News

Mr. Pichai: Tear down this wall!

A federal judge on Monday ordered Google to tear down the digital walls shielding its Android app store from competition as punishment for maintaining an illegal monopoly that helped expand the company’s internet empire.

The injunction issued by U.S. District Judge James Donato will require Google to make several changes that the Mountain View, California, company had been resisting. Those include a provision that will require its Play Store for Android apps to distribute rival third-party app stores so consumers can download them to their phones, if they so desire.

This is good news — but the judge’s order still needs to be carried out. Until that happens, a true victory has not been won and this is merely a promising development.

The Monster isn’t faring well in front of the judge:

Google wound down its defense in the US Department of Justice’s ad tech monopoly trial this week, following a week of testimony from witnesses that experts said seemed to lack credibility.

The tech giant started its defense by showing a widely mocked chart that Google executive Scott Sheffer called a “spaghetti football,” supposedly showing a fluid industry thriving thanks to Google’s ad tech platform but mostly just “confusing” everyone and possibly even helping to debunk its case, Open Markets Institute policy analyst Karina Montoya reported.

The effect of this image might have backfired as it also made it evident that Google is ubiquitous in digital advertising,” Montoya reported. “During DOJ’s cross-examination, the spaghetti football was untangled to show only the ad tech products used specifically by publishers and advertisers on the open web.”

One witness, Marco Hardie, Google’s current head of industry, was even removed from the stand, his testimony deemed irrelevant by US District Judge Leonie Brinkema, Big Tech On Trial reported. Another, Google executive Scott Sheffer, gave testimony Brinkema considered “tainted,” Montoya reported. But perhaps the most heated exchange about a witness’ credibility came during the DOJ’s cross-examination of Mark Israel, the key expert that Google is relying on to challenge the DOJ’s market definition.

Sounds like a total fail.

Ars Technica has more details.

Google messed up… again!

It’s almost hard to believe this is happening again, but Pixel users are reporting that an OS update has locked them out of their phones’ internal storage, causing app crashes, non-functional phones, and a real possibility of data loss. Over in the Google Pixel subreddit, user “Liv-Lyf” compiled a dozen posts that complain of an “internal storage access issue” and blame the January 2024 Google Play system update.

In October, Pixel phones faced a nightmare storage bug that caused bootlooping, inaccessible devices, and data loss. The recent post says, “The symptoms are all the same” as that October bug, with “internal storage not getting mounted, camera crashes, Files app shows no files, screenshots not getting saved, internal storage shows up empty in ADB Shell, etc.” When asked for a comment, Google told Ars, “We’re aware of this issue and are looking into it,” and a Google rep posted effectively the same statement in the comments.

“We’re looking into it” isn’t what users want to hear.

“If you needed any further convincing that Google is a ____ company, it’s Google breaking a fundamental aspect of a phone brought to you by Google to supposedly deliver the purest Android experience available,” said one commenter.

“How the hell did this ever get released?” asked another. “I know Google hasn’t been doing basic management well recently but this is a whole new level of incompetence. If there were real active competition in the smartphone OS market, this is the kind of thing that would have damn nearly killed a company.”

Ars Technica has a nice recap of the case so far:

The Department of Justice called its last witness this week, resting its case in a blockbuster antitrust trial probing Google’s alleged monopoly over search. Over the next five weeks, Google will do everything in its power to defend against those allegations—or else risk a potential breakup of its lucrative, industry-dominating search business—including likely calling Google CEO Sundar Pichai and other top executives as witnesses.

Since the trial began on September 12, Judge Amit Mehta has heard testimony from 29 witnesses, Bloomberg reported, including leading economists and senior executives from Google, Apple, Microsoft, Samsung, and other tech companies either partnering with or rivaling Google over the years.

Much of this testimony was closed to protect tech companies’ trade secrets, but news outlets have since filed a motion hoping to unseal testimony and access more trial documents sooner, hoping to share more details with the public about the case the DOJ made.

That this case was brought at all is a major milestone. For many years, the U.S. federal government let Google do whatever it wanted, leaving the European Union to provide regulatory oversight. There was little oversight or accountability from Google’s home country. Now, Google is finally on trial for its illegal conduct and harmful business practices. The decision won’t be made by a jury, but the government has brought lots of compelling evidence to the table that will hopefully result in a decision from Judge Mehta that Google violated the country’s antitrust laws.

The New York Times has a liveblog going on what is turning out to be a busy news day:

The Justice Department and 38 states and territories on Tuesday laid out how Google had systematically wielded its power in online search to cow competitors, as the internet giant fiercely parried back, in the opening of the most consequential trial over tech power in the modern internet era.

In a packed courtroom at the E. Barrett Prettyman U.S. Courthouse in Washington, the Justice Department and states painted a picture of how Google had used its deep pockets and dominant position, paying $10 billion a year to Apple and others to be the default search provider on smartphones. Google viewed those agreements as a “powerful strategic weapon” to cut out rivals and entrench its search engine, the government said.

Reporters paid close attention when the judge scrutinized some of Google’s claims.

The star of opening arguments? Judge Mehta. He spoke only briefly, asking a handful of distilling, clarifying questions. For example, the Google lawyer John Schmidtlein went on at length saying how easy it was to switch a default search setting. Judge Mehta interrupted to ask, well, how much switching is actually done?

Schmidtlein could only point to what happened when Mozilla briefly made Microsoft’s Bing the default on the Firefox browser, and “droves” of users switched to Google. But he said there were no good overall statistics. Really? In a digital world where every click is tracked? The judge asked the right question there — and elsewhere — this morning.

This a bench trial, not a jury trial, so the parties’ goal is to convince Judge Mehta to rule in their favor. The trial will continue tomorrow and for several days beyond that, as the government’s case involves quite a bit of evidence. Many Google employees will be questioned by DOJ attorneys.

The trial proceedings are not being televised due to federal court rules, so there’s no way to watch. The tech press will thus have an outsized role in informing the public and observers.

And of course Google denies they screwed up. But the research is there:

Google violated its promised standards when placing video ads on other websites, according to new research that raises questions about the transparency of the tech giant’s online-ad business.

Google’s YouTube runs ads on its own site and app. But the company also brokers the placement of video ads on other sites across the web through a program called Google Video Partners. Google charges a premium, promising that the ads it places will run on high-quality sites, before the page’s main video content, with the audio on, and that brands will only pay for ads that aren’t skipped. 

Google violates those standards about 80% of the time, according to research from Adalytics, a firm that helps brands analyze where their ads appear online. The firm accused the company of placing ads in small, muted, automatically-played videos off to the side of a page’s main content, on sites that don’t meet Google’s standards for monetization, among other violations.

Google’s response was that the report “makes many claims that are inaccurate and doesn’t reflect how we keep advertisers safe,” which isn’t actually a refutation of any of the findings. Hilariously, their response also said: “As part of our brand safety efforts, we regularly remove ads from partner sites that violate our policies and we’ll take any appropriate actions once the full report is shared with us.”

If they haven’t seen the full report, how can they say with a straight face that it makes many claims which are inaccurate?

This is basically trying to have it both ways: Pay no attention to that report, it makes many inaccurate claims // we’ll take any appropriate actions once we have the full report in our hands. Um, what? Which is it: do you consider this report credible or not?

The WSJ did its own review so it wouldn’t need to rely on Google to confirm anything for its reporting, explaining:

The Journal independently observed invalid ad placements such as those the research identified, but couldn’t confirm the extent of the phenomenon. Digital ad-buyers and engineers vouched for the research findings.

Ain’t independent verification great?

You can’t spin your way out of this mess, Google. You own it and there’s going to be consequences.