Google News Exec Shailesh Prakash Steps Down
An Indian-origin Google executive, Shailesh Prakash, has resigned from his position, according to a report by the Wall Street Journal.
The Google executive was working as its Vice President and General Manager for Google News.
The development comes when the relations of Google News company owned by Alphabet with publishers continue strained worldwide.
Prakash has over 25 years of experience in technology, retail, and media.
He has been with Google since November 2022; he previously spent 11 years working at the Washington Post as their Chief Product and Technology Officer.
He started his career with Motorola as a Software Development Engineer in 1995, later moving to Sun Microsystems as a Software Development Engineer.
Besides, he has also worked with Microsoft for six years as Principal Engineering Director.
Prakash is an Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay graduate with B.Tech in Computer Science. Later, he pursued an MS in Computer Science from Clemson University and in 1995 an MBA (General Management) from Georgia State University.
It would be recalled that since last year, the company has been sharply criticized by online publishers following Google's introduction of a feature called 'AI Overviews' in May, which places at the top of search results an auto-generated summary, effectively burying links to other sites.
The company does not share ad revenue with publishers whose material is cited in AI Overviews, according to reports.
Putting that aside, the Indian digital news publishers have been complaining for a long time that they were not getting a fair share of advertisement revenue from Google. According to their complaints, they only get revenue on the traffic that they get on their sites and that they did not have access to data about the revenue generated by the search engine.