The judge overseeing the historic antitrust case against Google has unsealed closed-door testimony from two crucial witnesses, addressing criticism about the trial’s lack of transparency. This move aims to optimize the content for SEO while enhancing creativity and uniqueness, improving syntax and tone, increasing perplexity and burstiness, and retaining the HTML tags.
Responding to concerns from antitrust advocates, Judge Amit Mehta ordered the release of significant portions of the testimonies given by DuckDuckGO CEO Gabriel Weinberg and Apple AI boss John Giannandrea during the trial.
Judge Mehta carefully reviewed the transcripts and considered redaction requests from the involved companies before deciding which portions to make public. The judge also revealed that partial transcripts from other notable witnesses, including Apple services chief Eddy Cue, will also be released.
Joel Thayer, an attorney representing two nonprofits, expressed satisfaction with the judge’s decision, calling it a “solid start.” However, Thayer hopes that further redactions will not be made by the parties involved, as it would affect transparency.
The trial has experienced a major shift as it has not held any closed-door sessions this week. In the early days of the trial, key witnesses were frequently removed from the public view for discussions on sensitive information, as reported by the Big Tech on Trial newsletter.
The Department of Justice (DOJ) has argued that Google pays smartphone makers and mobile carriers more than $10 billion annually to maintain its search engine as the default option on most devices. The DOJ claims that this practice suppresses competition and enables Google to maintain a dominant 90% market share.
Google maintains that these payments are fair compensation to its partners and asserts that customers choose its search engine because it offers the best product in the market.
The tech giant’s legal team has been fighting to keep certain documents and testimonies confidential during the trial, citing sensitive information about internal operations and trade secrets.
In one instance, Google attempted to block the release of a 2017 document in which Michael Roszak, the company’s vice president for finance, praised the “world’s greatest business model” of search advertising, comparing it to only “illicit businesses (cigarettes or drugs) that could rival these economics.”
The Post has reached out to Google, Apple, and DuckDuckGo for comment.
The unsealed testimony from DuckDuckGo’s Weinberg and Apple’s Giannanadrea revealed significant details that would have otherwise remained hidden from public scrutiny.
For instance, Weinberg testified that his team had extensive discussions with top Apple executives in 2018 and 2019 regarding making DuckDuckGo’s privacy-focused search engine the default setting for Apple’s Safari browser in private mode, as reported by Bloomberg.
Weinberg said, “We were talking about it, I thought they would launch it.”
Giannandrea, a former Apple head of search, expressed his belief in February 2019 that using DuckDuckGo as the default search engine for Safari’s private browsing function would be a “bad idea.”
In the end, Apple decided to maintain Google as its default search engine partner.
Last week, Judge Mehta ruled that the DOJ could publish trial exhibits on a publicly available website. However, Google and Apple have the right to contest which items should be revealed and which should remain sealed.
Judge Mehta will ultimately determine the outcome of the case.
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