The article massively overstates the impact of the 1998 Microsift trial. What Microsoft got was a slap on the wrist that they considered just a cost of doing business. Netscape died, and Microsoft's behavior remained the same.
This started a wave of lobbying and PR campaigns from industry groups that lasted until ~2013 or so stating that the EU was going to use its leverage its power to "issue fines to extract the wealth of American tech companies because there aren't enough European ones". Worded more eloquently (though I can't recall exactly how, I think they may have said something about the "EU Technology Tax" or something as an allusion to this), but never the less, its what they were conveying
This was targeted at gaining sympathy for the US government to intervene with the EU to make it more friendly for American tech companies, and more specifically, big ones.
I wish I could find the webpage ads I saw around this. It was not a good look.
Even the Netflix TV show about that EU tech company that supposedly made a Google Maps competitor, turned out to be a group of patent trolls when I researched them and found out they were just using Stanford's code.
> they still regularly issue 9 or 10 figure fines to US tech companies.
Its not a conspiracy. US tech companies just keep blatantly disobeying EU law regarding personal data. A few years ago GDPR fines were so low many companies just paid them rather than comply with the law. It makes sense if the fines are much bigger now - large fines are (apparently) needed to bring companies to heel.
If you want to avoid the fines, try complying with the law.
I know people complain about the GDPR, but the requirements seems much less obnoxious to me than what adtech companies keep doing. I don't want facebook and friends to track me all over the web and sell that information to the highest bidder. I'm with the EU - these practices should be illegal.
My problem is that GDPR/Cookie laws don't go far enough. If you can get out of the law by showing an obnoxious banner, it's not helping anyone. It should just be illegal to use behavior data to show ads to people, period. We had a systems that worked for 100 years based on general demographics, and they worked fine. Show me an ad based on the fact hat I'm reading TechCrunch, not based on the fact that I was Googling "broken lawnmower hand reach blade bolt safe??" two minutes ago.
The obnoxious banner doesn't actually get you out of the law, in the same way that putting "no copyrights intended" into a YouTube video description does not make your reupload of Family Guy funny moments legal.
Yep. The frustrating part is the cookie banners aren't needed during regular operation in order to comply with the law. When cookies are used for login you don't need to pester the user to consent to their use. (Consent is implied when the user logs in.)
Cookie banners are only needed when the website is doing something a bit dodgy - like behavior tracking for ads. Unfortunately, odious stuff is so ubiquitous that people think the banners must be necessary, and they blame the EU for insisting on popups instead of blaming the adtech companies for vomiting their crap into every website.
He's talking about humiliation from dragging Microsoft's and Bill Gates personal brands in the dirt, not actual penalty adjudicated.
Basically if we had videos of Pichai stuttering and unsuccessfully trying to weasel out of sharp questions in every news report for a couple of weeks that would perhaps open more eyes and hurt Google more than a fine of so many zeroes.
I disagreed with him back then as well. In the public comment on the Netscape settlement, I was one of the responses against it that the DoJ added to the trial.
Here was the position that I had then. Microsoft's documented behavior on previous antitrust cases meant that this settlement would not deter future abuse. And I laid out specifically why that decree would not work.
OK. His statement (and yours) rely on counterfactuals: what would MS have done had they not been sued? There is no way to resolve that. Arguing would be tedious.
In what way does my statement rely on counterfactuals?
I argued circa 2001-2002 that Microsoft had a history of legal brinkmanship and continued anticompetitive behavior through past consent decrees, and nothing in the Netscape decision would dissuade them.
The EU case in 2004-2008 demonstrated that, following the Netscape decision, Microsoft had not been dissuaded. They continued their anticompetitive behavior and legal brinkmanship, and this was confirmed by internal emails. This fact was why the EU penalties were so high. The judge explicitly wished the fines to be sufficient that Microsoft could not continue to view antitrust consent decrees as just a cost of doing business.
His argument that Microsoft was dissuaded is indeed a counterfactual argument. It is a counterfactual argument that contradicts facts established in later court cases.
This is why, over 20 years later, I stand by my previous belief. I think that my reasoning then was sound. And my predictions were validated by evidence introduced in later cases.
If you really wanted to not go there, you shouldn't have characterized my argument in a false way. And when your mistake was pointed out, you should have acknowledged the point.
Go ahead. Avoid the tedium of responding. It will avoid me the unpleasantness of further dishonest evasion on your part.
Meanwhile the facts remain these. From 1990 through 2011, Microsoft was continually being sued by or under consent decree in the USA for antitrust violations. From 1993 through 2013, the same was true in the EU. This is in addition to a long list of lawsuits from companies that their behavior harmed.
All evidence from external behavior and internal emails in court says that their attitude did not change until 2008.
This is not a counterfactual argument. And it provides good reason to believe that the 1998 publicity of having Bill Gates in court did not deter Microsoft from further antitrust actions.
I mean, in the world where they did get sued, IE existed and was annoying for the better part of a decade and then succeeded by two more first-party Microsoft browsers. It was right to sue Microsoft, but it also evidently did not fix the state of browser hegemony. The precedent was weak, and arguably more harmful than leaving it up for further deliberation. You can feel the impact on pretty much any FAANG software platform.
Microsoft felt that it had won the browser wars so thoroughly that they dismantled most of their IE team and took their eyes off the ball. Nobody else could make a competitive browser, and therefore nobody could add browser features that would undermine the importance of Windows for applications. They didn't realize that they already had added the key feature for the Outlook team.
The first real use of XMLHttpRequest was Gmail in 2004. Most people just thought of it as a cute trick. It wasn't until Google Maps and the coining of the term AJAX that people thought differently. Microsoft, of course, had already been hit with the 2004 EU decree, and kept its eyes off the ball. By the time Microsoft paid attention, everyone was using it, Firefox was competitive with IE, Safari wasn't too far behind, and Google was already working on Chrome. But by then it was too late. Microsoft didn't have the IE team, and had been shocked at the EU penalties.
Therefore I give the credit for Microsoft not crushing Google to the EU antitrust, and not the USA antitrust. Which really did have no teeth. As can be seen by their efforts to anticompetitively promote Windows Media Player.
Funny enough, XMLHttpRequest[0] was conceived because Microsoft needed to build out a web client for Exchange[1], which was a precursor to Gmail in many ways. In absolute terms, Gmail had more users and showcased the possibilities of web apps more broadly, however Outlook for the web in 2001-2004 was pretty sophisticated for its time
[0]: Though it was called ActiveXObject for a time
I don't understand why people think XHR is a cute trick. Desktop applications used nonblocking RPC (as did many other apps) outside of the web for a long time. So much of the web has been rediscovering and reimplementing (usually in a worse way) the basics of high quality, interactive applications about a decade too late.
> > He's talking about humiliation from dragging Microsoft's and Bill Gates personal brands in the dirt, not actual penalty adjudicated.
Yeah, like Trump's Access Hollywood tape...
At that huge scale whatever topic except for maybe CP ends up becoming a 50-50 split with fans loving the character and his brand even more and haters conversely hating it even more too.
That's because when people that you normally hate side against [insert divisive character] then the choice is to automatically jump on his bandwagon and viceversa. So at such scales it rapidly escalates to a 50-50 split or thereabout.
The best you can do is to have some sort of marginal victory against the character in a winner take all settings (such as an election or a supreme court ruling) and hope it demoralizes him.
Like when Trump lost the Presidency he was demoralized and disappeared for a while, but had he kept his morale high he'd have been the Monday Morning armchair shadow President critiquing and undermining everything Biden did from his Twitter account addressing to the 70M people who voted for him
I generally agree with you, but distaste for tech giants is one place where there does seem to be overlap across the left-right political-sport dichotomy. This falls more along class lines and can easily be equated with the Sacklers not being punished, government corruption going unpunished, etc
This is the largest reason behind Bill stepping back and ultimately completely retiring from Microsoft. Despite his nerdy exterior, he has quite an ego, and didn't like being portrayed that way.
That is hard to predict and would be a rewrite of history. Microsoft operated their business with handcuffs for years and it definitely allowed Apple to make a lot of advances in bundling things that Microsoft was too scared to do.
If that had a great effect, why did they continue violating antitrust law in the ways documented in the EU?
It wasn't like their antitrust history started with browsers. Their business practices were on display before - for instance look at the 1994 consent decree that they signed. Or did you think that Netscape was their first antitrust case?
I think it had a huge effect on changing the practices of their potential consumers.
I'm aware that Microsoft and Google still have massive marketshare, but there's no way of knowing what the world would look like if that lawsuit hadn't happened. They technically lost in the legal court, but internally may have been congratulating themselves because the penalty was so small.
But they lost in the court of public opinion. "Everyone knows" that Microsoft's modus operandi is "Embrace, extend, extinguish" monopoly-building, that IE sucks, that their entire platform is anti-user...it's taken decades of brilliant work on VS Code, on the .NET stack, and in other open source efforts to partially convince some of the developer community that they're not entirely evil. And honestly, Microsoft's character in all of this is a big part of why I daily Firefox on a Linux laptop, and probably a big part of why tools like Firefox and Linux exist. A significant portion of Google's success may be due to people leaving Microsoft's IE (and Bing) and using Chrome instead!
Here, "Don't be evil" Google - already somewhat maligned by their Adsense tracking cookies, their gradual degradation of the Search experience, their habit of canceling beloved projects, their own embrace/extend/extinguish model with Chrome, and their other actions, could suffer a similar character impeachment in this antitrust trial.
It doesn't matter as much whether industry insiders knew what their behavior was, or whether they take a financial hit, or even whether they're found guilty - what matters most is what popular culture paints them to be.
In what court of public opinion did they lose? Among people who were interested in open source 20 years ago? Sure! But who else doesn't like them?
The general public of people our age thinks good things about Microsoft. Even my siblings find my dislike of Microsoft bizarre. The only thing about Microsoft that most people my age ever hated was Clippy. And even Clippy is now generally liked.
And developers under 35 seem to find it bizarre that if I call Microsoft the Evil Empire. Just as I once found it strange that developers from the 1980s thought of IBM that way.
Things like "M$" and "Micro$oft" (and many other ways Microsoft was lampooned that I can't recall) where common when I was in highschool (~2008). Not with everyone, but any of the tech literate kids (not even say, the kids who made games in their spare time) were aware of these things, which by that time, gaming was getting to be more mainstream, and there was more exposure to these "in" jokes to a different crowd. They seemed to persist well passed the sell by date, as it were.
They definitely took a huge hit in public opinion. I'm from a middle of nowhere town, its not tech adjacent or focused, and these were common online forums where we interacted at the time (and by some extension the broader public ones).
Even teachers would poke fun at Microsoft from time to time, as I recall
Amongst e.g. PC game nerds who really started playing in the late 90s, there was always a sort of low-level antipathy directed towards Microsoft. It's non-specific, and its certainly not actionable, but there was always a little bit of bitterness that "oh, here's a new update to windows, how many of my games will it break?" Couple that with "I have to buy a copy of windows when I buy a new motherboard?!".
I would put forth an alternative theory with two parts: the smaller factor is that Linux was a better for web servers than Windows Server and the explosion of the business impact of the web sent developers toward workflows that played nicely with Linux.
The bigger factor is that smartphones allowed competitors to get a reset on the playing field for the consumer market.
Mac marketshare was in single digits until the iPhone took hold (yes, even after the success of the iPod), and we still had Microsoft dominating the market with over 80% marketshare as of 2018 (macOS has only hit double digit marketshare percentage as of about 2016, roughly doubling to over 20% from that time until today).
As an edit, maybe I’d add factor number 3: web-based business applications. I would say that Google’s business productivity suite set businesses free to be much more platform agnostic, along with other tools that moved from installed desktop applications to web.
Whilst I'd agree strongly that the courts exacted far less severe a penalty than they could have, or IMO should have, based on the Findings of Fact in the case, the point remains that Microsoft post trial was far less feared or effective than it had been previously.
It was in 2007 that the founder of this site and its associated venture capital wrote "Microsoft is Dead":
Microsoft cast a shadow over the software world for almost 20 years starting in the late 80s. I can remember when it was IBM before them. I mostly ignored this shadow. I never used Microsoft software, so it only affected me indirectly—for example, in the spam I got from botnets. And because I wasn't paying attention, I didn't notice when the shadow disappeared.
But it's gone now. I can sense that. No one is even afraid of Microsoft anymore. They still make a lot of money—so does IBM, for that matter. But they're not dangerous.
Of course, Microsoft did not in fact die, and it remains part of FAANG (or MAAMA, or whatever we're calling them these days), but the company did see a substantial decline by any number of measures (fear, market cap, reputation, market domination) through the aughts and well into the teens.
Google and Facebook and Amazon emerged, Apple (all but dead itself by the late 1990s) had one of the most phenomenal come-backs of any company ever. And when we talk of market domination today, the first names off peoples lips or fingertips are more likely Google and Facebook and Amazon than Microsoft. It's their market spaces which are most resistant to serious rivalry, whilst Microsoft scrambles for the scraps of desktop and tries to establish itself in the Cloud. The areas it had tried to dominate: commerce, Web search, handhelds, and even office software, are owned, or at least strongly contested (in the last instance) by others.
I'm not saying that Microsoft is redeemed (I don't think it is), or that it's well behaved (dittos). But the unrestrained malevolence it exhibited through the mid-1990s is mostly tamped down strongly.
There was a trial in the U.K. a little over a decade ago over whether a certain media mogul was engaging in cartel behaviour - and apart from those parties directly involved in the trial, and a few others such as myself who have come to know about the matter through one of the parties involved, nobody even knows it happened. It was deemed to be in the public interest to try him, but it was also deemed a risk to national security for any part of it to be public. He was evidently acquitted, or perhaps proceedings still drag on, with him wagering on a visit from the reaper before judgement is passed - oh irony.
There was a rather incredible turn of events where one of the parties who had been asked/told to be involved tried to go to the press (not owned by said mogul), and was promptly ratted out to the government, and the prime minister of the day then went on the ten o’clock news to denounce them, bringing their rather comfortable cosy-to-the-establishment life to a crashing end. They became a national hate figure overnight.
Really, we don’t even know what we don’t know — at least in this case we know that antitrust proceedings are underway.
Not OP, but I assume if he's in the UK, you take it for granted that all communications are monitored and big brother is everywhere. Ergo naming and shaming here runs the risk of the ire of those protecting said mogul...
To be fair I was being somewhat obtuse. It's fairly obvious he's talking about Rupert Murdoch, but my point was to highlight that believing that big brother is watching us, means they don't even have to be watching us.
OP could easily get away with spewing every detail right here without getting caught, but the constant fear of surveillance stops her. _This too_ is how democracy dies in the darkness.
1) There is no such thing as anonymity from state actors on the internet. Apart from anything else, semantic analysis can accurately indicate the identity of the writer of content - never mind the full take interception that has been a fact of life in the U.K. for over a decade now.
2) I really don’t want to bring the hellfire that rained on said friend down upon him once more, or upon myself. They crushed him like a damned insect. If I were to name him, you’d just say “oh, the pedophile. You can ignore anything he says, he’s a pedophile”. He is not, is anything but, and the “evidence” of his transgression that was presented doesn’t exist - the court transcripts from the incident in question show an entirely different picture from what the papers and prime minister threw at him. This made me acutely understand that the truth is entirely irrelevant, when you are up against the powers that manufacture reality.
> OP could easily get away with spewing every detail right here without getting caught,
The UK govenrment monitors UK citizens internet people have already been prossecuted simply for having knowledge of this court case which in the UK is illegal. The fear of surveillance doesn't stop her the reality of the government survaling people and then acting on it does.
I don't know how it started, but their own "war on terror" must have helped to hit that top spot.
Monitoring internet is just the same. "Eyes everywhere". The technology changed (people walking on the street vs people browsing the internet), but the practice remains.
And to show where the focus is (and it's not to serve and protect) the amount of corruption in the UK police (even rapists & murderers) are only caught after years and years, and only after the victims go through hell and high water to get justice. (that last paragraph is a bit provocative - but true)
Remember that the overwhelming majority of these cameras in London are privately owned and operated by shopkeepers and homeowners, it's not a massive state-operated surveillance network. They usually have extremely poor image quality and are hooked up to fixed local tape/hard drive recording rather than networked.
With that said, there are still a lot of state-operated cameras. Mostly to make money from traffic infraction fines, curiously that's one area where governments don't ever seem to cut police funding :-)
The US actually had more per capita (world rankings are US, China, UK, Germany), though they may be more _visible_ in the UK (particularly after the GDPR, there are differences in rules on covert surveillance). As I understand it, they're nearly all privately owned in both the US and UK, and their installation is driven more by insurance company requirements than anything else.
"after last week’s emergence of secretly recorded comments he made about bribes in the British newspaper industry and the phone-hacking probes."
I remember this happening at the time. I don't follow 'media news' much, but I do remember the scandal due to the 'recording' and how they were going about recording calls, SMS, etc.
I’m assuming you missed the part where they destroyed a friend’s life for trying to let this see the light of day. His wife ended up hanging herself as she couldn’t deal with the onslaught of publicity, and he had to leave the country for a few years, and now has a different, quieter, sadder career.
> but it was also deemed a risk to national security for any part of it to be public
Surely it's OK to keep secret if it WAS a matter of national security? Quite possibility that is open to debate in this case, but it seems sensible at least to have this provision in law?
Getting something sealed in the UK courts is a surefire way to get it on the front page of the Irish papers the next day. Keeping secrets by decree is very difficult these days.
The only reason courthouses are public is so the public can satisfy themselves that the courts are doing their job in a fair way.
That is equally satisfied by having the court proceedings sealed for a given time, for example 5 years. By then, the information is nearly worthless to a competitor.
"Indeed, Google lawyers have explicitly argued that the judge should avoid allowing documents to become public solely because it is “clickbait.” To put it differently, the search giant literally argues material should stay sealed merely because if that material is interesting. "
There's nothing about industry secrets. Google's lawyers don't want to "embarrass" the company or its execs.
Google probably has data of the others bids. If Bing bid billions for that spot as well and Google had to outbid them, then I think it is fair for Google to bring that up as evidence. At the same time Microsoft and Apple probably don't want to reveal to the public what actually happened there, so it makes sense for the judge to keep that under wraps since it isn't related to Google.
Google maybe even signed an agreement to keep that secret, so they aren't allowed to reveal evidence about Apple or Microsoft to the public, in that case it wouldn't be fair for the court to force Google to breach that contract just to defend themselves.
Yeah, I assume that is basically it. What would you expect to happen in that case? I'd assume nobody involved wants the world to see how these deals are made, and the judge probably agreed since this is a trial against Google and not Googles competitors.
It isn't even embarrass, it is backlash at lies, hypocrisy and contorted justifications that they are ultimately making. This judge has no business presiding over this case.
> The only reason courthouses are public is so the public can satisfy themselves that the courts are doing their job in a fair way.
Closing the court sessions eliminates that assurance. We have seen multiple times in our history that closed sessions are used to break the laws and conventions of this country in a way that harms our citizens and degrades their rights (see FISA court).
> That is equally satisfied by having the court proceedings sealed for a given time, for example 5 years. By then, the information is nearly worthless to a competitor.
There's an old saying, "justice delayed is justice denied". If in 5 years it turns out this this judge (who has since retired/died) violated all common sense and fair administration of the law, what happens? Nothing. Hell, even if they are still in office, what's the worst that will happen? They resign in shame? Meanwhile 300 million American people spend 5 years suffering the ill effects of the miscarriage of justice. That is not a fair return and it's not justice.
Secrecy is largely incompatible with democracy and justice. Think of why wikileaks was so damaging: because our government did things that were illegal, immoral, and kept them a secret from us. Same thing with the FISA court, which basically eliminated the 4th amendment. And at least those instances relied on the idea that they were special needs due to foreign intelligence requirements and security; Google's only argument is that they might lose money.
If a currently in progress trial is corrupt, we can prevent the harm that a corrupt outcome will cause before it happens. If you have to wait 5 years to discover that the trial was corrupt then we get at least 5 years of harm out of it. Potentially much more because have to retry the case years later will be much much more difficult due to evidence destruction.
Wait, what should we do if courts are unfair or corrupt?
Because honestly, …we’re way past that point in pretty much every country of the world. People are too demoralized or weak to do anything about it, but just for intellectual curiosity, what is supposed to happen when something abnormal happens in our societies?
The court houses are public to provide transparency to the public locking that away for 5 years does not provide transparency. I can't use that information when voting if the information is sealed until years after the next election.
> The only reason courthouses are public is so the public can satisfy themselves that the courts are doing their job in a fair way.
Don't agree. One purpose of public trials is to show the public how much the authorities disapprove of <criminal act X>. That is, public trials are intrinsically show-trials.
A second purpose is to punish the defendant for pleading Not Guilty (and/or warn others of the consequences of such a plea); even if you are innocent, your actions will be paraded in public, and subjected to the harshest possible criticism.
The title seems to be a bit misleading. I was anticipating a legal analysis of the case, but the actual title "How to Hide a $2 Trillion Antitrust Trial" seems to be more focused on complaints about its lack of transparency. Yeah, lots of things are hidden behind the curtain but we still have lots of useful materials for analysis?
Thanks for clarification. I guess the author wanted more "public attention"... Though the new title feels a bit clickbaity but arguably more faithful to the overall theme now.
I would like to encourage any former or current Googler that believes they can help and would like to call the DOJ, select the option for the switchboard operator, and ask for the Criminal Division at (202) 514-2000.
It's not a big stretch that US agencies extensively use Gmail/Google Docs/etc data to get information on individual ls and for corporate espionage / personal spying
>I am not anyone that understands the industry and the markets in the way that you do. And so I take seriously when companies are telling me that if this gets disclosed, it’s going to cause competitive harm.
Wait. What? An "anti-trust" trial against one of the five trillion dollar company in the world abusing its monopoly power is taken seriously on its claim it could cause "competitive harm"? Catch 22.
I guess the competitive harm is political in nature. The real competition seems to be China. The rationalization one of being a "strong" united front against an authoritarian system. So, the judicial system needs to subordinate itself to that power constellation. Ultimately succumbing to the authoritarian logic.
By excluding the public in order to not produce "clickbait" just furthers the growing mistrust in institutions which then in turn necessitates more "secrecy" as to not to "confuse" the public ...
This mindset exemplified by the likes of Eric Schmidt reminds me of Edward Teller's role in the nuclear arms race. Surely, brilliant people with a lot of valuable input but I wouldn't fully trust their judgment.
> Wait. What? An "anti-trust" trial against one of the five trillion dollar company in the world abusing its monopoly power is taken seriously on its claim it could cause "competitive harm"? Catch 22.
I don’t see the catch 22? Google is entitled to a legal presumption of innocence like any other organization, so the court can’t yet make decisions based on the premise that it is abusing its alleged monopoly power. It’s important for courts to avoid the perception that merely being the target of a lawsuit is a punishment, although of course in many ways it is.
> I don’t see the catch 22? Google is entitled to a legal presumption of innocence like any other organization,
There's no presumption of innocence in civil matters.
Since this is being tried entirely as a civil matter (and not as a criminal case, as far as I am aware[1]), there's no presumption of innocence, no "beyond reasonable doubt", there's only "preponderance of evidence".
[1] Unless it really is being brought to the court by the state prosecution, in which case it probably is a criminal matter.
If I need the preponderance of the evidence to find you liable, you were presumed not liable. Obviously the presumption is not as strong as clear and convincing or reasonable doubt, but there’s no reason to say that there is no presumption of a sense of liability under this standard.
> If I need the preponderance of the evidence to find you liable, you were presumed not liable. Obviously the presumption is not as strong as clear and convincing or reasonable doubt, but there’s no reason to say that there is no presumption of a sense of liability under this standard.
Preponderance doesn't mean "a lot", it means "more than the opposing evidence", and during a trial the balance sways between both parties multiple times.
There is no presumption of innocence, as all it takes is for one party to make a claim and the other party to not explicitly deny that claim for the balance of probabilities to be in favour of the party that made the claim.
If I sue in in civil court, with a claim of "He called me a dirty cheating embezzler, which hurt my relations with my investor" and you simply don't show up, you may lose.
If you do show up and refuse to argue your case, you will* lose.
If you show up and argue "no I didn't", then the balance of probabilities is back in your favour.
“If you do show up and refuse to argue your case, you will lose.”
If a defendant in a civil matter shows up and the plaintiffs case sucks, there is no obligation for the defense to put in a show and the jury (hell, even the judge) could rule in favor of the defendant who is presumed not liable.
But the judge shouldn't be completely oblivious of Alphabet's past history and its role as a "key market player" and just taking the claims at face value.
The argumentation doesn't sound very balanced tbh. More like: that's way above my league and I don't want to be the one jeopardizing national security, so I have to trust you on that.
In a sense, this is an admission that Alphabet is way too "big" already to be treated as an "ordinary company" which makes a due process a more complicated matter, euphemistically speaking. And I get that but as the substack article points out: atm right from the start it plays out way too far on Alphabet's terms.
Strictly speaking, it is over the companies monopoly in search. Google also lives in other markets where there is competition, so this may be about those markets not search.
Yes, but that doesn't give the DOJ a free ride to use an antitrust trial in one area to punish a company in other more competitive areas by revealing trade secrets. That is extrajudicial, and not far off from a dirty cop harassing an innocent party "You may beat the rap, but you can't beat the ride". The trial itself should not be a punishment under a half-decent justice system.
But companies also shouldn't get a free ride with "trade secret." At some level, they are free to pick their defense.
And, charity to the actual ruling, I'm assuming that better arguments were made behind closed doors to get to this point? I don't think it should be a problem to have parts of the process closed, at all. I do find it odd to have such a large blockout, though.
> But companies also shouldn't get a free ride with "trade secret"
They don't - the judge determines what should be sealed by weighing public interest against potential harm. In this instance, the article author disagrees with the judge's decisions.
Right, which is why I had my second paragraph. It is far too easy to assume the pedal is completely moved to one end.
I think it is fair to question judgements of people. Even judges and article authors.
Do we have any way of assessing how fair these judgements were? Do you have any way of showing that the DOJ was trying to get a "free ride" on revealing trade secrets?
But Google probably have a lot of data about their competitors that they would like to present to the judges. Making that data public would make it look like Google is smearing the competition, I can see why a judge would agree to keep that secret.
For example, Apple maybe had an auction to bid for default search spot on their platforms. Google bid the highest as we know, but we don't know what the competition bid and Google probably want to present that as evidence that this was just a normal auction similar to bidding for advertisement spots. For example, if Bing bid 90% of the current Google bid, then it is pretty clear that Google wasn't paying Apple to keep competition out but rather paying Apple for a premium spot in a fair market.
Nobody argues that Apple is anti competitive when they pay Google to put ads on top of certain search results, so why would Google be anti competitive when they pay Apple for a premium spot? They don't pay Apple to keep others out, just for the premium spot, you can still use other search engines.
In practice, what happens is that these values are slowly made more acceptable. "Think of the children" to make privacy violation more acceptable; "They are terrorists" to make human rights violations more acceptable; "Drain the swamp" or "The election was stolen" to make insurrection more acceptable; "Protect our women" to make transphobia more acceptable. That kinda thing. It's happening everywhere.
> In practice, what happens is that these values are slowly made more acceptable.
> "Protect our women" to make transphobia more acceptable.
This is itself a reaction to unacceptable values being imposed, namely that a subset of men should be allowed to disregard women's boundaries and consent with impunity.
The pushback is because so many women are standing up and saying no, we don't accept this incursion on our rights and dignity.
They are men, whether you like it or not. Men who desire to be women, or who just call themselves women, for whatever reason.
No-one should be compelled to accept a false, reality-denying belief as if it were true. This absurd assertion that some men are women is a particularly pernicious falsehood.
You act like that's settled fact. It's just your opinion.
The opinion itself isn't the problem, it's when you want to hurt an out-group that it becomes a problem. Personally, I despise a bully, especially am adult one.
On your opinion, it takes no account of edge cases. Occasionally, humans are born with XXY chromosomes. Occasionally humans are born with both male and female genitals. Occasionally humans are born chimaeric, with different DNA in different parts of their bodies. It's biological fact that the distinction between male and female is blurry.
We're on HN, I expect you already know this. If you didn't know this, then, you're one of today's lucky 10,000.
Either way, your opinion is not based in fact. I take it you'll be a little less rigid on this topic?
You have conflated two groups of people: those with rare disorders of sexual development, and men who demand access to women's and girls' spaces while pretending to be women.
Using the existence of the former group as a rhetorical shield for the intrusive behaviour of the latter isn't at all convincing.
It's quite clear from your comments that you elevate male desires above the dignity and safety of women. I hope you can reflect on your misogyny and perhaps even start to respect women as equals rather than second class citizens to be subjugated to the wants of men.
And you conflate your opinion with justification to dictate how others live.
Your accusation of misogyny is disingenuous and offensive, and I won't have it.
The fucking irony, after you had the brass neck to open with "protect women" - sir, the set of people railing against trans women using the women's loo is a neat overlap with apologists for Trump perving on girls in their dressing rooms.
We're defining other people in opposition to their self-image here, right?
CSA correlates strongly with authoritarianism. If you want to protect girls, drown a right-winger.
Well, at least we have common ground in our opposition to right-wing politics and the behaviour of its acolytes.
I urge you to read, with an open mind, what gender-critical and radical feminist women have to say, both on this issue and more broadly.
It is my hope that you find these female-centred perspectives to be more enlightening than what either of the male-dominated progressive or conservative political blocs exclaim.
Hold on - you're cruel because _sociology_ told you to be?
And at no point did you notice you were stanford-prisoning?
And you're so invested in your identity that you're willing to degrade and humiliate another human being? One who's been bullied all their life? And you think you're NOT right wing?
No, I don't think you and I have any common ground.
I see your account is brand new. Welcome to hacker news, assuming you're not merely dodging a ban. Identity politics, bashing minorities, accusations founded or unfounded - these are not welcome here. I doubt I'll be the last person to tell you that.
My comments only seem "cruel" to you because you have chosen to prioritize the desires of men over the needs of women.
As you've decided to promote this viewpoint in a public forum, you should expect to be called out on your misogyny for doing so.
Getting aggressive when people disagree with you isn't healthy either. For all your preaching of what is and isn't welcome here, I don't think that sweary rant upthread where you advocate drowning people you don't like aligns with the spirit of this site.
> > namely that a subset of men should be allowed to disregard women's boundaries and consent with impunity
> What?
Men who desire to be women forcing their way into women's and girls' spaces, and who keep advocating for the law to be changed, where it isn't already, so they can keep getting away with this.
No, we must beat them by showing the world that there's a better way. Unfortunately, allowing our corporations to take a shit on the rules of law and get their way in court because "trade secrets" is more like China than we'd like to admit.
This is akin to "all animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others". Special rules for special corporations who cry "trade secrets" when called out for bad behavior. Yuck.
This is the most important news on the internet today.
Google has completely transformed itself into this uber-corp, that is hell bent on absolute dominance.
Wow. I am an avid internet user, very much interested in technology / business / social media, and I was not aware of this. Sure, there is an anti-trust court case here and there, and I almost always seem to see EU has fined FAANG companies some millions of dollars for their breach of trust / security / monopoly etc. But, the way this is going on is amazing.
To ponder, why does the judge have to put the onus on Google, when he admits he doesn't know? Is there no mechanism where the judge says a panel of MBA / senior technocrats / VC's or the like be able to advise him on the matter?
Yeah it blows my mind that the judge has the ability to do this. As the article says he is basically sealing stuff on the basis that Google said it could be "clickbait" if it was in the media.
It's early days yet but this is so far shaping up to be the weakest anti-trust trial yet - weaker than Microsoft and many prior trials, because of Judge Mehta.
Fuck this guy. Amit Mehta exemplifies the problem with the system, and the failure of the American government. He is a disgrace to his position.
They were born some 2000 km and many language families apart, and probably would have little in common if they met with no pretext. Who knows though, right?
If a company feels the need to reveal their trade secrets in court to make their case, but ultimately wants to maintain protection over the trade secret itself, what option would you provide them?
Obama's signature of the Defend Trade Secrets Act in 2016 is also a recent indicator the executive branch has no interest in the breach of trade secrets. It would be astonishingly difficult for a trial judge to say, "you know, I think the public has an overriding, vested interest in knowing the internal details of Google's technologies."
This is the key factor that I think a lot of HN pundits are not understanding on this topic.
The answer to "How can the judge do that" is: judges have broad leeway over how they interpret "fairness" in their courtroom. It is incumbent upon the parties in the lawsuit to disagree with the judge; silence implies assent.
So the question people should be asking isn't "How can the judge be allowed to do that?" It has a simple answer. "He's a judge and this makes the most sense to him."
The interesting question is "Why isn't the DOJ challenging the judge's seals in the interest of public knowledge?" And here you have your answer: the Executive over the past several years has seen fit to lean in the direction that it is not necessary to flay trade secrets out into the public sphere (a harm that cannot be reversed) to conduct a prosecution. It is, in their eyes, a better pursuit of justice.
(If the public disagrees, recourse is through making it an electoral issue for choosing President or pressuring the legislature to pass a law that constrains a judge's authority on protecting trade secrets).
>If a company feels the need to reveal their trade secrets in court to make their case, but ultimately wants to maintain protection over the trade secret itself, what option would you provide them?
I wouldn't give them any options, as they are on trial for a reason. Corporate America can't have its cake and eat it too. Google is a multi-trillion dollar publicly traded corporation, they have significant cultural, political, technological and economic power. They are in court due to abuse of one (or more?) of those powers. Part of the trade off of making your C-Suite, founders, and major shareholders multi-billionaires via public markets is that you have to be accountable to the public.
If you're being sued for abuse of power, you can't just tell the judge "shhh, it's a trade secret, it can't be mentioned in public court, let's keep it so secret that most people don't even know we're in court, much less why we're in court" and expect to get away with it. Or, maybe you can....which is equally if not more disturbing in a democratic society. We're not China.
If you're a mom-and-pop startup or small firm, sure, revealing trade secrets might spell doom for you. But you're not Google. I understand why it's not good to have to reveal trade secrets. But if that trade secret has landed you in court, you need to be accountable to the people that utilize your products, own your stock, do business with you, etc...
Granted, if there is a legitimate national security concern here, I understand the need for secrecy. But I highly doubt there's technology in this case that would rip a massive hole in our national security readiness or long term technology strategy.
>"If he weren't a drug dealer, why did the cops arrest him?"
Because he's been caught several times using drugs out in the open, has been caught numerous times selling drugs, and his linkedin profile says he's an "alternative medicine distributor" and formerly a "streets pharmacist". If it quacks like a duck, walks like a duck, has ducklings, and swims in the water, it's clearly a moose, or a t-rex, right?
Let's be crystal clear here. Google has most likely broken a number of antitrust laws. That is why they are on trial. Google has faced antitrust suits previously.
>Even the corporations have a right to a fair trial.
You're making my point for me, so thanks. Everyone is entitled to a fair, public trial decided upon by a jury of their peers. A corporation trying their damnedest to pretend that they aren't on trial and aren't in legal crosshairs, while also saying "oh no you can't disclose any evidence it's all trade secrets and will cause harm to our corporation and our shareholders" Yeah, no. They have the right to a fair and public trial. That's it. If they didn't want to have to tell the world about what they are doing, they could have pursued a whole bunch of avenues to prevent disclosure of it WAY before it got to this point.
Alternatively, they could have just not gone and done the actions that caused the government to bring the lawsuit. It's not like shareholders got together and said "Hey Google, you MUST do actions X, Y, and Z, even though we know they will trigger an antitrust suit that you most likely will lose, or else we will fire your whole board". That didn't happen either.
EDIT: Should also disclose that within the last 6 months, I held Google stock and LEAP options. I no longer hold positions in Google, although I still am a paid user of multiple of Google's services, including Gmail, Google Workspace for Business, and Youtube TV.
> If it quacks like a duck, walks like a duck, has ducklings, and swims in the water, it's clearly a moose, or a t-rex, right?
(a) we have a whole legal philosophy based around "If we're gonna deprive it of duck-related rights, we'd better make damn sure it isn't a t-rex or a moose."
(b) remember, what these rules protect us from is the government having arbitrary power to jail people by calling us ducks.
> Everyone is entitled to a fair, public trial decided upon by a jury of their peers
Who owns the right there? It's not the government; it's the plaintiff and defendant. If both concur on a non-public trial, the Constitution doesn't force the trial to be public. The right to a public trial is a waivable right.
... which is really the crux of the matter. The DOJ has a right to ask for a public trial here also; if it's not public, that implies they have not. They really should be the ones people are up in arms about if we think there's a public interest in publicizing the trial proceedings, as they represent the public in these proceedings.
In this case, Google argues that the loss of trade secrets in the act of defending themselves constitutes irreparable harm, the court agrees, and the DOJ doesn't appear to have dissented. That's enough to settle the issue for this case.
> Alternatively, they could have just not gone and done the actions that caused the government to bring the lawsuit
You are, again, assuming the DOJ's case is legal truth before they've made it.
The easiest way for a corporation to never open itself to lawsuit is to do nothing. Obviously, we don't want to incentivize that as the common outcome; we lose our whole economy if we do. So the law tries to find a balance. In the case of this antitrust suit, I think there's a good case to be made that the DOJ is trying to bend precedent to make something illegal that the law was not previously understood to make illegal; the idea that Google has a "search monopoly" is a very frog-boiling argument of reinterpretation of law over the history of the company.
(If we're doing full disclosures: I do own Google stock still. I expect them to beat this lawsuit and then I'll cash out after the victory bubble).
Even still, you can't use "They wouldn't be in this court if they hadn't done something wrong" as part of the evidence for the 'preponderance of evidence' standard.
this happens every day in business trials. The judge has to show judgment (see what I did there?) about what is really a trade secret. Both sides get to present their arguments.
1. Present your evidence in public, and let it be tested by the court;
2. Keep your trade secrets secret, and find some other line of defence.
Secret courts are not compatible with public justice. The UK's Family Court Division is a notorious example, and UK jurists are (slowly) coming to acknowledge that secrecy in matters of children, divorce and so on is corrosive to public confidence in the Family Courts.
What's under discussion at the moment isn't Google's defense, which AFAIK hasn't yet started, right? It's the evidence and testimony being presented by the plaintiffs. They can get access to trade secrets as part of discovery, and are incentivized to make as much of it public as possible. There's just no downside to it for them.
Yes, there's procedures for redacting evidence and sealing testimony. Those procedures are being followed here, and leading to an outcome the author of the article doesn't like.
And when someone (a competitor) turns around and starts (frivolously) suing every company claiming that their supposed "trade secrets" are illegal activities?
How do I prove that your claim is frivolous without revealing my trade secrets?
(Generally this is not particularly different from patent trolling, which is also clearly a violation of the civil procedure rules, but took special laws and years to get even the most egregious people, like prenda, punished)
> If a company feels the need to reveal their trade secrets in court to make their case, but ultimately wants to maintain protection over the trade secret itself, what option would you provide them?
They can present their evidence in open court, or they can lose. That should be their option.
Their "loss" of trade secrets is not the law's, the government's, or the public's problem.
They should be given no options. The public has a right to know what these parasitic megacorps are doing, and kf revealing those things is damaging, well, good, let them rot and collapse in that case.
40-plus years of a legal philosophy that bows to corporate power will do this. I'm sure even if the judge made it public, Google's lawyers can appeal to a higher court and get it sealed
A) In the article they mention Google's lawyers said making things public would only serve more "clickbait" to embarrass the company... so their problem is people would talk about how Google execs actively flaunted anti-trust rules
Microsoft didn't blink until acround 2008 when the EU cases finally fined them enough that they blinked. See, for example, https://www.reuters.com/article/us-microsoft-eu/eu-fines-mic....