Republished under Creative Commons, Original article from Pluralistic.

Well, fuck.

Last year, Google lost an antitrust case to Biden's DoJ. The DoJ lawyers beat Google like a drum, proving beyond a shadow of a doubt that Google had deliberately sought to create and maintain a monopoly over search, and that they'd used that monopoly to make search materially worse, while locking competitors out of the market.

In other words, the company that controls 90% of search attained that control by illegal means, and, having thus illegitimately become the first port of call for the information-seeking world, had deliberately worsened its product to make more money:

pluralistic.net/2024/04/24/nam…

That Google lost that case was a minor miracle. First, because for 40 years, the richest, most terrible people in the world have been running a literal re-education camp for judges where they get luxe rooms and fancy meals and lectures about how monopolies are good, actually:

pluralistic.net/2021/08/13/pos…

But second, because Judge Amit Mehta decided that the Google case should be shrouded in mystery, suppressing the publication of key exhibits and banning phones, cameras and laptops from the courtroom, with the effect that virtually no one even noticed that the most important antitrust case in tech history, a genuine trial of the century, was underway:

promarket.org/2023/10/27/googl…

This is really important. The government doesn't have to win an antitrust trial in order to create competition. As the saying goes, "the process is the punishment." Bill Gates was so personally humiliated by his catastrophic performance at his deposition for the Microsoft antitrust trial that he elected not to force-choke the nascent Google, lest he be put back in the deposition chair:

pluralistic.net/2020/09/12/wha…
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But Judge Mehta turned his courtroom into a Star Chamber, a black hole whence no embarrassing information about Google's wicked deeds could emerge. That meant that the only punishment Google would have to bear from this trial would come after the government won its case, when the judge decided on a punishment (the term of art is "remedy") for Google.

Yesterday, he handed down that remedy and it is as bad as it could be. In fact, it is likely the worst possible remedy for this case:

gizmodo.com/google-wont-have-t…

Let's start with what's not in this remedy. Google will not be forced to sell off any of its divisions – not Chrome, not Android. Despite the fact that the judge found that Google's vertical integration with the world's dominant mobile operating system and browser were a key factor in its monopolization, Mehta decided to leave the Google octopus with all its limbs intact:

pluralistic.net/2024/11/19/bre…

Google won't be forced to offer users a "choice screen" when they set up their Android accounts, to give browsers other than Chrome a fair shake:

pluralistic.net/2024/08/12/def…

Nor will Google be prevented from bribing competitors to stay out of the search market. One of the facts established in the verdict was that Google had been slipping Apple more than $20b/year in exchange for which, Apple forbore from making a competing search engine. This exposed every Safari and iOS user to Google surveillance, while insulating Google from the threat of an Apple competitor.

And then there's Google's data. Google is the world's most prolific surveiller, and the company boasts to investors about the advantage that its 24/7 spying confers on it in the search market, because Google knows so much about us and can therefore tailor our results. Even if this is true – a big if – it's nevertheless a fucking nightmare. Google has stolen every fact about our lives, in service to propping up a monopoly that lets it steal our money, too. Any remedy worth the name would have required Google to delete ("disgorge," in law-speak) all that data:

pluralistic.net/2024/08/07/rev…

Some people in the antitrust world didn't see it that way. Out of a misguided kind of privacy nihilism, they called for Google to be forced to share the data it stole from us, so that potential competitors could tune their search tools on the monopolist's population-scale privacy violations.

And that is what the court has ordered.

As punishment for being convinced of obtaining and maintaining a monopoly, Google will be forced to share sensitive data with lots of other search engines. This will not secure competition for search, but it will certainly democratize human rights violations at scale.

Doubtless there will be loopholes in this data-sharing order. Google will have the right to hold back some of its data (that is, our data) if it is deemed "sensitive." This isn't so much a loophole as is a loopchasm. I'll bet you a testicle⹋ that Google will slap a "sensitive" label on any data that might be the least bit useful to its competitors.

⹋not one of mine

This means that even if you like data-sharing as a remedy, you won't actually get the benefit you were hoping for. Instead, Google competitors will spend the next decade in court, fighting to get Google to comply with this order.

That's the main reason that we force monopolists to break up after they lose antitrust cases. We could put a bunch of conditions on how they operate, but figuring out whether they're adhering to those conditions and punishing them when they don't is expensive, labor-intensive and time consuming. This data-sharing wheeze is easy to do malicious compliance for, and hard to enforce. It is not an "administrable" policy:

locusmag.com/2022/03/cory-doct…

This is all downside. If Google complies with the order, it will constitute a privacy breach on a scale never before seen. If they don't comply with the order, it will starve competitors of the one tiny drop of hope that Judge Mehta squeezed out of his pen. It's a catastrophe. An utter, total catastrophe. It has zero redeeming qualities. Hope you like enshittification, folks, because Judge Mehta just handed Google an eternal licence to enshittify the entire fucking internet.

It's impossible to overstate how fucking terrible Mehta's reasoning in this decision is. The Economic Liberties project calls it "judicial cowardice" and compared the ruling to "finding someone guilty for bank robbery and then sentencing him to write a thank you note":

economicliberties.us/press-rel…

Matt Stoller says it's typical of today's "lawlessness, incoherence and deference to big business":

thebignewsletter.com/p/a-judge…

David Dayen's scorching analysis in The American Prospect calls it "embarassing":

prospect.org/justice/2025-09-0…

Dayen points out the many ways in which Mehta ignored his own findings, ignored the Supreme Court. Mehta wrote:

This court, however, need not decide this issue, because there are independent reasons that remedies designed to eliminate the defendant’s monopoly—i.e., structural remedies—are inappropriate in this case.

Which, as Dayen points out is literally a federal judge deciding to ignore the law "because reasons."

Dayen says that he doesn't see why Google would even bother appealing this ruling: "since it won on almost every point." But the DoJ could appeal. If MAGA's promises about holding Big Tech to account mean anything at all, the DoJ would appeal.

I'll bet you a testicle⹋ that the DoJ will not appeal. After all, Trump's DoJ now has a cash register at the reception desk, and if you write a check for a million bucks to some random MAGA influencer, they can make all charges disappear:

pluralistic.net/2025/09/02/act…

⹋again, not one of mine

And if you're waiting for Europe to jump in and act where America won't, don't hold your breath. EU Commission sources leaked to Reuters that the EU is going to drop its multi-billion euro fine against Google because they don't want to make Trump angry:

reuters.com/legal/litigation/g…

Sundar Pichai gave $1m to Donald Trump and got a seat on the dais at the inaguration. Trump just paid him back, 40,000 times over. Trump is a sadist, a facist, and a rapist – and he's also a remarkably cheap date.

• Proofpoint researchers observed an increase in opportunistic cybercriminals using malware based on Stealerium, an open-source malware that is available “for educational purposes.”
• Multiple other stealers share significant code overlap with Stealerium, such as Phantom Stealer. Throughout this blog post, we’ll use the name Stealerium to refer to infostealers that share significant overlap with the original Stealerium.
• Threat actors are increasingly pivoting to information stealers, as targeting identity becomes a priority for cybercriminals.

Not Safe for Work: Tracking and Investigating Stealerium and Phantom Infostealers | Proofpoint US

Key findings  Proofpoint researchers observed an increase in opportunistic cybercriminals using malware based on Stealerium, an open-source malware that is available “for educational

^Proofpoint

::: spoiler Comments
- Hacker News.
:::

• 50% of young men say they would rather date an AI girlfriend than risk rejection from a human partner
• 31% of U.S. men aged 18–30 report already chatting with AI girlfriends
• 19% of American adults overall say they have explored AI romance
• 80% of Gen Z say they would consider a virtual relationship with an AI girlfriend
• 83% of Gen Z believe they can form a deep emotional bond with AI companions

Half of Young Men Would Rather Date an AI Girlfriend Than Face Loneliness or Rejection, New Report Reveals

AI girlfriends go mainstream: 80% of Gen Z open to virtual relationships as AI girlfriend market nears $140 billion

^{Girlfriend.ai (Half of Young Men Would Rather Date an AI Girlfriend Than Face Loneliness or Rejection, New Report Reveals)}

Despite having pledged to reach net-zero emissions, major members of Net Zero Asset Managers hold billions of dollars’ worth of fossil-fuel stocks, including those in “carbon bomb” projects, while marketing their funds as green and sustainable.

Meet the UN-backed 'green' investors’ group that invested in fossil fuels - DeSmog

Despite having pledged to reach net-zero emissions, major members of Net Zero Asset Managers hold billions of dollars' worth of fossil-fuel stocks, including those in “carbon bomb” projects, while marketing their funds as green and sustainable.

^{Stefano Valentino (DeSmog)}

• noyb.

noyb WIN: French DPA fines Google €325 million for “Spam Emails” in Gmail

The CNIL fined Google €325 million for creating spam emails in Gmail

^noyb.eu

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Sondaggio libri Settembre-Ottobre 2025

Sondaggione per il libro di settembre e di conseguenza quello di ottobre sondaggio Scadenza sondaggio il 07/09 alle 00:00 così lunedì si parte! 🙂

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