Tech is reshaping the world — and not always for the better. Whether it’s the rules for Apple’s App Store or Facebook’s plan for fighting misinformation, tech platform policies can have enormous ripple effects on the rest of society. They’re so powerful that, increasingly, companies aren’t setting them alone but sharing the fight with government regulators, civil society groups, and internal standards bodies like Meta’s Oversight Board. The result is an ongoing political struggle over harassment, free speech, copyright, and dozens of other issues, all mediated through some of the largest and most chaotic electronic spaces the world has ever seen.
Paramount’s $150 million purchase of The Free Press includes making former op-ed writer Bari Weiss the chief of CBS News.
A court-ordered sale of Google’s ad tech tools could backfire on publishers, the company warned.
Wired is reporting that the Department of Homeland Security is planing increase its surveillance of social media. The government is looking to run a “24 hours per day, 7 days per week, 365 days per year” program that would turn Instagram posts and TikTok clips into leads for deportation raids.
How much should the law defer to an internet hallucination?
We heard more testimony from Google’s technical expert Jason Nieh this afternoon about why he thinks divesting AdX and DFP would be much harder than the DOJ’s experts said. On Monday, the DOJ will bring DailyMail.com chief digital officer Matthew Wheatland in to testify in its rebuttal case, and may add an expert or two.
At a hearing in a federal courthouse in Portland, Oregon, a DOJ attorney defended the president’s federalization of 200 guardsmen. Deputy Assistant Attorney General Eric Hamilton said that the president has met the conditions of 10 U.S.C. 12406, having made a proper determination that Portland has become so violent that “regular forces cannot execute the laws of the United States.”
Which determination would that be? “The most important determination is reflected in posts he made on Truth Social,” Hamilton told Judge Karin J. Immergut, specifying posts made on September 27 and October 1, where the president called Portland a “war zone” occupied by “domestic terrorists.”
Scott Kennedy, representing the state of Oregon, called the president’s posts “vague, incendiary hyperbole that lacks a good faith assessment of the facts,” saying they simply did not line up with the reality of what was happening on the ground.
Former News Corp ad tech executive Stephanie Layser worries that even if Brinkema limits Google’s bad conduct, it will simply find a new way to make things difficult for publishers in ways that will be hard to detect. Layser said she felt like a “conspiracy theorist” about her suspicions Google was harming her business — until discovery in this case.
Google economic expert Andres Lerner testified that in the world that would have existed previously but for Google’s anticompetitive conduct, Google would still have monopoly power. Yet he generally agreed that remedies should unfetter the market from Google’s anticompetitive conduct. Brinkema said that seemed “inconsistent with the concept that some monopoly power can continue. There’s a tension there.”
In unsealed testimony, SpaceX investor Iqbaljit Kahlon says that some Chinese investors are “directly on the cap table.” This may raise some national security concerns, depending on how much information about SpaceX — which is deeply involved with the US defense department — gives to its investors.
Google security engineering VP Heather Adkins testified that while AI can help “autocomplete” some code that might be useful in a forced migration Google’s ad tools, vibe coding doesn’t produce secure enough code yet to make it so that a human doesn’t need to be looped into the process.
Identifying faceless ICE agents. Mutual aid for jailed protesters. Calling JD Vance a fascist. The war on ‘antifa’ is a war on free speech, and it’s just getting started.
Superior, Wisconsin, that is. But it’s great in other places too!
Elizabeth Douglas testified in Google’s defense that breaking up the ad tech tools her business relies on would introduce immense uncertainty in the one part of her business that feels relatively stable in terms of set up. But Google’s AI overviews, she said, are also part of the reason for WikiHow’s uncertain future, since they often keep users from clicking through to its pages.
DOJ attorney David Geiger asked Goodwin about his claim that AT&T’s breakup slowed tech progress — was he also aware it accelerated the development of the cell phone? Goodwin said no, and Brinkema interjected, “yeah, but we lost Bell Labs. That’s what people comment on.”
Former investment banker Shane Goodwin, who specialized in divestitures, gave several examples of such deals that later resulted in assets being sold back to the original firm, or didn’t achieve their goals. One example was the Sprint-T-Mobile merger that required a divestiture to Dish that was meant to result in a formidable 5G competitor.
The company continues its defense today after Brinkema declined to pause the case amid the funding gap for the DOJ.
Brinkema says this includes the fact that the expected outcome of this trial is a court order that Google could be held in contempt of court over if it breaks, and a long list of other lawsuits it faces. Wouldn’t these things temper Google’s behavior? Goel says Google likely would comply with a court order, but the problem is that it’s nearly impossible to list all the ways Google might later figure out how to advantage itself again.
PubMatic’s Goel said he didn’t have enough information about what a divested AdX would entail or how much it would cost to know if he would buy it. It’s a stark contrast from the search trial, where AI companies and rival search firms leapt at the chance to buy Chrome.
Rajeev Goel, CEO of rival ad exchange PubMatic, testified that he spoke to Google eight months ago about an issue where its advertiser tool wouldn’t buy some publisher inventory through PubMatic’s exchange. Goel said Google told him that was due to a bug they’re working to fix. Assuming that’s true, he said, Google still stands to make more money if it deprioritizes a fix.
As Mark Gurman noted in a tweet, the lawsuit claims the management of an Apple Store in Reston, VA, “failed to accommodate an employee’s Jewish faith and subsequently fired him because of his religion and in retaliation for complaining of religion-based discrimination.”
Google executive Nirmal Jayaram, who previously worked on Google’s advertiser tools, warned that a divestiture would likely degrade products for advertisers, and lead more of them to move from open web display ads to other formats that give them a greater return on their investments.
That’s how Google Ad Manager engineering director Glenn Berntson described the difference between a divestiture of AdX that excludes Google’s proprietary infrastructure versus one that includes it. Both are huge undertakings, he said.
Brinkema said she’s thinking about whether she needs to consider different classes of publishers, since those of various sizes have different needs. Some small publishers, for example, may make deals with local businesses for advertising, while others may use Google’s tools only for programmatic ads.
EV sales are sure to dip, and automakers are pulling back their investments. Now the real challenge will emerge.
