Respected attorney and regulatory analyst Megan Gray sat in the pews through Google’s recent search remedies trial.
After three decades at the Federal Trade Commission and DuckDuckGo, she’s sharing her insights into how Google and The White House view search giant’s break-up.
Some are quite spicy.
This is the latest episode from the fast-growing Future Media podcast stable. You can tune in here or on Spotify, Apple, Art19, or wherever you get your pods.
Gray’s been a warrior for privacy and data governance for decades, shaping global approaches and policies to regulate online platforms.
At the FTC, she won a $22.5 million settlement from Google and Apple over false privacy statements in Safari.
She also advocated for user privacy and ethical data usage as VP of public policy at DuckDuckGo, which testified against Google in the search antitrust trial.
Now she runs boutique law firm GrayMatters focusing on the intersection of law, technology and public policy, where she joined Alan and I this week.
She said: “The case was a funny animal because it was created under the first Trump administration because he wanted Google’s head on a stake.
“He told his Attorney General at the time: Bring me Google. I want a case against Google.
“And this was the case they crafted on a very expedited schedule for the DoJ.
“From a purely legal perspective, it’s a beautiful case. Very simple. Not very controversial.
“It’s almost a slam dunk because it involves exclusive contracts with a near 90 per cent plus dominant player.
“But the problem is that a good, appropriate litigator trying to solve a problem, would start with the solution, then go backwards and build a case.
“That’s not what happened here. DoJ did not start thinking seriously, or realistically, about the remedy, until well after the trial had kicked off.
“At the time this all started, the DoJ’s vision was for choice screens and to strike exclusivity provisions from contracts, and kumbaya - we have an even playing field.
“Now we all know that’s crazy. It was never going to work, but I honestly think that’s what the DOJ thought at the time it filed the lawsuit.
“Now what we have is a whole buffet of remedies, many different components, and almost a Hail Mary approach, to try to address the Google monopoly in search.”
So now that the DoJ has won, and Google has lost, and a judge has six weeks to decide what comes next, four billion users and the future of the web is on tenterhooks…
This is an episode you can’t miss…
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