

On today’s news digest: Disney Teams Up with Google's Display & Video 360 and The Trade Desk to Expand its Real-Time Ad Exchange; EU to Introduce Election Disinformation Legislation; Google Fined for Using Publishers’ Data for Gemini

Disney has announced an expansion of its Disney Real-Time Ad Exchange (DRAX), teaming up with Google’s Display & Video 360 and The Trade Desk to create a direct path to advertiser demand. Through DRAX Direct, users of Google’s Display & Video 360 and The Trade Desk will be able to directly access streaming inventory on Hulu and Disney Plus – the partnership will give a larger number of advertisers easier access to ad inventory across the streaming platforms.

Meanwhile in Europe, the EU is planning to introduce its first binding legislation to fight election disinformation. The guidelines will be designed to counter online threats surrounding elections, and will be adopted as soon as next week. Under the new legislation, platforms that fail to adequately tackle AI powered disinformation risk facing fines of up to 6% of global turnover. Once the regulations are in place, social media platforms and search engines will be expected to set up dedicated teams to scrutinise the risks related to online disinformation during election times. They will also need to demonstrate close collaboration with cybersecurity agents across all of the EU’s member states. The legislation will be enforceable under the Digital Services Act.

In other Europe focused news, France has hit Google with a €250m (£212m) fine over news copyright protections. France’s competition authority claims that Google disregarded some of its previous commitments with news publishers. Most notably, the watchdog has found fault with the tech giant for failing to notify news publishers that their content was used to train its generative AI model Gemini (Google made a commitment to undertake fair payment talks with publishers over the reuse of their content).