Category: Menacing Monopoly

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.

You can’t trust Google to stay out of a market, but you can’t trust it to stay in one, either:

Google said it would shutter the video game streaming service Stadia, its answer to Microsoft’s Xbox and Sony’s PlayStation video game consoles, in another sign of Google’s drive to be leaner amid fears of an economic slowdown.

Stadia, which has streamed games over the internet rather than requiring expensive consoles, will shut down on Jan. 18, Phil Harrison, Stadia’s vice president and general manager, wrote on Thursday in a blog post. The product debuted nearly three years ago, promising to revolutionize how people play video games. But it failed to catch on with enough gamers.

“It hasn’t gained the traction with users that we expected, so we’ve made the difficult decision to begin winding down our Stadia streaming service,” Mr. Harrison wrote.

Hasn’t gained traction and Google is unwilling to play a longer game.

Of course, Google still has market dominance in search and advertising, along with browser software, email, and mobile computing.

Once again, Google has gotten bigger.

Google has announced that its proposed $5.4 billion bid to buy cybersecurity firm Mandiant is now complete.

The internet giant revealed plans to acquire publicly traded Mandiant back in March, less than a year after Mandiant was spun out of its previous owner FireEye as part of a $1.2 billion deal with private equity firm Symphony Technology Group.

Moving forward, Mandiant will operate under the auspices of Google Cloud, though the Mandiant brand will live on.

“We will retain the Mandiant brand and continue Mandiant’s mission to make every organization secure from cyber threats and confident in their readiness,” Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian wrote in a blog post.

Lawyers and Wall Street bankers made money from this deal, and Google executives got to continue their acquisition spree, but that’s about the extent of who’s coming out ahead from this transaction.

Defaults matter, and Google executives know it. That’s why they’re fine with shelling out massive sums to other companies to keep their near-monopoly on search intact.

Alphabet Inc.’s Google pays billions of dollars each year to Apple Inc., Samsung Electronics Co. and other telecom giants to illegally maintain its spot as the No. 1 search engine, the US Justice Department told a federal judge Thursday.

DOJ attorney Kenneth Dintzer didn’t disclose how much Google spends to be the default search engine on most browsers and all US mobile phones, but described the payments as “enormous numbers.”

“Google invests billions in defaults, knowing people won’t change them,” Dintzer told Judge Amit Mehta during a hearing in Washington that marked the first major face-off in the case and drew top DOJ antitrust officials and Nebraska’s attorney general among the spectators. “They are buying default exclusivity because defaults matter a lot.”

It is amazing to hear these statements coming from the U.S. Department of Justice. For years, the European Union (EU) was pretty much alone in investigating and discipling Google for its bad behavior. But finally, after decades of doing mostly nothing, the U.S. government is suing Google. It’s long overdue and extremely welcome.

Privacy and security aren’t just ideas to pay lip service to in Denmark. They really matter.

Denmark is effectively banning Google’s services in schools, after officials in the municipality of Helsingør were last year ordered to carry out a risk assessment around the processing of personal data by Google.

In a verdict published last week, Denmark’s data protection agency, Datatilsynet, revealed that data processing involving students using Google’s cloud-based Workspace software suite — which includes Gmail, Google Docs, Calendar, and Google Drive — “does not meet the requirements” of the European Union’s GDPR data privacy regulations.

Specifically, the authority found that the data processor agreement — or Google’s terms and conditions —  seemingly allow for data to be transferred to other countries for the purpose of providing support, even though the data is ordinarily stored in one of Google’s EU datacenters.

Google claims that “students’ data is never used for advertising or other commercial purposes,” but such claims have been incorrect before. And ultimately, what matters to the authorities in Europe is whether, as TechCrunch put it, compliance with the GDPR and other laws is “watertight.”

Required reading:

The one U.S. tech company that’s partnered more than any other over the last 10 years with Vladimir Putin’s censorship machine is the one that adopted the early slogan “Don’t be evil” – Google and its YouTube unit.

Google has provided substantially more user data to the Russian government and censored far more content than Apple, Facebook, Microsoft or Twitter at the request of Kremlin departments.

Following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine last week, U.S. tech giants have stopped providing some services to Russians. Apple ceased product sales, Google cut Russians off from advertising revenues, and both removed Russian news outlet RT from their app stores, as did Microsoft.

Still, digital rights groups are calling on U.S. tech firms to go even further and stop censoring content in response to Kremlin requests, which has been a precondition for doing business in Russia. None of the biggest – Apple, Google, Facebook or Twitter – responded immediately to Forbes’ requests for comment.

It’s just good business … well, at least until geopolitical conditions change and it’s not so good anymore.

Just as Apple is really into China, Google seems to be really into Russia. Its YouTube platform is quite popular with Russians, and Google likes that. But, of course, operating in a market like Russia means having to do what the Kremlin says. And acceding to the demands of a dictator and warmonger like Vladimir Putin is evil and immoral.

So if Google doesn’t want to be evil, it’s going to have to change its position.