. Mid-2020, the firm (ticker symbol still GOOG) performed a stock split. In July 2021, Alphabet announced Intrinsic, a new robotics software company. In November 2021, the formation of a new company, Isomorphic Labss, to promite the use of artificial intelligence in the pharmaceutical world. August 2024, a US district court found Google guilty of violating antitrust law by using unlawful tie-ins to maintain its dominance in what remains its signature product, the search engine. No drastic remedy will be attempted, because the courts notices that the market has been taken over by AI/LLMs of late, and Google has no dominance there. April 2025, another US district court finds Google guilty of illegally monopolizing parts of what is called the adtech stack, I.e. online advertising technology. November 2025, the parties to the adtech case made their final arguments to the court in the eastern district of Virginia as to the proper remedies it should order. ...
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Without getting fancy, here are some key dates: 1996: Larry Page and Sergey Brin experiment with a new type of search engine. In those ancient days search engines simply ranked results by how often a searched-for term appears on a web page. But Page and Brin are after something a bit more sophisticated, a range of metrics that cumulatively determine how important the searched items are on a particular page. They literally used a friend's garage as an office while working on this idea. A cliche is born, the garage-born web business. 1998: The new business is formally created when Page and Brin persuade a co-founder of Sun Microsystems to pony up $100,000 so they can incorporate, set up shop in Menlo Park and hire their first employee. 2002: Yahoo offers to buy out Google for $3 billion. Google holds to a valuation of $5 billion, and the talks end without result. Also this year, in a display of the mainstreaming of the verb form of their name, an episode of t...
A much anticipated trial, the second US-versus-Google this year, unfolded over recent weeks before Judge Brinkema of the US district court for the eastern district of Virginia. Leonie Brinkema, by the way, is a New Jersey native with an undergraduate degree from Rutgers and a law degree from Cornell. She is also a Clinton appointee. Trial began on September 9. In opening arguments, the Department of Justice's lead attorney, Julia Tarver Wood, spoke of Google huge share of the market for the sale of online ads (87%). It is the almost-indispensable middle-man between someone who wants to advertise and the ad pages on which the ad will eventually be seen. It is selling to you (if "you" are an ad manager for a company with something to sell) the value of its algorithms, which help your ads find your products demographic niche. Wood spoke about how Google has aggressively bought up ad software companies like DoubleClick and AdMeld. She spoke, too, of how Google locks you in...
This year will be remembered for at least five very high-profile trials, each offering a window on a different part of American life. We will discuss them all today and tomorrow. To be frank, there is a little bit of duplication. Two of them are antitrust cases. But they are very distinct examples thereof and, to reduce any sense of overlap, we will begin today with one of the antitrust matters and end tomorrow with the other. 1. Apple v. Department of Justice In March of this year, DoJ antitrust enforcers will make their case that Apple has imposed both hardware and software limits on their iPads and iPhones to make life difficult for competitors. The messaging service Beeper, the bluetooth tracker concern Life360 Inc, and Spotify Technology are all alleged to have been victimized by Apple's hardball. The defendant company hasn't had much to say about this, aside from very general assertions that it doesn't hold a monopoly in any market...
We proceed to some cases in which the court's concern is the interpretation of statutes. Copyright and Fair Use 18-956 Google LLC v. Oracle America, Inc. (04/05/2021) (supremecourt.gov) In intellectual property, this session will be remembered for its decision in the procedurally complicated Google v. Oracle. Even that name is resonant: it suggests a legal battle of corporate giants of King Kong versus Godzilla proportions. I wrote about this case in this blog in October, and I refer those readers who might want background to that discussion . It was obvious by the time the case was argued last fall that there were two ways Google could win: either it could convince the judges that application programming interfaces (APIs) were not copyrightable, OR it could persuade them that this use of the Java API (now owned by Oracle) is a fair use even if the copyright exists. At argument, Stephen Breyer made a fascinating observation. He compared the Java API...
On Friday, March 12, the president of Microsoft testified before the antitrust subcommittee of the Judiciary Committee of the House of Representatives. The panel is investigating the news business. Traditional newspapers are dying off, and they are being replaced by digitized news sources that seem few and overly powerful. This was, indeed, the point Microsoft's Brad Smith was making. Google is the big bad monopolist. Nobody else can compete in the world of digital news because Google has blocked all the avenues for doing so. There oughta be a law!!! The wheel of fate has turned. Not too many years ago, it was Microsoft that was the big bad monopolist, and the forces of government were needed, so we heard, in order to cut MS down to size. But the government lost those cases, and the markets did find a work-around. Let's pause and contemplate the turn of the wheel. Back in the day when Microsoft was the defendant, these were the arguments: digital computers are a new th...
Regular readers of this blog may remember that I have on earlier occasion covered the very slow march through the court system of a monster of an intellectual property case, the dispute over the legality of Google's use of Java interfaces in its Android coding. But to review: years ago Oracle bought Sun, the company whose engineers had created the Java programming language, on which various APIs (application programming interfaces) have in turn been built. The dispute is a matter of copyright, not of patents. And early on in this litigation, Google took the position that there is no copyrightable interest in APIs. The Federal Circuit held against that view, and remanded to the trial courts for consideration of whether Google use is "fair use" under copyright doctrine, or unfair and thus infringing use. The Supreme Court, in 2015, declined to hear an appeal from the Federal Circuit, so Google resigned itself to fighting that battle in the trenches of a trial. The jury ...
I believe I may have mentioned at some point in the history of this blog, or its precursor, that at least one great physicist, Roger Penrose, believes quantum mechanics offers the key to the understanding of how consciousness arises within the function of the human brain. Today, I simply want to make the observation that quantum computing is no longer a hypothesis. It is a fact. Google declared its breakthrough this year. Some of the premier quantitative-analytic hedge funds in the world, including Renaissance and DE Shaw, have high hopes for quantum computing and expect that it will help them discover and make profitable use of now-invisible patterns in the markets. Let us be clear on what Google is saying. It says it has physical operating computers that make use of the quantum aspects of matter to outperform conventional (digital) computers for some specific tasks, a situation it grandly calls quantum supremacy. The qualifying phrase there, "some specific tasks,"...
It almost seems quaint, nowadays, the focus of some of us a few years back, at the start of this millennium, on the supposed monopolization of the search engine by Google. Three political scientists coined the term "Googlearchy" in 2003, in this passage: Though no one expected that every page on the Web would receive an exactly equal share of attention, many have assumed that the Web would be dramatically more egalitarian in this regard than traditional media. Our empirical results, however, suggest enormous disparities in the number of links pointing to political sites in a given category. In each of the highly diverse political communities we study, a small number of heavily-linked sites receive more links than the rest of the sites combined, effectively dominating the community they are a part of […] It seems quaint because we've all made our peace with search engines, as part of our normal working life. The action, the controversy, has moved on to social m...
How can we use statistics to get at causal impact? Of course, correlation does not imply causation. Remember my lesson from a Dilbert's comic last week. But still, there are inferences to be drawn somehow. It may be a fact that MacDonald's just spent a lot of money on an ad campaign involving firecrackers and tapdancing penguins. It may be, also, that they sold a million hamburgers worldwide yesterday. It does not follow that they sold the million hamburgers because of that ad campaign. What MacDonald's clearly wants is some idea of how many hamburgers they would have sold if they had had some other ad campaign in place, possibly some less expensive campaign. Something involving their familiar clown and his sidekicks. Here's a social sciency thing about "Bayesian structural time-series models" that aims at getting at the problem. It's actually based on the experiences of Google, paid clicks versus free clicks, etc. -- I just prefer the MacDonald...
On April 3, plaintiffs withdrew a lawsuit against Google in a federal court in northern California, a lawsuit in which they had contended that Google was illegally tying its licensing of the Android operating system to the favorable treatment of Google apps. They didn't withdraw their complaint because they had a change of heart. They did so because an earlier ruling by this court had pulled their ladder out from under them. It was jump to the ground or take a nasty fall. Here's a link to a news story on the subject. What is striking about this lawsuit is how much it resembles similar lawsuits brought against Microsoft back when it was the great digital boogeyman. Then, too, the central argument was a tying theory. [Sometimes that is written "tie-in." Fortunately, the two phrases sound the same, so when people speak to one another about these matters, there's no real chance for confusion. One creates a tie-in by tying one product or service to another, ...