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Google faces new antitrust trial after ruling declaring search engine a monopoly
Legal World News |
2024/09/05 08:37
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One month after a judge declared Google’s search engine an illegal monopoly, the tech giant faces another antitrust lawsuit that threatens to break up the company, this time over its advertising technology.
The Justice Department, joined by a coalition of states, and Google each made opening statements Monday to a federal judge who will decide whether Google holds a monopoly over online advertising technology.
The regulators contend that Google built, acquired and maintains a monopoly over the technology that matches online publishers to advertisers. Dominance over the software on both the buy side and the sell side of the transaction enables Google to keep as much as 36 cents on the dollar when it brokers sales between publishers and advertisers, the government contends in court papers.
They allege that Google also controls the ad exchange market, which matches the buy side to the sell side.
“It’s worth saying the quiet part out loud,” Justice Department lawyer Julia Tarver Wood said during her opening statement. “One monopoly is bad enough. But a trifecta of monopolies is what we have here.”
Google says the government’s case is based on an internet of yesteryear, when desktop computers ruled and internet users carefully typed precise World Wide Web addresses into URL fields. Advertisers now are more likely to turn to social media companies like TikTok or streaming TV services like Peacock to reach audiences.
In her opening statement, Google lawyer Karen Dunn likened the government’s case to a “time capsule with with a Blackberry, an iPod and a Blockbuster video card.”
Dunn said Supreme Court precedents warn judges about “the serious risk of error or unintended consequences” when dealing with rapidly emerging technology and considering whether antitrust law requires intervention. She also warned that any action taken against Google won’t benefit small businesses but will simply allow other tech behemoths like Amazon, Microsoft and TikTok to fill the void.
According to Google’s annual reports, revenue has actually declined in recent years for Google Networks, the division of the Mountain View, California-based tech giant that includes such services as AdSense and Google Ad Manager that are at the heart of the case, from $31.7 billion in 2021 to $31.3 billion in 2023,
The trial that began Monday in Alexandria, Virginia, over the alleged ad tech monopoly was initially going to be a jury trial, but Google maneuvered to force a bench trial, writing a check to the federal government for more than $2 million to moot the only claim brought by the government that required a jury.
The case will now be decided by U.S. District Judge Leonie Brinkema, who was appointed to the bench by former President Bill Clinton and is best known for high-profile terrorism trials including that of Sept. 11 defendant Zacarias Moussaoui. Brinkema, though, also has experience with highly technical civil trials, working in a courthouse that sees an outsize number of patent infringement cases.
The Virginia case comes on the heels of a major defeat for Google over its search engine, which generates the majority of the company’s $307 billion in annual revenue. A judge in the District of Columbia declared the search engine a monopoly, maintained in part by tens of billions of dollars Google pays each year to companies like Apple to lock in Google as the default search engine presented to consumers when they buy iPhones and other gadgets. |
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Court revives Sarah Palin’s libel lawsuit against The New York Times
Law Firm News |
2024/08/31 13:45
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A federal appeals court revived Sarah Palin’s libel case against The New York Times on Wednesday, citing errors by a lower court judge, particularly his decision to dismiss the lawsuit while a jury was deliberating.
The 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Manhattan wrote that Judge Jed S. Rakoff’s decision in February 2022 to dismiss the lawsuit mid-deliberations improperly intruded on the jury’s work.
It also found that the erroneous exclusion of evidence, an inaccurate jury instruction and an erroneous response to a question from the jury tainted the jury’s decision to rule against Palin. It declined, however, to grant Palin’s request to force Rakoff off the case on grounds he was biased against her. The 2nd Circuit said she had offered no proof.
The libel lawsuit by Palin, a onetime Republican vice presidential candidate and former governor of Alaska, centered on the newspaper’s 2017 editorial falsely linking her campaign rhetoric to a mass shooting, which Palin asserted damaged her reputation and career.
The Times acknowledged its editorial was inaccurate but said it quickly corrected errors it called an “honest mistake” that were never meant to harm Palin.
Shane Vogt, a lawyer for Palin, said in an email that Palin was “very happy with today’s decision, which is a significant step forward in the process of holding publishers accountable for content that misleads readers and the public in general.”
“The truth deserves a level playing field, and Governor Palin looks forward to presenting her case to a jury that is ‘provided with relevant proffered evidence and properly instructed on the law,’” Vogt added, quoting in part from the 2nd Circuit ruling.
Charlie Stadtlander, a spokesperson for the Times, said the decision was disappointing. “We’re confident we will prevail in a retrial,” he said in an email.
The 2nd Circuit, in a ruling written by Judge John M. Walker Jr., reversed the jury verdict, along with Rakoff’s decision to dismiss the lawsuit while jurors were deliberating.
Despite his ruling, Rakoff let jurors finish deliberating and render their verdict, which went against Palin.
The appeals court noted that Rakoff’s ruling made credibility determinations, weighed evidence, and ignored facts or inferences that a reasonable juror could plausibly find supported Palin’s case.
It also described how “push notifications” that reached the cellphones of jurors “came as an unfortunate surprise to the district judge.” The 2nd Circuit said it was not enough that the judge’s law clerk was assured by jurors that Rakoff’s ruling had not affected their deliberations.
“Given a judge’s special position of influence with a jury, we think a jury’s verdict reached with the knowledge of the judge’s already-announced disposition of the case will rarely be untainted, no matter what the jurors say upon subsequent inquiry,” the appeals court said. |
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Supreme Court rebuffs plea to restore multibllliou-dollar student debt plan
Legal Information |
2024/08/28 13:45
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The Supreme Court on Wednesday kept on hold the latest multibillion-dollar plan from the Biden administration that would have lowered payments for millions of borrowers, while lawsuits make their way through lower courts.
The justices rejected an administration request to put most of it back into effect. It was blocked by the 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.
In an unsigned order, the court said it expects the appeals court to issue a fuller decision on the plan “with appropriate dispatch.”
The Education Department is seeking to provide a faster path to loan cancellation, and reduce monthly income-based repayments from 10% to 5% of a borrower’s discretionary income. The plan also wouldn’t require borrowers to make payments if they earn less than 225% of the federal poverty line — $32,800 a year for a single person.
Last year, the Supreme Court’s conservative majority rejected an earlier plan that would have wiped away more than $400 billion in student loan debt.
Cost estimates of the new SAVE plan vary. The Republican-led states challenging the plan peg the cost at $475 billion over 10 years. The administration cites a Congressional Budget Office estimate of $276 billion.
Two separate legal challenges to the SAVE plan have been making their way through federal courts. In June, judges in Kansas and Missouri issued separate rulings that blocked much of the administration’s plan. Debt that already had been forgiven under the plan was unaffected.
The 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals issued a ruling that allowed the department to proceed with a provision allowing for lower monthly payments. Republican-led states had asked the high court to undo that ruling.
But after the 8th Circuit blocked the entire plan, the states had no need for the Supreme Court to intervene, the justices noted in a separate order issued Wednesday.
The Justice Department had suggested the Supreme Court could take up the legal fight over the new plan now, as it did with the earlier debt forgiveness plan. But the justices declined to do so.
“This is a recipe for chaos across the student loan system,” said Mike Pierce, executive director of the Student Borrower Protection Center, an advocacy group.
“No court has decided on the merits here, but despite all of that borrowers are left in this limbo state where their rights don’t exist for them,” Pierce said.
Eight million people were already enrolled in the SAVE program when it was paused by the lower court, and more than 10 million more people are looking for ways to afford monthly payments, he said.
Sheng Li, litigation counsel with the New Civil Liberties Alliance, a legal group funded by conservative donors, applauded the order. “There was no basis to lift the injunction because the Department of Education’s newest loan-cancellation program is just as unlawful as the one the Court struck down a year ago,” he said in a statement.
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Court orders new hearing for Adnan Syed in ‘Serial’ murder case
State Law Issues |
2024/08/25 13:45
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A 2022 court hearing that freed Adnan Syed from prison violated the legal rights of the victim’s family and must be redone, Maryland’s Supreme Court ruled Friday, marking the latest development in the ongoing legal saga that gained global attention years ago through the hit podcast “Serial.”
The 4-3 ruling means Syed’s murder conviction remains reinstated for the foreseeable future. It comes about 11 months after the court heard arguments last October in a case that has been fraught with legal twists and divided court rulings since Syed was convicted in 2000 of killing his high school ex-girlfriend Hae Min Lee.
Syed has been free since October 2022, and while the Supreme Court's ruling reinstates his convictions, the justices did not order any changes to his release.
The court concluded that in an effort to remedy what was perceived to be an injustice to Syed, prosecutors and a lower court “worked an injustice” against Lee’s brother, Young Lee. The court ruled that Lee was not treated with “dignity, respect, and sensitivity,” because he was not given reasonable notice of the hearing that resulted in Syed being freed.
The court ruled that the remedy was “to reinstate Mr. Syed’s convictions and to remand the case to the circuit court for further proceedings.”
The court also said Lee would be afforded reasonable notice of the new hearing, “sufficient to provide Mr. Lee with a reasonable opportunity to attend such a hearing in person,” and for him or his counsel to be heard.
In a dissenting opinion, Justice Michele Hotten wrote that “this case exists as a procedural zombie.”
“It has been reanimated, despite its expiration,” Hotten wrote. “The doctrine of mootness was designed to prevent such judicial necromancy.”
The latest issue in the case pitted recent criminal justice reform efforts against the legal rights of crime victims and their families, whose voices are often at odds with a growing movement to acknowledge and correct systemic issues, including historic racism, police misconduct and prosecutorial missteps.
The panel of seven judges weighed the extent to which crime victims have a right to participate in hearings where a conviction could be vacated. To that end, the court considered whether to uphold a lower appellate court ruling in 2023 in favor of the Lee family. It reinstated Syed’s murder conviction a year after a judge granted a request from Baltimore prosecutors to vacate it because of flawed evidence.
Syed, 43, has maintained his innocence and has often expressed concern for Lee’s surviving relatives. The teenage girl was found strangled to death and buried in an unmarked grave in 1999. Syed was sentenced to life in prison, plus 30 years.
Syed was released from prison in September 2022, when a Baltimore judge overturned his conviction after city prosecutors found flaws in the evidence. |
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