The worst possible antitrust outcome

Summary

Today's links The worst possible antitrust outcome (permalink) Well, fuck. Last year, Google lost an antitrust case to Biden's DoJ. The DoJ lawyers beat Google like a drum, proving beyond a shadow of a doubt that Google had deliberately sought to create and maintain a monopoly over search, and that they'd used that monopoly to make search materially worse, while locking competitors out of the market. In other words, the company that controls 90% of search attained that control by illegal means, and, having thus illegitimately become the first port of call for the information-seeking world, had deliberately worsened its product to make more money: https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/24/naming-names/#prabhakar-raghavan That Google lost that case was a minor miracle. First, because for 40 years, the richest, most terrible people in the world have been running a literal re-education camp for judges where they get luxe rooms and fancy meals and lectures about how monopolies are good, actually: https://pluralistic.net/2021/08/13/post-bork-era/#manne-down But second, because Judge Amit Mehta decided that the Google case should be shrouded in mystery, suppressing the publication of key exhibits and banning phones, cameras and laptops from the courtroom, with the effect that virtually no one even noticed that the most important antitrust case in tech history, a genuine trial of the century, was underway: https://www.promarket.org/2023/10/27/google-monopolizes-judicial-system-information-with-trial-secrecy/ This is really important. The government doesn't have to win an antitrust trial in order to create competition. As the saying goes, "the process is the punishment." Bill Gates was so personally humiliated by his catastrophic performance at his deposition for the Microsoft antitrust trial that he elected not to force-choke the nascent Google, lest he be put back in the deposition chair: https://pluralistic.net/2020/09/12/whats-a-murder/#miros-tilde-1 a But Judge Mehta turned hi...