Judge Amit Mehta will be deciding the case. I already have problems with Mehta’s actions and statements so far:
We can already see some problematic choices from Mehta. Google executives, including its CEO Sundar Pichai, have been found, in multiple cases, including this one, of destroying evidence related to potential antitrust violations. Apparently, chat logs involving discussions over antitrust show ‘that Pichai personally asked whether a chat group’s history could be turned off and then attempted to delete that message. A different judge in California sanctioned Google for this bad behavior, but not Mehta.
Judge Mehta doesn’t have a problem with Google destroying evidence related to the case??
[…] arguing that Google self-preferenced its own reviews ahead of Yelp’s, or its own travel services ahead of those like Expedia. Judge Meha tossed these claims, saying that service like Yelp and Expedia aren’t general search engines and are therefore not in the same market as Google.”
This was hard to hear. Google used its power as the only search engine in town to prioritize its other products (reviews) over its competitors. This is directly related to Google’s position in the search engine market and is an example important to the case for breaking the company up. To me this seems like a fundamental misunderstanding Mehta has about how Google’s products interoperate.
The case is likely to be appealed, probably all the way to the Supreme Court.
There is an appetite to break up these tech giants. By the public. Bipartisan support in Congress, and at the Executive level. This antitrust case was started in the Trump administration and has continued under Biden. I have this anxiety that with all this appetite, the months/years in trial, billions of dollars spent, that the deciders at the end of the day will be nine partisans (I’m one of the 58% of Americans who disapprove of the Supreme Court).
I hope my pessimism in this case is proven wrong and a strong decision is made against Google. It would set a precedent for other cases against tech giants.
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