Tausi Insider

Penguin Random House head Markus Dohle will step down at the end of the year after a U.S. judge blocked a planned $2.2 billion merger of the world’s largest publisher and rival Simon & Schuster, the company said in a statement on Friday. He had resigned “at his own request and on the best of mutual terms”, it added. Nihar Malaviya, who is president and chief operating officer of Penguin Random House U.S., will take over as interim CEO from Jan. 1, the company said. Thomas Rabe, chief executive of Penguin’s German owner Bertelsmann, expressed full confidence in Malaviya, who he said had a chance of permanently becoming CEO. “We’re looking at that over the next year,” he told Reuters. He said the company would focus on smaller and mid-size acquisitions in the United States and other countries. “We will invest several hundred million euros in the acquisition of book publishers worldwide by 2025 as part of our Boost strategy,” he said. Bertelsmann initially said it would appeal the U...

Google parent Alphabet GOOGL-Q filed on Wednesday a redacted version of its motion to dismiss a U.S. government lawsuit against it, which argued that the company broke antitrust law to maintain its monopoly in search and search advertising. The filings on Wednesday show that the company is mounting a vigorous defence against the antitrust cases, which, if successful, could force the tech giant to spin off assets. In December, Google asked Judge Amit Mehta of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia to dismiss both the antitrust case that the Justice Department filed in 2020 along with 11 states as well as a related complaint brought by 35 states led by Colorado. The motions were sealed and redacted versions were filed on Wednesday. The Justice Department’s lawsuit, filed by the Trump administration, alleged that Google violated antitrust law when it paid billions annually to Apple, LG Electronics Inc and other smartphone makers to ensure that Google search was the default...