Three years after receiving a record fine from the European Commission alongside an order to stop abusing its control of the Android operating system, Google is set to have its day in court.
Back in 2018 the company was fined €4.34bn (£3.8bn) for forcing phone makers to pre-install apps including Google Search and Chrome to the exclusion of other search engines and web browsers.
The fine was a fraction of the €116bn (£99bn) parent company Alphabet recorded in revenues that year, but the real cost to the company was the threat to its future income if smartphones landed in consumers’ hands without Google apps already installed.
Google’s five-day appeal against the decision is being heard at European Court of Justice in Luxembourg, where the company hopes to have the Commission’s decision annulled in its entirety.
A failure to do so could completely reshape the smartphone landscape, but other challenges targeting Google inside the US pose a far more significant risk to the company and could lead to the search giant being broken up into several smaller businesses.
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Breaking up monopolies
While there are an over-abundance of comparisons between the oil industry of the late 19th century and the tech industry of today, the slow movement of regulators is one of the most striking similarities.
It was in 1890 that US Congress passed a law to tackle the monopolies which had sprung up over the preceding half century, but it took more than three decades for that law to be used to break up Standard Oil, a company which by 1904 controlled more than 90% of oil production in America.
Standard Oil’s business excelled due to its innovations in refining oil, but also because the company had rapaciously acquired rivals and used its commercial heft to strike deals with railroad companies (themselves a target for early antitrust action) at discounted rates which the remaining oil businesses could not compete with.
In a landmark ruling in 1911, the US Supreme Court upheld that Standard Oil was an illegal monopoly and ordered it to be broken up into 34 independent companies. Though that power is not available to the European Commission, there is a growing movement in the US calling for similar actions to be taken against tech giants whom some believe are guilty of the same anticompetitive practices.
Modern antitrust law
Google is a very different company to Standard Oil, but the alleged unfairness of its practices – using its control of Android to force phone manufacturers who want to include the Google Play app store on their phones to also pre-install Google Search and Chrome – follows the same model of undermining rivals.
The investigation into Google coercing phone manufacturers formally began in 2015, although the Commission made its first enquiries about the company’s practices in 2013 when an association of Google’s rivals calling itself FairSearch lodged a complaint against its business practices.
The ruling came three years later in 2018 and now, three years later, Google’s appeal has reached the European Court of Justice. Thomas Vinje, counsel to FairSearch and partner at law firm Clifford Chance, told Sky News he expected there could be another appeal after the hearing in Luxembourg.
“Antitrust enforcement is not, on its own at least, sufficiently robust, sufficiently effective, to be able to address these really extraordinary concerns. I’m not sure the world has ever faced a situation where there is such a concentration of power in such a central element of today’s economy, and antitrust law is not up to the task,” he said.
“That is largely because they’re complex cases,” Mr Vinje explained.
“They’re more complex than rail roads or oil distribution – I’m not saying those are simple – but the issues faced in Big Tech today are a hell of a lot more complicated. So there is a hell of a lot more room for obfuscation… and dragging things out.
“So by virtue of the completely appropriate rights that defendants have in these cases, the cases just take too long.”
What is Google’s response and appeal?
Google, which claims the most popular search term on rival search engines such as Bing is the word “Google” itself and which controls more than 90% of the market for web searches, disputes the Commission’s arguments about its dominance, although that won’t feature prominently in its arguments next week.
In a news briefing ahead of the hearing, the company explained to journalists that it believes a lot has changed in the years since the Commission issued its decision.
Key to Google’s appeal is the argument that its control ensures Android is a platform which can run across millions of smart devices made by different manufacturers, increasing the economic benefits for developers – including rival web browser makers such as Opera, which is supporting Google’s appeal – and ultimately consumers.
Google will note that a revenue sharing agreement it had with phone manufacturers and mobile network operators, cited as an illegal contractual restriction by the Commission, ended in 2014.
The company also strongly disputes the way that the Commission calculated the €4.34bn (£3.8bn) fine, something the Commission said was “calculated on the basis of the value of Google’s revenue from search advertising services on Android devices” inside the European Economic Area.
What is the threat in the US?
Even if Google succeeds in getting the Commission’s decision annulled or amended, it faces three more challenges in the US which are backed by severe powers to tackle monopolies.
The first complaint was filed last October in a case led by the Trump administration’s Department of Justice and joined by 11 states – though with apparent bipartisan support – charging Alphabet with “unlawfully maintaining monopolies in the markets for general search services”.
Two more cases were brought against Google in December.
One from the attorneys general of 35 states accuses the company of anticompetitive practices in order to retain its dominance in search, while another filed by the attorneys general from 10 states focuses on the company’s monopoly power in digital advertising markets.
Google has denied engaging in anticompetitive practices.
A judge in Donald Trump’s hush money trial has warned the former president about “intimidating” potential jurors in the case.
Justice Juan Merchan warned he would not tolerate Trump speaking while potential jurors were questioned in court on Tuesday.
He said the former president was audibly uttering something while his lawyers were questioning prospective jury members, and warned: “I will not have any jurors intimidated in the courtroom.”
The first six jurors were selected to serve on Tuesday afternoon on the panel of 12 jurors and six alternates in the historic trial.
They include a waiter, an oncology nurse, an attorney, an IT consultant, a teacher and a software engineer.
Several others had been excused on Tuesday morning after saying they could not be impartial or because they had other commitments.
Others demurred when asked about their opinions of Trump, including one who said is personal views on the former president “has absolutely no bearing on the case that you’re presenting or defending. That is a separate thing”.
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Dozens of potential jurors have yet to be questioned.
The judge also ruled on Tuesday that lawyers are allowed to ask prospective jurors about their social media posts.
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That ruling came after Trump’s lawyer Todd Blanche told the judge he had found several social media posts he said come from possible jurors that are “very much contrary to the answers they gave”.
Potential jurors have also been asked about where they consume their news, their opinions on Trump and whether they follow politics.
The hush money case is the first of Trump‘s four criminal cases to go to trial and may be the only one that could reach a verdict before the presidential vote in November.
If convicted, Trump – the presumptive Republican presidential nominee – would become the first former US president convicted of a crime.
He has pleaded not guilty to 34 felony counts of falsifying business records as part of an alleged effort to keep salacious and, he says, bogus stories about his sex life from emerging during his 2016 campaign.
Trump has claimed the trial is the result of a politically motivated justice system working to deprive him of another term as president.
Before entering the courtroom this morning, he stopped briefly to address a TV camera in the hallway, repeating his claim that the judge is biased against him.
“This is a trial that should have never been brought,” Trump said.
Among the potential jurors dismissed on Tuesday was a woman who had previously notified the judge she had a trip planned around Memorial Day.
A man was excused after saying he could not be impartial.
Another man, who works at an accounting firm, was dismissed after saying he feared his ability to be impartial could be compromised by “unconscious bias” from growing up in Texas and working in finance with people who “intellectually tend to slant Republican”.
Jury selection could take several more days – or even weeks – in New York, which is a heavily Democratic city.
Around a third of the 96 people in the first panel of potential jurors in court on Monday remained after the judge excused some members.
More than half were excused after saying they could not be fair and impartial, and several others were dismissed for other reasons that were not disclosed.
The trial centres on $130,000 (£104,400) in payments that Trump’s company made to his then-lawyer, Michael Cohen.
He paid that sum on Trump’s behalf to keep porn actress Stormy Daniels from going public with her claims of a sexual encounter with Trump a decade earlier.
The former president has denied the sexual encounter ever happened.
Prosecutors say the payments – which they claim were falsely logged as legal fees – were part of a scheme to bury damaging stories Trump feared could help his opponent in the 2016 race, particularly as his reputation was suffering at the time from comments he had made about women.
Trump said the payments, which he acknowledged reimbursing Mr Cohen for, were designed to stop Ms Daniels from going public about the alleged encounter.
The former president previously said it had nothing to do with the 2016 campaign.
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Caitlin Clark has left an enduring legacy throughout American society and culture – both on and off the basketball court – all by the age of 22.
Clark, from West Des Moines, Iowa, made her college debut for the Iowa Hawkeyes in 2020 and has also represented the USA at international youth level.
Since then, she has been immortalised as the greatest scorer in college basketball history, racking up 3,951 points across four seasons.
In March, she passed five-time NBA All-Star and college basketball legend Pete Maravich for the all-time National Collegiate Athletics Association (NCAA) points record, held for more than half a century.
Her impact on NCAA attendances helped set or break records in all but two of the Hawkeyes games in 2023-24.
The “Caitlin Clark Effect”, as it has been known, has transformed women’s basketball forever. Here’s how she has achieved it.
The ratings game
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College basketball is highly anticipated in the early part of the year, culminating with “March Madness” – a knockout tournament to determine the NCAA champion.
More than 12 million people watched 2 April’s Elite Eight (quarter-final) matchup against LSU, where Clark scored 41 points.
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This year’s Iowa-South Carolina national championship game averaged 18.7 million viewers, up 89% on the year before – making it the highest-rated basketball game in five years, men’s or women’s, at any level. South Carolina won the game 87-75.
At its peak, the match was being viewed by 24 million people across America.
Clark’s presence in WNBA will be game-changing
To put that into perspective, the 2023 WNBA Finals averaged 728,000 viewers over four games – with 889,000 tuning in to witness the Las Vegas Aces’ championship win.
Of the 12 WNBA teams, the Indiana Fever had the second-lowest attendance in 2023.
This is their second draft in a row with the No 1 pick and they chose Clark.
Name, Image, Likeness
The 22-year-old has signed lucrative endorsement deals with Nike, Gatorade, State Farm and Panini – all before turning pro.
Name, Image, Likeness (NIL) restrictions were lifted in June 2021, following a Supreme Court decision. This landmark moment allowed student-athletes to earn from commercials and endorsements, where previously they were not allowed to until they turned professional.
According to NIL database On3, Clark has made $3.1m (£2.4m) from sponsorship deals, ranking as the highest amongst women’s basketball players and fourth highest amongst student-athletes.
The owners of a US funeral home have been accused of spending nearly $900,000 (£723,000) in pandemic relief funds on things such as holidays, cosmetic surgery, jewellery and cryptocurrency.
Jon and Carie Hallford, owners of Return To Nature Funeral Home in Colorado, already face more than 200 criminal charges connected to last year’s discovery of 190 decaying bodies in a bug-infested storage building.
Those charges include corpse abuse, money laundering, theft and forgery, including allegations they gave families dry concrete instead of cremated ashes, collected money for burials and cremations they never provided, and buried the wrong body on two occasions.
Now they face 15 further charges alleging they spent $882,300 (£708,000) in pandemic relief funds on items including two vehicles – a GMC Yukon and an Infiniti worth over $120,000, trips to California, Florida and Las Vegas, $31,000 in cryptocurrency, laser body sculpting, and luxury goods from retailers such as Gucci and Tiffany & Co.
The couple appeared in a federal court on Monday, where the prosecution argued they were a flight risk, having fled to Oklahoma last October after the decaying bodies were found and again before their arrest on state charges in November.
The judge did not decide whether they should be released pending trial, instead scheduling another hearing for Thursday.
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The discovery of the 190 bodies, some of which had been there since 2019, shocked the state of Colorado, which has some of the US’s weakest funeral home regulations.
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Concerns were raised as far back as 2020 about the business’s improper storage of bodies but regulators did not act, allowing the number of bodies to grow to nearly 200.
It was only after neighbours complained about the smell that authorities looked more closely at the modest 2,500-square foot building in Penrose, about 30 miles south of Colorado Springs.
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Since the bodies were discovered, dozens of families have been told the ashes they were given could not have been the remains of loved ones.