Guys, Google’s antitrust trial begins today!

The case revolvesaround [sic] whether Google illegally used its leading industry position to limit competition in its core search and search advertising businesses. It’s the first such antitrust trial against a technology company in more than two decades; the Justice Department took Microsoft to court on similar charges more than two decades ago.

I love this quote from the Business Insider email thingie:

“People don’t use Google because they have to — they use it because they want to,” Google’s president of global affairs, Kent Walker, told Hugh in a statement.

So explain to us why “Google squashed its competition by paying Apple and others to be the default search provider, all while deterring users from rival services.” It should be LIT, and the ramifications will ripple across a lot of tech, especially as all the AI (fancy autocomplete) technology is rolling out.

Apple executives, for example, could be called to testify during the trial, something it fought hard against.

More broadly, the case is a bellwether for how the government could argue future cases against Big Tech companies in the modern era.

The Federal Trade Commission sued Amazon this year in a case that argues the tech giant lured unwitting customers into Prime subscriptions that were difficult to cancel. The suit is a result of an Insider investigation in early 2022.

And a trial for the FTC’s antitrust case against Meta over its acquisition of Instagram and WhatsApp is currently in the discovery phase.

Each case is unique, but their focus on monopolistic behavior means the Google trial could set precedents followed by both sides.

And in related Google news (GIFT LINK),

Chrome has new privacy settings. Here’s what to change now

From the stats I can see on WordPress, a good number of people come to my blog Mock Paper Scissors via Chrome, so this is relevant to some of you. So why do you want to change settings?

This is a new way Google is trying to track what you do on the web to help advertisers target you. Google says this is better for your privacy than older tracking methods. But it’s still tracking — and people who care about their privacy may want to shut it off. It’s all part of Google’s promise to phase out the use of cookies for tracking in Chrome.

Always remember that YOU are the product that Google sells to advertisers. They know an extraordinary amount about you; if you let them, they will know much more.

As regular readers know, I got rid of Facebook somewhere around 2008, got rid of Xitter (rhymes with Twitter) last year, and I have been trying to get Google out of my life for a while, but it is harder to do.

Republished with permission from Mock, Paper, Scissors.