The New York Times is asking the court where Google is facing a major antitrust trial to open proceedings to the public and the press after a month of practically closed-door testimony.
The trial brought by the federal government accuses the Alphabet subsidiary of using tightly constructed deals with smartphone makers and other tech companies to squeeze out rivals in the search market.
The Justice Department, which brought the case in 2020, is arguing that Google has used these agreements, in which it pays to be the default search provider on smartphones from Apple and other companies, and on browsers like Mozilla’s Firefox, as part of a systematic approach to entrench the company’s dominance in search — leading to the company’s name becoming synonymous with searching for something online.
But much of the testimony in the trial in the U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., is not being heard by the public.
Access to the trial is limited and sporadic because Judge Amit Mehta apparently agreed with Google’s argument that the details behind its search business are too sensitive to share in open court, The Verge reported.
“The need for openness in this case — arguably the most important antitrust trial in decades, with far-reaching consequences for the future of the tech industry — is both obvious and hard to overstate,” The Times’ motion begins. “Though the Court has taken steps to make the trial more open, in several respects the degree of public access still falls short of what the law requires.”
It pointed to difficulty getting transcripts of testimony and the exhibits shown to witnesses.
“Sealing the courtroom is an extraordinary step in any case,” The Times argued. In this one, “the stakes are especially high.”
“Excluding the public from the courtroom not only impedes its ability to understand how this consequential case is being litigated — it also undermines the public’s faith in its justice system,” the news outlet argued.
The Times said the most serious and pressing problem is that there is no “consistent and complete access to admitted trial exhibits,” which does not comply with orders from the court for how materials would be made public, issued earlier in the case.
For example, the Justice Department has posted only seven exhibits used in court, but there are 18 others that have not been shared nor been identified as confidential, the filing states.
“Other records have been sealed without adequate explanation,” the filing continues. “The Court should unseal these unless the parties or interested third parties carry their burden to show that the sealing is consistent” with precedent.
The filing particularly targets the testimony of Apple’s Eddy Cue and Google’s Jerry Dischler, stating both should be completely unsealed, “given the absence of any justification for these redactions.”
Bloomberg, The Wall Street Journal and New York Post, Law 360 and independent news outlet MLex are supporting the motion, the court papers show.
It was not immediately clear when the judge will rule on the motion.