“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.
Corporate equivalent to a speeding ticket
A speeding ticket for like .0000000000001% of your daily income.
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.
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.
Except it’s not a bribe. It’s entirely above-board, the money they’re paying is a fine. They’re not “getting out of a ticket”, they’re paying the ticket.
Except they also don’t get points on their license, or whatever is analogous here.
They paid what the jury could have imposed and now they’re skipping right ahead to facing the judge, they’re actually saving the system some time and money.
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.
The prosecution’s own expert estimated that the amount that was paid was the maximum they could expect to get.
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.
“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 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.
