If they don’t want you to know things, it’s likely those things don’t make them look good.
That rule applies to basically every organization, from the federal government to universities to corporations.
And to the Big Tech corporations testifying in the federal government’s antitrust suit against Google, the first big monopoly trial in a quarter-century.
Google has spent the last couple of decades hoovering up everyone’s private information for its own use, but it wants to make sure the public knows as little as possible about what it’s doing to the public.
Normally in litigation like this, all sorts of information about the defendant’s business practices would come out.
Google is doing its best to see that none does.
So what’s Google hiding?
What little has leaked looks embarrassing, at the least.
One document the company unsuccessfully tried to keep behind closed doors — Judge Amit Mehta made it public — involved a Google vice president bragging about how “addictive” the search giant’s services are, comparing them to tobacco and illicit drugs.
The executive, Michael Roszak, said that means Google is free to “mostly ignore the demand side” — i.e., consumers — in favor of “the supply side of advertisers, ad formats, and sales.”
In short, Google’s products are, by design, so addictive that it can exploit its users for economic gain without worrying about what the users themselves actually want or need.
(As a consumer of Google’s steadily worsening products over the past decade or so, this claim is highly plausible.)
Google now says Roszak’s views don’t reflect the company’s, but it’d pretty much have to say that, wouldn’t it?
This could prove damning in another lawsuit the feds have filed against Google that could go to trial next year — on its online-advertising monopoly.
What else is being hidden? We don’t know because, well, it’s being hidden.
Now every business has trade secrets, and federal rules allow courts to keep vital business matters under seal.
But this case has angered experts in the field by allowing much more secrecy than in previous antitrust cases against Big Tech companies.
Federal antitrust suits against AT&T, IBM and Microsoft all involved confidential data.
But as numerous experts interviewed for a recent New York Times story indicated, this case departs from previous standards.
“The secrecy surrounding the proceedings is unprecedented in antitrust trials,” Carnegie Mellon professor Diane Rulke declared, and the Times’ “other antitrust experts” also “described the proceedings as unusually opaque, adding that the government’s antitrust case against Microsoft more than 24 years ago was far more accessible to the public and the press.”
One of secrecy’s more destructive aspects is it invites speculation about what’s being kept secret.
One possibility is that a more open approach would reveal just how closely Big Tech firms like Google have been working with the federal government to shape public opinion and even influence elections.
(Apple and Microsoft have joined Google in trying to keep this litigation under wraps.)
Former Popular Mechanics editor and expert conspiracy-theory debunker James Meigs notes in City Journal this is no conspiracy theory: Newly released documents show White House and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention officials working hand in hand with tech companies and social-media platforms to censor views and reports about COVID and its origins that turn out to have been true.
Google’s video platform, YouTube, even removed a “roundtable discussion in which Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis discussed COVID policy with a group of scientists,” including Stanford’s Jay Bhattacharya.
The sin: Some experts doubted the benefits of masks for small children.
The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals recently found that government officials engaged in an extensive program of coercion to censor search and social-media results.
And this paper’s reporting on Hunter Biden’s laptop just before the 2020 election was censored across many platforms.
Twitter (now X) didn’t even allow users to share links to it via direct message.
Of course, perhaps Google is just embarrassed about things it does to make its products addictive, as Roszak bragged; that’s the sort of thing that got tobacco companies in trouble, after all.
And there’s certainly plenty of that going on in the tech sphere.
As I wrote in my book “The Social Media Upheaval,” not only do tech firms go out of their way to make their products addictive, one of the companies consulting on those techniques is actually called Dopamine Labs.
Well, sunlight is the best disinfectant.
Over the past few years, huge tech companies like Google have assumed enormous economic and political power, often working hand-in-glove with unelected bureaucrats to suppress political opposition.
Antitrust law is, at core, about unwarranted power, and the American public deserves to know how those companies got that power and what they’re doing with it.
Judge Mehta, let the sun shine.
Glenn Harlan Reynolds is a professor of law at the University of Tennessee and founder of the InstaPundit.com blog.
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