If you are even slightly plugged into the doings and goings on in this tired old world of ours, then you have heard that Google has lost its antitrust case against the DoJ Antitrust Division, and is now an official, no-foolin', convicted *monopolist*.
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If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
https://pluralistic.net/2024/08/07/revealed-preferences/#extinguish-v-improve
1/
This is *huge*. Epochal. The DOJ, under the leadership of the fire-breathing trustbuster Jonathan Kantor, has done something that was *inconceivable* four years ago when he was appointed. On Kantor's first day on the job as head of the Antitrust Division, he addressed his gathered prosecutors and asked them to raise their hands if they'd never lost a case.
2/
It was a canny trap. As the proud, victorious DOJ lawyers thrust their arms into the air, Kantor quoted James Comey, who did the same thing on his first day on the job as DA for the Southern District of New York: "You people are the chickenshit club." A federal prosecutor who never loses a case is a prosecutor who only goes after easy targets, and leave the worst offenders (who can mount a serious defense) unscathed.
3/
Under Kantor, the Antitrust Division has been anything but a Chickenshit Club. They've gone after the biggest game, the hardest targets, and with Google, they bagged the hardest target of all.
Again: this is *huge*:
https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/boom-judge-rules-google-is-a-monopolist
But also: this is just the start.
Now that Google is convicted, the court needs to decide what to do about it. Courts have lots of leeway when it comes to addressing a finding of lawbreaking.
4/
They can impose "conduct remedies" ("don't do that anymore). These are generally considered weaksauce, because they're hard to administer. When you tell a company like Google to stop doing something, you need to expend a lot of energy to make sure they're following orders. Conduct remedies are as much a punishment for the government (which has to spend millions closely observing the company to ensure compliance) as they are for the firms involved.
5/
But the court could also order Google to stop doing certain things. For example, since the ruling finds that Google illegally maintained its monopoly by paying other entities - Apple, Mozilla, Samsung, AT&T, etc - to be the default search, the court could order them to stop doing that. At the very least, that's a lot easier to monitor.
6/
The big guns, though are the *structural* remedies. The court could order Google to sell off parts of its business, like its ad-tech stack, through which it represents both buyers *and* sellers in a marketplace it owns, and with whom it competes as a buyer and a seller. There's already proposed, bipartisan legislation to do this (how bipartisan? Its two main co-sponsors are Ted Cruz and Elizabeth Warren!):
https://pluralistic.net/2023/05/25/structural-separation/#america-act
7/
All of these things, and more, are on the table:
https://www.wired.com/story/google-search-monopoly-judge-amit-mehta-options/
We'll get a better sense of what the judge is likely to order in the fall, but the case could drag out for quite some time, as Google appeals the verdict, then tries for the Supreme Court, then appeals the remedy, and so on and so on. Dragging things out in the hopes of running out the clock is a time-honored tradition in tech antitrust.
8/
IBM dragged out its antitrust appeals for 12 years, from 1970 to 1982 (they called it "Antitrust's Vietnam"). This is an expensive gambit: IBM outspent the *entire DOJ Antitrust Division* for 12 consecutive years, hiring more lawyers to fight the DOJ than the DOJ employed to run *all* of its antitrust enforcement, nationwide. But it worked. IBM hung in there until Reagan got elected and ordered his AG to drop the case.
9/
This is the same trick Microsoft pulled in the nineties. The case went to trial in 1998, and Microsoft lost in 1999. They appealed, and dragged out the proceedings until GW Bush stole the presidency in 2000 and dropped the case in 2001.
10/
I am 100% certain that there are lawyers at Google thinking about this: "OK, say we put a few hundred million behind Trump-affiliated PACs, wait until he's president, have a little meeting with Attorney General Andrew Tate, and convince him to drop the case. Worked for IBM, worked for Microsoft, it'll work for us. And it'll be a bargain."
11/
That's one way things could go wrong, but it's hardly the only way. In his ruling, Judge Mehta rejected the DOJ's argument that in illegally creating and maintaining its monopoly, Google harmed its users' privacy by foreclosing on the possibility of a rival that didn't rely on commercial surveillance.
12/
The judge repeats some of the most cherished and absurd canards of the marketing industry, like the idea that people actually *like* advertisements, provided that they're *relevant*, so spying on people is actually *doing them a favor* by making it easier to target the right ads to them.
13/
First of all, this is just obvious self-serving rubbish that the advertising industry has been repeating since the days when it was waging a massive campaign against the TV remote on the grounds that people would "steal" TV by changing the channel when the ads came on. If "relevant" advertising was so great, then no one would reach for the remote - or better still, they'd change the channel when the show came back on, looking for *more ads*.
14/
People don't like advertising. And they *hate* "relevant" advertising that targets their private behaviors and views. They find it creepy.
Remember when Apple offered users a one-click opt-out from Facebook spying, the most sophisticated commercial surveillance system in human history, whose entire purpose was to deliver "relevant" advertising?
15/
*More than 96% of Apple's customers opted out of surveillance*. Even the most Hayek-pilled economist has to admit that this is a a *hell* of a "revealed preference." People don't want "relevant" advertising. Period.
The judge's credulous repetition of this obvious nonsense is doubly disturbing in light of the nature of the monopoly charge against Google - that the company had monopolized the advertising market.
16/
Don't get me wrong: Google *has* monopolized the advertising market. They operate a "full stack" ad-tech shop. By controlling the tools that sellers and buyers use, and the marketplace where they use them, Google steals billions from advertisers and publishers.
17/
And that's before you factor in Jedi Blue, the illegal collusive arrangement Goog has with Facebook, by which they carved up the market to increase their profits, gouge advertisers, starve publishers, and block smaller rivals:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jedi_Blue
An effect of Google's monopoly power is a global privacy crisis. In regions with strong privacy laws (the EU), Google uses flags of convenience (looking at you, Ireland) to break the law with impunity:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/05/15/finnegans-snooze/#dirty-old-town
18/
In the rest of the world, Google works with other members of the surveillance cartel to prevent the passage of privacy laws. That's why the USA hasn't had a new federal privacy law since 1988, when Congress acted to ban video-store clerks from telling newspaper reporters about the VHS cassettes you took home:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_Privacy_Protection_Act
19/
The lack of privacy law and privacy enforcement means that Google can inflict untold privacy harms on billions of people around the world. Everything we do, everywhere we go online and offline, every relationship we have, everything we buy and say and do - it's all collected and stored and mined and used against us.
20/
The immediate harm here is the haunting sense that you are always under observation, a violation of your fundamental human rights that prevents you from ever being your authentic self:
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/blog/2013/jun/14/nsa-prism
The harms of surveillance aren't merely spiritual and psychological - they're material and immediate.
21/
@pluralistic
Out of curiosity (I'm too lazy to look it up myself), could the court ever assess a monetary penalty and then assign the proceeds of that penalty to the DOJ for the express purpose of monitoring conduct remedies?
Essentially using punitive damages to pay for however many millions it costs to monitor the company for the next decade or so and make sure they keep obeying the conduct decree?
@hobley
Cory Doctorow
CassandraVert
William Ray
kbal