[davmre]

> The government doesn't have to win an antitrust trial in order to create competition. As the saying goes, "the process is the punishment."

Regardless of what you think of Google or this case specifically, this is an argument for authoritarianism: that it is legitimate for the government to "punish" any company at will, based only on them falling into political disfavor.

> ... the only punishment Google would have to bear from this trial would come after the government won its case, when the judge decided on a punishment (the term of art is "remedy") for Google.

Yes, this is called the rule of law. Punishment comes through the courts, after a guilty verdict. The government has to actually win the argument as to what remedies would be proportionate under the law. In this case the judge didn't buy it. It's fine to disagree with his reasoning (or with the law), but the fantasizing about extrajudicial punishment here is frankly un-American.

[ratherbefuddled]

There's very little reason that Google should have been protected from the evidence of its wrongdoing being made public. That's not extrajudicial punishment, that is public record. Justice should be seen to be done as well as done.

Who can know how appropriate or not the remedy was when the evidence is hidden?

For full disclosure: I'm neither a google employee nor a US citizen.

[davmre]

Sure, there's a strong public interest in having proceedings on record. US civil cases are supposed to have a presumption of openness, which the judge weighs against other interests, like protecting trade secrets, confidential business information, privacy of third parties, etc.

The public record argument is fine; it's just a different argument than the extrajudicial punishment advocated by the original post.

[protocolture]

>This is an argument for authoritarianism, that the government should be able to "punish" any company at will based only on them falling into political disfavor.

No its more like, the process of transparency harms the company enough that they will shift their own mentality to ensure they never have to participate in a transparent process.

[davmre]

If there's a general standard of transparency applied to all companies, fine. There are costs to increasing transparency, but certainly you could argue for that policy.

The argument that we should cheer on the use of government power to target a specific company, to selectively expose their dirty laundry as punishment for a crime they have not been convicted of, is what I found noxious in the original post.