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John:
Good afternoon from Capitol Hill.
Congress is still out of session, but the courts are action packed. Here are three recent developments.
Judge Finds Google Has A Monopoly On Search
On Monday, U.S. District Court Judge Amit Mehta found that Google has a monopoly on search and text advertising, capping off a win for the 2020 antitrust lawsuit filed by then-Attorney General Bill Barr and the Trump administration.
After a nine-week bench trial, Judge Mehta identified Google’s network of exclusive contracts to be the default search engine on browsers and mobile devices as locking up approximately 70 percent of the web from competition. (Back when the suit was filed in 2020, I wrote about how these search defaults are anticompetitive, both in blocking rivals from the market and denying them the ability to scale.)
The trial now moves to a remedies phase, where parties will argue how this monopoly should be addressed. Remedies could include a targeted prohibition of exclusive contracts, or structural breakup. Either way, as Axios notes, the suit – which will undoubtedly be appealed by Google – has the potential to end the “Google era.”
For some historical context, consider that after the government broke Microsoft’s monopoly of the browser market, the resulting open internet meant that Microsoft could not block a new, innovative search engine called Google from reaching Microsoft customers through the web.
So will this opinion have any effect on the censorship that these companies engage in? From the archives, here’s my 2021 essay on how the best way to address the speech concerns of these platforms is by addressing their market power – and why the right should reclaim its tradition of antitrust enforcement.
Judge Marchan Signals Denial Of Trump Motions & Imposition Of Sentence On 9/18
After the Supreme Court held that presidents had immunity from prosecution for official acts, the case against Trump brought by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg – where Trump was found guilty on 34 counts of business records falsification – took a pause as Trump moved to have the guilty verdicts thrown out. The sentencing, originally scheduled for July 11, was postponed to September 18 to allow the lawyers time to address the immunity issue.
Trump’s lawyers also renewed their request that Judge Merchen recuse himself from the case given his daughter’s extensive and lucrative work for Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris.
Yet the judge’s recent reply to the Trump team is ominous. Andy McCarthy has much more as to why.
The Department of Justice indicts Smartmatic
Three current and former executives from Smartmatic, the voting machine company currently suing Fox News and Newsmax, were indicted by the Department of Justice for participating in a bribery and money-laundering scheme in the Philippines.
The DOJ alleges that Smartmatic founder and president, Venezuelan-American Roger Piñate Martinez, and three others, including the brother-in-law of current Smartmatic CEO Antonio Mugica, paid at least $1 million in bribes to a top election official in the Philippines “to obtain and retain business related to providing voting machines and election services for the 2016 Philippine elections.” The bribes were allegedly funded through a slush fund created by overcharging for the cost of voting machines for the 2016 Philippine elections.
And while we’re on the topic of elections…
Virginia governor Glenn Youngkin last week issued an executive order codifying the use of paper ballots in Virginia elections and ensuring non-citizens are disqualified from voting – including booting the roughly 6,000 non-citizens that were registered to vote in Virginia.
You may recall that the House recently passed the SAVE Act to require proof of citizenship before voting in federal elections. The left and the media have smugly written off the need for the law because voting as a non-citizen in a federal election is already illegal. Yet the 6,303 non-citizens on Virginia’s voter rolls suggests that, without due diligence, it may already be happening.
In June, the New York Post reported that at least 46 states currently provide voter registration forms to migrants at welfare agencies and Departments of Motor Vehicles without requiring proof of citizenship.
The Free Beacon did a deep dive on the nonprofit Vot-ER, created by Alister Martin, who served as an adviser to Vice President Kamala Harris, which has teamed up with more than 50,000 doctors to sign up their patients to vote. This included patients in mental hospitals, facilities for adults who commit self-harm, parents whose newborns are in the NICU, and “patients in cancer hospitals, emergency rooms, substance abuse clinics, and palliative care departments.”
The Latest From Around The Conservative Movement
- Mark DiPlacido offers a rebuttal to Vivek Ramaswamy’s national libertarianism
One More Thing…
Become a CPI fellow! Applications for our Magnus, Intrepidus, and Veritas fellowships for conservatives are now open.
Sincerely,
Rachel Bovard
Vice President of Programs
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