More from US v. Google: all the news from the search antitrust showdown
DOJ attorney David Dahlquist is laying out the governments’ case for changes that would help “pry open the market to competition” in search. He’s accused Google of providing “milquetoast remedies that it knows will maintain the status quo,” instead mainly arguing in preparation for its appeal.
Closing arguments are starting in US v. Google, the antitrust trial that could determine whether Google is forced to sell its Chrome browser and dramatically change its search business. We’re not in court today, but we’re listening on a dial-in line for this final stage of the trial.
During its Search antitrust trial yesterday, a DOJ attorney produced a document showing that “80 billion of 160 billion ‘tokens’ — snippets of content — after filtering out the material that publishers had opted out of allowing Google to use for training its AI,” according to Bloomberg.
But that opt-out only applies to DeepMind models, Bloomberg reports — when asked if “the search org has the ability to train on the data that publishers had opted out of training,” DeepMind VP Eli Collins replied, “Correct — for use in search.”
First, Sundar Pichai used Google Plus to explain how the best product usually wins — as an example of a time Google lost. “I think I’m comfortable saying it wasn’t the best product out on the market,” he said. And laughed! A few minutes later, an FTC case against Google’s other terrible social network, Google Buzz, came up as an example of Google being bad for user privacy. Yet another tough day in Google social networking.
Google’s CEO has talked on the stand about Chrome and Chromium, and shouted out RCS and web standards, but he’s also said over and over that if Google is forced to share its search index, search data, and even search results with competitors, it might kill the value of Google Search.
“It makes it unviable to invest in R&D the way we have for the last two decades on Google Search... I think it will have many unintended consequences.”
In the Google Search remedies trial, the government is done arguing its case and now Google is getting started. Today’s first witness: CEO Sundar Pichai, who also led the Chrome team at the very beginning. I suspect we’re about to hear a lot about why Chrome exists, why it matters to Google — and why Pichai wants it to stay part of Google.
Testifying in the Google Search antitrust trial yesterday, Chrome general manager Parisa Tabriz said Chrome’s features and functionality owe to its “interdependencies” on other parts of the company, reports Bloomberg. She reportedly said over 90 percent of Chromium code has originated from Google since 2015.
Noting Android’s reliance on Chromium, Bloomberg writes that earlier in the day, a computer science expert for the DOJ said even if it sold Chrome, Google would be motivated “to make sure the source code is well-maintained.”
The landmark search trial has entered its remedy phase, and the government has big goals for the world’s biggest search engine.
My big question coming into this remedies trial was how serious the government was about making Google divest Chrome. It’s a swing, and seemed like maybe a negotiating tactic. But in opening arguments it became clear that getting Chrome out of Google is very much part of the goal. So far, judge Amit Mehta seems skeptical of the idea, but Jonathan Sallet, a lawyer representing the states, argued that something has to be done with maybe the most-used app on the planet:
“This kind of asset — 4 billion users — does not come up very often for potential companies to acquire.”
I’m here in the DC District Court for the remedies phase of the US v. Google trial, which found Google to be a monopoly in search. David Dahlquist, the lawyer for the Department of Justice, just showed a slide of Google’s “vicious cycle” — Defaults, Searches, Data, Quality, Money — and said he intends to offer a plan to unwind the cycle piece by piece. It’s gonna be an intense next few weeks.
The Alphabet Workers Union’s announcement of the agreement follows an unfair labor practice charge it filed last year over Google restraining employees from discussing the trial. The company is due in court this month for the remedy phase, which could see it being forced to sell Chrome.
...it is essential that workers are able to discuss these impacts, participate in the deliberations, and, if they choose, bargain collectively around the implementation of any eventual remedy.
[alphabetworkersunion.org]