Alphabet's earnings call was yesterday, and as usual, the company took in a lot of money ($86.31 billion), thanks mostly to ad click-through rates being at a certain level. More interesting, though, are the product numbers tucked away in the report.

For the good news, a big announcement was the success of one of Google's biggest subscription plans, Google One, which CEO Sundar Pichai said is "just about to cross 100 million subscribers." Google One is mostly a cloud-storage plan for Google accounts, allowing users to pay a monthly fee to get more than the 15GB of Drive and Gmail storage that comes free with a Google account. Pichai says the company's whole subscription business—which is going to be Google One (storage), Google Workspace (business accounts), YouTube Premium (ad-free YouTube), and YouTube TV (a cable TV alternative)—are up to $5 billion in annual revenue. That's up fivefold since 2019.

Speaking of subscriptions, one of Google's most expensive, the $350-a-year NFL Sunday Ticket , didn't have any hard numbers associated with it. Google SVP and CBO Philipp Schindler said the company was "pleased with the NFL Sunday Ticket signups in our first season." Sunday Ticket was always a money-loser for DirecTV, and that was before the price shot up half a billion in the streaming era. Google is now reportedly on the hook to pay the NFL $2 billion a year for the next seven years. When asked about a return on investment for the project, Schindler only cited "solid" advertiser interest and that "NFL Sunday Ticket supports our long-term strategy and really helps solidify YouTube’s position as a must-have app on everyone’s TV set."

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Google announced big changes to its most legally fraught set of user settings: your location data. Google's misleading Location History descriptions in Google Maps have earned it several lawsuits in the US and worldwide. A quick count involves individual lawsuits in California , Arizona , Washington , a joint lawsuit in Texas, Indiana, and the District of Columbia , and another joint lawsuit across 40 additional US states. Internationally, Google has also been sued in Australia over its location settings. The point is that any change to Google's location settings must have some motive behind it, so bear with us while we try to decode everything.

Google's big new location data change is a new, duplicate data store that will live exclusively on your device. Google's new blog post says data for the long-running Google Maps Timeline feature will now "be saved right on your device—giving you even more control over your data." That's right, one of the world's biggest Internet data companies advocates for local storage of your location data.

The company continues, "If you’re getting a new phone or are worried about losing your existing one, you can always choose to back up your data to the cloud so it doesn’t get lost. We’ll automatically encrypt your backed-up data so no one can read it, including Google." Users will apparently have lots of control over this new locally stored data, with Google saying, "Soon, you’ll be able to see all your recent activity on Maps... in one central place, and easily delete your searches, directions, visits, and shares with just a few taps. The ability to delete place-related activity from Maps starts rolling out on Android and iOS in the coming weeks."

Enlarge (credit: Chesnot / Contributor | Getty Images Europe )

Twitter CEO Linda Yaccarino has seemingly smoothed things over with Google after Twitter reportedly stopped paying its Google Cloud bills .

Sources familiar with the matter told The Wall Street Journal that Twitter has resumed payments to Google after "consistently" dodging bills that sometimes racked up to more than $20 million a month.

According to one source, Yaccarino hopped on a video call with Google Cloud's chief executive, Thomas Kurian, last week, hoping to set things straight between the two tech companies. Now, it appears that Yaccarino's management tactics were so effective that Google is weighing the benefits of forming "a broader partnership" with Twitter, possibly investing more in Twitter ads or paying to access Twitter data.

Enlarge (credit: SOPA Images / Contributor | LightRocket )

In what might be another blow to the stability of Twitter's trust and safety efforts, the company has allegedly stopped paying for Google Cloud and Amazon Web Services (AWS), which host tools that support the platform's safety measures, Platformer reported this weekend.

According to Platformer, Twitter relies on Google Cloud to host services "related to fighting spam, removing child sexual abuse material, and protecting accounts, among other things." That contract is up for renewal at the end of this month after being negotiated and signed prior to Elon Musk's takeover. Since "at least" March, Twitter has been pushing to renegotiate the contract ahead of renewal—unsurprisingly seeking to lower costs, Platformer reported.

But now it's unclear if the companies will find agreeable new terms on time or if Musk already intends to cancel the contract. Platformer reported that Twitter is rushing to transition services off the Google Cloud Platform and seemingly plans to drop the contract amid failed negotiations.

Enlarge / Microsoft says its latest cloud licensing terms are meant to give customers more flexibility and cost control—just not on Amazon, Google, or Alibaba servers. (credit: Getty Images)

Facing European antitrust scrutiny, Microsoft has made it easier to virtualize its software on non-Microsoft cloud infrastructure—just so long as that infrastructure isn't owned by notable competitors Amazon, Google, or Alibaba.

The conflict, months in the making, is striking for a company that has largely avoided the antitrust scrutiny of its rivals, and eagerly sought to distance itself from the anti-competitive complaints and government actions that beset Microsoft in the late 1990s.

Microsoft outlined the changes that would take effect on October 1 in a blog post . Nicole Dezen, chief partner officer, wrote that Microsoft "believes in the value of the partner ecosystem" and changed outsourcing and hosting terms that "will benefit partners and customers globally."