The IT Nerd

Well it seems that a crackdown on big tech may be inbound. And it starts with Google according to the New York Times who say that against the advice of career lawyers in the Department of Justice, William Barr is going ahead with an anti-trust lawsuit against Google:

Justice Department officials told lawyers involved in the antitrust inquiry into Alphabet, the parent company of Google and YouTube, to wrap up their work by the end of September, according to three of the people. Most of the 40-odd lawyers who had been working on the investigation opposed the deadline. Some said they would not sign the complaint, and several of them left the case this summer.

Some argued this summer in a memo that ran hundreds of pages that they could bring a strong case but needed more time, according to people who described the document. Disagreement persisted among the team over how broad the complaint should be and what Google could do to resolve the problems the government uncovered. The lawyers viewed the deadline as arbitrary.

While there were disagreements about tactics, career lawyers also expressed concerns that Mr. Barr wanted to announce the case in September to take credit for action against a powerful tech company under the Trump administration.

Well, this can go horribly sideways. I can easily see a scenario where rushing to file a lawsuit when you haven’t dotted the “i”‘s and crossed the “t”‘s can end up in Google kicking the DOJ in the posterior and making them look like fools. It will be interesting to see how this plays out.

This entry was posted on September 4, 2020 at 11:11 am and is filed under Commentary with tags Google. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.