Gail Simone — known for her stints writing Deadpool, Birds of Prey, and many other comics series — has now made it into the Merriam-Webster dictionary thanks to her famous pre-comics-career essay about a noteworthy trend in comic book tropes, too:
fridge
verb | to kill/harm a character (in a movie, show, etc.) to motivate another
The National Guard arrived in Los Angeles earlier today in a move that hasn’t been seen since 1965, and protests are stretching into the evening. There’s a Bluesky starter pack of LA-based independent journalists providing text and photo updates, plus news outlets and streamer Hasan Piker live on the ground. And demonstrations in several cities are planned for tomorrow, pushing for the release of union leader David Huerta, arrested during the recent aggressive ICE raids.
We’re at the end of a day-long set of closing arguments, concluding with one final request to the judge from DOJ attorney David Dahlquist to “please seize this moment in time” and order Google to change how it runs search. Judge Mehta thanks everyone for dealing with a “challenging schedule” for the trial and says, “we’ll get back to you as soon as we can,” and with that, the remedies trial portion of US v. Google is officially done.
Thank you for staying, someone whispers right next to the conference line just before things go silent — pretty sure it’s not directed at those of us listening in, but I can always dream. For now, we’ll be awaiting a ruling later this year.
Its attorney notes that an appeal in the liability case is ongoing, and Google wants that to be able to proceed. The DOJ, in a response, asks Judge Mehta to disregard the request, saying the appeal and remedies can proceed in parallel.
Mehta briefly asks how Google would recommend forming a committee that could handle all the specifics of whatever remedy is proposed, as suggested by the DOJ. Google’s attorney complains any committee could end up simply letting the DOJ — and the executive branch in general — control how the deal gets interpreted. “That delegation of authority, I submit, is a violation of due process.” Schmidtlein also brings up how broad the remit of the committee would be, covering everything from privacy to identifying competitors.
Unspoken here: the Trump administration is no fan of Google, and this deal — in Google’s interpretation — would give it a huge amount of power over the company.
We’re wrapping up final discussions about some of the more obscure remedies, and Google briefly references the issue of advertisers gaming the system if they’re provided search data. “There’s lots of problems with this,” Google’s attorney says, including significant privacy problems.
Judge Mehta has been triaging some non-Google cases to continue past 5, and we’re now back, with Mehta questioning Google’s attorney.
Mehta’s going through a final round of remedies and asking for explanations. First up: a proposed ban on self-preferencing. Government attorney explains it’s focused on search in relation to the Play Store, on-device AI, and a few other products. “Does this mean that, say, let’s say tomorrow Google launches a new product that is... Gemini... Super-Gemini. Do you mean to say if Google launched Super-Gemini, they couldn’t use Google Search to ground it?” Attorney seems to suggest banning something like that might be reasonable, though he equivocates. He says if there’s “a better way to draft” the statute, “we’re all ears.”