Month: October 2020

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After a 16-month investigation, the Department of Justice and 11 states filed an antitrust lawsuit against Google on Tuesday, arguing that the company’s search app—which is a permanent, preloaded fixture on Android phones—hurts search competition and disproportionately funnels traffic to Google’s ad business.

“Two decades ago, Google became the darling of Silicon Valley as a scrappy startup with an innovative way to search the emerging internet. That Google is long gone,” the complaint states. “The Google of today is a monopoly gatekeeper for the internet, and one of the wealthiest companies on the planet.”

The lawsuit, filed in the U.S. District Court in Washington, DC, has been criticized as haphazardly rushed to court to secure political gains for the Trump administration. “This case has nothing to do with that subject,” Deputy Attorney General Jeff Rosen said, on a press briefing this morning, when asked about why the suit was filed two weeks before the election. Interestingly, unprompted, Rosen was adamant about maintaining that this has nothing to do with recent GOP calls to dismantle Section 230 over perceived anti-conservative bias by Twitter and Facebook. “The antitrust case is very separate from the questions about social media and some other technology issues that are out there about skew or bias, which have been the subject, at least for us, with regard for Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act,” Rosen said. “That’s a totally separate set of concerns dealt with different people in the department.”

Department of Justice officials also repeatedly deflected when asked by journalists why this was not a bipartisan effort. The 11 states that joined—Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Indiana, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, South Carolina, and Texas—all have Republican attorneys general.

Google did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the lawsuit.

Last year, New York Attorney General Letitia James and Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton announced a parallel, wide-ranging, bipartisan antitrust investigation into Google along with 49 attorneys general. “We appreciate the strong bipartisan cooperation among the states and the good working relationship with the DOJ on these serious issues,” New York Attorney General Letitia James and the attorneys general of Colorado, Iowa, Nebraska, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Utah said in a joint statement today.

“This is a historic time for both federal and state antitrust authorities, as we work to protect competition and innovation in our technology markets. We plan to conclude parts of our investigation of Google in the coming weeks, they added. “If we decide to file a complaint, we would file a motion to consolidate our case with the DOJ’s. We would then litigate the consolidated case cooperatively, much as we did in the Microsoft case.”

James is referencing the last major antitrust case the DOJ brought against a tech company, when it set its sights on Microsoft nearly 20 years ago for its practice of bundling software on third-party machines, which much resembles this one. “Google pays billions of dollars each year to distributors—including popular-device manufacturers such as Apple, LG, Motorola, and Samsung; major U.S. wireless carriers such as AT&T, T-Mobile, and Verizon; and browser developers such as Mozilla, Opera, and UCWeb— to secure default status for its general search engine and, in many cases, to specifically prohibit Google’s counterparties from dealing with Google’s competitors,” the suit claims. The DOJ contends that this allegedly illegal strategy has bought Google “nearly 90 percent of all general-search-engine queries in the United States, and almost 95 percent of queries on mobile devices.”

The DOJ’s antitrust division initiated 18 investigations into the potential abuse of monopoly power between 2010 and 2019, but only a single case was brought to court. That case was brought against United Regional Health Care System, which was accused of forming contracts that prevent health insurers from contracting with United Regional’s competitors. A settlement was quickly reached in the case preventing it from conditioning contracts on the basis of whether insurers worked with competing providers.

As the DOJ bitingly notes, back when it was Microsoft in the spotlight “Google claimed Microsoft’s practices were anticompetitive, and yet, now, Google deploys the same playbook to sustain its own monopolies.” In that case, Microsoft was tried for violating a consent decree by engaging in exclusionary practices in an effort to maintain a stranglehold on the PC operating system market. (The company was further accused of trying, unsuccessfully, to monopolize the web browser market.) In 1999, a federal judge ruled that Microsoft was a monopoly and attempted to break the company into two. An appeals court later threw out the judge’s proposal and—against the protestations of several state attorneys general—approved a settlement negotiated by DOJ. As a result, Microsoft agreed to make it easier for third-party developers to integrate their software into Windows and was held to other conditions, including independent audits, which expired in 2011.

DOJ officials wouldn’t say if they engaged in settlement talks Google ahead of the filing, nor would the give specific details about what sort of resolution they were hoping to gain, though Associate Deputy Attorney General Ryan Shores stated that “nothing’s off the table.”

In the latest example of Google’s public-facing privacy push turning out to be little more than a farce, it seems the tech giant was accidentally exempting some of its own sites from a feature meant to clear browser caches and cookies in its Chrome browser. Whoops!

This loophole first came to light when iOS dev Jeff Johnson noticed that after setting up his Chrome browser to clear his cookies and cache after every session, the feature worked perfectly for every site except two: Google and Youtube.

As Johnson documented on his personal blog, when closing Chrome these two Google services only cleared cookies, but retained data in what’s known as “local storage.” While cookies are meant to track your behavior across the web and tie that data across multiple sites, the local storage data of a particular site is meant to only apply to that site so that it can be pulled up again the next time you visit. The difference, from a tracking perspective, becomes shrinkingly little when the site and browser happen to be owned by the same company. Using the Chrome extension LocalStorage Manager, data which Google and YouTube add to local storage appears to include things like device ID and GPS location.

While Google hasn’t yet responded to our request for comment on the loophole, a company spokesperson told The Register that the hiccup wasn’t the company attempting a covert data-grab, but was, in fact, a Chrome bug that was specific to “some first-party Google websites.”

“We are investigating the issue, and plan to roll out a fix in the coming days,” they added.

Thankfully, Johnson’s blog also explains how to opt-out of these local storage shenanigans: by adding both youtube.com and google.com to the “sites that can never use cookies” setting on your browser. He added that ticking off the “always clear cookies when windows are closed” button isn’t enough—even if, on paper, it looks like it should be.

There’s no way to prove if this was simply a bug as Google has claimed, but this sort of mistake is very much in line with its years-long track record of ignoring user privacy requests. Some notable examples include:

• Tracking the location of users through Google’s Maps and Search functions even after those users deliberately made the choice to pause sharing their location history
• Chrome syncing sensitive data when those same users had specifically opted-out. This practice was the subject of a lawsuit this past July which claimed, among other things, that the practice violated Google’s own privacy polices
• Claiming one of its browser identifiers contained no personal information when, in fact, it did

I wouldn’t expect anything less from the company whose privacy practices are so convoluted that even its own employees don’t understand them.