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In the most significant legal ruling against a major technology giant in more than two decades, a federal judge says Google illegally monopolized online search and advertising by paying companies like Apple and Samsung billions of dollars a year to install Google as the default search engine on smartphones and web browsers.

By monopolizing search queries on smartphones and browsers, Google abused its dominance in the search market, throttling competition and harming consumers, U.S. District Judge Amit P. Mehta said in his 286-page decision. Google owes much of its more than $300 billion in annual revenue to search ads.

“Google is a monopolist, and it has acted as one to maintain its monopoly,” Mehta wrote.

“Google is a monopolist, and it has acted as one to maintain its monopoly,” Mehta wrote.

In more terrific legal news, the Associated Press reported the shocking news yesterday that “Google illegally maintains monopoly over internet search, judge rules.” You don’t say.

The decision capped a years-old lawsuit filed by President Trump’s DOJ. In what AP called a “setback” for Google, Federal Judge Amit Mehta entered a whopping two hundred and seventy-five page ruling, longer than a normal novel, finding that Google has illegally monopolized search. Among many other things, Judge Mehta noted that Google spends almost $30 billion dollars a year to ensure its service is set as the default on nearly every device in the world.

“After having carefully considered and weighed the witness testimony and evidence, the court reaches the following conclusion: Google is a monopolist, and it has acted as one to maintain its monopoly,” Judge Mehta wrote. Google “enjoys an 89.2% share of the market for general search services, which increases to 94.9% on mobile devices,” the ruling explained.

The order didn’t prescribe what happens next, such as whether Google should be broken up. (Yes, please.) But the court scheduled a follow-up hearing on September 6th to discuss the remedy. Google has vowed to appeal, a process that could tie things up for years.

But even better, commenters expect a whole new crop of class-action lawsuits citing the judge’s findings, arguing that advertisers were gouged by Google’s monopolistic pricing.

One wonders. Had Google not abandoned its original motto of “Don’t Be Evil,” might it have avoided the DOJ’s crosshairs? Once again, we see the example of a big corporation that decides to dabble in politics and then discovers what happens next. (Ahem, Disney.)

As a libertarian-minded conservative, I generally object to government meddling in markets. But there is a place for anti-trust laws, and I can’t think of a more deserving target of scrutiny than this particular search giant. Thus, it’s progress.

Google is an illegal monopoly according to a US Federal Judge. The thrust of the case — which began 4 years ago — is that Google has a monopoly in the search market (90% of US searches; 95% of mobile US searches). The judge says that Google initially created that monopoly through ingenuity, a better product and superior business skills. But it has since maintained that monopoly position with “a major, largely unseen advantage over its rivals: default distribution”.

Google does this by paying browsers (Mozilla), smartphone makers (Samsung) and telecom companies — usually through revenue share agreements — to be the default search option, which drives its massive digital ad business. These type of payments are deemed anticompetitive and now total $26B a year, with the largest chunk ($20B) going to Apple to be the default search option in the Safari browser.

House investigates Meta, Google over Trump assassination attempt info

The House Committee on Oversight and Accountability is investigating Meta's AI assistant and Google's search autocomplete after a failed assassination attempt on former President Donald Trump in July.
Chairman Comer sent letters to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Google CEO Sundar Pichai requesting documents on their AI technologies' design and potential censorship.
The committee aims to understand how information might be suppressed or modified by these companies, according to Chairman Comer's statement.

Google Growth Strategist Exposes Google’s Search Engine Manipulation For Kamala Harris’s Campaign

Dakota Leazer revealed that Google has been actively coordinating with the Kamala Harris campaign, manipulating its search engine advertisements to favor her in the 2024 election.

As previously reported, the Harris Campaign edited news headlines with Google search ads to make it appear major news outlets such as Reuters, CBS News, CNN, NPR and AP are on her side.

While these major news outlets are shilling for Harris, her campaign edited the news headlines without the outlets’ consent or knowledge.

Google Growth Strategist Exposes Google’s Search Engine Manipulation For Kamala Harris’s Campaign

Dakota Leazer revealed that Google has been actively coordinating with the Kamala Harris campaign, manipulating its search engine advertisements to favor her in the 2024 election.

Google’s true origin partly lies in CIA and NSA research grants for mass surveillance

The intelligence community and Silicon Valley have a long history

Two decades ago, the US intelligence community worked closely with Silicon Valley in an effort to track citizens in cyberspace. And Google is at the heart of that origin story. Some of the research that led to Google’s ambitious creation was funded and coordinated by a research group established by the intelligence community to find ways to track individuals and groups online. ...

The story of the deliberate creation of the modern mass-surveillance state includes elements of Google’s surprising, and largely unknown, origin. It is a somewhat different creation story than the one the public has heard, and explains what Google cofounders Sergey Brin and Larry Page set out to build, and why.

But this isn’t just the origin story of Google: It’s the origin story of the mass-surveillance state, and the government money that funded it. ...

Intelligence-gathering may have been their world, but the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the National Security Agency (NSA) had come to realize that their future was likely to be profoundly shaped outside the government. It was at a time when military and intelligence budgets within the Clinton administration were in jeopardy, and the private sector had vast resources at their disposal. If the intelligence community wanted to conduct mass surveillance for national security purposes, it would require cooperation between the government and the emerging supercomputing companies.

To do this, they began reaching out to the scientists at American universities who were creating this supercomputing revolution. These scientists were developing ways to do what no single group of human beings sitting at work stations in the NSA and the CIA could ever hope to do: gather huge amounts of data and make intelligent sense of it. ...

A second grant—the DARPA-NSF grant most closely associated with Google’s origin—was part of a coordinated effort to build a massive digital library using the internet as its backbone. Both grants funded research by two graduate students who were making rapid advances in web-page ranking, as well as tracking (and making sense of) user queries: future Google cofounders Sergey Brin and Larry Page.

The research by Brin and Page under these grants became the heart of Google: people using search functions to find precisely what they wanted inside a very large data set. The intelligence community, however, saw a slightly different benefit in their research: Could the network be organized so efficiently that individual users could be uniquely identified and tracked?

This process is perfectly suited for the purposes of counter-terrorism and homeland security efforts: Human beings and like-minded groups who might pose a threat to national security can be uniquely identified online before they do harm. This explains why the intelligence community found Brin’s and Page’s research efforts so appealing; prior to this time, the CIA largely used human intelligence efforts in the field to identify people and groups that might pose threats.

Speaking of Russia, it’s not giving Google any treats, but it just treated the world to a sweet bit of hilarity. You can’t say Russians don’t have a sense of humor. As further evidence we are living in a badly programmed simulation, the UK Independent ran a not-joking story yesterday headlined, “Russia fines Google $2.5 decillion (that’s 2.5 trillion trillion trillion dollars).”




Russia is, apparently, getting sick and tired of its citizens being censored by Google. It’s been nonstop since 2022, since Google’s pudgy Gen-Z “trust and safety” teams and the search giant’s embedded deep-state moles think anything a random Russian says online must be Putin propaganda. (I know how Russia feels.)

So, obviously exasperated, a Russian court yesterday fined Google more money than there is in the entire world. It’s literally unaffordable. The amount was probably calculated using some kind of formula, like $100 per YouTube banned by Google’s censorship staff or $10 per Russian citizen put in YouTube jail or something like that. The article didn’t say.

As Russia and NATO have, Russia and Google have been fighting each other ever since the Proxy War started. I’m not saying Google is fighting with Russia like NATO because it is wholly owned by the same party or parties who also wholly own NATO, or that Google has become a hollowed out, deep state tool useful for ginning up color revolutions and stuff but not to much for searches anymore, which is also why it hasn’t innovated in any meaningful way for years and its searches get worse and worse instead of better and better like SpaceX rockets and Tesla cars.