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Google avoids jury trial by sending $2.3 million check to US government
(arstechnica.com)
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
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...
That's what the government said after Google paid. But also in the article:
...
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.