Google avoids jury trial by sending $2.3 million check to US government

So basically the corporate equivalent of slipping a traffic cop a $100, then him conveniently deciding that you're free to go.

More like seventy five cents, given Google's profit margins.
It’s more like paying the ticket without ever showing up in court. And at least where I live, I can do that.
- No - it's actually not like that at all.
  
  Google didn't pay that money just to bypass the formalities along the way to paying a fixed fine - they paid it in order to head off the possibility that they were going to face a jury trial instead of a bench trial, since juries are far more likely to vote in favor of much bigger fines than judges are.
More like saying to the judge "What's the max you can charge me? Alright, here's the money, let's skip the court bullshit." in this case.
- a fine is a price.
- Mm... no. It's really not.
  
  The specific point of all of this was that Google wanted to avoid a jury trial, and the specific reason that they wanted to avoid a jury trial is because a jury trial is much more likely to end up with a much bigger judgment against them. A judge in a bench trial will follow established precedent to arrive at a reasonable penalty, while a jury can and often will essentially arbitrarily decide that they should be fined eleventy bajillion dollars for being assholes.
  
  So their goal with this payment was pretty much exactly the same as the goal of the motorist who slips a traffic cop a bribe to get out of a ticket - to entice someone with immediate cash in order to avoid potentially having to pay much more somewhere down the line.
One has to wonder why corporations are fined such low amounts, in a just world these big corps would be fined in the tens of billions at the lowest.
- Because the low amount is the just amount minus what they paid to the people making decisions.

Sounds a bit unusual, but not unfair - Google just preemptively paid all of the damages that the government was seeking in this particular case, which is the only thing the jury would have been needed to determine. So having a jury would be a complete waste of the jury's time. The rest of the case would be up to the judge anyway.

If the prosecutor thinks they could get more now maybe they should have asked for more earlier. I think this may have been a miscalculation on the prosecution's side.

Not quite...

The government's damages expert calculated damages that were "much higher" than the amount cited by Google, the US filing said. In last week's filing, the higher damages amount sought by the government was redacted.
- That's what the government said after Google paid. But also in the article:
  
  Google said it contained "every dollar the United States could conceivably hope to recover under the damages calculation of the United States' own expert."
  
  ...
  
  In a filing on Wednesday, Google said the DOJ previously agreed that its claims amounted to less than $1 million before trebling and pre-judgment interest. The check sent by Google was for the exact amount after trebling and interest, the filing said. But the "DOJ now ignores this undisputed fact, offering up a brand new figure, previously uncalculated by any DOJ expert, unsupported by the record, and never disclosed," Google told the court.
  
  Siding with Google at today's hearing, Brinkema "said the amount of Google's check covered the highest possible amount the government had sought in its initial filings," the Associated Press reported.
  
  So it sounds to me like the prosecution quoted a figure they thought was high, Google said "sure, we'll pay that," and then the prosecution scrambled to say "no, wait, we want more!" After the fact.
  
  Google's far from my favourite company, but I really don't like the idea of the prosecution being able to arbitrarily jack up their demands after someone agrees to meet them.
The nice thing about trials of corporations is discovery. We have evidence of Google intentionally making search worse, increasing the time spent looking for results, and this improving ad sales. All that came out in discovery.
- Which also makes the trial worth holding.
  
  I don't like this tendency at all. It could be considered not as dangerous when MS and Google and others were like glorified typewriter makers.
  
  But now they affect quite a lot, and this being allowed leads us to catastrophes.

Corporate equivalent to a speeding ticket

A speeding ticket for like .0000000000001% of your daily income.

“This is illegal!”

Bung in the post

“This is legal… for a fee!”

If the punishment is a fine, it is targeted at those who can’t afford the brib—I mean fee.

"hey christians! do you sin? now you can buy your way out of hell!"

What's the fucking point of court if the worst corporations don't even have to show up? That's just fucking stupid.

I think you've misinterpreted. The trial is going ahead, it's just not going to be a jury trial because the only thing the jury would be there for is to determine damages. Since Google is preemptively paying the full fine that the prosecution was asking for there'd be literally nothing for the jury to do there. It'd be a complete waste of time. The trial will instead be a bench trial, decided by a judge alone.

They weren't "getting out of" anything with this payment. The "hell" that Google was facing was exactly the fine that they paid.

This is the best summary I could come up with:

Google has achieved its goal of avoiding a jury trial in one antitrust case after sending a $2.3 million check to the US Department of Justice.

The US opposed Google's motion to strike the jury demand in a filing last week, arguing that "the check it delivered did not actually compensate the United States for the full extent of its claimed damages" and that "the unilateral offer of payment was improperly premised on Google's insistence that such payment 'not be construed' as an admission of damages."

"To secure this unusual posture, several weeks before filing the Complaint, on the eve of Christmas 2022, DOJ attorneys scrambled around looking for agencies on whose behalf they could seek damages," Google said.

The US and states' lawsuit claimed that Google "corrupted legitimate competition in the ad tech industry" in a plan to "neutralize or eliminate ad tech competitors, actual or potential, through a series of acquisitions" and "wield its dominance across digital advertising markets to force more publishers and advertisers to use its products while disrupting their ability to use competing products effectively."

The US government lawsuit said that federal agencies bought over $100 million in advertising since 2019 and aimed to recover treble damages for Google's alleged overcharges on those purchases.

"She likened receipt of the money, which was paid unconditionally to the government regardless of whether the tech giant prevailed in its arguments to strike a jury trial, as equivalent to 'receiving a wheelbarrow of cash.'"

The original article contains 862 words, the summary contains 245 words. Saved 72%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!

I hate google so much is unreal. Any other business/natural person doing things like this will cease immediately but google can do it.

This is just one more demonstration on how colluded are Google and the US government.

They paid the damages that the gov't was seeking, thus avoiding a jury trial. You could do this too if you were ever sued by the gov't for damages, it isn't a tool that's only available to Google.
- Thanks for the clarification
If you get a speeding ticket and agree to pay the speeding ticket instead of going to court, you can feel as powerful as Google.

It may seem unfair, though the judge isn't allowing the Government to use their court to backdoor a exposure of Google's ad business, which doesn't prevent the Government from opening up a Monopoly case (or any other case) against Google, it just means the Government won't be permitted to do this specific thing in this specific way. It's the law and it's pretty simple, and Googles lawyers saw that.