Antitrust

In an update to a federal antitrust lawsuit originally brought on by Humble Bundle owner Wolfire Games in 2021, Newell’s request to conduct a remote deposition in fear of contracting covid has been denied. It’s especially notable as the Valve boss rarely makes appearances, even including our talk about Steam Machines or more recent comments about New Zealand and the Steam Deck.

This litigation lines up as part of a larger battle over digital stores like Steam, Apple, Google, and others and the billions of dollars they pull in by taking a cut of software sales.

The EU Court of Justice confirmed that Apple has joined Meta and ByteDance in appealing its designation under the tough new rules. The European Commission labeled three of Apple’s products as “core platform services” in September.

It’s not been officially confirmed which of these Apple is contesting, but last week, Bloomberg reported that its filings would concern the App Store and iMessage.

That’s a line from Expedia’s senior executive Barry Diller’s strongly-worded email to Google that Bloomberg reported on last month in the ongoing Google antitrust trial.

Diller complained that Google search ads costs ballooned from “$21M to almost $300M” from 2015 to 2019. But just look at these excerpts, written with the most “I said good day!” energy of anything I’ve read in the last year.

What could possibly justify such increases - it’s not as if you’re selling sugar against a world drought. The only conclusion is that Google has systematically moved every lever in its hegemony over search to disembowel our businesses.

We are not owners of horses begging for automobile manufacturers to keep us alive as technology replaces us. We are vibrant innovative enterprises that deliver value for consumers and I believe you are unfairly using your monopoly power to bleed us dry.

The US v. Google antitrust case may be frustratingly shrouded in secrecy, but occasionally we get some fun nuggets. The quote above comes from an internal email sent by Google’s Jim Kolotouros, VP of Android Platform Partnerships. “Chrome exists to serve Google search,” he writes. “If it cannot do that because it is regulated to be set by the user, the value of users using Chrome goes to almost zero (for me).”

Pichai will be one of the first witnesses Google calls for its antitrust defense, which started officially today. He’ll help make the case that Google’s search success is due to its own innovation and missteps by competitors, not big deals with companies like Apple (which it allegedly paid $18 billion in 2021).

Lawyers representing people suing over the high price and bad availability of NFL Sunday Ticket want information from Apple.

Apple is fighting the subpoena, which also calls testimony from Eddy Cue, saying it would be “unduly burdensome” and would disclose “irrelevant … and competitively sensitive” information.

Apple said the same thing when asked to have its execs testify in the Google antitrust case.

Goetz was awarded a patent for data-sorting software in 1968, after a three-year fight with the US Patent Office over whether software could even be patented.

The New York Times writes that the company he co-founded, Applied Data Research, filed an antitrust suit IBM in 1969 over its bundled hardware and software. IBM agreed to unbundle, but ADR didn’t let up.

Applied Data Research nonetheless continued its lawsuit. It was settled in August 1970; the terms included an agreement to supply one of its programs, Autoflow, to IBM.

“He not only got what he wanted,” Ms. Jacobs said, “A.D.R. started selling more products and opened the doors to the independent software industry.”

As Jordan races to overcome a first failed vote to become Speaker of the House Tuesday, CNBC put out a great reminder that the Ohio congressman could really care less about new antitrust laws.

Jordan’s spent the last few years investigating Big Tech in the House Judiciary Committee, but his focus has always been on content moderation and his unfounded fears that platforms are unfairly biased against conservatives.

And notably, Rep. Ken Buck (R-CO), who’s authored many of these antitrust bills, refused to vote for Jordan during the first round of speaker votes Tuesday.

After a slight delay, the Department of Justice has posted an exhibit from earlier this week in US v. Google, shedding light on the details of Apple and Google’s multibillion-dollar search deal.

The 2007 email thread features Sundar Pichai expressing his discomfort with making Google the sole search provider on Safari, while also revealing another potential option he disliked: fully different editions of Apple’s browser, one with Google and one with Yahoo as the chosen search engine.

Now, his email to Larry Page and Sergey Brin (among others) has surfaced in the US v. Google trial, where the Department of Justice is taking aim at Google’s multibillion-dollar deal for prime placement in Apple’s browser. Google argues it’s simply the best choice, but in those early years, Pichai appeared ambivalent about the exclusivity deal regardless.

“I know we are insisting on default, but at the same time I think we should encourage them to have Yahoo as a choice in the pull down or some other easy option,” he wrote. “I don’t think it is a good user experience nor the optics is great for us to be the only provider in the browser.”

FTC attorney Megan Gray, also an ex-VP of DuckDuckGo, wrote a now-removed op-ed for Wired this week asserting that Google secretly swaps brand names into search queries to point users at more lucrative (for Google) results. The Atlantic wrote that the story appeared to misinterpret a chart from Google’s antitrust trial.

Wired published an editor’s note yesterday after pulling the op-ed:

EDITOR’S NOTE 10/6/2023: After careful review of the op-ed, “How Google Alters Search Queries to Get at Your Wallet,” and relevant material provided to us following its publication, WIRED editorial leadership has determined that the story does not meet our editorial standards. It has been removed.

In certain situations, like using Gmail, Google News, Assistant, Contacts, or Google TV, personal data will be combined across different services it offers or with data from non-Google sources.

This is the arrangement set up by Germany’s Federal Cartel Office, or Bundeskartellamt, after an antitrust inquiry under a provision allowing it to intervene “when competition is threatened by large digital companies.”

In the future Google will have to provide its users with the possibility to give free, specific, informed and unambiguous consent to the processing of their data across services. For this purpose Google has to offer corresponding choice options for the combination of data. The selection dialogues must be designed so as not to guide users manipulatively towards cross-service data processing (avoiding “dark patterns”).

Where data are not actually processed across services and Google’s data processing terms explicitly make this clear, Google will not have to offer choice options. Any obligations under the General Data Protection Regulation remain unaffected by these obligations.

The regulator mentions it’s still conducting more proceedings against Google (Alphabet), Amazon, Apple, Facebook (Meta), and Microsoft.

Bloomberg reported yesterday that the “embarrassing” document that Judge Amit Mehta referenced when allowing the DOJ to post documents from the Google Antitrust trial was from a “mock” training session.

In it, Michael Roszak, Google’s VP of finance, reportedly called search ads one of the “greatest business models ever created” and likened it to “illicit businesses (cigarettes or drugs).”

The Microsoft CEO’s testimony will follow extensive questions this week about the company’s dealings with Apple and its struggle to get Bing on the iPhone, apparently including floating a sale of the search engine to Apple. And after a week of locked-down testimony, Judge Amit Mehta has directed as much of it as possible to take place in public session.

Yesterday, Epic Games filed a request for the Supreme Court to review lower court rulings in their lawsuit over Apple’s App Store rules, hoping to get a new interpretation that’s more in their favor,

Now, on Thursday, Apple submitted its own request, linked below, seeking a review to throw out the judge’s requirement that it change App Store rules barring developers from telling users about other payment options.

It is frankly shameful that Judge Amit Mehta still hasn’t ruled on opening up access to documents in this industry-shaking trial, let alone made it clear when any of the trial itself would be open to the public. Today, Apple’s John Giannandrea testified in closed court while reporters waited outside with no communication from the court at all. Ridiculous.

Google says it’s more likely than you think! The company is still fighting with the DOJ over whether to admit a potentially “embarrassing” document into evidence — the one that led to public records of the trial getting pulled off the internet. Mehta says he’ll rule on admitting the document tomorrow.

And that’s right, it sounds like we also still don’t know if the Justice Department will be allowed to resume posting exhibits online. But we got some testimony from DuckDuckGo’s CEO on the company’s travails competing with Google.

It’s the end of a locked-down day in US v. Google, culminating in some discussion of a yet-unviewed document at the center of a dispute between the two parties. And apparently we still don’t know if the Justice Department will be allowed to post exhibits from the trial (which, let’s reiterate, are public records) online. Frustrating!

Per Bloomberg’s Leah Nylen, there’s been “no word” on whether the Justice Department can keep posting exhibits online as they’re introduced in court.