91–100 of 173 posts
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 doll…
How is this even allowed? Should the judge and overseeing team be punished?
It almost seems like Judge Mehta is somehow complicit in this. Judges can also be corrupt, they are just human.
I love the irony of sealing the majority of a trial (2 3/4 of 5 days) about anti-trust. :)
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> How is this even allowed? Nixon v. Warner Communications (1978) 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…
> what option would you provide them? I would offer them this choice: 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…
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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…
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It was the exposure of Microsoft's business practices to daylight that had the greatest effect, IMO.
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'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.
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> I wouldn't give them any options, as they are on trial for a reason > They are in court due to abuse of one (or more?) of those powers. "If he weren't a drug dealer, why did the cops arrest him?" Even the corporations have a right to a fair trial. Innocent-until-proven-guilty applies to them too.
> "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…
(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).
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And when someone (a competitor) turns around and starts (frivolously) suing every company claiming that their supposed "trade secrets" are illegal activities?
Here's some background on the legal system in America that I think you are missing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Rules_of_Civil_Procedu... In particular, rules 11 and 12: https://www.federalrulesofcivilprocedure.org/frcp/title-iii-... https://www.federalrulesofcivilprocedure.org/frcp/title-iii-...
(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)