Google Convicted of Stealing the Internet
Penalties could include breaking up its search business
Aug. 6: Google guilty … Harris officially nominated … Stock market recovers unrecovers … New Trump Ukraine revelations …
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A federal judge yesterday ruled that Google, which doesn’t need an explanatory clause here because it’s a monopoly, is a monopoly.
Importantly, the judge found that Google is not just a monopoly when it comes to stealing the search engine field from everyone else. Just as/more importantly, Google was found guilty of monopolistically stealing the ad business driven by search.
“Google is a monopolist, and it has acted as one to maintain its monopoly,” Judge Amit Mehta wrote.
Google’s punishment will be decided in a later ruling. Obviously none of the individuals who committed these crimes will be punished with anything other than quarterly bonuses. Prison time is generally reserved for serious crimes such as lifting a pack of smokes.
Unlike small-time criminals, Google will not go to jail, and will definitely keep passing Go and collecting $200 an estimated 3.07 million times a day.1
The penalties facing Google the corporation (a legal fiction rich people use to commit crimes) could range from having to stop committing their crimes to having to break up the criminal gang that did the crimes. In other words, disassembling Google’s search business.
Google’s victims testified against their assailant during the trial. DuckDuckGo testified about Google’s cruelty to AnimalsAnimals. And even after the ruling, a DuckDuckGo OfficialOfficialSaid, “As we are seeing in the [European Union] and other places, Google will do anything it can to avoid changing its conduct.”
Prosecutors were unable to locate star witness AskJeeves.
And if the judge’s name sounds like a question — “Am it Meta?” — the answer appears to be, “Yes, sweet Newsfucker. Oh, yes. It am Meta.”
Because Meta (Facebook’s parent), and Amazon, and Apple, are all facing federal lawsuits that will likely be influenced by Mehta’s ruling.
And, yes, the Biden administration has been tough on anti-trust law and Big Tech monopolies, with Federal Trade Commission Commissioner Lina Khan waving the banner at the head of the front lines.
And, of course, Big Tech are now flocking to former Pres. Donald Trump in support of his political ideology that rich and powerful people should be able to do what they want.
And yet — ironic twist! — these anti-monopoly cases, including Google, were launched under Trump. How come? Surely it’s a coincidence that Silicon Valley back then was seen as largely Democratic?!?
Google President of Global Affairs Kent Walker said the company will appeal the ruling. “This decision recognizes that Google offers the best search engine, but concludes that we shouldn’t be allowed to make it easily available,” Walker lied in a prepared liement.
Please note that Walker is claiming that, under Mehta’s ruling, people won’t be able to find Google on their own, without Google paying billions to jam it up your ass every time you use any other business online. In other words, that you won’t be able to find a search engine.
Walker also lied that, “[W]e will remain focused on making products that people find helpful and easy to use.”
In fact, as Cory Doctorow has brilliantly explained with help from his great neologism, Google is dedicated to enshittifying itself. And us.
Basically, enshittification means that Google started off great, offering people a powerful search engine. It worked. People started using it and verbing it.
Wanna know how good Google was? Just Google it. OH WAIT.
I literally googled how good was google? Here’s what Google gave me:
As you can see, Google’s stupid artificial non-intelligence non-answered me in the present tense. About the present.
“Was” is not a fucking SAT word, stupid artificial non-intelligence!
So how did Google become not the best search engine? Google started off with the slogan “Don’t Be Evil” but downsized the “Don’t” part.
To make money off people, Google started offering them up to advertisers. Which meant serving searchers less and advertisers more. In short, enshittifying Google.
Which is why, as you may have noticed, Google now sucks. We’re still using it because, as Judge Mehta noticed, it’s a monopoly.
And Google’s not uniquely evil. Over decades we’ve warped our economic and regulatory systems to reward evil. So obviously people will use their corporations for evil.
Think about Twitter, AI, bitcoin. All started with noble goals. (Not including Facebook, which was created to objectify college students.)
All are now enemies of humanity. And all now work worse than they did at birth.
Just this weekend, we learned that five state attorneys general are asking Twitter to stop using AI to tell people that Vice President Kamala Harris can’t legally be on some state ballots. Y’know who wouldn’t have lied about that? Fucking Jeeves.
Enshittification doesn’t just happen. Which is why aggressive regulation and judicious judicial rulings can deshittify it.
Meet Your Official Democratic Presidential Nominee
The Democratic Party last night formally finished counting the votes of its delegates, who overwhelmingly chose Vice Pres. Kamala Harris as the party’s 2024 presidential nominee.
If elected, Harris will be the first woman to hold the office. And the first Black woman to hold the office. And the first South Asian person to do so. And the first Indian-American person to do so. And the first Kamala Harris to do so.
It’s almost like one (1) person can be many (∞) things at once!
Harris secured the backing of the requisite number of delegates within less than two days of announcing her campaign once Pres. Joe Biden stepped aside.
Just before midnight last night, the party announced that 99% of delegates casting votes had backed Harris.
A robust fight for the nomination likely would have helped sharpen her for the rest of the race, but so far she seems to be doing pretty okay without it.
She’s scheduled to announce her vice-presidential running mate about one minute after I hit “Send.”
Biden, Harris Tank, Save, and Tank Global Economy in 24-Hour Rollercoaster
After tanking the global market yesterday, Pres. Joe Biden saved it overnight, but is now tanking it again.
You may remember that Biden caused global stock markets to crash yesterday. Uh, somehow. Overnight, however, the markets began to recover. For, um, some reason. But by the time the sun came up on Wall Street, the recovery had started to melt due to, er, things.
I’m not gonna bother with where markets are right now, because by the time you read this, the panicking but very smart and sophisticated Wall Street bros who hold the marionette strings for our economy will be doing something else.
As your ever-serving TFN reminded you yesterday, there are no fundamentals driving this rollercoaster. It’s Wall Street bros in their fee fees about ephemeral job numbers and/or obscure Japanese trading strategies and things will settle down and likely be less than a footnote come November.
Which is too bad, because it means political journalists won’t bother reminding us in November that Trump said this yesterday:
“STOCK MARKETS CRASHING. I TOLD YOU SO!!! KAMALA DOESN’T HAVE A CLUE. BIDEN IS SOUND ASLEEP. ALL CAUSED BY INEPT U.S. LEADERSHIP!”
And then followed that up — after someone shpritzed Trump’s keyboard to unstick the Caps Lock key from its cocoon of dried flecks of Trump spittle and orange spray tan — with this:
“Of course there is a massive market downturn. Kamala is even worse than Crooked Joe.”
Never mind that it took genius Wall Street bros a week, by Trump’s reckoning, to figure out that Harris is the nominee. As savvy investors know, Trump controls stock market rises, while Democrats are in charge of sell-offs. This too and three and four shall fucking pass.
Three Quickies
Your dogged TFN published some original, albeit overdue reporting yesterday. Turns out that two of the key figures in the Trump/Giuliani scheme to smear Ukrainian corruption all over Joe Biden had ties to the National Prayer Breakfast. One of them was secretly a Russian agent at the time. One was invited to the breakfast by the same breakfast insider who swanned Maria Butina and Alexander Torshin around.
At the risk of overindulging in cheer-you-up polls, I do recommend just a soupçon of this one. The first big post-Biden presidential poll of Latinos shows Vice Pres. Kamala Harris with 55% support to 37% for former Pres. Donald Trump…in battleground states. Harris hasn’t recaptured the numbers Biden had in 2020, but she has improved on where Biden was in 2024. And unlike Biden, the day is still young.
Washington state’s all-party primary is today. Incumbent Rep. Dan Newhouse (R-WA) voted to impeach then-Pres. Donald Trump. So Trump is endorsing two of Newhouse’s Republican rivals in today’s primary. Two. Or “dos” as Democrats say.
TCB
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Go get ‘em, kids!
I did some math on Google’s earnings and probably got it wrong.
Cory's work is where I was able to make sense of what I was seeing happen on a daily basis in technology. It would be nice to think something good may finally come of this, but an appeal to SCOTUS and it's result are probably dependent on how much grift Clarence and Sammy are able to gain from the tech bros.