Around 7:00 PM on May 16, a courier working for Google hand-delivered a cashier’s check to the US Department of Justice.
The amount was for $2,289,751.
That sum would cover damages for one of the claims the Justice Department — and 18 states — brought in its broad antitrust suit against the company’s advertising practices.
But more importantly for Google, it means the case will never see a jury.
The antitrust trial, which began Monday and is expected to last another month, is set up as a court trial. There is no jury. US District Judge Leonie Brinkema, an appointee of former President Bill Clinton, is deciding the facts and law of the case from a Virginia court.
The Justice Department accuses Google of operating a monopoly in the digital advertising market, illegally squeezing rivals and locking customers into its ecosystem to raise prices for everyone. The case is different from another Google antitrust trial settled earlier this year, where a judge found the company illegally monopolized the search market.
Google says the Justice Department overestimated the power the company has in digital advertising. If Brinkema decides that Google is an illegal market monopoly, it could force the company to break up.
Only one of the 5 charges required a jury
While criminal defendants have a constitutional right to a jury trial, the rules for civil cases are more nuanced.
The Justice Department filed five different charges against Google under the Sherman Act, the landmark 1890 law that allows the Justice Department to break up monopolies.
The first four acts sought “emergency relief,” meaning the judge could later order Google to change its practices.
The fifth was for compensation, that is, money.
How much money? After several court moves, the Justice Department said monetary damages would amount to the amount eight different federal agencies overpaid for online ads they bought through Google’s marketplace between January 2019 and January 2023. That amount would then triple. . pursuant to the Sherman Act. And then they would add interest.
According to several professors the Justice Department hired to do the math, it all added up to $2,289,751.
For context, Google’s parent company, Alphabet, is worth $1.9 trillion.
Lawyers in the Justice Department’s antitrust section were caught off guard by the search, one said at a later court hearing. The check was paid the night before a major performance was due. Google denied any wrongdoing in the fifth count, but their attorneys at Paul Weiss said they “voluntarily tendered the payment to the United States of the full amount of monetary relief it could receive” to make the case “moot.” and “simple”. “The rest of the judicial process.
And besides, Google’s lawyers said, it was cheaper than the legal fees the company would incur to keep fighting it.
“Instead of asking the court to enter into the DOJ’s unexplored and unwarranted demand for a jury trial and to prevent the waste of resources that would result from defending against a claim for damages worth far less than a fraction of the cost of the litigation, Google has tendered payment to the United States of the full amount of the damages it seeks, trebled, plus prejudgment interest,” Google’s lawyers wrote.
The trial is being held in federal court in the Eastern District of Virginia. AP Photo/Stephanie Scarbrough
But the real victory for Google was avoiding a jury.
Juries are less predictable than judges and may not take kindly to a massive tech company.
“There is stronger public sentiment against big tech now than there may have ever been,” Rebecca Allensworth, a professor of antitrust law at Vanderbilt University, told BI.
The Justice Department “virtually never” takes antitrust cases to a jury, Allensworth told BI. But in this case, they wanted one. Government lawyers appealed to Brinkema, the judge, arguing that the fifth count should stand and damages should be decided by a jury. The amount Google gave them on the check was wrong, they said, citing court documents they said showed damages should be calculated differently.
In the end, Brinkema sided with Google. The $2,289,751 figure came from math done by the Justice Department’s own experts, she noted in a ruling. And the fact that it was a cashier’s check, issued by Wells Fargo, gave the Justice Department no justification for refusing the money to keep the case open, she said. (The exact amount of the check was initially redacted in court documents, but Brinkema later made it public.)
“It’s an absolute ‘that’s where the money is,'” she said at a June 7 hearing. “If they could have given you a wheelbarrow of money, it would have been the same.”
The trial, she said, would be without a jury.
A Google representative directed BI to an earlier statement the company issued in response to the judge’s ruling.
“DoJ’s trumped-up claim for damages has been disbanded,” the company said in a statement at the time. “We are pleased that the Court decided that this case will be tried by a judge.”
Justice Department representatives did not respond to a request for comment.
At the end of the June 7 hearing, Brinkema applauded Google and the Justice Department for their clever legal arguments.
“I want to congratulate the lawyer. Your arguments are excellent,” she said. “I am looking forward to this trial because the quality of the lawyer has been excellent.”