Early October of 2023 is a historic time for big trials.
In a New York civil case, Donald Trump, his adult sons, and 10 of his companies have been found liable for fraud, and the trial is ongoing on the issue of damages(Opens in a new window) as well as on several other causes of action beyond fraud. Although major legal troubles for the former president are nothing new, actually going to trial and him actually showing up for trial are a bit novel. With Trump still the undisputed front-runner as the Republican nominee for president, and with Trump repeatedly attacking prosecutors, the judge, and even court staff, it is easy to see why this trial is sucking up as much bandwidth as it is.
As if the Trump trial weren’t enough, the trial of Sam Bankman-Fried(Opens in a new window), the founder and former CEO of the now defunct cryptocurrency exchange FTX, started almost simultaneously. FTX was an extremely influential organization before it crashed into bankruptcy over the course of only a few days. Bankman-Fried had been widely hailed as an eccentric genius. Court followers who still have attention to spare after perusing the latest Trump headlines might see some Bankman-Fried stories too.
All this has left another huge trial — one which could meaningfully impact the direction of American society — flying under the radar. A federal case venued in Washington is underway in which the Justice Department is accusing Google of maintaining an illegal monopoly(Opens in a new window) over the market for internet searches. This is the first major monopoly case to go to trial in decades.
Don’t believe me that you could have missed something so important? Go ahead, Googl … ah, Bing it, yourself.
Google, of course, has amassed a small army of highly compensated mercenary lawyers to argue, basically, hey, people like Google, that’s why Google has 90% of the internet search market, and if they want to switch to some other search engine, they can. Which, though a fine enough point to make, pretty much talks past the government’s damning evidence of the circuitous web of Silicon Valley deals Google inked to pay ungodly sums of money to keep its search engine(Opens in a new window) as (and arguably prevent competitors from becoming) the factory default for users.
The case is obviously a bit unusual in the land of antitrust in that one typically thinks of a monopoly as overcharging consumers or getting away with selling an inferior product because it’s the only option. For anyone with internet access, performing a search on Google is free. It also generally turns up pretty decent results.
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Yet, times have changed since Theodore Roosevelt went about busting up railroad conglomerates(Opens in a new window) and hacking large oil concerns to smithereens. Whether it is eyeballs on a page which allow billions to stream in and would-be competitors to be summarily demolished, or overpriced rail tickets, history has proven that, whatever the medium of commerce, monopolies are not ultimately a winning prospect for the American people.
As a bonus, to the extent a law enforcement action can be thought of as political at all, this one is bipartisan. The Google antitrust case was first filed three years ago under the purview of Donald Trump’s Attorney General William Barr(Opens in a new window). The Joe Biden administration has made it a priority to crack down on monopolies(Opens in a new window), and the DOJ under Merrick Garland has proven aggressive on antitrust.
In litigation, the outcome is never foreordained. That being said, I do find that one exercise in predicting results can be especially useful in highly complex cases. It is not deeply analyzing technical legal arguments, it is not paying close attention to the opinions of so-called legal experts, and it is not doing your own research down some internet rabbit hole. Rather, it is simply considering a broad overview of the facts, and asking yourself what seems like a fair outcome.
Does it seem to you like Google likely has too much power to the exclusion of others? Answer that question for yourself, and you’ll probably be as close as anyone else to knowing the results of this trial in advance.
The Google antitrust trial is scheduled to run for approximately seven more weeks. Once there is a decision, we will know a lot more about whether a massive internet powerhouse like Google is tameable.
Jonathan Wolf is a civil litigator and author of Your Debt-Free JD(Opens in a new window) (affiliate link). He has taught legal writing, written for a wide variety of publications, and made it both his business and his pleasure to be financially and scientifically literate. Any views he expresses are probably pure gold, but are nonetheless solely his own and should not be attributed to any organization with which he is affiliated. He wouldn’t want to share the credit anyway. He can be reached at [email protected].