That is equally satisfied by having the court proceedings sealed for a given time, for example 5 years. By then, the information is nearly worthless to a competitor.
There's nothing about industry secrets. Google's lawyers don't want to "embarrass" the company or its execs.
The irony is, the company makes a lot of money from 'clickbait'.
Eric Schmidt, then Google CEO
Google maybe even signed an agreement to keep that secret, so they aren't allowed to reveal evidence about Apple or Microsoft to the public, in that case it wouldn't be fair for the court to force Google to breach that contract just to defend themselves.
Closing the court sessions eliminates that assurance. We have seen multiple times in our history that closed sessions are used to break the laws and conventions of this country in a way that harms our citizens and degrades their rights (see FISA court).
> That is equally satisfied by having the court proceedings sealed for a given time, for example 5 years. By then, the information is nearly worthless to a competitor.
There's an old saying, "justice delayed is justice denied". If in 5 years it turns out this this judge (who has since retired/died) violated all common sense and fair administration of the law, what happens? Nothing. Hell, even if they are still in office, what's the worst that will happen? They resign in shame? Meanwhile 300 million American people spend 5 years suffering the ill effects of the miscarriage of justice. That is not a fair return and it's not justice.
Secrecy is largely incompatible with democracy and justice. Think of why wikileaks was so damaging: because our government did things that were illegal, immoral, and kept them a secret from us. Same thing with the FISA court, which basically eliminated the 4th amendment. And at least those instances relied on the idea that they were special needs due to foreign intelligence requirements and security; Google's only argument is that they might lose money.
If a currently in progress trial is corrupt, we can prevent the harm that a corrupt outcome will cause before it happens. If you have to wait 5 years to discover that the trial was corrupt then we get at least 5 years of harm out of it. Potentially much more because have to retry the case years later will be much much more difficult due to evidence destruction.
One might imagine that if any unfairness is discovered, laws and processes are adjusted for future cases, but past cases will not be re-reviewed.
Because honestly, …we’re way past that point in pretty much every country of the world. People are too demoralized or weak to do anything about it, but just for intellectual curiosity, what is supposed to happen when something abnormal happens in our societies?
Don't agree. One purpose of public trials is to show the public how much the authorities disapprove of <criminal act X>. That is, public trials are intrinsically show-trials.
A second purpose is to punish the defendant for pleading Not Guilty (and/or warn others of the consequences of such a plea); even if you are innocent, your actions will be paraded in public, and subjected to the harshest possible criticism.