Adi Robertson

Senior Editor, Tech & Policy

Justice Department and Google spar over public access to antitrust trial files

Adi RobertsonSep 19, 2023

Google quietly raised ad prices to boost search revenue, says executive

Adi RobertsonSep 19, 2023

Court blocks California’s online child safety law

Adi RobertsonSep 18, 2023

US v. Google, Week Two begins.

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.

Adi RobertsonSep 15, 2023

Library Genesis is under legal fire again.

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.

Publishers' Lawsuit Accuses Libgen of "Staggering" Copyright Infringement * TorrentFreak

[TorrentFreak]

Adi RobertsonSep 15, 2023

Twitter turned over 32 Trump DMs to election tampering prosecutors.

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.

Twitter turned over at least 32 direct messages from Trump's account to special counsel | CNN Politics

[CNN]

In the Google antitrust trial, defaults are everything and nobody likes Bing

The first week of US v. Google begins with arguments over the power of deals and data.

Adi RobertsonSep 15, 2023

Adi RobertsonSep 12, 2023

Breaking down the Google antitrust trial.

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.

Adi RobertsonSep 12, 2023

Opening arguments in US v. Google just ended! Only ten weeks left to go.

I’ve just finished lunch after the Department of Justice, a group of state attorneys general, and Google made their opening arguments in today’s antitrust trial.

The Department of Justice wants Judge Amit Mehta to focus on “what Google did” — which, in its evaluation, is sign a bunch of restrictive Google Search exclusivity agreements with Apple, Mozilla, and Android manufacturers. Google is arguing that the whole trial is a gift to Microsoft, which (again, in its evaluation) has dismally failed to compete with Google on Search.

There’s no public feed after opening statements, but I’ll be back in court soon to watch the Department of Justice question Google’s chief economist Hal Varian about default search settings. Oh, and there’s a guy in a fake mustache and monocle wandering the halls.