Judge “in a pickle” after Google demands DOJ stop sharing public trial exhibits | Hacker News Reader

Judge “in a pickle” after Google demands DOJ stop sharing public trial exhibits

arstechnica.com

23 pointsthunderbong4 comments

> Civil rights groups tracking the trial have previously criticized Mehta for protecting Google's privacy over the public's interest. And last week—as the DOJ claimed Google was hiding evidence by training employees to avoid words monopolists use in office communications—Mehta allowed Google to seal off testimony from a Verizon executive despite the DOJ's objections. The DOJ seems increasingly concerned that blocking public access to key facts in the trial establishing Google's alleged monopoly might hurt its case.

Emphasis mine - it sounds like this judge is leaning quite amenably to Google at this stage. He is giving them quite a few concessions in this case. This is essentially allowing Google to hide some of the DOJ’s most compelling evidence from the public.

That said, this article is a bit hard to follow though exactly what is happening. I suspect even the author isn’t quite sure the exact nature of the evidence, which speaks to the effectiveness, for Google, of conducing the trial with confidentiality.

So more interesting bits:

> "Supporting the conclusion that Google is a monopolist," the DOJ said that its accounting expert, Christine Hammer, will testify "that Google turns an exceptionally high profit margin"—[redacted] percent—"on its search and search advertising businesses." Without knowing the profit margin precisely, the concern is that it might be difficult for the public to come to the same conclusion as the DOJ does about whether those margins are "exceptionally high," and that might make a difference in how the public views Google's alleged monopolistic behaviors.

I mean this is a real phenomenon. I would probably personally feel differently if that number is 5%, 10%, 100%, 1500%… in fact that’s basically one of the only numbers you need to know. If that return is excessively high compared to other non-monopolized businesses, that speaks to monopolistic forces creating barriers to competition flourishing in the space.

>“That’s something I wish I’d been told,” Mehta said. “I think a judge is told before evidence in the record is actually put on a publicly available website"

Wow. He said that into a microphone that he knew was recording? That's... distressing.

I'm not sure I understand exactly what is wrong with the judge saying that discoverably.

That he said it into a mic isn't a problem because it's discoverable, it's shocking because it suggests it wasn't an offhand comment, it was something he thought about before saying it out loud.

Evidence entered into the record in court cases is public by default unless the judge takes action to seal that evidence. Unsealed evidence is used to generate news, compiled for research, reviewed for commentary, etc.

Usually in these sorts of cases (where all sorts of sensitive info will be put into the record) there are agreements made between all parties before the trial about what will be shared publicly and what will be kept confidential.

So, he's not wrong. Usually there is an agreement in place governing what information will be shared, how it will be shared, when it will be shared, etc. But there wasn't an agreement in this case, and it's weird that he's acting like someone should have told him instead of acting embarrassed that he didn't know that.

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