Like the IBM forever-lawsuit.
> The Department of Justice began its antitrust case against IBM on January 17, 1969. The DOJ sued under the Sherman Antitrust Act, claiming IBM tried to monopolize the market for "general-purpose digital computers." The case lasted almost thirteen years, ending on January 8, 1982 when Assistant Attorney General William Baxter declared the case to be "without merit" and dropped the charges.
> The case lasted so long, and expanded in scope so much, that by the time the trial began, “more than half of the practices the government raised as antitrust violations were related to products that did not exist in 1969."
https://truthonthemarket.com/2020/02/03/the-ghosts-of-antitr...
It's embarrassing that law/courts are utterly unable to do anything at all to large businesses behaviors. They are so slow in matters of consequence as to be useless.
Counterpoint, maybe it really was meritless?
My thought is no. IBM was worse and more aggressive than Microsoft back in the day.
And yet they still lost their place on the top of the pile without any government intervention. Free market in action!
[dead]
Paywall / archive: <https://archive.is/CNDba>
Ok I can’t read the full article so apologies if they push back, but this seems like shareholder-directed hopium, to use the technical term.
1. The Search Ads case (trial?) has just entered the “remedy” phase after Google was found liable: https://www.justice.gov/atr/media/1367481/dl
2. The Display Ads trial did just start recently and it’s (IMO) more complex, but still, the government seems to have be pushing quite an aggressive line, with language like “they’re maintaining three separate monopolies”: https://www.justice.gov/atr/case-document/file/1566706/dl
3. TIL they already lost the Android trial, too! As of August the judge was considering remedies: https://apnews.com/article/google-play-store-android-apps-an...
4. On top of all that, Pichai himself was caught absolutely red-handed illegally hiding materials from legal discovery mechanisms, going as far as to ask interlocutors to move sensitive conversations to more ephemeral media. That’s on top of the org-level violations, namely a) setting GoogleChat to 24h auto delete as a sudden unexplained “security precaution”, and b) writing “attorney client privilege” on basically every engineering slide deck and technical memo that might possibly be sensitive, even though there’s no attorneys in sight. It looks like they were found guilty of this in May in one federal court and are being pursued in the other for it, but the punishments haven’t been announced yet. See: https://www.cnn.com/2023/03/29/tech/judge-google-deleted-cha...
5. Somehow, there’s no active federal case regarding Chrome, which kinda blows my mind. But with Mozilla collapsing and Display Ad changes coming down the pipe, this seems inevitable… here’s a hilarious article from 2008 tho where Microsoft promises to crush Chrome with Internet Explorer https://www.independent.co.uk/tech/google-may-face-antitrust...