An illuminated Google logo is seen in an office building in Zurich, Switzerland, on December 5, 2018. Portal/Arnd Wiegmann/File Photo acquire license rights
WASHINGTON, Sept 18 (Portal) – The U.S. Justice Department on Monday spoke out against excluding the public from the courtroom during some discussions about how Google prices online advertising. This is one of the key issues in the ongoing antitrust case in Washington.
The government wants to prove that Alphabet’s Google (GOOGL.O) violated antitrust laws to maintain its dominance in online search. Search dominance led to rapidly increasing advertising revenue, making Google a $1 trillion company.
David Dahlquist, speaking for the government, pointed to a redacted document in which there was a brief back-and-forth about Google’s prices for search advertising.
Dahlquist then argued to Judge Amit Mehta, who will rule on the case, that information like the tidbit in the document should not be redacted. “This satisfies the public interest as it forms the core of the DOJ case against Google,” he said.
John Schmidtlein, speaking for Google, urged that any discussions about pricing take place in closed session, meaning the public and reporters would have to leave the courtroom.
It is not uncommon for information such as market shares and business and pricing strategies to be redacted in merger processes.
And sometimes the redactions are more extensive, because the companies essentially want the information to be kept secret, and the government lawyers fighting the merger are working hard to win the merger rather than worry about excessive sealing said Katherine Van Dyck, an experienced litigator and senior counsel at the American Economic Liberties Project.
“Litigation is a pretty stressful process,” she said.
Her organization has pushed for the trial to be moved over telephone lines because pre-trial hearings were held due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Justice Mehta rejected this application.
Van Dyck believes Mehta’s call was the wrong one.
“When these are cases with massive, broad public interest and public importance, the courts need to take this into account better, change their rules and keep up with modern technology,” she said.
A case in point was Brian Higgins, a Verizon (VZ.N) executive, saying early Monday about the company’s decision to always preinstall Google’s Chrome browser with Google Search on its mobile phones.
After about 30 minutes of testimony, Higgins’ testimony was closed for the next two hours.
It’s possible he was asked about Google’s payments to Verizon, but the public will never know. Those payments — $10 billion a year, according to the government, to wireless carriers and others — gave the California-based tech giant strong default positions in smartphones and elsewhere.
Throughout the trial, Google defended that its high market share reflected the quality of its product and not illegal actions to create monopolies in some areas of its business.
The fight against antitrust could change the future of the Internet, which is currently dominated by four giants that have been under congressional and antitrust scrutiny since the Trump administration. Companies have defended themselves by emphasizing that their services are free, as in the case of Google, or inexpensive, as in the case of Amazon.com (AMZN.O).
If Google is found to have violated the law, Judge Mehta, who is deciding the case, will consider how best to resolve the issue. He could decide to simply order Google to stop the practices he found to be unlawful, or he could order Google to sell assets.
Reporting by Diane Bartz; Edited by Paul Simao and Nick Zieminski
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