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amit mehta
US Court Rules Google a Monopoly in 'Biggest Antitrust Case of the 21st Century'
"Google is a monopolist, and it has acted as one to maintain its monopoly," said a federal judge in the decision.
Aug 05, 2024
A federal judge left no room for ambiguity Monday in a landmark ruling in a case brought by the Justice Department and states against tech giant Google, in which the government argued the company had illegally monopolized the search engine and advertising market.
"Google is a monopolist, and it has acted as one to maintain its monopoly," said Judge Amit Mehta, who sits of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia.
In U.S. et al. v. Google, Mehta found that Google has "violated Section 2 of the Sherman Act by maintaining its monopoly in two product markets in the United States—general services and general text advertising—through its exclusive distribution agreements."
The American Economic Liberties Project (AELP) called the ruling a "tremendous win for consumers, innovation, and the entire tech industry."
During a 10-week trial last year, the DOJ argued Google had used exclusionary contracts to block its competitors from reaching potential users. The company's deals with web firms such as Mozilla and cell phone companies like Apple and Samsung have made Google the default search engine on millions of people's phones and computers, as has its contracts with other major tech firms and service providers.
The trial revealed that Google shares 36% of its search ad revenues from Safari with Apple and paid the company $20 billion in 2022 to ensure Google's search engine would have default status for Apple customers.
While paying billions of dollars per year to maintain its default status, Google has been using its dominance over ad space to collect more data about users and improve its search engine, while its rivals have been cut off from that ad space.
"If that's what it takes for somebody to dislodge Google as the default search engine, wouldn't the folks that wrote the Sherman Act be concerned about it?" asked Mehta.
The Justice Department proved to the court that Google had ensured its search engine would conduct nearly 90% of all web searches.
Vanderbilt University law professor Rebecca Haw Allensworth toldThe New York Times the ruling represents "a very prominent test of the Biden administration's new antitrust enforcement agenda."
The DOJ and the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) have also sued Apple, Meta, and Amazon for monopolizing the smartphone, social media, and online selling markets.
William Kovacic, former chairman of the FTC, told the Times in June that a victory against Google would create "momentum that supports [the government's] other cases."
U.S. Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) was among those who applauded the ruling, saying the unfair practices Mehta outlined "are the exact behaviors that hurt consumers, competition, and small businesses."
Lee Hepner, senior legal counsel at AELP, said the ruling "strikes at the core of how hundreds of millions of Americans experience the internet."
"It illustrates how Google has become one of the most powerful companies in the world while undermining innovation and degrading the quality of its core product," said Hepner. "The remedy must match the court's striking verdict in this case. At a minimum that means an end to Google's exclusive default agreements and breaking up business lines that have allowed Google to extend its monopoly into every corner of the internet."
Google is expected to appeal Mehta's decision, but as it faces another antitrust case brought by the DOJ over its advertising technology business—set to go to trial September 9—AELP interim executive director Nidhi Hegde expressed hope that Monday's ruling "sends a resounding signal that the antimonopoly movement is here to stay."
"The promise of antitrust enforcement is that it will fully restore competition where it has been lost," said Hepner, "and we'll be advocating that the court use all of its power to do so."
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Ex-Trump Aide Peter Navarro Ordered to Prison for Defying Jan. 6 Probe
"May this represent the beginning of real accountability for the orchestrators, the organizers, the funders, and the inciters of the attack on our democracy," said one legal analyst.
Mar 11, 2024
Peter Navarro could soon become the first former aide of ex-President Donald Trump to serve time behind bars related to GOP attempts to reverse the 2020 election results, according to a Sunday court filing by the American economist's legal team.
Navarro, who advised the presumptive 2024 Republican presidential candidate on trade, has been ordered to report to a low-security federal prison in Florida on March 19, his legal team told the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.
The filing comes after U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta, an appointee of former President Barack Obama, last month denied Navarro's request to remain free while appealing his September conviction. A jury found the 74-year-old guilty of contempt of Congress for defying a subpoena from the committee that investigated the January 6, 2021 insurrection.
Mehta in January sentenced Navarro to four months in prison and a $9,500 fine. At the time, the judge contested his claims that the prosecution was politically motivated, saying: "You are not a victim. You are not the object of a political prosecution."
Referencing Navarro's term for his scheme to overturn Trump's 2020 loss, NBC News and MSNBC legal analyst Glenn Kirschner said Monday: "Look who's getting Green Bay-swept into prison. May this represent the beginning of real accountability for the orchestrators, the organizers, the funders, and the inciters of the attack on our democracy."
Navarro's conviction and sentencing came after Steve Bannon, Trump's former chief strategist, was convicted in July 2022 and sentenced to four months in prison for ignoring a subpoena from the panel. Bannon remains free during the appeals process.
Politiconoted Monday that "Navarro is also fighting a civil lawsuit brought by the Justice Department demanding he return hundreds of records the government claims he improperly declined to deliver to the National Archives after leaving office. Some of those records pertain to the 2020 election."
Trump faces four ongoing criminal cases—including two related to his 2020 election interference efforts. However, it is not clear whether either will go to trial before the November election, in which he is expected to face Democratic President Joe Biden.
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Pivotal Google Antitrust Case Proves Need to Boost Public Access to Trials
"We saw a glimpse of what’s possible when audio access was permitted during the pandemic, and it’s clearly within the court’s power to make this a reality once more."
Oct 29, 2023
Amid the buzz of an always-on news cycle, it’s baffling that the most pivotal trial of the year has gone largely unnoticed.
The antitrust trial against Google’s search engine monopoly has slipped under the radar, and it’s a damning reflection of the state of our public court system. At its core, this trial delves deep into the crisis of economic concentration plaguing our society. The government contends that Google’s monopoly stifles innovation and raises costs for advertisers, ultimately burdening consumers.
But here’s the catch: Gaining access to this trial is an arduous task. In an era of unprecedented connectivity, we find ourselves isolated from proceedings.
Remote audio access, once a pandemic-era lifeline, has vanished. Even for the lucky few who attend in person, a peculiar ritual unfolds when they step into Courtroom 10 on the fourth floor of the federal district court in Washington, D.C.—cellphones are switched off and all electronics are stashed away. It was my privilege to be among the select audience during the first week of the 10-week marathon, and my notepad brims with hastily scribbled notes as testament to this rarified and restricted access.
Imagine a courtroom with no audio access, no cameras, no phones, and limited access to crucial exhibits. The witness list, the cornerstone of any trial, remains hidden until the eleventh hour. Federal District Court Judge Amit Mehta, who is overseeing and will rule on the case, adopted an early policy of deference to Google, granting them near unilateral power to decide what’s sensitive. As a result, in a trial about the existence of monopoly power, we lack data on Google’s market share. The terms of Google’s agreement with Apple, which, according to an unidentified senior Apple employee, enables the titans to “work as if we are one company,” is similarly concealed from public view. Even information about their original agreement from 2007 is deemed commercially sensitive—in 2023.
This case hinges on the power of agreements that establish valuable default status for Google’s lucrative search engine, which has enabled Google to maintain about 90% of the entire market, by some estimates — yet the court prevents the public from knowing how market dynamics change when those defaults are altered. In the midst of public skepticism regarding the Supreme Court’s conflicts of interest, we entrust the courts with safeguarding our fundamental right to public access, yet these glaring gaps undermine both transparency and accountability in our judicial system. The graphs and data we do end up getting to see are the result of intense struggles behind closed doors.
Last week, lawyers for the New York Times stepped into the fray to demand greater media access to trial testimony and exhibits. Judge Mehta was largely unmoved, relegating the question to daily squabbles over whether upcoming testimony should be sealed. To have a voice in those on-the-fly decisions, though, requires media outlets to allocate substantial resources, including making their lawyers present daily for the remainder of the trial. Worse, they’ll be arguing against Google’s sole knowledge of the forthcoming testimony and unilateral ability to argue its sensitivity.
To the extent government agencies should also be advocating for public access to court hearings, those agencies are already massively under-resourced to conduct their core obligations. To wit, the Federal Trade Commission, charged with protecting our entire economy from unfair and abusive monopolies, has lost a third of its appropriated staff—approximately 500 full-time staff—since 1980. By comparison, the Department of Justice is down 352 staff since 1979. In the same period, the economy has expanded six-fold and concentration has become ubiquitous across industries. In 2021, over 3,500 merger transactions were reported to the agencies, an 87% increase over the average number reported over the prior five years. In the FTC’s various litigation against Meta/Facebook, the FTC claims to be outgunned 10 to 1. The dynamic established by the courts renders the best-resourced private monopolies equipped to argue for the secrecy of trials that are public, if in name only.
Greater public access to trial proceedings is possible. During the pandemic, we glimpsed an alternative, as rules were established to allow audio feeds to trials. People hung on every word of Microsoft’s $69 billion acquisition of game studio Activision-Blizzard. Social media was abuzz with debates about key testimony as it unfolded. The sudden expiration of these rules just as the Google trial began was the reason for Judge Mehta’s rejection of a timely request for a live audio feed by American Economic Liberties Project. It was a blow to those who had savored the taste of greater public access to big courtroom drama.
In an altogether separate matter, NBC Universal has filed an application to gain audio-visual access to the upcoming trial of former President Donald Trump, stressing the First Amendment implication of denying such access. Debates over secrecy are more than just a sideshow distraction from the facts and substantive merits of these cases. It’s more than just time-consuming, costly and draining for both the public and the court itself. It invokes constitutional issues that go to the heart of our judicial system.
The path forward is clear and achievable. The Judicial Conference, a body of federal judges overseeing the operation of our federal courts, must adapt to the way the modern world accesses information and revise its rules to permit the broadcast of trials. They have studied the effect of cameras in the courtroom since at least 1988, with numerous committees recommending their introduction for both civil and criminal proceedings. The technology for enabling that access has undergone paradigm shifts in that time. We saw a glimpse of what’s possible when audio access was permitted during the pandemic, and it’s clearly within the court’s power to make this a reality once more.
We should not burden the public with the fight for access. The court must lead the way, by embracing transparency in the 21st century.
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