MONOPOLY BUSTING

Justice Department sues Google to break up its advertising empire
Alexis Keenan and Daniel Howley
Tue, January 24, 2023 at 11:07 AM MST·7 min read

The U.S. Department of Justice and eight states filed an antitrust lawsuit against Google (GOOG, GOOGL) on Tuesday, seeking the breakup of the company's online ad business.

This latest action comes more than two years after the agency and a group of state attorneys general joined in another suit alleging Google's search and search advertising businesses violate U.S. antitrust laws.

The Justice Department’s alleges that Google's suite of online advertising tools prevents competitors from entering the online advertising market and blocks publishers from monetizing their own content.

The department further claims that Google is illegally using, or trying to use, its monopoly power, and should be required to divest a host of entities that allow it to carry out the allegedly offending behavior.

Google CEO Sundar Pichai speaks during the Google I/O 2019 keynote session at Shoreline Amphitheatre in Mountain View, California on May 7, 2019. 

(Photo by Josh Edelson / AFP)

"Google’s anticompetitive behavior has raised barriers to entry to artificially high levels, forced key competitors to abandon the market for ad tech tools, dissuaded potential competitors from joining the market, and left Google’s few remaining competitors marginalized and unfairly disadvantaged," the complaint states.

"Google has thwarted meaningful competition and deterred innovation in the digital advertising industry, taken supra-competitive profits for itself, and prevented the free market from functioning fairly to support the interests of the advertisers and publishers who make today’s powerful internet possible."

The DOJ is specifically calling for Google to divest at least its Google Ad Manager suite, including both Google’s publisher ad server, DFP, and Google's ad exchange, AdX.

Shares of Google parent Alphabet (GOOG, GOOGL) fell as much as 1.6% following the news.

Pennsylvania State University law professor John Lopatka said the stakes for Google increase with the Justice Department's new lawsuit.

"The multiple actions expand the scope of the litigation for Google, and the greater scope somewhat increases its litigation burden," Lopatka told Yahoo Finance. "Reaching negotiated settlements becomes harder as the number of plaintiff groups increases."

Lopatka adds that a DOJ victory, as opposed to a victory by the states, would dramatically benefit private plaintiffs by establishing Google's liability for anticompetitive conduct that injured them.

A victory by the states would indeed bolster the cases of private plaintiffs, but not nearly as much as would a DOJ victory, as private plaintiffs would need to show only damages to impose liability for Google's anticompetitive conduct.

Yahoo Finance has reached out to Google for comment and will update this story when it receives a response.

Prior to the DOJ's filing, Alphabet reportedly sought to quell the DOJ's antitrust concerns by offering to split up its ad auction and ad placement businesses. That offer, according to The Wall Street Journal, was to maintain the would-be separate entities under the company's larger, parent company, Alphabet.

Google has for years faced scrutiny from domestic and overseas lawmakers and regulators concerning its dominance across multiple online and mobile markets.

In the U.S, the firm has faced investigations by the DOJ, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission, and state attorneys general over suspicions that the company’s search and digital advertising businesses operate as illegal monopolies.

In 2021, dozens of attorneys general sued the company, alleging that it was operating illegal monopolies in the market for Android app distribution by imposing technical barriers that prevent third parties from distributing apps outside the Play Store.

Over a decade ago, the company was fined roughly $10 billion (8.6 billion euros) by the European Commission, the European Union’s antitrust watchdog. Those fines resulted from three separate antitrust violations alleged by the Commission.

In 2017, the company was hit by the Commission for allegedly abusing its market dominance in search, and again in 2018 for allegedly abusing its market power in the mobile space by preloading its own apps on new Android phones. And in 2019, the company was again fined for limiting its rivals from working with companies that already had deals with Google’s AdSense platform.
Advertising

Google’s digital advertising business has become an antitrust target due to its unrivaled size and volume. The company holds a commanding lead in the space and controls some of the most important links in the online advertising chain — centrally its DoubleClick platform, a premier tool for online publishers, helping them create, manage, and track online marketing campaigns.

Acquired in 2007, DoubleClick was cited by Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) as one of the major acquisitions Google should be forced to unwind to improve competition in the advertising space.

Google, and competitor Facebook (META), have also been lambasted for the impact their outsized share of the online advertising market has on the media industry. With Google competing directly with online publishers for digital ad space, publishers have been forced to significantly cut back newsroom staff, sell themselves off, or close down entirely.

In Feb. 2021, Australia passed legislation that forces Google and Facebook to negotiate payment deals with media companies for using their content. Previous attempts to force Google to pay for media it benefits from ended in failure. In 2014, Spain passed legislation that would force internet sites to pay for content it used from publishers including headline and news snippets.

But rather than comply, Google simply shut down its Spanish Google News site. Users could still find articles in Google’s search results, but couldn’t use the Google News platform to get news from Spain-based publications anywhere in the world.
Search

Google is already defending itself against the DOJ's lawsuit alleging illegal dominance in the online search industry. As of Dec. 2022, Google controlled more than 92% of the world’s search traffic market share, according to StatCounter. In its lawsuit filed in Oct. 2020, the Justice Department and state attorneys general allege the company is unlawfully maintaining monopolies through anticompetitive and exclusionary practices in the search and search advertising markets.

According to the Justice Department, Google's exclusionary agreements, "collectively lock up the primary avenues through which users access search engines, and thus the internet, by requiring that Google be set as the preset default general search engine on billions of mobile devices and computers worldwide and, in many cases, prohibiting preinstallation of a competitor."

Google CEO Sundar Pichai testifies before the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Antitrust, Commercial and Administrative Law during a hearing on "Online Platforms and Market Power" in the Rayburn House office Building on Capitol Hill, in Washington, U.S., July 29, 2020. Mandel Ngan/Pool via REUTERS

In 2013, the FTC declined to take action against Google after an agency investigation of its search business. The decision followed a $22.5 million fine imposed on the company the prior year to settle claims that it violated a privacy settlement with the FTC agreeing that it would avoid placing “cookies” on and serving targeted advertisements to users of Apple’s competing browser company Safari.
Self-preferencing

Accusations that Google favors its own products or reduces the visibility of competitors in its search results have also been circulating for years.

One of the company’s biggest critics is Yelp, which, along with TripAdvisor, has hit at the company for placing Google-sourced ads above algorithmically-defined search results in the Google search page.

In July 2020, The Wall Street Journal reported on its investigation into Google’s search algorithm, finding that the tech giant favored its own YouTube videos in search results over those from competing video streaming services.

Alexis Keenan is a legal reporter for Yahoo Finance. Follow Alexis on Twitter @alexiskweed.

No Tech for Apartheid: Google Workers Arrested for Protesting Company’s $1.2B Contract with Israel

By Mohammad Khatami, Ray Westrick , Gabriel Schubiner , Amy Goodman 

April 17, 2024

Source: Democracy Now!

Democracy Now! speaks with two of the Google employees who were arrested staging sit-ins on Tuesday at the company’s offices in New York City and in Sunnyvale, California, to protest the tech giant’s work with the Israeli government. Organized by the group No Tech for Apartheid, the protesters are demanding Google withdraw from Project Nimbus, a $1.2 billion contract to provide cloud computing services to the Israeli military. “Google execs basically chose to arrest workers for speaking out against the use of our technology to power the first AI-powered genocide,” says Google software engineer Mohammad Khatami, who was arrested in New York. Google worker-organizer Ray Westrick, who was arrested occupying CEO Thomas Kurian’s office, says “more people are willing to organize and risk their jobs in order to take a stand against complicity in genocide.” We also speak with No Tech for Apartheid organizer and former Google worker Gabriel Schubiner, who calls on the tech industry to divest from Google and Amazon services. “Technology workers actually have a lot of power to shift this paradigm and to remove technology from this deep complicity with the Israeli occupation,” Schubiner says.

Transcript
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.


AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman in New York, with Juan González in Chicago.

Several Google employees, at least nine, were arrested Tuesday evening after staging sit-ins at the company’s offices in New York and in California to protest the tech giant’s work with the Israeli government. The sit-ins, organized by the activist group No Tech for Apartheid, took place at Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian’s office in Sunnyvale, California, and the 10th floor commons of Google’s New York office, which is right around the corner from Democracy Now!

Protesters are calling for Google to withdraw from a $1.2 billion contract to provide cloud computing services to the Israeli government, known as Project Nimbus. Last week, Time magazine reported Google’s work on the project involves providing direct services to the Israeli military.

The sit-ins were accompanied by outdoor protests at the Google offices here in New York and in Sunnyvale, San Francisco and Seattle, Washington. Workers and outside activists have opposed the contract since it was signed in 2021, but protests have ramped up over the past several months since Israel’s latest bombardment of Gaza.

No Tech for Apartheid says Google is enabling and profiting from Israel’s use of artificial intelligence to develop a “kill list” to target Palestinians in Gaza for assassination with little human oversight. The Israeli military is also using Google Photos for facial recognition across Gaza and the West Bank to identify and detain Palestinians en masse.

No Tech for Apartheid has published an open letter, co-signed by 18 other groups, that demands Google and Amazon immediately cancel their work on Project Nimbus. The letter has gathered more than 94,000 signatures from the general public.

For more, we’re joined by two of the arrested Google workers. Ray Westrick is with us. She’s a Google worker-organizer with the No Tech for Apartheid campaign, among the workers who occupied Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian’s office in Sunnyvale, California. She’s joining us from Sunnyvale. And here in New York, we’re joined by Mohammad Khatami, a Google software engineer who was arrested at the sit-in at Google’s office in New York. He’s joining us along with Gabriel Schubiner, a former software engineer at Google Research and an organizer with the No Tech for Apartheid campaign. And before that, he was with Jewish Diaspora in Tech.

We welcome you all to Democracy Now! Mohammad, let’s begin with you. You were, just hours ago, in the jail —

MOHAMMAD KHATAMI: That’s right.

AMY GOODMAN: — in the local police precinct. Talk about why you were willing to get arrested.

MOHAMMAD KHATAMI: Yeah. Well, rather than, you know, consider the demands that we’ve been raising for years now and listening to workers and considering the things that we’ve been raising, Thomas Kurian and Google execs basically chose to arrest workers for speaking out against the use of our technology to power the first AI-powered genocide. So, we were willing to get arrested for that, because at this point we aren’t willing to be lied to by our higher-ups anymore. We aren’t willing to be disrespected by our higher-ups anymore. And we wanted to take that to the offices and make sure it was understood by them, yeah.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: How do you sense is the support that you have among other Google workers, the degree of the dissatisfaction with the policies of Google?

MOHAMMAD KHATAMI: Yeah. I mean, Google has done a really good job at creating a culture of fear and retaliation against workers in general. But what we noticed was beautiful. So many people came up to our sit-in and basically showed support and felt that they were inspired by the work that we were doing, and felt inspired to speak out, which is exactly what we were going for. We want workers to feel like we have the power to choose where our technology is going and who we’re contributing to. So I felt really happy to see that, yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: Ray Westrick, you’re on the West Coast. You were arrested in California. Talk about this Project Nimbus and why you were willing to get arrested, and what the response — were you in the offices of the Google Cloud CEO?

RAY WESTRICK: Yes, we sat in at the office of Thomas Kurian, the Google Cloud CEO, to protest Project Nimbus, which is a $1.2 billion contract with the Israeli government and military between Google and Amazon. We also were demanding the protection of our co-workers, especially our Palestinian, Arab and Muslim co-workers, who have been consistently retaliated against, harassed and doxxed for speaking out about Project Nimbus and, you know, the humanity of Palestinians. So, we were there in solidarity with them. We were there to protest the contract, which is being directly sold — providing technology directly to the Israeli military as it inflicts a genocide on Palestinians in Gaza. And yeah, that is why we chose to sit in Thomas Kurian’s office.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Ray, could you — was there any response from the CEO or his office? And are you concerned about losing your job? Why — when did you decide to take this action?

RAY WESTRICK: Yeah. We did not receive any response from the CEO. And I think it’s really telling that they would rather let us sit there for over 10 hours and arrest us for peacefully sitting in his office than have leadership engage in our demands in any way at all. So, we’ve received no response from the CEO, and we were forcibly removed by the police.

And I — working at Google has been, you know, an honor. I really love my team. I love the work I do. But I can’t in good conscience not do anything while Google is a part of this contract, while Google is selling technology to the Israeli military, or any military. And so, it was a risk I was willing to take, and I think it’s a risk a lot of my co-workers are willing to take, because a lot of people are really agitated about this and have consistently made their demands clear and have faced retaliation for it. So, I chose to sit in, knowing the risks, out of care for the use of our technology, out of care for the impact of our technology and care for my co-workers.

AMY GOODMAN: For our radio audience, I wanted to let people know that Ray is wearing a T-shirt that says “Googler against genocide,” with “genocide” in the famous multicolor of “Google,” that it’s so well known for. I wanted to bring Gabriel Schubiner into this conversation, a former software engineer at Google Research, an organizer with the No Tech for Apartheid campaign, and ask you — you know, we had you on more than a year ago — this is before Israel’s latest attack on Gaza — talking about exactly this. And you were with a Jewish organization of Google workers at that time speaking out. Talk about the whole history of Project Nimbus.

GABRIEL SCHUBINER: Yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: And the resistance against it.

GABRIEL SCHUBINER: Yeah. Thank you so much.

So, Project Nimbus was signed in May of 2021 while bombs were being dropped on Gaza, while Palestinians were being evicted from Sheikh Jarrah and beaten at Al-Aqsa Mosque. That was really a point — when we found out about Project Nimbus, personally, for me, it was a turning point, where I no longer felt able to continue doing my work without engaging and organizing. There was a group of people that felt very similarly, so we started a petition. We were connected, got connected with Amazon workers, with community organizations, Jewish Voice for Peace and MPower Change, and spun a campaign out of that.

I want to be clear: Like, the campaign really is driven by worker concerns and worker needs around the ethical use of our labor, as well as the direct workplace concerns of the, like, health and safety concerns around working at a company that is facilitating genocide. We’ve known for a long time that this project was directly targeted at the military. It’s been reported in press that Google was giving trainings directly to the IOF. We know that Google gave trainings directly to Mossad. We know that the IOF —

AMY GOODMAN: When you say ”IOF,” explain the term.

GABRIEL SCHUBINER: I’m sorry, the — yes.

AMY GOODMAN: Because people are used to hearing ”IDF,” Israeli Defense Forces.

GABRIEL SCHUBINER: Right, yes. Yeah, it’s Israeli occupation forces, just to indicate, so we’re not repeating their messaging that their really aggressive repression of Palestinians is an act of defense. We know that it’s an act of occupation, so we say ”IOF.”

And so, we’ve known for a long time that this project was directly targeted at the Israeli military. But it was only recently, through this last contract that Google signed directly with the IOF, that we recognized that Google was really doubling down, that this contract is directly intended to facilitate military use. And we know that Google was chosen over other companies because of the advanced AI technology that they’re able to offer. So, given that we’ve learned how the IOF is using AI in this war, we really see this as like a really critical campaign for Palestinian liberation.

To speak to your point about the resistance against the project, we’ve been working against this project as workers for — since it was signed three years ago. We have been doing organizing. We have been doing, you know, base building and labor organizing. We’ve had protests externally and internally. We’ve had signed petitions. We’ve done outreach to our executives through internal forums, through chatrooms, through every available means, because, I think — you know, understanding, like, this contract really is — like, it really is an incredible issue for our work, like, all workers’ labor at Google. So many workers’ labor is contributing directly to this project, because all of the technology at Google is like deeply intertwined with each other. So, yeah, so we see this as really important, yeah.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Well, Gabe, I wanted to ask you — the average person, who’s not a Google worker, who might support your stand and who uses Google multiple times a day around the world, what are you calling for them to do?

GABRIEL SCHUBINER: Right. So, I mean, we’re calling for everyone around the world to really, like, help us with awareness, like, help us make it known that Google is a war profiteer. I think Google is so deeply embedded in people’s lives — right? — that it’s hard to ask for a boycott. But I think we’re calling specifically on people in the tech industry to divest from Google and Amazon. Google Cloud services and Amazon Web Services underlie a vast majority of the internet, but there are other options. So, technology workers actually have a lot of power to shift this paradigm and to, like, remove technology from this deep complicity with Israeli occupation.

AMY GOODMAN: Mohammad Khatami, can you talk about your own family background and why you so particularly care right now about what’s going on in Gaza?

MOHAMMAD KHATAMI: Yeah, yes. So, I come from a Muslim family. I was raised Muslim. And it’s really hard to wake up seeing the images of children slaughtered and know that your — you know, the work you’re doing is contributing to this. I’ve lost sleep. It’s just been extremely difficult to focus on work and think that you’re working for something that is contributing to the mass slaughter that’s taking place. And for speaking out against that, I’ve literally been called a supporter of terrorism, which is something that —

AMY GOODMAN: Called by?

MOHAMMAD KHATAMI: You know, by co-workers and HR and people in the company, a supporter of terrorism, which is, you know, something — it’s like a schoolyard insult. It’s something I haven’t heard since middle school. And that’s just an example of the retaliation and the harassment and the hatred that we face just for speaking up against our work being used in this way.

AMY GOODMAN: Are you concerned about losing your job?

MOHAMMAD KHATAMI: Absolutely. But it doesn’t — it’s not even important to me at all compared to working for something that is meaningful and having a good impact on the planet. I don’t want to have any association with this genocide. And I would hope that Google would change their mind about it, as well.

AMY GOODMAN: And finally, Ray Westrick, where do you see this movement going from here? And can you talk more about the Jewish-Muslim alliance around this among Google workers and former Google workers?

RAY WESTRICK: Yeah. I only see this movement growing and continuing to apply pressure. We received so much support during the sit-in. I’ve received so many personal messages from people, you know, thanking me for being vocal, and asking how they can be more vocal and get more involved. So I think this is absolutely growing. I think Google knows that this will continue, that, you know, workers are very agitated about this and will continue to speak up and apply pressure. And I think that’s why it was important for them to silence us. But this movement is growing, and more people are finding out about this, and more people are willing to organize and risk their jobs in order to take a stand against complicity in genocide.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, I want to thank —

RAY WESTRICK: And yeah, I think this has been a really unifying campaign for people of all backgrounds. And I know, specifically, a lot of us came together because we were specifically concerned about how Google has treated and retaliated against our Palestinian, Arab and Muslim colleagues, especially, like Mohammad mentioned, a lot of them have experienced harassment and doxxing for speaking out in like the appropriate channels at Google and have been consistently ignored and harassed and retaliated against. And so, we had to come together to say that we can’t let this happen anymore. We have to come together in protection of our co-workers and each other and in protection of, you know, the ethical use of our technology, to make sure that we’re not building technology that’s being used for harm. So, I think it’s been a really unifying campaign that is really grounded in taking care of each other and really grounded in making a positive impact and not facilitating more harm with technology.

AMY GOODMAN: I want to thank you all for being with us. Ray Westrick and Mohammad Khatami are both Google workers who were arrested yesterday, Ray in the offices of the Google Cloud CEO in Sunnyvale, California, and Mohammad here in New York. Also Gabriel Schubiner, a former software engineer at Google Research and an organizer with the No Tech for Apartheid campaign, before that, with Jewish Diaspora in Tech.

Google screwed rivals to protect monopoly, says Uncle Sam in antitrust lawsuit: We go inside the Sherman parked on a Silicon Valley lawn

Search engine giant has officially become 1990s Microsoft

Tue 20 Oct 2020 

Kieren McCarthy in San Francisco BIO 

Analysis The US Department of Justice has launched its long-awaited antitrust action against Google, accusing the tech giant of unlawfully protecting its search monopoly through “anti-competitive and exclusionary practices.”

The action doesn't explicitly mention breaking up Google, but does ask for "structural relief as needed to cure any anticompetitive harm," which is going to send shivers down the backs of Sundar Pichai and the rest of the Alphabet team.

In a striking parallel to antitrust action taken against Microsoft back in 1998, the accompanying 64-page lawsuit [PDF] cites the Sherman Act and accuses Google of “unlawfully maintaining monopolies in the markets for general search services, search advertising, and general search text advertising in the United States.”

Deputy Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen explicitly referenced the context in the DoJ’s official announcement: “As with its historic antitrust actions against AT&T in 1974 and Microsoft in 1998, the Department is again enforcing the Sherman Act to restore the role of competition and open the door to the next wave of innovation—this time in vital digital markets.”

It is the first major antitrust action taken against the new wave of tech giants – Google, Amazon, Apple and Facebook – and is likely to be just the start in a series of legal challenges to Alphabet's market power.

The Justice Dept's lawsuit is joined by 11 state attorneys general – all Republican, reflecting the dire state of partisan politics in the US. Last month, an excoriating Congressional report that also accused tech giants of abusing their market power was formally supported only by Democrats, even though both political sides are largely in agreement. We note a second group of state attorneys general, a mix of Dems and Republicans, are preparing a separate antitrust case against Google, so look out for that.

Today's lawsuit itself has a relatively narrow focus given Google’s massive scale: its search and search advertising markets. But, as the complaint notes, the impact is huge.

“Google is the monopoly gatekeeper to the internet for billions of users and countless advertisers worldwide. For years, Google has accounted for almost 90 percent of all search queries in the United States and has used anti-competitive tactics to maintain and extend its monopolies in search and search advertising,” the DoJ charges.

An Apple a day

The lawsuit digs into the agreements that Google has with other large tech companies to make it the default search engine on computers and devices, pointing out that they are exclusionary and “collectively lock up the primary avenues through which users access search engines, and thus the internet.” It homes in on the extent of Google's monopoly in internet search:

Between its exclusionary contracts and owned-and-operated properties, Google effectively owns or controls search distribution channels accounting for roughly 80 percent of the general search queries in the United States. Largely as a result of Google’s exclusionary agreements and anticompetitive conduct, Google in recent years has accounted for nearly 90 percent of all general-search-engine queries in the United States, and almost 95 percent of queries on mobile devices.

It also pushes the issue that ultimately sank Microsoft in the 1990s over its Internet Explorer browser: Google makes its search engine the default on billions of devices, prevents the pre-installation of competitors, and in some cases doesn’t allow people to delete its software.

Of particular focus is the deal with Google and Apple where Google pays Apple billions of dollars to make Google the default search on Apple’s iOS devices. Combined with similar deals with web browser companies, phone makers, and mobile networks, Google has created “a continuous and self-reinforcing cycle of monopolization,” the government argues.

Big Tech to face its Ma Bell moment? US House Dems demand break-up of 'monopolists' Apple, Amazon, Facebook, Google

READ MORE

To make the antitrust charges stick and so force change, however, the DoJ will need to demonstrate that this behavior results in harm to consumers. It argues that Google’s actions “reduce the ability of innovative new companies to develop, compete, and discipline Google’s behavior.”

It goes on: “Google has foreclosed any meaningful search competitor from gaining vital distribution and scale, eliminating competition for a majority of search queries in the United States. By restricting competition in search, Google’s conduct has harmed consumers by reducing the quality of search (including on dimensions such as privacy, data protection, and use of consumer data), lessening choice in search, and impeding innovation.”

And further: “By suppressing competition in advertising, Google has the power to charge advertisers more than it could in a competitive market and to reduce the quality of the services it provides them.”

Google: Antitrust is so 1990s

This is something Google has hit back at straight away. Kent Walker, Google's global affairs senior veep took up just this point in a statement filed shortly after the lawsuit went public.

"Today’s lawsuit by the Department of Justice is deeply flawed," he opined. "People use Google because they choose to, not because they're forced to, or because they can't find alternatives.

"This lawsuit would do nothing to help consumers. To the contrary, it would artificially prop up lower-quality search alternatives, raise phone prices, and make it harder for people to get the search services they want to use."

He points out that paying to promote your own products is perfectly legal and that people use Google as their default search engine because it's the best. It would be easy enough to choose another vendor, he argued, since people downloaded over 200 billion apps last year to get the software of their choice.

When you tell Chrome to wipe private data about you, it spares two websites from the purge: Google.com, YouTube

READ MORE

"This isn’t the dial-up 1990s, when changing services was slow and difficult, and often required you to buy and install software with a CD-ROM," he said.

"Today, you can easily download your choice of apps or change your default settings in a matter of seconds—faster than you can walk to another aisle in the grocery store."

As for the lawsuit itself, while you could argue that the narrow focus is a good thing, there are signs that it has been rushed, which may ultimately prove to be dangerously short-sighted.

A slew of attorneys working on the case resigned last month citing pressure from the Attorney General William Barr to launch the lawsuit before election day. They wanted more time to pull the case together.

The result has been that the DoJ has fallen back heavily on its successful case against Microsoft, drawing clear parallels. But as similar as Microsoft and Google are on the surface – tech giants using their extraordinary resources to control markets – there is a world of difference between the internet of the 1990s and now.

The lawsuit feels a little outdated in that respect and may not advance a necessary shift in antitrust thinking for the new digital era. For example, the lawsuit skims over the fact that Google has been increasingly favoring its own services over competitors; for example putting its own listings above those from others like Yelp.

It also barely touches the main driver of the entire modern tech economy: data. Access to people’s data, and connecting that data to individuals, building ever-larger databases to sell to advertisers is behind much of the tech giant’s behavior, particularly when it comes to anti-competitive actions and privacy violations.

That could be a major tactical error as the antitrust lawsuit could – and arguably should – have been used to build a legal record on the issue of data which could then be moved forward to tackle other companies like Facebook which don’t fit so neatly into the traditional antitrust bucket.

Lawyers can cash in

There are also numerous examples of the lawsuit feeling a little rushed and lacking the solid foundation that you would expect from such a huge case. As one example, take this sentence:

“This leaves the preset default general search engine with de facto exclusivity. As Google itself has recognized, this is particularly true on mobile devices, where defaults are especially sticky.”

There is no explanation of “especially sticky” – a phrase that the tech industry instinctively understands but which the legal system is likely to be completely confused by. The case doesn’t feel sufficiently locked down, especially when Google is going to throw every lawyer it has at the case and can afford to pick at every small point.

As for the chances of success: it should be a no-brainer. There is ample evidence of Google’s misbehavior and it should be easy to prove that one company having an effective monopoly over something as critical as searching the internet – a monopoly it aggressively protects – is not in the interests of American citizens.

But there is a world of difference between winning the case and having a real impact on the future. Google will fight extremely hard to limit the impact of the case on its business model and it is easy to see how it could still end up being the default search engine even after it is banned from pushing exclusionary agreements. The improvements could be slight.

And, if antitrust actions are not pulled further into the digital era through this Google case, it is possible that a company like Facebook could escape largely unscathed. Nevertheless, after nearly a decade of Google getting away with increasingly monopolistic actions – let’s not forget the FTC voted against its staff’s recommendation to investigate Google back in 2012 – it is good to see the US government finally act.

It’s just a shame it seems to have rushed things at the last minute for pure political reasons. ®

PS: Google's stock price is up more than 2.5 per cent at time of writing on the lawsuit's filing.

THE REGISTER

Google uses medical leave to oust workers alleging discrimination, employees say

April Glaser and Char Adams
Sun, March 7, 2021

Benjamin Cruz, a former instructional designer in Google’s Cloud division, was caught off guard when a colleague told them that their skin was much darker than she expected.

Cruz, who is Mexican American and prefers to be identified by the pronouns they/them, reported the incident to human resources in 2019 where personnel told them they should “assume good intent,” Cruz recalled in an interview. Unsatisfied, Cruz asked human resources to look deeper into the incident, and an HR official said an investigation into the matter had been closed, Cruz said.

So, Cruz sought help from human resources again. The solution? Urge Cruz to take medical leave and tend to their mental health before moving to a new role in the company. Cruz went on medical leave, and hoped to take the company up on its offer for a new position, they said. But Cruz was turned down from every role they applied for, so they were forced to quit.

“After I made that complaint, my work started getting pushed out from under me, but my team acted like everything was fine. I wanted to find help,” Cruz said. “When the medical leave was recommended to me, it was like an automatic process.”

Benjamin Cruz in Los Angeles. (Allison Zaucha / for NBC News)

Google declined to comment on Cruz’s allegations.

Cruz’s experience with Google’s internal human resources personnel echoes that of several former and current Google employees, including two prominent Black women, Timnit Gebru and April Curley, who were pushed out of Google at the end of last year. Both women were known for their advocacy for increased diversity in the tech industry, and when their complaints about how the company handled racial and gender discrimination reached human resources, they were both given the same advice: undergo mental health counseling or take medical leave.

In the weeks since both women’s departures, nine other current and former Google employees have come forward to say they were treated the same way. They consulted human resources after colleagues made comments about their skin color or Black hairstyles, or asked if they were sexually interested in their teammates. They also contacted human resources to report retaliation after protesting sexual harassment issues and to advocate for raises for Black people to match white employees’ pay. Each time, human resource personnel recommended the employees seek therapy or take medical leave to address their mental health — despite their mental well-being having nothing to do with their complaints. An additional 12 current and former Google employees confirmed that this is a common practice at Google’s human resources department.

“Going on leave is so normalized. I can think of 10 people that I know of in the last year that have gone on mental health leave because of the way they were treated,” said a former Google employee, who is a person of color and who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he wasnot authorized to speak about his work at Google. He went on medical leave last year after he said he had numerous unproductive conversations with human resources about how his colleagues discussed race.

In early 2020, a Black woman attended a Google meeting about supporting women at the company where data was presented that showed the rate that underrepresented minority employees were leaving the company. When she said that Black, Latina and Native American women have vastly different experiences than their white female colleagues and advised that Google address the issue internally, her manager brusquely responded, telling her that her suggestion was not relevant, the woman said.

The woman then complained to human resources, who advised her to coach the manager about her problematic response or take medical leave to tend to her own mental health, she said. The woman also spoke on the condition of anonymity because she’s still an employee and not permitted to speak to reporters.

“It felt belittling. I wasn’t in shock because I had heard it before. I had watched other leaders in the organization take these mental health leaves and then disappear,” she said. “It was clear that they weren’t going to take me seriously.”

Google said in a statement that the company is committed to supporting employees who raise concerns about workplace treatment.

“We have a well-defined process for how employees can raise concerns and we work to be extremely transparent about how we handle complaints,” said Jennifer Rodstrom, a Google spokeswoman. “All concerns reported to us are investigated rigorously, and we take firm action against employees who violate our policies.”
Pushed out

Gebru and Curley worked in vastly different parts of Google. Gebru was a lead researcher on Google’s Ethical AI team and is one of the highest-profile Black women in her field, known for her work uncovering racial bias in facial recognition systems. Curley was a tech recruiter who brought in new talent from historically Black colleges and universities. Workers said they felt motivated to speak after Gebru and Curley’s departures, in which both women said they were fired after speaking out about racism and sexism at the company.

Curley is one of several Google employees that reported problems with race discrimination within the company. (Joe Buglewicz / for NBC News)

Google would not comment on Gebru’s ousting. But the company’s head of research said Gebru resigned. The company declined to comment on Curley’s termination, but said in a statement it disagrees with Curley’s characterization of her departure.

In her six years at Google, Curley said she never received a raise or promotion, which depends on managers’ input. She was assigned nine different managers during her tenure, two of whom she reported to human resources for allegedly mistreating her and her team, a majority of whom were Black women. Each time, Curley says she was told that Google had investigated the complaints and found nothing wrong. She said she was then offered mental health support or the opportunity to take medical leave.

Curley said that, in 2019, a manager asked her which of her teammates she would sleep with. “I gave him a lot of attitude after that, and it went downhill from there,” Curley said. She said she experienced retaliation in the months that followed, including being regularly talked down to in front of her colleagues.

She filed a formal complaint about her experience with this manager. Then, in December 2019, Google cut her pay by $20,000, Curley said. Also following her complaint, Curley was put on a performance improvement plan, a formal agreement about how her work would improve, which only added more stress. After telling human resources officials she continued to feel anxious about her work situation, they advised her to take medical leave to manage her mental health. Google declined to comment on Curley’s allegations.

“It felt like they didn’t care about my mental health,” she said.

The first time, she took the recommended medical leave. But Curley did not take the second leave. She, along with several other employees, said when they went on medical leave, they returned to find they had new managers or were moved into new parts of the organization. Because these new managers did not know them well enough to provide adequate reviews, they did not receive raises or promotions.

“I was supporting my family, my nieces and nephews and my mom, and to not be able to do that is traumatic in a different way,” Curley said.

Image: April Curley. (Joe Buglewicz / for NBC News)

Diversity reports

For years, Google has highlighted its commitment to a diverse workforce. In 2014, Google became one of the first tech companies to publicize its workforce’s racial and gender makeup in an annual diversity report. The 2020 report revealed that Google saw a less than 1 percent increase in Black hires from 2019 to 2020 across the company. The percentage of Latino employees working at Google rose by 0.2 percent that year.

But none of Google’s competitors have done much better. Apple hasn’t shared diversity data since 2018, but reported a 2 percent drop in the number of Black employees in technical roles from 2016 to 2018. Facebook reports its percentage of Black employees in technical roles rose 0.2 percent from 2019 to 2020 and increased 0.1 percent companywide.

While Google reportedly spent $265 million on diversity efforts in 2014 and 2015, it still didn’t result in much change. From 2014 to 2019, Google increased its Black hires across its workforce by 2 percent, according to its 2020 report. It increased its Latino hires by 0.7 percent from 2014 to 2019, the report shows. While the company would not reveal how many employees work at Google specifically, The San Jose Mercury News reported last year that it had about 23,000 employees at its main campus in Mountain View, California, and 50,000 employees statewide, according to its economic impact report. Google had more than 10,000 employees in New York state, according to its own economic impact report.

“The fact that they’re spending a lot of money on DEI efforts and yet the actual composition of the company isn’t changing means that they’re not truly committed to changing the environment,” said Meredith Broussard, a New York University professor who has written extensively on Silicon Valley culture. “If tech companies truly cared about having more diversity in their ranks, they would fix it.”

Suggesting therapy

Before Gebru’s departure, she said she regularly raised issues on internal team mailing lists and with her managers about how women were treated at Google. But when her messages were forwarded to human resource specialists, Gebru said they advised her to seek out mental health resources.

“They’re like, ‘Well, if there’s something wrong with you, here are all these therapy resources.’” said Gebru. “And I would respond that no amount of support system is going to get rid of Google’s hostile work environment. I have friends. I go dancing. I have hobbies and therapy already.”

Following Gebru’s departure, Google held a forum for employees to discuss racism at the company, according to three current employees who attended. The first half, they said, was dedicated to sharing Google’s side of the story.

“A good 20 minutes of the call was just them discrediting her. This was a clear way of showing you that this is what could happen to you if you speak up,” one Google employee said. That call was followed by another session for Black employees to discuss their concerns with Gebru’s case with a counselor present.

“People were sharing really brilliant reflections on how painful Dr. Gebru’s firing was for them. And the therapist was just repeating it back saying, ‘Yes, yes, I hear you,’” said another Google worker who was on the call. “It was this pattern. Their real concerns were dismissed as feelings.”

The three employees spoke anonymously because they are not permitted to speak to the news media. Google declined to comment on the meeting.

Google confirmed to NBC that it concluded its investigation into Gebru’s ousting, but did not make its findings public. The company said it will implement new procedures to handle employee exits and increase its staff handling employee retention, according to Axios.

Workplace diversity and inclusion experts say it is common for human resource officials to use mental health and well-being as a tactic to ignore discrimination — and even participate in it.

“The broader pattern of HR not being supportive, continuing to make the person who was discriminated against the problem in some way rather than the discrimination and the perpetrator of the discrimination as the problem — those are patterns that we have seen in our research,” said Laura Morgan Roberts, a professor at the University of Virginia’s Darden School of Business and co-editor of the book, "Race, Work, and Leadership."
Not sick

Current and former Google employees who are white say they faced similar treatment from human resources when they spoke up about the company’s racial and gender discrimination issues.

In late 2018, Claire Stapleton, who worked at Google for 12 years, helped organize a walkout to protest how the company’s handled accusations of sexual harassment and assault. The demonstration came after a New York Times investigation detailed how the creator of Android received a $90 million exit package even though the company found that a sexual assault claim against him was credible.

Claire Stapleton, an organizer of the 2018 Google walkout over sexual harassment and misconduct, in New York, November 2019. (Dina Litovsky / Redux)

After organizing the protest, Stapleton said she complained to human resources that her manager had demoted her. She hoped HR would provide a mediator to help find a solution. Instead a human resources counselor told Stapleton to try mindfulness techniques to improve her relationship with her manager, according to Stapleton. Another human resources director recommended she speak with a third director who specializes in employee benefits. That official suggested Stapleton take a medical leave, she said.

“I was raising a retaliation claim and then she said, ‘Oh, but did anyone tell you about medical leave?’ And I said, ‘Yes, I know what medical leave is, but that’s not what I need. I’m not sick.’ And she was like, ‘Oh no, no, no, it’s not like that. We put people on it all the time,'” Stapleton said.

She did not take the medical leave, but resigned instead.

Google says it provides multiple ways for employees to raise concerns and investigates all retaliation reports. “If an employee wants to explore a leave of absence or have a workplace accommodation, Google’s Benefits team will work with the individual on next steps,” Google’s Rodstrom said.

In 2019, another current Google employee, who is white and spoke anonymously because he’s not permitted to speak to the news media, raised concerns about pay disparities between white and Black employees with similar experience levels. He hoped one of his Black colleagues would get a raise. Instead, he was ignored and then told to stop asking about it, he said.

“After months, I was like I can’t even show up to work another day the way they’re dragging me along,” the employee said. “And then basically at the end I said, ‘I need some options,’ and HR said, ‘You can accept severance or you can take a medical leave.'”

On Feb. 5, Margaret Mitchell, the co-lead of Google’s Ethical AI team with Gebru, wrote in a blog post that Gebru “has been treated completely inappropriately, with intense disrespect, and she deserves an apology.” On Feb. 19, Mitchell announced “I’m fired.” Google confirmed Mitchell’s firing to NBC, and said she had violated the company’s code of conduct by removing documents and employee data from Google’s internal system.

Mitchell said in a statement after she was fired, “I tried to use my position to raise concerns to Google about race and gender inequity, and to speak up about Google’s deeply problematic firing of Dr. Gebru. To now be fired has been devastating.”

CORRECTION (March 7, 6 p.m. ET) A previous version of the article misstated what Google human resources advised Timnit Gebru to do after she reported issues with how women were treated at the company. She was advised to seek mental health care, not take medical leave. The article also misstated Margaret Mitchell's job status at Google. Mitchell was a co-leader of the Ethical AI Team at Google with Gebru; she did not work under Gebru.

India's top court rejects Google plea to block Android antitrust ruling in major blow



Manish Singh
Thu, January 19, 2023

Google has been dealt a significant blow in one of its key overseas markets. India's Supreme Court on Thursday declined to block an antitrust order that requires the Android-maker to make a series of changes that could topple its financial viability.

India's apex court rejected to block the ruling against Google by the nation's antitrust watchdog Competition Commission of India. The court extended the deadline for enforcement of CCI's order by one week, however.

The matter will now go back to the country’s appellate tribunal, the National Company Law Appellate Tribunal (NCLAT), where Google previously failed to secure any relief. The Supreme Court has directed NCLAT to make its decision by March 31. The challenge for Google is that unless NCLAT reaches a decision in Google's favor by this month, the tech giant will have to make a series of changes to Android.

India is Google's largest market by users. The firm has amassed over half a billion monthly active users in the country. The vast majority of the smartphones shipped in India run Android.


The Competition Commission of India late last year slapped two fines against Google, alleging the Android-maker abused the Play Store’s dominant position in the country and required Android device makers to pre-install its entire Google Mobile Suite.

The CCI has ordered Google to not require licensing of its Play Store to be linked with mandating installation of several Google apps such as Chrome and YouTube. The watchdog has also ordered Google to allow removal of all its apps from phones and give smartphone users the ability to change their search engine provider. The CCI also fined Google $162 million in its first order.

Google warned earlier this month that if the Indian antitrust watchdog’s ruling is allowed to progress it would result in devices getting expensive in the South Asian market and lead to proliferation of unchecked apps that will pose threats for individual and national security, escalating its concerns over the future of Android in the key overseas region.

“Predatory apps that expose users to financial fraud, data theft and a number of other dangers abound on the internet, both from India and other countries. While Google holds itself accountable for the apps on Play Store and scans for malware as well as compliance with local laws, the same checks may not be in place for apps sideloaded from other sources,” the company said.

Google is facing mounting scrutiny from governments across the globe as policymakers begin to worry about the reach of technology giants and assess whether that is in detriment to local companies. Google lost its appeal against a record $4.3 billion fine in EU for using the dominance of Android to thwart competition. It’s also subject to Germany’s new regulation that targets large companies.

Indian startups rejoice as Android ruling against Google upheld


: Tour of Google's new Bay View Campus in Mountain View, California, U.S.

Thu, January 19, 2023 
By Munsif Vengattil and Aditya Kalra

NEW DELHI (Reuters) -Startups in India cheered a decision by the Supreme Court on Thursday to uphold an antitrust order that forces Google to change how it runs its popular Android platform, saying the ruling would open the market for rivals and boost competition.

The Competition Commission of India (CCI) ordered Google in October to make a series of changes, such as refraining from agreements that ensure exclusivity of its search services and mandatory pre-installation of its apps. It also told Google to allow third-party app stores to be housed within its Play Store.

In a major setback for the Alphabet Inc unit, the Supreme Court of India on Thursday declined Google's request to block the antitrust directives, which the company says would hurt consumers and stall growth of the Android ecosystem in India. Google now needs to comply within seven days.

Rohan Verma, CEO of maps service MapmyIndia which launched an app in 2004, told Reuters his app had not gained market share over the years because the Google Maps app was pre-installed on many Android phones.

The CCI order states Google can't impose such requirements now.

"We are elated," said Verma. "There was negative impact over the years, we hope now consumers and device makers use our app more."

About 97% of 600 million smartphone devices in India run on Android, according to Counterpoint Research estimates. Apple has just a 3% share.

Google licenses the Android system to smartphone makers, saying it provides more choice for everyone and agreements it strikes - which critics say are anti-competitive - help keep the operating system free and open-source.

Calling the ruling a "watershed moment", Rakesh Deshmukh, CEO of Indus OS, which runs a rival app store to Google's, said allowing other app stores within the U.S. firm's Play Store in India would give consumers more choice and promote use of apps.

Naval Chopra, a lawyer at India's Shardul Amarchand Mangaldas, which has challenged Google in courts in the past, said Thursday's court decision was a landmark one.

"This is a landmark decision in the history of competition law in India and globally," he said, adding the CCI directives "may well lead to a new Indian competitor in video hosting, mapping, web browsers or, dare we say it, search."

(Reporting by Aditya Kalra and Munsif VengattilAdditional reporting by Arpan ChaturvediEditing by Mark Potter)

India releases guidelines for social media influencers accepting paid promotions



Jagmeet Singh
Fri, January 20, 2023 

As the market of social media influencers is getting bigger in India, the South Asian nation has introduced endorsement guidelines to limit unfair trade practices and misleading promotions on the web.

On Friday, the Department of Consumer Affairs held a press conference to announce new guidelines to make it mandatory for social media influencers to disclose promotional content in accordance with the Consumer Protection Act, 2019.

Failing to follow the guidelines will make social media influencers liable for a fine of up to $12,300 (1 million Indian rupees). In the case of repeated offenders, the penalty can go up to $61,600 (5 million Indian rupees), the Indian government department said.

The department specified that the guidelines apply to social media influencers as well as virtual avatars promoting products and services online. The disclosures should be easy to notice in post descriptions where you can usually find hashtags or links. It should also be prominent enough to be noticeable in the content, the department said.

When it comes to promoted content in videos, the department said that disclosures for paid promotions should be placed in the video — not just in the description — and be made in both audio and video format. Influencers must also disclose if they promote a brand, service or product during livestreams, per the guidelines.

The department said the disclosures and endorsements should be in the language of the content.

"Today's guidelines are aimed at social influencers who have a material connection with the brand they want to promote on various social media platforms. So this is an obligation for them to behave responsibly," consumer affairs department secretary Rohit Kumar Singh told reporters.

The official said the department was in talks with tech companies to deploy some crawling algorithms to identify offenders. Meanwhile, consumers can file complaints if they find an influencer violating the guidelines, the secretary said.

"You can never cover it 100%. This is a cat-and-mouse thing... So, the idea is to protect the interests of the consumers and let him not be taken for a ride by showing him something as unbiased whereas actually, it is a paid thing," he added.

According to the secretary, the size of the social media influencer market in India in 2022 was $157 million. It could reach as much as $345 million by 2025.

Indian advertising industry's self-regulatory body Advertising Standards Council of India (ASCI) has welcomed the government's move.

"Influencer violations comprise almost 30% of ads taken up by ASCI, hence this legal backing for disclosure requirements is a welcome step. The [consumer affairs] ministry had been in touch with ASCI to review the various global guidelines on influencers," said Manisha Kapoor, CEO and secretary general of ASCI.

PLAYING HIDE THE SAUSAGE

Apple, Google Agreed to ‘Defend’ Search Deal From Regulators

Emily Birnbaum, Mark Gurman, Leah Nylen and Sabrina Willmer
Tue, September 26, 2023 

(Bloomberg) -- Apple Inc.’s lucrative agreement to use Alphabet Inc.’s Google as the default search engine for the iPhone includes a provision that the two tech giants will “support and defend” the deal against government scrutiny, a top Apple executive said at an antitrust trial.

Their longtime contract was renegotiated in 2016 to include the provision, Apple’s Senior Vice President of Services Eddy Cue disclosed Tuesday in a Washington federal court, where the US government is pressing its claim that Google operates a monopoly in the search business.

Cue, the architect of the most recent version of the agreement, said the provision for a joint defense was added at Google’s request. He said it was handled by company lawyers so he couldn’t speak directly to why it was included. Around that time, the European Union was investigating Google’s dominance in online search.

During his testimony, the executive defended Apple’s arrangement with its tech rival, saying it was the best choice for customers to have Google as the default search engine.

“There certainly wasn’t a valid alternative we would have gone to at the time,” Cue said. “I don’t know what we would have done” if the deal had collapsed, he said.

Google first became the default option in the Safari browser in 2002. That deal has been revised several times. Cue said the contract was extended in 2021, after the Justice Department filed its initial case against Google’s search dominance the year before.

Google pays Apple billions of dollars for this prominent position on products like the iPhone, making the agreement of particular interest to the government. The question before the judge in the antitrust trial is whether the search giant pushed its way onto Apple devices at the expense of competitors.

In his testimony, Cue stressed that Apple sees no need to develop its own search tool because Google clearly is the best option. That differs from the company’s approach in other areas: It competes with Google in mapping software and voice assistants, as well as operating systems for phones and computers.

The Justice Department displayed an email from 2016 in which Cue told Apple Chief Executive Officer Tim Cook that Google CEO Sundar Pichai was not agreeing to Apple’s proposed revenue share. When the Justice Department’s attorney asked Cue whether Apple would have walked away from the negotiation, Cue said he didn’t seriously consider it, but Apple might have created its own search engine.

Read More: What’s at Stake in Google Trial on Antitrust Charges: QuickTake

Part of Cue’s testimony Tuesday was closed to the public because it involved internal company information that Apple and Google want to keep secret.

Cue was expected to testify behind closed doors about Apple’s search arrangements with other companies, which provide the non-default options built into the Safari internet browser, according to a person familiar with the planned testimony. That includes Microsoft Corp.’s Bing, Yahoo, DuckDuckGo and Ecosia. Similar to its agreement with Google, Apple gets a slice of the advertising revenue generated when users select those search engines as their main option in Safari.

Last week, Apple machine learning chief John Giannandrea testified as well. The executive, who led search at Google before joining Apple in 2018, pointed to a new feature in iOS 17 and iPadOS 17 — the latest software that runs iPhones and iPads — that lets users assign a different default search engine for private browsing.

That means Apple users can switch between Google and another option more easily, according to Cue. “We like our products to come out of the box and work where it feels like magic,” he said. However, Apple doesn’t track how many customers actually make the change to a non-Google search engine, because of privacy concerns, Cue said.

The case is US v. Google, 20-cv-3010, US District Court, District of Columbia.

(Updates with testimony from Apple executive.)

Apple exec defends the decision to make Google its default search engine on iPhones and Macs

PAUL WISEMAN
Tue, September 26, 2023

The iPhone 15 phones are shown during an announcement of new products on the Apple campus in Cupertino, Calif., Tuesday, Sept. 12, 2023. On Tuesday, Sept. 26, a top Apple executive defended the tech giant’s decision to make Google the default search engine on Apple iPhones and Macs, saying there was no “valid alternative.’’ (AP Photo/Jeff Chiu, File)

WASHINGTON (AP) — A top Apple executive defended the tech giant’s decision to make Google the default search engine on Apple iPhones and Macs, saying there was no “valid alternative.’’

Testifying in the biggest antitrust trial in a quarter century, Eddy Cue, Apple’s senior vice president of services, said Tuesday that there wasn’t “anybody as good’’ as Google at helping phone and computer users search the internet.

The U.S. Department of Justice has accused Google – a company whose very name is synonymous with scouring the web — of smothering competition by paying Apple, Verizon and other tech companies to make its search engine the first users see when they open their devices.

Google counters that it dominates the market because its search engine is better than the competition, a position Cue supported in his testimony. Google also argues that users can, in any event, switch to other search engines with a couple of clicks.

The antitrust case, the biggest since the Justice Department went after Microsoft and its dominance of internet browsers 25 years ago, was filed in 2020 during the Trump administration. The trial began Sept. 12 in U.S. District Court in Washington D.C.

Mikhail Parakhin, Microsoft’s head of advertising and web services, testified Tuesday that Google’s dominance feeds on itself. The more searches Google processes, the more data it collects that can be used to improve future searches.

“The more data you have, the better the results are,’’ he said, echoing one of the government’s arguments.

Dominating the market helps in other ways, Parakhin said. For example, restaurants are more likely to make sure their location and hours are accurate in results on the leading search engine, while they are far less likely to bother correcting information on smaller search engines.

Experience shows, he said, that search engines need 20% market share to survive. Otherwise, “their quality degrades rapidly, and they disappear.’’’

Parakhin also recounted his experience battling Google in his previous job as chief technology officer at the Russian search engine Yandex. After Russian regulators required Android phones to let users choose their search engine – instead of letting Google hold the default position – Yandex’s market share rose from 30% to 55%, he said.

Earlier in the proceedings, the government called a behavioral economist, who testified that Google's default status discourages users from switching search engines, partly because they are reluctant to change ingrained habits. Last week, the founder of the search engine DuckDuckGo, which has about 2.5% of the search market, testified that his company struggled to compete because of Google's revenue-sharing agreements with Apple and other companies.

U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta likely won’t issue a ruling until early next year. If he decides Google broke the law, another trial will determine how to rein in its market power. The Mountain View, California-based company could be stopped from paying Apple and other companies to make Google the default search engine

New Alphabet/Google chief Pichai sees big pay boost

GOOGLE SCREWS ITS WORKERS BUT GIVES BOSS BIG BONUS

Google fires engineer who created browser pop-up message about workers' rights

New Alphabet chief Pichai sees big pay boost

Google parent Alphabet's new CEO Sundar Pichai is in for a big pay raise

Google parent Alphabet boosted the salary of newly anointed chief Sundar Pichai and promised more than $200 million in shares if the company hits performance goals, a regulatory filing Friday said.

Pichai's annual pay will more than double to $2 million next year, and he will be in line for $90 million shares of stock based on how well the internet titan does in the market and another $120 million in shares that vest over time, according to a Securities and Exchange Commission filing by the Alphabet board.

The value of the performance-based shares could be zero depending on whether Alphabet stock hits goals set in comparison to the S&P 100 in the coming two years, the filing said.

Taking the reins as chief executive of Google parent Alphabet, the soft-spoken, Indian-born Sundar Pichai faces a host of challenges at one of the world's most valuable companies, which has become besieged by activists and political leaders.

Increased scrutiny

The 47-year-old Pichai, who will remain as Google CEO in addition to taking up the new post, is seen as a steadying influence at a time when Alphabet faces an onslaught from regulators and others.

Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin are stepping away from their roles at the company they founded two decades ago in a California garage, but will remain in control of the Alphabet board based on share voting rights.

The soft-spoken, Indian-born Sundar Pichai faces a host of challenges at one of the world's most valuable companies, which has been besieged by activists and political leaders

Pichai will take over from Page as CEO of Alphabet, which includes Google as well as units focused on its "other bets" in areas including self-driving cars, life sciences and a variety of "moonshot" projects.

Sundar steps into his new role as antitrust enforcers in Washington, Brussels and elsewhere are stepping up their scrutiny of Google, which is the internet's dominant search engine and also the maker of the leading Android mobile operating system.

The company has also been in the crosshairs over how it manages "hate speech" and extremist content spread online, and how it deals with children's privacy on its YouTube video service.

Recently, its employees have organized to protest what some claimed was a lack of action on sexual harassment by executives, as well as Google's dealings with the US military and border security authorities.

When Google dropped out of bidding for a massive military cloud computing contract, it faced criticism for being unpatriotic, and Pichai appeared to ease tensions with a fence-mending visit with President Donald Trump.

Last December, Pichai kept calm while testifying in Congress as he parried US lawmakers over complaints of political bias and intrusive data collection.

"We build our products in a neutral way," Pichai said in one exchange

DECEMBER 20, 2019

France fines Google $166 million for abusing ad dominance

In this Monday, Nov. 18, 2019 file photo, the logo of Google is displayed on a carpet at the entrance hall of Google France in Paris. France's competition authority has fined Google 150 million euros ($166 million) for "abusing its dominant position" in the online ad market. (AP Photo/Michel Euler, File)

France's competition authority fined Google 150 million euros ($166 million) on Friday for "abusing its dominant position" in the online ad market.

The agency said the U.S. tech company mistreated buyers of ads based on keywords. Methods used by its Google Ads platform are "opaque and difficult to understand" and the company applies them in an "unequal and arbitrary way," it said.

It also ordered Google to clarify the rules for Google Ads and its procedures for freezing accounts, to avoid "brutal and unjustified" suspensions.

It's the latest in a string of European fines against Google, which faces very little competition for search engine business across the continent. The company has been hit in recent years with multibillion-dollar fines imposed by European Union authorities for unrelated antitrust cases and is also facing increasing regulator pressure on other fronts in Europe and the U.S.

Google said in a statement that it would appeal, and that its advertising policies are designed to protect consumers "from exploitative and abusive ads."

The case originated from a complaint that online consulting company Gibmedia filed after Google suspended its ad account in 2015. During and after their protracted dispute, Google published similar ads to those run by Gibmedia, according to the ruling, which also cites other examples of companies Google suspended without justification.

While it says Google's argument that it's protecting consumers is "perfectly legitimate," its rules are applied incoherently, with some companies' ads allowed and others that sell similar services suspended, the authority said.

It accused the company of "at best negligence, at worst opportunism" by initially offering services to advertisers that it considers dubious and later suspends, just to grow profits.

The ruling details multiple questions about Google's ad algorithms that the competition authority says have gone unanswered.

SEE  https://plawiuk.blogspot.com/search?q=google