“Look, I’m a trial judge. I am not anyone that understands the industry and the markets in the way that you do. And so I take seriously when companies are telling me that if this gets disclosed, it’s going to cause competitive harm. And I think it behooves me to be somewhat conservative in thinking about that issue, because, you know, I can’t see around every corner.”

So bring in an industry expert at Google’s expense (but not selected by Google) to advise you on what to make public. This seems obvious to me. Maybe I’m missing something because IANAL.

This is the best summary I could come up with:

Google is a very powerful corporation worth around $2 trillion, it controls access to the internet, and it will roll out generative artificial intelligence for billions of people.

“The Bill Gates on the courtroom screen,” reported the New York Times, “was evasive and uninformed, pedantic and taciturn, a world apart from his reputation as a brilliant business strategist, guiding every step in Microsoft Corp.'s rise to dominance in computing.”

For eight months, the Microsoft antitrust trial was front-page news, the drama of the trillion dollar personal computing revolution unveiled to the public.

One result was that Microsoft, afraid of public exposure years later, refused to use its control over the browser to kill nascent rivals, in particular a young search company called Google.

And yet, Mehta takes them seriously, which has led to an almost-entirely private trial, deadeningly boring to the public because key documents have been deleted and the important or embarrassing moments are held in secret.

Indeed, when the judge expressed a bit of frustration that exhibits were posted publicly, government lawyers immediately pulled down their website and said they would work with Google to make sure everyone was satisfied with the process.

The original article contains 1,784 words, the summary contains 195 words. Saved 89%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!

Fuck

This is scary.