Courtesy of the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, where law goes to die. The rule (requiring age verifications and health warnings on sites with a high percentage of adult content) was blocked in August through a lower court decision that’s now been overturned — without any explanation from the appeals court, which I guess we should expect by now.
Per Bloomberg’s Leah Nylen, there’s been “no word” on whether the Justice Department can keep posting exhibits online as they’re introduced in court.
Here’s the list of expected witnesses for the day as week two for this trial between the DOJ and Google kicks off, starting at 9:30AM ET:
• Verizon executive Brian Higgins, who will likely be questioned about Google’s exclusivity deals on Android. (This may take place in a closed court session.)
• Google vice president and general manager of ads Jerry Dischler. Dischler has worked at Google since 2005, so there’s a lot of history to go over.
• Former Google financial analyst John Yoo. Yoo’s LinkedIn bio describes his work as “research and analytics to structure and scale some of Google’s largest commercial deals meant to drive distribution and usage of Google’s services” on Android, among other tasks. He joined the company in 2016 and left in March of 2023.
Publishers filed a lawsuit accusing the book piracy site of hosting an “enormous collection of infringing works that anyone with an internet connection can access.” As TorrentFreak notes, however, this isn’t the first legal threat it’s faced:
After being sued by publisher Elsevier in 2015 at the same court, Libgen and the infamous Sci-Hub were ordered to shut down. While Libgen briefly disappeared, both sites ultimately ignored the decision.
We’d already learned the company now known as X handed over some Trump information as part of a probe into his attempts to overturn the 2020 presidential election, but newly unsealed documents provide a little more detail about what that included:
The company resisted producing the records because a court-approved order directed it not disclose to Trump details about the warrant. [...] “Indeed, the materials Twitter produced to the Government included only 32 direct-message items, constituting a minuscule proportion of the total production,” the prosecutors wrote in the newly unsealed brief.
The first week of US v. Google begins with arguments over the power of deals and data.
The first day of US v. Google has wrapped up (with a blow-by-blow readthrough of an email argument from 2009, which I don’t think Google’s lawyers found as funny as I did), and I’m headed back to New York — I’ll have more details tomorrow.
For now, if you’d like an overview of what this whole case is about, I appeared on Today, Explained to... well, do exactly what the podcast’s name suggests.
